I’ll be running a giveaway sometime in February, possibly through Goodreads. More on that soon!

If you want to do more to help victims of anti-LGBTQ bullying, support the Trevor Project.

I’m having a pretty busy week, so I leave you with links:

• A great interview at the Paris Review blog with Michael Cunningham. I find him so charming in interviews and am really looking forward to picking up By Nightfall. (Hat tip to Michael Fauver for linking the interview.)
• Alexander Chee on teaching the graphic novel.
• A very sensible piece about how many copies books usually sell.
• A petition to tell Silsbee High School (in Texas — oh, Texas) that it’s really not okay to kick a girl off the cheerleading squad when she refuses to cheer for her rapist individually by name. Based on the information in that article, the high school’s action was supported by a truly bizarre court decision, which claims that cheerleaders are only “mouthpieces” for the school and cannot refuse to cheer. It’s like a creepy sf novel.
• And a palate cleanser: Scottish wildcats, and one British scientist getting very excited about them (check out the embedded videos).

And, also, you know, not boring.

In the interest of not being boring, I’ve also slimmed down the number of other pages on the site a bit. My old summer reading lists (from 2006 and 2007) have gone private, though you can still ponder my book preferences on Goodreads if that’s your thing — I never did manage to go back and add many books read before I joined the site, but I’m reasonably good about updating it because I love the idea of Goodreads so much. (And because I sometimes look at reader reviews of my book, fine, I admit it.)

I’m going to try to keep up the pace of posting I managed through most of the spring and early summer, or something approaching it. I’m officially on fellowship now, though, and my main goal needs to be to follow Dear Sugar’s advice. That means I really should not be spending time looking at beautiful fake Criterion DVD covers or watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt insist to the world that you make him feel like a natural woman. It also means that I may go quiet here occasionally. But I’ve really enjoyed blogging more regularly this year, and with the paperback release of Alcestis coming up in February, I hope to continue to have plenty to say.

I’ve also added two new pages to the site: one contains an excerpt from Alcestis, and the other features extra bits of material related to the book. If you have any other questions, comments, or suggestions about material for the site, please let me know.

…

I don’t think that person really understands how search engines work.

I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade WordPress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.

By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.

Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.

A few good things to report: I’m planning my trip to the 2008 SEASECS meeting in Auburn to give a paper on Charlotte Charke; I’ll be seeing Jerome McGann speak next Friday (more than once!); Thanksgiving approaches, which means a much-needed trip to Oregon to see my parents. The HRC has been incredibly busy for the last several weeks, and so have I. I’m reading Laetitia Pilkington’s memoirs and drilling the irregular future tense stems in French.

Speaking of Oregon, here’s a sad but quirky-sweet tribute to the store cat at Powell’s Technical Books, Fup, who recently had to be put to sleep at the age of 19. I’ve been to that store two or three times and never saw her, which is kind of amazing, since T. claims that my superpower is seeing cats wherever I go. Fup was also the star of an ongoing mini-adventure serial in the Powell’s newsletter, apparently; you can read them here.

More posting later, when I am not stricken with post-migraine fragility. Bah.