Yeah, I know, I haven't posted here for a really long time. I didn't really mean to let it go so long, but life has a way of getting away from everybody sometimes.

Anyway, I'm going to be at the MediaWest Convention this weekend, and hope to run into some of my LJ buddies there. If you're looking at the programming grid, you will find me listed there as Urban Unicorn. I'm sitting on four panels this year -- all related to my current obsession: the romance novel.

I'm looking forward to the convention.

Well, I've been back from my mother's house for more than a week now, but I've been in one of those moods where even the occasional poke at the Internet feels like information-overload, so I guess you could say I've become a bit of an electronic hermit for a while. It often happens to me right after the holidays. Now, especially, I seem to prefer the old-fashioned company of books while I'm forced to sit around in my cast.

Sitting around isn't altogether a bad thing, of course. I suppose I should just try to get very zen about it -- and take advantage by working on my novel -- but gads, is it annoying not to be able to do my own laundry or vacuum my floors. I can load dishes into the dishwasher from my wheelchair, but putting the clean ones away is a whole lot more complicated. I do have help -- an aide from school helps to watch my son, and my husband's been taking on some of the house-chores, but still, inevitably, there are things that just don't get done. Oh well. I'm not supposed to think about that now. I'm supposed to be concentrating on convincing my leg to mend. Or something like that.

The fiberglass cast I have on is much lighter than the splint I previously wore -- as well as being a stylish day-glo pink -- but it's still a cast and still a pain to lug around. The good news is that it's supposed to come off near the end of January, and the doc thinks I might be able to start putting some weight on the leg then.

Better news: One week to PRESIDENT OBAMA. And so help me, if Bush opens his yap one more time before he leaves office to spew the kind of nonsense he's been spewing lately, I will be throwing every one of my currently useless left shoes straight through my TV. (Psst: Dude, you are not helping yourself or your "legacy" with these displays of temper and stupidity. Please have the grace to just shut up and stay away from the cameras until someone competent can assume the job. Thank you.)

I just finished reading Loretta Chase's wonderful novel, Lord of Scoundrels. It's the kind of book that I think even non-romance readers would enjoy. Note to fellow Snape fans: the hero of this piece is dark-haired, darked-eyed, with an enormous nose and a foul temper. He was tortured unmercifully while at Eton and has never been given a scrap of love before meeting Our Heroine, who is fearless as well as deadly with a pistol. I'll say no more, except that this book was originally published in 1995, before anyone knew who Harry Potter was, and that one of the joys of romance novels is the guaranteed happy ending -- even for guys with big noses and bad tempers. :-)

Okay, I have a pile of other romances to read -- plus some fantasy. Hope everyone is having a great new year. I'm counting down to Inauguration Day.

Recent culinary discovery: Raw sliced cucumber makes an excellent sandwich on whole wheat toast with a dab of hummus.

This is going to be a really quick post because I'm getting ready to leave town ahead of a snowstorm to visit my mom for Christmas. I don't know what kind of internet access I am likely to have at Mom's, so it is possible that I will be offline for a few days.

Thank you to everyone who has written to express sympathy and good wishes in the wake of my accident/broken leg. I had surgery Thursday; the leg has been put back together and so far all is well. I'm feeling okay, am hopped up on pain meds and getting around reasonably well with a walker. Oh, and I can now bend my knee. :-)

When I get internet access again, I will try to respond to individual comments and emails, but for now, I just wanted you all to know that your good wishes have been much appreciated.

Happy holidays everyone! I'll be in touch.

One of my favorite writers, Nancy Mairs, writes a lot about being wheel-chair bound due to her debilitating MS (http://www.maskink.com/mairs/). I stole the title of this post from one of her books because today, I find myself tooling about my house in a wheel-chair, having fractured my left leg Thursday. Yeah, the view is different from down here. It is indeed amazing what able-bodied people take for granted.

