WHAT A YEAR AMIRITE

A quick rundown:

VISA SHENANIGANS:

Re-applied for the O1B; got approved. I was visiting Singapore at the time (it was fun!) and so didn't actually apply for a visa appointment until I got home, and even then I faffed about because I had to get a new passport since it was going to expire in a year or so.

Ten days before my visa interview, Malaysia went on its first COVID lockdown. I couldn't schedule a fresh appointment until late June, and by that time, the first available appointment was in January 2021.
(And that, too, has been cancelled, so my appointment is in March, because what the hell.)

EXERCISE:

I started playing Just Dance Now in my room, since I can't go swimming! For a time I was swimming very regularly at the Holiday Villa, and learned to go only at certain times of the day because otherwise the guy at the desk would get all "You need to pay bc you're a guest, not a member" since I was using my mother's membership card.

- I got a FitBit! It's an Inspire HR. I've gotten used to wearing it a lot, though I've stopped logging my water intake.

BLEH:

I do not like living with my parents. I wake up anxious in the morning waiting for my parents to quarrel and bicker and I don't go downstairs until my mom is gone because she's going to comment on my morning drink because it's too much sugar and just URGH. My dad knocks and comes in without my saying so or calls me for stupid inane things like "don't forget to take in the clothes when it's raining" or "flatten the boxes" or something that I would get to eventually, just not as quickly as he wants me to do it.

- I lost not just one, but TWO computers. My ASUS has konked out again despite promisingly working so well for a while longer. The novel I had been working on there in Scrivener is not completely lost? I still have an earlier draft with the first 1/5, but most of it was handwritten, and that handwritten material... is in California. There was also a short story draft that is now gone. I'll have to start it from scratch again--it was a difficult thing to work on though, so maybe re-starting will be better.

My old HP has also died, after about almost 10 years. The hard drive, comprising ten years of memories, is also gone, and I was so sure I had backed it up somewhere, but cannot for the life of me find the external drive. I've got bits and pieces here and there, and my writing folder is often backed up. I especially mourn the pictures I took in 2012 when I took my road trip across the States.

I'm now on one machine for both work and writing, and would like to change that. I'd like to get another ASUS T1 because the keyboard layout was very suitable for me.


GOOD:

- I made a sweet potato cheesecake. I should make another one.

- I've been doing more embroidery and invested in a 200-skein packet. I need to do more of it!


WEIRD:

- I'm now Vice-President for the Malaysian Writers Society?? I guess I am. I should do more stuff while I'm here.

- All in all, I'm a bit amazed that I've spent over a year in Malaysia now?? Since 2003, I haven't been back for more than a summer season. I'm definitely going to move the fuck out if I ever come back and re-settle here.


EDITOR THINGS

- The first two long-form debuts I ever edited have come out! THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES got like FOUR Starred Reviews, and NUCLEATION is such a fun space opera. They're both debuts as well, so that is also super cool. I also edited Marie Brennan's DRIFTWOOD, a fix-up novel, another first!!

- I'm also editing an anthology which has parenthood as its core theme. I'm quickly realising I... uh, would prefer working on an anthology where I get to pick out of slush, rather than one with a committed roster.

- I've also signed an NDA for a cultural consultant project.

- The last volume of HOW TO TREAT MAGICAL BEASTS that I'm adaptation editor of is out in March! I really enjoy this job, so I hope to have more chances to do that stuff.

- I was on a panel talking about food, colonization, and diaspora for the Carl Brandon Society!

- I was part of yet another Worldbuilding Master Class for Writing the Other. I think I'd like to re-visit the video and update it. I'll have to ask Tempest about that.


WRITER THINGS

I published four things this year:

"Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-RaceFail" at Strange Horizons: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/trials-by-whiteness-definitions-of-whiteness-and-eurocentrism-and-their-relevance-post-racefail/

"Scholar Miaka’s Brief Summary of Memories Imbued in Memory Object Exhibit 132.NW.1" in RECOGNIZE FASCISM, ed. Crystal Huff: https://www.worldweaverpress.com/store/p171/Recognize_Fascism.html
CW: gendered violence, transphobia, slavery, physical & reproductive violence

"Mid-Autumn Incense" as part of Circlet Press' last Halloween Microfiction series: http://www.circlet.com/halloween-microfiction-mid-autumn-incense-by-september-sui/
CW: suicide

