“Morlock Night” by K. W. Jeter
What do King Arthur, H. G. Wells, and the lost city of Atlantis have in common?
Cool factor, and K. W. Jeter.
The rest of this review is at Comfy Chair.
Louisette
We’re home after about seven hours of waiting, surgery, and observation. Here’s a pic of her playing with toys in her hospital bed (you can see the small cut near her ear), and another from thirty seconds ago. All’s well, and she’s basically her normal self again (it takes 24-48 hours for the gas to completely leave her system).
Less and More
From next week, I’ll be reducing this blog to two days a week – Miscellaneous Mondays (anything from a rant on equal rights to a picture of a cat) and Louisette Wednesdays. I’m hoping this will result in an increase in quality. Either way, I’ve been blogging faithfully for many years as I wait for a book deal to come my way – knowing all the while that it could happen at any moment.
But it hasn’t, so far, and I finally have something better (hint: see Wednesdays) to do. Literally for the first time in my life. So I’m powering down the writing obsession, and delightedly replacing it with the (far healthier and more rewarding) obsession of looking after a little person (that I MADE) – combined with the heady excitement of actually having paid, moderately reliable work. It is the simplest thing in the world to power back up my writing career at a moment’s notice – right now, my best shot is the steampunk novel, which is currently sitting on the desks of three large Australian publishers, all of whom are reading it in full already.
As I power down, the famous slushwrangler “The Intern” has a real actual book coming out. Her blog is now “Real Actual Hilary” and it’s better than ever. In this entry, she writes about the final edit of her precious book. I definitely understand the obsessive joy of writing. And the pain of it, too.
“In my determination to put everything I had into this last chance, I lost my sense of taste and smell. If you asked me which clothes I was wearing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. If you asked me which plants had blossomed by the back door I barged in and out of several times a day, I wouldn’t have been able to guess. My body hurt, and by the eighth or ninth day a profound exhaustion made it harder to work for longer than an hour at a time, although I was wary of straying more than a few feet from the stack of paper on my desk.”
Surgery
My baby girl is going into hospital to have surgery tomorrow. Well, technically. In my view, if you’re not going into someone’s insides then it’s not really surgery. I suppose technically that’d be amputation, but that hardly seems right for an extra bit of Louisette that has no useful function – namely, the little extra bit of skin on her cheek near her ear. You can see it a bit in this sequence of photos from this morning:
As her mum, a little bit of extra Louisette is no problem – but if I can reduce the amount of childhood teasing she’ll get, then I’m in. And so CJ and I are taking her to hospital tomorrow, where she’ll have her first anaesthetic (she’s already had a tongue tie cut, but that didn’t need anaesthetic and thus didn’t require time spent in hospital to monitor for possible side effects). For me the scariest part is trying to coordinate up to four solid meals (using only types of food she’s already eaten several times, and including vegetables, starch, fruit, and protein), six bottles (we own four), a number of vomit or food-related outfit changes, entertainment that doesn’t involve letting her chew on electrical cords (the girl loves to get her new teeth into cords), and a near-infinite supply of nappies and wipes.
But tomorrow the deed will be done, and that’ll be a relief.
Cockington Green
If you grew up in Canberra, you would have been to Cockington Green at least once. I’ve spoken before about how much I love Questacon and Telstra Tower, but I’d forgotten entirely about Cockington Green. It’s nestled in amongst a score of other touristy places in Gungahlin, and worth a visit for anyone over two (although 2-5 is a dangerous age, because it’s definitely not for touching).
My mum, my sister, Louisette, and my sister’s two girls just visited Cockington Green for the first time in a decade – maybe even two decades.
It was also the first time Louisette and her toddler cousin rode in a double stroller together.
The toddler likes trains and was totally overwhelmed by the experience.
When we finished the ride she refused to get off, and it wasn’t easy to extricate her from the fence, either.
Read the full article (for which I now get paid, and paid per reader) here.
Danger and Delight
Louisette is such an easy baby that I very rarely have doubts about the mummy life (in fact, I’m waiting on one more publisher response before winding way back on the writing and blogging time, since it’s easy enough to rev things back up if one of the other publishers I’m currently waiting on – who won’t reply for at least six months – want to publish).
With sentences like that, it’s simply astonishing that I’m not yet living the life of the rich and famous*.
One thing that does scare me, however, is toddlerhood. It combines maximum energy with minimum self-preservation instincts – and sudden independence with the inability to clearly communicate. My own mum has pointed out that a toddler can understand heaps, and can say and do and understand more all the time – which will clearly make all the difference at the time. Nonetheless, I’m a little scared.
In the meantime, the horrors and joys of teething continue. She’s had some grumpy times lately, and has been waking up in the night almost every night for a fortnight. It’s 2:30am right now.
Teeth come through in pairs, so we’re very much waiting for the other shoe to drop. She’s developed a habit of sucking in her lower lip, which gives her a philosophical air.
And of course, she’ll chew anything that stays still long enough.
In unrelated news, last Sunday was my mum’s birthday, and for the first time in years all her descendants were in town at once. That’s my brother and his wife and son on the left, and my sister and her family on the right.
It’s always great for Louisette to see her oldest cousin (seven years older). . .
. . . and her youngest (three weeks old – what a difference seven months makes!)
*Or the author equivalent of the high life, which may sometimes peak as high as minimum wage.
Lion in a sidecar!
Because the past is awesome. This is from cracked, which often has swearing and/or naughtiness. But just go and read it, mmmkay?
Felicity Banks 