Well, I did manage to…

Well, I did manage to read Cinnamon Gardens yesterday -- I'm honestly not quite sure whether to recommend it to you. I'm not blown away by Selvadurai's writing; it often feels rather stilted and stiff to me. On the other hand, he's a gay Sri Lankan-Canadian man, who has done some interesting research and written an interesting book; I guess I'll recommend it, especially if you're interested in Sri Lankan culture of a few decades back, but I'm not strongly enthused. Good fodder for my research, though. Now I have to figure out what kind of paper I might want to write on the book; I may go into campus tomorrow and see what's been written on him already. Theoretically, I ought to be able to access the library databases from home, but I haven't figured out how yet. I'll probably just wait 'til Tuesday to get it done.

I finished up the Kay article, but the review -- meep. See, Chris and I just went online and had a nice discussion of it, which we logged. It wasn't too painful editing the article part, but we didn't worry about spoilers there -- we discussed things freely. In the review, we'd like to avoid spoilers, and I'm honestly not sure that's possible, given the sort of thing we talked about (some stuff from the end of the book, for example). I did a first hack through it and then sent it off to Chris; I'm hoping he'll come up with some brilliant solution. I'm feeling stumped. I'll be very glad when this project is done -- it's consumed something like thirty hours of time already, which is a little excessive for something that I probably won't be able to do anything with other than give to SH (not that I don't love SH -- I do. I'm just feeling a little short on time these days...especially writing-time).

I did up that ICFA abstract and sent it over to the person in charge; hopefully he'll let me know soon if it's acceptable. If he approves it (or if he has me change it and then approves it), I'll probably post it here and ask y'all for suggestions to help me with the actual paper -- it's on "Implications of Electronic Magazine Publishing in Speculative Fiction for Publishers, Readers, and Writers". Y'all might have some thoughts on that, right? Well if you do, just hang on to them for a few days...

The main thing I need to do this afternoon is my final line edits and comments for my erotica class; it'll be a relief to finish that, to be honest. It was a much larger time-sink than I anticipated, and didn't pay nearly well enough to justify that much time investment. They'd like me to offer it again in the spring, but I'll have to think about whether I could structure it differently so it didn't take as much time. We'll see. I have the online teaching credit on my CV now, so I don't really need another one, and while I enjoyed teaching the course, I have quite a few things already planned for the spring. :-) Once I do these comments, I'll do a final wrap-up and then be done with the course; it'll be good to cross a nice big item off my to-do list. It was also particuarly hard to motivate to be on-time with work/assignments/etc. with an on-line course; that's good to know. I'm going to have to be much stricter with myself if I do this again; it's just not fair to the students. I got somewhat behind, and as a result, gave them a bonus week of instruction to make up for it. That's not ideal.

So that's the task for this afternoon; I may also take a look at Marcy's intro for Herotica and start drafting my afterword. I'll probably take a break first for some more Christmas cards and maybe using gold outline paint to put little designs on my stained glass (I'm not particularly skilled with it, so if I do, they'll look less sharp and more goofy -- but perhaps they'll still be charming?) -- my fingers are starting to hurt from being at the computer all morning; my back, ditto.

Hope y'all are having a good Friday, and that if you have as much snow as we have here, you like it more than I do. I don't mind snow in theory, but it makes me extremely reluctant to go outside. I've lived in my plaid flannel pj's for a day and a half now; I think today's laundry day too...

9:45 - Took a break from finishing critiques (no, I'm still not done) to go see Charlie's Angels with Carol on Kevin's recommendation. Hilarious!!! Totally cool! What I want to know is, if I work out really hard and get really buff, will I be able to do that thing where I can sort of hover in mid-air on my way to using my high-heeled black boot to smash a bad guy in the face (with my entire body weight behind the kick, of course)? Or run up the sides of walls, chain link fences, people, etc. (still in high-heeled black boots) in something close to a 360 degree circle on my way to smashing up more bad guys? Or perhaps the most amazing of all, will I be able to run down the stairs after a bad guy in my slinky sleeveless evening gown cut down to my naked navel in front, tearing off clothes as I go, until I magically appear in a black turtleneck (plus black leggings and of course the high-heeled black boots) at the bottom of the stairs? Please, pretty please?

Well, I'm not going to do the working out until someone promises me that I'll be able to do all that when I'm finished...but I *am* going to go to Payless tomorrow and get me a pair of those fabulous high-heeled black boots. 'Cause you never know when you'll have a bad guy running right at you, and turning arund and running away would be chicken!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *