Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 23

Tuesday update: Better contented with Winter

All right, I’m still uneasy about weather and lack of generators, but the power is up at the time I type this, which is Monday night, actually. However, for the first time in a … very long time … decades, probably about thirty years, there aren’t any dogs in my home. I sent them off to the vet to board because it wasn’t at all clear when the power would come back on.

They were saying maybe midnight for most people, but we’re low priority (not a lot of people up here, after all). Also, on Sunday they said they should have the power on by four pm and it was actually seven hours longer. Which is actually not terrible, at least they’re working on it or expect to be soon. Today, my house was losing 2.5 degrees F per hour, so a little back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested the temp in my house could be maybe 43 F by sundown, well below freezing by midnight, and WAY below freezing before dawn. I mean, I don’t know if the rate of decrease would be constant, but it’s supposed to be really cold tonight, 10 F or less, so it seemed very possible the temp would keep dropping that fast.

Thus, I said to my neighbor, the competent guy who clears trees and plows driveways and has a big truck with four-wheel drive, “Hey, Tony, would you please take my dogs to the vet quick before they close and they can stay there overnight.” And there they went, and then the power came on after all, so here we are. Alas, the dogs are undoubtedly not very contented with their night, but on the other hand, they’re warm. And Tony can go get them for me tomorrow too, because highway B is terrible, evidently. Not just steepish, curvy, and covered with ice, but also you have to go around trees that are down on the highway. Evidently more keep falling, so that’s fun. Though now there is much less wind, so maybe that will be less of an issue tomorrow.

And now, since they have been boarded, all my dogs will have been vaccinated for bordatella and the canine flu, so I guess maybe I should enter Morgan and Joy in some rally competition in, say, March, since what the heck, they’re vaccinated, might as well take advantage of that to show them. (Spoiler: I keep not actually training them even though they would be good at it, so this isn’t that likely.) (But it would be a reasonable thing to do and they would really enjoy it, so we’ll see.) (Not Haydee; she would not enjoy that kind of thing.) (Have I ever mentioned that Ish has his Rally Excellent title, which is not that easy to earn and I’m proud of him. He is eleven this month, by the way, and no, he has never, ever been boarded, but at least he is the sort of dog who takes life as it comes.)

ANYWAY, the power has been on for a whopping four and a half hours as I type this, so if it’s still on Tuesday morning when this post goes live, that’ll be a really good sign.

Also, a neighbor told me there’s such a thing as a solar-powered charger for your cellphone and I sure wish I’d known that before, because wow, that would have made a BIG difference in how insecure I was feeling, since while the power was off, my cellphone was the sole contact I had with anybody and not only is the signal here sucky, but also I was watching the charge tick down … and down …. and down … and I’m definitely going to get a solar-powered cellphone charger immediately. Or as soon as Amazon can ship me one, anyway. This one looks pretty good. Has anybody got something like this? What do you think of it?

***

Writing update:

Last week was okay, I suppose, but I sort of puttered with this and that rather than leaping ahead with anything. The things I’ve been puttering with include “Midwinter,” still not finished, but close; and Tano’s next book, which I was rereading and then began to make some progress on … until the power went out.

So, yes, thus far this week has been absolutely pathetic. I compartmentalize well, but not perfectly, and it turns out I was much too worried about the temperature and the dogs to do anything, so Sunday and Monday were a complete loss in terms of writing. However, I did finish reading the book I’ve been beta reading, and once the power came back on, I drafted my first-impressions notes, which I will think about again as I re-read bits of the book and think about it. I also read three other books, which I expect I’ll post about later this week, at least briefly; and started a fourth, which I could not get into, and I think I know why and I might post about that too.

I generally set posts to go live around six in the morning, so I still won’t have any dogs at home when this post goes live. And I don’t feel I can say, “Hey, Tony, would you please go get my dogs at the crack of dawn, I’m sure you don’t have anything else to do in the morning.” However, by noon today, Tuesday, I sure hope my (warm!) home will once again be cluttered with spaniels!

