 Since author Mike Resnick was nice enough to post a comment on yesterday's Goddess of Ganymede, I offered him a chance to share some thoughts about another of his early novels, Redbeard, from Lancer Books. I haven't yet read this one, having picked it up only within the last couple of months. I knew, however, that Mike held it in similar regard to his Ganymede books, which is to say early work he'd rather everyone forgot. Unsurprisingly, I'm rather partial to that sort of thing. I suspect Mike is, too, which is probably one reason why he collected several of Henry Kuttner's early (and sex-infused) science fiction stories in a great anthology entitled Girls for the Slime God.  So, with little to say regarding a book I haven't yet read, I thought I'd give Mike himself a chance to share some thoughts about Redbeard. To my surprise and delight, he sent me back a long email, which (with his permission) I've reprinted below: Memories of REDBEARD? OK.
I was at NyCon III, the 1967 Worldcon in New York, and while I was there I stopped in to see some of the publishers and editors — none of them science fiction — that I'd been writing for.
One of them was Walter Zacharius, who owned Lancer Books. I'd done some doctor-nurse romances and Gothics for him under pseudonyms, and I thought I'd see if he had any more work for me. When I got there he was amazed at the success of the Conan books. He'd picked them up for a song, these 30-year-old stories that none of the other mass market houses wanted, and hired Frank Frazetta to do the covers — and they were selling like hotcakes. He had no idea why, but he wasn't a man to let grass grow under his feet, and he decided it had to be the barbarian hero, and he told me to write him a science fiction novel with a barbarian hero.
So I did. And I sent it to Larry Shaw, Walter's editor, and Larry sat on it for 2 years. I kept writing and phoning every few months, telling him that this wasn't an off-the-street submission, that his boss had assigned it, but for two years he never looked at it. Then he either quit or was fired — no one was ever quite clear on which — and Bob Hoskins replaced him, found a 2-year pile of unread manuscripts, started with the oldest, and called me his third day on the job, knowing nothing about Walter assigning me the book, to make an offer, which I accepted.
Today I find the book an embarrassment — it's not the kind of thing I would ever write; it was an assignment from a hack publisher to a 25-year-old kid who didn't know any better — but surprisingly it got uniformly good reviews, which I guess says a little something about either the state of science fiction, or the state of reviewing, circa 1969. Every reviewer commented the unique characterization; after awhile I realized that all it meant was that they'd never encountered an un-beautiful heroine before.
-- Mike Thanks for the commentary, Mike! ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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 A lot of artists got by in the late 60s and early 70s by essentially aping the style of Frank Frazetta (or producing homages, if you will). Boris Vallejo is probably the best known of these artists today, but Jeff Jones contributed more than his fair share of work to the paperback racks in the wake of Conan the Barbarian. From 1975 to 1979 Jones lived in a Chelsea workspace called "The Studio" with Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Michael William Kaluta. I'm guessing they threw some memorable parties. Jones vanished from the scene in the 1990s or so, and emerged earlier this decade having undergone gender reassignment surgery. She's now known as Jeffery Catherine Jones, and this interview at Sequential Tart offers a brief glimpse at some of Jones's thoughts and influences. It's an interesting read. I have several Jeff Jones covers in my collection, and many will eventually appear here. As for the book, The Goddess of Ganymede is the first paperback credit of science fiction author Michael D. Resnick, who enjoys a successful writing career to this day (and who will pen the introduction to the forthcoming Planet Stories edition of Manly Wade Wellman's Who Fears the Devil?). Resnick seems almost embarrassed by the book (and it's sequel, Pursuit on Ganymede) today, probably because it is a brazen pastiche of A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read Goddess last year and found it charming, in the upper-middle tier of "Sword & Planet" novels along with similar 60s work from Gardner F. Fox and Michael Moorcock. I just finished re-reading A Princess of Mars a few weeks ago, though, and upon looking at The Goddess of Ganymede again tonight I can see several places where Resnick could have differed from Burroughs but didn't. Still, too-slavish devotion to ERB is practically a defining statement of intent for authors working in the Sword & Planet "tradition," so I can't hold it against him. I've read more than a dozen of these books from nearly as many authors in the last few years, and almost all of them follow an identical pattern—first set by Burroughs back in 1912—in the early chapters. The books usually start with a brief introduction by the author himself, explaining how he came to hear the story of the manly hero and the mysterious circumstances of his life. In this case Mike incompetently builds a short-wave radio which picks up the broadcast of Adam Thane, an American soldier of fortune drafted into NASA's secret Project Jupiter aimed at beating the Russkies in the Space Race by sending a manned mission to photograph the gas giant's Red Spot. The story picks up from there with Thane's narrative, and we're treated to the usual progression of tropes. The hero somehow gets to the planet. The hero experiments with walking under the lighter gravity that will make him a superman. The hero meets a dangerous, monstrous inhabitant of the savage planet. The hero meets the humanlike inhabitants of the planet and learns their language. That sequence plays out, in roughly that order, in every single one of these books. After a while it's interesting to focus on what makes sword & planet stories different even within the formula, and here Resnick's crashed rocket and Cold War in space references anchor the book firmly as an artifact of its time. Mike won't let me republish it, so I suggest you hunt down a copy and check it out for yourself. .
