Author: Jinx

June 28th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
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…writing. Occasionally, I pause to dabble in hypochondria. (What’s that red spot on my cheek?) Apple, arugula and goat cheese sandwich for lunch. Daily walk during which I visit my favorite cheese shop and try a sample. Look in the window of my favorite donut shop and promise myself a donut in a week or two (boston creme) . Look in the window of my favorite cookie shop and and promise myself a cookie (The Harvey Milk looks good) Look in the window of my favorite cannoli shop and promise myself a cannoli (Like them plain). Wander home. Play Sims 4. Fix a healthy dinner while listening to news. Eat dinner with husband . Promise husband I’ll make an UNhealthy dinner next time. Read a novel or The New Yorker. Go to bed and make a point of thinking, not about what I heard on the news, but my sims. (Will the evil Felix Horn evict his obnoxious stepsister and her family from the estate now that his father has passed away?) Sleep soundly.

Wake up. Coffee in the morning…
June 27th, 2025

My birthday was this week. I am now forty-two.

The rain started on Wednesday as a pleasant silvery day with a driving mist. On Thursday, it came down in earnest. In the com room we could hear it beating on the plastic roof over the porch. Kay commented that when we move to the new locaion on Lombard, he will miss that sound.

Friday, it was still blustery. All that day people trickled in to wish me happy birthday. Employees always get a card and a bottle of wine (white.) Portia delivered this. Kay brought in my favorite breakfast, a sparkling apple juice and a croissant. Lou brought in some flowers for me, long stemmed and eccentric (much like her) with tumbled wheatlike yellow and purple blossoms. I treated myself to a special lunch at Betel Nut, a chic, dark little place, where I had a hideous but delicious anchovy salad — dried minnows with their heads and eyes intact, tossed with toasted peanuts and green things I could not identify. Then I went to my usual lunchtime haunt, Solar Light Books, where I bought a ridiculous volume on fairies and a paperback about the wreck of the Medusa.

Another lost bookstore. Solar Light Books was one of those Union Street shops in a building once residential, now retail, the bookstore reachable by a wooden angled outside staircase. I recall a nice young female owner, and a cat. I’d like to find that book on the Medusa and reread it, but I fear it’s not so much lost as submerged in the ocean of books crammed onto shelves and boxes in this apartment.

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June 27th, 2025

“Why is the day lasting forever?” Shelly asked. Because, of course, suddenly we are left with nothing to do but those chores that getting the magazine out gives us an excuse to ignore.

I spent a lot of time today answering mail and working on the phone list. The latter is always kind of interesting because the phone list is a measure of how people have risen and fallen in Charlie’s estimation. One person who’s been on it for years is now removed for being rude to Shelly at the last ABA. Others have been demoted from authors (indicated with an “A”) to fen (indicatd with an F.) Yet others have been promoted from Effs to Ays. I managed to get the final list run out at 6:00. When I left everyone had departed, including Charlie, who’d gone for a walk.

This was, of course, the era before email. Answering mail involved postage, etc. and was a pain in the ass.

Charlie may have gone off for a walk to cool down after the emotional upheaval of editing his phone list, which involved him revisiting old offenses.

Another measure of Charlie’s estimation was how flattering or unflattering were the photos of authors and fen included in the magazine.

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June 27th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
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…we are legally required to compost. This does not mean, of course, that everybody does it. (I have yet to hear about anyone being arrested for Failing to Compost.) It does mean we all get a free, portable compost container that we can, if we choose, empty nightly into the compost bin downstairs. We choose.

We also don’t have a car. Since we live downtown and the public transit here is good, we don’t need one.
June 26th, 2025

I’d hoped it would be sunnier this far inland, but the sky was stuill gray, the air still cool, and my bathing suit stayed in my bag. The pool didn’t look very inviting anyway. It was murky, and there was some sort of bot crawling around on th bottom, an automatic pool cleaner I guess. Instead I watched a ping-pong game with two agents slamming the ball at each other. I heard someone beside me gasp and looked up to see a rat running along the top of the backyard fence.

But the food that Portia had prepared the day before was very good — barbecued chicken breasts, salads, pork loins… I ate at a table with the company’s star broker (Blond, part-time actor, desk shaggy with stacked papers and files) At one point Rose invited me to walk around with her and look at the house. We went down to the wine cellar, which was as brightly lit and new and dustless as the rest of the house.

Kay and Lou and others from admin played poker at one of the tables by the pool. One of the male agents, a jowly man in his sixties, ventured into the pool, mainly walking around in the water up to his chest, but occasionally plunging foward to swim in strong, overhand strokes.

The sun lowered. The musicians began packing their instruments. Janey (dark-haired peppery agent who had waged an unrelenting war against Yovanna) offered me and Lara a ride back into the city. We waited in the front living room for her to bring her car around, listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland on the CD, and I contemplated the framed WWII era advertisements on the wall. Weirdly, what looked like a large building cornice in the shape of an eagle, large enough to qualify as another piece of furniture, rested on the floor beside the sofa.

A rat running along the top of a fence is not an unusual sight in California suburbs. It’s why Hanta virus is a real concern in this state — most recently in the headlines again after the terrible deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife in Southern Cal.

