Monthly Archives: September 2019

Election 2019: St. Paul School Board

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It’s election season! But only in St. Paul — Minneapolis is not voting on anything. Here in St. Paul, we’ve got the following:

  • Saint Paul School Board (vote for 4)
  • Saint Paul City Council
  • Garbage pickup referendum

This means {heavy sigh} that I’m going to have to actually write about the trash pickup issue. Spoiler: I come from Minneapolis, always thought it was ridiculous that St. Paul didn’t have municipal pickup, and have minimal amounts of sympathy for people who don’t think they should have to pay for a municipal service just because they use less of it; that way lies “why should I pay for libraries when I don’t read.”

Anyway, I do feel like I need some information that I still need to research before I can do a truly comprehensive write-up on that one, so in the meantime, I’ll take a whack at the school board race. Here’s who’s running:

Charlie Castro
Omar Syed
Jennifer McPherson
Elijah Norris-Holliday
Jessica Kopp
Tiffany Fearing
Steve Marchese
Zuki Ellis
Ryan Williams
Chauntyll Allen

You get to vote for four. This vote is not ranked. It’s a non-partisan race, but the DFL City Convention endorsed three candidates (Zuki, Steve, and Chauntyll) and then couldn’t settle on a fourth.

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CATFISHING ON CATNET coming November 19th

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816WkzoELELMy technothriller YA (young adult) novel about friendship, online community, AIs (artificial intelligences), robots, hacking, sex ed, and road trips, is coming out on November 19th.

If you would like to pre-order it, you can do that on the usual big behemoth sites OR you can preorder from Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore — which will allow you to get a signed copy even if you’re not local. You should also be able to pre-order it from anywhere that you’d normally buy books. It will also be available as an audiobook.

I will be doing several book-related events the week it comes out! On November 21st, I’ll be at local bookstore Magers & Quinn along with Marissa Lingen and Sue Burke. On November 22nd, I’ll be at the Loft Literary Center with Kelly Barnhill. On November 23rd, I’ll be signing at Uncle Hugo’s. (If I add other stuff, I will edit this post.)

You can also read an excerpt from it right now over at the Tor Teen blog! You can also read the (starred!) reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly. Finally, you could go read the short story that started it all, Cat Pictures Please. (The AI narrator of the short story is also one of the viewpoint characters in the novel.)

 

Trip Report III: Iceland

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I actually know a lot of people who’ve been to Iceland and yet not one of them has ever told me how incredibly weird Iceland is. Like, you walk around this island and you’ll think “is that smoke?” and the answer will be “no, it’s steam pouring out of the earth from a vent in some person’s back yard.”

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We stayed in Hveragerði, which is about an hour from the airport and has a whole lot of hot springs, making it possibly even weirder than the rest of Iceland.

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