Mark W Tiedemann

Category: blog

  • Book Recommendation

    This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase.  For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…

    China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade.  Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.

    Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.

    It’s an ongoing debate, and Miéville himself has weighed in on it, namely the definition of science fiction, principally in relation to fantasy.  What it comes down to for me is a question of philosophical utility.  Does the text at hand offer an examination of the “real world” consequences of a philosophical question given the constraints of a universe we recognize as that which is accessible by science?

    A bit long-winded, maybe, but insofar as any fictive enterprise can be shown to deal with the consequences of questions, the defining terms in this instance—or at least the limiting terms—are “philosophical”, “real world”, and “science.”

    Let me deal with this quickly, since I’ve dealt with it at length elsewhere.  By science I do not mean the rigorous application of what we know of science—if that were to be the determinant, 99% of SF would not qualify, and of that which did, a goodly portion would be enjoyable for a relatively small, self-selected audience.  What I mean by this is more on the order of an æsthetic stance vis a vis the narrative, mainly that the background setting and the foreground action conform to the forms we readily identify as “scientifically defined.”  The universe as understood by scientific enquiry.

    Basically, a vision of a “real world” that we can recognize and agree fits with what we can understand as how the universe operates.

    This automatically throws out most fantasy conceits.  (If you take the trouble to redefine your elves and fairies as parallel human species ala evolutionary branching or as aliens, you have retasked your imagery to perform a science fictional exploration.)

    Which leaves what I consider the most interesting and salient of components, namely the philosophical aspect.

    Science fiction is self-consciously philosophical, insofar as it is deeply, principally concerned with questions of how to live in a changed universe.  Not just technologically, but ethically and morally.

    Which brings me to the Miéville and my rather bold claim that it is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade.

    The conceit dealt with here is the question of language and its relation both to biology and to a universe that evolves, changes, and is largely unexplored.  Miéville gives an alien race whose language is hardwired into their biology.  They do not “learn” it, they are born with it and simply mature into its proper use.

    And they cannot, therefore, lie.

    Enter humans.

    The humans, as is our wont, work to learn to communicate with these aliens—the novel is set primarily on the alien homeworld, where humans have a single, rather naked and fragile colony/embassy— and when they succeed, they nearly destroy these aliens, who in response to the threat very nearly destroy the colony.

    Throughout, there is discussion and examination of language, its uses, and how it relates to both the universe at large and the inner landscape of individuals.  The examination, which in many ways is an abstrusely philosophical one, is absolutely central to the action of the novel.

    And this is what good science fiction does!

    I won’t here go into further detail.  To do so risks spoilers and if you’re in least interested, you will not thank me.  (I will say that Miéville has produced one of my favorite lines in all science fiction.  No, I won’t tell you that, either.  I want you to have the fist-pump experience I did when I read it.)

    I must also add that while in some ways what I have described might easily be seen as a dry, plodding work, the exact opposite is true.  Miéville is a gifted stylist and his prose rush along, carrying the reader through an adventure.

    So for Christmas, for yourself, for a treat, go on-line at Left Bank Books and buy a copy.  Read it, give it away as a gift, feed the SF geek in your life, or introduce someone who has stubbornly refused to see the merit in all this “space stuff” to something of undeniable intellectual worth.  Wednesday, December 5th, it’s 20% if bought online.

    Do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

  • Archive

    I have published 529 posts on this blog.

    Absurd.

    I started the Distal Muse as part of an effort toward self-promotion, an effort that has in some ways failed.  But in the years since it was first established (I think it’s first incarnation, as part of a ridiculously complicated site, was 2003) I’ve used it to hone a skill—the short essay—and indulge whims that I frankly have little interest in trying out professionally.  After that original site was replaced by the current one, in 2006 or ’07, I started using it for all sorts of things, including putting up original art.

    I look back over what is here and I’m pleasantly dismayed at the variety.  Not altogether pleasantly nonplussed by some of the content.  But, for better or worse, it’s all mine.

    Some of it, I think, is not half bad.  (May not be half good, either, but that’s a matter of taste.  I think.)

    Since its commencement, I’ve added a FaceBook page and, more recently, Twitter (at my agent’s urging; I’m not really sure how to use that one), to which I link my new posts.  Since one of the purposes of this whole enterprise is to ATTRACT ATTENTION TO MYSELF (to gain an audience, you understand), I thought I’d start using the archive, and link to older posts that may pique the interest of some of the good folks who now subscribe to my various digital presences.

