I have been absent a lot. Partly this is due to overwhelming life stuff, and partly it's due to what I think is RSI. My hands have been hurting too much to type save when necessary. I've been doing a lot of sound editing, and that's been really hard on them, too (it involves a lot of clicking and scrolling). I love writing, and I love doing audio stuff, and I want to be able to do those things for as long as I can, so that's meant cutting back on journal entries and comments and things. It makes me sad, because I love being a part of this community of LJers, too, but I'm afraid it's necessary. I'm starting to look into more ergonomically sound options, but I haven't come up with any concrete solutions yet.

But! I wanted to show you some pictures from a recent excursion I took with nineweaving and teenybuffalo. We went out to Cape Cod for a day, and wandered through Edward Gorey's house, and then had some afternoon tea, and a visit to a lovely used bookstore, and a swim in the ocean. It was a thoroughly marvelous day with equally marvelous company.

I'd been to the Gorey exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum this spring, and loved that, so I was quite looking forward to seeing the official Gorey museum in his old house. It did not disappoint. Not at all. The thing which impressed me most at the Athenaeum was a collection of envelopes in which he'd sent letters home from college. They were each hand decorated with drawings and watercolors in unmistakably Gorey style. Each one was a different, and each one was a delight. I thought how wonderful it must have been to receive those envelopes, and I wondered what he'd put inside them. The thing that made me the happiest about them was that he'd done it just for one person, and just because. He wasn't The Famous Edward Gorey then. He was just a college kid, and a person who couldn't help making art and spreading joy around.

His house was full of oddities and wonders which supported that theory. He was a strange person, with a tendency toward collecting and hoarding things. He saved all his ticket stubs, for instance, and there must have been thousands. The docent told us that he had a local reputation for showing up at yard sales and buying odd bits of junk. He had a collection of antiquated cheese graters and old tools. All the available surfaces were lined with glass bottles and rocks and things like that. His kitchen was not very usable for cooking because of this. They said he had thousand of books, but they'd cleared them out to make room for display cases.

He also loved cats. There was a picture of him with cats draped all over him and around him that someone had taken to illustrate a magazine article. They told us he had six at any given time. There's one left at the house now: Ombledroom, or Mr. E. He's large and white with some dark spots, and he quite enjoys attention from visitors.

They've been going through boxes (so many boxes) of things in the attic and barn, and finding bits and bobs that he used for inspiration. A collection of old tassels clearly served as models for Les Passementeries Horribles (video link).

Later, lunchtime brought us to The Optimist Cafe, which provided us with unexpected (but welcome!) afternoon tea, over which we compared horrible dating stories, among other things. Thence to Parnassus Books, where we all came away with a prize or several, and encountered some things amusing and horrifying as well. And then we walked on a boardwalk over a saltmarsh, and eventually swam in the sea (well, Nine waded, but still, all of us were dampened to some extent). Finally, tired and content from a day of rambling, we stopped at the Brewster General Store, where Teeny showed us the Dimelodeon she recalled from her childhood. All in all, a wonderful summer excursion.

And now, you will certainly wish to see pictures, no? Click on Omble below to see the whole set over on Flickr!



And, because I've had Gorey on the brain, I've also finally gotten around to putting up the set of Gashlycrumb Tinies pictures we did at our Unspeakable Horror of the Literary Life party last Halloween. We didn't get all the letters (and there are a couple of repeats in there--everyone wanted to die of ennui!), but it's a pretty fun set nonetheless. Note also, this series of outtakes for Clara, who couldn't waste away properly for ages due to feline interference. Hee!

And now I am going to make good on my subject line and read a book away from the computer, while covered in cats.

This is the one with csecooney and gwynnega and Mary Robinette Kowal (in effigy), which we recorded at Readercon, and which is entirely silly and wonderful. Gwynne reads a zombie poem! Claire demonstrates her repertoire of hilariously terrible fake accents! Mary is a hand with a voice! Mary's Real Person even makes a brief cameo at the end to approve this tomfoolery.

Go listen!

(I really hope this actually posts. I've been unable to post or respond to posts and comments since this latest spate of DDoS attacks on LiveJournal began, so please know that I've been reading when possible and really wishing I could respond. I still hope to reply to comments left on my entries in the near future at least. I really haven't been ignoring you!)

First, thank you to everyone who came to the Interstitial Arts Exchange Party. It was really packed and an awesome event, and that's in no small part thanks to all of you! You rock!

We had Passports, Leaving Dakota, The Cabinet of Curiosities Contest, and a collaborative collage going. For the passports, the attendees went all out. maverick_weirdo drew lovely little escutcheons in all the ones he received (I think he was actually at it all night without a break, poor thing) and emilytheslayer brought wool to spin into yarn before our very eyes, and put little bits of fluff into the passports she received. I will have to do a page by page picture entry for my passport soon, but I haven't had time to document it yet. Eventually! And then you will see how jaw-droppingly amazing these things are.

In addition to all that, several people brought fantastic items for exchange. Chris Howard brought Saltwater Witch artwork, asakiyume brought paper flowers, and teenybuffalo brought amazing little clay sculptures. And that's just three examples, not even close to the whole of the creative offerings for exchange.

For the Leaving Dakota contest, we had attendees come up with a caption, or a description of a missing photo. Competition was fierce! I haven't got them transcribed yet, but soon I will post all the entries for your reading pleasure.

For the curiosities, we provided a box of random craftish supplies and had people build their own curiosities and describe them. This was a giant hit! I think everyone at the party was really looking forward to reading the book by the end of the evening. I made a posterboard display of the promotional tour poster (supplied by Jaym Gates), the title pages (with art by the amazingly talented John Coulthart), and a description taken from Jeff VanderMeer's blog with instructions to create and describe a curiosity. The seed the contest, I made a sample curiosity called "What the Phoenix Left Behind". At this point, I feel I ought to say that I really did find all those objects within a few feet of each other in my town. I thought of firebirds and Sharyn November and then I knew I had to make them into a thing. At the end of the evening I let some of the runners up from various contests take curiosities home as prizes, which was another cool way to spread the creativity around. Yay!

The rest of the weekend passed in a flurry of readings, conversations, and amazing trips to the airport and train station. What? I hear you thinking it. But srsly, I dropped off two groups of people, and each one was a wonderful chance to get to know my passengers. In one case, I even found out that britmandelo's friend was a Sabrina the Teenage Witch fan! You might have no idea how exciting this was, but Sabrina fans are few and far between, and I have never met anyone besides Moss who will happily dissect gender presentation in Sabrina with me. Until this weekend. And I'm sort of sorry for the two people in the backseat who had to listen to us geek out about Sabrina for twenty minutes on the way to South Station, but honestly, that was one of the absolute coolest things in a weekend of super amazing cool things. In case you were wondering if I was a bg old geek... um, you weren't, were you? Yeah.

Anyway! I read a poem in the Rhysling Slan, which was nervewracking, because I realized halfway through that I had brilliantly chosen a deeply personal poem and might start to cry at any moment, so the last half of my reading passed in a blur of shaky nausea. I didn't cry, though! Yay! And I hear people liked it all right, so that's good. I hear there was applause, but I don't remember that, only a great buzzing in my head as I stumbled to my seat and hoped against hope that I wouldn't throw up or pass out on the way. I didn't! Double yay! The really awesome thing about the Rysling hour, though, was getting to listen to so many of my excellent friends reading, and then! Then we we got to swarm csecooney with congratulations at the end because she won! She won the long form award for her most excellent "The Sea King's Second Bride" (which you can read and listen to in the Spring 2010 issue of Goblin Fruit). And she was even wearing the spectacular Sea King capturing skirt that Anita Allen made for her and everything! It was utterly perfect.

I love being read to, so I went to readings whenever I could (which wasn't as much as I wished). I got to hear leahbobet read from her debut novel, which won't be out forever and a half (but then she did spoil the entire plot for me later in a late night epic discussion of awesomeness, so I guess that's all good?). I took a short break from arts party prep to check out the Crossed Genres party, and heard a great short reading by Camille Alexa. cucumberseed rocked his quite well-attended reading with pirates and swearing. A lot of swearing. It was fantastic. Mary Robinette Kowal read from her novel in progress, which was really interesting because I got to see other people hearing it and reacting to it for the first time. I've been reading the raw draft as she goes, so I knew what to expect, but hearing her her read it was neat, and watching others was fascinating. And then later we had a conversation about that, too, which was great and made me think a lot. Also, I was supposed to interview Mary along with csecooney and gwynnega, but Mary didn't actually make it to the interview, so, um, we pretended she was there anyway. All I can say is that this month's Broadly Speaking podcast is going to be Very Silly. And by very, I mean extremely. I'll link you when it's up.

