Sorry I’ve been a bad blogger of late, folks. I’ll whip something up soon.

At any rate, I wanted to share my little bit of news: check out this list of this quarter’s Honorable Mentions in the Writers of the Future Contest. Oh, okay, it’s a long list, I won’t make you search. I’m on there.

I was finally convinced to try sending to WotF for the first time this quarter — I’m still eligible because I’ve only had one pro sale. When I decided to start entering, there were only a few days left before the deadline, so I sent in a fabulist short story from my thesis even though I wasn’t sure it was a great fit for the contest. But it got an Honorable Mention, so I think that constitutes ‘encouragement’. I feel encouraged, at any rate!

Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica disappointed me. “Disappointed me” is a weak term. It took all my trust and affection and wrung them out of me, then pressure-washed the floor to make sure no traces stained the concrete. Only Fox’s Cancellation Department (motto: You like it? We kill it!) has ever used TV against me to better effect. So when people said Season 3 was good, I laughed cynically and ran away. When Ryan said he was going to watch it, I performed last rites just in case. When he told me it was ‘awesome’, I told him, “I’ll let you sing your canary song from a leeeetle deeper in that mineshaft.”

But Ryan knows me very well. He knows that I love Lucy Lawless, that I’m insatiably curious, and that I love a good space battle. He bought the premiere in HD. And here I am again, with that horrible tooth-grinding narrative tension settled in my bones. That lean forward from the couch so easily readopted. We’re so weak, we humans. (I mean, Joss Whedon is working with Fox again. We are a weak species.) Please, BSG, keep rocking. I don’t think I can heal again. I’m taking you back, but don’t break my heart.

So it’s over, my first con appearance as a writer. I loved it. That’s even though I was initially terrified that I would be expected to arrive full of wisdom and pithy jewels, and even though my first panel was so poorly attended I considered closing my eyes and trying to levitate to make sure it wasn’t an anxiety dream. I learned (or sensed) that I am what I’m expected to be: full of opinions and odd scraps, self-deprecating jokes and nonsense; and that I know more than I realize. All my subsequent panels were well-attended, and even at the first one, I learned something. It’s an odd thing, a convention panel. It arrives sometime after you do, assembled from audience questions and bits of every person at the front of the room. You go partially to find out what it is you’re going to say.

I met splendid people, and in general, everyone was radically friendly (even by Northwest standards.) I made new friends and bought new books. I haven’t assimilated everything yet — that will require time, and quite a bit of sleep.

But one thing I think I will remember forever. It’s both a shining moment and a little bit of a regret. After a panel I was on where my story, “Burgerdroid”, was relevant, I was taking the escalator down to the main meeting floor. A woman leaned over the railing and called, “Felicity! I just wanted to tell you I loved your story.” I very nearly started running backwards up the escalator. I did not want to miss this. But I decided to err on the side of caution and confined myself to grins and thanks. “Have you got anything else coming out?” she said.

“No sci-fi,” I replied.

“Too bad. It was the most badass story I read all year.” (this is of course reconstructed. She may have said ‘kickass’, for example, but the emotion of the hearer is unaffected by such details.)

I really wanted to find out who she was, but the few times I saw her again, she was deep in conversation, and her nametag was always flipped the wrong way. (If you ever read this, nice woman with long hair and bangs, leave me a comment and introduce yourself.) Maybe I’ll see her again — Orycon is a pretty cozy convention, and I hope to return next year. But if I don’t, I’ll chalk it up to fate: maybe it’s a good thing to have an anonymous reader in mind who loved your work and wants you to keep writing.

Enough blogging! The page calls. Some nice woman with long hair and bangs is waiting for more stories.

Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered…okay, mostly through printing problems and logistical errors, including some on my part (Captain’s Log: must…tell…artist…project due date!), I have produced my first ever chapbook. Well, once I stitched one together in a Book Arts class my pal Julie Madsen taught, but only a real completionist is going to argue that counts.

My first chapbook, brought into existence for the occasion of Orycon 30, consists of the (hopefully) humorous story The Lonely Mecha-Dragon, briefly published on this website and now polished into chapbook form. Most notably, it now has cover art by my fabulous friend Amanda Van Howe, who came through under duress with a lovely, classic mecha-dragon. Classic except for being mecha, that is! She is a very gifted illustrator and artiste and I feel very lucky.

