Enamel Paradise

A Sacramento Connecticut manager for Bath & Bodyworks fired an employee for being Wiccan. The manager called in the employee to question her scheduled vacation time, and the employee stated that she had taken Samhein off every year for six years, and that the vacation had been approved almost a year earlier. When asked why this particular week, she disclosed that she was Wiccan. According to the article:

Her manager replied, “that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, let me ask you where your priorities should have been?” Uberti asked what was so ridiculous and was told, “Well, you will need a new career in your new year” and “I will be damned if I have a devil-worshipper on my team.” Uberti was fired shortly after the phone call.

This kind of discrimination is unacceptable. Don't buy from B&BW and let them know why.

givesushope
It's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love.

veggieslackers
Despite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast.

It's that time of year, when red velvet and white fluff are in season, when pine and mistletoe scent the air, when sleighbells jangle in the distance...and Nebula nominations open.

Now, I've never been nominated for a Nebula. I've rarely even been suggested for one. But I thought I'd list the things I've written this year that are eligible, just in case any of you are SFWA members and want to vote for them. (Plus some little announcements toward the end!

Palimpsest
Obviously, this would mean the most to me--Palimpsest was in many ways an orphaned novel, surrounded by lay-offs and championed not by its publisher but by its readers. I still can't believe Amazon ranked it #1 on its SFF of 2009 list.

Under In the Mere
Sadly, I think this is a hair too long to qualify in the novella category, and is a long shot given how weird it is--but hey.

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
I love this story with a great love, and I think some of you did too. If you haven't read it yet, please do! I think I am probably turning this into a novel.

Golubash, or Wine-War-Blood-Elegy
Yay, first SF story ever!

The Anachronist's Cookbook
This got zero attention, mostly because it was only available on an app for the iPhone for a long time. But finally, I have gotten permission to post the story for free on my website! All my issues with steampunk in fiction form!

Proverbs of Hell
This story about love between a monk and a demon just came out in The Stories Between, an anthology to benefit and celebrate the awesome indie bookstore Between Books. It's basically filled with storied by authors who have read at the store over the years, and is GORGEOUS besides. Check it out!

A Delicate Architecture
This was the first YA piece I ever wrote--a Hansel and Gretel story, following the witch's childhood and the root of her obsession with candy.

Thank you to everyone who votes! If you are a voting member of SFWA, I will provide free e-copies of any of these that are not available online on request. Just email me.

fashin
Just in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.

All right, so hi!

So we are, transfiguration and I, discussing relationships and I'm reminded of a conversation that I had with someone I just met about what was going on between her and her boyfriend. At one point she was discussing the level of connection between them and saying how deep it was, and as the conversation progressed she also revealed that there were some problems within the relationship. Issues that she was not satisfied with. She was worried about addressing those things because doing so might create a large conflict which, at the time, would have felt worse than just enduring this dissatisfaction.

Because my goal in life, and certainly when giving advice, is that the people around me come out happier, I wondered how she felt about conflict or suffering in general, especially if it was for a greater cause, or even if it was just for personal growth or happiness. So I used basic debate skills to get her to discuss some of these issues, many of which had to do with feeling overprotected, and as though the people that protect her are in some way being condescending by doing so. She was making an assumption that there was an implicit statement in the desire to protect her that said that she could not protect herself.

So I asked her, "Have you ever tried this? Perhaps you could look at people being overprotective, especially your boyfriend or anyone that loves you, not as saying that you can't protect yourself, but as saying 'I'm sure she'd be fine but why should she have to be bothered?' In that way you could view the inferred condescension just as someone wanting to do something nice and be of service to you as a friend or lover."

She answered that she would simply rather not be protected because, by protecting her, regardless of the veracity of any implication or inference, they were robbing her of her opportunity to learn by failing or going through hardship, and facing challenge head on. I then confirmed, "So, you don't think that it's a good idea to avoid any sort of suffering or conflict as long as you think it will bring about personal growth and greater happiness." She said I was correct, and indeed that she would rather face a challenge head on and learn from that experience even if it was a more painful way at the time.

"Then really it sounds like you should talk about these issues with your boyfriend, seeing as how your stated position is that you'd rather face something head on if it results in personal growth." That was game folks.

After glaring at me for having successfully ensnared her in my trap of the obvious, she relented and admitted that she knew I was right and of course it's untenable to remain in an unhappy situation just as it's untenable to maintain any situation in which you feel a need to alter your behavior on the basis of fear. In this case it was the fear of losing the connection that she has with her boyfriend.

Once she had come to this realization, I then noted that I felt like the connection would probably be deeper if she could be totally honest with him. She then asked, "So what do I do then?" She literally asked, word for word, "I mean should I just tell him exactly what's on my mind?" I began to laugh. "Listen to yourself!" I said. "Did you really just say out loud, 'Should I tell my boyfriend, with whom I have a supposedly deep connection, what is on my mind?' Yes! Yes! Yes - you should."

