Satsumas! I have them!
After seeing Gord’s post mentioning that he had a big box of tasty satsuma/mandarin oranges, I went out and got some for myself. Yum!
Review of Fantasy Magazine #7
There’s a review of Fantasy Magazine #7 (which includes my story, “Tending the Mori Birds”) at The Fix.* This is my first review, and I was thrilled to see that it said nice things like:
“It’s a simple, elegant idea, and Yoachim’s telling of it is simple and elegant to match.”
I don’t think the issue has been officially released yet, but according to the Fantasy Magazine website, it should come out soon.
Yay!
* Thanks to tinaconnolly for calling the review to my attention!
Banana Muffins
Two ripe bananas were transformed into muffins:
I had to search around a bit for a muffin recipe that only called for 2 bananas (most want 3), and ended up using this one. They go really well with honey butter (which Maureen had at Thanksgiving — tasty and easy, just mix honey with room-temperature butter).
Sweet Treat
There’s a place three blocks from my apartment that has gelato and cupcakes. (I suspect they have a lot of other things as well, but I’ve never gotten past the gelato and cupcakes.)
This particular cupcake is a vanilla cupcake with lemon filling.
It was tasty.
Fortunately I have yoga class tonight to help burn off all the lemon-vanilla calories from my afternoon treat :)
Leftover Turkey
Turkeys were on sale at the grocery store the day after Thanksgiving, so I picked one up and roasted it for Sunday dinner, along with a couple of the traditional accompaniments. The turkey was a relatively small (9lb) bird, but with only two of us eating it, I still ended up with plenty of leftovers to play around with.
So for lunch today I made turkey and dumplings, with leftover turkey and homemade turkey stock:
So close, and yet. . . .
Two recent rejections:
R#64 – 17-days from Strange Horizons
R#65 – 172-days from Cemetery Dance
The rejection from Cemetery Dance had a nice friendly note scribbled on the back side of their rejection form letter, saying that I’d come close and should try again soon.
And, speaking of trying again, two submissions:
Sub#75 – to Heliotrope (my 3rd to that market)
Sub#76 – to InterGalactic Medicine Show (my first to that market)
Thanksgiven
Had a lovely lovely time at Maureen’s ‘orphan Thanksgiving’ tonight. Good company, good food and drink. Food highlights included juicy delicious turkey, sausage-parsnip-apple stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes topped with brown sugar and pecans, pumpkin pie, deep-dish apple pie, and chocolate amaretto cake. (And I ate all of the above, including ALL THREE DESSERTS. It is Thanksgiving, after all.)
My contribution to the feast was French vanilla ice cream, spiced pumpkin seeds, and cinnamon-sugar coated roasted almonds:
The almonds came out …
Business Cards!
I finally got around to ordering myself some business cards:
These half-size business cards came from http://moo.com — they have pictures on one side and contact info on the other side. You can pick out as many pictures as you want (straight from flickr, if you happen to have a flickr account). I picked out ten different designs, including colored pencils, gummy bears, plasma ball, fire, and (of course) tentacles.
Vanilla Bean
Whole Foods sells vanilla beans — a single bean folded in half and placed in its very own little spice jar:
I bought one, so as to follow shelly_rae‘s suggestion that vanilla bean ice cream might make a good accompaniment the apple pie she’ll be bringing to Maureen’s “Orphan Thanksgiving.”
I’ve never worked with a whole vanilla bean before, but it’s kind of fun. You slice the bean open and scrape out the little tiny seeds inside:
…
Another sub…and the realization that not all revisions are improvements
Sub#74 – to Weird Tales (my first sub there)
I’ve been struggling with this story, revising it and revising it, and I looked at the most recent version this morning and it was pretty terrible. Basically, in trying to fix this problem or that problem (over a series of drafts), I’d shredded the story into an incoherent mess. So instead of starting with the most recent version, I went backwards (not to the original draft, but to the first revision), and from there made a few changes, and suddenly the story worked.
* * *
This puts me at TEN …
