Vacation week, updates and a few links

I suppose it’s high time I made an update and bumped my rant about “Dr. Laura” down a spot. Final comments at the end of this post.

Last week, I spent six days in a row with family from Chicago and New York up at Dad’s. I got lots of really long, wonderful swims in the lake, did some boating, baked pies and fruit cobbler, ate food I rarely eat like ice cream and corn on the cob, watched home fireworks over the lake (ours and some neighbors’) saw the Roman Polanski movie The Ghost Writer on DVD (interesting but ultimately unsatisfying, partly because the protagonist couldn’t possibly have been a writer, he was too dumb! Sheesh!), and generally hung out. Dad’s last Townsend band concert for the season barely dodged a possible rain-out and enjoyed a large and appreciative audience, and my nephew sat in with them and played trumpet. It was cloudy for the peak nights of the Perseid meteor showers, but I saw one very bright meteor on Friday night. I saw that one because I was hanging out laundry at 2:00 a.m. thanks to a bottle of sunscreen leaking all over my swim bag. Ah, summer!

Now that everyone has gone home (my niece and nephew start school today!! 8-( ), I’m back to work, from which I am goldbricking to write this post. I have a book to edit and covers to design as my top priorities this week, and I’ve been shutting things down and sitting on the couch with Pig to read manuscripts in order to reduce potential distractions. Therefore there’s not much news. The watering ban is still in effect, and all the rain is missing Pepperell. The big tomatoes are ripening all at once and I’m eating tomatoes every day; the rest of the garden is faring about as you’d expect. In another week or so I’ll dig the potatoes and see what we’ve got. I’ve gone back to cycling for aerobics, and I’m [finally, after long resistance] trying out Blockbuster’s rent-by-mail service, starting with season two of True Blood. I refuse to sign up with Netflix because I hate their pop-up ads so much, I don’t want to give them my business. I already have a Blockbuster store account, and they’ll accept PayPal. They also have Being Human and other obscure interesting things I’ve wanted to see. It’s cheaper than iTunes, and there are many shows and movies I’d like to see, and cycle to, once without owning them permanently.

Speaking of cover designs, Orbit Books has been doing tongue-in-cheek overviews of fantasy cover art trends for 2008 and 2009. They’re really funny! Part One shows a chart of general cover motifs or cliches; Part Two lists characteristics of heroines on urban fantasy covers.

Media Bistro commented on a bit of trivia about Edith Wharton, who wrote a novel on scraps of brown wrapping paper at age 11 because her mother didn’t want her to be a writer and wouldn’t let her have writing paper. Media Bistro asked readers what they wrote on as a child, and in a later post, reported some of the most unusual answers.

Mostly, I wrote on lined school paper in pen or pencil, but I did have an unusual medium. I worked in a public library that used five-part carbon forms to order books. Each form consisted of four detachable index card size sections (so the pages were about 5″ x 12″) with carbon paper between the different color layers. The bottom layer was card stock and when you’d typed up the orders and separated them, the last one created a temporary card to put in the card catalogue until the book arrived (and now you know how long ago that was!). However, the library only needed two thin forms and the card, so one of my tasks involved removing the unneeded two sheets and their carbons from each form and throwing them away. Except, of course, I didn’t throw them away–I brought them home, hundreds and hundreds of them, and used them as typing paper. I wrote most of a novel on a stack of those long narrow sheets, about two inches thick. I also did a fair amount of writing in those saddle-stapled exam “blue books” I scrounged at school. I’m a serious scavenger. 🙂

Last and least: Many people have commented on “Dr. Laura’s” melt-down. Like me, other commentators pointed out that “the N-bomb” was the least of the issues with what she said. (Indeed, in a different context, it wouldn’t even be an issue: it’s a word, it has a history, we know it’s offensive, people say it, there it is. The problems lie in what “Dr. Laura” said, and thinks, about it.) Since then, “Dr. Laura” has announced that she is cancelling her radio program and retreating to the Internet, where she can join the ranks of notorious toxic bloggers and wreak her damage that way. She complains that she’s doing this to “regain her First Amendment rights.” Have you ever noticed that the people who proclaim their “First Amendment rights” most loudly, and make themselves sound so victimized and oppressed, are always the people who are egregiously abusing those rights, and bemoaning the fact that their hate-speech and verbal battery is being challenged? I wish “Dr. Laura” was capable of recognizing why she offended people, and understand why she’s racist, sexist, homophobic and hurtful…but she isn’t capable of seeing that, and she never will be.

That’s no reason not to give her a hard time, of course. *wry smile*