Love it.

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POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

Corned beef, I will love you until the day I die

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I’m leaving my laptop at home today so I can work on the galleys for Circle of Enemies without distractions. I won’t be checking email or reading online (unless I get to jonesing and stop off at a library computer).

You good folks have a nice day.

“Things and that Magic is a byproduct of their presence but also a channel between their home and us: their pantry”

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It’s fun to run foreign language reviews of my books through Google translate.

Not another blog post about sleep

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Okay, really it is. After going to bed at 11 last night, I woke at just after 4 am and couldn’t fall back. No, I don’t feel all that well today. In fact, my joints ache, my eyes ache, and my stomach is feeling cautious.

On top of that, being gluten-free is a gigantic pain in the ass. Gi. Gan. Tic. There’s no carb to be kept on hand to eat quickly, when a meal is delayed or no one is home. If you cook rice and stick it in the fridge, each grain gets all hard like little pills. Potatoes just get soggy. And yeah, we have quinoa, but you know what? Quinoa sucks. Don’t tell me what a complete protein it is; I’m an American in the 21st century, I could build a whole new person with the protein I eat in a month.

You know what’s quick and convenient? Bread. You know what tastes like shit? GF bread.

Ah well. I’ve done fasts before, and they always challenge me in ways I don’t expect. I’ve been trying to stay on top of the meals and calories–even with the extra cooking time wasted spent preparing these more labor-intensive foods, but I’m still seriously hungry for most of my day.

Yes, I know about “bodies holding onto fat when they think they’re starving.” My body doesn’t think it’s starving; I fed it two eggs with potatoes, cheese and black olives this morning. It has fuel, just not always when it needs it. There’s a lot of mental self-sabotage involved with food denial, and I just need to be aware of it.

Time for me to send an email to my agent, then get back to work on The Project That Must Not Be Named. I want to get as far as I can before I return home. I’m expecting the galleys for Circle of Enemies to be there, waiting for me.

Also, no, I’m not wearing green (or orange); I’m green on the inside.

Randomness for 3/17

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1) Homemade pop rocks. via Matt Ruff.

2) 20 Sad Etsy Boyfriends. Also: Sad Dancing Hipster is Sad and Dancing.

3) I’m so tired of this sort of thing that seeing it now just makes me tired. Author demands respect for sf/f from literary lovers.

4) PW’s map of North American chain booksellers.

5) “Nonsense, I did not shave your wife.” via @matociquala

6) 127 Hours, starring Wile E. Coyote. Video.

7) So you need a typeface… Flowcharty goodness.

Happy Irish Day.

Question for the hive mind

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What’s the modern version of The ClueFinders?

Put in a 22 hour day yesterday

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Ah, the joys of parenting a child with sleep issues.

Without getting into too much detail without his permission, as I mentioned before the time change hit him very hard. Yesterday he couldn’t get up until noon and last night I couldn’t get him to sleep until after 3:30 am. If it were my sleep schedule that went out of control, I’d set my alarm, get up super-early, be tired all day and go to be slightly early. Fixed!

For him, we may be forced to let him stay up all night one night so he can turn himself around that way.

On top of that, we’re squabbling over his assigned reading. I’ve given him a book that’s a second-world medieval-ish fantasy and he’s treating it like a plate of bitter carrots (“It has castles. I don’t like castle books.”)

Aside from the stress of having a fantasy writer’s child refuse to read traditional fantasy [1] there’s also the idea that he doesn’t believe that I, as his homeschooling parent, have the right to assign reading to him (book-length reading, at least). This… doesn’t work for me, as you might expect. If he’s griping about books written for popular readers of the modern era (with fantasy elements, which he loves) how’s he going to respond to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

Obediently, if I have anything to say about the matter. Of course, it’ll help if he’s well-rested and has been fed healthy food that he likes. We’ll see.

Finally, I got my royalty statement for the middle part of 2010 and… well, those numbers could be better.

[1] IT READS THE HOBBIT BEFORE BEDTIME. IT DOES THIS WHENEVER IT’S TOLD

Here I am

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It’s after 12 noon, PST, and my son is struggling to wake up on the couch. Thank you, clock change. As much as I appreciate the energy savings that comes from switching the times we get up during the long daylight hours of the year, we just spent a month trying to adjust my son’s sleep schedule so he can be awake in the morning and not sitting up, alone, in the dark of night trying to sleep. He’s described himself as “a kid with weird sleep problems,” and we were so friggin’ close to settling him in to his new schedule.

Can’t we just skip our “fall back” next November? Hell, half the time I wish we could just all switch over to GMT–do absolutely need to have my lunch at 12:30 pm rather than 8:30 pm? I don’t see why.

