As of Thursday, "The Tinyman and Caroline" is available as a podcast from PodCastle! I've always been terribly impressed with the Escape Artist folks (Escape Pod, Podcastle, and Pseudopod), and I'm thrilled to have them do a story of mine.

For the reference of Nebula nominator-type people, here are my eligible stories under the new rules:

* "Simulacrum's Children," Writers of the Future Vol. 24. August, 2008. [Amazon|Powell's|Audible.com (audiobook)]

* "The Last Devil," Beneath Ceaseless Skies. November, 2008.

* "The Tinyman and Caroline," Beneath Ceaseless Skies. May, 2009. (Also available via PodCastle.)

* "Lady of the White-Spired City," Interzone. May/June, 2009.

* "Katie Birch," Baen's Universe. October, 2009.

* "The Woman and the Mountain," Beneath Ceaseless Skies. November, 2009.

If you're in SFWA and are interested in reading any of these, I'd be happy to send you a copy.

1. The next-door neighbors are playing "Hey Jude."

2. On the walk home today, there was a dead bloated dog just five or six feet off the sidewalk, being picked at by some fair-to-middling-sized buzzards.

3. Today my American Diva passed a test for the first time this year. That sounds horrible, but in context I'm terribly pleased, especially since more than half the class flunked.

4. Speaking of music, all my kids are obsessed with Michael Jackson. I catch them doing moves that they say are Michael Jackson dance moves, which I wouldn't know because I never paid him any attention.

5. You know the 'dance' the Funky Chicken? Well, my kids have taken to discussing "the Chicken Funky."

Dropping in during the brief break in school craziness to mention: I'm published! Twice!

The Woman and the Mountain is now live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which also has gorgeous new cover art. Who doesn't love an airship?

And, Katie Birch is now available in the latest issue of Baen's Universe, complete with a rather haunting illustration. I'd forgotten or never realized that all the JBU stories are illustrated, so seeing this one today was a lovely surprise. And though I'm sorry to see the magazine go, I'm very glad I got to appear in it at least once before its death.

I've been promising themed pictures posts for forever, and I'll have to keep promising a little longer. In the meantime, here are some pix of the school I teach at, just to give you an idea of where I am and what things looki like.

( Click here to see the neat pictures! )

I'm still working on replying to comments to my reading frustrations post. Thank you so much, everyone who write with ideas and encouragement!

Anyway, it's been a while since I've talked about, yanno, the fun stuff in Honduras. So here's some: two things that I don't think would be heard in any other context on Earth but where a bunch of non-native speakers are trying to express Spanish concepts in English words.

1. "Miss" and "Mister." These are, I gather, the usual translations of "Señora" and especially "Señor," and they're how students usually refer to us authority figures.

The thing is, "Señor" in Spanish applies to a much wider range of situations than "Mister" in English. Kids are forever addressing male teachers as just "Mister," as in, "Mister, can you give me one ball?" or often just an expression of dismay, "No, Mister, no!"

They're also used as more general nouns. For instance, in church we sing to "El Señor de Señores," which sounds much stranger in English: "Mister of Misters." Or a child might say, "You have to tell the mister about that." I actually had a student say about me, "She is my miss."

At first it sounds truly bizarre, but now I barely hear the strangeness anymore.

2. In Honduras a frequent expression is "Buen provecho," which translates roughly to "Good eating." However, it is apparently used all the time, because a student comes by to wish me a good meal - in English - at least once a day. I also hear "Good eating," "Enjoy your meal," and occasionally even "Bon appetite."

Chessie and I are now making a conscious effort to wish students a good meal more often, as it's clearly a cultural thing that we just need to train ourselves for.

This is a cry for help to the flist. It is a sad, sad fact that one of my least favorite sixth grade classes is reading. Here's why: I learn to read around age 5, I absorbed all my vocabulary and an instinct for grammar by osmosis, and I didn't make another qualitative shift in my understanding of language until I took my first creative writing class in college. For me, reading has always been intuitive.

Which is great and lovely and all, but it means I have no idea how to teach it to people for whom it's not intuitive. I'm fairly sure my textbook is silly and stupid, because I'd have thought it was silly and stupid even in sixth grade, but I don't have enough theory to replace it.

( A cut, behind which I moan a little )

Anyway, finally, here's the plea: I'd love to hear personal experiences of things that helped you improve in reading as a child (although I suspect the folks here are a bit skewed to the reading-is-intuitive approach). Also, if you're an educator type, any specific links or helpful suggestions for teaching reading at this level would be wonderful. I've been Googling, but a testimonial of "This web site really helped me" is invaluable.

Please keep in mind that my kids have no Internet access, so online activities are out. I'm looking more for helpful suggestions, ideas, and projects for me-the-teacher.

Things here in Honduras have settled down a little bit from the excitement earlier this week. For those who don't know, deposed president Mel Zelaya returned to the country this week by sneaking into the Brazilian embassy and taking refuge, and then proceeding to give inflammatory speeches from the roof of the embassy. Upon his return, a nationwide, 48-hour curfew ('torque de queda') was instituted almost immediately. Which, for me, translated into two days of unexpected and glorious vacation.

But now the curfew is lifted during the day and classes and such are returned to normal. Now I guess we just wait and see. Elections are in November and Zelaya wasn't/isn't even eligible for re-election (which is what started off the whole mess in the first place), so maybe the 'crisis' will be past at that point. We shall see.

Oh, Lymond. Not only are you a marvelous lute player and a fencer like unto none, not only can you pretend Irishness so convincingly that only another Irishman could tell, but you're also the most skilled lover in the universe. Yes, the universe. Yes, that might be a slight paraphrase from the book's actual wording.

And look! You've gone and gotten yourself framed again. Congratulations.

Current Mood: skeptical

One of the conventions I’ve discovered in anime that absolutely fascinates me is this: a nosebleed functions as a sort of visual euphemism for a character getting an erection. Sometimes what the nosebleed “actually” signifies seems to be understood by the other characters, and sometimes not; certainly in all of my two examples there’s an element of wink-nudge towards the audience.

This idea of visual euphemisms strikes me as a completely foreign concept. I’m used to the idea that what I see on screen is literal reality, at least within the context of the story. I can only think of two other somewhat similar examples of things presented as literal reality that were meant to be interpreted as something else entirely.

One is the very close symbolic association between witchcraft and lesbianism in the Willow/Tara arc in season four of Buffy. I wrote about this at some length a while back, but the short version is that there are multiple conversations, ostensibly about magic, in which “lesbianism” could be substituted for “witchcraft” and “sex” could be substituted for “spells” without losing anything aside from a bit of grammatical finesse.

The kicker, though, is in “The Yoko Factor” in which Spike is trying (successfully) to cause friction between the Scoobies. We then have the following exchange:

SPIKE: Your mates said you weren't playing with computers so much. Into the new thing.

WILLOW: What new thing?

SPIKE: You know: you two, the whole… wicca thing.

WILLOW: They were talking about that? ... What'd they say?

SPIKE: Talking about, you know, it's a phase, you'll get over it.

WILLOW: What? Who said that? ... Was it Buffy?
(to Tara)
'Cause you know what she means by that…

SPIKE: She was defending you. 'Cause Xander said you were just being trendy.

WILLOW: Trendy?

SPIKE: I didn't see why they were going on. Person wants to be a witch, that's their business.

WILLOW: I knew Buffy was freaked.

(emphasis mine)

Nabbed from various folks:

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

As mrissa and swan_tower said, no promises that I won't actually write the story you tell me about. Story ideas is part of what this about. :)

Previously unbeknownst to me, Amazon will not sell mp3 music to locations outside the United States. Something to do with international rights, I assume. Which, yanno, makes the ever-available piracy option just that much more appealing...

*grumble grumble*

Current Mood: profoundly irritated

It turns out that the way to get a roomful of (Spanish-speaking) sixth graders to all sing the same words at the same time is to put accent marks on the syllables with the beats, and then have them clap on each beat. Suddenly, the woeful mush of the verses of "Awesome God" has audible lyrics! (Presumably this would also work with English-only students, although the idea of an accent mark would likely take them longer. It's built in in Spanish.)

So, what glee have you discovered today?

(Not-a-meme inspired by this post by yhlee.)

I thought I was done bothering y'all with reviews, but aliettedb pointed out this review of Interzone 222, as reviewed in Locus by Gardner Dozois:

The best story in Interzone 222 is Sarah L. Edward's Lady of the White-Spired City, a quiet, understated, but also subtly powerful story about an emissary of an interstellar civilisation returning to the land of her birth after a span of generations away, and having to struggle with all the myriad of ghosts of the past that are raised by her return.

