Hello and welcome, everyone. This is my little corner of LJ where I blog about bug-eyed monsters, dragons and other imaginary critters, rocket ships, time travel, gaming, attending conventions, Southern fandom, zine-writing, editing, etc.

What you're likely to find: Posts about books, movies, games, conventions. Occasional posts about music--sometimes filk, sometimes just regular stuff that I like. The quotidian mysteries of an editorial assistant's life--the fact that the paper cuts you get from cover flats hurt 1000% worse than regular paper cuts, for example, or the knowledge that yes, shoving around 75 boxes of galleys does build upper-body strength. :) Every now and there there will also be posts about astronomy, space exploration, computers, and cats.

What you won't find: discussions of politics, religion, and sex.

Edit: Of late, there have been posts about my health.

Thanks, and happy reading.

Patrick Stewart speaks out against domestic violence, and opens up to share his own painful, personal experience with it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/27/patrick-stewart-domestic-violence

I liked his acting work before, but now I have a new level of respect for him personally.

(crossposted)

After the success of my first heart-related fanzine, A Change of Heart, I've decided to put out another issue.

This one will be timed to come out during February, which is American Heart Month. If that issue does well too, then I may have an annual fanzine on my hands. :)

So if you wanted to submit something for the first one but didn't get around to it, or if you want to send me a letter of comment (LOC, in fan-speak) on the first issue (link goes to pdf version available from efanzines.com), here's your chance.

I'm looking for essays, poems, artwork, and short fiction--from fans with any type of heart disease/heart failure, on the topic of being a fan with heart problems. See first issue for examples.

As before, emailed submissions are greatly preferred--to laurahcory at yahoo, but if you know someone who doesn't do email, ping me and I'll get you my snail-mail address.

Deadline for submissions is Jan. 15th, 2010.

Feel free to re-post in other fannish places.

( In March 2009, one of these people had a heart attack )

Baen is now on Twitter; you can follow us here:

http://twitter.com/BaenBooks

Guest-tweeting this week--Tom Kratman. Check it out, and if you're on Twitter, please come "follow" us.

Details here.

So locals, who's going?

A friend just pointed me to this book:

The Subversive Copy Editor, by Carol Fisher Saller. It's going on my holiday wish list, methinks. :)

So we went to see my mom this weekend, as she's home recovering from surgery to remove a benign tumor from her neck. She's doing well, aside from catching my dad's cold, recovering from the operation faster than expected.

After lunch, we walked out on the patio, where we looked into the back yard... and paulcory and I saw three ginormous fungi, basketball-sized, I kid you not. Pictures here:
http://paulcory.livejournal.com/166506.html?view=641642#t641642

kalluna has ID-ed them as giant puffballs. It's weird, in the entire time I grew up there, we never had anything like that show up in the yard.

While this is awesome photography, it's also Exhibit A in Why Laura Doesn't Go With Paul on his Nature Photography Outings:

http://paulcory.livejournal.com/161573.html

(snake warning for anyone who might have a phobia)

Happy Birthdays to shsimko, x_creepy_doll_x, and jenna3, and also my cousin Morris. Hope you all have wonderful days. :)

A tiny bit of amusement (I hope, anyway)...

We drive by this place on the way to and from my parents' beach place. I know it's common practice to name the family business with the family's name (hence Baen Books), but I *think* I'd make an exception in this case:

http://tinyurl.com/q2t7wn (site is work-safe)

Every time we pass their sign, I think to myself, "Wow, they dig everything..."

Shamelessly stealing from onyxhawke...

As a lot of you already know, author davefreer is moving from South Africa to Australia. He really wants to take his four-legged family with him, and keep his fans happy while waiting for the next book to hit the shelves. So with the help of friends he launched this site to help cover the absurd cost of moving his fur-family. There's also a Facebook group of the same name, and an LJ community, save_the_dragon.

Questions? Ask here.

(crossposted)

Taking a brief lunch break to announce that my one-shot fanzine, A CHANGE OF HEART, as announced here, is now done and available.

At the moment I can email you a .doc or .rtf, or send you a printed version if you send me your snail-mail address. There will be a pdf version later this evening, and once I have the pdf, I'll send it over to efanzines.com for inclusion there.

Thanks so much to everyone who sent something, and to everyone who helped get the word out, and to laminahospes for carrying the first batch, still hot off the presses and containing a typo or two, to WorldCon for me.

(and now back to busily printing off mss; an editorial assistant's work is never done)

(crossposted)

As seen elsewhere online, Raleigh has won the right to host the 2010 NASFiC--North American Science Fiction Convention. (What's a NASFiC, you might ask? It's the convention that happens here when the WorldCon goes to a site outside of the North American continent, and in 2010 it'll be in Australia.)

http://reconstructionsf.org/

laminahospes et. al. have busted their tails just to win the bid, and now their reward is--more work. ;)

This is a huge deal for Southern fandom; the last time the NASFiC was in a Southern state was 1995, and that was the '95 Dragon*Con. It's been even longer than that since the South hosted a WorldCon (though Texas is bidding for 2013).

