Brutal Women

The Warrior's Way: Ninja Assassins and Blowing Shit Up in the Old West

2010-12-07T06:35:00.004-05:00

The Warrior's Way is a beautifully shot, silly little film that's apparently been stuck in post-production for years. This doesn't surprise me, as anybody who starts mixing genres is going to have some trouble with marketing. In this case, it's a mix of martial arts movie + western, with all the silliness that that implies. In fact, there's even more silliness than that, as our martial arts hero exiles himself to America and takes up in a town largely populated by a defunct circus troop where he takes over an old friend's laundry business and starts teaching the local tomboy how to throw knives and cut people up.

Yes, I'm serious.

And if that description didn't pique your interest, this is not the movie for you.

In the Far East, a super assassin, the "best swordsman in the world - ever" kills every member of a rival clan save one. He saves this child and exiles himself to the American west to a small, decripit little town that has suffered under the tyrannic rule of some random group of Bad Guys. I'm not really sure why the Bad Guys are terrorizing this town. Or why they terrorized the town once, apparently, and then just came back a few years later for the sake of the plot to terrorize it again. You know they're bad guys mainly because they try to rape the heroine (twice) and because they kill people indiscriminately. Why do they do this? No frickin' clue. Because the plot says they do. Handwave, handwave.

As our hero begins to rebuild his life among the circus freaks and with our tomboy heroine, he is also hunted by the members of his assassin's guild, who are pissed off that he didn't kill the last member of their rival clan. They believe that the only way to truly "win" the war against the clan is to kill the last member. After all, when she grows up she will just start to hunt them down, and the whole cycle will start again.

Kate Bosworth of Blue Crush fame (she will always be "that chick from Blue Crush" to me) plays our heroine, a scrappy tomboy whose family was murdered by aforementioned Bad Guys. She scarred the one who tried to rape her by throwing hot oil in his face (a touch which reminded me of the scar that Red Sonja gives the Evil Queen, after the guards rape Red Sonja. Nothing new under the sun). This incident, of course, inspires her to take up arms to seek revenge (whenever he rolls back into town? Or has he been periodically visiting and she just hides? Who knows), and now she practices throwing knives. Before our hero entered the scene, his predecessor was also teaching her how to weild a blade. So, you can see how I'd appreciate this movie, despite the ridiculous and annoying and overdone near-rape scenes.

There's a lot to like in this movie if you're willing to sit back, relax, and giggle along. They're pretty clear about what kind of movie it is right from the get-go, with supertitles that tell us the assassin on the screen is now the "Best swordsman in the world - ever." It's a silly little romp that spends a lot of time planting flowers in the desert only to blow them up (literally and metaphorically).

The fight scenes are pretty spectacular, the blood is over the top, and it has a couple of really great lines. My favorite is when the hero finds our heroine trying to throw knives, and she's missing her target. He turns to her and says, "It's not your arm that shakes. It's your heart." Somehow, blindfolding her and taking a few good lessons with the hero cures her of this (handwave, handwave), but it wouldn't have been nearly as good a movie if she didn't get her revenge, too.

I appreciated that she had her own story arc. I didn't appreciate that (spoiler, duh) she gets stuck with the kid at the end, which was pretty much the stupidest thing in the whole world based on everything that came before. What, she had a kid sister once so she knows something about kids? I guess she did make the kid a diaper when they rolled into town, so she must be the perfect person to give a kid to?

Arg.

Of course, by then most folks are dead, so there's not a lot of other options.

At any rate, the movie stuck to its mixed genres. Plenty of martial arts action, stoic hero, *and* it's western sensibilities - random bad guys, big shootouts, plucky heroine. This movie was about fifty million times more fun than half the crap that's out right now, but it's going to have a much narrower audience because, yeah, weird little movie with ridiculous plot holes. Geoffrey Rush even shows up as a filthy, drunken marksman. Weird, I know.

Depending on your taste, this might be a fun film to see after a couple of beers. Don't expect anything profound, but if you want to see some stuff get blown up, cut up, shot up, and giggle at movie tropes (and roll your eyes at ridiculous rape-means-we're-bad bad guys) while a red-headed heroine throws knives, this could be fun.

Also, circus freaks. Blood feuds. Ninja assassins.

Sometimes I suspect I was just delighted that they'd gotten all of these ridiculous things into one movie.

