Didn't mean to vanish here, but winter and deadlines and did I mention the WINTER? (Someone please appease George R.R. Martin with a suitable offering to make it stop–I expect the White Walkers to show at any time otherwise.) And surely today is our last snowstorm of the season, she said, with a tiny measure of hope. When I'm not here, you can almost always still find me tumbling random things and on twitter, of course.
Lots of quietly exciting things have been happening. I just turned in a draft of secret project, the first new book I've finished this year (obviously, since it's only three months in!). I got to see some possible cover looks for Girl on a Wire and they were AMAZING; I can't wait to see how the final version turns out. I just broke down and made an exception to my long-time Groucho Marx, non-club-joiner policy to join SFWA, because so many people have been doing such good work the past few years to change it and keep it relevant and I want to support that. I taught a group of amazing teen girls about SFF over the weekend, and since so many people pitched in great exercise ideas over on facebook I'll try to do a devoted post about that and share some of those. What else? Christopher also finished a novel draft last month (very exciting). Oh, and I had some new author photos taken, which I'm sure I'll be showing you soon.
Right around New Year's C and I started watching Person of Interest, after seeing it recommended by many, many trusted sources as an excellent science fiction show–most notably the io9 recs, and those from Molly Gloss, Ted Chiang, Chris McLaren (source of its excellent nickname Hobo Batman), and Adam Christopher. They were right. Though it took us a while to fully commit, and I definitely think there are some skippable episodes in the first season. That said, I'm glad we didn't skip them. It truly is one of the most excellent, provocative SF shows around, with sharp, thoughtful writing. We'd have so caved and started watching earlier if you'd told us there was a dog. We're suckers for a dog (especially Bear, above). And we're now all caught up with the current season, which is a little woeful, because it was so nice to feel like there was an endless supply of episodes.
Anyway, I'll be back later this week with a round up of recent reading and many accumulated links and fewer excuses. Probably.