I... can't really ask for better words that those. What a way to start the morning.

Current Mood: thrilled

Okay, all-wise flist: How can Queen's Play be so much shorter than A Game of Kings and yet take so much longer to read?

*groan*

I learned a new word today that I suspect is slang, or at least colloquial (and what's the difference between those, anyway?): cursi, pronounced COOR-see. According to the student explaining it to me, it means, "something that is so cute that it is too much cute." Very useful word, indeed.

The reason I learned it was because the student wanted a comparable word in English. My best guess was twee, which apparently comes of fairly specialized roots and isn't exactly widely-used, at least not in my circles. My next guess was 'sappy,' but I think that was both too general and in a different direction than what the student was looking for.

So, what would you guys suggest for a synonym?

I came to Honduras with a fairly specific idea of what 'Hispanic' names sounded like, and I have been surprised. Not only have I not met a single Pablo, Pedro, or Maria, but many of the names I have found, I would never have guessed. A few highlights:

Walterina (f) - named after her father Walter, maybe? Otherwise, I've got nothing.

Osiris (f) - oh yes. First person I've ever met named after an Egyptian god, and it was a woman. Pronounced oh-SEE-rees.

Ms. America (f) - not such a surprise, maybe, since I've heard America as a first name before, but it's her preferred title in front that makes the name.

Erickson (m) - from a ubiquitous last name at my undergrad to a (I'm told) fairly common first name in Honduras.

Fausto (m) - nothing like an allusion to classic German literature, eh?

Obed (m) - and now for an Old Testament reference.

I have a number of themed posts in mind, but they all require more photos, not to mention text to go with the photos. So for now, here are some general photos I've taken around El Progreso since I got here, which'll give you the start of an idea of the land- and city-scapes here.

( Click to see photos! )

I've long liked the idea of podcasts, particularly podcasts of fiction (original or reprinted), but I've never listened to them very much because I couldn't figure out how to fit them into my life. I can't just sit down and listen to an audiobook or podcast the way I sit down with a book; I get fidgety. I also haven't driven a commute in over five years. Until recently, my podcast listening was limited to the rare bus trip or airplane ride.

But now, finally, I've figured out how to listen to podcasts: I listen to them while handwishing the dishes. This is especially nice since I haven't had the time or the brain to actually sit down and read lately.

So, I made a first sweep through Escape Pod and PodCastle, picking out everything that caught my eye. Two recent favorites have been Sara Genge's biologically and sociologically exotic Family Values (which confirmed that I really like how biology informs her worldbuilding) and Andy Duncan's early 20th century Parisian horror theatre piece Grand Guignol, which is gleefully full of faux gore.

Short version: yay Escape Pod and PodCastle. I recommend. :)

Classes start Monday - eep.

I just looked through the last couple of weeks of photos, and have a few I'm tickled pink to show you all. Alas, I'm beat. You'll have to make do with my fabulous new icon. Those gigantic green things hanging next to my head? Those would be grapefruit.

The new laptop arrived today, in tip-top condition. Hooray. Now we can start thinking about blogs with photos again!

I am presently eating tomato, chicken, and green banana soup with warmed tortillas on the side, as sent over from the neighbor. I just thought you should know.

I've already mentioned that we buy purified water from the Arroyo company truck that comes by the house - one of these days I'll have pictures of one of the trucks, which have a honeycomb structure on the sides to hold the 5 gallon water jugs.

Similarly, on Tuesdays and Fridays the garbage truck comes. In Honduras, most everyone who can afford it lives inside a locked gate. Also, there are unattended dogs running all over the residential areas. Thus, you can't just leave your garbage bags outside on the ground for the garbage men to pick up, because the dogs will get into them. Nor, obviously, can the garbage men get to them if you leave them inside the gate.

The usual solution seems to be to leave them inside the gate but in sight of the street, so that when the men come down the street yelling "Basura!" ("Trash!"), you have time to open the gate and put the trash out. (However, we've been experimenting with leaving the trash hanging on the fence, out of reach of the dogs, which seems to work. I haven't seen any actual garbage bins.)

