World Fantasy is one of my favorite conventions because of the high density of people that I know and like. Yes, there’s business, but mostly it’s wonderful to sit around and talk shop, or not, with people who get it.

This one was a little different for me because SFWA had a presence here, so I was being all “official” as the Secretary. The only thing that it really changes is that I have one more hat to wear and, of course, that I had to take notes at the business meeting.

I keep getting back to the room and feeling incapable of forming coherent sentences to describe what I did during the day and who I saw. The “who I saw” list in particular seems overwhelming just because it seems like everyone is here. I will try to do a better summary when I’ve had a little bit of sleep.

At the moment I need to finish prepping for the puppetry workshops I’m teaching at a local elementary school tomorrow.

Then, in the evening, it’s off to Borderlands to participate in a group signing with folks from World Fantasy Convention. Do come by!

World Fantasy Convention Group Signing at Borderlands with over a dozen distinguished authors and editors including Paolo Bacigalupi, Ellen Datlow, Nina Kriki Hoffman, Cecelia Holland and Mary Robinette Kowal, Monday, November 2nd from 6:30 – 8:00 pm – Our second big group signing will include the authors listed above as well as Laird Barron, Marie Brennan, Lynn Ceasar, Nancy Etchemendy, Cody Goodfellow, Elaine Isaak, Nick Mamatas, Diana Paxson, Mark Teppo, Tony Richards, Michael Shea, John Skipp and probably more! We are blessed with an abundance of authorial talent, so don’t miss this chance to meet the whole gang at once.

I’m heading to the train station, where I will catch the train to San Jose for World Fantasy. I’m looking forward to the ride and having the quiet down time to just focus on writing and reading. I’m taking Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin for the trip.

I spent today looking at support materials for a grants panel I’m sitting on tomorrow.  In many ways, it’s like reading slush but generally better written.  Or at least shorter. Tomorrow, I’ll spend locked in a room with other panelists talking through each submission which should be interesting. I’m sure there are going to be things that all of us likes and things that only one of us likes and the other folks think is insane.

Makes me miss being on the Shimmer editorial board, it does.

In cat news, Marlowe seems fine although we are still on the lookout for “poop on a rope.”  He does, however, hide under the bed every time I put my shoes on. Poor guy.

We just brought Marlowe home from the vet. The situation seems to be resolving and, unless he shows some signs of discomfort, they think he’s in the clear.

Whew!

He has a big red bandage on his leg from the IV and is hiding under the covers.

Here’s where we stand with Marlowe. I took him back in for another x-ray at 4:00 and Dr. Sutton said that she thought there was still foreign matter in there. He also had some gas in intestines that he didn’t have before which could just be gas or could be trouble. Faced with a choice of admitting him right away or bringing him home until we heard from the radiologist, I opted to bring him home.

When Dr. Sutton called later it was to say that the radiologist definitely thought there was a linear obstruction and swelling in the small intestine. Surgery is now back on the list of possibilities.

Meanwhile, Marlowe seems totally fine. He’s eating well, drinking water, wearing his helmet of invisibility, and otherwise behaving as if he doesn’t have two feet of string inside him.

The plan now is for him to stay home with us until nine or ten tonight and then go to the vets for overnight observation. If it’s warranted they’ll do another x-ray to see where things stand. And then, if we need to, surgery.

He’d be in for couple of days and on pain meds when we brought him him. Probably with a cone. I am devoutly hoping he’ll just pass the darn thing.

String has long been one of Marlowe’s favorite things to chase. When Harriet came into our lives, we introduced her to string as well, which she thought was the best thing ever.  Now, Harriet has this funny habit of picking her toys up and walking around the apartment with them.  With the string, she’d trail this long end of it, which Marlowe would chase.

Hillarious and adorable.  Sometimes they would play tug-of-war.

But because I know the dangers of cats eating string, I always put it away when they weren’t supervised.  Until last night.

The cats were happily playing. I was helping Rob in the kitchen with dishes and Harriet walked in to complain, without her string.  So far, this has mean, “The string is inanimate again! Make it move!”

