Anyone have any ideas about why China, and not the US, has been my #1 source of traffic for the last couple of days? And traffic has been up pretty considerably in both viewers and pageviews, so it’s not like a single bot is crawling the site or something.
I feel like this has to be nefarious somehow, and also like my suspicion is maybe at least a little bit racist. But maybe not.
Anyway, I’m bound and determined to get to bed as early as possible tonight, so this blogwanking update was brought to you by the letter Zzzzz.
I got the best kind of snow day today, the one that takes you by surprise; the area got blanketed in ice last night, so I was anticipating a two-hour delay but I really wasn’t thinking we were actually going to get the day off. And then … I blinked, and now it’s 8:45 somehow, and I came closer to just forgetting to put a post up than I have in a good long time? I took a nap today but it wasn’t the whole day. I have no explanation.
I have read and reviewed the first two books in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. There will be a fourth, supposedly this year, called Alecto the Ninth. That will apparently be the final volume. This one, Nona the Ninth, only happened because apparently Nona’s story got a bit out of Muir’s control and she had to make it its own book; early printings of Harrow actually say that Alecto will be the next book, an error that I don’t know if they corrected in later versions.
You might notice that the word “review” does not appear in the title of this post. This is not a review. I am functionally incapable of reviewing this series any longer, and I can only barely apply the verb “read” to the process my brain was attempting while my eyes were roving over the words on the page. If I had read the book, I would have understood more of it. By the end of this book, there are so many characters who are not in their own bodies that I feel like I need a fucking spreadsheet to understand what is going on. Some characters may — or may not, no one is clear– be in more than one body. My wife loves these books unreservedly; I keep asking her questions and she begins to answer them with “Well, do you remember when …” and my answer is invariably no. No, I do not remember that happening. No, I do not remember that character, who was apparently mentioned six hundred and thirty times in book two. No, the back cover copy on this book describes several different events in the book and I don’t remember any of them. Blue thing in the sky? What blue thing in the sky?
I only just found out, in conversation with her before coming in here and writing this, that not one but two of the characters are apparently planets. I missed that! I feel like a character being a planet should have been something I noticed. Two of them I definitely should have noticed. I did not. The main character, Nona, is physically nineteen years old but has the mentality of a six year old and is in some unclear way only physically six months old; the book is fairly adamant that she, Nona, is not Nona, but is in fact one of the two main characters of the two previous books, possibly in one of their actual physical bodies and possibly not, and by the end of the book I am literally unsure if any of the three of them are alive, in any sense of the word. I think Gideon’s actual physical body is running around, but someone else is in it, I think, unless we were supposed to realize that the other person who is in Gideon’s body now was always in Gideon’s body and this is not a change of the status quo but a reveal. I have no fucking idea.
Also, there are other Gideons, and at least one of their bodies is still running around, also not occupied by the spirit of that Gideon. I think. I saw a reviewer on Goodreads refer to that Gideon as G1deon to help distinguish them.
There is one person who is actually two people, but not at the same time, until they get into a fight with someone else and win it by the second person in the body shoving the owner of the other body out and taking it over, so then the one person who is actually two people is actually two people, until later, when one of them catches fire for, as near as I could tell, no fucking reason at all, and then suddenly both of them are back in the same body again only now both of them are one person. Whose name is Paul.
There is a character named Hot Sauce. Another named Pants of the Undying. A third’s name is Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity. I made one of those up. I dare you to figure out which one.
Just because it’s been on my mind lately, and also because I’m not really interested in talking about school right now, here’s some information about upcoming conventions I’m going to be attending:
FIRST! I will be at the 2nd Hall of Heroes Con in Elkhart, Indiana on September 8th and 9th– just a few days from now! This will be the first con I’ve attended that was close enough to my house that I will be able to just drive to the con each day rather than having to worry about couchsurfing or getting a hotel room, so I’m pretty excited about it. I’m on the 2nd floor of the Lerner theater in booth H4, directly across from the entrance to the Crystal Ballroom. Folks who have been there in the past tell me this is a pretty primo spot, so I’m excited.
