Jayne is not dead. In fact, she thinks she'll go for a walk.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I am not, in fact, dead nor have I stumbled through a rip in space and time and ended up in a place with no Internet access. I've moved into my new apartment, am almost unpacked, have started a summer class, and am now desperately trying to find the laundry room in my building (that actually may have fallen through a rip in space and time).

The point of that list was not only to bore you to death with things not geek-related but to point out that I'll probably won't be popping up with bitter tirades during the next couple of weeks. I will try to abuse the scanner at the writing lab to bring you some comic goodness at some point, and expect to see some rambly post about a video game at least three years old because that's just how I roll.

I thought I would take this opportunity to stop working on one story that is slowly pushing me to view defenestration as a good idea, and instead talk a little about a book I recently read. The book is Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea.

Yes, I am reading a book about a man reading the Oxford English Dictionary. Look, I am a contributor to a blog called The Geekiest Girls You Know. This cannot be a surprise to any of you.

Reading the OED is light and fun, especially if you love the English language, which I do (see above for defenestration). The book is broken into chapters that follow the individual letters of the alphabet, and it's nice framing device. Each chapter doesn't deal explicitly with the OED, but more of Shea's experiences reading it. Shea takes a lot of tangents to explain his love of dictionaries, talking about optometrist he's been seeing since he was child, some history on dictionaries themselves, and boils down to a lot of free association. The result is charming and sweet, if perhaps lacking focus.

What really makes the book, though, is that at the end of each chapter is a list of words Shea has discovered while reading the OED. He lists his favorite words with his simplified definition, and buying this book alone is worth it for the words he finds.

I love words and languages, and especially English because English is the kind of language that accosts other languages in a dark alley and rifles through its pockets for spare adverbs. I mean, English actually has a word that means to throw yourself out a window (defenestration, and MST3K made a joke about refenestration, proving they are all giant dorks and I love them).

How can you not love a book that finds words that mean the approach of evening (advesperate), the point on the back on a animal that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to scratch (acenstious), or being equal to another in stupidity (uasinous)? You can't is my point.

As an aside, English also has a word that means the action of frizzling (hair). That word is frizilation and is relevant to my life because that's all my hair does when it senses even the smallest amount of moisture, which causes it to expand to thrice it's normal size. I now have a word to put to the sensation of my hair frizzing in every direction: it is frizalting. Also, I stumbled across it because I was bored one day and looking up random words in the OED online. Why, what do you do when you're bored?

One of the other words Shea defines is wonderclout (n): a thing that is showy but worthless. This is one of the words that makes me wonder how I ever got along without it. You know that move in any video game that is always really awesome looking but doesn't serve a purpose? It's a wonderclout. Any geek's encyclopedic knowledge of comic books and tendency to obsess over continuity to the point of distraction is a wonderclout. My ability to keep a running list of the Absolutely, Non-Slanderous, Completely True Facts about Alan Moore is a wonderclout. This entire post talking about language and words is a wonderclout. Damn, that word is useful.

But my new absolute favorite word, edging out frizilation and defenestration and wonderclout is unbepissed.

Unbepissed (adj.): not having been urinated on; unwet with urine.

That's right, there was apparently a time in human history that being peed on or covered with urine was so rampant you needed a special word to mean you were urine-free. This is also my new favorite response to the question "how was your day?" because if your day was so gut wrenching awful the only thing you can say about it in response is that no one peed on you, well, that really sums up the suck of your day in one short, awesome word.

Goddamn, I love English.

Oh, in unpacking I found my copy of Ed Wood's Death of Transvestite, so expect a wonderclout recap of that book.

In conclusion, I hope that your day, dear reader, has remained unbepissed.

You all know I wouldn't be able to resist this

If there is one thing that is able to draw me from my crazy eyed, packing/cross country move nightmare it is epically bad movies. This one is so awesomely awful that we need a new word for it. Awesomeful? Awfulsome? Or perhaps we should just say Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. No. Seriously.




I have watched the trailer about eleven times and there are still so many unanswered questions.

How desperate were Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson for money that they decided to "star" in this movie? Surely there are less humiliating ways to earn money. Like selling your kidneys on the black market.

When is the exact moment in this movie that you can actually see the actors die on the inside? How much LSD did you have to take to come up with this concept?

How is a shark, albeit even a mega one, able to leap thousands of miles into the air to chow down on an commercial airplane? Why would the shark even want to do that? Was it bored? Was it a dare from his other mega shark friends? I suppose even mega sharks suffer from peer pressure.

You are aware that if something living is frozen it does not place the organism in a state of suspended animation but kills it dead, right, movie? Also, if you want to go for the mega fauna angle, you are way off with your math. Way off.

How drunk do you think that Australian guy was in order to say the line "I've looked into its eyes" without laughing and/or losing all respect for himself?

Thrilla in Manilla, Deborah Gibson? Really? You just managed to get five shades whiter saying that line. Also, I will pay you to never, ever utter that inane line again.

Are the writers aware that octopuses, even giant ones, are not natural enemies of sharks, even mega ones?

What the fuck? No, seriously, what the fucking fuck, Asylum? It was like this movie was specifically made to fuck with my head.

I think we all know that I am going to buy the hell out of this movie and recap it for you because Giant Octopus vs. Mega Shark, people! I am only so strong.

Wait, you mean I actually like something? Shocking!

I know I haven't been around for awhile, what with finals coming up and trying to find a place to live and trying to get a teaching position, but I want to assure you, dear readers, that I have not abandoned you in the midst of my crazy eyed flail.

And by crazy eyes I mean I look like this:

Only with about a thousand times more flail and fail.

Anyway, it's come to my attention that my last four posts have been of the bitter, spiteful, strangly hands variety, and seems to give the impression that I find no joy in the world. Now to be fair, I do have a bitter, spiteful happy place (but the pizza there is delicious), but occasionally I do find something that makes my little geek girl heart swell in joy and happiness and love that has only slightly been be-bittered. Today I shall discuss one of those things. And since Alan My Bead Knows Every Secret You've Never Acknowledged Yes Even That One Moore hasn't done another bitter and crazy interview, I shall fall to my standby of books.

I love books. Genre, literary, good, bad, books are awesome. With any luck (and by "luck" I mean "Oh god I'm going to eat ramen noodles for the next three months") I'll be unemployed and bored this summer and start recapping some of the more awful books I come across (and by awful, I mean one is written by Ed Wood Jr. and another is this blindingly stupid romance. In space), but that is not this post. This post is about happy making things, and so I won't be talking about Ed Wood Jr. and his transvestite killer for hire (no, seriously).

Instead, this is about Kelly Link and two of her short story collections: Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners.

Kelly Link isn't well known, not yet anyway, but she is strange and wonderful. Every story of hers has a strange fantasy twist in it. Most of them have an undertone of creepy. Some will make you shiver. All of them will make you want more.

Stranger Things Happen was published in 2001, so let's start with that one. Unlike Magic for Beginners, STH plays very heavily with fairytale themes and tropes. I don't mean that as a bad thing at all. I love fairy tales, especially the old, dark versions, and Link's twist on these old tales are fantastic.

The stories themselves aren't explicitly linked together, featuring different locations and different characters, but you can see that they all take place within the same world.

I'm not going to go through the collection story by story, not because Link's work doesn't merit because it does, but because there are eleven stories and I would enthusiastically babble about all of them on about the same theme and that's not entertaining for anyone and would also be approximately elevenity hundred pages long. So I'm going to comment on a couple of my favorites.

Link has a deceptively stark and simple style. I say "deceptively" because I have tried to write in this style and struggled with it. This allows Link to make ample use of all the spaces her words leave, and also means that the style is light on description but really rich in provocative phrases that make you shiver.

One of my favorite stories is "Survivor's Ball, or the Donner Party" because it is downright creepy and dripping with tension. Throughout the entire story you keep expecting awful to happen and yet nothing really does, and the entire affect is unsettling and frightening.

It follows Serena and Jasper as they drive through New Zealand and accidentally but not really get invited to the Survivor's Ball. Jasper has a cracked tooth, and this story features my favorite line that makes me seethe with jealousy because I didn't think of it first: "His tooth whined like a dog." This is the perfect Link sentence: short, simple, but goddamn if you don't get what she's talking about.

Like all of her stories, "Survivor's Ball, or the Donner Party" ends in a way that has you going, "Huh. I really want more," but in a good way.

"Flying Lessons" is about young love and tragic death and Greek gods and an Orpheus like journey, only with a twist. The story is broken up into small segments, and dispersed throughout are instructions for going to hell. These instructions open and close the story and add a strong framework for a story that might otherwise have been too formless. And like all things Link writes, there are lots of tiny, weird details, like death by peacock, and odd moments of humor that makes sense within the frame of the story.