In other news, I’m sitting here in Seattle listening to my city officials hit the snooze button on earthquake preparedness yet again. Every time a big quake hits somewhere on the Ring of Fire (or a minor quake hits here, as it did in Feb of 2001) the news starts talking about “waking up” and “alarms” but of course nothing was done. There’s no prestige associated with seismic retrofitting–instead our local governments are fighting over a “deep bore tunnel” under downtown Seattle as a replacement for the elevated viaduct highway.

Meanwhile, I’m living in an apartment in a converted house–built with cinderblocks (and uninsulated, too, the bastards)–and I have no idea how well it would stand up to a real earthquake. Luckily, Admiralty Inlet would blunt the force of a tsunami before it reached Seattle itself, but the quake itself could be a nightmare.

And what the hell can I do about either of these things?

Randomness for 3/14

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1) Headlines illustrated.

2) What’s in Spock’s Scanner? Video. This is honestly hilarious. via Tor.com

3) A really beautiful truck crash.

4) Could many cases of ADHD really be caused by food hypersensitivity?

5) This shadow art is amazing.

6) This is amazing, too, but also chilling. Satellite photos of Japan before and after the earthquake.

7) A pro scriptwriter in L.A. tells how she broke in, complete with clueless commenters. Another pro writer straightens those clueless commenters out.

Writing tech, tax tech, belly tech

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The new iPad has had unexpected benefits: In landscape orientation, the keyboard is a good size for my son’s hands and he spent much of last night writing a story. The software eased some of his usual anxieties about writing anything–mainly spelling and penmanship–and he completed over a thousand words of an absurd story called “The Tooth Fairy.” It also helps me see what we need to work on in his schooling. I thought he had quotation marks down, but no.

It’s (past) time to do our taxes and this year I got a recommendation from a successful local writer for an accountant she uses. There are three main problems: One is that it looks like I’d be filling out forms for him that are like Turbo Tax forms which he, presumably, will then enter into his own version of tax software. Assuming we’ve been doing our taxes correctly (more on that later) this seems like paying for data entry–is there any real benefit to using a professional? Two is that they don’t quote a specific rate. This is what they say:

Tax return preparation fees are based on a per form fee or an hourly rate schedule; whichever is most appropriate, on a client by client basis. Hourly rates vary depending on the staff member performing the work and the complexity of the work itself. In addition, direct expenses may be charged when applicable.

That’s as specific as it gets. We didn’t earn all that much last year, so I have no idea what they’ll actually charge us, but it’s likely that we can’t afford it. Third is that my wife thinks problems one and two are bullshit and we might as well Turbo Tax again this year.

Me, I’d hoped to uncover some extra deductions and go over quarterly taxes with him. See, I don’t do quarterly taxes, preferring to take the relatively minor penalty (about a hundred bucks) to avoid all that estimating and paying early. That should probably change, though. Does Turbo Tax even do that for me? It’s not like I have a lot of money coming to me this year beyond the on-publication payment for Circle of Enemies–I need to sell another book or two, and I have no idea if that’s even going to happen.

Sigh. It looks like another year of Turbo Taxing, unless someone has better advice

Exactly one week ago I had an egg sandwich for breakfast… and I immediately started sneezing and my nose started running like crazy. When I told my wife, she gave me a finger-wagging and blamed it on wheat gluten.

She’d seen a nutritionist two weeks earlier and came home to tell me we were going to be giving up wheat flour. She’s done it, too. Her body shed ten pounds very quickly and the weird red, rough skin… thing that’s been troubling both our faces for a long while immediately cleared up for her. Now she’s making scary noises about giving up wheat for good.

The sketchy thing is that her nutritionist has told her that the gluten clogs the spaces between the villi in your intestine. Me, I’m doubtful about that, but the results are there even if I’m doubtful about the mechanism.

I couldn’t join in right away, because I’d just gone grocery shopping and I wasn’t about to throw out all that damn bread. Still, the last shop was pretty much wheat-free and it’s time for me to join in. And I will. With luck, my face won’t be red and inflamed, and I’ll drop some of this extra weight. Weighing less will hopefully mean less pain and therefore more exercise. Current goal: live long enough to see my son graduate from college.

Anyway, the iPad is going to be recruited to this effort–I just need to find a good calorie counter/wellness app to download. (Suggestions more than welcome–accuracy and ease of use are my top considerations). The thing about giving up wheat is that I’m hungry all the time. I can eat a big bowl of curried rice, veg, and chicken but it will never be as satisfying at the same amount of pasta. I don’t mind being hungry–I’ve done some pretty severe fasts in my time–but it’s important for my wife to know she’s getting all the calories she needs, even if they’re more complex than they used to be.

So… any thoughts on going gluten-free? Any iPad wellness apps to recommend? What about those writerly tax problems? (No advice on the boy and his story, please; it’s still too new.)

Thanks.