The Lonely Mecha-Dragon, by Felicity Shoulders under the auspices of (coughherselfcough) Paracosmonaut Press, is a limited edition of 100, hand-numbered by the author! I will also sign them if given the slightest provocation. How can you get them? Well, first of all, by being named in the “Thanks” section (there go five or six of one-hundred), second of all, by coming to Orycon and paying the low, low Orycon price, and third of all…yet to be determined. Watch this space. But not for too long, you might get pixel-burn on your eyes.

I have this problem: I like confusing genre boundaries, but I like putting books in boxes. Online, they call them shelves. It’s easier with tags, but shelves have to justify their existence: it’s silly to create a shelf for just one item. So, I was celebrating the inauguration of my somewhat snottily-named “literary-is-a-genre” shelf just now by adding previously “genreless” pieces of fiction to it, and I immediately ran into trouble. I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek begins in 1950’s Chicago, and continues into the 1960’s or so. It’s definitely literary fiction, but isn’t it historical as well? Why didn’t I have it shelved that way? I wouldn’t shelve The Blind Assassin that way, though it goes way farther back, because it proceeds to the era of its writing. Dybek’s shnovel does not. Does that make it historical fiction?

Is it a requirement that historical fiction be set in a sufficiently remote era? The 1950’s are next-door to World War II, which boasts any amount of historical fiction. Are novels set in the 1960’s historical fiction? The 1980’s? Does the era have to inform the story (how can it not?) or is the requirement that the author inform the reader about the era? Is The Things They Carried historical fiction, because it was about the Vietnam War but published in 1990? Is it not historical fiction because it depicts a period and place the author did live through? Does the magnitude of events depicted (their historicity) affect whether something is historical fiction? Does the age of the narrator? (I’ve been considering the idea that my internal genre-o-meter reads I Sailed with Magellan as non-historical because the 1950s protagonist is a child, thus implying an older narrator in a later time-period. If he were a child protagonist in the 1850’s, thus rendering his imagined adult self ‘historical’ as well, would it twitch the genre-o-meter in a different way?)

I have thoroughly confused myself, and should go to sleep. How about you? Got clarity?

As my literary godmother predicted, appearing at a convention proved to be a less remote possibility than I had thought. Time to rejigger the Fame-o-Meter, I guess! I made some inquiries about attending Orycon 30 in a professional capacity, and voila! I’m on the schedule. Orycon 30 is November 21-23 in downtown Portland.

Orycon 28 was the first (and thus far only) sci-fi con I ever attended, as a guest of one of my other good fairies, the scintillating Leslie What. It was a blast, dampened only by the necessity of making coffee drinks for $8.50 an hour miles away during some of the festivities. Well, that and the parking ticket, but I underwent that parking ticket knowingly in order to stay around awesome people for another half an hour! Orycon 28 was a grand old time, and I look forward to Orycon 30 with great excitement. And a little trepidation, but I tell myself not to worry. After all, it’s mostly talking to people, and I talk to people every day. Sometimes I even talk to cats!

Anyway, I’ll be on four panels and host one round-table conversation (schedule here.) Wish me luck, and perhaps I’ll see you there!

Truly, English is beautiful for its rich and varied scope, from the profane to the obscure, the lyrical to the particular.

Today, exploring the online Oxford English Dictionary because, thanks to Multnomah County Libraries, I can, I came across this utter gem: liripoop.

Let me say that again: liripoop. Better still, I own one and have been in discussions about what to call it. This sadly incomplete entry on Wikipedia should give you an idea (the OED lists liripipe and liripoop as the most prevalent spellings.) I wore one of these around my neck (and a mortarboard on my head) at my MFA Commencement. We were all unsure what to call it. People seemed to tell us it was a ‘hood’ despite its evolution towards the vestigial. “Why is it that bizarre shape?” people asked. No one could say. But now, thanks to the OED, I know.

And I also know that by being “furnished with a liripipe” I have become…liripipionated.

Howdy folks. Just letting you know that, after my big move, I’m now going to be moving in with my grandma for some weeks – she broke her hip but has rampaged through her physical therapy and just needs someone to help her out at home whilst she finishes healing. So I’m off to do the bending-and-twisting-at-the-waist parts of life for her. There should also be much Scrabble, and a lot of time for writing, so, hundreds of miles away from my boxes crying to be unpacked, perhaps I shall blog more diligently. Stay tuned!