"In The Glass Hall of Supreme Women" at Fireside Fiction: https://firesidefiction.com/in-the-glass-hall-of-supreme-women
CW: body horror, misogyny, fungi


My 2019 short story "The Freedom of the Shifting Sea" got more press:
- reprinted in John Joseph Adams' BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY 2020, guest edited by Diana Gabaldon: http://www.johnjosephadams.com/best-american/projects/best-american-science-fiction-and-fantasy-2020/
- Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award Honors List: http://carlbrandon.org/awards/


My friend Stephani Soejono and I worked on a listicle, "Top 5 Hunting Grounds This Summer Season" which features fake local places for man-eating mermaids to go hunting: https://curiousfictions.com/stories/3278-jaymee-goh-top-5-hunting-grounds-this-summer-season

My Curious Fictions is sadly neglected because I am no good at keeping up anything regular, apparently. I do like it a lot as a platform though!


I also finished a 128k-word draft of a novel, which started out as fanfic of How Raeliana Ended Up At The Duke's Mansion (which was a manhwa I was enjoying until recent episodes where it turns out the core concept is actually quite WRETCHED and I am FURIOUS) and I've since made it its own thing. I'm doing a major re-write which is currently at 98k words and that's probably 2/3rds of the way through. I was hoping to have a better draft by the end of the year but that doesn't seem to be happening? We'll see--I'm stuck at a character death right now but maybe I'll figure it out in a bit.

The quick pitch: "A promising young woman wakes up in the body of a side character from a murder mystery romance webserial. Thing is, this character's doomed to be fridged before the story even starts! Not to mention that for a romance, there is a very high, very politicised, body count. Our intrepid side character is off to discover secrets that fanlore could only guess at, and help the hero, a duke of the kingdom (of course he is!) stop his enemies before they get the better of him."


I'm also now on AO3! My handle there is septembersongs but I don't have much, just some Girl Genius fic and Strange Magic stuff.

I shall try to do more of this:

- I almost fell of my chair twice this last 7 days so I am buying that gaming chair. I cannot do this weird perching-on-a-cushion thing anymore.

- Now looking for a wired keyboard and mouse, thinking of getting a keyboard with a USB port so I can attach a mouse to it. But I would also like them to have pretty colours.

- Largely I don't think I'm going to make it back to the States within 2020, so I have to look for someone to sublet my room in Berkeley. If anybody knows anyone looking for a room in the Bay, Aug - Dec 2020, at rent around $898 with awesome housemates near a BART station, hmu. My housemates have to vet the subletter, so interviews are a thing.

- My mom is so dumb, omg.

- My A/C is fixed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- I finally bought new hangers to hang up all the clothes in my luggage bags after like, months of them sitting there. My dad was all like "why can't you just use the hangers downstairs that we use for laundry" and I'm like "there would be no hangers left for laundry" and he was like "You that THAT MUCH CLOTHES?" and I'm like "look i know you are a retired gremlin slob for some of us still like having a range of professional and party clothes". Some of these clothes need to be handwashed so I'll have to set aside time for that.

- also need to catalog the books in the boxes and pack them away. I want to catalog them so i don't have to open boxes just to find out what's in them in the future!!!!

- I got myself a table clamp for holding an embroidery hoop!! Pictured here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBXSiRynfr_/ It's amazing and I'm so excited to use it more.

- Trying to plan my next embroidery project, and I need tracing paper. Of course I would only think of it when MPH has finally closed and I forgot to go back to check out its stock. I went to AEON Big yesterday, which is kind of like a local Kmart, except it is several floors and has less logic.

- I did not know it would be so hard to find large writing notebooks here. The spiral-bound notebooks are small. The ones which are thick are bound by glue and thus gonna be unhappy to write in. The ones bound through stapling, UGH, so thin. I finally bought a two-hundred pager, but it isn't very thick because it's 100 sheets, really. But I really want to do long-hand writing for the Clarion write-a-thon so here we go.

- Speaking of I'm not sure if I want to continue the novel from last year. I typed it up into the computer afterwards and then the computer died. It's now gone to the workshop, so trying to remember how much I typed up and how much revision I did to what I did type up. (There are [BRACKETS] in my handwritten draft.) I do believe that there isn't a whole lot left to write, since I hit the major climactic battle. But I also want to write something else--I have an outline for a silly Eurofantasy romance inspired by all these manhwa I keep reading.