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 Here's Whom the Gods Would Slay, a 1960s science fantasy novel by Ivar Jorgensen. Like Alexander Blade and S. M. Tenneshaw and a motley class of buffoonishly named compatriots, old Ivar was a fiction, a pseudonym shared by a host of pulp-era writers. Whom the Gods Would Slay, for example, was adapted from a novella of the same name in the June 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures. The cover in my collection is the 1968 Belmont reprint.  I purchased this book because I am a sucker for anything with a Viking on it, and because one of the authors associated with the Jorgensen pen name is Robert Silverberg, a recent interest of mine. Alas, this book was not by Silverberg, but instead came from the pen of one Paul W. Fairman, quite an interesting character in his own right. A practiced hand at the pulp game, Fairman wrote for pulps in numerous genres under several different pseudonyms. By 1955, he was editor of Fantastic and Amazing Stories. Two movies were made from his work, Target Earth and Invasion of the Saucer Men.  Also, somewhere along the way, Fairman produced this:  I haven't yet had a chance to read Whom the Gods Would Slay (or, for that matter, The Orgy at Madame Dracula's), but I sure as hell want to see Invasion of the Saucer Men! ... Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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Photo by Joshua Frost. From PaizoCon a couple of weeks ago.
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 The Carnelian Cube, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, is one of a handful of 1970s and earlier fantasy cited by Gary Gygax as significant influences upon the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game in Appendix N of his opus, the Dungeon Master's Guide. As D&D was a primary vector from which fantasy first entered my life and captured my imagination, I've always been especially enchanted with the books on this list. I've been seeking them out and reading them for years, and each one I cross off the list is a milestone in my reading history. I launched the Planet Stories fiction line at least in part thanks to my fascination with the pulp fantasy on Gygax's list. I came to The Carnelian Cube a few months ago with an open mind. I respect de Camp's efforts as one of sword & sorcery's pioneering paperback editors, but his dripping-with-disdain biography of Lovecraft and his less than up to the challenge Conan the Barbarian pastiches have always left a sour taste in my mouth. I eagerly await the de Camp novel that demands I raise my expectations, but it hasn't happened yet. Pratt is a tabula rasa for me. He famously collaborated with de Camp on the "Incompleat Enchanter" series (also on Gygax's list), which I haven't read. His The Blue Star appeared in Lin Carter's hugely influential Adult Fantasy imprint from Ballantine in 1969, a part of the bedrock of modern fantasy. But again, I haven't read it, so other than respecting both of these authors as early pioneers, I went in pretty blind. The Carnelian Cube first appeared in a 1954 Gnome Press hardcover, which is about as strong bona fides as you can get for early book-form sci-fi. My copy is a 1970 reprint of the '67 Lancer books edition, with a cover by Frank Kelly Freas, one of the genre's most higly respected artists. The book concerns a small cube of carnelian inscribed with mystical writing in ancient Etruscan. When the archeologist Arthur Cleveland Finch sleeps with the stone under his pillow, its magic transports him to the world of his desires, in the first case "a perfectly rational world." He awakens a resident of that world, with many details of world history and culture shifted to match his desires. Unfortunately, the cube is nowhere to be seen, and Finch must navigate the strange social landscape of a plantation called Strawberry House to discover it and eventually escape from an increasingly absurd and deadly escalation of tension that must surely end in his death. In Strawberry House he becomes Finch Arthur Poet, a man of art in a strictly regimented world. After falling afoul of the law for charges of advertising and indolence, Finch reclaims the carnelian cube and dreams of a world where and individual can be himself. Thing brings Finch to another version of pastoral Tennessee, this time dominated by an almost completely functionless society of violent nonconformists. When Finch