Altivo

The passing of Ursula K. Le Guin is a great loss to the English language literary world, and not just to science fiction or fantasy readers. A true Grand Master, she was a leader in the realm of speculative fiction as well as a superbly skilled artist of language and imagery.

Watching the comments of many who said they had never actually read any of her work, or had only read the Earthsea books, sent me back to my shelves to revisit some of Le Guin's works that I first read many years ago. First and foremost among these in my opinion would be The Left Hand of Darkness, published about 1969 if I remember correctly. I have read it at least twice, once as an assignment in a literature class and once on my own that I recall. Overall I have probably read about half of her published works, and have always intended to complete the list. This one book, though, stands out in my memory as perhaps her greatest and most visionary work. It deals with issues of gender and sex role quite neatly, and is often lauded for that, but there is much more to it. Political topics such as nationalism, economics, xenophobia, language and cultural barriers, greed, and power are all inherent to the story and its characters. The realities of long distance space travel are merely touched upon as an element underpinning the plot, but handled in a manner that is accurate and consistent with our current understanding of relativity and physics. Le Guin's description of the "ansible," a device that permits instantaneous communication over galactic distances, was puzzling in 1969 but fits in almost perfectly with our understanding of quantum entanglement and how it might be used now, half a century after she first described it.

Le Guin was made a Gandalf Award Grand Master of Fantasy by the World Science Fiction Society in 1975, and a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2003 (rather tardily in my opinion.) She received numerous other awards during her writing career.

The Left Hand of Darkness received both a Hugo and a Nebula.

I can't recommend Grand Master Ursula Le Guin's writings strongly enough. If you haven't read her beyond the realm of Earthsea, you should. And there is no better starting place than The Left Hand of Darkness.

[I was disturbed to find that my own local public library did not have the book on the shelf, nor was it in their circulating e-book collection. Much to my satisfaction, within a day of pointing this out and urging them to purchase this title and also The Dispossessed, both were in fact made available to users of the e-book selection.]

I see that I failed to post this announcement here when I added it to my writer's guild forum.

More than a month ago, I was pleased to receive notification that my story "Harvest Home" has been accepted for publication in the anthology Fragments of Life's Heart (release anticipated early in 2016 from FurPlanet.) This story features my two favorite characters, Argos Weaver (a white wolf) and Fennec Redtail (a red fox,) about whom I have written reams but none of it has ever seen formal publication. Many excerpts appear in various spots on the web, however.

I will be sure to let everyone know when it is actually available. In the meantime, I remind you that my story "Coyote's Voice" appears in ROAR, volume 6 which was released in July of this year, also from Furplanet.

I have also been invited to appear on a panel at Midwest Fur Fest in Chicago, December 4-6. The panel is titled "Making Anthropomorphism Matter" and is set for Saturday, December 5, from 08:00 to 09:00 PM in the McCarran meeting room. Two other writers will be on the same panel: Tempe O'Kun and Sparf. I haven't attended MWFF since 2008, and look forward to the much enlarged event with a bit of trepidation.

Once again I've taken too long a break from posting here. The winter has been made busy by several events, not the least of which is my planned retirement from full time library work. After June, I will be a greymuzzle pensioner, with more time for writing, music, gardening, and my pets. Of course that means helping to find and train my replacement. After twelve years in one job, there is a lot of stuff to organize and document and I've been kept very busy getting that done while keeping up with my regular responsibilities.

Meanwhile, my husband is getting near the end of his five year quest for the Ph.D. degree, which has also kept us pretty busy. Next week he will be presenting a paper at a conference, while I cover the animal care tasks he normally handles here at home.

Also some announcements on the writing front. First, I have two poems recently published. One gives a tortoise's view of history, and can be found at QuarterReads. The title is "Thoughts Chelonian." The second appears in a curated selection of furry poems at Adjective Species. The title is "Procyon Prowling" and the subject is a raccoon. I recommend the poems in that collection. They represent a wide variety of styles and formats, and an equally diverse viewpoints on furry subjects. Lunostophiles did a fine job of selecting them from the submitted works.

My story "Coyote's Voice" will appear in ROAR volume 6, to be released in July at Anthrocon if all goes according to plan. The publisher is Bad Dog Books, and the very competent editor for this issue is Mary E. Lowd, also known as Ryffnah.

I'm also currently engaged in writing the completing chapters of Oh, Ricky, the parody on Richard the Lion(heart) that some of you may remember from NanoWrimo 2011. I'm doing that in connection with this month's Camp NanoWrimo where I'm one of a dozen folks working together to prompt and encourage each other.

More as events develop. Thanks for reading.

Some of you long time followers may recall The Clydesdale Librarian, my furry review site. It was launched on the beta Google sites, and collapsed when Google changed the code and structures so much that I couldn't keep up with the necessary revisions. Of course, it was beta after all, so what could I expect? Still, it was discouraging enough that I let the site languish for several years.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been receiving notices that Posterous, a blogging and image sharing site, is going away. I had an account with Posterous, but only used it to follow others. Nonetheless, they keep advising me that Posterous will be shut down (as of today in fact) and I should back up my content and move it elsewhere. I requested the backup file of all three of my posts, which has never arrived.

Anyway, Wordpress was suggested as one of the platforms to which Posterous material could be moved. I've meant to look into Wordpress for a while, and this gave me the needed nudge. The end result is that I spent most of Sunday manually rescuing content from the Google sites edition of Clydesdale Librarian, and translating it bodily (textually?) to a new Wordpress site. I completely deleted the old Google sites pages, which means that various links in Google are now dead. We'll see how long it takes them to catch on and update to point to a non-Google site.

