Having never really been in the US for any long extent of time…

What’s the likelihood of shops in Washington DC being open on a Sunday? (specifically, May 22nd, in case there are any special holidays involved I wouldn’t know about)

Thanks in advance!

(why yes, I’m booking my journey for the Nebula Awards Weekend. Why do you ask? :))

Last one, for the road… (the BF/H is playing go, and I’m too tired to do anything else)

So, I just got myself a brand new CD, and I was looking at my playlists. I use music all the time (I pretty much can’t write without a familiar sound in the background), and I’ve got a medium consumption of stuff: once in a while, I’ll buy a new stack of CD to have new songs to add to the rotation. By the looks of it, the last stack of CDs I bought was more than a year ago–so it’s time to look for more. I thought I might share some of my favourites, on the off-chance some of you enjoy the same kind of songs, and could point me out to more artists I ought to be checking out. I mainly listen to female singer-songwriters (don’t ask, I have no idea).

-India Arie. First CD I bought for myself, years ago. I liked the first two albums (India Arie and Voyage to India to bits), but I haven’t been as big a fan of the later ones.

-The Innocence Mission. Karen Peris has such a wonderful voice. I don’t have everything by them: some of the old ones are hard to get hold of, and I stopped buying CDs after being somewhat disappointed by And Now the Day is Over, but the new ones sound good.

-Vienna Teng. Her first album had two songs that floored me (“The Tower”, and “Between”); the second one was pretty good, and I was somewhat disappointed by the third one, but I just got the newish one, Inland Territory, and it looks like a return to top form.

-Dar Williams. The first album I bought was The Beauty of the Rain, which is awesome (especially the atmospheric “Mercy of the Fallen”). I now have pretty much the entire backlist, and I’ve just seen there’s a newish album, Promised Land. Shiny.

-Tracy Spuelher. I downloaded a couple free songs from amazon, “Hummingbird” and “Where do we go now”, which I found pretty good–catchy, with good lyrics and a nice mood. I listened to her newer albums, which are even better–and I gave in and bought an entire album off itunes (which I never do, because I hate not being able to transfer music where I want).

So, any other cool singers in the same vein I ought to know about?

…to the reader-hivemind: if I call a soldier a “knight”, does this mean that he *has* to have a horse or be mounted on one?
The equivalent French and Spanish words are “chevalier” and “caballero”, which are formed from the root of “cheval” and “caballo” respectively, suggesting that possession of a horse is imperative. “Knight”, insofar as I can see, doesn’t have that connotation, but maybe it’s irreversibly acquired it by now?

So, as I’m trying to get this %% manuscript out the door…
I have this character. His Nahuatl title is cihuacoatl, and I’m not planning to use it lest I give people headaches. So I have a choice between two translations: the Snake Woman, or the Female Snake.

Although the first one is the traditional, correct Nahuatl translation, I’m afraid it will have also everyone thinking he’s a woman. But I’m not 100% up-to-date on connotations, and for all I know the second one also strongly implies a woman, too…

What do you think–Snake Woman or Female Snake/Female Serpent?

EDIT: what about “She-Snake”?

So, in my quest to widen my reading habits… Anyone have some good urban fantasy with a solid mystery plot they’d like to recommend?

I haven’t dipped into UF for a while, and my memory is a little hazy, but I read a bunch of books a few years ago where the focus was more on the worldbuilding, the characters and the cool magic, rather than on the suspects, the red herrings and the twists–if it makes sense. I want something that works as a thriller/detective story on its own terms, rather than have it be lame and saved by the fantasy or romance component (“lame” being defined as “I can guess the culprit within the first fifty pages”).

Thanks in advance!

Given a choice between:

-a novel where there is one point-of-view character per scene, and where the scenes more or less follow chronological order, but can be quite short (one scene=2,000 words approximately)

-a novel where each chapter is set in the point-of-view of a single character (one chapter=4,000 to 5,000 words approximately), but where the timeline ends up more warped than in the previous option

which one would you prefer, and why?

(I ask because I’ve seen both and enjoyed both, and I’m not quite clear on where I want to take Foreign Ghosts yet…)

EDIT: as zweipunktnull, I’ve been a little unclear. You only have 3 point-of-view characters in the entire novel. They alternate, in more or less equal shifts.