In the meantime, the cats voted vehemently not to go to the vet for boarding and therefore they’re here, so that’s something. As a side note, I really do not know how I’m going to get Maximilian to the vet for vaccinations next year, because wow, vehement is a weak term for his opinion on the matter. I sure am glad the power came back on, because I was trying to decide what else to do to protect them from the cold.

Maybe I had better get some other kind of carrier that is somewhat easier to force a cat into. I’ve never actually had a cat I couldn’t get into a carrier. Not sure what options exist. Hmm. If you type “easy load cat carrier” at Amazon, you get things like this. This top-loading design would probably be easier. I suppose I should read reviews.

Today, provided the power stays on, I’m going to pick something and make real progress on it. That’s the plan!

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Tuesday update: Better contented with Winter appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: winter of discontent

Just letting you know that

a) ice storm Sunday morning

b) power was out for 15 hours, back on for five, and is now out again.

c) my generator isn’t working

d) neither is my mother’s generator

And therefore I have no power and no inclination to try to get off the mountain to anywhere that does have power. Thus, zero posts until the power is back on.

My mother is staying with a neighbor whose generator is working. I’m crossing my fingers that I won’t have to figure out what to do with the critters if the temp in my house drops to dangerous cold.

Posting will resume when power turns back on. Hopefully later today, but who knows.

Meanwhile, I’m reading paper books…

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: winter of discontent appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

How to Teach classics to your dog

An actual book: How to Teach Classics to Your Dog

This book reminds me a bit of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie — as you may know, Charlie was Steinbeck’s poodle, and in the book, Steinbeck has conversations with Charlie.

Charley is a tall dog. As he sat in the seat beside me, his head was almost as high as mine. He put his nose close to my ear and said, “Ftt.” He is the only dog I ever knew who could pronounce the consonant F. This is because his front teeth are crooked, a tragedy which keeps him out of dog shows; because his upper front teeth slightly engage his lower lip Charley can pronounce F. The word “Ftt” usually means he would like to salute a bush or a tree. I opened the cab door and let him out, and he went about his ceremony. He doesn’t have to think about it to do it well. It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read, can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

Anyway: How to teach the classics to your dog: you do it via casual conversations, of course, with an emphasis on the role of dogs in the classics in order to maintain your dog’s interest. Here’s a tidbit from near the beginning of the book:

***

A ray of sunshine pierced, spear-like, through the sky, and then the gorgeous bow of Iris, one of the messengers of the gods, appeared.

Una blinked at me, her long, fine lashes quivering in a way that means only one thing: That I’ve made yet another classical reference. …

Iris? she suggested, with a flick of her tail, which waves, flag-like, when she is interested in something, though that is usually a decomposing vole.

“Iris, the rainbow, was a messenger god, along with Hermes. The ancient world, much like ours, was powered by messages. People prayed to the gods and sent curses. Heralds and embassies brought offers of peace or threats of war. In Athenian drama, the speech given by a messenger is one of the dramatic cruxes of the play.” …

We pottered up Parliament Hill, beginning to dry off a little. Una took the opportunity to rub herself on a bit of grass; she only succeeded in making herself look more bedraggled.

“It’s all about messengers,” I continued. “The rainbow is a celestial phenomenon, marveled at by generations. We’ve been trained to think of it as light refracted into seven distinct colours. But look at how Virgil describes Iris in his epic poem, the Aeneid.

Ergo Iris croceis per caelum rosicida pennis

mille trahens varios adverso sole colores

And dewy Iris, on rosy wings, through the sky

Came pulling a thousand colours …

***

And a lot more. This would be a great book to drop on a table in a school library, where students who like dogs might pick it up and flip through it, thus discovering that they might also like the classics.

People make mistakes: the Surpreme Court judge Baroness Hale, when she was awarded her coat of arms, chose for her motto “Omnia Feminae Aequissimae.” The translation given in the press coverage was “Women are equal to all things.” The only problem is, that’s not what it means. It could, just about, mean: “Women are very equal with respect to everything,” but that’s bad Latin. If I saw that in a piece of prose, I’d translate it as “All things of a most equal woman,” which doesn’t make much sense at all. …

Which is funny, and also reminds me of Nicole fixing my Latin and Greek in Silver Circle, after ChatGPT gave me a bad translation for a death spell or whatever.

