(no subject)

I felt like crap all day. Exhausted, too tired. Went to campus for a bit, socialized, did minimal work. Missed lunch. Finally went to Busy Cafe to hang out and read while eating.

So, earlier this year Gail Simone asked me for help developing a new character for the DC Universe and we came up with Munira Khairuddin, a super spy foil to Batgirl, revamping Spy-Smasher/Katrina Armstrong. Just found out that Munira made her debut in Batgirl #32 =) She's loosely based on an actual friend of mine, Munira Mustaffa, a Malay woman doing security studies in the UK right now with an eye to researching terrorism in SEAsia. Looking forward to how this develops.

I am definitely going to finish two things this week: the SEAsteampunk manuscript, and my prospectus. jolantru and I started writing the introduction and yay!

Ayana Jamieson, a scholar who's finishing her dissertation on Octavia Butler, gave me a call to check and see whether I'm still on board for the conference that her association, the OEC Legacy Network, is having in February 2016. And of course I am. We chatted a bit about other plans happening around the time, and the difficulty of getting academics to commit to stuff. I mentioned my time at LosCon, and she said "Octavia Butler had written about attending LosCon in the 80's... she said it had been a waste of her time and she would never have gone if it hadn't been so local to her."

Ouch!

Anyway, time to sing another rousing chorus of this:

"This Year - the Mountain Goats" (Watch on YouTube)