By request
Jun. 21st, 2011 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanSomeone in a Delicate Condition has requested that people post.
Well, I'm still sick from Wiscon, though I am somewhat more confident than I was a few days ago that the sore throat and even the lingering cough may be gone by Fourth Street. I am not attending the playreading on Thursday, just in case.
This is a truly evil virus and has partially eaten my brain. I had a very odd experience a week or two ago. I was reading Cat Valente's The Orphan's Tales and was relieved that my feverish brain was not having any trouble at all with her lovely prose. But several narratives in, I started getting confused about how deep I was and who had done what to whom. I had already devoured The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was perfect for reading while ill, though I expect to find things I missed while foggy when I reread it, which it also seems very well suited to. I really loved the book. The blurbs list influences like James Thurber, which I can very well see, but I think they left out Lewis Carroll. A lot of the peculiarities of my own dialogue come from the Alice books, and I think I know them when I see them. Fairyland is both warmer and darker than the Alice books, containing more humanity and more strangeness.
Anyway, I had finished that, so I reluctantly laid aside The Orphan's Tales and picked up a Kage Baker novel I had gotten at Uncle Hugo's some time ago. The prose is very different, but it, too, is a first-person narrative that begins with a young girl encountering terror and wonder, and for about the first half I kept thinking, "All right, the last tale before this was the grandmother's tale, so I have to remember that we'll back out of this at some point and I wonder when we will get back to the girl with the stories on her eyelids -- oh, wait." I loved the Baker too. I wonder if illness makes me uncritical, but I don't think so. I got very cranky about several other books I read while ill.
I signed up for my Fourth Street panels before I got sick, and am now muzzily looking at the descriptions and wondering if I can remember what I wanted to say.
Today's muzziness, however, I think is not caused by the virus. There were endless thunderstorms and torrential downpours last night. I was finally sleeping around five a.m. when the doorbell rang. I picked up the phone and listened, and heard a couple of voices saying things like, "I don't know if that's their open door there." They sound like the police, I thought, so I said, "Hello?" They were the police. I put some clothes on and for some reason got not just my keys but my cellphone, and went downstairs. Yep. Police. They said they had gotten a hang-up 911 call. I was much too sleepy to either recall their names or to ask what number the call had come from. I hope our house is not going to just suddenly start calling 911 at random. We have an ancient PBX intended for small offices, not readily replaceable except for huge sums. I hope it is not getting frisky in its old age.
I am reading you all, truly.
Pamela
Well, I'm still sick from Wiscon, though I am somewhat more confident than I was a few days ago that the sore throat and even the lingering cough may be gone by Fourth Street. I am not attending the playreading on Thursday, just in case.
This is a truly evil virus and has partially eaten my brain. I had a very odd experience a week or two ago. I was reading Cat Valente's The Orphan's Tales and was relieved that my feverish brain was not having any trouble at all with her lovely prose. But several narratives in, I started getting confused about how deep I was and who had done what to whom. I had already devoured The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was perfect for reading while ill, though I expect to find things I missed while foggy when I reread it, which it also seems very well suited to. I really loved the book. The blurbs list influences like James Thurber, which I can very well see, but I think they left out Lewis Carroll. A lot of the peculiarities of my own dialogue come from the Alice books, and I think I know them when I see them. Fairyland is both warmer and darker than the Alice books, containing more humanity and more strangeness.
Anyway, I had finished that, so I reluctantly laid aside The Orphan's Tales and picked up a Kage Baker novel I had gotten at Uncle Hugo's some time ago. The prose is very different, but it, too, is a first-person narrative that begins with a young girl encountering terror and wonder, and for about the first half I kept thinking, "All right, the last tale before this was the grandmother's tale, so I have to remember that we'll back out of this at some point and I wonder when we will get back to the girl with the stories on her eyelids -- oh, wait." I loved the Baker too. I wonder if illness makes me uncritical, but I don't think so. I got very cranky about several other books I read while ill.
I signed up for my Fourth Street panels before I got sick, and am now muzzily looking at the descriptions and wondering if I can remember what I wanted to say.
Today's muzziness, however, I think is not caused by the virus. There were endless thunderstorms and torrential downpours last night. I was finally sleeping around five a.m. when the doorbell rang. I picked up the phone and listened, and heard a couple of voices saying things like, "I don't know if that's their open door there." They sound like the police, I thought, so I said, "Hello?" They were the police. I put some clothes on and for some reason got not just my keys but my cellphone, and went downstairs. Yep. Police. They said they had gotten a hang-up 911 call. I was much too sleepy to either recall their names or to ask what number the call had come from. I hope our house is not going to just suddenly start calling 911 at random. We have an ancient PBX intended for small offices, not readily replaceable except for huge sums. I hope it is not getting frisky in its old age.
I am reading you all, truly.
Pamela