- WORK! WORK! WORK! My second acquisition is finally coming out! ARCs of NUCLEATION are up at NetGalley and Edelweiss and it's not as popular as THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES (Kimberly doesn't have as strong a track record as RB does) so I need to figure out ways to get more people interested in it. If you like to review books set in SPACE, let me know!! NUCLEATION is one of those fun commercial books which made me go "oooOo!" when I read the first few pages.

- I am writing again and I am writing fanfic. It's basically a re-write for The Reason Why Raeliana Ended Up At The Duke's Mansion because WOW is the premise wasted on an incompetent protagonist and I just lost patience one day. It's gotten to the point where I could conceivably file the serial numbers off and pass it off as original fic, especially given the sheer number of recycled isekai stories right now.


I think that's it for now.

Yesterday I got a notice that my visa interview had been cancelled, which caused me much dismay and I might have cried and stomped around the house sobbing to get a bowl of ice cream.

Later, the Restricted Movement Order began circulating. In sum, Malaysia (or at least West Malaysia) has been told to stay home, from the 18th to the 31st.

- all returning citizens have to immediately self-quarantine
- no one's traveling out of the country
- foreign visitors and tourists are banned from entering
- all education institutions, from kindergartens to universities, public and private, have been closed
- only essential services will remain open

The Bay Area is in lockdown until the 7th, so I couldn't go back there even if I could head out earlier.


I've been struggling to focus on my work because my room isn't particularly comfortable for working, and I cannot handle being around my family for too much (working at the dining table is more physically comfortable but mentally not). I may try because my brother also works downstairs, but he also hogs the fan, and the mosquitoes come for me instead of him, and that's super annoying!

I better ask my dad what the contingency plans are. I think my mom will keep going to the shop since she's a pharmacist and we don't do a whole lot otherwise that would disrupt our lives, but I think out of all of us, only Dad does a whole lot? So he might get even more annoying.

It was really nice when my parents were away last weekend to Kenyir Dam. Mom almost didn't go because she tripped and hurt her ankle (there's always something these days). Roy and I came downstairs to let the maid clean our rooms and we just ended... sleeping on the couch together. It's been a while since I got to hang out with anyone to laze like that.

Anyway my concentration has been extremely shot recently and I am going to try to work regardless.

When I was a child, someone told me that for maximum luck, you shouldn't open your red packets for at least 2 weeks. I think that morphed into, you shouldn't open them within the first 14 days of New Year's, which culminates with Chap Goh Meh.

Since this last weekend was Chap Goh Mei I felt it was the right time to open up all the red packets to calculate my earnings, seeing as I'm unmarried still and all.

We went up to Penang on Friday, and had a reunion with my mother's family (almost all her siblings except her eldest brother, who went to Australia to be with his kids, since 3 out of his 4 are now living in Melbourne). I haven't seen my eldest aunt's sons in some time, not since their kids were toddlers, so it was kind of interesting, if a reminder of my age and how... not close I am to them. I mistook a niece for my cousin's wife which /o\ She just looks so much like the mom! But my mother's family is in many ways not "my people"--they speak Cantonese or Hokkien for most part, and it was hard trying to get to know any of the nieces without my mom interjecting all the time (which led to some ramble about how it's hard for girls to be dentists because you have to have strong hands for dental work which ?????????).

On Saturday, I followed my parents on an early morning walk around downtown Georgetown, which was mostly a trip down memory lane for them as they talked about what used to be there, or who used to live where, which is mildly interesting, but I was promised a yau char kwai at some point and got pretty hannoyed (hungry + annoyed, which is like hangry, but not so bad).

Had my dad drive me over to Charis Loke's place, where we had a nice brunch, and I was just gonna leave after, but my dad decided he wanted to nap, and so could I hang out with Charis for longer? And OF COURSE I CAN, because Charis is... really cool??? And she suggested we go over to the Thaipusam festival a few blocks away. It was a really interesting experience! In KL the place to go to for Thaipusam is Batu Caves, but it's usually crowded and my family doesn't really make it a point to go, so I've never been. Of course I grew up with the newspaper articles with the images of the intense body piercing and near mutilation that is performed during Thaipusam, but I've never seen it in person. So that took another two hours, and I posted an Instagram story of it.

