One of my favorite Khristmas specials starts with the line, "In all this world, there is nothing so beautiful as a happy child." The special is "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus," based on the book of the same name by L. Frank Baum. I love the sense of magic and the feel of a complete, original mythology in L. Frank Baum's version of the story of Santa Claus. It always makes me uncomfortable when Santa Claus mythology is combined with Christian mythology. The two don't really fit together. And while I enjoy movies like The Santa Clause (starring Tim Allen), there is a flippant quality to the mythology in them that isn't satisfying. There is something wonderful and deeply true about the way that the Sesame Street Khristmas special and the classic letter to Virginia in the New York Sun answer the questions behind the idea of Santa Claus, in a sense, by un-asking them. Very zen. Very true. Nonetheless, I do like to see Santa Claus turned into a story that has a mythological wholeness to it.

This is all beside the point, though. Watching "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus" with Elaine this Khristmas, I found myself struck by that first line. I'd never paid overmuch attention to it before. I accepted it as a reasonable-seeming concept, although, it in no way spoke to me. Now that I have a child though, I find that it both speaks to me and that I can no longer accept it as reasonable.

There is a great deal that is beautiful in this world. A happy child is a beautiful thing. But, unless you are a human, biased by the drug-like chemicals that wash over your brain to reward you whenever you see happy infants and children, a happy child doesn't outshine all the other things of great beauty in this world.

A sleeping tiger. The flower-like wings of a deadly preying mantis. Waterfalls. Trees. Snowflakes. Grains of sand, greatly magnified. Two cats playing. A Sheltie prancing in the tall grass of a field. Only humans, under the influence of the drugs generated by their own brains, think that a happy child outshines all these other beauties. Without that peculiarly slanted vision, a happy child is merely a piece of all the other natural beauty in the world we live in.

Elaine asked me to remind her what number comes after thirteen. So, I offered to count with her. We recited numbers together until the mid-thirties, at which point most numbers were accompanied by a break for hysterical giggling. Elaine still doesn't see why we would bother having so many numbers. They're so unnecessary! And therefore comical.

Once we got up to one hundred, Elaine seemed to have the pattern down, so I broke off and let her keep counting alone. Once she reached the hundred-teens, the following conversation ensued:

"Is that all the numbers?" Elaine asked.

"No, it goes on forever," I replied.

"Forever?"

"Yeah, you can count forever."

"But then I won't eat anymore!" she exclaimed.

"You won't eat?" I asked her, baffled.

"If I keep counting forever," she explained in a nearly incoherent burble, "then I won't eat anymore! I have to eat too! And I'll miss school!"

Clearly, numbers are terribly dangerous objects. We really shouldn't keep so many around.

Arthur C. Clarke is a writer who I found highly influential back in high school. I read his 2001 series, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End, and a massive number of his short stories, even though I wasn't particularly a fan of short stories at the time. The last time I read anything by Arthur C. Clarke, however, was probably more than a decade ago when 3001: The Final Odyssey came out.

I know that many of the books I loved in high school have paled some with age -- others, that I couldn't stand in high school, I've come to realize have profound depth and subtlety. (Such as the entire works of Jane Austen and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin.) In fact, over time, I've come to suspect that I preferred a certain type of 2-dimensional, cardboard character when I was younger. I found them easier to understand. Science interested me more than people, so I preferred authors who wrote about science (Clarke, Asimov) to those who wrote about people.

My tastes have changed some over the years. Deep Space Nine taught me to appreciate politics, handled well. Jane Austen and an excellent college professor taught me to appreciate irony. And I think that simply spending more time on this planet filled with people has taught me to have more interest in the stories of other humans. (Though, I do still prefer animals and aliens.)

All of that said, I have found it extremely pleasant, comforting, and downright restful to revisit Arthur C. Clarke by way of reading The Songs of Distant Earth this week. (A book that I'd never read before.) I don't believe, by any means, that it's his best work, but it's written in a voice that I haven't listened to in many years. And, no matter how much I've changed in the last decade or so, I still find it to be a really wonderful, thought-provoking and thoughtful, intelligent, well-considered voice. The words that Arthur C. Clarke had to share with the world are words worth hearing. It's an amazing treasure that there are still words of his for me to discover so many years after his death.

Arthur C. Clarke, you are still missed.

Last year during NaNoWriMo, "Write or Die" (http://writeordie.com/) was all the rage. It's basically a box that you can write in, and it will punish you if you stop writing. Depending on the setting, it may punish you by beginning to delete the words that you've already written. Apparently, some people find this motivating. I just find it frightening.

