Hello, journal folks. I hope those participating are having a successful (so far) NaNoWriMo!!

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that this has been my Year of 10% Off Projects With No Rape, and I would like to report it's chugging along pretty nicely. I've gotten some projects I don't think I would have seen had people not heard about the 10% off deal, and they've been very very cool.

I'm posting for two reasons:

1. If you haven't heard, I'm offering 10% off projects with no rape in them this year! So if you're looking for an editor, or you know someone who is, and your projects have no rape, please get in touch before the end of 2015. This brings my rate down to $67.50/hour, and as always I offer payment plans, etc.

2. This has been a cool thing, and I'm thinking next year I should offer 10% off for something else. But what? Anyone with an idea should let me know, either here or by email - anna@annagenoese.com.

Happy Monday, folks. I have no pistachio muffins, sadly, but I do have dark chocolate caramel wedges from Trader Joes. One must sacrifice.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

Wow, hello, journal platform people! It's been almost a year! You can always find me at annagenoese, and right now I'm doing tumblr at dngrcpckwithmurdericing, although that's in no way professional at all and mostly hockey players doing hockey and shoving each other. (Insert joke about how that's the same thing here.)

Today I am here to recommend a great book I read on the bus this morning: Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains

This is the autobiography of a Ukranian Jewish woman who traveled from Ukraine to the United States in 1894 to marry a (Jewish) man she'd never met and start a life with him. She tells about how they decide to homestead in rural northeast North Dakota with his family, and the perils and successes. This is not a Jewish Little House -- this is much more stark, and much more to the point about poverty and privilege. It does not read the way current autobiographies/memoirs do -- it's much more like a letter Rachel Bella Kahn Calof wrote to her descendants so they would know about her life and struggles, so they would be able to know what her life had been at the turn of the century.

The autobiography itself is bookended by an "acknowledgments" that discusses the way the autobiography was discovered in historical archives, written in Yiddish on a "Clover Leaf Linen" writing tablet and translated into English and typed by children and grandchildren and then an "epilogue" written by the youngest son, who tells of what his mother leaves out about the rest of her life, giving an "ending" to the story, so to speak. At the end of the book are also two great, if much more academic, essays about Jewish homesteaders in the history of the United States, which I very much enjoyed reading.

I know a lot of you are interested in Jewish history the way I am, so I thought some of you might like to read this!


( TW: Pet deathCollapse )


I hope everyone is having a good Friday! Have a great weekend! Read some good books!

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

I've had a lot of potential clients have issues with pricing this year, and trust me when I tell you that I really get that. I was able to work it out with a lot of them. I'm lucky because now that I have a day job, I can be a lot more flexible about pricing and about payment plans.

I thought it would be nice, to celebrate Hanukkah and the solstice, to offer a sale to everyone, not just the people who come to me and ask for it.

My usual price is $75/hour, and I normally ask new clients for a deposit of 50% of the estimated total to hold a spot in my schedule for anything someone wants me to do.

SALE: If you contract with me between now and 31 December for any job that you want me to do between now and July 2015, my price will be $50 per hour, and the deposit will be 25% of the estimated total. Additionally, you can split that 25% into two payments, one in December, and one in January.

Please get in touch with me if you'd like to hire me to edit your work! anna@annagenoese.com

( in brief, the types of editing I offerCollapse )

Happy Hanukkah!

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

It was pointed out to me the other day that I am extremely difficult to buy for. I completely disagree. Just pay a little bit of attention. You can always buy me a book!

Like, the number one thing I want from any person is a book. A book you love. If you have time, annotate it. A book you love that you've annotated ("And this is the part that I thought was perfect when I was 15...") is precious.

This kneejerk reaction had me listing off things as I fell asleep the other night. What other stuff do I always like from people? What do I collect? Example: My mom likes horse stuff, and she wears a lot of pins. So I might buy her a pin that is a stylized gold horse. What do I have that's like that? What have I "settled into" as I've grown older?

