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Over on tor.com, Irene Gallo has been hosting a thread: Show us your tentacles: A Lovecraft art meme which captured my fancy. I really don't have time to be doing anything but painting my current horse book, but due to forces that seemed beyond my control, I seemed unable to resist the compulsion to draw a Cthulhu of my own... I did a rough sketch of a tediously unoriginal critter trying to be sort of creepy when I realized that I needed to just go with what I've become practiced and adept at doing! Which is, turn any kind of thing into a fairy (I've been doing almost nothing by sparkly fairy illustration since the middle of 2006). So, I am 'embracing the cuteness' and the result is Fairy Cthulhu:

I am now seriously behind where I had hoped to be today, but it was an incredibly fun digression. Now back to the coal mines.

I am, for the record, having one of those days where I really wish that I could get hundreds of tiny elves to come in the night and do the mountains of overdue writing for me, and more elves to sign the pile of 2000 sheets of UK Graveyard Book limited edition papers with my signature, and maybe a couple of tallish elves who look an awful lot like me to come in and take over all of my possible personal or professional commitments that might involve traveling anywhere in the world, and frankly while we're on the subject I'd like a handful of elves to deal with the email backlog, the towering piles of things I really need to read, and even someone to blog for me. And don't even get me started on things that want blurbs or introductions. (Looks around balefully.)

I was convinced that all was doom and despair and hopeless and I would never write my way out of this and there weren't enough hours in the day or days in the week or anything when I finally got out of the house and went down to the bottom of the garden to write, and discovered, on the way, masses of late and forgotten raspberries on the raspberry canes. So I stopped and ate raspberries, and you can't be properly miserable or grumpy eating sun-warmed raspberries you're picking and eating yourself.

I'm just saying. You can't.

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Tor.com has gone live. This is a really good thing. Lots of excellent writers blogging. Much stuff to read. I learned that illustrator Pauline Baynes was dead from Tor.com, and I was saddened. I read Jo Walton on Eric Frank Russell and found myself posting a reply. I suspect that Tor.com will become what Patrick Nielsen Hayden said he was hoping it could be about when he first mentioned it to me at Eastercon -- a social and professional hub for SF on the interwebs. The automatic place to go if you're interested in genre, immediately after you've checked Locus online -- http://www.locusmag.com/.

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iTunes has the latest Best of The Moth Podcast up. You can hear me telling my story of my sixteen-year old self's travel trouble, and also, from the same event, you can hear Edgar Oliver telling what happened when he returned to Savannah, which was my favourite of all the stories told that night. The open iTunes instruction (the downloads are all free) is http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275699983. Sometimes these things do not work out of the US.

But here's some Edgar Oliver in conversation (and reading a poem) on YouTube. Yes, he really talks like that, his voice and accent musical and strange:



Hello
i went to Kyle Cassidy's live journal to see what was so objectionable with the photos (was it the t-shirt?...shrugs...they didn't look so evil to me) and i happened to see: NEIL FREAKING GAIMAN singing "i google you". Any chance of an audio clip of that being put up on your site? pretty please? i'm sure i'm not the only fan out there that would love to hear it!

Well, that was me actually singing while Kyle was blogging. Shortly after that Amanda went off and came back with a small recording device and said "Sing that again into this," so I did. And I don't think anyone will ever hear that recording except her. On the other hand, she apparently sang "I Google You" last night in LA... so I imagine that it'll be out on the internet soon enough, sung by someone who can sing much better than I can.

(Goes and looks on YouTube.)

It's up already. (Warning: It's a very dark film, more or less an audio track, and the last two words of the song are cut off.) I love what she's done with the chords...



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Okay. I'm going back to the bottom of the garden to write about Selina Kyle and Joe Chill.