The accident happened while I was trying to get my son off to school. I slipped on a piece of paper and fell three or four steps -- a relatively minor fall, but it evidently caused one of those "feak" breaks where I managed to hit the leg-bones in just the right spot. I snapped both the tibia and fibula. And yeah, it hurt. Neither my 2004 kidney stone nor my 2002 childbirth pains were adequate preparation. I did a lot of screaming before I managed to get to the phone and dial 911. The scariest part of the whole thing was being alone in the house with my autistic six-year-old -- who, of course, was freaked out and didn't understand why mommy was suddenly screaming and crying and having to crawl along the floor.

The paramedics were incredibly fast. They were in my house within 15 minutes of my call. That wait was probably the longest fifteen minutes of my life, though. After that, things were fairly routine. My husband arrived. He got the kid off to school while I rode in an ambulance to the ER at the University of Michigan. Then it was a long, tiring, round of drugs, x-rays, more drugs, endless repeat explanations of what had happened to various doctors, nurses, techs ... well, you get the idea. I stayed one night in the hospital and was released the next evening to hobble around my house with a wheel-chair and crutches. Wednesday I see the doctor again to schedule surgery. The break is in a cast right now, but evidently they'll need to use pins and such to put my leg back together.

So there goes all my planned holiday shopping and baking. Sigh. On the upside, I will probably get more time to read and write out of the deal. Since the conclusion of this year's NaNoWriMo, I now have two romance novel drafts in the hopper. Draft A (from 2007) is now over 100,000 words long and is really beginning to shape up. I'm seriously in love with those characters. Novel B (the new one) currently ends with a giant deus ex machina, but also has some good sex scenes (if I say so myself). I can work with that.

Anyway, if you want to know the minutia of my days at home, I have started to Twitter again about some of the stuff I'm doing. I suppose that daily stuff is mildly more interesting now due to the increased difficulty factor.

http://twitter.com/urban_unicorn

Another year, another NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I am drafting a second romance-fantasy novel, even as I continue to revise the first. You can see my word-count and an excerpt of my rough draft here:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/219891

Hey, fellow geeks:

Did you know?

Barack Obama has read all the Harry Potter books with his daughter:

http://www.fanboy.com/2007/07/barack-obama-harry-potter-fanboy.html

Barack Obama can make the Vulcan hand-signal:

http://www.whatheck.com/2008/10/obama-gave-nimoy-vulcan-hand-signal-at.php

Personally, those are qualities I think we need in a president.

Last night I saw the most twilight-zonish thing ever, right there on my tee-vee. John McCain, trying to reassure someone at one of his rallies that Barack Obama was a decent human being and not someone to be feared. But that wasn't the weird part (even though McCain looked like it was killing him to utter those words). The weird part was when the folks at the rally booed McCain's statement, as much as to say: "How dare you rob us of our paranoid, rascist fantasies? For god's sake, they're all we have left!"

I have always known there were such people in my country. Yet to be confronted with the reality, in living color, while hanging out in the family room with my husband and six-year-old son, was positively surreal.

Most political campaigns have ugly moments, and normally I shrug and figure it's all part of the game, but the race-baiting crap that has been coming out of the McCain camp over the last week has been genuinely scary. It is creepy and disgusting to be reminded that I actually live in a country where a certain portion of the population is all too willing to believe that the black guy with the weird name must be some kind of foreign agent -- or worse. The lynch-mob style reactions of the crowds at these rallies is chill-inducing. This goes beyond any normal political rhetoric I've absorbed during any campaign in my lifetime, and it's obvious that McCain was trying to dial it back here. But it feels like too little too late. I really hope I'm wrong about that.

The good news is that the vast majority of Americans seem to be as nauseated by that kind of hate-speech as I am. Of course, it only takes one lunatic to do something crazy. Just sayin'.

I wanted to write about something more pleasant here today, but reality is what it is.

Oh well, maybe next time.

Today's D-Kos tracking poll has Obama at 51 and McCain at 42. (Cool!) Right now is the time of year (er, well, every four years, anyway) when I find myself living and breathing this kind of stuff almost 24/7. Sorry. I can't seem to help myself. I will probably leave the house today wearing my "Yes We Can" t-shirt.

