I mostly wanted to log-in to tell you that an interview I did with Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith went up on GayYA.org sometime ago and I missed its debut. It's a fun little conversation about all the hassles they had during the process of trying to find a publisher for their novel Strangers (which I read and enjoyed.) The interview is called: "The Question of Queering the Mainstream Novel..."

Otherwise, I've mostly been lazing about enjoying the heck out of my Christmas/New Year vacation. I had to work yesterday evening for five hours at the Maplewood Library, but otherwise I've been doing a whole lot of nothing. I'm an extreme pro at nothingness. Turns out, I can do it pretty much all day when I put my mind to it. To be fair to myself, I've actually worked quite a bit on the novel that Rachel and I co-wrote as the School for Wayward Demons. I even had a few brilliant insights into how to work tie some scenes together, so that's a win.

I should probably download some of the pictures I took over Christmas/Solstice and post them here so you can see all the fun stuff we got. Naomi asked me what our favorite gifts were this year, and I think for Mason it was the book by the XKCD author What If...? and the giant LEGO set of "Metalbeard's Sea Cow."  Shawn favorite things were a pair of garnet earrings that Mason picked out for her and a pair of fuzzy hand warmers I found for her.  Me, it's hard to say.  I got a lot of nice things, but probably the best for me was the money got from my folks which I instantly ran out and put on a coffee card at Claddaugh and, of course, the two pound bag of foreign coins that Shawn got for me.  Okay, this is a weird thing you probably didn't know about me, but I LOVE weird, old foreign coins.  In fact, I'm always carrying five coins on me at any given time. Why?  Well, it started as a silly Feng Shui thing that I read about long ago, but it just kept on as a... thing, I don't know.  Just a thing I do. But, I periodically lose the coins, so I like having a bunch around to replace them.  Plus, just digging through the lot of them is fascinating.  This year the prize was finding a Soviet coin, complete with the CCCP and the sickle and hammer.  (I also carry around a coin that was clearly made to be a pendant for someone, as a hole was drilled in it, and it's old enough to have been carried during the Civil War, though I think it's Canadian.)  At any rate, this is just a fun weird thing I like.  

So there.

Okay, I just asked Alexa to spell Feng Shui (except I'm never sure how to pronounce it anyway) and I must have really f*cked it up because she said to me, "Technology is complicated.  I don't always understand it myself."

Preach it, sister.