I also attended a couple of panels (including the one about children's books that asakiyume was on, and a really interesting talk by handful_ofdust, which made me feel even worse about not yet having read her Hexslinger books. People have been recommending them to me for ages), shared some meals with awesome people, caught up a tiny bit with some Viable Paradise kids, and generally had a wonderful time.

So much happened over the weekend that I can't possibly do it all justice. If I saw you and talked to you, I really loved getting the chance to do that. In many cases, I'm very sorry that I didn't have more time to spend with you. wirewalking says she wants to have an everybody come and spend more than three days with her right now con, and boy do I understand that. I wish we could.

In the meantime, here are a few pictures from the weekend, to remember it by, or perhaps to better pretend you were there.

I'm home for a bit setting up the last of the Arts Exchange Party stuff. Since Kyle's announced it, and I have the photos now, I can tell you that one of the awesome components of this party is Leaving Dakota!

It's a really interesting photo story traveling show by Kyle Cassidy, who says more about it here. Alas, I don't have all the additional artifacts, but I suspect we may end up with some before the night is over. There's going to be contest associated with this, too. So that's two contests with prizes. Plus the passports and the general awesomeness that others are bringing into this thing. Come on over and check stuff out. You may walk away with shiny new wonders!

I still don't know the room number, but it will be on the 6th floor, starting at 8. Follow the Interstitial Arts signs and the sounds of irrepressible creativity!

Progress on the Interstitial Arts Exchange Party prep is going quite well. Here's what I have been working on for this past week, and what I finished today:


Interstitial Arts Passports!

The idea is that attendees will get passports and take them around to other attendees to fill them with "stamps" like drawings, haiku, scraps of fabric, stickers, etc. to mark their passage through the interstices.

The small text at the bottom of the passport says:

Imaginary and Real States of the Interstices.

I think I made about a hundred and twenty of them, and I don't really know if that will be enough, but I ran out of red card stock and gold embossing powder, so this is the full extent of my passport making capacity. I may number them. Then they can be all fancy and limited edition like!

To make these, I cut paper and card stock into 4" x 6 1/2" rectangles, stamped them with rubber stamps (the passport and imaginary and real states ones were custom orders, but the leaf I had already), dusted them with gold embossing powder, used the heat tool to magic the powder into shininess (which was really probably not the best plan for a heat wave, but oh well; art hurts), folded them and stapled them with red staples to match the card stock. Each passport has eight pages to fill with travel stamps. I'm really hoping the party attendees run with this idea and make them even more amazing than I can imagine.

Other exciting things we will have include a gorgeous hand drawn and colored map by Sherwood Smith, a Thackery T. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities contest (with prizes for the best curiosities!), and something else I can't quite announce yet, but which I am pretty sure will also be super fun.

So, that's what I'm up to. If you'll be at Readercon, I hope to see you there! If you won't, I'll be sure to take a lot of pictures so you can see what we do.

Driving home from Plymouth...

Moss: Herring Pond Road.
Me: Yes, that's actually named after Amy Pond's brother. ... They don't like to talk about him much.
Moss: That's because The Doctor ate him with custard.

Aside from the Interstitial Arts Exchange (which is shaping up to be really cool! More details to come!), I've been doing a bunch of other things.

Stone Telling's fourth issue just came out a few days ago, and I got to do another Roundtable interview. Yay! This time the poets I talked to were Amal El-Mohtar, C.W. Johnson, Jeannelle Ferreira, and Valentina Cano. This issue was guest edited by J.C. Runolfson and Shweta Narayan, and they did a fantastic job. So many amazing poems in there! Jeannelle's "Bacab Skerry" has infiltrated my dreams the last couple of nights, which is is really neat, and also really meta.

My awesome friend KJ Kabza just put out a short story collection (he's also got a novelette in the July/August issue of F&SF--woot!), and as a bonus feature for that collection, I did an author interview with him. You can read an excerpt of that interview over here if you like!

And of course, I've been doing plenty of Outer Alliance stuff. The latest podcast episode went up a little over a week ago, and features interviews with neo_prodigy and David Levine. I also got to announce one of my really exciting sekrit projekts in that episode: Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond of  The Writer and the Critic will be guests on the OA Podcast in August! Hurray! I love their podcast, so I'm very much looking forward to having them on mine. This week's Spotlight is about other podcasts, like the new all-star SF Squeecast rarelylynne moderates.

