2005 travel so far

Here are my tentative travel dates so far this year:

New York 3-14 March
Bologna 11-17 April (Children's Bookfair)
Barcelona 21-26 April (Sant Jordi)
New York 1-8 June (BEA)
Los Angeles 4-10 August (SCBWI National)
FFM 18-23 October (Buchmesse)

The first NY trip and Bologna are set. BCN it's too soon for Sara to figure out what dates she can take off and which editors we want to try to see who we won't have seen in Bologna (mostly comics sorts) and what adult folks I'll try and see on my own after she comes back to Madrid.

The second NY trip in June may get extended a few days, depending on whether or not I line up any promo events for the poetry antho, which should be out by then. (Had hoped to translate today, toting poems and a dictionary with me hither and yon, but didn't ever find the time in between meeting with friends and colleagues.)

Am sure a bunch of other trips will pop up in between the above confirmed ones.

I'm pretty much resigned to bowing out of World Fantasy in Madison this year, so I'll probably wind up at IberCon in Vigo (Galicia) which will be the first joint Luso-hispanic SFconference, so should be interesting. Also, my friend Xose lives in Pontevedra, so it's an excuse to visit with him, since that's only a short ride away.

Painful

Tonight I started reading Brent Hartinger's GEOGRAPHY CLUB. This is one of the recent crop of gay-themed YA novels, which I knew I'd have to read at some point, but which (despite a premise I like; a groupof gay kids try and figure out how to meet at school without anyone knowing they're queer and create the Geography CLub, thinking it's so boring no one else would want to join) I'd been putting off, for some reason I'm not quite sure of, even though many people seem to have liked it.

I can't understand why. I absolutely -hate- the voice of the narrator.

As I struggle along (I'm determined to finish it because it's a book I'll be expected to have read, writing both gay lit and kidzbooks) every few pages I long to throw it across the room and re-read James Howe's wonderful THE MISFITS instead to take the sour taste out of my mouth (or since it's reading, out of my eyes?).

I look forward to Howe's TOTALLY JOE this fall (his sequel to THE MISFITS focusing on the gay character). I thought David Levithan's BOY MEETS BOY (despite being the title of one of my own books, an anthology I published with St. Martin's press a few years before his novel came out) was cute. (I haven't yet read his THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY.)

Reading this, though, is like pulling teeth. But I will get through it, if only to be able to say that I've done so.

And who knows? The narrator's voice is not salvageable, but maybe the plot will pick up and stop being so utterly hackneyed and cliched... (As they say here: Esperanza es lo último que se pierde, or translated: Hope is the last thing one loses.)

Forces of nature

Wow, we're having a pelting hailstorm out of nowhere.

A few minutes ago, the sky went pretenaturally black and suddenly there were these little pings as small frozen bits of hail started bouncing off the balcony.

Now it's coming down fast and furious with these sea-salt sized chunks of hail, and it must be pretty cold outside since it's sticking: the road below is almost completely white.

I think a change of plans for today may be called for. Instead of going down to the cafe to work, I'll make a pot of tea here and curl up with a book. (For some reason, working in my own home is such an uphill battle, but I may enter the fray a little later today.)

I'm beginning to look forward to my trip back to NY, since I am woefully understocked these days on things-I-want-to-read. I have plenty of books I've not yet read on hand, I just am not feeling in the right moment for most of them. (And even there, three of the to-be-read shelves are only half-full these days, instead of overflowing as I'm used to finding them when I gaze across the room at them...)

FYI for other writers

Here are a few calls for submissions that might be of interest to different writerly-sorts who read this LJ.

I am not associated with any of these projects. This falls under the category of sharing the wealth and passing along information:

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( Antho: Best Sex Writing of 2005 from Thunder's Mouth )

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( Antho: Fresh Men 2: New Voices in Gay Fiction from Carrol & Graf )

(Pay attention to this one, ethereal_lad.)

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( Antho: HerStory: Why I Live in My Bathtub and Other True-Life Stories about the Moments that Make Us from Adams Media )

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Good luck to anyone who tries writing for one of these!