I think Stealth Halloween went over pretty well. Of the costumes that I know about there were: a cylon, a werewolf (but it wasn’t a full moon), Monk (from the show), the mall goers from Night of the Living Dead (before the zombies attack), a muggle, a clone, Sarah Palin and John McCain. I believe there were others, but I’m not certain.

John Ekkers loaned me a shoulder holster and gun¹ to complete my ensemble. Do you know who I am? The answer is behind this link, but guess first.

Tomorrow I have a reading at 1:30 and am hoping to get rid of the rest of my halloween candy then.

1. squirt gun and bright green [↩]

I’m the new Fantasy columnist at AMCtv.com and will be having a column every Friday about fantasy and film. My first one is up today where I cover The Top Five Fantasy Films to Relieve Stress Swing by and offer your thoughts over there on other films that might relieve stress.

I’m safely at World Fantasy in Calgary. I was on the plane out with Jim Minz of Baen and Eric Raab of Tor.  It was like a early con at the airport.  Things here are as much fun as I had hoped.  It’s also lovely to see how many people are planning on doing the Stealth Halloween tomorrow.  Should be fun.

I had dinner with Beth Wodzinski, Sean Markey, Aliette de Bodard, T.L. Morganfield and Christie Skipper Ritchotte.

Then we went back to hang out in the bar with, well, everyone.

While I’m travelling…

Steampunk. A subcategory of science-fiction or fantasy?  Discuss.

I’m leaving the apartment at 5 am to catch a train to Penn Station to catch another train to Newark to fly to Calgary for World Con.

My bag is packed. Besides the usual clothes, I have my costume for Stealth Halloween plus treats for stealthy trick or treaters.  What sort of treats?  Candy and mini-chapbooks.

Saturday, I have a reading at 1:00 pm.  I’ll have a selection of horror for you in honor of the season.  Come listen and have some leftover candy.

Rob’s been having some trouble at the winery with his hands. He’d been losing sensation in his fingertips, dropping things and dealing with general weakness. We were pretty sure it was carpal tunnel syndrome, so he was trying to put off going to the doctor until after harvest.  A persistant tingling in two of his fingers added to everything else finally sent him in yesterday.

The doctor, a hand specialist, confirmed that it was carpal tunnel.  But then he told Rob that the persistant tingling was a sign of nerves dying.  He didn’t want to delay treatment, at all. So sometime next week, Rob is going in for surgery.  He won’t be able to lift anything at all for two weeks with that hand. And then be on very light duty with it for months.

I’ll keep you posted.

• 23:55 Gluing skull to shoulders plate. #
• 00:26 Wiring a humerous to the shoulder plate, then will hotglue ribs in place. Using gaffers tape as a “design” element. #
• 02:33 All righty, it’s time to finish off the fog witch’s costume. With luck, I can call it a night soon. #
• 03:27 I just realized I need another set of hands to do the last bit. I’m going to clean up and go home. #
• 08:21 Mom and Dad are safely on the bus and headed for the airport. I am headed for work. #
• 13:30 Sawing the baby’s face off. #
• 13:33 Hollowing out the baby’s head. #
• 13:43 Reinforcing baby’s torso and installing blood pockets. #
• 14:40 In a cab to deliver the puppets. Woot! #
• 17:09 I am sad that I won’t be doing any puppet building for the next week. I have so enjoyed telling you EXACTLY what I’m doing. #

Personally, I think the outcome of this has the promise to be pretty darn exciting.

A message from Roy Blount Jr.:

A couple months after I became Authors Guild president in 2006, we met with Google to propose a settlement to our class-action lawsuit. The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright protection. Nick Taylor, then the president of the Guild, saw Google’s scanning as “a plain and brazen violation of copyright law.” Google countered that its digitizing of these books represented a “fair use” of the material. Our position was: The hell you say. Of such disagreements, lawsuits are made.

Our proposal to Google back in May 2006 was simple: while we don’t approve of your unauthorized scanning of our books and displaying snippets for profit, if you’re willing to do something far more ambitious and useful, and you’re willing to cut authors in for their fair share, then it would be our pleasure to work with you.