I was reminded of this experience because last night my lovely fiancee and I each received an email from a concerned friend. I responded to the concerned party with my sincere feelings, but transfiguration felt that there were some things that she was inclined to say yet had some reservations about.

I understand that no one wishes to be misinterpreted or say something that they would later regret or that is only true while said in a moment of emotional response. So I decided to tell my fiancee this story. Hopefully she will be able to use it to think about a good way to word her response, as I know she cares deeply for the friendship she shares with this concerned party.

Who knows? Maybe it will even help light the way for someone else.

Here I am, with a hundred things to post about, the rest of St. Petersburg and the wedding and a new book...and I'm playing Mortal Kombat vs. DC and staying up while everyone else is in bed.

I guess I'm having a bit of wedding withdrawal. For awhile there was so much to do that it could never get done, and then it was done and there were so many loved ones to spend time with that I could never spend time with them all, and then there was the honeymoon and it was all SO MUCH. And justbeast was there all day every day for two weeks, and now he's gone again, from very early to very late, working in Augusta, and I miss him. I'm taking a month off before starting on the next book that's due (Prester John Book I, due oh-my-god January 30th) and I want to do awesome things, I want to do everything I've been putting off, but I'm so enervated and tired and just want to be cuddled and relaxified. But it is not to be, just now.

I'm going to get up early tomorrow, I think. I have the Interfictions reading in Boston at 7:30, but I can do things before then. I'm going to try out my new ice cream maker (flavor suggestions welcome). Maybe take a stab at unpacking. Definitely hit the post office. Pretty myself a bit and maybe get my nails done in town before I go. (I am HOPELESS with doing my own nails. It always looks like a monkey went at them.) I don't know. I want to feel awesome. I feel like butter scraped over too much bread, to quote another small, hapless thing.

At least I made yummy dinners for my house full of people. (I feel that it should have a name, like House Cerulia has, now that we are so many.) Beef stroganoff last night and pelmeni lightly fried with curry paste along with green beans sauteed in a bit of bacon fat tonight. And we valiantly work on ingesting the alcohol leftover from both our weddings.

Thanksgiving is coming up, and along with justbeast , babymonkey , and mishamish , we have blazepoet , yakavenger , ioianthe , and her husband Bill-I-can't-find-his-username. Full house! Right now the menu is looking like: plum-molasses glazed goose with cherry-sage stuffing (I make this every year, it kickes the shit out of turkey), lamb shashlik, borscht, butternut squash-apple soup with bacon and goat cheese, homemade bread, spinach salad with warm bacon dressing, cranberry compote, sweet potatoes ala babymonkey, pumpkin chiffon pie with cranberry whipped cream, apple toffee pie with a white chocolate glaze, and gluhwein. What? My inner Sicilian grandmother kicks in when there are more than two people in the house. ALL WILL BE FED.

For future holidays, we can accommodate two other couples. First come, first seated--let us know early if you want to come and we'll hold a seat at the table. This goes for all food-related holidays, not just Thanksgiving.

So yeah. I'm trying to take it easy but taking it easy is weird and a little unnerving. I need to start knitting again.

Yesterday we went walking to Battery Steele, the WWII fort here. It is so very The Barrens and I mourn that no one in this house has read IT but me. There are even fucking terrifying dark corridors and graffiti and abandoned rooms and I so have to get greygirlbeast up here someday, it reminds me so of The Red Tree, too. I love my island so much. I'm so viscerally grateful to be home, to not have missed autumn, to smell the sea and get mud on my boots climbing around the woods with the bittersweet and the sumac. I just...am feeling disconnected, afloat, dreamy and strange.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
3. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
4. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
5. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

One, I'm reading at the IAF Interfictions 2 reading tomorrow, 7:30 pm at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. You all are coming, right? Because there's musical accompaniment and possibly an accordion. And Brian Francis Slattery (ZOMG.) Also my last trip to Boston for awhile as I burrow, sick of travel and with a novel due at the end of January (I don't even want to talk about it.)

Two, I'm working on a trailer for Under in the Mere, and searching for music. I want something appropriate to Arthuriana without going full McKennitt, melancholic, probably, but not necessarily un-modern. Any musicians out there want to get some exposure by letting me use one of their tracks? The Palimpsest trailer got over 20,000 views...

Any suggestions of other musicians must be people who are contactable and at all likely to give me permission. Bands I have to contact through MySpace and are on tour, probably not.

Lastly, I am NOT getting sick. I swear.

As I mentioned before, yuki_onna and justbeast flew back in from Russia Sunday night with the intention of driving straight back to Maine. When they landed Cat texted me that they were coming straight to my house from the airport to avoid backtracking, since D's family home is 30 miles further east. In order to expedite their quick departure, I dragged all their stuff out onto the front porch. Just as I finished, Cat texted me again with the news that the car situation required them to go to the parental home first.

