Bright Dead Star (L'arrivée)
Mostly cloudy again today. A high of 81F.
Another unremarkable day. The anxiety over the election has replaced the anxiety over health and money as the primary impediment to my working. I'm beginning to panic, seriously, over everything I'm not getting done. If it were only a matter of needing to be paid, well, that would be plenty fucking enough, but it's also a matter of feeling like a complete bum, sitting here day after day with nothing to show for it.
Fuck.
Sorry.
Okay, well, today four copies of the ARC of Bright Dead Star arrived (sooner than expected). And I think it's going to be a very attractive book, in no small part thanks to Lee Moyer's wonderful cover art (see below). Note that the cover of the actual book will not include the title or my name, no text whatsoever, after the fashion of, for example, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (2015), which also sports a Lee Moyer cover. I just didn't want anything obscuring the art, and Bill Schafer agreed. There are the usual typos and flat-out errors in the ARCs, which is one reason ARCs exist, not only to bring in reviews but to allow a last round of proofreading. Still, some of these are, at least to me, especially annoying. For example, there's a Noah Rothman quote on the dedication page that needs to be on its own page. On the actual epigraph page, the final line of the Current 93 song, "The Light is Leaving Us All," from which the collection takes its title, is in italics, when it ought to be in quotation marks. And finally - and this one really gripes my fanny - on the final page of the book there's a quote from one of my favorite novels, Donna Tart's The Secret History. Only, I mistitled the book The Secret World. You know, like the freakin' video game. To be clear, these are all errors of my own making. And, obviously, they will be corrected in the final text. That renders them no less frustrating. Anyway, as I may has mentioned, Bill has given me permission to sell three of these, and dumb mistakes only make them more colllectible, so keep watching the skies.
Today on Facebook I posted the following:
I wasn't sure if I was gonna talk about this publicly, but here I go: For the past couple of years I have seriously considered conversion to Judaism, and in the last few months I've begun actively, formally moving towards conversion. I have found a Reform synagogue that is accepting of both my being transgender and my being an atheist. It all feels strange to me, too, but it also feels right, and I want to thank Sonya Taaffe giving me someone to talk to during this process (besides the rabbi). I'll probably get into the *whys* of this in my blog at some point; this is not the place.
I want to thank everyone who was encouraging and kind. There were hundreds of you. Sadly, there were three or four who, instead, greeted the announcement with anitsemitic rants. They were reported and banned from my Facebook, into the outer darkness, consigned unto the void. And so forth. And yes, it does feel very strange, going public with this news.
That's enough for now. I have to be at McWane early tomorrow.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
4:54 p.m.
Another unremarkable day. The anxiety over the election has replaced the anxiety over health and money as the primary impediment to my working. I'm beginning to panic, seriously, over everything I'm not getting done. If it were only a matter of needing to be paid, well, that would be plenty fucking enough, but it's also a matter of feeling like a complete bum, sitting here day after day with nothing to show for it.
Fuck.
Sorry.
Okay, well, today four copies of the ARC of Bright Dead Star arrived (sooner than expected). And I think it's going to be a very attractive book, in no small part thanks to Lee Moyer's wonderful cover art (see below). Note that the cover of the actual book will not include the title or my name, no text whatsoever, after the fashion of, for example, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (2015), which also sports a Lee Moyer cover. I just didn't want anything obscuring the art, and Bill Schafer agreed. There are the usual typos and flat-out errors in the ARCs, which is one reason ARCs exist, not only to bring in reviews but to allow a last round of proofreading. Still, some of these are, at least to me, especially annoying. For example, there's a Noah Rothman quote on the dedication page that needs to be on its own page. On the actual epigraph page, the final line of the Current 93 song, "The Light is Leaving Us All," from which the collection takes its title, is in italics, when it ought to be in quotation marks. And finally - and this one really gripes my fanny - on the final page of the book there's a quote from one of my favorite novels, Donna Tart's The Secret History. Only, I mistitled the book The Secret World. You know, like the freakin' video game. To be clear, these are all errors of my own making. And, obviously, they will be corrected in the final text. That renders them no less frustrating. Anyway, as I may has mentioned, Bill has given me permission to sell three of these, and dumb mistakes only make them more colllectible, so keep watching the skies.
Today on Facebook I posted the following:
I wasn't sure if I was gonna talk about this publicly, but here I go: For the past couple of years I have seriously considered conversion to Judaism, and in the last few months I've begun actively, formally moving towards conversion. I have found a Reform synagogue that is accepting of both my being transgender and my being an atheist. It all feels strange to me, too, but it also feels right, and I want to thank Sonya Taaffe giving me someone to talk to during this process (besides the rabbi). I'll probably get into the *whys* of this in my blog at some point; this is not the place.
I want to thank everyone who was encouraging and kind. There were hundreds of you. Sadly, there were three or four who, instead, greeted the announcement with anitsemitic rants. They were reported and banned from my Facebook, into the outer darkness, consigned unto the void. And so forth. And yes, it does feel very strange, going public with this news.
That's enough for now. I have to be at McWane early tomorrow.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
4:54 p.m.