Signal boost: writing challenge

elisem just posted LIONESS CHALLENGE: Moon in a Rocking Chair, a writing challenge/contest based on a sterling silver and opal pendant she made. Details there, but it's pretty open-ended: a piece inspired by the pendant, no more than 500 words long.
The winner will receive the pendant "Moon in a Rocking Chair" and bragging rights. The winner retains all copyright to their work(s).

I'm signal-boosting this because, many years ago, Elise did a similar challenge for poetry a pair of earrings, "Song of the Lesbian Elephant." I don't think of myself as a poet, but they were pretty earrings, and an interesting title, and one day I decided I could write something good enough to lose a poetry contest. I was surprised, and pleased, when she told me I'd won.

Wednesday reading conveniently finished a book around dinner-time

Recent reading:

Rex Stout, And Four to Go. I thought I'd read all the Nero Wolfe books, but I think this one was new to me. It's a collection of four novellas, none of them impressive. "Easter Parade" does odd things with Wolfe's orchid obsession, and contains some anti-Asian racism, what feels like a mix of Wolfe (and the author) being aware of how that racism affected a Chinese-American woman, and Archie's literal and straightforward use of "inscrutable." (Authors aren't responsible for the opinions of their characters, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether they share them.) An character's actions being with both Wolfe telling one character that he understands that she knew the police wouldn. There's one ("Fourth of July Picnic") that's more Wolfe-tricks-the-killer than usual one where he and Archie Goodwin figure out who did it, but learn the motive in Wolfe's usual meeting of all the suspects. "Christmas Party" is layers of deceit, including Goodwin and Wolfe lying to each other, but didn't quite work for me.

Steven Brust, Vallista. This is the fifteenth of the Vlad Taltos/Jhereg books, and not a good starting point—a lot of it assumes the reader knows who people are, and what happened in many of the previous books. The story starts when Devera finds Vlad and says something like "Uncle Vlad, help me" before vanishing, leaving him trying to figure out what's going on, how, and why, in a building that makes Escher's "Relativity" seem straightforward. (Slightly grumpy spoilers here: ( Read more... )

Brust has said there will be 17 of these, which leaves two after this, and I'm not sure where he's going to take it from here (which I think is a good sign).

Current reading:

The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel
So Far So Good, by Ursula Le Guin

meta: access

baratron pointed out that I'd forgotten to lock a couple of entries, and I've changed that. If something vanished, that's why.