confusedly offers his "Finch Arthur Poet" name from the previous reality, he gets pulled into the dangerous machinations of the Pegasus Literary Society, rife with psychics and murderers. He finds work as the coxwain of a tumultuous rowing crew, attempts to avoid the temptations of a beautiful woman, and realizes that a little conformity is necessary for survival. This is the lushest of the three realities presented in the book, with memorable names (and characters) like the bombastic Hyperion Weems, the temptress Eulalie, the native american ghost-spirit Ganowoges, and an effective sense of growing, dangerous chaos. Finch finds the cube and drifts off to sleep thinking of his home in the very first chapter, and of the digs of ancient Etruscan sites. He awakens into a world in which scientists brainwash thousands of subjects into thinking they are ancient warriors, setting them in bloody wars against once another to simulate important moments of ancient history. In the end Arthur Finch escapes this cold, immoral world of cold social science to escape to who knows where, and the cycle continues. Perhaps because it covers three distinct realities, and perhaps because it was written by two authors, The Carnelian Cube is often disjointed and difficult to follow. I went in expecting heroic fantasy but ended up with something written much more like a less-funny Vonnegut book, part whimsy and magic and part literary and serious-minded. I found some of the broad racial stereotypes (particularly the aforementioned Indian) in the book more difficult to excuse as a product of their time than in 1930s offerings from authors like Merritt or Otis Adelbert Kline, and I guess in the end I didn't think all that much of the book as a whole. As for what it really brought to D&D, it's pretty easy to say. The different realities of The Carnelian Cube are akin to pocket dimensions or demi-planes in D&D parlance, and the cube itself literally appears as one of the game's most powerful magic items. Dust off your old hardcovers and look up the cubic gate, and you'll find that it's described as being made of, you guessed it, carnelian. -------- Crossposted to Paperback Flash. .
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Just when I thought I'd gotten sick of Michael Jackson tributes, someone had to go and post this.
I haven't seen it in probably 20 years (though I, like everyone else alive in the 80s, pretty much have the song memorized), and upon modern review I'm struck by a few observations: 1. How fucking awesome it is. 2. What a 100%-quality production it is from top to finish. 3. Legend after legend after legend after legend. 4. Everyone with a solo part has a distinctive, original voice. 5. Distinctive, original voices were more prevalent before the era of MTV, where untelegenic people could get by on talent. 6. I love how it includes Bob Dylan, a nice echo to what is genuinely a folk song, composed as an anthem wholly in the tradition of the 60s folk movement. 7. Extremely innovative and, well, "multicultural" for its day, mixing country stars with R&B legends with megastars of previous decades. It's easy to see how this song brought people together. 8. Dan Akroyd? .
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Here's the complete playlist from the PaizoCon Mix Challenge. I threw down the gauntlet to Paizo.com's awesome online community, asking those who attended PaizoCon to put together a 4-song mix to share with other audiophiles at the convention.
The rules were simple:
1. 4 songs.
2. All songs 5 minutes or under.
3. Deep cuts will be better received than mainstream stuff everyone has heard.
4. No fruity elf music or background soundtrack songs to play while RPGing.
That #4 caused some cognitive dissonance with the gamers involved, but after all was said and done everyone followed the instructions and we had a great time. The combined tracks went something like 3 hours in total, with more than 40 songs. I think next year more people will participate, and I'll probably reduce it to 2 songs per person. The event ended at about 2:00 AM, and everyone was tired by the time we finished (though the homebrew "Pathfinder" beer and Maker's Mark certainly helped pass the time).
Anyway, here's the complete track listing, in no particular order:
Marie Laforet: Marie Douceur - Marie Colère
Nightwish: Wishmaster
Serge Gainsbourg: Ballade De Melody Nelson
Ween: Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?
