This is definitely the best unfrozen spiderweb I've ever shot; it was in a cluster within a light along the Yaletown side of False Creek. I also got a blurry shot of a couple birds scrabbling over a fish and a dog--a pit bull, I think, on today's walk.

I love living in a place where cold, in the wintertime, usually means above freezing temperatures. My crocuses are almost an inch high.

Kelly and I were headed to Memphis Blues yesterday for a luxurious meatfest, and when we turned Northward Kelly spotted this! It turns out Grouse Mountain has been building a wind turbine, named Eye of the Wind. It is huge--65 meters high, and it has an observation deck. I must go!!

Speaking of Memphis Blues, they now deliver! (Though I think they won't go south of Broadway, Ana .) This is my favorite take-out place--sometimes I just want me a big helping of meat!--and even though I almost always walk there, it's comforting to know that if it's blizzarding, I can oblige them to come to me for the princely sum of $2.

Reading, fiction, the gift of literacy. I just finished Elizabeth Bear's UNDERTOW, and it is so cool. The quantum mechanics of her universe, the terrible political situation, the vivid, pond-clear prose... I feel so lucky to live in a world where I can share another person's imaginings, thoughts and dreams so thoroughly.

Teh Internets! I would be a very poor correspondent if not for e-mail and blogging. As it is, I am able to keep up with my beloveds both in and out of town in a way that didn't exist just a few decades ago.

I love my new camera. I'm still in the learning-how stage, feeling like I haven't taken a newer-better-perfect shot yet. It's a good stage to be in.

TUBE! Our GLEE season one DVDs have arrived, and K and I plan to spend tonight reviewing favorite moments and discovering special features.

My beloved choir, VLGC, whose next concert, Fun & Games, is January 23rd. Singing in harmony gives me so much joy; it is its own miracle.

And, of course, all my loved ones are excellent. You know who you are. You make the good moments grand, the mundane moments funny, and the crap moments bearable. I am truly blessed.

I spent part of the morning writing letters and the rest on a long walk. It was raining quite hard and I didn't get the camera out much, but there were a few things, almost all tree-related, that were worth shooting. This blue bottle, one of a number hanging from a tree in front of a sea-green house, was one. I went East to Nanaimo and then North, looking for and at the industrial seam where city meets sea. I prowled Wall Street, catching glimpses of shore and port and loading docks, and discovered that Lakewood Drive is a direct route to all that fenced-off shoreline.

It was good to get out and moving; the day was warm and pleasant, and I saw the usual collection of birds, squirrels, and odd, sodden flowers. Afterward, I lunched and then headed to Superbass and Ana's place, where we and Kelly played Rock Band for three and a half hours.

On the way home I noticed that the setting sun had dropped under the floor of the rainclouds, just as K asked what I was thinking. I told her I was remembering that one of my favorite things about January in Vancouver is that slanting gold light from the West, and the rainbows it makes on sunny rainy evenings. Not five minutes later a rainbow formed in front of us, pale but clear, a full arc. Gorgeous!

The lovely and fabulous Gigi wrote to ask for my cabbage roll casserole recipe, so here it is:

1. Brown a pound of lean hamburger. (Or ground other meat. Or veggie ground round.)
2. Add 1 chopped onion, a pinch of salt and pepper, a half a cup of uncooked rice, and mix well. Continue browning for five minutes.
3. Add a cup of tomato paste and a cup of water and heat to simmering.
4. Dissolve 2-3 ginger snaps into the pan and simmer for five more minutes.
5. While that's simmering, shred a small cabbage--you want three cups or so and put it in a baking dish.
6. Pour the hamburger mixture over the baking dish. Do not stir. Bake for 90 minutes at 325 degrees.

If you prefer to spice it yourself, go with ginger and cinnamon to taste instead of the cookies.

At first glance, 2009 wasn't a great reading year but as I go back through the list, putting the best of these books in bold-face, I see that I've read almost no bad books in the past twelve months. There may not have been a lot of quantity, but I seem to have high-graded. Everything was decently written and compelling. This may mean I've lost the patience required for finishing half-assed novels and non-fiction.

I found SAHARA: A NATURAL HISTORY especially compelling; I tried a few more of Villiers' books, but they didn't grab me as hard. Instead I was led to the Napoleon book, MIRAGE, and from there to LOOT. That made for a terrific journey... I'll look for more related things, I think, in the year to come.