Fortunately, it was a warm evening, and dry. Rather than drag everything back in, I just sat down on the porch and read a book on my iPhone. It was midnight and I was surrounded by 2 big suitcases, 2 duffles, 4 large boxes and half a dozen or so paper and plastic bags filled with stuff. I kept the porch light on and the front door open, so I was pretty visible. The sight of me garnered more than a few flashed brakelights as drivers slowed to see what was up.

At about 12:30 a police car cruised by. I know the officer(s) saw me, because I saw the flash of their brakelights just as they passed me. The patrol car continued to the end of the block and turned right.

I wondered if they were circling the block to come by for another look. I wondered if they would stop and ask what was going on. I thought about that Yale professor and wondered how I would feel if they asked to see my identification. I decided that it wouldn't bother me.

They didn't come back.

That fact is at the heart of privilege issues. If I had been a black man sitting on the front porch in this predominantly white neighborhood, I am certain that they would have stopped to question me. And I don't think it's just a matter of being out of place. If I had been sitting on a porch in a predominantly black neighborhood, surrounded as I was with stuff, I suspect that the officers there would probably pass me by as well. Or if they stopped, it would be to discover if I was in any distress myself.

I get to feel like the police are watching out for me, on my side. I get the luxury of it being a novelty if I am ever asked for identification or to explain my actions.

Privilege isn't always receiving a quantifiable benefit. A lot of it is invisible to people who have that privilege. But just because I can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

The Bride and her Beast returned from Russia yesterday. Cat and Dmitri flew back in last night and, anxious to get home and wishing to take advantage of their jet lag, packed up and hit the road at about 1am.

Mindful of their time crunch and their compact car (and, to be honest, desirous of making sure that they managed to get out of here with ALL their stuff), I spent some time yesterday evening packing up their things, removing unneeded packing material and boxes and compacting everything down to the essentials as effectively as possible. I figured that would help them get all their stuff into their car.

What I hadn't figured on was them arriving with their car quite full already.

Foolishly, I hadn't thought about the wedding gifts and other things that had gone home with D's parents. So when we looked at their car and then looked at the large pile of stuff on my front porch, it was with some dismay.

D suggested leaving behind some of the wedding things, like the bouquet. Cat protested because she wanted them at home. I protested because - AUGH!! No more boxes in my house!!! I suggested that they leave behind the suitcase with the wedding togs - after all, it's just one suitcase, and they are going to be back at Christmas. That was a reasonable compromise, and we got to work.

I really wish we'd taken pictures, because mere words cannot convey the special Tetris/Tardis combination required to get everything into a vehicle that clearly must be bigger on the inside. It's kind of amazing how many extra things can fit into the interstitial spaces between and around the large and bulky items. Misha and Babymonkey, if you can, take the time to appreciate their unpacking. It's going to look like a clown car. Just make sure they get all the wine out from behind the passenger's seat before they open the back door or there will be sad.

And if they have to stop suddenly on the freeway, the shifting load will likely kill them. Other than that, no problems!

So now they are gone, which means The Wedding of Bard and Beast is truly at an end. I walked back into the cleaned out guest room to savor its return to our possession.

And by the gods if I wasn't just a little bit sad and lonely. Of course, Ferrett being gone for this week doesn't help that, but the wedding was such fun and so wonderful that having it all gone leaves me a bit nostalgic.

Oh, well, I can always go down to my sewing room and revel in the mess left by the seamstress. That's still there for me.

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

The final chapter of Fairyland is up.

Chapter XXII: Ravished Means You Cannot Stay

A mother cannot see every little thing, and glad we may be that she could not, as it would have caused a great deal of trouble September would never have been able to explain.

In the following weeks, we will be updating the Museum, filling out the missing audio chapters, and I will be deep in thought planning the sequel. I don't have a release date from Feiwel & Friends yet, but I'm led to believe it will be sooner rather than later.

Thank you to everyone who read and supported this project, who retweeted, posted, boosted the signal. Every member of onaleopard . Who made icons and art. Who loved September and feared for her. Who gave me advice and encouragement. (Particularly alexandraerin , corvaxgirl , and talkstowolves , as well as justbeast , who faithfully created and updated the website all this time.) Who made this particular magic with me. I count us all as Fairyland Family, and make no mistake--what happened between us, in and around Fairyland, was a miracle of no small measure. My gratitude cannot be summed up in a text box. I'll be working on some special treats for you "early adopters" as the print edition nears its birthday.

If you have any questions at this point, any final copyediting notes (I know geek love when I see it), or comments, please feel free to email me. The donation button will stay up and active, as will all chapters, as long as I have a thing to say about it. I'll be posting when we get home (flying out today) about this whole process--many stories to tell.

I would love, now that the story is told, to see some reviews pop up, some discussion of the novel while it still lives only online. It is very hard to get cyberfunded projects reviewed professionally or even by their readers. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them.

