Camera Obscura at the Horseshoe Tavern

Above: Had fun at the Camera Obscura concert at the Horseshoe Tavern last night with Jeff and Ray. The group is a Glasgow band that Jeff and I found out about from Ray. Despite being jetlagged, Camera Obscura put on a great show.



Will Write For Chocolate has been updated! Column topic this week: "How To Write A Query Letter."

I have an eye check-up this afternoon; I've been having one every six months every since my disturbing detached retina incident a two years ago. I don't mind eye check-ups except that one of the effects of the eyedrops is that I can't read anything (including my computer screen) for a couple hours afterward. I -hate- not being able to read, even for a very short length of time. Yay for iPods!

Just finished reading another novel for young people:

The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgwick. Fast-paced, eerie, engrossing. Part of the pacing is due to the short length of the chapters; some chapters are only a paragraph or two, one is completely blank(!). I'm going to check out the author's other titles. This would be a good summer read for a teenaged boy or girl who isn't squeamish.

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Technonerdboys, recitals and The Goose Girl

We had been planning to go to the cottage this weekend, but decided to stay in the city instead.

Major e-mail woes (yes, again). I had been reorganizing my Applemail and hadn't realized that putting an asterisk at the beginning of a folder name (which Eudora was fine with) could cause the contents of entire mail folders to vanish into the ether. :-( Fortunately Jeff figured out what had gone wrong and was able to restore older mail from a backup. I'm going through the two versions of my mail now, trying to figure out which mail needs to be moved where.

The photo above is of MY NEW OFFICE SHELF! Jeff made and installed it for me yesterday in his basement workshop, what a sweetie. I feel incredibly lucky, having a technonerdboy husband who is also handy with the hammer. He's also going to build me another bookshelf, one for paperbacks that will fit on the wall beside my office door.

I'm not going to have any trouble filling my new shelf above my desk, believe me. Some of the more astute of you will observe that I have covered up my office window in that corner. I forced myself to admit that I never look outside while I'm working and that the space would be much more useful as another place in which to put things. I know, I'm such a hermit. If I lived alone, my place would consist entirely of bookshelves, with an occasional peephole to look outside when I wanted to know if it was raining.

Anyway, instead of looking at the underside of our deck, I'd much rather look at Beckett Gladney's oil painting for our Myths and Urban Legends CD. :-)

Also in that little alcove at the moment: red scarf from Andrea (hanging above), that little gorgeous pot that Luisa made, card from my sister and her family (each member drew themselves on the front), photos of my sister and brother and their spouses, photo of Jeff & me on our honeymoon, a little funny cloth monster-guy that Jeff gave me, and a small teddy bear from Ruth. Just to the right of the alcove, you can see my Patrick Stewart Literacy poster. Someone who saw my mention of this poster in Blatherings years ago offered to buy it, but I said it wasn't for sale.



Above: My Dad has recently been cleaning out the basement and found this flyer from a recital I gave with two others in 1989 as part of the annual music festival in the town of Elora, Ontario. I remember being so excited because people had to actually pay money to go the recital! A whopping $3!! We actually did have a full house and I was dead nervous, but I recall it going pretty well. I performed Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 23 #10 and Gershwin's Rialto Ripples on the piano.

Just finished reading:

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I LOVED this book, and hoovered the entire thing in one day. I especially enjoyed the author's lyrical writing style, so appropriate for the re-telling of this fairy tale. A highly satisfying read. Thanks so much to Sara and Ruth for recommending it to me! I have to get my own copy for my Comfort Book shelf; I know I'm going to be re-reading this book many times.

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My Life In A Nutshell

Came up with another book idea recently. Something's obviously kicked into high gear in the creative part of my brain since my life has settled down. I'm writing everything down in my daily writing journal, of course, the fragments and plot ideas and snippets of characters dying to tell their stories, as well as gradually piecing things together for each project in SuperNoteCard. I was started to get frustrated at first, having all these ideas I'm excited about and not being able to write everything at once. But now I'm realizing it's probably a good thing, letting these unwritten books percolate a while in the back of my brain.

