She'd tripped over something in the dark, and hadn't wanted to bother anyone, so lay in her room in agony for four hours. Bizarrely, that bit I understand. The bit I don't understand is the making me a cup of tea with a broken arm. (Not that I'm not grateful. It was a very nice cup of tea.)
Several X-rays later, it seems the bone is cracked, not broken, her arm is now in a sling, she's on painkillers, is much happier, and she won't actually be playing the violin when Folk Underground appear at the Duluth Renfest this weekend. And I'll be making my own tea.
So I'll just post a bunch of links and things. Apologies to all of you who sent me these for not including your whole messages:
There's a poster for Howl's Moving Castle up at nausicaa.net. Diana Wynne Jones! Miyazaki! I'm really, really looking forward to it.
On the subject of Japan, I've been fascinated by this Japanese news summary site. Part of it, I'm sure is just the way things are phrased: TOKUSHIMA -- A company president who set up a surveillance camera in a dormitory for female Chinese trainee students "to prevent the trainees from disappearing" faces charges for peeping, police said left me with a short story in my head, in which people slowly vanish away, and eventually completely disappear, unless they're watched by helpful other people with surveillance cameras all the time. While the headline Probe shows adults rampantly approaching kids for sex left me pondering the unfortunate set of meanings of the word rampantly.
There are plans afoot for thousands of Christians to move to South Carolina, and then secede from the union. No word on what the South Carolinans think about this.
Some nice person in Hawaii sent me this link to an article about a Childrens literature conference with a lovely photo of The Wolves in the Walls.
There are a bunch of things coming out I've not mentioned, that I probably should. This is the cover of the forthcoming Harper Childrens edition of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. The red circle, which you can't quite read, tells you that the first printing is a limited edition which comes with a free CD of me reading the story.
This is the cover of Fantagraphics' book of interviews, Hanging Out With the Dream King, by Joe McCabe. The cover, at least at this stage in its design, sort of misses out on telling what's actually interesting about the book, which is it isn't that it's a book of interviews with me (well, it has one) but more with people I've worked with and collaborated with -- Joe's interviewed people as diverse as Tori Amos and Alice Cooper, Charles Vess and Sam Kieth, and pretty much everyone else he could find. The cover photo looks like it's me in a padded cell, but it was actually taken in the Library Hotel last year, the day after the signing that went on forever.
This rather gorgeous image is listed on Amazon as the cover of Creatures of the Night, the upcoming Michael Zulli book, containing adaptations of "The Price" and "Daughter of Owls". Actually the cover looks like this. The first image is part of the cover that Michael Zulli has done for the second "Creatures of the Night" book, his adaptation of "The Facts in the Case of the Dissapearance of Miss Finch". Here's more about the first book. It's a hardback -- uniform with P Craig Russell's Murder Mysteries and John Bolton's Harlequin Valentine.
I was fascinated and amused by the story of Pete the Public Service Porno Puppet.
Oliver Morton's comments on the Beagle Report, or lack thereof, over at Mainly Martian, strike me as one of the joys of blogs: informed, timely, sensible commentary by someone in a position to know something about the subject -- in this case, Mars, and how to land on it, or not.