State of the Catherine update

I had another relapse on the health front and the crud I thought I'd kicked a couple of weeks ago came back, without the ear infection, at least. But still. So I'm moving very slowly, but am putting vigorous amounts of effort into recovering faster and staying that way.

It has, apart from that, been an interesting week.

• Caught a MN Lynx game on Tuesday night, just in time to see them lose a second one in a row. It's a bummer but we hope to see them win again at the playoffs.
• Took acclaimed poet Terry Garey out to dinner for her belated birthday celebration at the Tiny Diner Restaurant. She was quite pleased with the cuisine, the surrounding garden and landscape, the beehives on the roof and the Thursday night Farmer's Market. :-)
• Saturday was a Mom day at the Midtown Global Market, followed by dinner with Mr. Matt at Rainbow Chinese and a trip to Southdale to view Lucy. About which, well, it was clear that Besson thought he was sending a message of some sort. The ones that got through to us were: women are seriously underrepresented in both the French police force and sciences, using more of your brain makes you largely immoral and unconcerned with pesky things like other people's lives, and we should all plan to kill more evil gangsters. Or something. Though we all enjoyed ScarJo meeting Lucy the Australopithecus.
• Sunday, Jana and I met with the Director of the MN Book Awards about the lack of representation of science fiction, fantasy and romance books in the annual awards. This was by virtue of my awesome stature in the field. The reason that we were meeting with her had to do with a meeting Jana had with her last year when she won Book Artist of the Year. Jana went to bat for the local SFF writers and asked why we and the romance writers were consistently edged out in favor of Mystery and Thriller (the last SFF winner was Lois McMaster Bujold in 1999, back when there was a separate SFF category. Since then there's been 2 SFFnal finalists - Lois again, but no winners. Romance had its first finalist in the last 2 years). Writer Alan DeNiro also did a fine write up of some of the attendant issues and why getting shut out of the Awards hurts writers and does the Awards no favors. At any rate, she seemed receptive and we had a bunch of ideas, both on recruiting judges and changes to the structure and timeline  of the Awards. I should note that the previous administration (MN Humanities Council) engaged in some enthusiastic denial and mild gaslighting on this topic, so the fact that Friends of the St. Paul Library are willing to talk now is a substantial improvement. Hope it leads to good things.
• I got signed up for the International Wolf Center's WolfTrek Tour in October! This was one of many things I put off last year due to Mom Move so I'm really glad that they're doing a second one and I can go this time.  Short version: tour bus from the Twin Cities to the Center in Ely, MN (near the Canadian border for nonlocals), stay overnight and spend two days learning about wolves and meeting the onsite wolf pack. I'm really excited about this. :-D
• Speaking of other things that I'm excited about, I'm taking a writing min-vacation this week. Jana takes a weeklong book binding vacation every year, plus sundry out of town workshops, but I haven't been doing much of either for the last two years and haven't had any real uninterrupted writing time in well over a year. So I'm going to hang out at a B&B in a little town south of here for a few days and write at the end of this week. I expect that my online  presence will be greatly reduced for a few days (most of that presence is on Twitter and Facebook, less so on Google+ and out here these days). And there will be hot baths! And I'll finally get to read Wonderbook, if all goes well.

In other news, frequent readers may recall that at the end of last year, I had a three book deal with a publisher fall through due to irreconcilable differences over some of the contract terms. On the one hand, this left me with a newly created pseudonym (Emily L. Byrne), much of a novel draft and outlines for two more. On the other, it was hideously disappointing and came on top of some other setbacks that set my writing back quite a bit and were hard on me emotionally. I'd been wondering why a publisher would approach me, then suddenly announce that their terms were all written in stone, even the highly irregular ones. Well, the publisher in question was Ellora's Cave and today word is out that they've let go much of their staff and may be in serious trouble. I'm really sorry to hear that, for the sake of their authors and remaining staff, and I hope they turn it around. On my end, I'm looking at indie publishing my books and dabbling my feet in the waters of contemplating setting up my own press to publish other people. It's at the incredibly embryonic level at the moment but I'm working on a business plan and prep so we'll see how it goes from there. More as I know it.