Here's the other stuff I came up with:

- pine. Anything pine. People on a budget can buy me the cheapest pine-scented tea light candles from the dollar store and I'll be thrilled. I own tons of pine candles, actually, I am never tired of them.

- malachite. Anything malachite. Just the stones, big rocks of the stuff, jewelry. I'm a silver-tone person, my ring sizes go from about 12 to about 13, and kimbaandjane custom-makes my necklaces and knows what I like.

- cat toys. I have three cats! Anything for my cats -- cat toys, snacks, whatever.

- yarn. From fingering weight to bulky, whatever, 400 yds or more of any yarn in any fiber, pretty much. I even like acrylic. I like purples and oranges and greens.

- donations in my name. I am big on anything that feeds children or helps people get abortions for the most part. I also really love food pantries in general. I don't really care how much the donation is. $1. There, you've given me a gift.

- a nice card that says "I love you." I mean, if that's appropriate. (Sometimes it is really not appropriate. Sometimes it's creepy. But that doesn't stop some people. And those people really need to stop, wow.)

And, I mean, money, of course, but it seems gauche to put it out there. But I just did, oh well.

I think about gifts a lot, actually, because I like to think of myself as someone who is good at giving them. But I am bad at giving them on a timetable. Give you a great gift for your birthday? Not so much, I will probably take you out for a meal instead. Give you a great gift in the middle of the week randomly? Yeah, I'm on it. I think that's mostly because I am often thinking about the people I love, and that means I often see things that remind me of them. And I tend to impulsively buy or make those things, and then I cannot wait. I cannot. I cannot wait to give my loved ones these gifts. So it's Hanukkah in October!

What gifts do you like to get?????

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

My post about the OTW got some weird (to me) reactions. (In fact, I got a bunch of emails from staffers I had worked closely with, all apologizing if they had "made" me quit. NO NO NO, my darlings, no.)

So I realized I need to clarify a couple of things.

I didn't step down because of any staff or volunteers. The staff and volunteers of the OTW are pretty much all amazing. Even the ones with whom I never saw eye to eye about anything. I didn't step down because of the amount of "executive staff" type of work I was doing. I didn't step down because of the amount of work -- as I mentioned in my other post, I would have joyfully gone on giving the OTW 40 - 50 hours every week of my time if needed or wanted.

I didn't step down for any reason other than I found trying to work with the rest of the Board like pushing a boulder uphill and having it roll down on top of me and flatten me over and over. Even with two really incredible staffers who I deeply respect joining Board for the 2015 term, I couldn't countenance another two years of it. I just couldn't.

I do feel horrible and guilty and like I've abandoned the staff and volunteers, but those who had close contact with the other current Board members know what it was like and hopefully empathize and understand my decision.

I have a huge amount of respect for the staff and volunteers who keep on keeping on.

So. Right after that, bright and early Monday morning before the sun was even up, I left for #bbcon (lol) -- the Blackbaud convention for nonprofits that centers around their products nonprofits use, like Raisers Edge and The Financial Edge and... whatnot. My day job uses Raisers Edge for stuff, so I got sent off to Nashville to experience this convention. Its equivalent in SF/F is apparently SDCC because there were thousands of people there, and the convention center was about a mile long and at one point I just collapsed onto a bench and laid down on it because I simply could not keep walking. (Yes, that is what I imagine SDCC to be like, but... with comics.)

On my way there, at a client's request, I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I actually have owned it since it came out, since I loved Sharp Objects and Dark Places. I just never got around to reading it, so reading it as homework for a client was a perfect opportunity. And, unsurprisingly, I really loved it. I actually have a lot to say about it, but I'm not settled on what I want to say in my head because I'm still distracted by how much I loved it. I predicted almost the whole plot -- up to a point, and I'm not sure how I feel about that point.

(I'm told there is a movie? This is what I get for getting all my news of the world through Tumblr. ha ha.)

