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The climate is definitely turning toward fall. For the last two nights I've layered on all the summer bed layers (sheet, empty duvet cover, plush blanket) and put on bed-socks as well. Today, I actually wore a jacket and gloves when biking! But I'm still holding out on turning on the thermostat and switching the bedding to the feather comforter.

I've also been contemplating unearthing my daylight alarm clock, because I hate getting out of bed when it's not quite light (if I don't have to -- and I mostly don't have to), but I'd like to get in the habit of getting the day started a bit earlier. That can wait a bit, since we're about to reset to standard time.

We're getting the brisk winds that make October such a nervous time (re: fires). I installed the Watch Duty app on my phone and periodically get notifications of semi-local events, but never close enough that I would ever need to be personally concerned. It will be interesting to see what El Niño does for the winter rainfall and snowpack.

I've started one of the knitting projects I picked up yarn for during the March Yarn Crawl -- the "pigeon sweater". I have some hopes of finishing it before the winter is over. Unlike my previous sock project, most of the pattern is straightforward enough that I can knit while doing other things.

I spent the last week in Orlando FL for the Golden Crown Literary Society conference (lesbian/sapphic publishing). I attended in 2014 and 2015 when my novels were first coming out and had such an unsatisfactory experience that I hadn't been back until now. This time the experience was more satisfactory, largely because I adjusted my expectations, and to a lesser extent because I applied more of my "introvert-at-the-con" techniques. It's still basically an insular "family reunion" sort of event, but I got more value out of it this time and plan to return because I'm laying the ground for more self-publishing and especially for the eventual LHMP book.

Traveling meant I went back to doing manual physical therapy (because the Medieval Torture Devices (MTDs) absolutely don't pack well). I was a little worried that I wouldn't make the desired level of progress, but I think I did ok. I've revised my plans for Worldcon and plan to do manual there as well, largely because I simply can't fit the MTD schedule in around a convention. Tomorrow I'll have my regular PT appointment and see how the progress goes.

I'm back on my bike! I got the ok at my last PT appointment but waited until after the trip to start up again. My grip is strong enough for the brakes, though I need to take a non-standard angle for doing the left-hand shift lever (between the lower and higher sets of gears). It's always been a bit on the stiff side to shift up, and I'm not managing with my thumb alone currently in standard position. But if I get a different angle so I'm pushing in line with my arm, I can manage it.

I've been having an assortment of tech annoyances. My Peet's Coffee app isn't recognizing my balance or points (although the barista confirmed they're there in my account). I'll try deleting and reloading the app.

More annoyingly, last Wednesday, while I was out of town, I got a text that my internet was out. Usually this is due to squirrel nests in the junction boxes, but that normally happens in rainy season. In any event it was still out when I got home. A couple tries at cycling the power or hitting the reset button had no effect and the online troubleshooting was no help. So I fought my way through the useless chatbot to eventually get a human being. (The human connection was not without frustrations as the combination a muffled connection, my auditory processing disorder, and her slight accent meant I spent a lot of effort on "let me repeat back to you what I understand you to have said.")

What it comes down to is there's an issue with the wiring. I'm on the old-fashioned copper wires. ATT is switching over to fiber and/or "internet air" (which presumably is functionally a personal wifi repeater for a wireless signal). So they aren't repairing issues with the copper wiring any more. Since an Internet Air account will cost me about a third of what I was paying previously, I have no serious qualms about switching except for the week it's going to take them to ship the equipment. (I'll get a discount off my bill, but that's a long time to rely on cafe internet and phone tethering.)

Oh, and the internet being out means I need to carry a garage door thingie when bicycling rather than being able to rely on my app. Sigh. The hazards of appifying one's life.

On the up side, I've been introduced to a new online game. Outlier (https://playoutlier.com) is an anagram-type game that gives you a grid of 25 letters (may include multiples--you can only use each displayed letter once in each word) and rewards you for how uncommon the ten words you find are. For particularly rare words, it tells you how many other players have ever used that word. My unique finds for today (though others may have found them after I played) are: onager, frumenty, trilby, and abominates. I suspect that you can get rarity points more easily for longer words.