Anyway, fun book if you’d like to wander through snippets of the classics.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post How to Teach classics to your dog appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Looking back at 2024 and forward to 2025

I’m thinking both of the personal level and the broader publishing world.

The most obvious and notable feature of 2024 for me personally was that I read almost nothing. I didn’t keep track, but I’d be surprised if I read more than, say, two dozen books during the entire year. At least half a dozen were beta reads for other authors, too. This counts re-reads. It counts everything. What a ridiculously non-reading year 2024 was!

In 2025, I’d like to actually read more books. Maybe I’ll aim for one book per week. Or maybe not, because honestly, if I’m super engaged with writing, I just don’t want to read anything. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

The other most obvious and notable feature of 2024 was that I wrote about 620,000 words, and published about 745,000 words: Marag, Rihasi, and Silver Circle #1, #2, and #3.

The difference is because I wrote some of Silver Circle last year. I don’t remember exactly how much, and in fact I will never know because I wrote Silver Circle chapters wildly out of order. I believe the very last chapters I wrote were chapters 2, 4, and 11 in SC #3 — those are Natividad chapters. Oh, I wrote some of the subsidiary scenes after that — I mean the brief other-pov scenes that are included in various chapters. The VERY last scene I wrote was the one with Sheriff Pearson setting up an anti-Human Purity operation with that friend of his.

Writing chapters out of order does make revision more complicated, btw. Nevertheless, that’s how I did it.

I’m writing chapters out of order for “Midwinter,” too, but this is SO MUCH SIMPLER as a story, so it won’t be a problem.

Sharon Shinn says she’s writing a couple of novellas this year that don’t include any action to speak of. I’ve got one of them now — it’s a Donnal and Kirra story from the Twelve Houses world — though I haven’t read it yet. The other will be an Elemental Blessings story. The reason I mention this is that it’s occurred to me that “Midwinter” also doesn’t contain any action to speak of. Or at all. It’s a really quiet story, as you’ve already seen, of course, if you’ve read the part that I’ve put on Patreon so far (same as the part that’s gone into my newsletter so far.) There won’t be a lot of action in “Sekaran” either. Apparently slice-of-life stories are my jam right now. Maybe I’m just recovering from the extreme action of Silver Circle.

I don’t really know what I’ll complete in 2025. “Midwinter” for sure, “Sekaran” probably, Tano’s next book for sure, but then what? [Insert shrug here.] Quite a few possibilities. I’m not going to worry about it just yet. I’m guessing that I will probably be publishing four or five books in 2025, counting “Midwinter,” but maybe not counting “Sekaran” — I’ll need to see how that looks, how long it goes, before I can make a decision about that. I don’t want to push the timing so hard for anything in 2025 as I did for Silver Circle. Nevertheless, even with a more sensibly relaxed pace, I do think four is about the minimum and five or or even six is plausible.

Meanwhile! What else is going on in the broader world?

Here is a post at Jane Friedman’s blog, My 2024 Year-End Review: Most Notable Publishing Industry Developments

 The bestselling nonfiction title on TikTok, The Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen, was picked up this year by Simon & Schuster as part of a five-book deal. Shaheen reportedly received a seven-figure advance and a 50-50 profit share. Indie cookbook authors, too, have been avidly signed; an example is Matthew Bounds, who I interviewed in August.

When I started digging further into the trend, I found that nearly every bestselling self-published romance author has an agent and a track record of subsidiary rights deals with traditional publishers; authors are able to retain ebook and audiobook rights if they wish. New literary agencies outside of New York City have sprung up to support these authors as well.

I believe it’s by far one of the best industry developments I’ve seen in recent years: good for authors, good for publishers, and possibly great for the future of the author-publisher relationship.

This does sound positive. It would be nice if this started happened for non-romance authors. I suspect space opera might be next. Or cozy mysteries. Those seem like categories where this new kind of hybrid publishing might be workable. Jane Friedman also points to other new hybrid models, particularly Authors Equity, which is, essentially, a traditional publisher that offers zero advances but a share of royalties much more comparable to Amazon than to the low royalties offered to authors by prior traditional publishing models.