This year, however, there's something that I think really might work. "Written? Kitten!" (http://writtenkitten.net/) is a similar box in a webpage that you write in -- except, this one rewards you with pictures of kittens! I had to test it out, you know, to see the first kitten picture. It turned out to be an old-timey style drawing of a little girl clutching a gray kitten above a Valentine's heart. Excellent motivation! I'll probably try doing some of my real writing in the Written? Kitten! box later, but, for now, here's the 100 words I wrote to earn that first kitten:

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Elaine. She was young and clever. And oh so terribly mischievous! She lived in a house with three loyal dogs and five wise cats. Of all these pets, the one she loved best was Kelly, an orange and black Halloween cat. Kelly's stripes blended from orange through gray to the deepest midnight. So, sometimes when she curled up in a ball to sleep, she looked like a pumpkin. Other times, she would stare at you with her golden eyes, and the black in her fur would shine with the darkness of her heart. For she was an evil cat.

Watching the word counts go up all around me, as various writers I know tackle the behemoth that is NaNoWriMo, makes me wish that I could be playing that masochistic, addictive game again. However, I've decided that it will be better for me overall if I give NaNoWriMo a skip this year. I've had a very busy year, writing-wise, and I don't think I have the energy for another all-out push at the word count right now. (I already played that game this summer with writing several short stories for anthology deadlines.) I do have a number of projects that I desperately need to make progress on, but I think they'll all be better served by a more fluid, flexible pace.

By the end of Rainfurrest: I met all kinds of amazing people and had the most fun I've ever had at a con.

I got to be on two panels with Alan Dean Foster, which was a real highlight. And, according to the feedback I got, I was actually good at being on writing panels! (Given my painful shyness and fear of public speaking, that was not something I actually expected.) I really enjoyed telling people about my experiences as a writer and teaching what I know about writing, and a number of people told me that they found my comments on the panels to be insightful and interesting. One man even told me that he liked what he'd seen of my sense of humor on one panel enough that he went right to the dealers' room and bought my book.

Which brings us to "Otters In Space"... After selling a couple copies of it at WorldCon, I was almost out of the box I ordered last summer. So, in a fit of optimism, I ordered an entire second box, and the people at the FurPlanet table were kind enough to agree to carry them for me in the dealers' room. I figured I'd probably sell better than at WorldCon, since Rainfurrest is a much more targeted audience for a book about talking cats, dogs, and otters. However, I never imagined I would actually sell out during the weekend! By the end, I had to find a way to clip a ballpoint pen to my badge, because it was just too inconvenient to keep digging it out to sign copies of "Otters In Space" and the Rainfurrest anthology (which had two of my stories in it) all the time. I'm pretty sure that this is the best problem I've ever had.

On top of all the writerly goodness, though, I really just love going to Rainfurrest. I like wearing my ears and tail; I like carrying around a plush otter or My Little Pony without getting strange looks; I like all the giant, friendly animals who wave at you and give you hugs and bounce around playing. This year, I brought my four-year-old daughter and my mother to keep track of her, and they had a great time too. Elaine chased around fursuiters -- especially a green unicorn and a raptor who had a My Little Pony in his mouth. (She had to inform him that "ponies are not tasty!"; I'm told that he replied that they taste like ice cream.)

The whole weekend was fun and fantastic and I can't wait to do it again next year. I guess, I'll just have to make it all the way down for Further Confusion again this January to make it not quite so long until the next convention. I hope I'll get to see some of the new friends I've made there.

Let the season of make-believe begin!

We start the fall every year with our annual Talk Like a Pirate Day party. It's mainly an excuse to dress up like pirates and say "Arrrr!" a lot. I mean, sure, we could do that on Halloween, but then we wouldn't have a day for dressing up like The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland or the fairy story centered on a young girl that we've chosen for this year... Anyway, this weekend was especially intense in the make-believe department, because we also went to Fairyworlds Harvest. I wasn't really planning to do costumes for it, but my friend Sarina discovered that she had some child-sized fairy wings and gave them to Elaine. Then, while I was searching Goodwill for Halloween costumes, I found a pair of amazing butterfly wings. Thus, Elaine and I got to spend the day, dressed as fairies, traipsing through the woods. Elaine was given no less than two free wands -- one with crystals and pink rocks on it and the other made from balloons. She was invited to a tea party where she sat on a giant red toadstool and drank mint tea served by a fairy. It was a delightful way to spend the day.

Then, we had our pirate party! Arrr! And we even managed to capture a mermaid and make her dance for us. Arrrr!

Next up in make-believe land: I head north to Rainfurrest this weekend. I will be on nine panels, including a Furry Writers' Guild Meet & Greet and a reading from my own "Otters In Space." The rest of the panels are about the craft of writing. And I will, of course, be wearing my fluffy Sheltie ears and tail the whole time. I'm almost tempted to wear my butterfly wings as well and be a fairy cat, but I think that might be a bit much.