My two favorite non-writing activities related to writing are research and building playlists of music.

The current project -- a decidedly time-limited distraction from the novel -- requires an enormous amount of research, a lot of which is difficult. Good difficult. I know I'm getting close to where I need to be because of the dreams I had last night. Saturation dreams, the kind I have when my brain is putting together all the pieces and making sense of a bunch of stuff. It's not totally different from learning a new game (especially a mmporg). It feels strangely like swimming. At the moment I can't touch bottom, but I know it's there now.

The even more fun part for this story was putting together the playlist. I habitually do this for short stories. I suspect it's actually more important for short-form stuff than it is for longer works because short stories live or die by their hold on mood and music is an extremely effective way for me to get into the feel of the time and place. The times and places of this story are extremely particular.

Sometimes my playlists are heavy on music with lyrics. This playlist is largely instrumental, or with chanting. I even fit in a couple of Wimme's solo yoik pieces.

I'm being coy about the story itself because it's for the Haunted Legends anthology and... well, I feel like being coy about what I'm doing. If nihilistic_kid or ellen_datlow want to know what I'm working on before I send it, I'll be glad to tell them. I'm guessing not, though.

Also, I'm at that phase of story ideation here I get superstitious about saying what I intend to do, lest I pin down things that should be mobile.

Do you box up everything because it might be useful some day? Have you been doing so since 1985? Are you a computer and/or gadget freak?

I need stuff from the 1985-87 era. What kind of stuff?

• Sharper Image catalogs
• Issues of Computer Shopper, Byte!, Compute, Computer Gaming World (or any other publication of that variety -- and yes, I'm aware there is a collector's market for some of that stuff; I don't want to collect -- see below)
• Manuals for telephone equipment (consumer or otherwise)
• Any ads for tech stuff from any magazines of the era

I don't need (or even want) actual physical copies. Scans are ideal and they only need to be good enough to be legible. If you can't scan them yourself, I'll happily pay for postage, scan them on my end and return whatever you sent me in the same condition you sent it (or pay you should something evil and postal happen in transit or while in my care). I don't even really need entire magazines. The ads are most useful to me, though reviews of hardware are great too, as well as speculative articles. I am completely aware that in asking for scans of ads and reviews from 1985 era Computer Shopper I am asking for A LOT. I'd be completely happy with a representative sample of just 10-15 pages, preferably covering several different areas of tech (pc, C64, Atari, printers, bulk floppy sales, etc).

Just to make matters easier, you can be enormously useful to me if you've got any of the stuff listed above just by leaving a comment here with some of the following information:

• Prices of floppy disks, tractor feed paper, ink ribbons
• Vendors for above
• Location of users group meetings and what their focus is
• Names of equipment manufacturers, what they make, how much it costs
• Ads for things that sound stupid or impossible

Also, if I'm being completely dense and missing some available public source (or even quasi-public) for that stuff, I'd appreciate being told I'm a bonehead who doesn't know how to google. Providing you also include a pedantic example of how I should have done it.

If you don't have anything of this sort, but know people who might, please send them the link to this page.

All queries should be directed to the comments, where I'll happily arrange whatever variety of transport is required.

• The Romans had 24 hour days. Every day had 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark. The length of hours varied throughout the year.
• The Greeks had special, tiny coins that were carried in their mouths.
• There was a circuit that affluent Romans toured of the world that was ancient to them. The tours took between 4 and 6 years and was considered to be a part of their education.
• The word palimpsest comes from the practice of erasing scrolls and writing new works on them. By the 1st century there were merchants who specialized in books (printed on papyrus or vellum scrolls).

My head is so full of stuff right now that I'm likely to leave an infostain if someone bumps into me.

I ended up spending most of the day getting things ready for guests over the weekend, so I didn't get as much writing done as I really would have liked. However, I did manage to at least lay out the basic skeleton of the meal my characters will be eating.

It's worth noting that this meal is an extraordinarily plausible one for the place and time. Really.

###Gustatio###
@Conditum Paradoxum wine
 Honey, wine, Pepper, mastic, saffron, spikenard, fire-dried date stones.
#
@Varro's Recipe for Beetroot
 Black beetroot, honeywine, salt, oil.
#
@Cymas
 Cabbages cooked with cumin, salt, aged wine and olive oil served with a sauce of mint, pepper, lovage and rue.