Once at the convention, I read Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son, which was divine and great and full of wit and charm, exactly what you'd expect from him. Recommended. However, it's not really an autobiography so much as it is a memoir about a specific piece of his life around his father dying. I really wanted more autobiographical details. Because I'm nosy. How did he meet his partner and how did he figure out he was bisexual and tell me more about filming Spy Kids and how handsome is Antonio Banderas in person for real and so on. But the book itself is really compelling and wonderful. Two thumbs up, five stars, etc.

On my way home, I read Gillian Anderson's A Vision of Fire, co-written by Jeff Rovin. I hadn't realized there was a co-writer or I would have been giving him credit this whole time. My apologies.

It was very charming. There was what I am calling "accidental racism" (having an Indian girl be possessed by the spirit of dead Vikings, basically? More complicated than that, but basically); and there is some sloppiness in the "action" sequences since they are done in first-person POV. But ultimately it was greatly enjoyable. It was actually way better than I thought it would be. I had girded myself to read it the whole way through even if it were terrible, but it wasn't! I liked it! I kind of want a sequel! I really liked the way it ended! I liked the mythos! I was sad it was so short! A++++ effort.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

For the last three years, I've been volunteering with the Organization for Transformative Works, and for the past year I've had a seat on the Board of Directors. I know I don't talk a lot about that here, but I want to for a moment just so that there's a public record somewhere. Because I've just resigned, and I want to make sure there's a place people can go to see why.

I have resigned because even though the Strategic Planning Committee is amazing, and they are working hard to bring the organization in a direction I'm more comfortable with, ultimately the OTW is not organized in a way that I find personally comfortable.

Mainly, though, many of the other board directors and I just don't have the same values around work, professionalism, and the way organizations should be run. That makes trying to get things done very frustrating for me, and interactions become fraught with tension even about the most innocent of subjects. The professionalism issue isn't just about getting work done or meeting deadlines or putting in the necessary time to make sure issues are handled properly -- it's also about having to deal with outright rudeness and disrespect.

With jobs, some of these issues are things to "suck up" and handle because there's an exchange of goods/services; with a volunteer organization, the volunteering itself is the exchange, and I'm not coming out with enough things in my "pro" column to justify to myself this use of my time.

I want to make it clear that I'm not burned out on the work -- I'd happily put in 40 - 50 hours per week of volunteer time for the OTW's mission (and some weeks indeed I did!). This is about not being able to work with the other Board members and not being able to work within the unhealthy and unsustainable structure that currently exists for OTW volunteers.

It sucks, but that's the way it is right now. Hopefully the org can right itself. I wanted to help with that, but after three years, I'm done. It's work for other people now, and I wish those people the best.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

Right now I'm working with a client on his 350,000-word novel, so there's not a whole ton of time for reading for fun. But I've fit a bit in!

I finally finished Ancillary Justice. I can completely see how other people love this book, but I just didn't ~get it~. I will likely pick up the next one anyway, but I wish it had hit me as hard as it hit others.

After that, I read Smoke Gets in your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty. It's a memoir about a year spent working at a crematorium. Sadly, it is not as interesting as it sounds. It's written in a style that I loathe -- that of the Jezebel/Mary Sue article. The author, who is actually a pretty famous mortician (as morticians go) unsurprisingly has written a bunch of articles for Jezebel. She's also really judgy about the people she meets in the course of her life and the way they deal with death. On the other hand, going by what she says about her own thoughts about death and the way current US culture deals with death, she's probably a super great mortician who would do a really good job handling someone's death. And I definitely know people who would love this book. (They also read Jezebel regularly! To each their own!)

Then I finished With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. It's a memoir about the Pacific theater during WWII. I am pretty obsessed with WWII (as y'all know), but I don't actually know anything about the fighting. This might actually be the first book I've ever read about the actual fighting during WWII. It was very informative. Also about the Marines!

(Once when I was ten, I wanted to join the Marines or be a Navy SEAL. Then I learned women weren't allowed to join the SEAL teams, and lost all interest in the armed forces.)

