2 March 2004

It's me! And Stella! And Greg! Oh, heck, here's the whole ToC: Fortean Bureau's got "Seven Minutes in Heaven" up and good stuff by other people who aren't me, too. It was a fun story to write. I hope it's a fun story to read.

After reading this month's ToC, I think I finally have a better idea of what to send to Fortean. Unfortunately, right now I'm feeling like the answer is "everything!" And I don't imagine they want to become the All Mrissa, All The Time Magazine. Although, if they did, y'know...I do have a few stories here....

In somewhat less pleasant news, I would like to remind everyone who contacts someone else over e-mail that you are, in fact, responsible for what you send. If you send something you didn't mean to, the appropriate response is to apologize, not to get upset with the recipient for reading the incomplete thought they didn't know was incomplete because you e-mailed it to them. Also, in this century, adults are permitted to use each other's first names, especially in e-mail correspondence based on something casual like a personal journal or weblog. If you want me to address you in e-mail as Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Rev., or Duchess, you'd better come up with a reason pretty fast, or else become someone with whom I have a distant professional relationship. Because otherwise Your Eminence is going to be plain old Jo(e) Whateveryournameis and like it.

Honestly. I feel like it is my month for the literary nutjobs to come out of the woodwork. It seems like every other e-mail I get lately is from someone I've never talked to before, with a theory of some book I read once years ago. Half of the theories pay no attention to a) the historical placement of the book or b) the book itself. Which I feel is rather important. Do all you other journal keepers get this mail, too, and it's just my turn now? At least I've heard from some nice new people, too, just to balance it out. It's just been alarming.

I had a friend once, now demoted to the status of acquaintance for not entirely unrelated reasons, who was wholly unable to talk about books as they were written. He talked, for example, about the crushing depression present in every character of The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. When he was oh-so-coincidentally having a bad week himself; go figure. Sure, we all read something of ourselves into the stories we read. There's interpretation room; of course there is. But generally it's good to be able to point at something, some little thing at all, really, if you're going to claim that it's authorial intent. Or to acknowledge that you're not really talking about the author at all.

Hmmm. A certain teacher I know has had students talking out their, uh, hats this month, too. Maybe it's something with the moon. You hear stories about emergency rooms, but never about essays.

Anyway, anyway. Other than dealing with the hat-talkers, I'm just grooving along here working on my book. Timprov and I returned to the office surplus store yesterday in search of chairs and to see if there were chairs and desks Mark might want. Answer, sadly, is no. This "surplus" store was a good place to go if you wanted a really junky desk for $25, or if you wanted to pay $900 for a decent office chair, but the middle ground was...not impressive. Less so than Office Despot or Office Max or the like. So we'll head to some other office supply store for chairs and Mark's new desk.

Finished Nameless Magery, and it felt like there was not quite enough there to make all the bits go together. I'm on page 900 of the Crescent Dragonwagon cookbook and still marking recipes. The problem with reading cookbooks the way I do is that it seems to go quickly, and then all of a sudden I'm done and I have to copy out all the recipes I marked. Sigh. Oh, the trials. Oh, the tribulations. And in the category of further trials and tribulations, it's time to pick out another book to read. Woe, woe, alack. Wailie, wailie.

I'll get by somehow.