12 February 2003

Morning, dear ones. Don't know when you'll read this -- we've been having webhosting issues that we need to sort out. So I'm just starting it, and I'll post it whenever the issues are sorted.

My sense of basic well-being has slipped a couple of times lately -- once in the grocery store on Sunday, once yesterday in the late morning. Usually I have a sense that It Will Be Okay. This is a very contingent sense of Okayness -- that if Datlow doesn't pick up the story she's got right now, it'll be right for Stan Schmidt, or for nice people somewhere else; that if we can't find the right house for the right price, we'll live in an apartment and not have to shovel the walks for awhile longer while we keep looking; that if something unspecified and bad happens, my loved ones will stick together and do the best they can with it. And that that best will be Okay. I lost that last link a couple of times in the last few days, the jump to where the best we can do is Okay enough. It's not a pleasant feeling. I fight it as hard as I know how.

And things really are going to be okay. Mark received confirmation yesterday that not everybody in his field is a great big dork, which is a relief to me, and no, I can't say anything more about it here until we figure out What It All Means. And to figure out What It All Means, we have to have some more data, more pieces of What It All Is. So.

One of my old boyfriends, still a dear friend, reported an odd conversation with his father at the dinner table. His dad said, "You can say this for Marissa: she'll never marry a dummy, and she'll never marry someone unsuccessful." I had a hard time translating that: what did he mean? Did he mean, "So congrats, son, you made the first cut"? "So don't get your hopes up, loser-boy"? (I really doubt it was that one.) "Better work hard just to make sure"? Or, knowing this man as well as I do, perhaps the message was, "Hey, this crossed my mind just now." Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I think my old boyfriend's dad was right: I do have extremely discerning tastes. Mine is the best. And everybody else should think so, too.

My brain is trying to compose in 5/4 time this morning. It's a very silly brain. I have no piano and thus cannot compose. But it's doing its damnedest.

Yesterday, despite having a pretty awful moment, I worked on Dwarf's Blood Mead and a newish short story called "Erasing the Map." It's only new-ish and not new because it has two additional main characters that I didn't know about before -- I had a story idea with only one main character, and now it has three, and the two new ones are more interesting, so. There you have it. Well, not yet; I only did a couple of pages of it. So: more DBM today, and possibly more of the Joukahainen story, because that's pretty pure escapism.

Also more housecleaning, more laundry, more trips out to the recycling bins.

I skimmed through Hugh Seton-Watson's Eastern Europe 1918-1941 -- it wasn't particularly informative in most regards, and it had very, very little about the Baltics. And its 1943 perspective was both interesting and a bit repellent -- there was a flavor of wartime propaganda to it, our noble allies, etc. Now I'm reading Finnish Cities, which will also be a skimmer for some of it: much of it is 1987-specific information about where to get and what to see. Some of it still useful to me, the rest 10 years too early for my characters. So.

I keep getting "Sell Sell Sell" from the BNL "Maroon" album in my head: "It goes like this: we have no choice. The minarets, the wailing voice, and vaguely Celtic music fills the air. We choose a foreigner to hate, and soon Iraq gets more irate -- we really know nothing about them, and no one cares."

Later. I read Finnish Cities with Google Image Search in front of me, because the author was fond of listing which Finnish painters had works in which Helsinki museums. And it meant little to me. So now I have links to a handful of story-inspiring Finnish paintings, and that's good. Ran some errands, cleaned the house. My watch battery has stopped, most annoyingly.

And our Issues are more or less sorted out with webhosting. I don't know if I'll get webhosting for www.marissalingen.com specifically or whether I'll leave it on the current redirect, but we're already paying for the current redirect site with our ISP, so that makes it a bit easier to decide on, at least temporarily.

But the redirect isn't to Speculon any more, and I know there'll be people who don't find me because of that. I'm sorry. The webhosting expiration crept up on us, and then Timprov had a decision in front of him. He hasn't posted a new issue of Speculon in months. Many months. Those of you who have been following Speculon know that. His health, you probably also know, has been an ongoing, major problem. I don't talk about it much here, because this isn't his journal, and because a person's health is a fairly personal issue. But those of you who know him know how much of an issue it's been in making plans for things like dinner, much less a business.

So when the webhosting expired, it became a decision point: was he going to attempt to keep Speculon going? Should he pay for a site that he hadn't been able to work on for months and likely wouldn't be able to for a good while? The answer ended up being no.

I'm sad to see Speculon go, although it's been halfway gone for awhile now. But I agree with Timprov that it's the best decision under less than ideal circumstances. So.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of Snow Queen slippers and a spiderweb sweater. This may become a story. I just don't know.

I try to go off on tangents here, but I keep returning to the same things: there's a lot changing around here. But in some ways, they're not so much changes as recognitions of things that have already changed. It'll look a lot more like that in a few months, when I start telling you all stuff, and you say things like, "Oh, aren't you excited?" And I will be. Just, you know, not as recently. Changing. Staying the same. I don't know about this "more" stuff. Just lots of both, changing and staying, and also lots of settling into change.

Meh. I don't like talking around things. Timprov decided today that I'd be Sethra Lavode if I was more enigmatic, because "you're pale enough, and you eat about as much." But I don't want to be enigmatic. I would much rather have someone describe me as straightforward than as enigmatic. The only time I want enigmas is before people's birthdays, preferably mine. Also sometimes in books. But not in real life.

We decided yesterday that I would be a Tiassa, given the opportunity; that Mark is most assuredly an Athyra; that Timprov will claim the Yendi. I have never seen him coil and strike, which I suppose at least allows for the possibility that he does so unseen. For those of you who don't read Steven Brust novels, this will not be at all enlightening. Wendy thinks there's an online personality test to be had here. But I find "Tiassa dreams and plots are born" most fitting, and "Inspiration requires preparation" is a very good epigraph. And Tiassas are supposed to be pale, so. Tiassa it is.

Okay, I think that's it for tonight. I'm not used to Morphisming at night. It's a bit odd. But it's an odd time, this February thing.