I had every intention to working the rest of the afternoon but instead crashed the hell out, waking up in time for an evening dinner with some of my dad's cousins, in particular Uncle Jimmy's family. Uncle Jimmy passed away a year ago, and his sister also passed just last month (the day of the wedding I attended, in fact). Uncle Jimmy's three kids are more my kind of people, but I didn't get to sit with them, and haven't really gotten to talk to them much. I've not met them since they were teens (they're a few years younger I am; I think I last saw them in my first two years in Canada?). And sigh, my mom kept interjecting again, and it's really hard to have a basic "get to know you" conversation with her butting in with answers and questions that don't actually generate more conversation?? Anyway that was another wash, but oh well. I'll keep trying, since I do value my dad's family to some extent.

Anyway what with all the red packets!!! I've got some RM230 in cold hard cash!! Which is not bad for a season--I've had some really stellar years, but the last decade has been slim pickings since I'm not there to collect in person usually. It's also worthwhile writing down who gave which red packet... it's a bit of a surprise sometimes to see who's giving how much each year (you know the economy is taking a downturn when a wealthy uncle gives less than the years before, for example).


--

In other news, the FedEx box containing my new O1B petition has been shipped!!!! It's 18lb of paper--I need to get the PDF of the documents in the order that they are arranged and whatever else.

Since I paid premium processing, this time I'll get a response within 14 days, so the countdown now begins. My lawyer is VERY positive about my chances. After that I have to go to the US embassy here to get the actual stamp. Hopefully that all gets resolved in a month??

--

Went to the dentist for some scaling last weekend, which was in the realm of RM250, but had to go back to get my fillings fixed. The dentist told me that one of my teeth is ... 80% filling now, and one of the four remaining corners has a pretty high chance of getting cracked in the next few years, so she suggested getting an onlay. Since it's on my dad's dime, and also not in USD, I figure I might as well do that now and have less dental work to worry about in the future.

But an onlay takes about two weeks to construct, and in the meantime, I've got a temporary onlay that feels... like chewing gum?? Just the surface of it. When I scratch it, it feels hard like a regular tooth, but running my tongue over it makes me itch to remove it like an errant piece of gum!! So hopefully I'll hear sooner than two weeks for the onlay.

So the cough persists. It's annoying and my manager is getting full-blown Jewish Mom on me about it, so I'll be making calls around health centers to see if there's a place which will take my dumb uninsured butt in and have a look at it. I don't think it's an infection? I feel that if it's an infection then it should hurt? But it's also Not. Going. Away. I thought taking Mucinex would fix the problem, and it alleviated it a bit, but I still needed NyQuil to stay asleep (and NyQuil hangovers, whoof, not fun, I felt like I was about to leave my falling body a few times during work).

I've been sleeping without the heater on to see if that works, but it just makes me feel cold first thing in the morning. At the same time, breathing in the warm air seems to irritate my throat, so, ???

But it's okay enough that I've been going to work anyway. I've been slushing a lot and it feels great! Still haven't heard back from DHS about my visa, but I have the paperwork that says it's been submitted.

*

I've been bleeding around the gums, so this evening I brushed my teeth and flossed, then gargled with salt water until the bleeding stopped. Flossing is weird! Afterwards I keep wanting to press my tongue against the gaps between my teeth, and I think that's when I've done a good job. I think I'll do the salt gargle every time I floss, and moving forward, I shall try to floss at least once a week.

In the interest of self-care, I randomly bought a couple of Aveeno hand masks, because the backs of my hands were starting to feel flaky, and why the heck not. They go on like gloves, and have a tissue layer inside with the lotions or whatever the formula is. There's a tab at the wrist to tighten the whole thing and keep it in place. I could keep working on the computer as a result, and even use the phone to a limited degree.

The idea is that in ten minutes, the concoction inside soaks into your skin, and after pulling out your hands, you don't wash them off, but keep massaging the excess into your hands. So... it felt a little bit sticky and goopy, but I kept at it and didn't wash my hands until it was all completely dry. That was about 5 days ago, and my hands feel GREAT still. I usually apply lotion by squeezing a bit onto the backs of my hands, and rubbing the backs of my hands together. I figure this one time I can just give myself a few minutes to soak in the stuff instead, and I'm kinda basking in the results.

