Biohackery, a do-it-yourself wetware mods site snarfed a picture of me in Jellyfish Lake from the Cory Doctorow story in the new Flurb webzine.
I spent yesterday helping Rudy the Younger lay the new floor in his kitchen. It took 13 hours, including a leisurely (!) rush hour drive down the Nimitz to San Leandro to get four gallons of the special glue needed to attach these bamboo-resin planks the floor. Rudy said we were scoring Substance D, and it felt like it, filtering home through tiny CA backstreets to avoid the blocked freeways. I love all the little houses in Berkeley; the air there is so great off the Bay and ocean.
What with our road trip to the Wild West, and putting together Flurb, and copyediting my antho Mad Professor(cover by Georgia Rucker), and going through the whole Postsingular manuscript revising it, and proofreading the galleys of Mathematicians in Love, I haven’t, like, written anything new on my novel for a month now. And I left my heroine Thuy Nguyen in dire straits, facing the evil transhumanist Jeff Luty and the subdimensional sentinels…
“Animal-headed men and women rushed about, some on foot and some flying along the sand. And there, climbing the steps of a lotus-columned temple, were six bird-headed men with the magic harp! Flutes and drums sounded from within the great stone hall; a ragged bonfire on its floor illuminated a blood-stained altar.
“Not stopping to ponder, Thuy ran at the sentinels, screaming her defiance.
“Moments later she was bound hand and foot. Two jackal-headed women slung her from a stick and carried her up the steps behind the bird-men bearing the harp.
“A familiar figure was standing before the altar with a twitching giant scarab in his hands. Jeff Luty. The drumming rose to a crescendo, punctuated by shrieks from the flutes. Luty smiled wetly and extended the scarab’s large jaws towards Thuy.”
I better go help Thuy!