It is, of course, really upsetting, and full of graphic details of death and war, and there is a ton of racism. And there was nothing about Jews or Nazis at all -- it was all about hating Japanese people, which is not a part of WWII I have spent a ton of time focused on. Very depressing. I don't mind hating Nazis at all, but the author's fierce dedication to hating Japanese people (and it's not even like there was any kind of reason -- just "we're at war with these people therefore I hate them"; what.) was unnerving and upsetting. Not recommended, unless you're doing research or something.

After that, I was ready for something a little lighter, so I moved on to what I thought would be, like, a kind of easy murder mystery procedural: Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman. It starts out with, like, thirty pages of detailed, horrible rape and rape aftermath. The rest of the book is about a woman realizing the man she's prosecuting for murder is the guy who raped her.

I think the big thing with this book was that there's supposed to be a "trick" of the plot, but since I saw it coming from, like, 1/3 of the way through, it didn't work for me. But I did kind of enjoy the writing, so I also read its sequel, The Last Witness, which is pretty much a direct sequel about the same characters and the same rapist.

Figuring out plots and then being disappointed when what I'm reading/watching doesn't have anything going for it besides its plot is a big theme in my life. I am the person who guessed in the middle of Scream that there were two killers. I am the person who turned to my girlfriend in the theatre and said, "Oh, he's dead," about a third of the way through The Sixth Sense, not realizing that was going to be the big reveal at the end, because it seemed so obvious at the beginning.

(I have a prediction about what the season-long plot of How to Get Away with Murder is going to be -- I got through the first episode's plot really quickly.)

To be fair, sometimes getting the plot out of the way is what I love about a show. For example, Elementary: once I've figured out the plot, I can focus on enjoying the characters!

In WWII news, I am finally reading Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I've read other Arendt before (my college girlfriend was obsessssssssssed with her), but this is the first time I'm reading the controversial Eichmann book. Except... you know, fifty years later, it's actually not really super controversial. Fifty years later, the idea that evil can be banal is hugely... normal. The knowledge that there were Jewish officials who collaborated with Nazis... well, that's what happened. In 1963, the scandal of the articles and book -- I mean, she got death threats for what I now can't imagine being unknown much less radical or scandalous.

I'm only halfway through, but I'm loving it. Of course I am, it's Arendt, who doesn't love Arendt?

Anyway, upcoming for me is two conferences back to back -- one here in MD and one in TN. So I will be reading The Lotus and the Storm by Lan Cao over those days. And I am so excited because Tuesday is the day when we get Gillian Anderson's book A Vision of Fire AND Alan Cummings's Not My Father's Son! Bisexual Actor Book Tuesday!

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

Last week, I rather unexpectedly adopted a cat. Back in January, my beloved Shiksa died of a heart attack. I thought to myself, Two cats is enough. But Vincent and Theodore have been rather lost without a third -- without an alpha female bossing them around. And one of my close friends found a post about a DC-area alpha female who needed a home.

Just a few days later, I'd adopted her.

I named her Queen Esther, but have ended up calling her Hadassah all the time. (I have had to explain to a lot of people why Queen Esther and Hadassah are interchangeable names to my mind. Even Jewish people. ngl, that is very surprising.)

Here are some pictures:

• The moment I realized I was going to end up calling her Hadassah even though I named her Esther


• Vincent trying to make friends.


• Theodore trying to make friends.


• Hadassah exploring my bookshelf.

She is tiny -- she weighs about 7 lbs. To give you a sense of scale, Vincent weighs 19. Shiksa weighed 26.


...Now. Book log.

I am still struggling with Ancillary Justice. It is just really not for me.

Last night I read the new Tana French - The Secret Place. I thought she did an amazing job with the voices of the teenage girls, but I did not understand at all what the hell the paranormal elements were doing in there.

The mystery was okaaaaay but I am tired of books narrated by dudes that are books about women. The book would have been plenty interesting if it had been narrated by the woman who was the lead detective investigating the case. I didn't have any empathy or interest in the male narrator observing all the women who he continually reminded us he could never understand because he's a man. Tedious.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

This weekend I had the Monday (today) off from my day job, so it's been lazy around these parts. Except not really; I've been reading and crafting all weekend. I wrote a short story as a gift for a friend; I scrubbed the bathroom (buying what is, in fact, the first cleaning supplies for this apartment... after six months of living in it); I cross-stitched a gift for another friend; I'm working on knitting a shawl.

