dragonimp

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III.

Which I'm finding fascinating and exciting for all sorts of reasons. But then....

....I realized that the friend who would've been most excited about this died some years ago, after her life had pretty much bottomed out.

So now I'm all excited/fascinated/melancholy.

Mmm.. latest piece of art probably shouldn't go up on dA unless I feel like playing chicken with the mods. Which I don't.

So the deck is out. One minor hiccup of a burst pipe, but the deck is out. Why was there a pipe under the deck? Because the guy who put it in was an idiot. He was really big on do-it-yourself, but not so big on doing things to code or even common sense. Take the deck itself: ordinary wood, not weather-proofed, and painted - not stained, not sealed, painted. No wonder it was falling apart and rotted. So finding base metal pipe laid on the bare dirt wasn't really a surprise, and having it burst at a spot that was rusted through was just par for the course. There's shit like that all over the house: outlets nailed right to the drywall, extension cords run over bare insulation, wiring tied to joists with string, etc. Any work we do on the house inevitably leads to several rounds of face-palming. BUT the deck and the aviary are now gone, thanks to my brother's hard work, and we avoided a flood thanks to some quick thinking and a little ingenuity. now we can concentrait on getting the presents finished up and mailed and cleaning the house.

Bombay Nick's Chai Bar

We stopped by this place after voting. If you at all like tea, I definitely recommend checking it out. The teas are a bit pricy, but worth it: high-quality, hand-blended looseleaf teas, including several all-organic wellness teas, all original recipes. The big draw for me is you can get real chai - not that syrup stuff available at most coffee shops. They even have a spicy coffee blend that's good - and for me to say something coffee-related tastes "good" is pretty remarkable.

A year ago I posted about a YA manuscript that was getting a certain kind of negative response from agents - basically, some said they would be interested IF a certain (gay) character's POV and references to his sexuality were removed.

But this saga has a happy ending: the manuscript has been picked up by Viking press, gay characters intact!

Details and a description of the book are in that post, but I wanted to highlight this part:

Sherwood and I wanted to write something fun and exciting, with adventure and romance and mutant powers and martial arts and a vivid sense of place. And we wanted it to be about the people who are so often left out of those sorts of books: Latinos and African-Americans, Jews and Asian-Americans, gay boys and lesbian girls, multiracial teenagers and teenagers with physical and mental disabilities. We didn't do this to fulfill some imaginary quota, but because we wanted to write about teenagers like the real ones we know, the real ones in Los Angeles, the real ones we were.

...

Stranger is a post-apocalyptic adventure, not an issue novel. But all stories have their genesis somewhere, and for me, it was my wish to say, "It's okay. You're okay. You'll get better. You'll make friends. You'll fall in love. You can be a hero." I hope it finds its way to the people to whom it will speak.

A scifi/fantasy story... with a cast that looks a lot like everyday life. A story with gay main characters that's not "about" being gay, but instead says this is normal, too.

The shelter in place warning has been lifted, but I dunno if I trust that the air will clear that quickly. The cities farther west got the worst of it, but I still think I'm going to be limiting my time outside today :/.

For those who didn't see my sudden bitch-out on Twitter/Facebook last night: I thought I was done with the next chapter. I'd even compiled it and exported it to RTF for beta'ing. But when I glanced through the RTF document, none of the rewrites I'd done in the last few days were there. So I looked back in Scrivener, and - gone. Vanished. It's like nothing I'd typed had registered. It's basically back to the rough-draft word-vomit stage. I've never had it do this before so I have no idea if the problem is my computer or the Scrivener application itself. Scrivener is usually really, really good about saving. But all of it got switched off last night just in case. We'll see. But I can't really deal with this until maybe Tuesday.

Okay, I've been on Tumblr for a few weeks now, and my verdict is: great soapbox, really lousy for actually interacting with anyone. Really, really lousy. I have no idea why someone would use it as their primary blog or why fandoms would move there instead of lj/dw or other places you can actually talk to people.