So I went into the living room. No string.  Marlowe was curled up on the couch looking innocent.  I wandered through the rest of the apartment. No string. I said, “You’d better not have eaten that.”

But I wasn’t really worried because neither cat had shown any interest in gnoshing on it and they lose toys all the time. I mean I was worried enough that I repeated to Rob, “I hope one of the cats didn’t eat it.”

So this morning, we got up, fed the kitties and about fifteen minutes later Marlowe vomited explosively. Oh look. There’s the string. Or… about half of it.  So I called the vet and we trotted off to the SE Portland Animal Hospital, which saw us right way.  The whole time, I was thinking of Cherie Priest’s cat, Spain, who had an episode with a hair tie and wound up needing surgery.  Much, much cursing was going on inside my head, because I know better than to let a cat have string. I know what it can do to their insides.

They’ve done x-rays of him, which I get to show you, and everything looks fine.

They’ve hydrated him and we’ve got him on a stool softener, hoping that he’ll pass the rest of the string with no problems. Apparently inducing vomiting in cats is not as safe as it is for dogs. We had the choice of hospitalizing him or bringing him home and since he seems fine at the moment, we’ve brought him home.

The really amazing thing? When we got Harriet, she came with pet health insurance. After her first vet visit, in which she had a couple of minor issues, I decided to extend the insurance and to add Marlowe. So this whole vet trip? Covered under “ingested foreign object.”

Ironic, eh? The cats have insurance, but the people don’t. Of course, we don’t eat string.

Edited to add: The vet just called and after the radiologist reviewed the x-rays they think there might be an obstruction in the small intestine. We are taking Marlowe back in for a review at 4:00.

To give you plenty of time to prepare for Halloween, I cover ten costumes based on Fantasy characters, over at AMC.

Swing by and check out Ten Costumes to Make Your Halloween Fantastic.

Dad emailed me today to ask if I were dead, because I hadn’t blogged in awhile.  Well, actually, he just wanted to know if I were really busy.  The truth is that while I am busy, I’m working on stuff that’s not terribly interesting to write about.

Shall I blog about laundry? Or, the phpBB template we’re arguing with at the moment?

Actually, this week we did have Liz Gorinsky staying with us, which was great fun. She’s a lovely houseguest and left us with macaroons from Pix Patisserie.  I highly recommend the Scotch Whiskey one.

Pretty much everything else is about the cats, which while amusing… I dunno, I just don’t want to turn into one of those people who blogs about her cats all the time. Although watching Harriet fall off the back of the couch while sleeping is pretty darn funny.  I’ve got to get a webcam hooked up because it’s happened more than once now.

Right now? I’m making yogurt. Exciting. I know.

About once a week I get an email from someone hoping I can help them contact Fundable.com and get a response from them.  So far, no luck on that front.  The most recent one was from a woman who had raised $400 to help a wounded dog.  I was grabbing a link for her and accidentally wound up on the BoingBoing page about my very bad experience with Fundable.com.

Lo and behold. A new comment by Mr. Pratt. I am sharing it with you because… well, I’ll let him speak for himself.  (The emphasis is mine.)

What happened in this article was a result of me covering for glitches in Fundable’s payment system.

I admit this.

However, I because did not write the payment backend that caused these glitches and I could not get my business partner to fix them, I have taken moves to close Fundable against his wishes, even though the site was making money.

Frankly, the content on the site was disgusting to me. I don’t want to run a site helping people fund surgeries for their nearly-dead pets when there are plenty of people suffering from hideous diseases who are more conscious of their pain than animals.

This Boing Boing article was thankfully the moment I saw clearly that my business partner is a sloppy programmer who has no drive for excellence.

I make plenty of business mistakes but I try to own up to them, even if it is embarrassing in public.

I just got home from seeing Where the Wild Things Are which I really loved. I thought it hit all the right notes and was quite moving.  I encourage you to go see it on the big screen.

The Wild Things are an amazing combination of body suit with animatronic faces, that were later enhanced with cgi.  It is, I have to say, utterly seamless.  The team of people who created each character deserves a big hand for really compelling performances.