As 2010 begins, I'm alternating between Elizabeth Bear's excellent SF novel UNDERTOW and the latest THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Tim Folger. The latter is a book I look forward to every year, but Kolbert's choices aren't doing it for me... she chose articles that seem, very much, to be overviews. They convey a lot of information and it's somewhat intriguing, but the writers don't dig as deeply into their material as I'd like. I still have THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE to look forward to, though, and doing this post has nudged me into e-mailing my favorite true-crime writer--I know her slightly--to beg for crack ask if she's off mat leave yet.

( The Book List )


What did you read this year?

Finally, I'm thinking about tracking movies too in 2010, since Derryl Murphy's post on the sixty films he saw in 2009 was terrific fun.

Kelly and I went with Sue, Bob and Sue's mother Pat to Society yesterday. We had some smoked salmon for an appetizer, and I had lovely lovely ribs for my main course. But the thing I want to tell/crow/warn you about is dessert.

See, wait staff kept walking past with drinks that were topped with cotton candy. And finally Sue and I had to know: are you serious, and do you have to have alcohol to get the cotton candy?

Ah, said the waitress. You can have the cotton candy as part of dessert. Dessert, it turns out, is the "Junk Food Platter." Which was: caramel corn, cotton candy, made-there ice cream sandwiches, a small milkshake, made-there 'Hostess; cupcakes, pink mystery slime, chocolate-chip cookies and rice krispie cakes. There were five of us, so Sue and I said, bring us enough for two. Figuring, you know, less than half a dessert for each of us.

Two--and this is the warning part--is enough for six or eight. But OMG, it was intense sugary goodness.

I was on my way back from work, staring out the Skytrain window as we crossed over the Grandview Cut at Clark Drive, and I saw a raptor. Just a flash: it was either a harrier or a juvenile eagle, I think, but it seemed worth hoofing back the five blocks to see if it might wait around once I got off the train. No luck--the smaller birds drove it off, I suspect. Ah, well, I'd opted to do it knowing it was a win-win exercise: either I'd get a bird sighting/photo, or I'd get an extra-zippy walk in.

Zippy walk accomplished, I backtracked to the grocery to pick up all the things I haven't been shopping for in ten days.

Tonight Kelly and I are embarking on one of our last seasonal dates, dinner out with my sister-in-law and brother at a happening place in Yaletown.

As of today, I have slots available in both of the above courses, which are online offerings from the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. In "Writing the Short Story", which starts on January 13th, you workshop two stories (of any genre) and revise one of those. It's a lot of work, you learn a ton, and if you're considering something like Clarion or Clarion West, it's an excellent way to gear up for the summer. Meanwhile, "Creating Universes, Building Worlds," sometimes also known as 'the worldbuilding course,' is open to anyone who'd like to try writing in the speculative fiction genres.

Want to know exactly what you'd be writing, reading, watching, and doing for those ten weeks? My syllabi are online. Here's Writing the Short Story, and here's Creating Universes.

Questions? Ask me anything.

Unrelated crowing: Blue Lotus was kind enough to let me know that Indigo Springs is on the National Post's Long List for Canada Also Reads.

Edited to add: Two people have written to ask if they need to be in California to take my classes. The answer is no--they're completely online and I've had people enroll from Italy, Australia, Canada and all over the U.S.

Barb and I hit Trout Lake this morning while the sun was coming up. It was bright and the ducks were clustered together, and so the real treasures yielded by the expedition were spiderwebs that spent Boxing Day catching the fog and then froze in the night. This one (and its many friends) were on the metal bridge that crosses the Grandview Cut at Lakewood Drive.

We had thought of making a second attempt to see Sherlock Holmes today, but opted for loafing instead. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, there's more reading, couch time, World of Warcraft, and nappage. Zip has sent us two disks of Dexter S2, so later we may see if it matches the current mood.

Okay, I'll admit it. One reason I read so much in December because I start to think about my annual Books Read post, and I get embarrased about how much I didn't read. It never seems like enough, and I get a bit of a burn on. Of course, December also tends to bring time off and new books in the house. In any case, I finished with the Hearst book yesterday, and enjoyed it very much. Those of you who like a bit of U.S. history without its being too overburdened with war, war, and more war will, I think, be very interested.

Many of you probably already know what's cool about the first Mercy Thompson novel by the lovely and talented Patricia Briggs, MOON CALLED. (first chapter here!) There's Mercy herself--a compassionate and wise-mouthed auto mechanic trying to keep her head down in a world full of extremely scary vampires, slightly less scary (and ooh-la-la sexy) werewolves and other things that go bump. There's the politics of coming out as a magical creature in this universe. The prose is neat and stylish, and the dialogue has snap. Which is important because there's also sexual tension to burn in this novel, which sets up a nice solid love triangle for those of us who like a little romance, especially if it's messy.