"Shoe and Marriage" is perhaps the most experimental story of the entire collection. It is composed of four vignettes, and each of them is only connected by, you guessed it, shoes and marriage. The first is concerned with the prince charming from Cinderella, but not in the way you think and, oh, how I love it even though I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the story.

The next one, "Miss Kansas on Judgement Day" is even more surreal and bewildered, but again, oh god I love it. The third is "The Dictator's Wife," and it's heartbreaking and bleak and sad and so engaging. The last vignette is "Happy ending," and I can't tell you if it actually is a happy ending because my copy of the book, instead of the last page of "Shoe and Marriage," has a reprinting of a page from an earlier story. Thanks, Small Beer Press. Now I will never know if it is a happy ending. I shake my fist at thee!

Finally, "The Girl Detective" is the closing story, and Link weaves together another fairy tale, the twelve dancing princesses, and the idea of Nancy Drew and the girl detective motif, all told from a strange, outsider narrative. Like the stories in this collection, what's really going on beneath the surface isn't entirely clear, but it's such a delightful journey that I'm not sure if it really matters if Link is trying to do anything other than tell a good story. And it is an excellent story.

Magic for Beginners was published in 2005, and unlike STH, the stories in this don't appear to take place in the same universe. While STH drew strongly on fairy tales and myths, MfB, with the exception of one story, seems to have shed that fairy tale feel and is grounded in the real world. Or the real world seen through Link's eyes.

Like I did with STH, I'm picking out a couple of stories to talk about here, but all of them are worth a read. And by "worth," I mean "go pick up her books right now, seriously."

I'm going to start with the exception to my above statement. "Catskin" is very much a fairy tale in its characters and themes and narrative. I don't mean a fairy tale like the white washed Disney versions now, but the old ones that are about blood and gore and scaring you shitless.

Goddamn this story is creepy. Brilliant, but so, so creepy. It follows the story of Small, a witch's son who goes to avenge the witch's death with the witch's cat, who makes him a suit of cat skin from murdered cats. It's hard to describe this story without me just typing the entire thing into the post. Look, if you like the old versions of fairy tales and sitting in an empty room feeling like someone is watching you then you will love this story. This creepy, creepy story.

"The Hortlak" involves zombies, but not the traditional, brain eating zombies. These zombies come into a 24 hour convenience store, but not for brains. This story follows girl Charley, Batu, and Eric. It's a story about young love and loss trying to figure out what the hell you want. It also has another amazing line: "Eric worked in retail since he was sixteen. He knew how hateful people could be." Word, Kelly Link, WORD.

"The Cannon," is my least favorite story. It's told as an question and answer session, and it's not clear who is speaking. There's a lot of really great details and interesting world building going on in such a short piece, but it never quite gels for me.

"Stone Animals" is a haunted house story, only REALLY FUCKING CREEPY BY A LOT. It appeared in Best American Short Stories of, um, 2006, I think. A family moves into a house with stone rabbits out front, and things in the house become haunted, including one of the children. Nothing happens in the traditional haunted house sense, but it's more subtly creepier than The Grudge could ever hope to be.

Quickly, in passing, "The Great Divorce," features one of my favorite narrative structure kinks: stories within stories. In this story a character tells another story, and in that story another character tells a story which features characters from the first story. Follow? It's okay if you don't. The fun lies in unpacking it all.

"Magic for Beginners," the titular story, is by far the longest. It follows Jeremy and his friends and family and a show called "The Library," which may or may not be the adventures of real people. What Link does really well in this is that confusing tangle of emotions when you're fifteen and hopped up on so many hormones you can barely think and you like two different girls at once and trying to navigate your way through it all while your parents are going through a rough patch and you have to move to another town. Wow, that last sentence is a mess, but you get my point.

What I don't like about this story is that everyone in it, the teenagers, the parents, Jeremy himself, are presented as these quirky people who you know would never exist in real life yet pop up all the time in books and movies. To be honest, I think why it bothers me is because I find myself doing the same thing in my own stories, making my characters all quirky and precious. In clumsy hands that can be irriating, and Link is treading a very fine line.

In all, Kelly Link creates stories in a world that is far more mysterious and magical and downright creepy than our own. She has a new collection out that I haven't been able to pick up yet, but I deeply want it.

If you're still unconvinced to give Kelly Link a try, Neil Gaiman has this to say: Kelly Link is probably the best short story writer currently out there, in any genre or none. She puts one word after another and makes real magic with them--funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon of armed marines.

And we all know you don't argue with Neil Gaiman, so go pick up her books right now.

And don't worry, soon I shall be back to my bitter, spiteful self.