    Obviously, anyone can peruse the archive any time they want, and to my pleasant surprise, some do.  But I thought this might make it easier.

    Yes, I’m trying to get more regular readers.  But I also have a small vanity which chafes at the idea that past work will fade into total obscurity.

    So while I may not post as much new work here as I have been lately (an inordinate amount of which has been political—duh, I wonder why!), I hope folks will indulge in my previous babblings and may find something worthwhile therein.

    Erosions

  • Foggy, Raw, Learning Curve

    Newfallen

     

    One of my more annoying personal characteristics is a seeming aversion to instruction manuals.  For someone to whom reading is one of the four or five great pleasures of life, for whatever reason, I cannot abide the tedium of reading a set of instructions.  For one thing, nothing seems to stick until I actually try to perform the functions laid out.  I might as well be reading Linear-B.  (Oddly, I can read theoretical texts without much difficulty—physics, art, philosophy, psychology, and so forth—it’s only step by step “how to” works that both try my patience and do me no apparent good.)  Of course, when I do read the instructions, something does stick and I find the task at hand less baffling.  Nevertheless, all my life, I have my hands on what I want to do before getting past the table of contents in the manual.

    Where they help is when I run into something that stops me in my tracks.  (Let me in my defense say here that I am not one of those males who make a fetish of not asking directions; I have no problem stopping on a road and asking someone where I am and how to get elsewhere.)

    Anyway, I’ve been, the last few years, teasing my way through digital photography.  I’ve been posting the results as I go along.  I broke down a couple years ago and bought a new camera, a Canon 60D, which is not the top-of-the-line (good heavens, I  didn’t have five grand!) but is not an amateur machine, either.  It’s about what I needed to get me started and produces more than acceptable results.  (I suspect I’m going to have to pop for a better lens one of these days, not to mention a second one to extend the range.)

    To date I’ve been shooting everything in JPEG and working with the images in Photoshop 7.  I’ve been hearing and reading about shooting in RAW all this time, but the JPEGs have been very amendable to my manipulations and I’ve been learning my way through Photoshop handily.  (A friend came over a couple of times to show me the initial stuff, which made the instructions make sense.)

    Lately, I’ve been running up against the edges of quality.  Nothing I could quite put my finger on, just…an impression…that these photographs could be sharper or a bit richer…what finally came down to a sense that they simply didn’t contain enough information.

    So I thought it was time to try RAW and see if it made a difference.

    It did.  The first one being, I can’t open the files in Photoshop 7.  A quick check around the intraweebs and I discover that I need a plug-in for that.  Hm.  A hundred bucks.

    However…

    The program that came with the camera does open them and there is a, what I initially thought was a cruder, processing program included.  Well, there are many things I don’t readily see available, but I can work with the files and convert them into JPEGS, which I can then pull into Photoshop for further work.

    And it does seem that there is more to work with.

    Back in the ancient past, we used to debate lens quality versus film acuity, the amount of information a given lens could transmit and the ability of a particular film to “see” it.  On paper, at least, it always seemed a silly argument, because even the cheapest aftermarket lenses transmitted far more data than the finest film was capable of recording.  And yet, there was a reason Leica lenses were so damned expensive.  You could see the difference.  It was palpable.  What information was recordable by the film was intimately dependent on how much information it had to, for lack of a better word, choose from.  In the end, it was a signal-to-noise problem, classic amplitude/frequency physics.  I was pretty good for a time at distinguishing the quality of the glass, as we said, from the quality of the image on paper.  In my own work, I could see it clearly, even though more often than not, it was not quantifiable in other than æsthetic terms.

    If the quality isn’t there, it can drive you nuts, even if in every other respect there is nothing wrong with the image.  It’s like a noise in a motor than only you can hear.

    So all I want for Christmas (for now) is the latest version of Photoshop (or equivalent) that allows me to work in RAW without having to buy a damned plug-in.

    Why not get the plug-in, you ask?  Excellent question.  Basically, because I have rarely had any luck downloading those blasted things and installing them properly without days of struggle fixing whatever went wrong in the negotiation.

    Besides, I’m sure what I’m using currently is antiquated.

    Meantime, I seem to have managed to step up the level of quality this way.

    Eroded Ascent

  • Post Thanks

    I asked Donna this morning, “Is this the first Thanksgiving we’ve spent entirely alone, at home?” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think so.”

    Just as well.  I seem to have caught a bug that has churned me up a bit the last couple of days.  Not bad, just very uncomfortable, leaving me not in a very congenial mood.