*dusts off website* *evicts family of pigeons roosting in blog software*

Greetings from Portland, where two industrious humans and one cat (slightly less lazy than usual) are unpacking and reassembling their home. Also trying to keep at least part of it from disappearing under the resultant layers of empty cardboard and crumpled newsprint, but that’s another story. The big story here is that for the first time in recorded history, Ryan has more books on shelves than I do. Yes, the man who was storing his books largely in artistically arranged stacks (don’t knock it, I’ve seen it done very beautifully by the French) has an entire bookcase full of the beggars. Whereas the woman who used LibraryThing to tag her books with the number of the box they were packed in…has 14 in a tiny Target bookshelf. Ooh, and the Millennium Edition of Lord of the Rings sitting flat on another shelf.

So book-arranging has been under discussion. Ryan, in the course of getting other people to go to Ikea to buy this now-full bookcase, made it clear that my books should stay away from his books (like beets from mashed potatoes) because our systems are different. I like mine alphabetized by author, and he recoils in horror from this idea (like the average human from beets). His mom (in the ‘other people’ going to Ikea) says she does hers by topic, then by size within topic. Ryan said this sounded about like what he does, though he conceded my point that having books by the same author together made sense. However, so far, looking at his bookcase, I don’t see that author-grouping occurring much. Here are the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels next to a glossary for the Aubrey-Maturin novels…good call. On the next shelf, two non-Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian together, next to two Jonathan Lethem books, next to a Brust novel which isn’t next to any other Brust novels. Well, it’s a stand-alone, isn’t it? But still in the Dragaeraverse…then there are the random sprinklings of Heinlein. I don’t really get it. You’ll have to ask him. But it appears that taller books are on the sides, which I guess is pleasing to the eye.

Which is (at last! Your patience is rewarded!) the point of this blog post. I had never thought of using book size as the organizing precept within each shelf of my library. When Ruth first said the words, I had to blink to reorder my universe, as if she’d said she organized her books by color (which I hear used to be pretty common). It made me wonder if my system seems as odd to others. Here is how I organize my books:

• One shelf of ‘fawncy’ books (collector’s editions, rare-ish editions, leather-bound, otherwise pretty). I’ve kicked a few borderline books off this shelf when it got too crowded. Points for being beloved as well as beautiful, or for sentimental value. This shelf’s arranged to look nice, with a preponderance of slipcovered editions on one end.


• The rest of my fiction books, regardless of target audience age, alphabetically by author, then by title except within series.


• Fiction anthologies, themed then general, alphabetical by title.


• Poetry books, alphabetical by author.


• Poetry anthologies. I don’t really have enough to have a rubric. Don’t hurt me, poets!


• Nonfiction. Ah, this is the question. Right now, it’s alphabetical by author. But doesn’t topic make more sense? I used topic originally, so there must have been some good reason why I changed. When in doubt, consider libraries. They use topic for non-fiction. But then I end up trying to decide whether to put pterosaurs before or after dinosaurs in the paleo section, and which possible segue book to use. Maybe I should get a labelmaker and use the Library of Congress system.


• Exceptions: oversize/art books, bottom shelf. When I had franchised novels, I put them all together alphabetically by franchise (under ‘S’. Yes. I mean those. Those, too.)

Obviously, I’m open to changing how I shelve nonfiction. I am also still struggling with the question of drama, which in my case is 90% Shakespeare (the Shakespeare:drama ratio is even higher than the paleontology:nonfiction ratio. I have at least two complete works and massive piles of individual plays.) I have been shelving it as fiction, but perhaps it needs its own section, cuddling up to poetry, since it is, after all, largely Shakespeare.

This entire system was implemented in high school. Before that, I used a system of vague feelings. I read constantly, and reread constantly, and relied on my long searching browsings of the shelves (to decide what to reread next) to refresh my impressions of the current state of the shelves. So, if I had a sudden desire for a specific book — say The Midnight Folk – I would stand in some fairly clear patch of my bedroom floor – possibly balancing awkwardly, if the clear patches were far apart – and summon the physical memory of the book, the picture on the front, the color of the spine, until I remembered where I’d last seen it. This was possibly good for the mental muscles and may count as meditation, but it was an odd book-organization system.

How about you? How do you organize your books? And if you are Ruth or Ryan and I have grossly misstated your system, feel free to abuse and disabuse.

Qubit took refuge from the movers and emerged cautiously onto a world transformed: