Lucy-S's New Writeups

December 29, 2009 (event)

2009-12-28T03:49:58Z

Wow. So. Yeah. My first novel is out in stores today.

It's a fantasy entitled Spellbent, and if you fancy a peek at the cover, it's on my homenode. It's published by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, and at present is available in mass market paperback and as an ebook. The plan as I understand it is that if the book does well enough sales-wise, they'll release it in hardcover sometime down the road. This is what Del Rey did with Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which has done pretty darned well.

This is a milestone for me personally -- I've wanted to be a novelist pretty much since I first learned to read. Writing and publishing has been a lot more complicated than I ever would have guessed as a seven-year-old reading A Wrinkle In Time, and every day I'm learning something new because there's always something new to be learned.

On a related note, in two weeks I'll start working as a mentor in…

NEW! GUNDARK ENERGY DRINK! (recipe)

2009-07-23T15:25:29Z

DO YOU ENJOY THE KICK OF ENERGY DRINKS?

BUT DOES THE POPULARITY OF RED BULL MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A SHEEP?

DOES THE PRICE OF ROCKSTAR MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A CHUMP?

DOES THE DIY PUNK IN YOU WORRY THAT YOU'VE BECOME A MINDLESS, TWITCHING SLAVE TO CORPORATE CAFFEINE PEDDLERS?

THERE'S A BETTER WAY!

MY NAME IS LUCY, AND I'M HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT THIS GREAT NEW ENERGY DRINK I'VE DISCOVERED CALLED GUNDARK!

YOU WON'T FIND IT IN ANY STORES -- YOU MAKE IT YOURSELF WITH INEXPENSIVE INGREDIENTS YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE RIGHT THERE IN YOUR OWN KITCHEN. BEST OF ALL, NO ACTUAL COOKING OR MATHEMATICAL SKILLS ARE NECESSARY!

I WAS GOING TO KEEP GUNDARK ALL TO MYSELF, BUT THE GHOST OF BILLY MAYS VISITED ME LAST NIGHT AND HE CONVINCED ME TO SHARE THE SECRET WITH ALL OF YOU! HE MIGHT HAVE JUST BEEN A HALLUCINATION CAUSED BY SLEEP DEPRIVATION, BUT HE WAS VERY VERY CONVINCING AND ALSO A COMPLETE GENTLEMAN!…

dumb (poetry)

2009-06-22T19:31:35Z

I remember the faux-granite cafe table,
your graceful hand smoothing your blue
silk batik dress as you lamented the cost
of your daughter's crow-footed tuition.

Not merely a teacher but a professor, you
knew college like a chef knows meat. Score-
happy undergrads claimed you as a favorite
while you eased them into life's grinder,
took them for treats before they left town

for rosy jobcoggery. Tenure buttered
your budget for croissants and birch beer,
but oh, your kid's crimson-lined hunger -
on a tweed skirt paycheck, Harvard's hard.

But it would cost her almost nothing here,
I said. Your oh-please smile marked me
naive. You declared your only child
deserved class with smart people.

The pastry went to sand in my mouth.
I wanted to leap onto the brittle table, yell
Woo howdy no don't let yer purty little gal
git learnt…

June 19, 2009 (person)

2009-06-19T17:36:11Z

It's all over the news that a woman was fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs. Which is of course a miscarriage of justice, an outrage, crazy, appalling, whatever you want to call it.

In reality, the RIAA and related groups have mostly stopped suing people ... part of my job is processing the big scary cease-and-desist emails they send to the university I work for. The emails include dates, times, IP addresses, files shared, etc. My job is to identify which sysadmin is responsible for the network the illegal filesharing incident occurred on, and to send the notes along to him or her. If the infraction involved our wireless network, I figure out who the student was and forward the messages along directly (and then deal with the panicky/angry emails the student sends back).

We get dozens of RIAA/movie studio notices each day, and have been for over a…

A Boy's Guide to Neoteny (poetry)

2009-06-08T17:06:30Z

At the rest home, it's Pet Therapy Day
and a discharged sergeant, 40 years
old, legs lost to a roadside explosion,
holds a fuzzy month-old ginger kitten,
whispers fond nonsense and buries
his rough face in the purring fur.

Across the sea, a skinny son, barely teen, torn
from mother and hut, is given greenshirt rank
and a machete. Soldiers promise him manhood
if he'll silence the comfort girl's wailing newborn
in the barren field. Weaklings starve. So the boy
obeys, and buries his own heart beside soft bones.

Near the tiny grave, ants silently wage formic warfare,
black versus red, the chitinous adults hard-programmed
to flourish in murderous places. They coldly nurture
captured larvae. Sleeping pupae, legs folded like prayer,…

April 15, 2009 (event)

2009-04-15T14:36:42Z

Well, my third book just came out ... it's a poetry collection entitled Chimeric Machines. No penises were harmed in the making of this book. It's got 36 poems and a couple of prose pieces; Tom Piccirilli wrote the introduction, and Ursula Vernon painted the cover art (you can see the cover etc. at http://las.livejournal.com/).

Other than that, I've mostly been working at the Day Job and working on deadlines. The editors at Random House recently accepted the changes to Spellbent, and I'll be getting the copyedited manuscript back late next month. I'm supposed to turn in the second novel in the series in June. Spellbent will be out sometime in January-April 2010, I believe; they just had the first meeting with the art department to discuss the cover, and I'm excited to see what they come up with. RH has had some beautiful covers, particularly for Tim Lebbon's books.

For those of you who are…