Check out crowdfunding for your next serial addiction. I will continue to post fiction online whenever I can.

Thank you so much. You are all my heroes.

*shrugs on a green smoking jacket, straightens hair, and takes a very small bow*

USA Today picked up Cat and Dmitri's tale of woe and triumph.

Good job, all you fellow outraged people who called and wrote and retweeted!

Was awakened at 2 and cannot get back to sleep. Everything is very silent in our room, and my stomach is empty. How I wish the streetside blini stands were 24 hours. Oh my god, streetside blini.

One of the thoughts I kept turning around in my head today was about fantasy literature and the war. WWII is a favorite garden patch for anchoring Western fantasy in historical and moral authority, from Narnia all the way down to Hellboy. It's irritated me in the past, because it seems like a way to infantilize fantasy, to say: look! It's connected to the American idea of the easiest moral choice ever, to go to war against the skull and crossbones brigade! That means it's real, complex literature! And inevitably, those stories that do choose WWII as their adoptive parent show a monochromatic worldview of depressing simplicity. (I'm sure there are exceptions. It's 4 am, this is not a critical piece.)

Now, one of the big set pieces for American and especially British fantasy is the children's evacuation from London. That flight from the horrors of the real world into the pastoral countryside is pretty much the street map for portal fantasy. And yet.

The children of Leningrad were evacuated, too, at least a large number of them (the London evacuation wasn't complete either. Kids are hard to keep track of and for some reason parents are sort of attached.) They were sent out of a urban horror story far worse than the Blitz--and yes, the Blitz sucked, and rationing was hard, but it doesn't even compare to Leningrad and their daily 125 grams of sawdust and turpentine bread, or total lack of power in -38F winter winds, or 60% of the city population dying. No jolly Doctor Who episodes about plucky Leningraders and Captain Jack, you know?

Anyway, they were sent out into...well, it's not pastoral England. But I listened all afternoon to a woman talk about where she went, and it was like a fairy tale. A Russian fairy tale. You know, the kind where you still starve. How the orphans climbed behind the stove and giggled and shared secrets and tried to guess what was cooking by the smell. How they allotted her size 33 boots, and she cried trying to put them on because they were so big, she would never grow big enough to fill them. How she was obsessed with her teacher, who she thought might be a witch, because whenever she woke up in the morning, the teacher already had her clothes on. Whenever she went to bed at night, the teacher still had her clothes on. When did she sleep? Could she take off her clothes? And then how all the children of Leningrad were so determined to stay together, to never loose each other, but now she never talks to the others anymore. (Oddly enough, her orphanage was in Komarova, where Ahkmatova is buried, and which used to be a writers' dacha.)

For me, part of what fantasy does, part of what makes it valuable, is how it can tell a story about the real world in such a way that it jars you out of the endlessly repeated sadnesses of human life and makes you consider it all in another way. How it, mythology and folklore and fantasy, provides a set of narratives through which to see one's own experience, and understand it as part of a much bigger story of the world. Because the world likes to tell stories, the same ones, over and over. The world has fetishes. The world has kinks.

And now, in my heart of hearts, I want to write the book that starts with this other evacuation of children, this shadow-sister to the famous London one. It's a different story, a different starting point that goes to places Narnia doesn't begin to imagine. Again, I struggle with whether I am the person to write it, if it would not be better if my surname were Valentinova. If I maybe don't have the right to put that to paper. But then, I listened to Galina Sergeyevna today, I heard her story and I came to this city and I married into this family with so many war stories. Do I have any more right to write Italian war stories, because I am Italian, though I know no stories of my family during the war? I don't know. All I know is that this someone is sitting at the bottom of me right now, being very quiet and still, little Galina in her size 33 boots, and I look around this city and know I cannot be done writing about it, it is not even possible that I am ready to walk away from it.

Today was intense on many levels.

We walked over what seems like it must be the entire city but in reality was only about 1/5 of it. St. Petersburg is not like other European cities. It has enormous, wide streets that put California to shame, blocks that go on forever, with oddly repeating buildings so that one feels like one is on a loop, and the distances are just vast. I guess there was room enough in Russia not to skimp on the mileage here, but ye gods, my feet are killing me. Not!Leningrad combines the walkability of suburban Ohio with indifferent subway coverage. We have not tried the trolleys yet, as the scale involved only became clear to us today. The maps make it all look so close, but truly, they cajole and lie and make a fool of human hearts. Once you start walking, the city telescopes and all of the sudden you're staring down three miles of long, icy thoroughfare. Oh, look, it's only a block away! MWA HA HA. BLOCK IS INFINITE. CITY MOCKS WESTERNER.

It also started snowing today. Which was beautiful, and soft, and lovely.