I've also been trying the Sabbatical Beauty Sakekasu mask. Unlike the clay masks I've been using, the texture is kind of grainy, and it's still not quite clear to me what full coverage is supposed to look like with this. It also tingled a bit the first time using it, so I almost thought it wasn't going to work out, just like the other masks I've tried. But the second time I used it, it didn't have the same feeling. I'm trying to lessen the redness in my cheeks, which hasn't been the case so far, but my skin definitely feels a LOT softer and smoother. Like, I can't stop touching my face XD

My morning routine so far is, face wash, witch hazel toner, serum. The Botanics serum is pretty nice, a little halfway through the bottle after a month of consistent use (well, mostly... I didn't use it when I was sick). I really want to use the sleeping mask, but until I finish the serum, it seems like overkill, so I can wait until it's all done and I've given my skin time to adjust to being off the serum.


I guess I should add "skincare" to my list of interests in my profile! XD

Saturday:

- Fran and I went out to the Embarcadero for Feebas Research stuff. It was a really interesting challenge, keeping track of Pokestops and carefully aiming Pokeballs. I usually throw carelessly because I always throw curveballs, so always get that 50XP for it and it adds up.

We then drove out of downtown before the Women's March got underway to the Pokemon Gym near my work, because I'd scored an Exclusive Raid pass out there, and invited Fran on it. Deoxys-Attack is soloable, so we took it down with little trouble, and then finished off the rest of the Feebas event. I got my shiny Feebas some 10 minutes before the end of the event! Gah.

- We then headed to Udupi Palace in the Mission. Claire texted us a few minutes before our scheduled meet-up time (2.30pm) because she had forgotten about the March and her Lyft was stuck as a result. Eric had arrived in SF a little earlier but had gone to meet Maurisa at the Black Comics Art Festival Youth Day stuff, and they also mis-timed their departure and were stuck in traffic. So... I'd been hoping to have said hi and eaten and be done by 4pm, but ended up hanging out way longer. And after a good meal we went to Dandelion Chocolates, too. So Fran and I only left way after!


Sunday:

- I went swimming.

- I then spent most of the day working on edits, and meant to do a final pass, but caught a few things I missed. I hadn't realized how bad my eyestrain is that I missed such blatant stuff. Had to miss BCAF stuff at the SFPL as a result, which I now wish I hadn't, because Rebecca Roanhorse was an interview spotlight, argh!

- In the evening, I headed over to the city for dinner with the SF in SF guests. I'd also invited Eric, but didn't realize there'd be so many people crammed around a table, and also how many white folks there'd be. Of course there're a few Jewish folks, but otherwise Eric, Bill Campbell, and I were the only visible POC at the table.

Eric dipped out after dinner, and Bill and I hung around in a pub waiting for some of the BCAF folks to come hang out. I left around 8pm.


Monday:

- 9am POC brunch! I organized this because when I lived in Riverside, and Eric and I would come up for BCAF, I wanted to see all my POC fandom friends. I don't have to worry about this now, of course, but Eric was driving in from out of town so I thought I'd organize one anyway. We went to Mo'z Cafe a few blocks from Yerba Buena, and it was GOOD. Had the crabcake florentine, and that kept me going ALL DAY.

- It was great to see the usual suspects at BCAF and also be able to chat with folks as usual about their stuff. At some point I began working the Rosarium table for Bill. The writer for Super Sikh was also there, so I had to re-organize the table a little bit so folks could talk to her while I continued shilling the rest of the merchandise.

It was a bit deflating to see people pass on our stuff simply because they were there for the comics (like literally walked away as soon as I told them many of the books were anthologies or collections), but there were folks who were still excited to see some of the stuff we had and willing to give it a try. No more copies of The Sea Is Ours by the end of the day! (Not that there were that many to start with.)

- Since Bill was staying with Rina and Jacob, and I was helping him close out, I got to tag along to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. Then Rina gave me a ride to the Bart.


Today:

- I had every intention of going to swim today, but at 4.30am (a full half hour before my 5am alarm) I woke up and rolled around a bit. When my alarm DID go off, I just.... ran out of can. I could not. I had no can left. So I set another alarm for 7am and just did a lot of deep meditative breathing. Which led to going in and out of some lucid dreaming.

I'll go tomorrow morning.

The good news is:

- My manager and boss talked about giving me one more day a week at the office! Which I could also use for slush reading, which means remotely working. Since I'm getting more into editorial, I get to be first reader, which I'm pretty excited about.