I wonder what else 2025 will bring us in that department? I don’t mean scammers like Spines, who are remarkably open about being scammers. I mean legitimate, useful hybrid options. It seems likely, not to say inevitable, that options will expand and that this will be a good thing for serious authors.

AND

What was your favorite book that you read in 2024? If any leap out at you, please drop the title in the comments.

What are you most looking forward to in 2025? If any upcoming title has you especially excited, please drop that title in the comments, too!

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Looking back at 2024 and forward to 2025 appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry Wednesday: Kipling: New Year’s Resolutions

I realize last week’s poem was pretty much a New Year’s poem, but I had this one already scheduled for New Year’s Day. Therefore, here it is. As this is a Wednesday, I just shifted the poetry up one day this week.

Rudyard Kipling

New Year’s Resolutions

1.

I am resolved throughout the year

To lay my vices on the shelf;

A godly, sober course to steer

And love my neighbours as myself-

Excepting always two or three

Whom I detest as they hate me.

2.

I am resolved – that whist is low –

Especially with cards like mine –

It guts a healthy Bank-book – so

These earthly pleasures I resign,

Except – and here I see no sin –

When asked by others to “cut in.”

3.

I am resolved – no more o’ dance

With ingenues – so help me Venus!

It gives the Chaperone her chance

For hinting Heaven knows what between us.

The Ballroom and the Altar stand

Too close in this suspicious land.

(N.B.) But will I (here ten names) abandon?

No, while I have a leg to stand on!

4.

I am resolved – to sell my horses.

They cannot stay, they will not go;

They lead me into evil courses

Wherefore I mean to part with – No!

Cut out that resolution – I’ll

Try Jilt to-morrow on the mile.

5.

I am resolved – to flirt no more,

It leads to strife and tribulation;

Not that I used to flirt before,

But as a bar against temptation.

Here I except (cut out the names)

Perfectly Platonic flames.

6.

I am resolved – to drop my smokes,

The Trichi has an evil taste;

I cannot buy the brands of Oakes,

But, lest I take a step in haste,

And so upset my health, I choose a

“More perfect way” in pipes and Poona.

7.

I am resolved – that vows like these,

Though lightly made, are hard to keep;

Wherefore I’ll take them by degrees,

Lest my back-slidings make me weep.

One vow a year will see me through;

And I’ll begin with Number Two.

***

Happy New Year to you all! I hope 2025 is a great year for everyone!

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Wednesday: Kipling: New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Adrienne Rich: Mathematician

Here’s a post by Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:

In 2017, when I was writing my book on calculus, I fell deep into Rich’s poetry. Calculus sets geometry and algebra in motion; it is a leap from the static to dynamic. That’s precisely the sort of leap that Rich’s poems bring to life. …

This math-to-feminist-poetry connection might not seem obvious, or, for that matter, entirely respectful of Rich’s depth. But I’m hopeful that Rich herself would have embraced it. Though she devoted her life to poetry and politics, she saw a crucial role for the quantitative, too. “We might hope to find the three activities—poetry, science, politics—triangulated,” she wrote, “with extraordinary electrical exchanges moving from each to each.” …

… But I want to leap ahead to the final section of the poem, which begins:

Interior monologue of the poet:
the notes for the poem are the only poem

What Rich is saying–or what I hear her saying–is that the final draft of the poem itself is never as true or as beautiful as the initial notes you make for it. The printed thing lacks the spontaneity, the freshness, of those first notes.

But then, just a few lines later, she modifies this thought, refining the initial meaning, nudging us deeper:

the mind of the poet is the only poem

Ah, so it’s not the notes themselves. It’s the frame of mind in which the poet wrote those notes. It’s the inner experience.

But then, Rich revisits this thought a third time, ending the poem with one of the most famous lines she ever wrote, one that I clumsily borrowed as an epigraph for my calculus book:

the moment of change is the only poem

***

There you go! Change — that’s why Ben thought about this with regard to Calculus. I appreciate the way Ben shows, in many of his posts, that he appreciates and loves both language and math. Neat post if you would like to see the “bad drawings.”

This is part of the description from his calculus book:

Change is the Only Constant is an engaging and eloquent exploration of the intersection between calculus and daily life, complete with Orlin’s sly humor and memorably bad drawings. By spinning 28 engaging mathematical tales, Orlin shows us that calculus is simply another language to express the very things we humans grapple with every day — love, risk, time, and most importantly, change. Divided into two parts, “Moments” and “Eternities,” and drawing on everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Mark Twain to David Foster Wallace, Change is the Only Constant unearths connections between calculus, art, literature, and a beloved dog named Elvis. This is not just math for math’s sake; it’s math for the sake of becoming a wiser and more thoughtful human.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Adrienne Rich: Mathematician appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: Alllllmost

So, here I am, working on finishing “Midwinter.” It’s 150 pages now. I’m writing chapter 11, but I skipped over chapter 10 to get there. I think it’s might actually be 13 chapters long. Or so. I suspect it’s going to be long enough in finished form to edit it properly and publish it as a novella, so we’ll see about that.

The big question: Can Rachel Finish This Story Before January?

Um, probably not, which is annoying. Not dire or anything, just annoying. It’s certainly a lot closer to finished than it was.

Did I mention I wrote a couple chapters of “Sekaran”? I did, so that’s underway, but I’m going to backburner that as I pick up Tano’s next story, read through the part I have sitting here, and get moving on that.

Meanwhile!

I can report that the audiobook of Illuminae is surprisingly good, though you do lose most (not quite all) of the cool text effects — the poetry in the shape of a heart, the text that radiates out from the center like spokes of a bicycle wheel, all the stuff like that. It’s a really well done full-cast production, with some clever (honestly, very clever) ways to handle some of the weird text. Craig got this audiobook from a library to listen to on his drive, and we listened to it while putting together puzzles, with the paper book there to refer to, because we were both curious about how they handled the weird text. As I say, it’s a quite good audiobook, though you do lose a lot of the text effects you get from the paper editions. I don’t know how it looks as an ebook.

Next: re-reading the other two books of the trilogy, because now that I’ve listened to the first book and that’s all fresh in my mind, of course I want to re-read the other two books.

Also, I can confirm that audiobooks work great as an adjunct to putting together a puzzle. No doubt it helps if everybody helping with the puzzle is on board with the choice of audiobook.

Okay! Practically January! Back to work!

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: Alllllmost appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

I don’t think I could collaborate

So, I said I was reading Rocky Start by Jennifer Cruisie and Bob Mayer, right? Yes, I did; that was right before Christmas.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!

And now, here’s a fun post at Cruisie’s blog where she’s talking about how she and Bob handle this collaboration, thus:

The two questions/suggestions Bob and I get most often are:
1. How do you collaborate?
and
2. You should make your texts into a book.

And the two answers we usually give are
1. Lots of communication, lots of back and forth, occasional arguments, and a lot of wordplay when we get to the point where we can’t write fiction without a break.
and
2. Because the vast majority of our texts are boring as hell to anybody but us.

What I’m thinking now is that it might be better to show what we do which would also explain why nobody would want to read an entire book of our texts. (And it would be a big book. I think Bob figured out we’d written 600,000 words of text to do the Liz/Vince books alone.)

And then there are many samples of texts, which are mildly interesting as apparently Jennifer Cruisie is thinking of getting a dog, so there’s that. No dog pictures or anything like that, though.

Then Jennifer says,

You know, a major difficulty in collaboration is trying to remember where the hell everybody is and what they’re thinking. Especially if we’ve both wandered off center and so are writing two different Roses. So for another nine minutes, we tried to figure out where everybody was in our different versions, with examples of trying to figure out where people are until Bob says, “You can kill the kids if it makes it easier.” And of course they are not going to do that, but it’s funny in context.

And the whole thing is making me think about how hard it was to keep track of where everyone was and what they knew and when they knew it and who told what to whom in SILVER CIRCLE, and right then I thought, Ugh, no collaboration in my future, because seriously, this is hard enough when it’s just me having to work it out, without someone else sending characters who knows where.