We started out at the Anna Ahkmatova museum--now, normally, I hate museums. I am skirting the idea of skipping the Hermitage. I know this makes me a bad person and fit for reviling, but the thing is, museums are dead, enshrined culture, and I would so much rather make my way among the living, tasting and breathing the real and alive city, trying to scry out its heart. I see images online all day. The difference between that and a long white antispetic hall with more images hung on it, often the same images I've seen in other media, is less than you might think. With so little time in any one place, I'm always loathe to spend it in a closed space where I cannot touch anything, or smell anything, or even hear anything, usually. I live enough of my life in a purely visual realm.

But for my darling poetesses I make exceptions. Because it's her house. Where she lived, when she lived here, before the war, before she was evacuated in 1941. My passion for Ahkmatova's work has only grown over the last several years, and sitting in her room, looking out on the golden autumn garden with the first snowflakes drifting down past flitting crows to settle on glistening red rosehips--I had to go. I had to be there. It is an amazing place. I try to imagine it filled with people, with writers making inside jokes and getting drunk and being afraid and giving each other jokey awards and just being kids, the way I and my writerly friends are kids, only Anna and her friends were under a shadow, and most of them were killed, including her husband and son. Everything about Russia seems to start out as a story Americans would find familiar--raconteur writers, dashing, charismatic poetess at the center of it all, city on the verge of war--and then goes to a place so unimaginably awful that even telling the story of what happened here in those days is an act of bloodletting that most westerners avoid entirely.

So after that we went to the Siege of Leningrad museum. Now, there's almost no translation there, but I've seen all those photographs before in my research, and I knew what most of the exhibits were. We saw Tanya Savicheva's diary, and a preserved bread ration which made me feel ill--so tiny, and made with little more than sawdust. But that's what you expect in a museum dedicated to an atrocity committed in wartime.

I didn't know that the guides, the guard, even the coat check woman were all Blockade survivors. (Or as the guard kept calling it: the Affair of Leningrad.) We sat quietly by with Dmitri whispering translation as a PhD student (who turned out to be a fellow Edinburgh University grad) interviewed the guard. She laughed at some of the questions: didn't they teach you about the war in school? I was only a child. Ask the tour guide, she remembers more. Then we followed her to the coat check room, where the woman who remembers the most, having been a teenager, had the day off, and Galina, who was three, and evacuated with the children of Leningrad, told us the very little she remembers, and much more about her orphanage and life bouncing from one family to another after all but her much older sister were killed in the Blockade.

It is very, very hard to keep from crying when those stories are told. When Galina herself teared up talking about the first victory day celebration twenty years later. How she doesn't remember her parents' faces. She was so beautiful and serene, and yet this thing that happened when she was three dominates her entire life.

We walked in the cold after that, down into the impossibly deep subway, where underground, marble pillars and bronze stars shine, polished and bright. Through the streets on Vasilevsky Island, with their sherbet-colored cathedrals and apartments, everything ice-cream and custard colored, yellow and pink and pale green with white piping. We ate solyanka and cabbage and sausage and looked out at the Neva, which is close enough to freezing to have that extra sheen of water that wants to go to ice but can't quite manage it yet. I thought a lot about how much I hate American WWII movies and the whole narrative of that war for us, which ignores so much and rearranges everything else so that it all ends with a lantern-jawed GI hero stomping a cartoonish Hitler single-handedly. American cinema and politics love WWII because it was an easy war for us--the bad guys were nice enough to wear black and twirl their mustaches. It wasn't an easy war here, and people are still living in the same places, the same apartments where it happened. Galina told us that after the war she and her sister just came back and lived in the same apartment. Palimpsests on palimpsests, writing and rewriting a city.

We watched streetdogs all day, handsome black gentlemen, nosing carefully for bones. We watched the night fall suddenly, utterly, and talked about the old days, how they never really end, or begin, but just keep going, forever, like a dark street.

I've been sitting on this news for a really long time, and while I am recuperating from a day of walking all over Not!Leningrad, which is NOT LIKE EUROPE in that it is absurdly enormous, with gargantuan streets and map scales that mock mortal feet, I finally get to announce it. Plain old good news, instead of craziness.

Possible some of you remember the source of the icon in this post. Once upon a time, long ago, I was planning an epic fantasy trilogy based on the myth of Prester John, arising out of my Interfictions 1 story, A Dirge for Prester John. (Speaking of, the IAF Auction to support Interfictions 2 is on now, and there is a wonderful piece based on my PJ story over there. I'll also be reading from the story at the Boston IAF spectakular next Friday at 7:30 at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, accompanied by Brian Slattery's amazing musical troupe!)

I'm deliriously pleased (having nothing to do with the pleasure of being off one's feet) to announce that I've sold the trilogy to Night Shade Books. First book should come out sometime next year.

Which means it finally gets to exist! Yay!

