Asakiyume mita

This prompt is a long one...

Hagio Moto's classic manga "They were 11" [11人いる! (1975)] was about a group of space cadets who find an extra person in their midst during what is to be their in-the-field final examination. They are strangers to one another, and no one knows who the extra person is or what their intention is. Invent your own who and why for this situation.

PS, you don't have to keep to the space field exam situation if you don't want.

choose a question to answer or go all in on all of them ;-)

13. What's a song you'd include on a spooky playlist?

14. You're setting out food for the fairy folk. What do you leave them?

15. Talk about a real-life creature that seems especially weird/alien/haunted/intriguing to you.

Going door-to-door and asking for treats/sweets: in your country/culture, when do people do that?

This question occurred to me in part because in addition to the trick-or-treat custom we have in America, there are caroling traditions in the UK (and Europe? Y/N?) AND, R's children told me that when they were living in Ethiopia, they participated in something where boys went door-to-door with staffs, did a dance, and received bread baked fresh for the occasion or, more recently, money.

I looked around online, and it seems to be the festival of Buhe, celebrating the Transfiguration of Christ. More information in this article. R was telling me about the special bread, and I was thinking it would be fun to try making.

The prompt for Spooktober 8 is...

What are your thoughts on zombies?

The prompt for Spooktober 6 is...

Share an experience you've had of déjà-vu


Personally, I have these all the time, probably a sign of cascading temporal failure. But for example, one time I was sure I'd heard a news story before (which is possible; the local NPR station repeats stories). "We've heard this before, right? The guy's going to say that he's always loved this parcel of land and that he's glad to be in charge of its remediation and redevelopment, right?" And Wakanomori looks at me and says, "No, this is a breaking story."

But maybe in this case it's a, you've-heard-one-story-about-redevelopment-you've-heard-them-all type thing.

The prompt for Spooktober 4 is...

What can make an ordinary landscape or scene seem spooky?


(Plus today is the spooky reading on Twitch, 3 pm Eastern [NYC] time--watchable here: https://www.twitch.tv/csecooney)

This Sunday (October 4--happy October, everyone), 3:00–4:30 Eastern time, I'm going to be participating in an online reading organized by the marvelous C.S.E. Cooney, truly a phoenix among humans. She's going to run it on her twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/csecooney) You don't need an account to watch, but you do to comment.

It's got an amazing line-up of participants:

• Nadia Bulkin (Author of Issues of Authority, described as political horror--gotta read this!)
  
• Christa Carmen (Author of How to Fake a Haunting, excellent title)
  
• Zig Zag Claybourne (author of Khumalo Tales, third in a trilogy I've read the first of--truly magical)
  
• Eden Royce (winner of MANY awards; author of Psychopomp & Circumstance--I've had Eden's books on my to-read list for a decade!)
  
• A.T. Sayre (author of The Asterist--I don't know this writer, but the book description sounds tense and exciting)
  
• Virginia Mohlere (author of A House of Perfect Safety --which I blurbed! It's on the cover!)
  
• Amanda McGee (author of A River Wide, which I read an ARC of--excellent)
  
• Emma Gibbon (author of "Everybody Is in the Place," described as part punk, part metal, part crooner)
  
• Steven Gibbon (author of Libsnitch Snilly, "a dark and twisty labyrinth of absurdity.")

I'll be reading from A Flash of Scarlet, forthcoming next year, a Tales-of-the-Polity novel that will have cover art by sabotabby and OMG, she's not done yet but it is looking so, so good. She's amazing!

Tentative back cover copy for A Flash of Scarlet

Decommissioning deities the Polity has outgrown can be rewarding: Decommissioner 37 counts several retired gods and goddesses among her precious handful of friends. Too bad the Ministry of Divinities is transitioning from gods and goddesses to Abstractions. It’s hard to feel personally involved with even the most noble of Abstractions. Courage, Justice, Propriety … they’re so … well, abstract. Still, you can’t argue about their worth. So why is the Polity’s feared Civil Order police force demanding that Propriety be decommissioned at an important mining site? Decommissioner 37 finds herself embroiled in a case that challenges her understanding of ghosts, gods, the Ministry’s powers, and her own family history.