We’re happy to report that our proposal found a receptive audience at Google and at Association of American Publishers and the several publishing houses that had filed a separate lawsuit in October 2005 against Google. Reaching final agreement turned out to be not so simple, but today, after nearly two and a half years of negotiations, we’re joining with Google and the AAP and those publishers to announce the settlement of Authors Guild v. Google.

The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge before it takes effect, includes money for now and the prospect of money for later. There’ll be at least $45 million for authors and publishers whose in-copyright books and other copyrighted texts have been scanned without permission. If your book was scanned and you own all the rights, you’ll get a small share of this, at least $60, depending on how many rightsholders file claims.

Far more interesting for most of us — and the ambitious part of our proposal — is the prospect for future revenues. Rightsholders will receive a share of revenues from institutional subscriptions to the collection of books made available through Google Book Search under the settlement, as well as from sales of online consumer access to the books. They will also be paid for printouts at public libraries, as well as for other uses.

The payments will flow through the Book Rights Registry, a new independent entity that can be thought of as the writers’ equivalent of ASCAP. Much as ASCAP tracks the uses of songs and collects royalties for songwriters and musicians, the Registry will serve the interests of authors and others who own the rights to books appearing online as a result of this settlement. The Registry will be controlled by a board of authors and publishers; as part of the settlement, Google will pay $34.5 million to get the Registry up and running, notify rightsholders of the settlement, and process claims.

Readers are also big winners under the settlement of Authors Guild v. Google. Readers will be able to browse from their own computers an enormous collection of books. We hope this will encourage some readers to buy full online access to some of the books. Readers wanting to view books online in their entirety for free need only reacquaint themselves with their participating local public library: every public library building is entitled to a free, view-only license to the collection. College students working on term papers will be able to point their computers to resources other than Wikipedia, if they’re so inclined: students at subscribing institutions will be able to read and print out any books in the collection.

We expect that millions of out-of-print books (and many in-print books) will be available through Google Book Search to readers, but we don’t know how many, since that depends partly on you. Participating rightsholders can choose to pull their books from this service with reasonable notice at any time and will retain substantial control over Google’s presentation and pricing of their books.

As with any class action, individual class members remain free to opt out of the settlement.

There are many, many more details, but I’ll leave those to the official notice. There’s also an official press release, edited to within an inch of its life and the settlement agreement itself. They’re linked below; be my guest.

Roy Blount Jr. President Authors Guild

October 28, 2008

Press Release Class Notice Settlement Agreement

Copyright 2008 Roy Blount Jr. Mr. Blount authorizes any recipient to forward and post this message in its entirety.

So, I was building this collar for Hecate and you know, it’s late and there are all these spare bones lying about. Some of the pieces I couldn’t use, like the pelvis, because it was so shoddily constructed that it didn’t really look like a pelvis if it wasn’t attached to the skeleton.

What did it look look? I’m glad you asked. Here’s a video to explain.

• 20:12 Shopping for Halloween costumes with my parents. I just needed more bones. #
• 21:05 At puppet kitchen, installing an armature into Hecate’s collar. Mom and Dad are having pizza with Rob. #
• 22:21 Sent the family home. I’m sawing a skull open. #
• 23:39 Spraying the skull with vanilla. #
• 23:41 And now pausing for a hot chocolate break while the skull dries. #

We don’t normally take the paper because neither of us are home often enough to really read it, but with the folks here we picked up a copy of the Sunday New York Times. I found this piece on the Op-Ed page and was startled by the opening paragraphs.

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

So I went looking for more information and found more of the text at the Daily Telegraph. The gist — heavily paraphrased — is that a prolonged war exhausts the U.S. and provides recruitment incentives to would-be terrorists.

I’ll tell you, it’s strange not to be going into the Puppet Kitchen to build things. I kept feeling like there was something I needed to be doing all day today. What I did instead of that was head up to the farmer’s market and pick up some produce plus some apple cider.