On top of that, my new novella, the California-punk Arthuriana Under In the Mere, is finally in the world and ready for purchase. I need to do a big post on this but I just haven't had the time, hopefully understandably. I'll make my traditional OMGNEWBOOK post when I get back on Tuesday. In the meantime, if you haven't ordered it, hie ye hence, and if you have, the first (reasonably in-depth, not single line) review posted online will receive an Arthurian gift package from me, which will include some original jewelry and other gee gaws.

We went out and walked in that wind last night. It is in nights like that, and in gazing up at the moon, and in the surge of storms, that I feel that sense of magic. Holding out my arms, eyes closed, that rush of wind feels like it runs through me and I am part of it.

And that, to me, is the wellspring of much of my belief. I believe that magic is our attuning with the world. My beliefs are as much related to quantum mechanics as they are to faith, because we keep learning, through science, things like observation changing the result of experimentation.

I believe that the forces of the universe that are beyond both macrocosmic and microcosmic can be accessed, and the way the human mind does so is by a sense of deity. Essentially, I think humans create godhood and, like the changes through observation, belief becomes a focus for the universal forces. I think of the forces in general as goddess/creator because it's an effective way for me to relate to them. I think the sheer power of belief can swirl some of that force into something more manifest, but it's like standing in Lake Erie and swirling your arm around to create a tiny whirlpool: you've affected the water right in front of you and made it do what you want, but the rest of the lake is too large for that effect to impact. And as soon as you stop concentrating that energy on the water before you it slips quickly back into common form of lake.

Some people go through life completely ignoring the force of the universe. Some people think of it as Capital G God and react to it passively in the form of praying to that force. It can impact the energy just like observation can impact an experiment, but the attitude is generally that the force is external.

Witches reach into the water and swirl those whirlpools up. Shaping deity from the force of the universe is creating a vortex in that water. Doing magic is reaching into that power.

Sometimes I can't focus the energy to manipulate it. But when I do, there is a moment when I can hear the pulse of the universe.

Sometimes, like last night, I don't have to manipulate it. I can just let it wash over me. That is blessing.

I finally finished R's baby quilt, in time for her second winter at least! Here's a photo:




It's called Rebecca's Road. The path travels crazily all through the quilt, just like our paths in life. And in one place the path gets reversed, signifying that sometimes we make mistakes, but if we keep moving forward they will straighten themselves out. Her mother told me that I will have to tell her the story of the quilt when she is older. For now, it's lots of bright colors and fun things to find: mermaids and soccerballs and kittens and cowboys.

And the reason that got finished was because I had taken up making the altar cloth for yuki_onna and justbeast's wedding, and I felt too guilty to finish it without finishing the baby quilt first. Spurred on by deadlines, I also finished the altar cloth:



The fabrics were ones that Cat and I purchased before she went to Maine. She said she wanted me to teach her to quilt. Since she doesn't sew at all, I wanted to start with basic piecing; she wanted to start with abstract Russian iconography. We were making some progress, but then the move happened and the fabrics stayed here and since she already loved them were perfect to make into the altar cloth (with design help from bec76; thanks, love).

Now I am into contract crunch season, so no quilting for a while. Le sigh.

Sunday morning: I can't even begin to describe the post-bachelor/ette party condition of my house. After 50 guests in the house, it looked like there'd been a frat party. We made some headway in picking up the recyclables and trash (thank you so much, tithenai, for all your help!) before we had to get ready and head out for the wedding site.

Monday morning: Ooooh, no, please don't ask me to clean!! Fortunately, we still had guests so we couldn't *possibly* clean when we still had to entertain.

Tuesday and Wednesday: Stabs at cleaning.

So here we are now:

Dining room: Baba Yaga and her house of chicken legs are snuggled up by a stuffed pony, all leaning crazily against a pile of 300 paper plates. The canvas bag of emergency supplies - sewing kit, band-aids, safety pins, etc. - is still waiting to be unpacked. Oh, and a gray bag with a camera lens. Anyone want to claim it?

Master Bedroom: Improbably, a fake mustache rests on the dresser. I can't quite explain that....

Guest Bedroom: We will daintily close the door upon the detritus of the Bride and her Beast.

Office: My dress and stuff, still in a trash bag on the floor. Oh, and a stray black shoe. Anyone want to claim it?

Family room: Other than the shifting of furniture, remarkably clean. s00j and company are very good at being vagabonds and respecting their space.

Sewing Room: Piles of taffeta are scattered everywhere. Scraps and threads all over the floor. A complete mess. But, Janice the seamstress did make up for her mess by leaving behind scissors, thread, needles, pins, and other stray bits.

Bathroom: Rumors that we now own a large black dog are completely untrue. Instead, it was a black Cat, who sheds. The number of hair products, face products, razors? Rather overwhelming. I assume they all belong to Cat and D, but if you left them behind? Not worth claiming.

The wedding I will write about soon. But I had to take a moment to memorialize the backstage parts of the experience. It will soon be cleaned up and forgotten if I don't, and it's dear to me.

