The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Barbara Gordon:

Oh, and punkrockhockeymom @ 819: Finish your damn story and send it in to VP. You will never regret doing this. You will regret not doing it.
Simple, really.
-Barbara, VPX

Hey! That's a book by Doris Piserchia, hang on and I'll get my copy ....
Spaceling, by Doris Piserchia, Daw 1978
"The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth's atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape.
SPACELING is the story of Daryl's desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure that it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation.
But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!"

You'd probably like her other books - The Dimensioneers (1982), Earthchild (1977), Star Rider (1974).
It's a damn shame she stopped writing.
-Barbara

This was just forwarded to me. There's a video of a performance, too.

"The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens."

Teresa, according to the website the snowmen are 'ready for battle' though I think they're headed for the wrong theatre of operations. But maybe they go with this ornament?

Bill, thanks, I'm glad you're okay. Thanks also for keeping me mindful that books are powerful memory-triggers. I have seen people cry before over rediscovering or identifying childhood books. It's not like answering a crossword puzzle clue.

Piscus, thank you for sharing your poem. I was never able to gather up the strands and put them into order for myself, either time, and yours does that. The last line is so spare and strong.
The closest I've come was a memorial poem for a friend's niece, killed in a traffic accident.

Unknown now
What jaunty beasts would have sprung
From the bright paper squares
Alison leaves
Her thousand paper cranes
Unfolded.

-Barbara

Glinda, that was exactly the item I was boggled by when we got the Oriental Trading catalogue.
The whole section of duckies is a garden of delights.
These ornaments also confused me.
-Barbara

Epacris, I was given Swimmer in the Secret Sea after the first miscarriage, as a sort of working-through book, so I wasn't sucker-punched. In the middle of a Renaissance fantasy, though, I wasn't braced. Naq gura gur yvggyr qbt vf xvyyrq, naq gur yvar vf ercrngrq. I was reading on the bus, too.

abi, thanks for the warning about Time-Traveler's Wife. Life is full of these little trapdoor surprises, isn't it?
-Barbara

Bill at 746 - urgh, very sorry. I wavered over what to quote, and decided to keep away from the actual ending, but yeah, I can see that was too close. I should've kept to citing Wahb and the clawed tree part - that's what I remembered from my own childhood.

I was (still am) completely messed up by a scene in Damiano, by R A Macavoy, where the little dog (Biondino? Biondello?) asks about a dead baby 'it's so little, can't it be alive?' which I read after my second miscarriage. Oh, look, I'm tearing up just typing that in.
-Barbara

In junior high (which was worse than senior high) we had a typing assignment (on manual typewriters, by the way) that began "High school days are the happiest days of your life."
I refused to type it, did the next one instead, and bet the typing teacher, who was also the guidance counselor, that I would NOT look back on these years with any affection whatsoever.
In my second year of university, I came back to take stuff out of storage, and collected my $1.

I figured university was miles better than high school because a)you weren't with the same people all the time; b)students had mostly chosen to be at uni, where high school was more of an internment centre.

-Barbara (49, fully clothed and in my right mind)

I'm not reading this thread (because I am doing NaNoWriMo, really really really!) but my husband is reading selected bits to me, and he asked me to post about the word I just used: Dingsprache, a German word for the way one speaks when one forgets the relevant words. "Put the um, round thing in the thing with the door, okay?"
-Barbara

Xopher at 165 - the 1998 winner of the 3-Day Novel Contest, Pawn to Queen: a Chris Prior Mystery by Pat Dobie, has a first person narrative where the gender of the narrator is never revealed. There are references to girlfriends and to past relationships, but since the story is set in Vancouver BC, that's not really a gender-clue.
The blurb pegs Chris as female, but it's not in the text either way.

My own (shortlisted but not winning) entry into the 3-Day had a major character whose gender was never established (because it didn't matter to the story). A friend said to me "But you know the gender, right?"
Nope. I don't. I have no idea what that says about authorial authority, either.
-Barbara

Keir, I noticed that about the plane in Lord of the Flies, too, and assumed it was meant to indicate a future setting, and that the children were being evacuated as with WWII, only now (bigger, faster war?) by plane rather than ship and train.
-Barbara

Cold Comfort Farm, Penguin 1978 edition:

p.6: NOTE: The action of the story takes place in the near future.

p.11: the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague

p.20: the slums of Mayfair

p.30: indeed, since the aerial routes and the well-organized road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies had fallen into a settled melancholy

p.129: Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. ... She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials.

p.161: Claud, who had served in the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46,

p.208: The papers arrived by air-mail at noon next day. They were dropped neatly into the great field by the air-postman

None of this turned up in the Beckinsale film, which I think was done as a period piece c.1932 when the book was published. There've been a couple of other adaptations, I think one other film and a radio version, and I don't know if those took it as future or past.
-Barbara

Another not-usually-named-as-sf UK novel is Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbon, though the sfnal touches can be easily missed. Videophones and references to a war with Venezuela, if I remember.
This may have been discussed on some other ML thread.
-Barbara

Ooh, excellent article, and a strong point made that writers are writers, and fanfic =/= parasitism.
Lee Goldberg's head may explode.
-Barbara

Jim @ 757, I used to be fairly sure it was a stand-alone book, but my lack of success in finding it has made me wonder if it were in an anthology. It would have to have been a novella or novelette length, though, and I definitely had it out from the public library.
I'll check into the TZ anthologies. Thanks for the thought!
-Barbara

The typewriter-from-hell subthread has reminded of a book I read in, um, early 70s, and I believe it was new at the time. About a struggling writer who took a room in a boardinghouse, where the landlady (a woman of large sagging bosom) gave him a typewriter that had belonged to a deceased tenant.
The typewriter was haunted, or possessed, and constantly turned out reams of Golden-Age pulp fiction, from jungle adventure to space opera, which the struggling writer found himself experiencing as the hero.
Every time he got close to the buxom heroine, whether she was a princess of the lost race or a feisty widow on a cattle ranch, the story would break off, he'd be called for dinner or whatever.
My recollection is that at the end he discovered that the deceased owner had been deeply in love with the landlady, and that he was being pushed to consummate that doomed love.

I've posted the description on some book sites, including ABE's Booksleuth (where I hang out and can identify _other_ people's books) but the title and author remain unknown.
If this does ring a bell for anyone I'd love to know. It wasn't a great book, but it was a fun read, with lots of Golden-Age parody.
-Barbara

I would like to go on record as not being jealous of the XIers. Happy for them, yes, having that intense, scary, wonderful experience to come.
But I was at VPX. Nothing's going to beat that, even another VP.
-Barbara

ethan @ 173, was it near sunset when you saw the green flash?

mez @ 206 - oh, me too, I had a crush on Captain Scarlet (and can still sing most of the theme song). Captain Blue was Canadian, so I liked him too.

-Barbara

michelel @ 44, I do recall reading about a folk belief of the native people in Guatemala, that might fit the bill. I'd have to find my old photocopies to be sure, but roughly, it was about spirits (white-bearded and dressed in white) who lived in mountains, who took the Indian people away to be their servants or to work on underground plantations. They were guarded by fierce dogs, but occasionally someone would escape and return to his village to tell the tale.
-Barbara

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