And of course, I've been hanging around with my cats, as per usual. Remember how a few Fridays ago, I mentioned that Ophelia loves it when I sing, and jumps in my lap? Well, this morning, I was singing along with Erasure (who have a new album coming out in October! Eee! And I am seeing them in September! Double eee!), and the silly mitten was jumping in my lap constantly. It was so adorable that I ended up documenting it with the laptop's built in camera.



What have you been up to?

Q. Whose idea was this, and why?
A. I kind of accidentally made it up after I mistakenly thought some friends were having a mix CD exchange. One of them told me that she was no good at making mixes and couldn't participate. I jokingly said that she could make other creative stuff, and we could have an interstitial arts exchange, which would be very appropriate, since Readercon tends to attract the interstitial arts crowd. Then, because I am foolhardy, and because a few others thought it seemed like a fun idea, I ran with it.

Q. Do I have to give something away?
A. You don't have to do anything! But! If you bring art, big or small, to give away or trade, that could be fun! It's also fine to bring stuff just for display, though. And we will have some things on hand to make and do, so even if you come empty-handed, you might leave having given and received things anyway.

Q. What do you mean by art? And what is interstitial art?
A. The Interstitial Arts Foundation defines interstitial art as, "art made in the interstices between genres and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. It is art that crosses borders, made by artists who refuse to be constrained by category labels."

In practice, this might mean mixing genres (science fiction and fairy tales, literary mainstream and fantasy, etc.), crossing media divides (It's a poem and a scarf at the same time!), or just being tricky to categorize (Is this song country or metal? I just don't know...).

For the purposes of this party, art means anything creative that you feel inspired to make. Poems, songs, mixes, cards, games, jewelry, pictures, sculptures, stories, or any combination of any of those things! And of course, I haven't listed all the possible things by any stretch. In my previous entry about this party (before we had a firm date and time), I showed an example of art inspiring other art and mutating in exciting ways. That's the kind of spark I hope leads to a creative bonfire at this party.

Q. I'm not an artist. Can I just come to hang out?
A. Yes! Of course! And if you find that you want to participate in some spur of the moment creativity when you arrive, we're certainly not going to stop you. *g*

Q. Can I sell stuff at this party?
A. No, this is a free event for sharing free stuff and/or showing off stuff you don't want to give away. No soliciting! But, if you want to promote your art by showing it or giving samples away, that's totally fine. And of course, if you have business cards, definitely feel free to give those out to anyone who might be interested in buying things from you later.

Q. Is this an official Interstitial Arts Foundation event?
A. Nope! I just made it up 'cause I felt like it. It's not officially associated with any organization. But! A lot of IAF types will be attending, and Readercon is hosting an official IAF Town Meeting on Sunday, so if you want to get involved with that organization, you'll have plenty of opportunity to do so over the course of the weekend.

Q. I have a reading at nine, so I can't get there until at least ten. Should I still come?
A. Absolutely! This party is officially going from 8pm to 11:30pm, but unofficially, we'll let the creativity run its course until we all feel satisfied with the results. If you can only come for a bit at the beginning, or at the end, that's totally fine. Please do stop by when you can!

Q. Who are you, anyway?
A. I'm Julia Rios. I write, and interview people, and I like to dabble in crafty things, though I'm no master artist by any stretch. I'm a regular contributor to the Outer Alliance blog, and host of the Outer Alliance Podcast (promoting LGBTQIA content in speculative fiction), and I'm really interested in celebrating diversity in all kinds of ways, especially if it means getting people to do awesome things together.

Q. How accessible will this event be for disabled people?
A. We'll do our best, but I don't know. It's going to be in a hotel room, so there won't be a ton of space. I think it'll be on the 6th floor, but the hotel does have elevators, so at least there's that.

Q. I have still more questions! What are you going to do about that?
A. Ask them in the comments, and I will do my best to answer them to your satisfaction.

From littlebutfierce. Leave a comment if you would like me to ask you five questions, and then you may spread this like a deadly virus in your journal, too! It's a fun way to get to know people, I think.

1. Who's the author that was the most fun to interview for the OA podcast?

Oh, this is hard! I love interviewing people because there's always a fun moment, or a thing I never expected to find out in every single interview. One of most fun interviews I can think of off the top of my head was the one with JoSelle Vanderhooft, Amal El-Mohtar, and Mike Allen, though, because they all knew each other beforehand and they had a really comfortable conversational chemistry with each other. Also, it was super adorable when Amal cursed and then sheepishly asked if it was okay to curse on the OA podcast. Hee!