It's my birthday today -- the first time in quite a while when I'm not going to Kalamazoo for my birthday. (The Medieval Congress) As a result, I don't really have standard practices for what to do to commemorate the day. There will be a family dinner on the weekend, but today it's just me.

So I started with a fancy-breakfast-in-the-garden, which I don't do as often as I could. (I prefer to start the day with my bike ride, which practice is incompatible with a leisurely breakfast.) Other plans involved a movie and going out for sushi. I half-heartedly dropped my movie plans (Sheep Detective) on facebook with a solicitation for company, but facebook is facebook, the day is a weekday, and unsurprisingly no one took me up on it.

In the past week I've moved into the next stage of learning skills for self-publishing by working on formatting The Theory of Related-ivity in Vellum. So far Vellum is user-friendly, in that every time I've had a question about how to do something, it's either easy to figure out, easy to find in the help files, or easy to determine that you just can't do the thing I'm trying to do. As one review of the program noted, it isn't really designed for complicated non-fiction books, but there are only a few places that's been frustrating.

I solved one issue not related to Vellum when I figured out how to get better resolution jpegs of my Excel graphs. (Something that was a bit of a "Doh!" moment once I'd solved it.) But it wasn't until I did a test-export of the project into ebook and pdf versions that I was reminded that the lovely multi-colored graphs that are so easy to publish online and in ebooks also need to work in black-and-white for the hard copy. (It isn't that I expect to sell all that many hardcopy versions, but I want to have the option.) So now I need to go back through a couple dozen graphs and select color sets that will provide good B&W contrast. (Tricky for the percentage bar graphs with 13 variables! But there are only two of those.)

I've also decided to put out my translation and commentary of the 18th century French appeal record of Anne Grandjean (gender and sexuality issues) as a published book. That one has me thinking about the complexities of designing layout for both ebook and print. For print, it might be nice to do facing-page text with the commentary at the bottom of the pages, but that's impossible for the ebook. (Also, I'm not sure it would be possible in Vellum, though I know exactly how I'd do it in InDesign.) I'm also thinking ahead to the LHMP book and some fun layout ideas that wouldn't work for both. I should probably take a look at some examples of print/ebook pairs that have complex layouts in print.

By "complex" I mean things like separate text boxes for sidebars. (One idea I'm toying with would be rather than having all my mini-biographies in a single section, inserting them as sidebars in the topical chapters that they're most closely relevant to.)

One of the secondary functions for publishing low-impact smaller projects is to explore these sorts of questions. But compared to the non-fiction projects, novels will be easy!

When I think about my writing catalog, it always brings me back to that ill-fitting advice that a writer should stick to focused "branding" even if it means having multiple pen names. But my writing projects don't separate out neatly that way. the Grandjean translation is directly related to the LHMP book. But the LHMP book is directly related to my lesbian historical fiction. And the historical fiction is closely connected to my lesbian historical fantasy. And there would be no point to distinguishing that from any of the other types of fantasy I write. I still have a twinge of regret for using a pen name for Baby Names for Dummies, because it, too, connects up with my historical research. And what would be the point in using anything other than my real name for the Related-ivity book, since my identity is solidly connected to the reason I was interested in the topic.

I am me. I contain multitudes. I refuse to be fragmented.

So today's adventure was going uptown to meet friends at the Cloisters and see the special exhibit (on sexuality in the Middle Ages) with them. I took the subway up then walked the last bit through the park with snow softly falling. As I'm walking along the path, a couple coming the other way stop to compliment my coat. (This is the long green redingote with the shoulder capes.) I thanked them and told them about how I loved to make historically-inspired clothing and we chatted briefly then went on our way.

So I saw the exhibit and the rest of the museum. Went to an early dinner with my friends. Then caught the subway back toward downtown, but because it's a weekend I had to overshoot my destination and double back from Columbus Circle. So I'm standing on the platform at Columbus and I hear this voice, "I'd recognize that coat anywhere!" It's the same couple (at the opposite end of town). We chatted some more while waiting for our trains and it turns out they both went to Berkeley for college. What a small world.