- New Suns got a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly! And I'm mentioned in it!

The bad news is:

- Gigi Gonzales, who I graduated with, and walked the commencement stage with in 2017, passed away just the other day, reportedly of cancer. I knew she'd been having health issues, which I thought was either exacerbated or caused by grad school, but I had no idea it was this bad.

I was never really close to her, but we would occasionally hang out and chat. She had to commute in from San Diego. She took an auntie-esque interest in my personal life.

I'm very glad that she finished her dissertation and that we got to walk the stage together. (My adviser was on her committee, and hooded her, because her adviser, Henk, wasn't into ceremony so didn't attend commencement.)

And I'd just written to the department admin chiding him about the website not having been updated with our dissertations. I'm going to figure out how to strongly word a request that the Dissertations page needs to be updated ASAP, if only in Gigi's memory.

*shuffles off to bed*

I've been spending most of the holidays in a state of feeling lost and anxious, mostly over things I can't control, but some over things which I could but am not sure what to do about it and whether I can (not as in, can I do it, I'm sure I can, the question is one of sustainability and maintenance). And while I'm getting a kick out of being thoughtful and junk about my future since I should be worrying about that stuff like an adult anyway post-PhD, I'm going to acknowledge also being a bit of an ingrate and not really thinking about people who've made this whole year a good one for me.

My psychiatrist was very gentle with me all through the six months I had her before my medical insurance ran out and I had to move anyway. We tried a bunch of different meds, and out of all of them, Effexor was the best, but I can mostly still function without it. Would try again though.

I reconnected with Pan Jia Ling after 14 years of no contact, by some Twitter coincidence where Grace Fong retweeted a bunch of women artists introducing themselves and I just so happened to catch Jia Ling's in my timeline. She immediately had me come out to Oakland to stay with her and give a talk at her company.

That same week, I also got to attend oyceter's wedding! She and Randy have also been so, so, so good to me. They've let me stay over their place several times, even when I've misread my bus ticket and had to bunk over one more hour, one more night. Then, when I moved to the Bay Area, they let me stay with them for a week while I began working at Tachyon and hunted for a new place to live.

yeloson has also been Homie Extraordinaire™. Over the years he's let me bunk over at his place for days at a time, he's always inviting me to do martial arts training and food and storytelling stuff (I don't grok gaming but trading worldbuilding ideas is always a great time with him). These days I get to eat with him almost weekly. He let me stay over his place too, right before I moved into my new place.

My new roommates have been great and I'm so grateful that they offered the room to me despite the fact that I may not stay here very long. It's nice to live with people who share my sense of geek chic and who take just as much interest in the household as I do. I tend to hide from them a lot because my bedroom faces the dining room, but I do like them a lot!

Since moving to the Bay, I've also gotten to see more of the people I usually only ever see at events like WisCon! I'm pretty happy with that. I miss folks from Riverside, especially my Pokemon Go friends, so it was really exciting when my usual crew came up to visit me! We walked all over UC Berkeley one day, then San Francisco the next, did a ton of raids together.

If not for Emily Jiang talking to Jacob for me about my potentially interning for Tachyon, I wouldn't have been able to just ask Jacob about working there. I mean, I'm sure I would have eventually, but I would have taken longer at it, because it felt a lot like asking for a favour.

Jacob apparently pushed Jill to at least meet with me for an interview, and I think it was a good interview where clearly all our goals were aligned. I'm so grateful to them for giving me that chance! Learning at Tachyon has been so great, and watching how Jacob and Jill work gives me high hopes that this is a thing I could conceivably do in the future myself. I may only go in three days a week, but every day is a good day with good people. After years spent in a dysfunctional space where I had to soothe many fellow grad students, it's been a joy to just come into the office to be with people who love books just because they like books and not because of academic cred, who also like food (a lot of chocolate has been consumed this holiday season), and who also just like their work a lot.

( on other fronts )

I've been doing quite a bit over the last couple of weeks:

- Publishers Marketplace announced Rose Lemberg's novella sale to Tachyon, and I'm the editor for the project! I'm hoping the feedback I give on it will really help. I need to earn that Associate Editor title.

- I'm struggling to write a review of an anthology. Part of it (well, a major part of it) has to do with reading it on the phone and I find myself at a loss reviewing something that I can't thumb through easily. I'm not sure what the fix is. I think the ebook revolution is great for like quick reads but for those of us who want more engagement with the work, paper works are still a must.