After I dropped that off at the apartment, I gathered Mom and Dad for a stroll down Central Park. The weather cooperated in lovely ways and was crisply sunny. We hopped onto a train eventually and went to Cafe Edison, also known as the Polish Tea Room for an egg cream and brunch before the show. It’s a diner in the fading splendor of a Victorian ballroom. Gorgeous plasterwork and then hardcore diner fare. It’s a grand blend of styles.

We had tickets to the matinee of Spamalot. I’ll tell you that I was highly skeptical of the premise. I mean, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is pretty much perfect as is, how could converting it to a Broadway musical possibly be good. And yet it was. It succeeded perfectly at what it set out to be, a profoundly silly musical adaptation of Monty Python. The energy never flagged. I enjoyed it without reservation.

We stopped at Zabar’s to pick up some treats. Mom and Dad were suitably impressed with the place.

Hypothetically, let’s say you were going to an convention over Halloween that had a no costume policy. Let’s further say that you respect the desire to have a professional convention, but still… Halloween. One might opt for what I call Stealth Halloween. What is this, you might ask? It consists of two components.

Stealth Costumes: Wear clothes which appear completely normal to the casual observer, but which come with a solid rational for who you are really dressed as. Think of going as Clark Kent rather than Superman. You still get to wear then nifty spandex, but just keep it under your shirt. Or, say, you could choose to be a Replicant. ¹

Mobile Trick or Treat: Carry treats on you for those folks that might need an extra boost during the course of the day. In the real world, houses that have candy let people know by putting a jack-o-lantern out. Wear a sticker on Friday to let people know you’ve got treats. Like, oh, say that picture in the corner which is handily sized for a 2 x 4 mailing label. ²

1. No, I’m not telling you who I’m going as, that would spoil the fun of guessing. [↩]
2. If you see me on Halloween and want to participate, I’ll have a bunch of them with me. Plus treats. [↩]

This morning we started off with bagels and cream cheese then headed out into the world. We took the train down to South Street Seaport, which took forever because all trains were running local. When we got down there it was Icelandic levels of windy. I mean,really, the sort of thing that threatens to push you down if you aren’t working against it constantly. It was like gravity suddenly came in two directions and was intent on creating a new direction of down.

We picked up tickets for Tale of Two Cities for this evening and Spamalot for the matinee tomorrow. As Dad says, one highbrow and one lowbrow.

From there we went to Chinatown to Shanghai Cafe, one of my favorite restaurants for a meal midway between dinner and lunch. Their soup dumplings are the best I’ve had anywhere. Yes, for the KGB folks, they put our usual restaurant to shame.

We strolled through Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho up to the City Winery to visit Rob. By happy chance they were finishing early today so he got to give us a tour and then come home with us. We hadn’t gotten a ticket to the play for him, but I doubt he could have stayed awake if we had. He was asleep before we left the apartment.

The play… it wants to be the next Les Miserables and it’s just not. That said, James Barbour as Sydney Carton was brilliant. I could have listened to him all night long and waited for the moments when he was on stage. Particulary his scenes with Brandi Burkette as Lucy. Mom concurs. The cast was overall very strong, I just felt like the music was overblown, even for Dickens. Mom and Dad don’t agree with me there.

So we’ve come home, had a glass of 2006 Passito di Panterlleria and are heading for bed. I bet you guys don’t know what to do with me after all that twittering.

My folks arrived last night to spend the weekend with us.  They were supposed to arrive around noon, but the weather out of Atlanta was apparently foul. Normally I would have been distressed to lose those hours with them, but honestly, after the past week having a little extra time to clean was very welcome.

We went to Picnic for dinner last night which was lovely.

On the way home, we stopped for a bit to watch a show being filmed. Our street gets used fairly often for filming — I don’t know why — so it’s not uncommon to come out and find the whole thing lined with trailers and whatnot.  Last night’s shoot was interesting because they had a rain machine on. So they were stopping passersby, not just for continuity, but so we didn’t get wet.  Needless to say, Dad was fascinated with the rain machine.

I was in bed by midnight and my body seemed a little confused by this, since I woke up –wide awake — around 5:00.  I suspect it will take a little while for me to adapt back to a normal day/night cycle.

Today I think we are headed out to museums and the like.