But in addition to these necessary services, lots of other people come along the street yelling things. "Tortillas!" is common, from people selling fresh tortillas, often from their bicycles. One day someone was riding around in a pickup yelling "Colchones!" ("Mattresses!"), but we couldn't decide if he was buying or selling. And sometimes people yell things that we just can't make out at all.

I had thought, seeing as its bilingualism is one of the school's main selling points and as there are signs all over saying, "We Only Speak English," that naturally the teacher training would be conducted in English.

Silly me.

I don't know that much Spanish yet. Besides, Mr. Boss, who's conducting the training, has a fairly strong case of the Honduran accent, which drops S's willy-nilly. (This is unlike the Spanish accent, which lisps S's in the middle of words, but not at the ends, I don't think.) Fortunately, the one American who's already been at the school several years sat and translated some for us.

More suchlike tomorrow.

In other news, my computer appears to be arriving on Thursday. Hurrah.

Ooh! And, I took pictures especially for the purpose of making a special dedicated Honduran icon.

Via housemate Pen, I have discovered Full Metal Alchemist. He and Chessie showed me some other anime first - Martian Successor Nedesico for fluffy, humorously self-aware space opera; and Greenwood for (almost) entirely non-genre comedy/lightweight drama. I got through them, I giggled occasionally, and I even had a couple of favorite characters in Nedesico. (Ruri. Ruri is fabulous.)

But Full Metal Alchemist, finally, seems to be my anime. It's much more serious in tone, with coherent magic rules, colorful worldbuilding, likeable characters, and the willingness to go dark places. This is not happy fluffy alchemy, y'all. The cost of magic is explored over and over - in fact, it's reiterated in the intro of every episode. The characters spend much less time exclaiming, waving their hands, and otherwise over-emoting than the other anime I'd seen (besides Miyazaki). The animation is lovely.

And I have 42 more twenty-two minute episodes to go. Hurrah. More when I have more to say.

Discovered in my inbox this morning that, as part of a cross-promotion between the two magazines, PodCastle will be podcasting my Beneath Ceaseless Skies story "The Tinyman and Caroline." Woohoo! PodCastle is an excellent production and my single favorite podcast source, and I'm absolutely thrilled to appear there. Plus, totally honored to be representing BCS to the PodCastle listeners.

This would also be the first sale I've made without the formal submission process. Another milestone.

I've usually made a point of replying to all comments on my blog, but for the forseeable future I'm giving myself permission not to. If I don't reply to yours, it doesn't mean I didn't appreciate it, it just means no response popped into my head when I read it. :)

Chessie and I went shopping today. We had a goal: find a very fine-tooth comb for the cleaning of ticks (or something similar - we don't have positive ID) out of one's hair. Our secondary goal was to bring home another large fan, if we happened to find one, so that we'd have a fan dedicated to the common area as well as a fan for each bedroom.

Now, there are a number of places to shop in El Progreso.

( Click here for much more about shopping in Honduras. )

( Click here for lots of newsy things and a few slices of life )

Today was the day of rain and housework. We've had at least three cycles of thunder/lightning and then rain; this last bunch of thunder was close, sharp, and pretty startling if you didn't expect it.

As for housework, Chessie swept and wetmopped the floors (all tile), and I assisted by following along and talking to her. No, seriously, she specifically asked if I would, and said it was quite helpful. Right, then. I can do that.

I'm beginning to think that Chessie and Pen are really good matches as housemates for me. Chessie was an English major, and so I can talk lit geek stuff to my heart's content. Today the discussion was Shakespeare, which plays we'd seen and read, our varying experiences with Hamlet, and the tentative plan to have Shakespeare readings as soon as I have a computer again (so that we each have one to read off of; neither of us brought any Shakespeare).

Pen, meanwhile, is the CS geek who's interested in Ideas of all kinds, be they mechanical or philosophical or whatever. He's also the SF and anime buff. (Tonight I'm being introduced to Martian Successor Nadesico, which I've never heard but am told is a good way into anime; hopefully there will later be viewing of Fullmetal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop, both of which I have heard of.) He's the one I talk to about Dune and Neal Stephenson, not to mention that he's my in-house computer consultant.