- I'm also struggling to get started on the new novel, an Asian fantasy romance. I've got the outline ready and I'm re-reading old drafts to see what I can salvage.

- My old laptop died, after five years of dissertation writing. I'm still thinking about sending it in to Asus to see if I can get it fixed, because it seems to be a motherboard issue. The rest of the keyboard is just fine. But it might just be an unnecessary expense? I also bought a new HP Pavilion 360 for about ~$800 (that's computer, plus MS Office software, plus antivirus, plus 1 year of Geek Squad help). I'm still getting used to the keyboard--it's deeper than the Asus, which I hadn't anticipated being a problem, and the up and down keys on it are way small. The keys are nice and wide though, and I like the size (10") better than the larger ones.

- I'm trying out OneNote for writing my draft, rather than the old way of using multiple Notepad files (LOL).

- I sucked it up and bought a domain! http://jaymeegoh.com is now a thing! It still needs work--I need to put in links to all the interviews I've done and a press kit, but the bare basics are up.

- I went to the SF Tea Festival last weekend! It was a lot of fun, and I bought a bit of tea. Mostly I went to hang with folks, and afterwards we all went to ladyjax's place for food.

- I performed last night! I wrote a short piece of utopian fiction for F&B: Voices from the Kitchen after being scouted on Twitter. I was the only science fiction writer in the lineup of memoirs and personal essays and someone had a piece about tea. There was a lot of food at the event too, since the organization putting it on is an incubator for entrepeneurs to start restaurants in the Bay area, particularly immigrant women.

The event was at Brava Theater, which I'd passed by a few times already but never went in. It's an Art Deco venue that focuses on Latin@ events.

Fran came as my plus one, and there was a reception beforehand with pupusas, and an afterparty at the restaurant of one of the graduates of the incubator's program, a really interesting Indian restaurant.

- On a whim, I got on the Antioch line to go to Rockridge, where Safeway is, and there's also a Trader Joe's nearby. I sometimes walk to Safeway when I want cheaper groceries and have the spoons to walk there (it's a 25 minute walk, as opposed to the 10 minute walk to Berkeley Bowl which is famed for its organic produce but honestly with my meat-heavy diet it's not worth it). I got frozen tamales! I'm very excited about this. I got also other groceries like cereal and shredded cheese and walked home.

- I felt like garbage today and couldn't go into Locus. I tried to write today too but it's been hard. Stayed in bed until noon, and while I'm not exactly sick, I'm really really fatigued: been going to bed at midnight and waking up at 6. I don't think my body likes that! Hopefully with all the rest I got, I'll be able to write today!

I don't actually remember a whole lot about my birthday week but that's okay! I know I had one chocolate thing a day.

On Tuesday, I had a date! With the same guy. He picked me up from the nearby public library, drove us to the Haight, and we had some bbq food. Then he drove out to the Marin, and I got him to take me out to the Wave Organ so I could visit it for the first time since moving here!

He had also bought me not just one but TWO kinds of cake, so I could pick one (black forest versus chocolate mousse; I picked the latter, because I'm not a fan of black forest). We went to someplace secluded and had cake, and it was great.

Wednesday, I went to an event at Moe's. Nick Mamatas, Tim Pratt, and Meg Elison chatted about stuff, rather than did the traditional reading, which I think is really fun! I thought they had some great banter, and Nick is always entertaining. I did not buy any books. I did stop by the Starry Plough to get some brownie but forgot that they take 30 minutes to make a brownie!! So I had to settle for something else. I got grilled cheese. (I had their cheese pizza last night which was pretty great.)

Thursday, Fran and I went for rice triangles!!! There's a cute place in Rockridge that does that and it's really nice! Then we went for ice-cream! Because heck yeah!

Friday, went with yeloson for Chinese food, and this was followed by a trip to the Little Giant Ice Cream Shop for bourbon-infused chococolate in root beer.

My Pokemon Go family, Tara, Isaiah, and Tomas, drove up to play in UC Berkeley and the Embarcadero!! We went for brunch at Lois the Pie Queen on Saturday, and then assorted places along the waterfront on Sunday. These are my people who go HARD on the game--I finally got my Shiny Articuno!

So, turning 34 was a good time.