Finally, MOON CALLED has good action scenes (deft use of martial arts, especially) and an excellent sense of the tragedy that lies at the heart of any werewolf story. Because--and I was lucky enough to learn this from Suzy Charnas, author of the unforgettable "Boobs"--to be a werewolf is to lose to the beast, and to pay and pay and pay.

It was odd to read this so soon after DYING BITES--they have similar settings, but they're very different books.

We meant to go see Sherlock Holmes today but the matinees were sold out, so we saw A Single Man instead. If you can stand to be spoiled, go read Kelly's unstoppably hilarious review right now. You will bust a gut. If you can't, go see the movie just so you can read the review. I say this as someone who watches Criminal Minds partly so I can savor Elizabeth Bear's recaps, so you know I'm being sincere.

I just spent two hours building a spreadsheet for the minor characters and various suspects in DAUGHTERS OF ZEUS, tagging the pages they're on, quickly summarizing what they're up to or what's being revealed about them. I wrote the draft fast and this is part of the clean-up process... making sure people don't vanish from the manuscript, wrapping up their individual storylines, adding grace to their various arcs and subplots, and ensuring that by the story's end, no big character questions have been left unanswered due to authorial inattention.

This is the sort of thing that a Find function makes easy. I am so grateful for word processing technology. Having to go through a draft manually and scratch out a list would be much harder. When I'm done, I can hit one button and shuffle this list of incidents and clues by page--in other words, sort all the details in the order that they're revealed. In a sense, I'm outlining after the fact.

(Which is more or less how I liked to flowchart, back in the longago day when I was flirting with being a computer programmer.)

It's a strangely clerical task, but it's giving my writerbrain a gratifying workout. The little holes and gaps that turn up have to be filled, after all, and that's not pick and shovel work. Instead, cool little ideas pop up--possible connections, ways to make the details more ominous or illuminating, to make them fit better with the overall story.

I didn't finish... this is what tomorrow's fiction time will go to, and probably the next few sessions of work, whenever they fall.

Kelly and I walked to Yaletown from Main Street Station today, because Skytrain was having challenges. A 25-minute hike with dropping blood sugar did nothing for our morning cheer, but it did yield a few photographic treasures:

Sunrise behind the Telus World of Science:


After a thoroughly sumptuous breakfast, we noticed this caged lady in the doorway of a building across the street from Kelly's office:



I did not pause to shoot this female hooded merganser on the way to Elixir, because the light was dim and we were starving. She was waiting when I looped around on the way back, though:

I talked with Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column this past weekend about Indigo Springs. (And gaming, comics, and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love too). The interview can be heard here.

I've been saying we're opting out of Christmas, but it's not a bah-humbug thing, and a few seasonal events have happened or are happening with us:

The annual theater outing: White Christmas, with Barb, was very fun.

Decorating: No! We never do a tree or anything else.

Celebratory Brekkie: Since tomorrow's a work day, we're going for a fancy-schmancy Wednesday brekkie at a hotel near K's office. Mmm, brekkie.

Bare minimum giftage: Last month when we happened to be in a lot of bookstores anyway, Kelly and I bought gifts for the nieces and nephews. We love buying books for kids. There's also a Robson fambly gift-exchange, and my brother-in-law Bob, who drew my name, wins huge kudos for kindly donating to my choir, as per my tree-hugging minimal-shopping request. Thank you, Bob! In a similar spirit, he and Sue asked for, and got, a gift certie for the incomparable restaurant Cru.

The 25th itself: The two of us, spending the day together. Bliss! We'll make a nice dinner. We may watch While You Were Sleeping or Love, Actually. Or we may go out to see Sherlock Holmes.

Carolling: It was festive, it was seasonal, it was fun with the choir peeps.

Dates! Between now and the 1st, we have a few dinner dates and friendly get-togethers planned.
The rest of our plan involves several consecutive days off and loafing.

So that's what a lean, fighting, stripped-down holiday season looks like at Chez Dua. I bet some of you are in for three to five times as much activity. I hope it's terrific, rewarding, refreshing and an all-round fantastic time.