ETA: Now with a poster!

I finished Annihilation.

I liked it--in a kind of detached way that matches the narrator's own affect. Her remote, cerebral tone was, for me, an effective way of conveying strangeness; it gave me a good-for-the-story sense of vague discomfort.

But one thing struck me as hilarious, and it was how golden-wonderful the narrator's transformation was compared with every other transformation we read about on the page. This is from what I put up on Goodreads:

It sure was something that the biologist’s transformation involves immunity to hypnotic suggestion, heightened senses, superfast healing, and, per another team member, glowing:

”You were a flame," she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. "You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, though the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o'-the-wisp."

Other people, mind you, get turned into some kind of giant molting crustacean that moans, or fused with a dolphin. Our narrator has some pretty high-powered Mary Sue specialness going on. I definitely want the biologist’s transformations, not the crustacean guy’s.

Remember, when signing up to go into Area X, ask for the slow-burning flame package, not the crustacean package.

R's younger son Y broke his arm at the elbow over the summer, and he hasn't quite gotten back full mobility, so he's having some PT. The first visit was last week, and the second visit was this past Friday. I drive them there and stay to help out with communication.

At the first session, the therapist came forward, a friendly-seeming person with very short brown hair, smooth skin on the face, and stocky build. I thought of them as female. But their voice was pretty deep, and when they described what they were doing and I was explaining in simpler language to R, I stopped myself from saying "She's saying ... " and instead said, "The therapist is saying..." After a couple of instances of this, it felt awkward, so I did the thing: I said to the therapist, "Excuse me, I have a question. What pronouns would you like?" And the therapist smiled kind of embarrassedly and said, "Oh, she-her."

So then I referred to the therapist as "she," and R looked at me incredulously, but didn't say anything. Afterward, at her house, R said, "The therapist--woman? But no ..." and she indicated her own chest and the distinction between her breasts and the rest of her torso, i.e., no differentiation. But she accepted that. I had the therapist's business card: the name was a typically female name starting with L.

So then this past Friday we went, and the therapist was working with another client but Y come in and called out a greeting to him. "Do you remember L?" I asked, using the female name.

"Oh, it's [typically male name beginning with L] now," the therapist said with a grin.

"Oh!" I said. "And ... the pronouns?"

"He-they," the therapist said. "All the paperwork came through."

"Oh! Great, congratulations!"

But then I needed to type a message into Google Translate for R: "Last week I said the therapist was a woman but the therapist is a man."** Because after R's incredulity--but then acceptance--the week before, I wanted her to be aware that things were not that way after all.

**Crafting sentences for Google Translate takes some work because the translation between English and R's language isn't great. I have to always do a reverse check to see if it's coming out with what I want, and sometimes it doesn't. Making sure all the referents are very clear seems to help.

The short story is by Maria Haskins, "The Fall of the Automatous Abbey," a very quick, very touching read. The protagonist is Seal, a cleaning bot:

Being a cleaning bot meant cleaning, and Seal knew its purpose, none better. It was the same purpose it had chosen all those years ago when the Mechanical Forces first liberated it from servitude in the asteroid mines and brought it to the Abbey to be rebooted into freedom by the Abbess.

The Abbey is destroyed, leaving Seal alone--except for a swarm of nanobots:

Occasionally, Seal’s path intersected with glitching swarms of nanobots that had previously followed the guidance of the Abbess, performing tasks of minor repair and maintenance. Some of these swarms attached themselves to Seal ... and ... wrought small, seemingly disjointed changes to its circuitry and processes ...Their alterations also provided Seal with a new map-layer to help locate the dwindling number of functional charging ports.

It's very short, just 1500-some words.

I've made progress on Annihilation as well and am musing on what it means to have a narrator who's compromised from the beginning.

( mild spoilers ahead, in the sense that I'm talking about the story as I read it, so I'm revealing things that happen )

So you have a disoriented, disorienting narrator giving you a warped impression of a strange and warping place.

It's cool.