Intersection Logs

Via james_nicoll/james_davis_nicoll and kgbooklog

Gollancz has put out a list of what they consider the 50 best SF/Fantasy books they've published -- heavily dominated by white Anglo-Saxon males, as others have pointed out. Bold means I've read it, italic means I own it. For the purposes of this meme I've arbitrarily decided that having a Gutenberg e-copy of something doesn't count as "owning" it.


( SF )
( Fantasy )

Reply to this meme by yelling (or any other form of writing) "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

green_knight gave me these.

( astronomy, beading, photography, SF, cacti )

January: Happy New Year! And 548 words before lunch.
February: I have no idea what this is; it's a fairly boring tree on the corner of the street, most of the time, but as I went past today I noticed it was flowering; this is the sort of thing for which a 12x zoom is useful. [Photo post]
March: I've been having a hard time settling down to read lately -- particularly this last week, when my brain doesn't seem to want to focus on anything longer than a typical LJ post. [Book post]
April: The hedgehog cacti are in bloom! [Photo phost]
May: I'm back, tired and brain-fried.
June: I'm off again in about three quarters of an hour. [There was another trip between these two!]
July: On Monday we made the canonical stroll through the woods to Whirlow Park, where the rose garden was out of order but there were plenty of other flowers to see, and moorhen chicks picking their way over the silted-up beds of the ponds. [Start of a rather damp summer vacation in Sheffield.]
August: There are some compensations to being jet-lagged at this time of year; the couple of hours after dawn are the best part of the day, when the heat is still gentle, the shadows are long, and the night-blooming cactus flowers can be seen in their glory. [Photo post]
September: Words! 603 of them, to be precise.
October: They're starting to put out the fall-winter bedding plants and let the summer grass die off in preparation for reseeding, and the temperature is supposed to plunge all the way into the eighties on Sunday as a storm passes through. [Photo post]
November: 2633 words so far. [Nano report]
December: This morning there was a cardinal, a flash of scarlet among the oleander foliage.

via intertext

I grew up in the north of England, lower middle-class with working-class grandparents, but I've spent the last ten years in the Southwestern US, and my reading and TV incorporated a fair bit of American output for years before that.

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.
stream or brook

( Read more... )

via athenais



Left to right:

Doily. One of my hobbies (mostly in abeyance this year, though) is thread crochet, and this is a from a scan of one of my own designs. Used for posts on crafts and creativity. I've had that icon a long time; I think it was the second one I made, back when I was a free user with only three slots.

Behemoth 47: That's the title of my novel-in-progress, and the image is an impression (based on some stock art from a CD label package, I think) of what the hyperspace in that universe looks like. It's supposed to be the icon for talking about the novel, but occasionally gets stuck on computer comments by mistake because my big heavy laptop is also called Behemoth.

5x5x5 cube: I love puzzles. My father had an original 3x3x3 Rubik's cube about a year before they were popular the first time around, and I got a 4x4x4 for my eighteenth birthday. When I saw the 5-a-side version in the Maths Department staff common room back in London, I coveted it madly, and haunted the toy store it came from for months, but they never got any more in. After I moved to Tucson, I finally figured out how to order one online from Hong Kong. (And yes, I did solve it, though I doubt I could do it now without working it out again from scratch.) I use this icon for posts and comments of a geekier-than-average nature, or sometimes to convey puzzlement.

An approximation of what I look like in real life. Very rarely used; occasionally feels appropriate for commenting in discussions about anonymity or appearance.

Seaview, from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the only show that has ever moved me to fanfic.

The teacup; I snagged this from jslayeruk at the time of the London Tube bombings, when drinking tea did seem like the appropriate response. (I'm British, and I even lived in London for a few years.)

Dragon! From the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, my trip-of-a-lifetime last year. Used for posts about China, and also for commenting on naominovik's posts or blogging dragon books in general.

Comment on this post. I will choose seven userpics from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are using them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.

I am the tanka. The attention of others Is unnerving, and Since I try not to draw it, I'm left alone. Which is good. What Poetry Form Are You?

Sounds about right, actually.

From kip_w

Look at your LJ userpics

If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one.
If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one.
If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one.
If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em.

List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it's interesting to you, and what significance it has.

( Read more... )

From matociquala, via papersky and others:
Go ahead and post the awfullest, grottiest, ancientest piece of juvenilia you still have a word processor that will open. I'll wait.

Well, I didn't have a word processor of my own until 1989, by which time I wasn't really a juvenile. The first thing I did with it was to type in the half-finished novel I'd started when I was 19, and then I finished it. It got somewhat polished along the way, but the first chapter didn't change much. So this is something that started as handwriting in erasable ballpen in a notebook, got typed into an Amstrad in Locoscript, then converted (via flat ascii and a disk-transfer service) to Lotus Ami on a PC, and finally to RTF. This is about half of the first chapter. Oddly enough, given that I didn't even have the concept of viewpoint at the time, it's fairly consistently in one POV, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the thing.

( The Firebird Gate, Chapter 1 )

Via marykaykare

1. I rarely leave the house without wearing two sterling-silver rings, one on the third finger of my right hand, the other on the second finger of my left. They don't mean anything in particular, but I feel undressed without them.

2. I crochet thread doilies in the oddest places -- at bus stops and on buses, in scientific meetings, even once in the yard of the US Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where I was applying for a visa.

3. I drink a lot of decaffeinated, unsweetened black coffee, mostly instant, because I like the flavour.

4. I wear long-sleeved lightweight blazers in the hottest weather, for sun protection and pockets.

5. I've never learned to drive. There's no physical or mental impediment -- I just don't choose to.