When in Doubt, Cut Down a Tree. In the Snow.

2010-12-06T06:28:00.000-05:00

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday...

What's On Your Bookshelf: Why I'm Still Holding Out On Buying an E-Reader

2010-12-01T06:19:00.000-05:00

The local Books & Co. had several Nooks on display the other day. I've resisted e-readers for lots of reasons, but mostly because of Amazon's weird "You bought it but we can take it away" thing. If I download a book, I want to download it like a PDF. A file that's mine. No DRM. The idea that Amazon or a publisher can suddenly decide to retract something already given scares the anti-censorship fiend in me.

And yet... and yet.. I have too many books. I'm tired of moving them. And sitting in bed curling up with a 800-1000 page book isn't really cozy. It's awkward. Carting it around on a plane is even less cozy. Reading from a slim e-reader seems so much easier.

But I'd also like to actually be able to, you know, read it. I love the color Nook, but the backlight kind of bothers me on that version. But I'm not sold on the non-backlight because if I can't read in the dark on an e-reader without and extra light, what's the point? And why am I paying as much for an e-reader as I am for a laptop? At that point, why not just read books on a laptop? And that's just no fun. And why should I pay extra for Wi-fi?

That said, I realize how much easier life would be if I could fit all my books onto a hard drive... but also how easy they would be to lose. Knowledge is great. But it's also hard to hold onto.

I suspect that I will always buy really good books in print. The kind of books you really love and cherish. The ones you want to have signed by authors. Or the ones with really important information that isn't likely to go out of date soon.

But there are other kinds of books - the popcorn reading, or the 8-book sagas, or the 12-book history compilations - that will just be easier to read and forget about or read and easily access on an e-reader. I love books, but the more junk I get bogged down in, the more I realize just how many of them I can live without. There are only so many books I love at any one time.

When book and movie libraries both move totally digital, I expect to have a couple bookcases of prized books, and that's it. The more times you move, the more you appreciate having a clutter-free life. E-readers help with that. But I don't love the technology enough (and it's not yet cheap enough) to make the switch.

I'm a notoriously late adopter. I resisted getting a cell phone until I live in South Africa, and then I ditched it again for four years in Chicago. I didn't get a proper one again until 2007?

The e-reader will be the same. All the cool kids will have them, and stare at me wide-eyed when I talk about how much space all my books take up, before I finally find something that really turns me on.

Homesteading in Dayton, Ohio

2010-11-30T06:19:00.003-05:00

I lost my last job because of the banking crisis, but despite that week of terror, I've been largely shielded from the recession. I was beyond lucky to get offered a job after being unemployed a week. Health insurance freak-outs subsided soon after.

All around Dayton, stimulus money has inspired tons of construction projects. There are new parks, newly paved and repaired streets and highway projects, and abandoned buildings being torn down. There are even a couple new tech buildings being built. The local university has been taking advantage of the crash to buy up property, including the enormous old NCR building, and is making the south side of the city a regular university town.

Few of these buildings are full anymore.

It's easy to ignore or simply not see other things. I visited the pharmacy downtown yesterday during my lunch break, and discovered that Chik-fil-a, and Roly Poly in courthouse square, and the Quizno's across the street, had been closed for some time. I'd known Quizno's was done for awhile, and I figured Roly Poly was coming (they have terrible service), but Chik-fil-a was a surprise.

See, the big skyscrapers downtown are far from full right now. Some of them are totally abandoned and up for auction.

I came home last night to find that the city had finally torn down the two houses due for demolition across the street from our house. This was after they'd finally gotten to the house right behind ours last week. Our neighborhood is wide-open and spacious, and it reminded me in that moment of Detroit. They've got a similar issue in many of their neighborhoods. So many houses have been torn down that they're looking for people to do something with the old lots. Abandoned lots that nobody's doing anything with aren't making the city money, and aren't inspiring people to stick around.

I remember telling J. at one point that we should totally go out and "homestead" in Detroit, where if you call the police there's a good chance they won't come and if your electricity goes off, it may not come back on again. If I didn't have to worry about where my drugs would come from, it could be fun.

Turns out, I kind of like this option better. Easier access to drugs and all. See, Dayton still functions, despite the complaints you see piling up on the City's Facebook page. Everyone I've dealt with at the City has been pleasant (even if not always competent - but that was one person out of half a dozen), and genuinely interested in helping people grab up and develop land. There is opportunity here, even if it sometimes seems like the world is dying all around you.

