I plan to do a post with pictures from the adventure we had a couple of weekends ago, but for now you can check out a little bit of what I have been up to.

Tweet the Meat is a Twitter horror magazine that published a tiny horror story of mine earlier this week.

The first Outer Alliance Spotlight post is up on the Outer Alliance blog, too. I'll be doing new Spotlight posts featuring allies of queer Speculative Fiction every Friday. This week the Spotlight guest is author and reviewer Michele Lee.

I will try to get that picture post up soon, but for now, I must go and find food. And yell at Dinah Bell for shredding the mail. Again. Sigh. Frustrating cat is frustrating.

This book's theme is things you're afraid of, so I went with the thing that almost anyone who knows me would guess right away: spiders. I've always been afraid of them, and I consistently have nightmares about them crawling over the bed towards me. Generally, these dreams end with me making incoherent scared noises, jumping out of bed, and waking up across the room, shivering. The worst was the time I was on a plane and dreamt that a spider was crawling across the tray table in front of me. I woke up when the woman next to me shook me and asked if I needed a doctor. She thought I was having a heart attack or a seizure because I was breathing erratically, clawing the air in front of my chest and mumbling, "Oh my god!" over and over in a voice shrill from terror. Awesome.

So, I wanted to make a page about spiders, but I didn't want to actually look at lots of spider pictures because when I do that, I get goosebumps (really, I do, It's freaky), so I decided to try my hand at pop-up bookmaking! Thanks to this wonderful intarweb, I found a great tutorial on creating pop-up spiders.

And so, to the pictures! Click on any picture to see a larger version.


"Come into my parlor," said the pop-up spider to the arachnophobe.

( Well, are you coming? )

Pronounced Nak-a-tish, this town has a ton of antebellum architecture. It's also the setting of Steel Magnolias. My sister and I had the good fortune to spend a night there last summer --and survive! What follows is the picture heavy (plus a short video) story of our adventure.

( Read more... )