    But it got me thinking on the nature of the day and its uses.

     

     

    We lounged, walked the dog, talked, read a little (I’m finishing up a stack I’ve been working on for a time and this morning completed William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways), talked some more, napped, ate a little.  We did not engorge.  Neither of us felt good enough for a feast, so perhaps we came through the day more clear-headed than in past years.  We watched a favorite movie—Pleasantville (which I still think is one of the finest films ever made, easily in my top 100 if not my top 20)—and thoroughly appreciated each other.

    Our tradition has been to take the first invitation that comes for the day, but this year the one that came with geologic regularity did not come—regrettably, I suspect politics has scuttled that one—and we demurred on another.  No matter, I’m glad it worked out this way.

    I skim on a light froth of gratitude most of the time.  I subscribe in no way to the notion that what I have has come entirely by my own hand.  I have no problem crediting others for their contributions to who I am and what I have done.  I’ve been through periods of ill-advised hubris, thinking myself wholly self-completed, and all it left me with was an ashen taste of disappointed affirmation when I realized how unfair and ungenerous such an attitude can be and how hurtful it is to express it.  I am grateful.

    I am grateful for my friends, of whom I have more than my share and who are among the best people I can imagine (and I have a pretty good imagination).  There is no way to adequately assess how important they are and have been to my life.  We have among us constructed many a worthy moment, torn through seminal evenings with laughter, tears, and unspoken commitment, reinvigorated shattered hopes among each other, and sat through despondencies together like old sailors waiting for the tide.

    I am grateful to live in a place, in a time, where I can think any thought, read any book, make any art, and live according my own principles, and all without having to steal such privilege from anyone else around me.  I live in a house of books and music and art that resonates with songs of imagination and whose walls are only place markers by which the true horizons of my inner life can be appreciated in the comparison.

    I am grateful to have the wherewithal to understand and appreciate what I have.

    I like to think that in some small way my life has meant something, if only to a few people, and that I will not have spent my time frivolously and without effect.  If this single vanity is not self-deception incarnate, then I am grateful to have lived to a purpose.

    I’m grateful for my dog.

    I am mostly grateful to have a companion who shares with me without reservation.  Donna has been the best, insofar as I can understand the term, a soul mate, the one with whom I have both laughed and cried the most, and with whom this life has taken on the contours of its present delights, of which, though I complain often of what I have not yet achieved, there are many.

    Everything else is secondary, transient, novelty, replaceable, but for which I am also grateful.

    To all of you who have added grace and joy and the pleasure of shared experience to my life—to our lives—I thank you and hope the coming year will see a few of your hopes fulfilled.

    It’s a good life.  Appreciate it.

  • Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

    Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

    We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

    Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

    William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

    But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

    But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

    And yet.

    People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

    I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

    I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

    Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

    I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

    Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.

  • New (ish) Job

    Okay, I’m going to be a bit less here for a while. For one thing, I think I’m fairly toasted from the election season.  My blood pressure hasn’t been this consistently tasked since, I don’t know.  And the aftermath has gone from bad to silly.  Sure, I could probably comment on the silly (oh, the stupid—it hurts precious, it hurrrtsss), but why?  Just seeing it should be enough and I don’t need to get angry all over again every day.

    Look, guys (yeah, you old white farts who seem to think the only two things of value in this country are money and the military), Romney lost.  He lost because people didn’t like him.  Although, to be fair, a lot of people apparently did like him.  Maybe.  Maybe it was just that a lot of people don’t like Obama.  But apparently not enough to vote for Romney.  Anyway, you seem to be trying to find every other reason under the sun (or under a rock) to explain that so you don’t have to face the most likely reason—your policy positions don’t appeal, Romney didn’t have enough “charm” to overcome his deficiencies as a candidate, and a majority of people, in spite of a long campaign of disinformation, defamation, and distraction, think Obama should have another four years to see what he started through.  Romney lost because voters preferred something else.  It’s that simple.  You want to change that for next time?  Do something about the nonsense in your party, grow up, and stop fooling around with issues that piss people off.  Then come back and talk to us.

    Also, it is not the end of the world.  It’s not even the end of the world as you know it.  Obama is not the anti-christ, he’s not a socialist, he’s not going to end liberty (I actually saw that declaration often, that his re-election would be the end of our freedom, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what do you people think is going to happen?  And ancillary to that is: just what can’t you do today that you could do five years ago, other than maybe afford the mortgage on your McMansion? Jeez, folks, get a grip!)  In four years you’ll have another shot at trying out your vision, the election will happen, and people will vote.  America will go on.

    Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today. Ahem!

    I have a new job.  Newish, anyway.  I’ve been doing some on-again off-again work for Left Bank Books this past year.  They opened a downtown St. Louis location a few years back and it’s been taking a while for people to become aware of it.  So I took walks around, meeting people, letting them know the good news, that they have a full service—independent—bookstore right in their midst.  Now and then, I’d repeat, remind, find some new folks, and it seemed to have a small effect.  Business picked up.

    I’ve now joined them as part of their regular staff.  Part time.  I’m still trying to launch a literary career, after all, and I need time to, you know, be literary.  But how cool is this, that I get to work in a bookstore now?

    Peruse their webpage.  These folks do a lot.  Many, many author events, lots of programs, reading groups.  Now, obviously, to do cool things requires cool people, and they have more than enough.  The last few weeks I’ve been trained by some and they rate high on my cool people meter.

    So if you wonder at my lack of comment here or you can’t get me on the phone as often as you might like, well, this is why.  As we wait for the fuse to catch on the rocket of my best sellerdom (yeah, right), I’ll be there, wandering amid the shelves and offerings and drooling (dryly, dryly, can’t get the pages wet) and wondering why I won’t live long enough to read all the really great books.

    Oh, yeah, I’m still writing stories.  I have a little news on that front as well, but I’ll save it for later.

    So have a good rest of the year, check back from time to time (I’m a little compulsive about this, I will be posting something), and maybe if any of you are in St. Louis, come on by Left Bank.

  • Rolling Feast

    Fortune sometimes favors the impulsive.

    For years, we’ve been toying with joining PBS. The cycle of fund drives that present interesting specials on our local station (Channel 9, KETC) both annoys us for the interruptions and for the twinges of conscience triggered because we feel like we’re not doing our share to support it. The question has always been, when to do it?

    Because they always offer gift packages to sweeten the deal and we’ve been tempted. Last spring, though, they came through with something we couldn’t turn down—tickets for a dinner train.

    Both of us like trains, though we have ridden them fewer times than the fingers on one hand. There’s a romanticism about them that appeals to both of us, even though we don’t frequent them. (We took one train trip to Chicago, which was novel and unromantic, and I’ve taken the train from St. Louis to Kansas City twice—well, once, really, since one of those trips was during a time when the line was coopted by freight line after a flood and my ticket was fulfilled by bus—and none of those trips endeared us to the fact of train travel. But the idea lingers on and one day we may well do a cross-country in a sleeper.)  So for our pledge of X dollars, we found ourselves with a guidebook to such trains across America, a DVD about them, and a pair of dinner tickets for the Columbia Star.

    We’d planned to do this in mid-August, but fate intervened in the form of a ruptured appendix and we had to delay until I could actually sit through a three-hour gourmet meal on a rolling vehicle. So it ended up in mid-October.

    Which was kind of ridiculous, really. After all, part of the novelty—we assumed—was the passing scenery. After seven in the evening in mid October, what exactly would there be to see? “Oh, we have floodlights mounted on the cars to light the way,” I was told by the charming scheduler when I asked. Hmm.

    In any event, we were getting special treatment. The tickets were time-limited and we’d delayed past their due date. I explained the reasons and pity was taken. We were slated for October 20.

    It’s a hundred and twenty plus change miles from St. Louis to Columbia, so we arranged to make a weekend of it and stay with out friend John in Jefferson City. The weekend turned out to be spectacularly beautiful, the drive down Highway 50 relaxed, and peppered with scenic delight.

    We ambled from Jefferson City up 63 to Columbia and found our destination easily enough (earlier, Donna had fun playing with Google maps on John’s iPad, finding the location). It was off in a combination of old farmland and industrial development that was still active but had seen more plentiful times. The Columbia Star terminal looked nicely restored and a large parking lot filled with cars and guests as the sun headed down for the day. (The range of vehicles ran from modest—older Nissans—up to opulent—a couple of new Lexus and Mercedes.) (The plural—would it be Lexuses or Lexi?) We walked around the train, admiring it like some great antediluvian beast brought back from a cloud-obscured plateau, uncertain of its provenance but impressed by what we thought we knew of it, both its power and its rarity.