Blackstar: Thieves in the Night
Buddy Guy: Feels Like Rain
Clutch: The Yeti
Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley: All Night
Depeche Mode: I Feel You
Devo: Automodown/Spacegirl Blues
Dr. Zeus: Kangana
Garbage: Vow
Joe Darwish: The Ken Song
Les Claypool featuring Henry Rollins: Delicate Tendrils
Nightwish: Elvenpath
Nightwish: Nemo
Os Mutantes: El Justiciero
Rebirth Brass Band: Do Whatcha Wanna
Robert Earl Keen: Mr. Wolf & Mamabear
Steve Earle: Lungs
TV on the Radio: Wolf Like Me
Amorphis: Sampo
The Atomic Fireballs: The Man With the Hex
Butthole Surfers: Theme from Underdog
Cold War Kids: Saint John
doubleDrive: Tattooed Bruise
doubleDrive: Inside Out
Gang of Four: Guns and Butter
Gogol Bordello: Sally
Green Day: Peacemaker
Guns N' Roses: Riad N' the Bedouins
Iron Maiden: Montsegur
mclusky: Lightsabre Cocksuckin' Blues
Nine Inch Nails: Where is Everybody?
Sleater Kinney: One Beat
Smashing Pumpkins: Ava Adore
Steve Earle & the Dukes: F the CC
Fantomas: The Godfather
Oingo Boingo: Yodel
Neko Case: This Tornado Loves You
Julie Fowlis: Hug Air A'Bhonaid Mhoir
Jefferson Airplane: White Rabbit
Susumu Hirasawa: Dropfilled with Memories
And, in the spirit of Music Mondays, here are YouTube links to my four submissions:
Marie Laforet: Marie Douceur - Marie Colère Serge Gainsbourg: Ballade de Melody Nelson (embedding disabled by request, bastards)
Ween: Mister, Could You Please Help My Pony?
Os Mutantes: El JusticeroSlimming it down to two next year. The assembled audience really dug the Mutantes track and the Paint it Black cover, but I think old Serge may have sailed about 30 meters over everyone's head. People seemed to dig the baseline, though, which is something. Like all of PaizoCon, the Mix Challenge was a hell of a lot of fun, and something I now look forward to on an annual basis. . PS: I'm gearing up to relaunch Paperback Flash, my experimental book collecting/reading blog some time this week. I scanned in a bunch of new covers late last week, and should have some thoughts up very shortly. Do keep an eye out for that! .
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Here's a hilarious story about a very persnickety secretary who just happens to work for my Representative in Congress.
Good fun for Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else who likes to laugh at losers.
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Saturday night at Paizocon I hosted an intimate gathering of about 12 audiophile Paizo fans for a music listening party. Participants brought a 4-song mix of deep cuts to share with other music lovers, and a few really excellent participants brought some homebrew "Pathfinder" beer, some Maker's Mark, and various and sundry other alcoholic beverages (it didn't hurt to be about 50 feet from the excellent hotel bar, either).
 We started at about 11:30 after the Paizo Banquet (which deserves a blog recap of its own), and had enough music to last more than 3 hours. The selections were very eclectic, ranging from 1970s French pop (one guess who brought that) to funky gaelic guitar rock to blues to hip hop to video game character theme songs. I must say nearly all of the songs were interesting and fun, and I plan to cut a 20-song mix of some of our favorites (I'll be sure to post the full list here once I have fully recovered from the convention). But the song that impressed us the most came all the way from Finland as the contribution of a Finnish Paizo fan who ventured all the way from his homeland to visit the show. We were all blown away by Nightwish, a "symphonic" metal band with an operatic female vocalist and some head-banging speed metal riffs. What's a symphonic metal band, you ask? Check this out. And be sure to listen closely to the lyrics, which I've reproduced below. They reference Dragonlance, of all things. Wow. LYRICS: Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Elbereth Lorien A dreamy-eyed child staring into night On a journey to storyteller`s mind Whispers a wish speaks with the stars the words are silent in Him Distant sigh from a lonely heart "I`ll be with you soon, my Shalafi" Grey Heavens my destiny Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Silvera Starbreeze Sla-Mori the one known only by Him To august realms, the sorcery within If you hear the call of arcane lore, Your world shall rest on Earth no more A maiden elf calling with her cunning song "Meet me at the Inn of Last Home" Heartborne will find the way! Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster guitar solo Wishmaster Crusade for Your will A child, dreamfinder The Apprentice becoming... Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Master! Apprentice! Heartborne! 7th seeker Warrior! Disciple! In me the Wishmaster Wow! In honor of the Paizocon Mix Challenge and in order to trick myself into posting here more often, this post initiates a new weekly series called Music Mondays. I'll post something I'm listening to at the time, and I invite all readers to post their own YouTube video music suggestions. I've already got the next few weeks planned out, and I'd love it if you guys bring some tunes of your own! .