I got another illustration inquiry, this time from someone who was doing a Google search for something completely unrelated, found my Blatherings, then discovered (and liked) my drawings. Reminds me that I still need to do an online portfolio of some kind. People also seem to be finding me through my drawings on Flickr, but I'd like to have something more organized and selective that I can point potential clients toward.

And then there's songwriting. I'm getting the songwriting bug again, especially since our gig at GAfilk is coming up next January. I'm working on a song that both Urban Tapestry and Summer and Fall can perform together. I've never written for five voices at once before (except on paper in my Counterpoint theory classes, which isn't at all the same thing); I'm excited about the challenge!

Sometimes I do think it ironic that I graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.Sc. in Computer Science but am now thoroughly immersed in the arts. There's a part of me that wonders if I should have more regret about not knowing what I wanted to do earlier in my life but y'know, most of the value of my university days came from experiences outside of the classroom. I have a much better idea of who I am and what I want now than I did back then, and there was no shortcut to this knowledge...I am the sum of my experiences, after all.

And I'm still learning. :-)

Just finished reading:

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner is the sequel to The Thief. I enjoyed the sequel even more than the first book, probably because the main character has grown and the atmosphere is somewhat darker. I am SO tempted to buy the third book (The King of Attolia) but it's only available in hardcover. Ah, temptation...

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Happy Canada Day!

Happy birthday, Canada! Allison and Judith have written great Livejournal entries about Canada Day.



From time to time, I'm going to start highlighting some blogs I like. Like But She's A Girl...[Femina Geekoides], a wonderful blog that Jeff told me about. The author is "a biologist, an Apple/Unix geek, an audiophile, an avid reader and film buff, and an amateur (in both the inept and unpaid senses) photographer." If you read anything from her blog, do read her About Me blurb. I DO so want to meet this woman in person someday. An excerpt:

"I apparently do not have the gene for interest in make-up, clothes or celebrities. Believe me, I've tried to be interested. I've even bought so-called Women's magazines', convinced that I can't be so psychologically different from the rest of female-kind. But eventually I realized that I just do not have any interest in them, and now I just head straight for the computer/hi-fi magazines aisle. This makes time spent in the hairdressers very dull."




She's funny. She's multi-talented. She writes well. She focuses on the positive rather than whining and making mean-spirited snide remarks about people in her life (a trend in many blogs these days, it seems). Even when she complains, she does so with good humour and cutting wit. She talks about books and technology and and and oh stop reading this and go read her blog instead. :-)



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Ingo

Many, many thanks to my friend Parki for proofreading my manuscript before I send it back to my agent. I'm also working my way through the entire mss again myself, this time reading everything out loud. Sounds silly, but I find it difficult to proofread my own writing after I've worked on it for so long otherwise. I find the read-aloud method also useful for checking for sentence flow.



I've decided to shut down Blatherchat for good. I've been getting way too much spam, and UBB's interface only lets me delete posts one at a time...a major pain when I get two dozen spam posts in one day, or come back after a vacation. I already had to delete a number of forums because the hard disk space was costing me/us too much on Samurai.

Anyway, if you'd like to post comments, please do so under the appropriate post in Livejournal. I'd also be interested in hearing from any non-LJ out there who have comment boards re: spam control. So far, the only way to control spam comments seems to be a moderated comment system but that also seems to be a major pain to me, having to approve every comment that gets posted. Suggestions/advice welcome! For now, I think I'll just stick to Livejournal comments.

Just finished reading:

Ingo by Helen Dunmore (Harpercollins, 2006). I recently picked up this new novel for young people from The Flying Dragon. An engrossing read (I got hooked right away), and the world that the author has created is entirely believable. I'd rather not say more about the book because I don't want to give too much away. Hm...just noticed that Ingo doesn't seem to be available in the U.S. yet, just Canada, perhaps because it was first published in the UK (?). There are clear British language references throughout the book, like "crisps" instead of "chips" and "Mum" instead of "Mom." Anyway, I look forward to the next book in the series!

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