So I had a little shindig this weekend:
I don’t usually celebrate my birthday on my actual birthday. That’s ’cause I work in education and September is to us as April is to accountants — an extended fugue-state of overwork and chaos that can only be endured, never eliminated. (And that’s why I haven’t updated the blog much lately; sorry.) This year, tho’, was many things: my 40th birthday, my 5th year in NYC, etc. I’d been hoping to take advantage of the beauty of a New York autumn and have a rooftop party. So I asked my friends Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman if I could borrow theirs. (Also, a cup of sugar.) They live in a building whose rooftop is made for parties and has an awesome view of the Hudson and the lower Palisades; if the weather had cooperated, it would’ve been perfect.
But. The evil demons of construction intervened! And sadly the rooftop was closed off for surprise renovations. I contemplated cancelling the party, as I didn’t really have time to scout around for an alternate location. However! D&E, wonderful people that they are, offered instead their gigantic, elegant, fantasy-author’s-dream apartment, which is full of fascinating little tchotschkes and busts of creatures that never existed and numinous depictions of perfectly ordinary things and surprise poems by Neil Gaiman. So I decided to proceed. And it. Was. AWESOME. There was wine (oh so much wine), and music, and a sticky toffee pudding as birthday cake, and hilarious conversation. The photo above was taken using the “panorama” setting on my camera, which I totally didn’t know existed, and which takes and overlays three pictures on top of each other which is why my father looks like a ghost and I have three hands. But still. AWESOME.
It’s nice to have friends.
(Also, I received three submissions in my call for tattoo art — thank you! I haven’t had time to do more than look at them and wibble over how cool they are, but they’re all excellent. It’s hard to choose! More on this later.)
Totally awesome! Fantastic!
Your father *does* look like a ghost! And you look like a goddess! That is **so** cool!
I hope you had a lovely birthday. I had forgotten that I’d read some of Ellen Kushner’s novels (The Swordspoint books) and now have to go read them again while I’m waiting for the library to get more of yours in eReader format. ^_^
i hope you had a lovely celebration! Thank you so much for daring to write such fascinating, sensual books featuring solid, complex female characters who look like me. I’ve been searching for stories like the Inheritance Trilogy for years, and am so happy to have found them in what you have written.