So congratulations again to Warren and crew. Well done! And an excellent slate of guests, too.

As some of you know, I'm a longtime Champions player (coughtwodecadescough). As most rpg players everywhere, I cut my gaming "teeth" on Dungeons & Dragons, but once I got to college and made new friends and found UNC's gaming club, and gamers were playing this thing called "Champions," I got hooked and never looked back.

Hero System is flexible in both character-building as well as setting--you can make anything from a sword-wielding paladin to a flying, laser-blasting cyborg, and with all the assorted supplements floating around (and even without 'em), you can have a game set in a Tolkienesque fantasy world, or outer space, or in a typical Marvel/DC-ish comics superhero universe, or anything in between.

Hero System is what GURPS wishes it was. There, I said it.

Yes, the math can be a little complex and daunting at first, and Champions can attract a particular breed of rules lawyer, but a good GM can keep the rules-lawyering and munchkining to a minimum, and with practice (and a calculator), even math-idiots like me can eventually master the mechanics.

( It's true, nobody wants to hear about your character )

Thing the first: Baen Books is now on Facebook.

Thing the second: We're accepting entries in our "Name That Vampire Anthology" contest now through August 31st. Despite my love of vampires AND bad puns, I'm not allowed to enter--but you are!

Going to cookout and fireworks later today. This is the dessert I'm bringing, Rice Crispy Scotcheroos:

6 cups Rice Crispies (or generic equivalent)
1 cup light Karo syrup
1 cup peanut butter
1 package chocolate chips
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 greased 9" x 13" pan

Heat Karo syrup until almost boiling. Stir in peanut butter. When well mixed, pour over Rice Crispies. Spoon into pan. Melt chocolate and butterscotch chips together. Spread on top of Rice Crispies. When hard, cut into squares.

Laura's notes:
* You can speed up the hardening by putting the pan in the fridge.
* The original recipe off the Rice Crispy box calls for an extra cup of sugar, in addition to the Karo syrup. Um, no. Just... no.
* A "package" of chocolate chips varies depending on what I have on hand. You need to have at least twice as much chocolate as butterscotch, or slightly more, at a minimum. I throw in extra chocolate just because.
* Crunchy or plain peanut butter, doesn't matter, whatever you like is fine. And JIF works as well as the organic all-natural stuff; again, whatever you like.

This is one of those things where people will eye the pan suspiciously at first, until one person tries it, then suddenly everyone descends on it like vampires at a blood bank. ;)

Some people have insinuated that this comic reminds them of me...

http://www.pvponline.com/2009/06/23/dice-dice-baby/

I beg to differ: for one thing, as a Champions player I don't collect polyhedral dice anymore, just six-siders. So there. Humpf. ;)

Since my heart attack and angioplasty/stents, I've been trying to think of a fannish way to get the word out about heart disease, which as I'm sure my readers are aware, is the #1 killer of men and women both in the US. I volunteered at a health expo last weekend, at the WomenHeart booth, handing out brochures and information.

Well, on my way to work the other morning, a lightbulb went off. Fans don't want to read brochures, we want to read *fanzines* (duh). So I figured I'd try to solicit as many stories from as many fannish heart patients as I could, put them all together in a one-shot, and distribute it far and wide. Maybe even make a nifty, limited-edition button to give to all the contributors.

The last page would be an "In Memoriam" page, or as one my favorite TV shows, Babylon 5 says, "To absent friends, in memory still bright..." with a list of fans who've passed on from heart disease/heart attacks/etc.

Toward that end, this is a call for submissions to my one-shot, to be called A CHANGE OF HEART.

What kinds of submissions am I talking about here? Well, statistics are dry and boring. I could throw a bunch of numbers at you, tell you that many more men than women get referred for cardiac rehab, for example, but it's more entertaining to craft an anecdote about being the only person in my cohort dealing with PMS.

Essays, poems, letters of comment, and artwork from fans who've had heart-related illness and/or surgery are welcome. If you yourself aren't the heart patient, but an immediate family member is/was, I'd also be glad to hear from you.

Emailed submissions are strongly preferred; please send to laurahcory [at] yah00 -- but if you know someone who doesn't do email, ping me and I'll send you my snail-addy to pass along. And I need names for the "In Memoriam" page.

Deadline for submissions is July 24th. That gives me a couple of weeks to pull it together and have it ready to send some copies up to WorldCon and other late summer cons.

Permission granted to forward this to other fannish places.