As usual during the election-season, I have dropped off the edge of the internet world so I can spend more time watching MSNBC, reading Daily Kos, and listening to my favorite wacky liberal talk-show hosts. (Mike Malloy's MST3K-style "commentary" on Bush's speech of last week was just priceless, had me helplessly snickering up my sleeve; and Stephanie Miller has had lots of good mockery on McCain lately.)

I watched maybe 40 percent of the first presidential debate. I intended to watch it all, but once I was satisfied that Obama was holding his own, I found that McCain grated on me even more than I expected. (Sheesh, Grampy -- drop the patronizing stuff already. And I'd lose the scowl too if I were you. Trust me, it doesn't help.) I taped a bunch of the after-commentary. As usual, Rachel Maddow was the best and most insightful. Calling this woman a pundit would be an insult. She's a feakin' genius.

Ross has settled into his school routine very nicely, and seems delighted to take the bus in the mornings. I'm still pushing through the re-write of my novel, while consuming various Regency and other period romance-novels like so much candy. My current favorite authors: Mary Jo Putney, Elizabeth Hoyt, and Amanda Quick. I hope to have more to say about their work in a future post.

Oh, and I've recently adopted the sweetest Severus Snape doll. You can take a peek at him right here (click on the doll's photo to see a larger image):

http://www.twodaydreamers.com/professorsnape.html

I have to say, though, that the promotional photo simply doesn't do justice to the gorgeousness of this doll. I'll try to post some pictures of my own Severus doll later on that really show him off to advantage. Coolest part of taking him out of the box: getting to play with Sev's collar and tie. Sigh. I've always longed to do that.

So, being a yarn-geek in addition to the other kinds of geek I am, one of the first things I did with my new laptop was to re-look up my favorite crochet pattern, "Susan B's Easy Ripple Afghan"

http://home.att.net/~susanBinKC/patterns/ripple.html

But how cool is this? I also found a blog full of things you can do with this simple ripple stitch. The "No-End-in-Sight-Ripple-Along" can be found here:

http://neisripplealong.blogspot.com/

I swear I'll put a more substantial entry up soon (probably concerning romance novels), butI couldn't resist sharing the yarn-geek fun.

A friend of mine sent this link. I found the video -- dramatizing a "Font Conference" -- scarily funny. Must be all those years spent typesetting fanzines.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

I've been deliberately rationing my internet time lately as I dig into the revision of my novel. That's the main reason I've been fairly quiet lately. The other is that I'm still spending lots of time shuttling my son back and forth to various summer activities. I'll be glad when fall is finally here and the schedule settles back down to something reasonable.

I suppose, that as the mother of a six-year-old with autism, I ought to have something pithy and insightful to say about Right Wing Idiot Michael Savage and his recent declaration the "ninety-nine percent" of diagnosed cases of autism constitute an "act" put on by kids who are merely spoiled brats. But really, to dignify that kind of stupidity with a response would be to pretend that I am any longer surprised by the garbage that is regularly spewed by right wing talk radio. ("I am shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on here!") These people hate everything and everyone, so why should anybody be stunned when they attack ordinary families touched by disability, average people who are trying to raise their kids and make it through each day as best they can? Attacking people who are already suffering is the right wing's bread and butter. Yeah, I'm disgusted, but I'm in no way surprised.

There's a good post about the Savage debacle on the "Joy of Autism" Blog, one of my favorite autism resources. (The woman who writes it has a son about the same age as mine):

http://joyofautism.blogspot.com/

In the meantime, I am wrestling with the attempt to write clever dialogue for two people waltzing in a crowded ballroom. Never have I so envied and admired the timeless wit and skill of Miss Austen.