The new URL is http://hossification.wordpress.com and the title is Exposterous Hossification: The Clydesdale Librarian. The first new content went up this morning, a review of Howard L. Anderson's Western-style Australian adventure novel, Albert of Adelaide.

Saturday is Gary's birthday. He's very difficult to buy gifts for. I've got him a basic e-reader (Kobo) and I think he'll like it but it will take him a while to warm to it. (He had the same reaction to MP3 audiobooks but now he's addicted to them.) I charged the battery and loaded a dozen free books that I think he will like, on top of the 100 or so that already come pre-loaded. Thanks to the Baen free library (www.baen.com/library) I could easily get free copies of several complete books. I'll show him how to check out and download library books, of course.

I've also got a locomotive for him. N scale, of course, but he wanted a Diesel switching engine and we still haven't found a good one. I got a Kato NW2 in B&O/Chessie System colors after hunting for months. Those things are pricey. (Yes, it cost more than the Kobo reader.) I'm still looking for an unpainted shell for the NW2 so I can do a custom paint job for him in any line, real or imagined, that he chooses.

And Sunday is Father's day, which means I should also get him a gift from the sheep, ducks, horses, and his dog...

I'm sore. As if I'd been gardening all day. What I actually did was uninstall a five seat multi-user Linux workstation and replace it with a newer six-seat version this morning. This entails lots of crawling around on the floor and pushing cables through small openings. Hurray, it's working. I think.

Oh, and we cleaned the fans for the horses' stalls. Or I should say Gary did while I handed him tools and such. It's getting really warm and humid, so this is a good thing.

Spent some time at work messing the the Literati, trying to get it to update its firmware, but without success. It tries all right, but comes back with the message "Update cancelled." No reason given. Also, if you try to sync it using Kobo Desktop, you get the message "Downloading update" for a minute or so, followed by "Update failed." Other possible conclusions: Somehow the available mamory in the device is locked, marked read only, or otherwise unwritable. I could offer to do this, but it seems best to leave this sort of thing to the customer.

The refurbished Kobo Wi-fi reader arrived today in the mail. Amazingly small and light weight, with supposedly very long battery life since the display is e-ink rather than LCD. The battery was already charged, so I took it with me to listen to an evening performance by Kishwaukee Rambers, one of Gary's groups. The musical performance was great as usual. The Kobo reader performed as it should, connecting by wireless, updating its own firmware, downloading titles I already own from the Kobo website, and so forth. I'm not fond of e-ink. It isn't high enough in contrast, in my opinion, and it is slow to update which gives a sort of seasick feel to each page turn. It looks as if the letters swirl around and rearrange themselves to spell out the next day's message.

But at least it works, all functions are operational. That's more than can be said for the Literati, even though both devices are obviously built on the same design and software core. I installed epub books by download from Kobobooks, by drag and drop, by using Calibre, and all of them came up just fine. At least I have an idea now what the Literati should be doing when it sits there and stares at me.

Morning meeting, afternoon shopping and chores, tired as if I'd been at work all day.

Indulgence: bought myself a new e-book reader, the Sharper Image Literati. Off EBay, half price for new unopened box. My old eBookwise has served faithfully for years, but it doesn't read the new standard formats and is obviously doomed to oblivion. I don't want to be bound to Amazon and their proprietary formats. This one will do, it's a version of Kobo I believe, and reads epub, html, pdf. Has wifi and a backlit screen. I don't like e-paper. Anyway, for the price it was worth a try.

Cool and gloomy weather, threatening to rain all day but never did. Gary cut a large part of the grass that was getting rank from rain and neglect.

He's watching all of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, one disc per night. Not sure quite why, but I'm sitting through them and being reminded of how badly I think Jackson treated Tolkien. He made a fine dramatic epic but it's not the story I have read again and again. It's another tale entirely.

...is a day with some sunlight. Maybe. Well, there was some today, by afternoon anyway.

Gary has to finish a take home exam by noon tomorrow and then he's free from school at least until fall. It will be good to have him back.

I note with regret the fact that Maurice Sendak has passed away. While most furries probably know him for Where the Wild Things Are, I will always remember him first for In the Night Kitchen, a lovely little dreamscape that set off a fury and if I remember correctly even got onto the ALA banned book list for a while. All because he drew a dream picture of a little boy with no pants on. Humans are just amazingly silly and stupid about things at times.

Finished Patricia Briggs' Cry Wolf and I recommend it to anyone interested in a good werewolf story. Neither the horrible blood and gore stuff of years ago, nor the mush of many romance novels that just use the werewolf legend as a backdrop, it's a believable story with characters well worth noticing. It's part of a trilogy, plus a prefatory novelette, and I see I'll have to read all of them.

It's late and that's most of what happened today other than the usual work, eat, sleep routines.

*trumpet fanfare*

Allasso volume 2: Saudade has arrived on the scene from Pink Fox Publications. Available in traditional print or Kindle format from Amazon, this issue contains material from no less than eight (count them, eight) members of the Furry Writers' Guild, including myself. Prose, poetry, and some nice artwork too. Don't miss it.

End shameless plug. Seriously, editor Brian Lee Cook has done a super job of bringing these materials together. You can even skip my own story if you like, but you should read the others, OK?

No more woodpeckers today. I suspect, as usual, they have gone on to look for better nesting grounds. Whatever it takes to meet their criteria, we don't quite have.

Day relieved largely by a nice opportunity to recomment furry books from mainstream literature (rather than explicit furry small press titles) on Twitter.

Tomorrow will be long too, with an in service training seminar that I'm helping to give for new catalogers (and old) in our consortium.

Old guitar strings swapped onto my classical guitar still haven't settled very well. Every time I check they are flat again. Maybe this will continue until the newly ordered ones arrive, and I can start all over again.