###Fercula###
@Raven with sweet sauce
 Two ravens, pepper, lovage, celery seed, mint, raisins, honey, wine vinegar, stock and olive oil. Served cool
#
@Kid Seasoned with Laser
 Black goat - intestines toasted and stuffed with pepper, laser and olive oil. Placed back inside the goat and sewn. Roasted together and cooked add ground rue and laurel berries. Take the drained kid from the pan and set it on a platter. Mix the rue and laurel berry into the juices in the roasting pan, simmer and pour this gravy over the kid and serve.
#
@Moray Eel with Saffron Wine Sauce
pepper, lovage, savory, saffron, onions, pitted damsons, wine, honey wine, vinegar, fish stock, boiled wine and olive oil

###Mensae Secundae##
Nuts and apples
Cheese

But why do we not pursue those pleasures that are mutual and bring equal delight to the passive and to the active partners? For, generally speaking, unlike irrational animals we do not find solitary existences acceptable, but we are linked by a sociable fellowship and consider blessings sweeter and hardships lighter when shared. Hence was instituted the table that is shared, and, setting before us the board that is the mediator of friendship, we mete out to our bellies the enjoyment due to them, not drinking Thasian wine, for example, by ourselves, or stuffing ourselves with expensive dishes on our own, but each man thinks pleasant what he enjoys along with another, and in sharing our pleasures we find greater enjoyment. Now men's intercourse with women involves giving like enjoyment in return. For the two sexes part with pleasure only if they have had an equal effect on each other -- unless we ought rather to heed the verdict of Tiresias that the woman's enjoyment is twice as great as the man's. And I think it honourable for men not to wish for a selfish pleasure or to seek to gain some private benefit by receiving from anyone the sum total of enjoyment, but to share what they obtain and to requite like with like. But no one could be so mad as to say this in the case of boys. No, the active lover, according to his view of the matter, departs after having obtained an exquisite pleasure, but the one outraged suffers pain and tears at first, though the pain relents somewhat with time and you will, men say, cause him no further discomfort, but of pleasure he has none at all. And, if I may make a rather far-fetched point, but one I should make as we are in the precinct of Aphrodite, a woman, Callicratidas, may be used like a boy, so that one can have enjoyment by opening up two paths to pleasure, but a male has no way of bestowing the pleasure a woman gives.

Therefore, if even men like you, Callicratidas, can find satisfaction in women, let us males fence ourselves off from each other; but, if males find intercourse with males acceptable, henceforth let women too love each other. Come now, epoch of the future, legislator of strange pleasures, devise fresh paths for male lusts, but bestow the same privilege upon women, and let them have intercourse with each other just as men do. Let them strap to themselves cunningly contrived instruments of lechery, those mysterious monstrosities devoid of seed, and let woman lie with woman as does a man. Let wanton tribadism -- that word seldom heard, which I feel ashamed even to utter -- freely parade itself, and let our women's chambers emulate Philaenis, disgracing themselves with Sapphic amours. And how much better that a woman should invade the provinces of male wantonness than that the nobility of the male sex should become effeminate and play the part of a woman!

So today I'm working on a couple of things. I need to get my office cleaned up. I've managed to lose some photos that Dennis sent me for his website, and he's getting ready to put at least the store back up, so I kind of need them. They're somewhere.

Also, I've been working on the worldbuilding portion of the Spaceship Story, and in doing so I've got some resources lined up that might be useful to folks doing science fiction-type stuff.

First up is Celestia. It's a multiplatform tool for exploring our galaxy. All of it. You can jump around between stars, zoom into planets, moons, asteroids, existing spacecraft, etc. It lets you speed up or slow down or go backwards or forwards in time. In short, it's an astronomy program for exploring everything. The basic download will get you going very nicely, but there's tons of awesome add-ons to make it even better. However, installing them can be somewhat less than intuitive.

The other tool is StarGen. There are both Mac and Windows versions of the stand-alone app, plus a link to a web-based version. It generates solar systems with pretty complete data on each planet. You can have it filter output to only systems with Earth-like, or potentially habitable planets. I gather that the method it uses isn't up to date with current planet-formation theory, but it does still produce good results for storytelling purposes.

Personally, Celestia has been an enormous boon. I've used it before to do things like watch the surface of Ganymede over thousands of years to see where Jupiter's shadow falls and to get a sense of the kind of day/night cycle. Plus, it's just inspirational for flying around in the great vastness of space. The main download includes a database of a couple hundred thousand stars, but you can also download a 2 million star-database. Zooming all the way out to see the entire Milky Way when you've got millions of stars will smash most desktop computer systems, but it's pretty awsome to do anyway. Plus, Celestia will let you keep zooming out until you're seeing just galaxies. Nebulas currently aren't handled particularly well, and the program limits actual visitable stars to ones within our galaxy, but that really should be enough for most purposes.