This is just a babbling check-in post for a Monday morning. My brain is not really up to coherent thought at the moment (I still have to get the kid down to afternoon day camp, among other things). I did have some success revising a couple of key scenes in my romance novel over the weekend. I also seem to have decided to re-write one entire portion from the hero's POV. Since the initial draft was completely from the heroine's perspective, I look forward to the insights that might be yielded by the switch. The last time I tried this, the results were very interesting. I gained lots of insights into the fictional world I'm writing.

I also finished the Lisa Kleypas novel, Prince of Dreams, that I was reading. I loved it. It's now official; I'm addicted to this writer's work. This woman's books have become my idea of the perfect literary comfort food. They contain most of the perks of fanfic (without having to deal with the the social complications of an actual fandom), and the author's prose style is beautiful. I've had my interest in a promising romance plot destroyed too many times by clunky or sloppy writing. What a joy to discover a romance writer who knows how to construct a pleasing sentence.

I'm considering writing an essay on the kids' shows that I've come to enjoy watching with (or even without) my six-year-old son. The top three would probably be Blue's Clues, Arthur, and Wow, Wow Wubbzy. (I just like saying "Wow, Wow, Wubbzy." Don't you?)

I've been doing lots of novel-reading lately. I don't have time to post a full review of anything right now, but suffice it to say that I heartily enjoyed Holly Black's urban fantasy Tithe, as well as the second book in Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle trilogy, Rebel Angels -- in fact, I loved that one so much that I raced out to pick up its sequel, The Sweet Far Thing (the final book in the series), even though it's still only out in hardback. If you enjoy period fiction set in the Victorian era and/or eerie Gothic fantasy, this is the series to seek out. It also does delightful and subversive things with the fantasy genre. I have started reading Charles de Lint's The Blue Girl, another urban fantasy that sympathetically treats "loser" teens, and so far it seems promising. De Lint has long been a writer that I admire and trust. And I'm mid-way through another Lisa Kleypas romance, Prince of Dreams.

I'm devoting the next month or so to shoveling out the clutter in my house, as well as doing a systematic top-to-bottom rewrite on my own romance novel. I'm also collecting and jotting down ideas for the coming NaNoWriMo in November, as well as continuing to chew on the Harry Potter canon and films in search of a fanfic angle; I seem to have decided to let that project percolate in my subconscious for a time while I try to figure out where this novel of mine is headed.

My husband and son are out of town until Monday afternoon, so I actually got to go to a movie with friends the other night. The Disney-Pixar flick Wall.E turned out to be just as adorable as the previews indicated, while also strangely apocalyptic and subversive. I enjoyed it enormously. I also wasted far too much time playing around online, steam-cleaned my carpets, and worked on my romance novel fairly late into the night. All in all, reasonably diverting, but I almost miss the sense of being on a schedule. Almost.

I have a notion in my head for a sort of "anti-Harry Potter" tale -- not an HP fanfic, but sort of a fictional "response" to the whole concept of magic boarding schools (of which there seem to be many in addition to Hogwarts). I just think there ought to be some challenge or alternative, in fiction, to the stupid social Darwinism that gets tolerated or even celebrated in this genre. Specifically the Marauders' attacks on Snape spring to mind, but I see this as a larger narrative problem, if that makes sense: popular fiction's passive acceptance of dog-eat-dog capitalism and its values.

My beloved IBM ThinkPad bit the dust a few days ago, but my dear hubby (who is way more of a tech-head than I am) found me a brand-new, lovely little Gateway that I am now breaking in -- and not a moment too soon. I was starting to go nuts without access to my word-processor. I only hope we can salvage all the data from the old IBM hard-drive.

In other news, Ross is now in summer school (two of them actually) most days, but it's time-consuming to ferry him back and forth with the car, so it looks like the summer will be a little frantic, at least while we all get used to the new schedule. At least I can sneak a couple hours of writing time most days, even if my house looks frightful.

Just finished a terrific romance novel, Mine Til Midnight, by Lisa Kleypas, a truly skilled writer who manages to conjure up whole worlds in her books. (I loved her Devil in Winter as well). Her period details (Victorian, usually) are deft and non-intrusive, her bedroom scenes are luscious and inventive, and she has a fanfic writer's instincts for judiciously applied moments of hurt-comfort. I will definitely be reading more of her work in the future. I'm learning a lot by analyzing her style as well.