    The dinner train phenomenon, as we learned from the PBS special that brought us to this place, is widespread and one of the chief ways many old, historic trains have been preserved. Some of them run quite a long distance and they are day-long excursions. This one runs between Columbia and Centralia, rumbling at a stately pace for about three hours, there and back, long enough for the repast on offer.

    People continued arriving after we parked, leaving ample time to inspect it. The gathering on the parking lot reminded me of scenes on docks, crowds facing the ships about to take them away. A line of track acted as psychological barrier—a steel rope in the tarmac—keeping onlookers safely separated from the docile beast until its handlers declared it safe to approach.

     

     

     

    But a few minutes before seven, people with clipboards began sorting us out, allowing us to board, directing us to tables within the finely-restored dining cars.

    The lack of scenery beyond the twenty or thirty feet the floodlights illuminated was ostensibly compensated for by the fact that people were placed at tables with strangers—unless you had a larger group—with whom you were forced to either engage pleasantries and become cordially acquainted or stoically endure if you’re not the gregarious sort. I admit to having difficulties in that department and were we to do this again we’d make plans with another couple at least.

    But to be fair, the couple with whom we were paired was pleasant, the conversation, while shallow, was not without moments of shared laughter and some interest. After fifteen minutes, though, it was also clear that we really lacked anything very much in common with them and while it was not awkward it was not the kind of experience one would necessarily wish to repeat.

    But the food!

    Our waitress brought our drinks and then took our opening orders (the main courses were already set in advance) and I decided that this was excellent training for them—serving on a moving platform that rocked (gently, yes, but nevertheless) and none of them spilling a bit, drop, or particle.

    There was a pulled-pork on cornbread appetizer, followed by an acorn squash bisque that…well, I’d never tasted anything quite like it. I could have done with a full bowl of it and been wholly content.

    That would have been a shame, though. The main course—there were several to choose from—was superb. Now, both Donna and I have high standards for prime rib. We were spoiled. All joking aside, the best prime rib either of us ever had was at the long-defunct St. Louis Playboy Club. I’m serious. The chef there could turn prime rib out like ambrosia. We’ve had close before, but never better. This was probably as good. It was wonderful.

    We trundled along through small town Missouri. After our trip to Chicago, I decided that contemporary passenger trains really take you through America’s back yard. That’s pretty much what you see, the back end of what is hidden from the highways and main streets. This was no different. However, some people whose houses stood along the line knew the schedule of the train and were outside, with fires going, a few barbecues still underway, waving as we passed by.

    Our table mates imposed on us to take a picture of them and we asked the same in return, something we almost never do. But I felt that this deserved a bit of commemoration. There was a moment of intimidation when I handed across my Canon 60-D, but I’d already set it up and pointed to the button. The picture was successful.

    We drove back in a state of satisfaction, heads filled with nothing but agreeable impressions and an unspoken decision to do this again. That’s as good recommendation as an establishment can get, the promise of repeat business. It helps that we think the idea behind it—preserving a bit of history—is a worthwhile one.

    But it is the food that makes it worth doing.

    Bon appetite!

  • All Hallowed Eve Is Upon Us

    Drink

    So…be careful out there.

    Bwahahahahahaha!

  • Mountainous Majesty

    Colorado, 1984

     

    Just ’cause.

    And I didn’t want to put up something predictable, like a full moon or a werewolf or blood spatter.

    Happy Hallowe’en.  Be safe.

  • Yes, It Is My Birthday

    I take partial responsibility.  After all, my parents had more than a little to do with it.

    I usually forget my birthday until the week before, when everyone starts reminding me.  This year, though, I’m paying a bit more attention because, well, I’m here to have one.  That was, for the first time ever, more than an academic question recently.  So for that I am grateful to many people, most of whom I do not know and may never see again—doctors and nurses and even some folks who thought good thoughts without my knowing—and for the love of my friends.

    I have pretty much everything one could ask for out of life.  The one thing that would make this just super cool would be to have some publisher offer me a significant amount of money to publish one of the books I have on offer.  I trust that will come eventually.

    I’m most especially pleased that I have Donna.  Still.  Always.  She’s one seriously wonderful human being.  I love her and I am still baffled that she loves me.

    So, to everyone, thank you for your birthday wishes.  You strangers out there who read this, if you want to do something more than wish me happy birthday, go buy one of my books, read it, and rave about it on your own blog or on Amazon or wherever. (If you choose REMAINS, you’ll make my publisher happy, too.) But even so, thank you, thank you, thank you.

    I’m going to a convention now.  Have a great day.

    Celebratin’