[Morrill] Goddard's more daring assertions begin from the premise that it is hard to make people think. He agrees that the power of abstract thought is the highest human faculty, but he nevertheless sees a lot of flattery in the notion that man is a rational animal. In Goddard's observation, people are far more interested in their sense perceptions and emotions than in their thoughts. He sees nothing particularly wrong or shameful in this, but puts it down to the fact that we have been sensing, feeling and emoting since we lived in caves, while we have only lately begun to cultivate our rational faculties, public education and mass literacy being last minute innovations in the life of man. Thus, while all mankind is capable of rational thought, most of us only use it with deliberate effort, after a good night's sleep, and for remuneration. Even then, our efforts are often halfhearted and the results mixed.

Kenneth Whyte, THE UNCROWNED KING: THE SENSATIONAL RISE OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

It has been a deliciously low-key day. I've spent a few hours scampering around Howling Fjord picking imaginary flowers and turning them into imaginary potions, and several more on the Whyte book. Coffee with my love, lunch and dinner in, a bit of fiddling with my photos and a nap have filled out the rest.

I spent ten good minutes chasing birds today; I had a teeny tiny window of time and the light was decent, so I decided to hit the two blocks near my house where Stellar's Jays and Flickers are most likely to turn up. This is one of the nice side-benefits of our location: it's near an odd chunk of land, owned by the gas company, that has a bunch of dead conifers, probably mountain-pine-beetle victims on it--perfect habitat for the Stellar's Jays. For much of the year, jays can be had there for the looking, but that doesn't make them easy subjects. This one was typically shy... it led me on a chase up Second Avenue, picking the high spots and darting in and out of view, laughing all the way. I knew better than to run after him forever, having been down that road many times before.



So I put the camera away and headed off toward my coffee date, thinking even as I did so that it wasn't wise, that something was sure to pop up as soon as the camera was bagged.

Sure enough, the flicker at the top of this post plopped down more or less right in front of me not ten steps later. Unlike the jay, it really wanted to be photographed--this is also pretty standard, because they seem to be fearless, especially when they're eating. And hey, when you look this flashy, why not make like a supermodel? It was kind enough to wait until I'd got the gadget out again and even nibbled its way around in a circle so I could shoot it front, back, and sides.



Kelly and I met for coffee afterward, and then hit La Grotto del Formaggio for lunch sammies and delicious cheesy treats. In about forty minutes we're headed out to sing holiday carols on the Drive. Afterward, there will be loafing, possible rearranging of our various household artworks, and reading. I'm about a fifth of the way through Kenneth Whyte's THE UNCROWNED KING: THE SENSATIONAL RISE OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST. Gilded Age New York! The foibles of Joseph Pulitzer! Muckraking journalism in the pre-TV era! Whyte has a strangely conciliatory take on just about everyone: "Everyone says this and that bad thing about Historical Figure X, but if you look at the record you'll see s/he was probably nicer/smarter/less uncouth than they've been portrayed, and anyway all of that stuff came from one biased and intemperate source," seems to be his general tone.

Biographers often thrive on creating villains out of their subjects' competitors and loved ones--it adds conflict--so this is a remarkably gentle approach.

In other news, Vancouver Sun books editor Rebecca Wigod has me listed in the "Nice" (or "Ecstasy") category of her 2009 holiday wrap-up.

Birdhunter and I haven't made it out much in pursuit of birds, but I've still managed to take 450 photos since U.S. Thanksgiving. I am grooving on the food photo settings, which made it easy to get this shot despite somewhat challenging light:



Pomegranates are sexy and photogenic, and I'm quite pleased with this shot.

Xtra West's review/interview of INDIGO SPRINGS.

It has been an action-packed morning. I met up with the friend of a choir-buddy this morning, so we could heft two of our old shelves into a moving van for her, and then zoomed off to the mentoring gig. This was followed by lunch, a run to the framing store to pick up the copied portrait of Lady Georgiana Fayne done by my great-grandmother Phil. The psychic framing man at Action on Commercial Drive picked a dark brown mat that matches our bedroom curtains very well and makes the portrait look even more amazing.



I've also been firing messages back and forth with Rick Kleffel, who's going to interview me tomorrow for an upcoming Agony Column Podcast. (Click here to hear his wonderful conversation with Connie Willis about her upcoming novels Blackout and All Clear!) Kleffel has already done a write-up on INDIGO SPRINGS, a snippet of which follows:

In Dellamonica's vision, magic is not just a sort of psychic power. It's a transformative force that she uses to rewire our world. And worse — it's transmissible. It's a plague.