Woo-hoo! ... I mean, okay. I finally figured out how to make the links work on this journal (or re-figured it out, or something). Sorry for the inconvenience to anyone who tried to click them earlier and found they didn't work.

http://twitter.com/urban_unicorn

I've not finished (okay, I've just barely started) reading Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series, but I have read some of his other books (Ruby in the Smoke springs to mind), and I gotta say that I love this man's description of his writing process. It's not exactly like mine (I start with characters first), but it's weird and haphazard enough to inspire my love. Check it out:

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/authorstudio.html

A quick note of apology to all of my friends and correspondents. I've been away visiting my mom for a week, and I didn't have the wireless access that I expected to, hence no internet for a few days. That's the only reason I've been so quiet lately. I promise to try to catch up with everybody this coming week. 

I don't have a lot of time to post today, but I thought it might be worthwhile to try to articulate my reaction to Senator Obama's speech last night. (Despite being a fairly heavy-duty political junkie, I don't actually listen to all the speeches -- not even all of Obama's; my son doesn't allow me that kind of free time ... But I did get to listen to this one, and boy did it resonate.)

It's hardly original to chip in after all the pundits have spoken and observe (yet again) that Obama made (yet another) incredibly moving speech last night, standing now on the cusp of becoming the Democratic party's official nominee for President -- as I said to my husband while sitting in front of the television, I don't think this man can give a bad speech (or if he did, he'd have to be trying really, really hard to be bad). But, as always when listening to Obama, I found that his words actually lifted me, emotionally, to a place where I could see past the death, destruction, willful stupidity and brutal lack of compassion that the past eight years have immersed us in. And that, I think, is worth something, even if it has come to be the expected standard of an Obama speech.

Of course, for me, it defies credibility that The Other Party is actually trying to sell us four more years of pointless war, no jobs, and government indifference to the suffering of human beings. Do they really believe this will work? Or even that it will sell? This country has been on a sojourn through hell for the last eight years, and the best the Republicans can come up with is to demand that we embrace hell, lest we fail in our duty as patriots?

Sorry, not buying that. Never did.

Barack Obama is not a perfect candidate, but last night when I heard him speak, I saw someone who was willing to call on Americans to trust our better angels, to make decisions based on hope, not fear. And that, I think, even more than his being African American, is what makes his candidacy historic.

A few days ago, in a regular weekend feature called "In Character," NPR did a piece on Mr. Spock. During that meditation on the significance of everyone's favorite Vulcan, Culture Studies professor Henry Jenkins (author of the fabulous book, Textual Poachers, which is a must-read for anyone in media fandom) asserted that Barack Obama's candidacy appeals to the part of our culture that is ready and willing to embrace a Mr. Spock -- someone who, having come from two different cultures, can transcend and speak to both. An oversimplification? Probably. But I see much that is indeed Spockian in Barack Obama, not least an ability to explain difficult constructs in a cogent, simple way, and the ability to use logic to diffuse emotional tension. And yet Obama also has enough Dr. McCoy in him to stir the emotions in behalf of sound, humane, and "logical" goals that speak to the higher purpose of humanity. To care for each other. To seek justice for all. In these ways, I suppose you could say Obama is indeed the perfect Star Trek candidate.

Oh yeah, and he gives one hell of a speech.

I'm sorry, but Grumpy McSame has no chance against the logic and humanity of a Mr. Spock.

I just read a powerful post on the liberal blog Daily Kos detailing a recent speech by Michelle Obama. Here's the link:

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/29/33133/3956/139/524643

I have admired this woman all through this messy campaign, but these words of hers are astonishing in their naked truth:

"Fear is the reason this country is where it is today. Fear is a useless emotion.

"Don't ever make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility. Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn't.

"Don't ever make decisions based on fear."

Wow. Just, wow. Thank you for that, Michelle.