Well, that's it. One night in St. Petersburg and I'm a little in love.

Trying to squeeze the most out of our reduced time here, we immediately set off walking through the city, stopping to eat pelmeni and my first borscht, as well as coffee and rum and hot wine as the cold got to us. It's only about 30 degrees here tonight, but it goes right through you.

The night was bookended by babushki--grandmas. At the pelmennaya, this amazing old woman sat at her table, right out of every Russian movie you ever saw, with her scarf and all, slurping borscht with almost violent gusto. She then wiped her mouth on both her sleeves and heaved a huge bag over her shoulder before stomping out of the place.

At the last place we went to, a club that has a "Back to the USSR" 80s night on Sunday that WE WILL SO BE GOING TO, another old woman got up and started bumping and grinding on the dancefloor to a techno remix of One Night In Bangkok. Just wow. (Also I note that about half the restaurants in our guide go something like "amazing shashlik, dumplings, fish, great atmosphere, and oh by the way topless waitresses, just saying.")

So we walked over to Gorokhovaya Street, which is where I put my heroine's house in Deathless. I chose the street more or less at random, because I liked the sound, but it turned out to be a fabulous choice, as it's an iconic St. Petersburg street, with beautiful residential buildings, in addition to meaning "pea," and thus connected to "the days of Tsar Gorokh," which is a way of saying "back in the day." So we walked along it, looking at houses that might have been Marya Morevna's, peering through the dark at long, silent, cold canals, and I spent a lot of time reading cyrillic at the approximate speed of a toddler.

The thing is, this city feels so familiar. Part Paris, part freezing version of Rome--and I've been trying to imagine it for so long for the book, that now that I'm here, it all looks so much like I thought it would, and I have such good associations with Russian food, Russian language, even Russian faces. Everyone here has their Very Severe Face on, which is what I normally look like, except that everyone thinks I'm angry if I'm not smiling. But here, I blend! Sort of. Once we were out of the airport, the immediate switch to English upon seeing my face wasn't so bad. And justbeast gets that too, from time to time.

But I love it and we've only seen a slice of it, in the dark. The seaweed coming up out of the black canal, the color of sour cream floating in borscht, the occasional hammer and sickle still topping iron fences, this odd palimpsest of old and new city. I can't wait to see it in the light.

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
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Who's in Saint Petersburg?

WE ARE, BABY!

Everything went smoothly, we got our luggage, are ensconced in our hotel, not even three blocks from the street where I put Marya Morevna's house in Deathless.

We are gonna make these next days count.

So many, many thanks to all of you. See icon like whoa.

Also, apparently it's something of a tourist activity to look for long lines akin to the Soviet days. The guidebook says where to find them. I find this bizarre and hilarious.

The events of the past two days have been embarrassing and heartbreaking--but also humbling and heart-lifting.

You guys are amazing. The power of the internet for good is astonishing. I had no idea I knew so many people in Germany.

A hundred times thank you for all your support, for rozk 's Facebook group, for charyvna 's superpowered ability to get us a night in this hotel for free, for the Fairyland donations and calls to Expedia. Apparently at some point Expedia stopped needing to be told what the situation was as practically the entire company has heard about it from all of you.

Can you even imagine that? That as a group, in the middle of the night, you can make such a difference.

The update is this: with a little luck, we will be on a plane this afternoon. We have visas and unless something goes really wrong, we'll still have a few days in Russia. (Communal activity for the somewhat ironic win.)

Expedia, to their absolute credit, emailed us this morning and admitted whole heartedly that their agent was at fault. They'll be refunding our trip and offered us a credit toward future travel. That's more than we ever expected, and they really did go out of their way to make it right. I want to especially thank the employee (who asked to remain anonymous) who due to her own honeymoon experiences took a personal interest and made this happen. 

Seriously, you should all be proud of yourselves--your collective power is amazing. And your collective kindness towards us. Let this, certainly, be a lesson to all, especially us, not to believe someone just because they are a human being and work for travel specialists. We've had an object lesson and won't forget it--I hope this helps others not to make the same mistake.

Hopefully, all benevolent gods of travel willing, we'll be gawking at cupolas come evening. And holding all of you close in our hearts, our tribe, who never lets us stay in the dark for long.

I should be writing about the wedding. I really intend to write about the wedding. But then Maine happened, and I feel that I have to write about the reactions I'm seeing.

Let me state straight off that I am heartbroken about the vote in Maine. I am a staunch supporter of gay marriage. Even though anyone who has read me for any length of time knows that, I have to state it up front, and even having done so some people are not going to be able to hear what I am saying. I expect to be thoroughly flamed for telling the truth. it won't be the first time.

The most common response I am seeing to the Maine referendum is, "How dare they think they can vote on my civil right to marry whom I please?!"

Here's the thing: you don't have a civil right to gay marriage.