SECOND! I will be at Kokomo-Con on October 13 in Kokomo, IN. I went to this con last year and had an absolute blast, and had bought my booth for this year’s show before I even left last year’s. It’s only a one-day show but I had a tremendous time last year and I have high expectations for this year’s show. I just found out today that I’ll be at a three- day ed conference in Noblesville (just south of Kokomo) on the 10th-12th, so the logistics of getting down there just got sorta complicated and I’m gonna be tired and crabby, but still! High expectations! No word on the booth yet, but I don’t expect to be hard to find.
MAYBE! I have been to Indy Pop Contwice, and am already signed up for next summer’s show, but they just announced that they’re expanding to Fort Wayne and will be doing a two-day Pop Con on December 29-30. I will probably be doing this con, but I’m waiting for a paycheck or two from the new job before I put the money into it and I also need to be sure I want to do a first year con. I’ve found Pop Con really well-run, though, so it ought to be okay, even though it’s on really short notice and it’s probably going to be a damn disaster but what the hell let’s risk $150. Fun!
PROBABLY, I HOPE! I am signed up for ConFusion 2019, which is January 17-20, and I need to figure out if it’s really all four days, but the vendor tables are juried and the deadline isn’t until August 31 so I don’t know if I’m actually officially accepted as a vendor yet. I mean, I’ve never not been accepted for one of these things, so I have high hopes, but it’s still possible they’ll say no. A lot of authors who I’m huge fans of are regulars at this con, so I’m crossing every digit I have that I get to go.
First, the weirdly-quasi-racist Yellow-Peril-with-a-mustache lookin’ laughing dude who replaces the letter “O.” I can deal with that.
For no clear reason, the second letter O is an eyeball. Which… okay.
But look at the I in “Joking.” Why the hell is that a little person? And somehow that’s the detail that pushes this logo from poorly-designed to truly inexplicable. Why the hell are any of these letters actually other things? Who the hell designed this? Who approved it? And why is the whole logo on what looks like a splash, and how long has this thing been in my gameroom and I’ve never noticed how goddamned weird it is, and holy hell is the yellow dude masturbating?
Under ordinary circumstances, I’m not really the type to bribe my classes with candy. I hand it out now and again, certainly, and will use it as a minor incentive for minor stuff that they would be doing anyway. For example, we write every Friday morning; I give the kids who read what they write a Jolly Rancher. Sometimes I give them two if whatever they wrote manages to entertain me. I used to do a trivia question every week that was due Thursday; kids who got it right got a piece of candy on Friday. (You may be seeing a theme here.)
I’ve been trying to give away the same container of Jolly Ranchers for a while now, to the point where I thought they were getting old– at least to the extent that it’s possible for Jolly Ranchers to get old– and I decided that today I was finishing off the container no matter how ridiculously contrived the reason for handing out Jolly Ranchers was. Making this easier was the fact that most of my knuckleheads in first and second hour are suspended right now, so the kids were much more likely to behave than normal.
“Work on this assignment,” I declared grandly, “and I shall reward those of you who do not annoy me with these Jolly Ranchers. Perhaps more than one, if you please me greatly and are not otherwise foolish.”
(Yes, those exact words.)
Fifteen minutes later, they were noisy. “Remember, folks, Jolly Ranchers are at stake here,” I said.
…
One of my smarter kids– I swear, one of the smarter ones– puts her hand up.
“Is you sayin’ you gonna give us steak, too?”
(I’m reproducing her words precisely. She actually generally doesn’t talk like this; her speech gets more slangy when she’s expressing surprise. True story.)
For a moment, this confuses me.
“No. What? Jolly Ranchers. No steak.”
The students go insane. There is a chorus of complaints. I remain bewildered.
“You said Jolly Ranchers and steak!”
Sigh.
There has to be a factory somewhere that’s actually hiring, right?
Just because it’s been on my mind lately, and also because I’m not really interested in talking about school right now, here’s some information about upcoming conventions I’m going to be attending:
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