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June 26th, 2025

Today, Bill Contento installed Pagemaker 3 and showed me how to use it. The colors are different, and the logo. For much of the day I stayed in the back office with Bill and Faren, getting the hang of Pagemaker’s new autoflow feature, so it occaionally got a bit crowded. Charlie, who was in a good mood now that another issue is under his belt, kept coming back to see how things were going, then darting away because he couldn’t stand watching it any more.

Late in the afternoon I drove Charlie down to Berkeley to leave some galleys and a book cover at The Other Change of Hobbit. Lisa Goldstein was there. Then we went to Andronico’s where we both did a little shopping. By the time we got back to Locus it was time to go home.

Charlie was blind in one eye, which screwed up his depth perception, so our duties included chauffering. Sometimes that meant visiting the local bookstores — The Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival in Berkeley, Fantasy Etc. in San Francisco… The Other Change of Hobbit has, alas, gone the way of many bookstores and no longer has a corporeal form. At that time it was in a little shopping complex on Shattuck, always brightly lit, never cluttered or shadowy, but well-stocked with the latest and best in fantasy and science fiction. It was, as all important bookstores should be, a social center where part of the visit was pausing to gossip with the owners, Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, or the writers who freqented it. Lisa Goldstein, the author of THE RED MAGICIAN, was at that time a small, blackhaired, pretty woman of about my own age, and everything I aspired to be in a writer. She still is. Wish I could remember what we talked about.

Andronico’s back then was the ne plus ultra of high end supermarkets — soft lighting, with soothing music, wide aisles, and an amazing selection of produce, etc. It has since been swallowed up by Safeway.

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June 26th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
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Beluga caviar.

Back in 1988, the magazine where I worked had readers and subscribers in the Soviet Union. A writer from Eastern Europe was in town and he brought us some as a gift. It was black and glistening and piled high into a clear, unlabeled glass container the size of a large mayonnaise jar.

We stopped what we were doing and gathered in the kitchen (the magazine was run out of our editor’s house.) Our boss was a generous man and we all got to taste it. That first mouthful spoiled all other caviars for me. It was delicate, almost indescribable, like the first scent of the ocean when you are traveling to the shore. I believe an awed silence fell. Lumpfish would never be the same. When my brother got married a year or two later, and I wanted a gift that truly expressed my extravagant delight and affection for them both, I bought the couple some Beluga to take on their honeymoon.

For a while after the fall of the USSR, Beluga caviar was pretty much unobtainable in the US. Imports started up again in the ‘oughts, but it’s much further out of my price range now — even in my prosperous retirement — than it was back when I was a struggling peon at a magazine.
June 25th, 2025

Ross is a ritzy, countrified neighborhood, all narrow roads and enormous lots, estates half hidden behind stands of trees. Tad’s home turned out to be a brand new, red brick two story house, surrounded by palm trees. Three bedrooms (which I did not see, but inferred), a pool (which I saw) a jacuzzi (which I heard about), a wide back yard surrounded by a giant stand of tall trees looming and vaguely threatening as though, like Birnham Wood, they’d all just marched up to the fence holding them back. Tables were set out with rounds of polenta topped with chevre, cheese trays, crackers… A caterer walked around offering raw or barbecued oysters and a trio played classical jazz. There was also a volleyball net and a pingpong table.

In spite of all this, there was something new and empty about the place. Not enough people were there to fill up the back yard, and the house itself was too bare and polished inside. There were hardly any photographs of poeple, but many old framed advertisements from the WWII era, which Tad seems to collect. The house, someone told me, had been built by Tad after demolishing the original structure, and the tall palms that surrounded it had been rearranged. Two of them looked as though they were dying.

Tad himself looks to be barely 30 years old, young, fairly good-looking, with pale skin and light red hair. He must be planning a family. I can’t imagine living in that place alone without feeling like a peanut in an oil drum.

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June 25th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
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…jeans, tee, and blue and white plaid shirt, soft-soled shoes and my small, crocheted straw hat. The t-shirt would most likely be the one my brother gave me, dark gray, very soft, a bit long, with a smiling half-moon on it. My brown and black serape would be either draped over my shoulders or carried under one arm, depending on the temperature.

These tiers of clothing are necessary in San Francisco, where walking a block or even just stepping into the shade can take you from hot to cold, and where it is de rigueur for layers to flap when the wind rises.
June 25th, 2025

Charlie was not quite at his worst today, but close, wavering between chumminess and martyrdom. Any sign of an employee thinking for herself infuriated him. He tried to prevent me from checking a board to see if the correction I was running out would flow properly onto it.

I’ve been given a fairly meaningless nudge “up.” Charlie told me to change the colophon to reflect, not only Trevin’s departure, but Shelly’s promotion. She is now “Associate Manager.” This means one who goes with Charlie to conventions, helps him deal with people, etc. Perhaps out of fear that I would object to remaining lowest on the masthead, he has changed my title to “Production Associate,” a term that sounds marginally better than “Production Assistant.”

Shelly took off with the issue at about 3:00. I spent the rest of the day getting out the invitations to Charlie’s two parties next week and later, driving him down to Montclair to run some errands.

“The board” meant the paste-up board. Charlie literally tried to prevent me from walking into the front room and looking over the paste-up board. Among the many nutty behaviors I’ve encountered in insanely controlling male employers, that’s the nuttiest.

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