Lately I've been thinking about starting a Scrivener file of memoirs. Not necessarily with specific plans to do anything with it, but just to organize some of the writing I've done that I think other people might be interested in.

One thing contributing to these thoughts is my "analyze the Best Related Work" category and looking at published memoirs, but it's not like I think I'm operating at that level.

I pulled up my Dreamwidth tag "personal history and philosophy" and laughed to see that the second most recent post under that tag was a similar rumination where I noted that I'd put together a spreadsheet of links to DW posts that I thought fall in the category of memoir-worthy. Well. So. That will make assembling the Scrivener file easier!

As I noted in that post, I have a lot of posts on writing philosophy and technique in my Alpennia blog that I'd need to identify separately, but that might be of more interest to people than random natterings.

What I don't know is whether that interest actually exists. I mean: *I* think I'm pretty darned good at a turn of phrase and interesting angle on things, but maybe I'm deluded? I'd like to think I write a lot of interesting things in this blog and in the Alpannia blog, but how can I tell unless people have interacted with me about them?

ETA: LOL, and of course, having followed up on that supposed "list of memoir-worthy blog posts" I can't for the life of me figure out where, or under what name, I saved it! Fortunately, I guess I can reconstruct it using the same process.

Not really a con report from WisCon. (My brain isn't up for anything eloquent when I'm having a travel day. Currently posting from O'Hare airport.) More like waving hi to the new readers, from the DW account-link exchange. As I mentioned on the Discord, this blog tends to be complementary to my website blog (which you can subscribe to: https://alpennia-feed.dreamwidth.org/). The alpennia blog/feed has the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, posts about my books and writing, book reviews, and other things that fit with author-type-stuff. (Also some random projects that I want to host personally, such as the annotated transcripts of my great-great-grandfather's Civil War diaries.)

This blog tends to get stuff like garden reports, travel notes, angst and philosophy that I don't necessarily want to link closely to my professional presence, and ephemera. Posting is erratic but averaging at least once a week. (I think.)

(I started this in fb but it got too long for that format so I posted it here instead.)

Last evening of vacation (though technically, today is our displaced holiday for New Years). I feel like I haven't been posting much anywhere in the last three weeks. I probably have, but if I haven't then maybe that was part of my vacation?

Worldcon was fun, if fraught with worries about omicron. (Based on post-convention Covid reports, it sounds like all the precautions did their job. The incidence rate was significantly lower than the general DC population in the same period.) NYC was relaxing, since Lauri and I decided to ditch any plans to see shows or go to museums and mostly just hung out.

I was a coming back to California, I was anxious enough about exposure that even after 2 consecutive days of negative tests I stayed masked for the New Years Eve/Day hangout with family. Another post-visit test was still negative so if BinaxNow is to be trusted, I seem to have gotten through all the travels without picking up any viral hitchhikers.

Got a bunch of blog/podcast writing done during vacation. Today's project was to play-test doing a video 'cast, combining the usual audio with a slideshow, and just to make things more challenging, including and embedded image of me doing the script. Zoom has some great tools (designed for academic settings) for this sort of thing. I've even worked out how to edit around re-takes in video without having to touch iMovie. I don't plan to shift the podcast to video as a usual thing. (For one thing, the editing is *much* faster when it's audio only and I'm doing it in Audacity.) But this will be much easier than the kludgy method I used for my only other slideshow episode, and I rather like the idea of having my face on-screen alongside the slides. (It does mean that I have to design the slide-show with a blank corner where my image will be.)

I've started the winter garden chores: pruning the roses (and other stuff), doing the soil-work stuff that is much easier when the ground is damp. I got an email from Trees of Antiquity that they're coming up on delivery season. Or rather, pick-up season since I took that option. I figured it was worth the combination of saving the shipping cost and an excuse for a minor road trip. (They're in Paso Robles, so abut 200 miles each way.) I'm getting a Bing cherry to replace one that failed to thrive, a Santa Rosa plum because one can never have too many plum trees, and some black and red currants and gooseberries because the blueberries are being successful as landscaping plants in the front yard and I have lots of space for more smallish berry shrubs. (I've tried currants and gooseberries in the back yard before and they were never happy about how little water they got. But in the front, where the irrigation is aimed at keeping the roses and the grass happy, they should get plenty.) So the trick will be getting all the holes dug before I pick up the plants.