2. What was the most surprising thing to you about WisCon?

Honestly, I have to say I really didn't expect to have so many people recommend the new My Little Pony show to me. That was far and away the most surprising thing about WisCon. I still haven't watched it, but I do intend to!

3. What advice do you think your 50-year-old self will wish she could give you right now?

If I knew that, I'd probably be better at doing whatever it is that I'm doing right now. I have this feeling I may just be kind of stumbling through life forever. Sometimes I try to think about what I would tell my 16-year-old self, but I'm no good at that, either. I mean on the one hand, I want to say, "Hey, it's okay to like girls! Don't worry about it!", but on the other hand, I think I wouldn't have believed me at the time anyway. And it wasn't okay to admit it at school. I mean even not admitting, I still got beaten up for it. Admitting it would not have made the beatings stop. On the other other hand, acknowledging privately that it was okay would maybe have been a good thing. Hmm. I don't know. None of this helps me with the theoretical advice from 50-year-old me to present day me, either. I guess my best advice is to keep trying?

4. What's the best book you've read this year so far?

Oh man, another hard one! I think I have to go with Liar by Justine Larbalestier, if only because I read it while on a family vacation in April, and it was one of those books that everyone with me ended up wanting to read and talk about. I can't tell you anything about it, though, because Justine has been very clear about not wanting people to spoil it, and talking about it does rather spoil it. But talking about it with people who have read it is pretty neat! Everyone has different ideas about it!

5. When left to your own devices on a Saturday w/no obligations, what do you like to do?

Take a nice walk past my local pond (which is gorgeous in every season, really!) into the town center, write a bit at my local coffee shop with a cup of herbal tea (and maybe some lentil soup, mmmm), walk some more, come home and have a nice dinner and maybe make some art, or read, or play Rock Band (I only sing, though; Moss drums, which makes it a nice joint gaming activity. I am very not good with video game controllers as a general rule).

One of my favorite things about WisCon was Nisi Shawl's Guest of Honor speech. She talked about awesomeness (except I think she called it genius, or maybe magic--it's really all the same thing, I think), and how we should be actively trying to spread as much of it around as possible. She mentioned how in The Last Unicorn, the unicorn's majesty doesn't take away from anyone else, but instead makes everyone around her more majestic and beautiful and awesome. It's not a zero sum game, being awesome. It's a magical compounding wonder. I'm right there with Nisi on that, and one of the things I particularly love about being so deeply immersed in the speculative fiction community is how this tends to manifest all around me on a regular basis.

Here's a recent example:

A couple of weeks ago, csecooney wrote some lyrics for a parody song based on her story, "Oubliette's Egg" (which you can read in Jack o' the Hills). Because I am extremely silly and had GarageBand open already for podcast purposes, I recorded it as an MP3 on the spur of the moment. Then, in the comments, asakiyume made a passing reference to cephalopods in court robes... We all know how much I love a good cephalopod, right? I couldn't resist asking Asakiyume to draw this for me (because, unlike me, she actually can draw), and she promptly returned with this:



Is that not awesome?

So, there on one day we had music, drawings, and stories all intertwined and mutating at a glorious rate. Hurrah!

Now, because I am always on a mission to spread as much silliness and wonder and creativity around as I can, and because I am bound and determined to make Readercon (historically, my terror!con) into something delightful and not anxiety-inducing, I somehow managed to semi-accidentally create an Interstitial Arts Exchange Party for this year.

The idea is that you make something, big or small, fancy or frivolous: a poem, a song, jewelry, cards, whatever (bonus points if it somehow relates to the literary theme of the con). Bring it along to show off or give away or trade with others. Then we all get together on either Friday or Saturday night in my awesome Party Room in the party block of the con hotel, and revel in the awesomeness.

Anita Allen has already promised to bring some photos of the corset she made to go along with tithenai's The Honey Month.

I know Mary Robinette Kowal is going to be wandering around that weekend. Perhaps she will see fit to come and share some of her Shades and Glamour cards with us...

I am not sure what exactly I will bring, but I'll make sure to have some giveawayable things, and some supplies on hand for people to engage in creative endeavors right on the spot.

So, if you're coming to Readercon, please come and add to the creative awesomeness pool! If you're not coming and want to send pictures or MP3s or whatever else my way, I'll happily share them/display them for you. I also plan to take lots of photos on the night, so everyone who can't make it will at least be able to see what it was like. If there are songs and things, I'll work on trying to figure out how to get recordings online for you, too.

Finally, if you are going to the con, would you rather come to this party on Friday or Saturday night?