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Just finished Day 2 of PaizoCon, the annual gathering of Paizo fans in Seattle. 200+ attendees this year, and tonight was the huge banquet and my mp3 listening party, which was great. Lots more to say on this later this week, but for now I need to sleep.
Here's an in-action photo:
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And a warm good night to Frankenstein, a DEAR friend of mine.
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The wireless access from the Milford Plaza hotel in New York city could only be shittier if it never worked at all, as opposed to cruelly offering one bar every 16 minutes or so. I'd love to write up a report of the great Book Expo America Paizo is having, but I only have so much patience with typing on my iPhone. So, how's about some pictures? 
That last one is from the folder surrounding the bill for my dinner Friday night at Keen's Steakhouse, where I dined with the illustrious Misters Pierce Watters and Chris Pramas. Probably the best filet mignon I've ever had. Delicious. I'm back in Seattle tomorrow night and then I'm off on another trip on Wednesday. Paizocon is in two weeks. Seems like old times! . Posted via LiveJournal.app.
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Anyone paying close attention to my various twitter and facebook updates or the "Music" section of my recent LJ posts will no doubt already know that I am deep in a month-long obsession with the new album from the Decemberists, The Hazards of Love.
I previously thought I'd owned a Decemberists album that I'd listened to once and discarded (careful review revealed that to have been, in fact, a Stereophonics album), so The Hazards of Love is the first encounter I've ever had with the Decemberists.
That puts me significantly behind the curve in terms of modern music, so filled with enthusiasm for some of the most interesting lyrics and flat-out ballsy conceptual jukes on this album I decided to read a bunch of reviews.
Here's what I discovered:
Music critics are often really, really stupid and lazy, and many of them resent having to use their minds to understand music that aims higher than a bubblegum ballad or autotuned pop-music tripe.
Take this review of the album in Slate, for example. The reviewer gets his bias right out of the way before going on to spend the rest of the review misquoting lyrics, generally not getting the gist of the storyline, and being resentful at having to use his brain.
Disappointing.
I mean, a few years in the PR business was enough to teach me that many (if not most) journalists are lazy, but this guy deserves the Pulitzer Prize in thoughtless criticism.
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While checking in on my old friends at the Oerth Journal I came across the art of Dean Oyebo, who provided a pretty stunning cover for issue #24 (I edited issues 3–7 back in the Stone Age of the internet). Duly impressed, I popped over to his website and found some pretty inspiring images.
Vistas like these (which often seem to creep up as concept sketches for levels of video games) really spur my imagination and make me want to add them into my RPG campaign world.
 Anyone else have examples of this kind of atmospheric "setting" artwork they'd like to share? .
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Following up on my post from yesterday, I poked around and found a scandalously underwatched series of YouTube clips comprising the entire "He-Man is More Powerful Than Jesus" interview. It's 10 parts long, but perhaps my favorite segment is all about my favorite hobby: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS!
Which begs the question. If He-Man is more powerful than Jesus, are either of them more powerful than Venger? .
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This is pure great. The last line will live on as a mantra forever.
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It's the annual Local Yarn Store tour weekend here in Seattle, which meant my girlfriend ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bbcaddict was running at full octane over the last 48 hours in an attempt to visit 23 "local" yarn stores by the end of tomorrow. This year she managed to polish off 14 of them on a day off yesterday, leaving eight on the slate for today. The stores give out a free pattern and a stamp on the passport, which is entered into a drawing for a bunch of knitting stuff.
This year we were joined by alsofine and her husband yo_sarrian, good company under any circumstances. I'm not so much for the knitting (but I love the sweater, scarf, and gloves Danica's made for me), but I always tag along on the trip because it's a great chance to explore greater Washington just as the weather is turning from suicide watch to paradise. The tour also takes us up to Bellingham, a fun little town with two of the best used bookstores in the state.
This year we only had time to visit one of the stores, but it was enough to cost me about $30 in paperbacks. Ah, yes, the smell of pulp woos me much more powerfully than the smell of lanolin and menopausal hobbyists, and this year's Local Yarn Store tour produced quite an interesting paperback haul.
I'm getting to a weird place with my paperback collection. I actively collect about a dozen authors and generally keep an eye out for "sword and planet" and barbarian/sword and sorcery trash fiction. Essentially, if it's from before 1980 or so and it has the words "in the tradition of" and references to Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I generally pick it up. If it features all of those things and, say, a naked female breast on the cover, I'll buy it automatically. But my personal collection is now better, often WAY better, than any used book store I can find, so I often end up leaving empty handed these days. Even the "behind the counter" vintage "quality" SF paperbacks on display at most stores offer nothing but stuff I already have or don't want.
