cleaning out Firefox

March for Babies -- The link is to the fundraising page for the family of a friend, but I link to it because of a different friend, who has endured one of the most difficult pregnancies I've ever heard of, and will soon be giving birth to a pair of preemies. So supporting maternal and infant health is something I'm a bit keen on right now.

On a lighter note: Why the Library of Congress is Archiving Tweets -- I find this deeply nifty, because they're right: the value of an individual tweet is fairly low. But taken in the aggregate, they form a corpus of high historical value, for certain kinds of research. And Twitter and the LoC seem to be taking a reasonably sane approach to what they're archiving and how, and how access to it will be managed.

On a note of high hilarity: Marella Sands on the language of sex in vampire fiction -- specifically, comparing old-school Polidori and Stoker approaches to the Anita Blake series today.

Another Sirens update -- Registration costs go up after April 30th, so if you're on the fence about going, try to decide quickly!

That's four links, and everybody says five things make a post, so my fifth thing shall be, uh, me apologizing for only having four. (I actually do have a fifth, but it deserves actual discussion, so I'm saving it for later.)

Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

Oh! I do have a fifth thing. Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when writers celebrate Shakespeare's birthday by collectively thumbing their noses at a certain past vice-president of SFWA and posting fiction for free online.

I was all proud of myself for having picked out a story to post this year, only to discover two minutes ago that it's one I posted in the past. So I, er, don't have anything new to share at the moment. But this page lists all the fiction of mine that is readable for free online (either in e-zine archives or on my own site), and if I manage to get something else sorted out today I'll be back to post that later.

The IPSTP community has many, many more links. Enjoy!

Okay, I've got one.

I found something new to post, that didn't require much jinking to make it web-ready: "But Who Shall Lead the Dance?"

This originally came out in Talebones, whose fourteen-year run came to an end last fall, much to my sadness. Patrick Swenson published three of my stories in total: this, "The Twa Corbies," and "The Snow-White Heart," which was in their final issue. (You can still buy back issues here.)

. . . you know, posting this has reminded me of something I forgot. Namely, that this story tried to turn into a ballad as I was writing it. You can see that in the style -- this was the first real stylistic experiment I ever tried writing -- the rhythm of the "But who shall lead the dance?" suggested the end of a ballad stanza to me, and everything else followed from there.

Maybe I'll revisit that, and actually try to write it as lyrics, just for fun. No doubt I'll fall on my nose; poetry and related forms are not something I'm good at. But hey, it'll be good exercise. And the silly thing's halfway there already.

things I have not been able to suss out

Hey, historians! Can anybody tell me when the north bank of the Thames was properly embanked/walled/whatever, east of the Victoria Embankment? That one formally ends at Blackfriars, and I'm trying to figure out what the riverbank would look like to someone standing a bit further east (between Blackfriars and Queenhithe) in 1884. As in, is it a mess of wharves and wooden pilings and what-have-you, or has someone built a nice tidy stone wall by then?

Why yes, I am obsessive about my details. How could you tell?

Anyway, my books don't say, and I can't get the Internet to help me. Possibly my fu is just not on tonight. And yeah, Peter Ackroyd has that whole book on the Thames, but it's 11 p.m. and even Amazon Prime can't teleport things to my desk. So I figured I'd ask and see if anybody can answer the question without me having to add to my research shelf.