Awesome! My friends at the Puppet Kitchen were on ABC news this week. Check it out.

See! Saying things like  ”Pass me an eyeball” is perfectly natural.

Today I headed over to my modiste’s to try on the muslin for the green spencer that I’m having made to wear at the Shades of Milk and Honey Launch Party in Raleigh. She had used the lining of the spencer to create the muslin.

The fit was pretty good right from the start, which is nice. V– is using the spencer/pelisse pattern from sensibility.com. The entire time she was fitting me she kept raving about how good the pattern was and how well it went together.

One of the first questions we came to was sleeve length.  This changes with the period. So while V–’s inclination today would be to have the sleeve end just above the wide part of my hand, the spencer is modeled on a man’s military jacket. For those, it comes down over the wide part of the hand. We checked original pieces and behold, the sleeves for a lady’s spencer came quite far down.

Once we had the sleeve length and V– could see how the garment lay, we turned it inside out so that she could adjust the fit.  The spencer is double-breasted and quite fitted.  You can see the multitude of pins V– employed to make it snug. She also decided to move the bottom of the spencer up so that it was closer to the waistline of the dress.  One of the interesting things about these is that the fashion changes constantly and since every garment was handmade for a specific person, there is no single “right” way to make something period correct.   It involves looking at a lot of pictures and interpreting the design principles of the Regency to come up with something that makes sense on the body of the person wearing it.

One of the things that is fairly consistent is the way the backs are constructed at this point. With the spencer on inside out, it’s easier to see the lines of the back.  The armscye of the spencer and my dress both much farther into the back than a modern garment. The result of this is that even though the bodice is quite snug I have a pretty full range of motion. I can cross my arms over my chest and lift them over my head.  This isn’t an option by the time you get to the Victorian era.

Now that the spencer is fitted, V– will true up the lines on the pattern, which basically means that she’ll adjust the paper pattern for my actual size and make sure everything is smooth.  Then she’ll cut the final fabric.

The outer fabric is a green silk sari that I brought back from India years ago.  We’re actually going to reverse the border, which has gold thread, because the reverse side is more delicate than the front.

Look! My author copies of Shades of Milk and Honey arrived today.

We are also eight days away from the release day of August 3rd. Not that I’m counting.

To celebrate, I’m going to give away two signed copies of Shades of Milk and Honey.

How do you win? Between now and August 1st post a caption in the comment thread on my website to go with this illustration from 1800.

On August 2nd, I’ll open a poll with the various captions listed and give a copy of the novel to the most popular caption AND to my personal favorite.

Edited to add: Yes, you may enter more than one. However, with this addition I’ll narrow them down to my top favorites before posting the poll.

For your amusement, here is one of my research tools for Shades of Milk and Honey. It’s very handy if you are doing anything set in the Regency. Also, I find it interesting how many vulgarities are just everyday speech now.

I have arrived safely home, with my luggage and the contents of my luggage intact. And only twenty-four hours after I’d planned to get here.

The cats are frantic with loneliness and Marlowe is doing a great deal of chasing invisible demons to prove his affection for me.  Rob is still away at IPNC so I’m just going to go to bed and let the cats hog his side.

While I’m in transit again, here’s an amusing comic about Miss Austen.

It’s a Large Book.

(Hat tip to Todd Sanders)

Lest you feel bad for me and my delayed flight yesterday, allow me to show you one of the views from my bedroom window at the lake cottage. The bedroom I was in had windows on three sides, all of which looked out on the lake. To say that it was relaxing doesn’t take into account the very kind generosity of Merrie Haskell‘s inlaws.  I got a lot of work done during my additional 24 hours with them.  I finished the first round of Glamour in Glass revisions and began revising a novella.

Dave Klecha gave me a ride to the airport and my flight is currently on time. I suspect that it will leave without problems because the alternative would be staying here another day and that would be very pleasant.

Due to the delayed flight, I am once again ensconced on the porch of Merrie Haskell’s lake house and working on revisions to Glamour in Glass. While I am thus engaged, allow me to present to you Emma Thompson’s speech at the Golden Globes when she pretended to be Jane Austen.

I’m at the airport in Grand Rapids and my flight is delayed by an hour and a half. This means that I’ll miss my connection in Minneapolis and there’s not another flight that will get me home tonight. Or rather, there is but it’s over-sold by seven people so they can’t book me on it. I’d have to go standby and hope that eight people didn’t show up so that I could get on.

I’m torn between going back to Merrie Haskell’s lake house to spend the night and getting on this plane to see if maybe I can get home.

Part of my dilemma is that the Oregon Regency Society is having a picnic tomorrow. I have managed to be out of town for every single event and was so excited that I’d finally get to go to one. I suspect that I will opt for staying here because that removes any uncertainty and the lake house is very nice.

Edited to add: Yes. I’m staying overnight here and flying home tomorrow.

In other news, it has been suggested that as a service to humanity I should post my flight itinerary so other people know what flights to avoid.

My most grateful thanks to Miss Ellis for sharing this video with me.