But the Bellingham stores always cough up a few surprises.
Here's the haul from this year's Yarn Tour trip. I'll eventually get all of these covers up on Paperback Flash once I've cleared a lingering freelance assignment off the schedule and can truly waste time online without feeling tremendously guilty about it. In the meantime, here's the list:
Spearmen of Arn, by Del DowDell
Warlord of Chandor, by Del DowDell
Whom the Gods Would Slay, by Ivar Jorgensen (not, sadly, Robert Silverberg as I had hoped)
Berserker 1: Shadow of the Wolf, by Chris Carlsen
Berserker 2: The Bull Chief, by Chris Carlsen (with naked boobs on cover!)
Zanthar at Moon's Madness, by Robert Moore Williams (Yeah! Now I have all of the Zanthar books!)
Five Steps to Tomorrow, by Eando Binder (closing in on a complete collection of Binder paperbacks)
Warlords of Xuma, by David J. Lake (I've got the other book in this series, which is now complete)
Dream Quest 1: Halberd, Dream Warrior, by Lloyd St. Alcorn (sequel to On the Shoulders of Giants)
Redbeard, by Michael Resnick (Mike has all but disowned this, which makes me want to read it more)
I can't imagine reading much of that stuff any time soon, but I was pleased to find all of it.
Thanks, Yarn Tour!
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I've been trying to eat healthier for the last couple years, purging chemical-ridden garbage like soft drinks from my diet, trying to go "organic" whenever possible, and all but cutting out fast food entirely. At the same time I've been trying to save money by not going out to eat for lunch every single workday.
That latter trick is more difficult than it might appear. As a senior manager, I don't generally get more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted quiet at a time, so it's nice to take a break and get out of the office for an hour or so, chat with friendly coworkers about the latest episode of Lost or I Love Money 2 or whatever ISN'T the work of the day.
That said, eating out all the time is a killer on the old pocketbook, even if I do try to keep my meals under $10. So last weekend I took advantage of a sale at the supermarket and picked up about a half-dozen "Healthy Choice" microwave meals to eat during the week. I haven't had the heart to look at the list of chemicals in the ingredients, but the calories are pretty good and the pictures on the packages make the food look edible.
And it is edible. The problem is that none of it tastes particularly good. Take today's meal, for example. I'm about 3/4ths of the way through my Chicken Tuscany "steamer," a slightly more expensive bowl-in-bowl contraption that heats the pasta sauce separately from the noodles, chicken bits, and vegetables. The chicken chunks are nicely seasoned and tasty, but you only get four of them. The noodles themselves are OK, but the vegetables are soggy and tasteless, and the sauce is not really anything to write home about.
Looking at the unfinished meal, I'm thinking it might be a "healthy choice" because I'm probably going to choose not to finish it, and thus will end up not eating a full meal.
I can feel the pounds melting away.
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Nothing, really.
I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with my blogs in light of shipping the 576-page Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and finishing off the seemingly endless list of bullshit associated with getting ready for Book Expo America and Gen Con. I've got one unfinished writing assignment that has stuck with me like a never-to-be-healed seeping leprous wound on the bottom of my foot, and I've got a trip to New York, a trip to Minnesota, and a local convention we're running all in the space of three and a half weeks starting at the end of this month. Seems like old times!
It's frankly no more or less work-intensive or frustrating than my normal trajectory over the last several years, but I am having a difficult time making time for myself, which means that I'm not spending much time with friends and I'm spending almost zero time posting to my blogs.
Lots to be pleased with, lately. The Wolverine movie was shite (but enjoyable shite), and the Star Trek movie was WAY better than I anticipated. I'd like to see that one again, and may try to hit an IMAX show tomorrow with Danica. I love the new Decemberists album (thanks, Kyle!), and all of this furious work means that burr-in-the-saddle annoying "never dos" are working their way off my to-do list (which looks a lot like Santa's list of good and bad children, I'm afraid). The weather in Seattle is finally turning into something that doesn't furrow my brow for months on end, and the Seattle International Film Festival is about to begin.
So there is much to be happy about.
Maybe I'll blog some of it. :)
Thanks for keeping an eye and an ear on my blogs. More content will follow shortly.
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