I feel back in the swing of life, which is hilarious since this is probably the hottest weekend since I moved here and even with the temp in my apartment set to 75F, the a/c has been on the whole time. (Which makes me feel like I'm melting and is awful, yet has not stopped me from running around.)

Book log!

Solipsist by Henry Rollins. It's the last of the books I read this weekend, but I'm putting it first because I didn't finish it. It's depressing as hell, a stream of consciousness narrative about suicide and depression and murder. It's supposedly fiction, but it reminds me of nothing so much as Grey by Pete Wentz, which I still haven't read more than 10ish pages of. So much fiction is really autobiography or wishful thinking in disguise, in my experience, and this (and Grey) moreso than most. Grey even has passages I recognized easily from PWentz's online journals (yes, I'm an aficionado, ahem); I'm sure that if I were more familiar with HRollins's journals from the late 90s, I'd recognize passages from those in this.

Anyway, I had to give it up about 1/4 of the way through, because there's not even a narrative, it's just fantasies about killing animals and suicide and murder and hopelessness the whole way through.

Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright. I read this when I was... seven? I loved it back then, and it stuck with me all these years; Minnehaha especially. Two kids, exploring the woods, hanging out in a secret clubhouse, meeting cool adults. It was great to reread it. Not so great was the stuff that I realized I did not even remember being in the book -- I remembered the girl character and boy character doing the same things and having basically the same thoughts. But actually there is a whole thing from the male characters about how curtains are for women, and only girls are interested in fashion; the girl characters squeal at bugs and mice and run away from scary things while the boys are brave, blah blah blah.

I did not remember that being in the books at all. It made me wonder if I absorbed it without realizing as a child, or if I immediately discarded it as ridiculous and rewrote the book in my head. Probably a bit of both, but more the latter? I hope more the latter.

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek MD and T.J. Mitchell. Loved this!! An account memoir-style of Melinek's first year as a forensic pathologist. Despite all the murder and suicide and 9/11 stuff, it was a really light read. I read it Friday night all the way through, and really enjoyed it. (Totally recommended for people who are doing research for characters, too; there is a lot of detail.) However, I was not thrilled with her chapter on how much she hates people who commit suicide. Her dad committed suicide when she was a child and she has a lot to say about people who do that, and lingers on the subject in a truly obnoxious way. Suicides are threaded throughout the book, but there's a whole chapter devoted to some bullshit. Skip that, and the book is fantastic.

...and, of course, I am reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie as I said I would do, but I keep putting it down. I'm finding it a slog, even though it has bits that shine.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.

Over the weekend, I was in NYC visiting my nephew:



While there, I read... The Hot Zone by Richard Preston.

Basically it is a zombie novel but about real life, because it's the story of the emergence of Ebola. And everything about Ebola is like a zombie novel (especially the Mira Grant Newsflesh trilogy). I took immense glee in reading about the way the virus works and all the science-y stuff.

(When I told my mom, "I don't know, I'd rather die from Ebola than Spanish flu," she shifted her chair away from me.)

(Last year, I read The Great Influenza, and it scared the shit out of me. Ebola seems awful, but less painful for everyone involved.)

Somehow I ended up with only non-fiction on my ereader, so I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I do have some nice fiction paperbacks at home, but I don't like to carry those around. My train ride on the way home from NYC was 100% fanfic and editing a YA sf novel, so maybe I'm due for more non-fiction. Or maybe I should finally read Ancillary Justice, which I bought when it came out and then never read because someone I hated posted about how much they loved it. Yes, I am small and petty and probably that was cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Just look at the picture of baby feet again:



Also, look! The Humble Bundle Book Perk bundle is mighty tempting.

This entry is cross-posted from alg@dreamwidth.org, where it has comments.