I'm anticipating having a good year for the fruit trees, since the amount of ground water seems to be a significant factor. And we're getting a lovely amount of rain at the moment.

Not sure where this came from or where it might possibly go, given that I don't tend to write contemporary. But the following scene popped into my brain fully-formed while I was doing the grocery shopping.

# # #

Amanda brandished her pen like a magic wand— or maybe a sword—and flipped open the logo notepad so that the name and image could catch the client’s eye. All In: Corporate Team-Building and Events. “So what did you have in mind,” she asked with what she hoped was the right balance of crisp professionalism and chirpy enthusiasm.

The woman fixed her with a gaze likely to wilt crispness and silence chirping. “I don’t do trust-falls. I don’t do Secret Santas. I definitely do not do surprise parties.”
 

Amanda took a slow, deep breath and jotted down, “control issues” on the first line of the page.

(I don't usual mirror my alpennia.com blog posts here, but I thought this one might be of more general interest.)

The conference is over, save for the sessions I've marked for viewing when they come out in video in a couple of days. (So there may be a few more blogs on those over the next week.) As a wrap-up for this, the first virtual 'Zoo, I present to you the collated, edited, and organized...

Unofficial ICMS Bingo Squares

(also applicable to other conferences)

There are 35 squares, sorted into 6 categories. This allows for randomization in individual bingo cards. It is recommended that squares be drawn from each category for good coverage. I've attempted to edit and generalize the squares to avoid poking fun at any particular demographic. Feedback on this point is appreciated. These are taken from a private chat channel I participated in with some friends during the conference, and believe me there were things that needed to be edited before appearing in public!

Environment

• Speaker’s cat appears and becomes very affectionate
• Unfortunate Object is visible in speaker’s zoom background
• Barking dog, sirens, or other background noise
• Speaker’s phone goes off during paper

Technology glitches

• Speaker is unable to open key files
• Speaker can’t connect
• Speaker’s sound is muffled/poor quality
• Speaker loses internet connection mid-talk
• Speaker’s connection freezes

Generic Zoom Things

• Previous speaker forgets to mute and has background conversation during paper
• Speaker has lost track of the zoom window
• Speaker is on mute [suggested “free square”]
• Speaker announces, “I’m going to share my screen now” [suggested “free square”]
• Moderator has to ask audience member to mute due to feedback/background noise
• Closed-captioning misinterprets word in amusing or embarrassing way

It Could Happen at Any Conference

• Moderator complains that panel discussion is not covering intended subject
• Speaker you most wanted to hear didn’t show up
• Speaker is missing a page of their paper and improvises
• "This isn’t so much a question as a comment"
• None of the panel discussion members have prepared remarks and all stare at each other in silence
• More than one paper withdrawn from session / speaker not able to appear
• Speaker admits to writing paper the night before
• Paper topic is entirely different from what was originally proposed

Presiders/Presenters Behaving Badly

• Moderator mangles presenter name or paper title
• Moderator/respondent compliments papers with gendered language (e.g., “lovely paper” for a female speaker vs. “wonderful paper” for a male speaker)
• Speaker boasts about and shows off library
• Pre-session chatter among speakers is a bit more candid than is wise for a 'hot mic'
• Speaker engages in egregious name-dropping
• Speaker brings in personal skill/interest unrelated to topic of paper and it overwhelms the content
• Moderator turns off video and is AWOL when speaker finishes

Zoom-Conference Interface

• Speaker’s household member appears in background
• Speaker emails slides to moderator in real-time due to being unable to screen-share
• Speaker requires real-time troubleshooting for technology problems
• Academics of a Certain Age discuss learning the ins and outs of zoom and other technologies
• Speaker is unable to present PowerPoint and see paper text simultaneously