But it’s sort of interesting to read about how other people collaborate, so here you go, click through if you’re interested.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post I don’t think I could collaborate appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry for Christmas and the New Yeaer

I was looking for poems that aren’t as familiar to me, and stumbled over one by Tennyson. Not sure if I’ve seen it before, but I sure haven’t seen it recently, and I have always liked Tennyson, so here —

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry for Christmas and the New Yeaer appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Favorite Christmas Stories

I tripped over this collection of Christmas stories last year, and I might have mentioned it here, but I don’t remember. I really liked a lot of the stories, so I wanted to mention it for sure this year.

This collection includes 12 stories, all of which are good to great except “In Coppelius’ Toyshop,” which, sorry, I hated and don’t recommend AT ALL.

“Cat’s Paw” is mainly fun if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, which I’m not, so there’s that. I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t for me.

My favorite might be “All Seated on the Ground.” Not sure, though. I really liked a lot of them! Let’s take a quick look:

“Miracle”

There was a Christmas tree in the lobby when Lauren got to work, and the receptionist was sitting with her chin in her hand, watching the security monitor. Lauren set her shopping bag down and looked curiously at the screen. On it, Jimmy Stewart was dancing the Charleston with Donna Reed.

In this story, Connie Willis makes it crystal clear that It’s a Wonderful Life” is not her favorite Christmas movie. Good story; I liked it.

***

“All About Emily”

All right, so you’re probably wondering how I, Claire Havilland — three-time Tony winner, Broadway legend, and star of Only Human — ended up here, standing outside Radio City Music Hall in a freezing rain two days before Christmas, soaked to the skin and on the verge of pneumonia, accosting harmless passersby.

Topical AI story, not that I’m at all concerned about AI robots becoming real people any time soon. Not my favorite trope, but I did like this story.

***

“Inn”

Christmas Eve. The organ played the last notes of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and the choir sat down. Reverend Wall hobbled slowly to the pulpit, clutching his sheaf of yellowed typewritten sheets.

In the choir, Dee leaned over to Sharon and whispered, “Here we go. Twenty-four minutes and counting.”

A story that could have been too saccharine if someone else had written it, but worked here.

***

“All Seated on the Ground”

I’d always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a letdown. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and ET, there was no way they could live up to the image in the public’s mind, good or bad.

I loved this story and did not figure out the trick until the protagonists did.

***

“Adaptation”

Marley was dead: to begin with.

A rather touching story about only seeing magic if you’re willing to see it.

***

“deck.halls@boughs/holly”

As soon as the nearly empty maglev pulled out of the station, Linny uplinked to Inge. “I need a netcheck on a Mrs. Shields,” she said. “3404 Aspen Lane, Greater Denver.”

A great story. Maybe this one is my favorite.

***

“Now Showing”

The Saturday before Christmas Break, Zara came into my dorm room and asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with her and Kett at the Cinedrome.

A funny, rather manic story that’s not quite believable, but almost.

***

“Newsletter”

Later examination of weather reports and newspapers showed that it may have started as early as October 19th, but the first indication I had that something unusual was going on was at Thanksgiving.

Pokes a little fun at the long newsletters that get sent in Christmas cards. I liked the story, though I also like the updates I get about people’s lives in Christmas newsletters. Also, and alien invasion.

***

“Epiphany”

A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.

A subtle story; I bet it was difficult to write. I liked it a lot.

***

“Just Like the Ones We Used to Know”

The snow started at 12:01 AM Eastern Standard Time just outside of Branford, Connecticut. Noah and Terry Blake, on their way hoome from a party at the Whittiers’ at which Miranda Whittier had said, “I guess you could call this our Christmas Eve EVE party!” at least fifty times, noticed a few stray flakes as they turned onto Canoe Brook Road and by the time theyi reached home, the snow was coming down hard.

A slightly silly story about getting what you wish for, and oops.

***

Also, at the back, Connie Willis lists her 24 favorite Christmas movies. She argues vehemently that Miracle on 34th Street is the best Christmas Movie ever made. The original black-and-white film.

Also her 20 favorite Christmas stories.

Also her 6 favorite Christmas TV show episodes, including all the Dr. Who Christmas episodes, many of which I have surely seen, but none of which leap to mind when I think of them. I should re-watch some of those!

I hope you all have a beautiful Christmas!

Image from Pixabay

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Favorite Christmas Stories appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.