Speaking of computers, I've just ordered a new one and had it sent to my friend Ariel's folks; these are the people that are moving down in a couple of weeks. Also, they have Hondurans coming through their house on a pretty regular basis. So, one way or the other, I should have my shiny new computer soon. And, turns out, it was several hundred dollars cheaper than the last one and is more powerful in pretty much all areas. So, yay. Crisis resolved without too much stress.

(Spanish lesson of the day: the noun 'rain' in Spanish is 'la lluvia,' (pronounced 'la YOO-vee-uh'), which I think sounds very pretty. If you want to say that it's raining, you say, "Llueve" (yoo-WAY-vay), which literally means "It rains." And if you want to say that it's raining really hard, as it was here today, you say "Llueve mucho!" (yoo-WAY-vay MOO-cho, with lots of hand motions and facial expression as desired *g*).)

I have the entries set so that you should be able to comment 'anonymously' even without having a Livejournal account. At the bottom of each entry is a link that says "Leave a comment." Click on that, and then select the "Anonymous" option. (Of course, it's helpful if you sign your comment, or else it'll really be anonymous and I won't know who you are.)

Or emails are always good, too. :)

Yeah. Mi computadora se murió. It so happens housemate Pen has lots of experience with repairing computers, and after a thorough dissection he reports that most likely my motherboard is fried. So now I get to either find a replacement computer in Honduras or plumb the mysteries of getting one shipped from the states.

Rats.

On the bright side, my hard drive (and thus my data) is most likely just fine. Also, this makes all my trouble with Firefox moot.

It's popular to ask what books you'd take with you to a desert island. Inadvertently, I seem to have answered that question when I packed for Honduras, where public libraries seem to be unheard of, and English-language pickings at the bookstore are slim.

Here, then, is a picture of my desert island library: ( Click for picture and much discussion )

Also, a bonus answer: they always ask you what one personal item you'd want on your desert island. Often it's food. It seems my choice would be one jar of homemade cherry jam, which is what I brought here for when I especially need a taste of home.

Here's my first real post about Honduras. Hurrah! I'll probably alternate between subject-specific posts (ex: downtown El Progreso) and event-related posts (ex: the first day of school). This one is more of a general jumble.

(For those who need a refresher, my informational post about why I moved to Honduras is here. You can see a list of all my posts about Honduras here.)

( Click to read more! )

I am stumped. Is there any reason that my Mozilla Firefox might suddenly not get along with a number of interactive-type web pages? Starting last week, it's been a real pain with the new Gmail interface (although it does fine with the old version). I also have trouble logging in and out of LJ. And logging into my online bank account is ridiculous - the website keeps saying it doesn't recognize me.

I'm using Firefox 3.5.1 now, but when this started I was using an older version - I thought maybe just installing the new version would fix the problem. My OS is Vista.

EDIT: This problem first appeared last week when I was still in the States, so I don't think it's related to the Honduras move. Also, everything is still working fine in my secondary browser. It seems to be just a Firefox problem.

Ideas? Help. *whimpers*

Yep. It is hot and sticky in Honduras. Who knew?

I'm working up an actual entry, possibly with pictures if I take my camera today when we go grocery shopping.

1. I have one more DW code. Comment if you want it.

2. Preparations for Honduras continue apace. The American folks I'll be living with have moved into the house we'll be living in, and say it's satisfactory. It looks like we'll be taking the hosuehold furnishings off the hands of the previous tenant, rather than going out and buying them new - yay for that.

3. Clearly, I need a Honduras icon.

It took me much longer to do this than it should have, but the two winners of the copies of the WOTF anthology are:

wendigomountain
dragonpaws

If you could each please email/PM me with your mailing address, I will get your books in the mail.

And thanks everyone for participating!

In between getting the last of my immunizations, saying goodbye to friends, and other such pre-moving activities, I've been on a movie binge. Finally, I've been renting and watching a whole bunch of things I've been meaning to see for years, in some cases. Also, I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie.

No spoilers.

( Sweeney Todd, Soylent Green, Hellboy II, Last Chance Harvey, Fight Club, HP6, Hot Fuzz )

Clearly, if I don't do this before I leave for Honduras (August 1! I have plane tickets!), then I won't do it for a very long time. :)

So, comment here if you'd like a chance for a copy of the Writers of the Future anthology, Vol. 24. I'll be taking names until midnight Sunday night (or, yanno, whenever I get up Monday morning), and then I'll use the highly scientific names-in-hat method to select two lucky winners.