We want to think of civil rights as forces of nature, but they are compacts within society. And gay marriage has not been defined as a civil right by the U.S. government, or for that matter very many other governments in the world. Many people can't even wrap their head around the notion that gay marriage is a civil right because they are so caught up in the traditional intent of marriage, which was a way to survive in the world, raise children, and pass on property. They don't understand why they think of marriage in that way because there hasn't been anything to make them think of it in any other way.

We haven't brought them into the social compact of a new view of marriage.

This is not unprecedented. At one time in this country, Negroes were not considered people. Dred Scott, the terrible case that decided that persons of color did not have civil rights, meant that the social compact treated millions of former slaves as less than human. People recognized that it had to be undone, and laws were passed in states. But for a period of time until it was overturned, persons of color only received permissions to do things, not rights.

Gay marriage should be recognized as a civil right. But getting to the point where that compact within society exists is still a battle that has to be fought. We can't skip that step. We tried, and the citizens of most states where gay marriage has been judicially or legislatively passed have voted to repeal those rights.

Until that social compact is made, this is going to keep happening. It's sad and terrible, but it's the reality that we have to work with. Just railing that it isn't right or fair is not getting the job done. We need new strategies.


The other argument I keep running into is that the U.S. is a representational democracy, not a direct democracy, and that all we are getting is "mob rule." But what people are forgetting is that this is not a federal issue. And states often have something closer to direct democracy in the form of the referendum.

Marriage has long been a states rights issue, notwithstanding Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage). Marriage laws are made by the states, and the whole thing will not become a federal issue until enough states recognize gay marriage that it is an issue. Loving v. Virginia was decided by a highly activist court, which the current court certainly is not and is unlikely to become so. We can't count on them.

The majority should not deprive the minority of civil rights, but we have to get to an agreement as to what those civil rights are. We have more work to do on the ground, convincing people that gay marriage is not ridiculous. For all of civilization marriage has involved a pair of people genetically capable of reproducing. To a lot of people, that's still what marriage is. There's a whole center that still doesn't "get" why gay marriage is even an issue, and most of the voices they hear on the topic are spewing on Fox. We need "boots on the ground" talking about rights in a way that those people can hear. I don't know what that way is, but we have to find it.

Having some free time on our hands, the penultimate Fairyland chapter is up.

Chapter XXI: Did You See Her?

Donations are, as always, appreciated, and especially so right now. I don't feel comfortable putting up a tip jar, but Fairyland has always run on the donation model, so if you feel moved, it is there as it has always been.

There is a Facebook group that's started a phone campaign to Expedia--it's here.

Thank you all for your support. I'll keep you updated.

This is getting to levels of awful I can't even describe.

We got a visa invitation. All we need is to take it to the Consulate.

Which is closed tomorrow for a holiday. Meaning the earliest we could get to Russia would be Thursday night. Giving us at most three days.

And we're out of money. This has cost more than half of what the whole trip cost, and we've been penalized severely for changing our flight, on top of it all.

Both of us are just sitting here with our heads in our hands. We don't know what to do. We just wanted a honeymoon and now we're stranded, with no money, in a strange country, and fucking Expedia refuses to help us. Do we just turn around and go home? This hotel is so expensive, and we can't afford another night. I just don't know how to Pollyanna this.

Fuck. Everything seems pretty fucking dark right now.

I guess you can't have a wedding go as amazingly well as ours did and not pay some kind of cosmic price.

We are currently stranded in Frankfurt, Germany.

When we booked the honeymoon to Russia with Expedia, we were told that we did not need visas.

Did this seem odd to us? Yes. So we called and talked to Expedia in person and were assured that we did not need visas. We had no reason not to believe this information.

Only to arrive in Germany, attempt to board a plane to Russia, and be informed that boy howdy do we need visas.

We have been here for almost six hours, dumping euros into the phone to try to fix this somehow. Because justbeast is fluent and was born in the Ukraine, he managed to talk the Russian consulate into some kind of exception, if we could get a visa letter of support from Expedia.

Who refused.

We found another company to provide one. Theoretically, we spent the night in Frankfurt and pick up our visas at the consulate in the morning (as they are busting their asses over there, with 10 am to 1 pm business hours). Theoretically. Any number of things could still go wrong.

We are both beyond exhausted. We have been traveling for more than 24 hours. We need showers. My legs and feet got all swollen on the plane from not moving. I've cried a little. If I never see the inside of Frankfurt airport again it'll be too soon. And on top of that, we have to pay a truly obscene amount of money for a hotel room tonight, of which Expedia grudgingly agreed to cover less than a third, as they have no documentation of someone telling us we didn't need visas when we did. Funny how you might not write something like that down.

I hope we'll be laughing about this tomorrow. Right now, I ache and just want this Brazil bullshit to end.

But the wedding was so wonderful. I'll post about it, when I'm no longer marooned.

Fairyland will update when and if we get to our hotel. I am sorry--the situation was out of my control.