Last night I went out to dinner with T– from Brilliance to this amazing restaurant in Muskegon called Mia and Grace.  It’s a very small dining room that features organic, farm-to-table cooking, and pretty much everything made on site.  The food was nicely balanced and interesting without being “interesting” if you know what I mean.

I had a lavender-vanilla bean creme soda that was really lovely. We started with the local cheese plate, moved on to a beet carpacio salad that flirted with perfect, and I had their gnocchi with spinach. For dessert a true key lime pie.

Highly recommend the restaurant, if you are in the area.

Today we finished recording An Artificial Night around four-thirty. This pleases me because they had scheduled three and a half days and it only took three.  It really is funny how I can read smoothly for three pages and then hit a sentence that I can’t seem to get out.

After work C– drove me into Grand Rapids on his way home and dropped me at a coffee shop. Merrie Haskell came to fetch me and take me back to her lake cottage for a little bit of relaxation before heading back to Portland tomorrow.

All in all, it’s been a very good trip.

During my lunch break from recording today, I checked email and had an acceptance from Daily Science Fiction for my story “American Changeling.”  I’ll tell you, a short story sale makes lunch seem a whole lot tastier.

There are two things about this sale that make me giggle. 1) I’m in the middle of recording a Seanan McGuire novel about a changeling. Totally different style of changeling, but it’s still funny. 2) This is not a science fiction story.

I’ll let you know when the story is out, but here’s a teaser.

American Changeling

Half-consciously, Kim put a hand up to cover her new nose ring. It pissed her parents off no end that she could tolerate touching cold iron and they couldn’t.

Iron still made her break out sometimes, but didn’t burn her. It had taken forever to find someone to make an iron nose ring, but the effort would be totally worth it.

“Kimberly Anne Smith,” Mom’s voice caught her in the foyer as surely as if she’d been called by her true name. “I’ve been worried sick. Do you know what time it is?”

“11:49.” Kim dropped her hand and turned to face Mom, her Doc Martens making a satisfactory clomping on the hardwood floor. “I’m here. Home before midnight. No one with me.” Sometimes she thought about bringing friends home to show them what her parents really looked like after their glamour dropped.

It feels really good to sit down are narrate someone else’s book. Besides the fact that I actively like Campbell nominee Seanan McGuire‘s October Daye series, there’s a huge difference between reading my own novel and someone else’s.

When reading my own, there’s a part of my brain that keeps going “What were you thinking?!?!”

When reading someone else’s, I just have to think about being in the story.  Also, the October Daye series is written in first person which I find easier to adapt to audio than third person.  I think because I can basically treat the entire book like a giant monologue — which it is — it’s easier to find the emotional throughline to carry me through the book as an actor.

We got through Chapter 10 today and I hit two VERY interesting challenges. Unfortunately both are spoilers so I’ll have to hold my observations on those until after An Artificial Night has been out for awhile.

After I finished recording, I biked into town to Jumpin’ Java to write. David Klecha came out to commit some fiction as well and we kept each other honest.

There’s a fiction contest to celebrate the writing of H.G. Wells that offers a pretty spectacular £1,000 prize. Yet it received no entries.

Perhaps because it forbid any science-fiction entries.

And yet… the rules said

Stories should give readers in 2110 an idea of what life is like for ordinary people, working or retired, in the second decade of the 21st century—its complications and perplexities, and above all its humorous aspects. HG’s characters described the misery and humour of apprenticeship in a draper’s emporium. There must be both fun and drudgery working in a supermarket or MacDonald’s. Is this or back-packing a better way to fill in the time between college and university? And what is it like if you don’t go to university? Plumbing is said to be a well-paid alternative—and always good for a laugh. And how does it feel to be made redundant—all too familiar in 2010, but hopefully less well-known in 2110? There are plenty of non-sci-fi stories waiting to be written.

Leaving aside the silliness of an H.G. Wells competition which forbids SF, um… Stories written about the future are science fiction.

The rules have since been changed and the contest deadline extended but still… the failure to understand how broad the spectrum of science fiction can be is kind of sad and funny all at the same time.

Read the full article at the New Yorker.

Edited to add: I misread the instructions and thought they wanted stories written in 2110, not for readers in 2110. This does not make the rule disallowing SF any less silly in my mind but at least it isn’t contradictory with it’s own rules.

(Hat tip to lackriver)

Oh, I forgot to tell you about my travel adventures actually getting here, besides the whole lunch with Dave aspect, which was just fun.

I had a red eye out of Portland at 12:50 AM.  One of the benefits to all the ridiculous travel I’ve been doing lately is that I’m now a Gold Medallion member at Delta, which means that if there’s an upgrade available, I move up to first class. It is a different world up there.

It makes waiting much more tolerable. Waiting for things like, say, when the captain announces that the engine is leaking fuel and that we might need to sit on the ground for awhile.

Or when, oh, I dunno, he says that it might be a four hour wait and they might not be able to let us off the plane for security reasons. That’s easier to face with plenty of legroom.

Fortunately, they let us off the plane after only a half-hour and were able to get a new plane and us onto it pretty fast. We left an hour and a half late which, all things considered wasn’t bad.

And really, if they are going to notice fuel leaking from the engine, I’d rather have them spot it before take-off.