1. My short story "In Winter" is now online at Lackington's with an astonishing illustration by Gregory St. John. I do not write historical fiction easily, even at flash-length; I was making myself crazy with research just to feel comfortable with the setting when strange_selkie reached gently across the internet and stopped me ("Research schmesearch, they wore white parkas and shot at things well. It’s fiction! Just get it written down and then go and do the dissertation on the Winter War"). The dissertation remains undone, but the story was written entirely to Moss of Moonlight's Winterwheel (2013) and I am delighted it found a home in this magazine. The rest of the issue is people like Alexandra Seidel, Yukimi Ogawa, Bogi Takács; you should read it immediately. rushthatspeaks had observed that there was no point in any version of "The Snow Queen" that did not contain the robber girl.

2. Strange Horizons did not win the Hugo for Best Semiprozine; Lightspeed did. Congratulations to them and to many other people! I would have given the award to Pacific Rim over Gravity myself, but I have no arguments at all with John Chu, Sofia Samatar, and Kameron Hurley. Nor with Ancillary Justice. Yay.

3. yhlee sent me a book and a drawing! The book is The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 and looks like a great lineup (cucumberseed!). The drawing is of a character of mine from an as yet unpublished story. I have put it on a very high bookshelf without any nearby jumping-off points; the cats shouldn't be able to reach it unless they've mastered the vertical ascent. At least, so far, they don't bother pictures on the wall.

4. Last night was the third or fourth series of nightmares I've had recently in which people I know in real life either tell me point-blank how much they don't like me—they're sorry, they've been trying, it's just impossible, they have to stop—or it's finally made clear that they haven't been avoiding me socially by accident. I hate dreams like this partly because they're such a visceral fear and partly because they feel in danger of bleeding over into waking interactions with people who have not, actually, said anything cruel to me outside of my subconscious. All of a sudden I feel uncertain about them and it's not their fault that their doppelgängers are jerks.

5. Five things make a post and the fifth was going to be different, but we have just determined that Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond (1929) is streaming on Netflix at 169 minutes and a Kino release. I can't speak for the music—it's not the Alloy Orchestra—but the point is, it's all there. I hope the intertitles are better. Enjoy!

I must accomplish some things about my day, like errands. Have some ancient dolphins and some recent cats. They are five months and a week tomorrow. It is almost incomprehensible that we lived half a year in this place without them.