When the credits rolled they had each of the Wild Things listed with their voice performer and their suit performer, which made me very happy.  Too often, the puppeteers get ignored altogether or lumped into a group at the end.  The lumping is sometimes unavoidable because complex puppets are frequently team efforts and it’s hard to sort out who did what.  So it was nice to see a film that acknowledged the fact that the guys in the suits are on set all the time, while the voice performers have more limited contact with the rest of the cast.  Not to downplay their performance, by any stretch, ’cause bad voicing can ruin good puppetry.

It’s just a pet peeve because there are times when a puppeteer or matchmove artist works for months on a show and then isn’t credited.

So.

I was excited and the credits had rolled too fast for me to really catch the names of the suit performers. I headed to IMDB.

Which does not list the suit performers for the characters.

WTF? Who made that decision?

I finally found the list of the cast over at FanCast, which does credit them and they deserve kudos for giving truly expressive body language to the characters.

• Vincent Crowley as Carol Suit Performer
• Sonny Gerasimowicz as Alexander Suit Performer
• Nick Farnell as Judith Suit Performer
• Sam Longley as Ira Suit Performer
• Angus Sampson as The Bull Suit Performer
• Mark McCracken as The Bull Additional Suit Performer
• John Leary as Douglas Suit Performer
• Alice Parkinson as KW Suit Performer
• Garon Michael as KW Additional Suit Performer

Well done, all of you.

Where the Wild Things Are opens today, which I’m pretty excited about. The visuals look exactly right, but…

When I first heard Spike Jonze was adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are as a feature, my reaction was along the lines of Buh-Wha? I mean, the story has nine sentences. Nine. You see, in order to make a successful transition to screen, a picture book has to have sufficient conflict to withstand expansion while still maintaining a sense of wonder. By most reports, Wild Things actually pulled it off. So in honor of its nine-sentence leap, here are nine picture books I would like to see following in its footsteps, er, paw-steps.

Check out my column at AMC – Blogs – SciFi Scanner – Mary Robinette Kowal – Nine Candidates for the Next Where the Wild Things Are.

Yesterday was the first coldish day since we moved in and I’m impressed by how quickly the apartment loses all its heat through the large, gorgeous and single-glazed windows. The desk which I am so happy to have next to a window is, in fact, quite chilly.

There are storm window frames outside and some storm windows in the basement. I’m hoping that they’ll actually put them up.

Meanwhile the cats are starting to settle in to each other’s presence. Harriet is very interesting in how she plays. When I pull out a string or stick, she’s quite slow in batting at it. I finally realized that if she lived with 21 other cats in a single room that she probably didn’t ever play with a human. On the other hand, give her a toy mouse and she can amuse herself for big chunks of time.

The other thing, and this is actually a problem, is that if I give Marlowe any attention, Harriet comes over and pushes her way in between us. It’s clear that she is used to having to compete for attention and Marlowe is such a wimp that he runs away. Retraining her to share the human will take awhile.

We also had a vet trip today. She’s got some digestive issue going on (which is very stinky) and an ear infection.  Thank heavens she comes with insurance.  Let’s just hope it’s better than Rob’s…

I have a 1800 word science-fiction story that I’d love to have some readers for.  If you have time to give a read and offer feedback, please drop me a line and ask for the password.

The teaser:

Beyond the Garden Close

Lena rocked back and forth, feet aching from standing so long, as if the metal floors were harder in the auditorium than anywhere else in the ship. The paper bib she wore rustled as she shifted. The waiting that the high-holy put the prospectives through made Lena nervous. Which was part of the point, of course and Lena tried not to let her nerves show. There were nine prospectives this quarter, standing in a cluster. Lena knew the other women, of course, but maintained the ship-standard illusion of privacy by ignoring them.

She wouldn’t be among the prospective child-bearer if Phoebe hadn’t wanted a babe so much.

All long-limbs and soft curves, Phoebe had the grace of a goddess, but she’d never be granted child-rights. She had the taint of celiac disease as a hand-me-down from some grand or other and that throwback meant her stock had to be culled from the tree. Even if she made it through the trials today, the high holies would never let her bear a child.

But Lena, now. Lena would pass for sure and certain, only problem was she didn’t want a child.