Autumn

I found this story, which I had never heard before, in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg:

For example, when gay rights organizations started campaigning against homophobia in the late 1960s, their initial efforts yielded only a string of failures. They pushed to repeal laws used to prosecute gays and were roundly defeated in state legislature... It seemed like the gay community's larger goals -- ending discrimination and police harassment, convincing the American Psychiatric Association to stop defining homosexuality as a mental disease -- were out of reach.

Then, in the early 1970s, the American Library Association's Task Force on Gay Liberation decided to focus on one modest goal: convincing the Library of Congress to reclassify books about the gay liberation movement from HQ 71-471 ("Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes") to another, less pejorative category.

In 1972, after receiving a letter requesting the reclassification, the Library of Congress agreed to make the shift, reclassifying books into a newly created category, HQ 76.6 ("Homosexuality, Lesbianism -- Gay Liberation Movement, Homophile Movement." It was a minor tweak of an old institutional habit regarding how books were shelved, but the effect was electrifying. News of the new policy spread across the nation. Gay rights organizations, citing the victory, started fund-raising drives. Within a few years, openly gay politicians were running for political office in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon, many of them citing the Library of Congress's decision as inspiration.

(At least nowadays, most university libraries classify their books by the Library of Congress system, and most public libraries by the Dewey Decimal System. I'm not sure if that was the case in the 1970s.)

I post this not just to be all "Yay for librarians and their liberal agendas!" but because -- sometimes it's easy to feel like the work that could Actually Make A Difference is impossible, and the work that's in front of you doesn't make any difference in the big picture. But sometimes it's enough just to find one small thing that you can do something to change.

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I sewed a pair of shorts for Sprog, using a worn out boy scout shirt that a friend let me have after I transfered the patches to a new shirt.  Feel pretty smug with myself, though we had one harrowing moment where he decided to stick his finger in the sewing machine. It crunched his finger, but no long term damage.  Maybe now he'll leave it alone, though I doubt it.

Heard back from my publisher that amazon's being sold out isn't unusual and that orders are placed every day. They expect amazon will be shipping again soon (much sooner than a month). They also said that for some reason Barns & Noble hasn't placed an order yet. Which might be why amazon is kicking their butts.

So, go ahead and order, it should ship soon.

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[Roller Derby Portraits]

Flood at Union Station * wrecking your weekend plans?  Never fear -- we can solve that problem.  You are all hereby invited to our party instead!

Tomorrow, Saturday June 2nd, Bakka Phoenix will launch Tree of Bones, the third book in Gemma Files' dark westen-gothic series.  We'll have snacks, drinks, and even a band (one word:  cowgoth!).  3pm, right here in the store.  You know you wanna be here.


*scroll down for some awesomely terrible pics

Meaning, the kind in which you wanna stay inside and do those small tasks you've been putting off for ages.  Like, say, sorting through the out-of-control collection of hand-written recommendations.  In doing so, we found this gem:


"It took some time to decide how best to convey my feelings about this book.  It was tough, but i think I've found the right balance between insight and sensitivity:   FOR THE LOVE OF ALL YOU HOLD DEAR, DON'T READ IT! ...Back away slowly, and maybe the yuck won't get all over you."


Good times.  And no, we're not going to name names.  It's out of print anyway.

( several recommended things here )

The title of this post only barely merits the plural.

Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption, various authors and artists. A graphic novel, collecting stories by a slew of (male) authors and (female) artists, all centered around a Louisiana bayou, "one of the seven sacred hearts" of the world. (According to the afterword, some of the other hearts are in the Outback, the Amazon, and Tibet, and there will be volumes for them, too.) I felt a few of the stories in here were a bit too brief and/or elliptical for their punch to really hit me, and I'm kind of meh on some of the art -- but then, that is frequently my feeling on graphic novels as a medium. I liked this one enough to want to read the next volume, now that the core characters have been set up, to see where they go from here.

Deeds of Men, Marie Brennan. Yeah, my own novella. A quick re-read for the purposes of refreshing my memory on a few things.


. . . and we're done.

So where did this month go?

A lot of it went to illness. Not to delve into the gory details, but I had a minor procedure done early this month that will hopefully address a chronic issue that is possibly at the root of my sleep problems (and therefore my generalized fatigue); it is, unfortunately, the sort of procedure that makes things worse before it makes them better. If it does the latter at all. I should know one way or the other by the end of June. And then copy-edits landed on my doorstep, and there was KublaCon (at which kniedzw and I ran our LARP), and then con crud.

I started a number of books this month, some of which I abandoned, some of which I hope to finish soon. But the only ones I actually finished were a graphic novel and my own novella. Which is pretty pathetic. Next month I start seriously noveling again, and I also have Fourth Street -- but as far as leisure reading is concerned, my count pretty much has nowhere to go but up.

http://xkcd.com/1063/

Today I have a picture and a thousand words. I am the queen of today.

Today (also queen of word rep) was Agent F's last day of school. I got several hundred words written before I picked her up at noon. From there we got a hair cut, bought a book (she picked a horse book, and she doesn't even know about horse camp yet), bought a new swimsuit, and went to the nearby water park. Aquatic fun ensued.

After dinner and the assembly of some sort of Barbie pool thing that comes with small dogs*, I finally made it back to the WiP to finish up today's quota. We've made it past the corpse and the alarming reveal. Now I just need to get the investigation rolling and find an in for a new POV to whom a different part of the plot is happening.



* I just work here.

Item: Sampler issue of Apex features Jim C. Hines, Sarah Monette, and me!

( (here's what I have been reading) )