Living in fear of the submit button

[davidgillon]

Well, I finally submitted "The Art of Breathing" to Disabled People Destroy SF Monday evening. It was pretty much ready to go on Sunday, but computer issues, and a whole lot of submission anxiety, complicated the whole issue. I'm now noodling about with a non-fiction piece entitled "Why Helva is Bad for SF", and have until tomorrow to finish it if I want to submit if to the same destination. It's easy enough to show "The Ship Who Sang" is just plain bad about disability, despite being the book SF fans are likeliest to nominate as good about disability, but showing it's bad for the genre is a bit more difficult, and may require making the reader actually think.

It's snowing outside, and while I renamed 'the Beast from the East" as "the Pest headed West" based on yesterday's lack of performance, today actually is more convincing, with about 4" of snow on the ground. That's by far the most we've had this winter, but still falls short of its headline billing in my opinion. Of course it's still snowing, and has been almost constantly for about 16 hours, so there's time yet.

In Ark news, I pulled on my big girl panties (female character) and headed out for some exploration. My nervous foray onto the plateau at the top of the hill revealed it's actually Weathertop (yes, this is the official in-game name) and one of the few really safe areas. Looking north from the edge of Weathertop through my spyglass, I spotted a couple of Chalicotheriums, which very much remind me of the mecheiti in Cherryh's Foreigner books, though the most straightforward literary reference would be the actual chalicos used as riding beasts in Julian May's "Saga of the Exiles". I suspect I'll use Weathertop as a forward base from which to head north into the redwood forests, though I really want to tame a chalico so I can do that mounted. The dodos continue to be a nuisance and I'm massively expanding the pens so I can actually move around without being constantly blocked by dodos.

Speaking of Cherry's Foreigner books, I finished Deliverer last night. The blurb is oddly wrong, describing 8yo Cajeiri as "playing pranks and causing mischief". It's right that Cajeiri is bored, but what he is doing is far from playing pranks. He actually has a well-reasoned plan (for an 8yo who doesn't understand the security risks) for maximising his freedom and is pursuing it subtly. The closest he comes to a 'prank' is rudely yelling a question, and he understands exactly why it was wrong. The blurb is also completely wrong in categorising the threat to him as because he's spent two years living among humans. The threat is solely related to the fact he is Ilisidi's heir, the heir to Malguri, the Eastern fortress where the series first kicked into gear a decade or more ago. There are clearly threads left unexplained in the resolution, the Ship-Aijiin have got a huge explanation coming as to what they've been up to, with 'instrument packages' dropped all over the continent. but I think I'm actually going to go back and restart the series from Foreigner. I'd need to revisit the books to write the review I want to, and I know I missed some of the fundamental stuff feeding into the Destroyer/Pretender/Deliverer sequence, so rather than trying to find book 10, I'll restart from 1 and try to comment as I go.