Below are the most recent 10 friends' journal entries.

Saturday, December 26th, 2009
marthawells	9:02a	Had a fantastic, very relaxed Christmas. Starting Christmas eve, we watched White Christmas and Love Actually, then Christmas morning we put on Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, from the book by David Pirie, to rev up for movie-going later. We have the big Christmas meal for lunch (with a reprise later for dinner) and I made ham, my mother's ham gravy (my first time to try to make it and it turned out fabulous -- pure concentrated hammy goodness), garlic braised green beans from a Food Network Magazine recipe, dressing, rolls, and cranberry sauce. Plus pumpkin pie and apple pie. And there's still a pile of Christmas candy. Then we went to see Sherlock Holmes which was FABULOUS!!!!! Then we came home, still in fabulous-movie-haze, watched a couple of Venture Brothers episodes to introduce it to belleps, then Julie and Julia, (still adore Julia Child, still want to strangle Julie Powell), and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Then we collapsed. Hope everybody else had a great day! (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
marthawells	11:00a	Yesterday it was 70, humid, rainy, and then there were huge gusts of wind, and then a tornado warning. This morning it's down below 50 and dropping, and earlier I could see the blue line of the cold front moving in. Now it's completely overcast. morfin went out to get a part to fix the toilet (because our house is still falling apart), we're expecting belleps to arrive, and I need to make an apple pie at some point. I'll probably make potato soup and candied baked beans (it's an old recipe of my mother's that involves bacon, brown sugar, and cinnamon) for tonight. We'll have a fire and watch movies. Tomorrow we'll be having ham, nom nom nom. Happy holidays to everybody who's celebrating! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
marthawells	8:28a	From Writer Beware: Drewlie & Julia: Or, The Case of the Alias'd Literary Agent Questions erupted on Julia's Facebook forum. Why the inconsistencies in Julia's professional info? Why the fake address? The weirdness of Sara dropping dead and Julia emerging out of thin air began to look even weirder--could Sara and Julia, with only an "e" of difference between their last names, possibly be the same person? I think online scams like this catch a lot of people unprepared. They think if they aren't being asked for money from the start, then this can't be a con game. But some of the scam artists out there desperately want their victims' attention and sympathy and belief, and the money, if they get around to asking for it, is secondary. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 21st, 2009
marthawells	11:50a	Missing Child in Chicago Chicago-area people: Eric Marin has a notice about a missing child, last seen leaving for school. If you're in Chicago, please check it out and pass it along. Brianna is described as a African-American, 5 ft. 4 inches tall, weighing 110 lbs., with brown hair, brown eyes, and a fair complexion. She also has pierced ears. She was last seen wearing a navy blue polo shirt, navy blue sweater, gray pants, and a brown coat. She had on black gym shoes, as well. According to police, she frequents the area near her home, as well as the area near 105th Street and Yates in Chicago, Illinois. (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
marthawells	11:36a	I still need to clean house, and figure out what I'm going to cook next week, and try not to be excessively tempted by yummy but labor-intensive recipes in Food Network magazine. A friend gave morfin a small sachertorte for Christmas, so we will be happily nomming on that next week. We're also having intermittent internet problems again, so I may disappear at any moment. We're also far outside the radius of the snowpocalypse, and it's actually going to get warmer here over the next couple of days. But it should get back down to the 50s for Christmas, which is nice, because then we can have a fire in the fireplace while watching The Fellowship of the Ring and other traditional Christmas movies. And I am looking forward like crazy to the new Sherlock Holmes movie. And the next new Doctor Who episode on BBC America. I've been leaving two folded blankets out on the bed for the cats to sleep on, and apparently one is more comfortable than the other, because twice I've caught Harry about to chomp down on Bella's neck to forcibly remove her from it. Links: Bent Objects by Terry Border Book Reviews in the Black Gate Blog. A local chocolate factory and restaurant in Calvert, TX: Cocoamoda. If you ever pass it, stop immediately and eat everything they make. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
marthawells	9:40a	eldritchhobbit recommends: The Apex Book of World SF edited by Lavie Tidhar. Stories from authors from China, India, Malaysia, Israel, Palestine, France, Serbia, and more. And from oldcharliebrown: the table of contents of The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition edited by Rich Horton. In our house's continuing quest to fall completely apart, last night we discovered our doorbell was broken. Which explains why no one's been coming to see us. I think I'll be very glad when this year is over. It's been a very, very long one. Example: Around September I started looking to see when the next Temeraire book would be out, since it had been at least a year since the last one. I finally checked the date on the last one and saw it had actually come out in May. So if there was a year between May and September in my mental exhaustion timeline, that makes the whole year stretch to at least three years, maybe more. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
marthawells	9:17a	More fabulous signed books as prizes in Patrick Rothfuss' Worldbuilders fundraiser for Heifer International. Signed hardcovers of The Fall of Ile-Rien are up there, but the drawing for prizes is random. The fundraiser has raised over $34,000 already, not counting the auctions for professional manuscript critiques and rare manuscripts. I think I'm mostly done with Christmas preparations, except for the house-cleaning and food-buying, which I can't do until next week. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
marthawells	8:40a	Speaking of YA books, oracne did a review of Libyrinth, by Pearl North Realms of Fantasy Magazine: Please Help Us Serve You Better (and create accountability) We have purchased premium placement for the month of December in Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Chapters. We’ve been receiving reports from all over the country that suggest we are not receiving this placement in at least two of these chains. For Vampire fans: Local Austin writer Don Webb has a new story collection just released by Dark Moon Press on Kindle: A Velvet of Vampyres $2.22 Some people would say Don Webb is a winner (Fiction Collective Prize 1990, Death Equinox 1999), others would say he is a loser (he has been nominated for and didn't win the International Horror Critics Award, Rhysling Award, Shirley Jackson Award and a Hugo for fan writing). Some people would say he was mysterious with a string of non-fiction occult books as well as being a Master of the Order of the Vampyre. Maybe he's popular (Trucker's USA), maybe he's high-brow (Norton's Anthology). This fictive grimoire will leave you with more questions. Exploring the Vampyre, the undead archetype of Desire and Blood, Dark Magic and White Hot Lust the tales here are far from from conventional. The stories range from the Sumerian roots of the myth to modern day quantum physics, from the torture of being loved by a Vampyre to the the need for art. Some of the material has been anthologized (in Blood Muse and Louisiana Vampires), some comes from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Two tales and a poem are unique to the book. There is also an essay, part magickal and part current cultural criticism "Why Vampyres?" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
marthawells	9:13a	We had a couple of hard freezes earlier in the month, and I've noticed that all the plants in my backyard are dead. It's a vegetation charnel house back there. One of the few things to survive was the huge climbing rose bush. Did anybody else get a bunch of spam comments last night? Of the "That's a great post! -- here's a link to my site" variety which includes a link to site selling term papers or whatever that really has nothing to do with the post? links: Writer Beware with more information on: two pieces of ebook news: Last week, the publishing world was abuzz with news that Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins intend to delay the release of ebook versions of most of their hardcover titles by three or four months, rather than releasing the ebooks simultaneously with hardcovers and As reported by PW and the New York Times, Markus Dohle of Random House sent a letter on Friday to dozens of literary agents, claiming that the company’s older contracts give it the exclusive right to publish in ebook form, even where the contracts pre-date the existence of digital formats and/or their language does not mention electronic rights. And jimhines has a post on Girly Books This is obviously a book about three girls, so doesn’t that mean it’s written for girls? (Much as Name of the Wind was written for red-haired boys, and the Zombie Raccoons anthology was written for decaying scavengers.) On a slight tangent to that, when I was in elementary school, I really liked the boy's adventure type of books, partly because here weren't that many girl's adventure books. Girls in the boy's adventure books usually took on the role of the load (an MST3K label for the character who has to be carried by all the others), the hostage, or the surrogate mother. Fortunately in the library we were going to at that time, the SF/F section was next to the children's section, and where I found a lot more books like Andre Norton's, with lots of female main characters going on adventures of their own. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
marthawells	9:13a	Links: Houston Elects First Openly Gay Mayor Links about the Peter Watts situation: Peter Watts' Blog, Toronto Star article, Original Boing Boing Article. Art link: One of my favorites: Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (Comment on this)