There are things I like here. I like that it's a bike friendly city. I like the 2nd Street Public Market that's open year round and has an awesome deli that serves lobster bisque (if I close my eyes and don't think too hard, I can pretend I'm at Pike's Place Market in Seattle). I like that we've got a bunch of rivers, and parks. I like that there's a boxing gym right downtown, even if I still haven't managed to get there. I like 5th Street's bars and restaurants and funky feel. I even like the Dayton Dragons field, even though I could give a crap about baseball. It just looks nice. I love the art institute. And the summer festivals are killer. It starts with the Strawberry Festival, then the Lebanese Festival, the Greek Festival, Octoberfest, and so many more, and as many county fairs as you'd like to go to.

Now, it's not like I'm going to write a love letter to this place. When I came home yesterday and looked at the flat, filled in lot where our haunted house used to be, I dreamed once again of spring when we would be able to start planting five million trees on our combined barren lots. I miss the mountains, and big trees, and the ocean. I miss road trips to Reno and Bend, OR and Timberline Lodge.

Taste of home: 2nd street public
market is open year round

But I'm also under no illusions about how everyone else is struggling through this recession in big cities where rent is always over $1,000 and mortgages are often over $2,000.

My quality of life out here is a lot better than it would be if I was trying to scrape together $1,200 for a two bedroom in Portland and shelling out hundreds a month to cover gas. Today, I live two miles from my job and a mile from J.'s school. The longest commute we have is J's 20 minutes to Centerville when he's working nights at one of the school's branch campuses.

With all my student loan payments, I don't know how I'd live very well at all in a big coastal city. But out here? Out here I have a house for $541 a month, a car that's paid off, and I don't generally worry about how to pay for groceries. It's not such a bad place.

Now that our prior place is all rented out, we can even afford Christmas, which was looking iffy there when we expected to be paying mortgage + rent in December. Life was not going to be fun. Now we're getting back our deposit, too, and Christmas is fun again.

There are very few places J. and I could live well on what we make (particularly with the amount of debt I've wracked up traveling and getting degrees over the years). I'm not in love with Dayton, but I like that it lets me live that hazy half-dream of The Good Life on a budget.

The Mad Men Tango

2010-11-29T06:34:00.001-05:00

One of the things that makes Mad Men so consistently watchable is that it defies soap opera conventions. We've come to expect certain things from TV shows. We expect these people to live crazy, over-the-top lives full of great tragedies and great good fortune (but mostly, great tragedies). We expect miscarriages, drowned children, car wrecks, true madness, terrible accidents.

Instead, what Mad Men gives us is tangible, relatable, believable, every day tragedy. J. and I watched the season finale last night, and while Don was out philandering with yet another woman - leaving his children alone in a hotel room - J. said that he expected one of the kids would have disappeared, or the baby would have died or... something, while Don was out getting it on. This would *surely* be Don's wakeup call about all the philandering... No way, I said. This isn't a soap opera, and that's one of those convenient character-spurring-moments that doesn't happen in this show.

Sure enough, we pan to the lamp and get on with the show with everybody still intact.

In fact, the one truly outrageous accident I could think of in the show was when account exec Ben Cosgrove runs over the foot of the new head of operations with a John Deere mower last season. And one of the reasons it was so outrageously believable is because nothing like that happens on this show. But, just like real life, weird and wacky does occasionally happen. Just not, you know, every damn week of your life (OK, so, there was the weird California thing where Don runs off with that crazy family of free-love rich folks for three weeks, but I've blotted most of that out).

They also take great pains to ensure that we see lots of time passing between and during episodes. It's not like there's some wacky hijinks going on at the agency every week or some tumultuous thing in their homelives getting upset every week for the benefit of TV audiences. We just get the highlights. In fact, a great deal of the actual action in this show happens offscreen. What we see are significant slice-of-life character moments. We get The Milkshake Scene, and Betty-giving-Don-the-keys scene, and Peggy wearing the client's product to a client meeting scene, and etc. This makes the show clip along very quickly, and lets us judge our protagonists during low, high, and simple everyday moments.

Everytime somebody gets pregnant on this show, I still expect The Tragic Miscarriage or the Botched Abortion, but it never happens. Instead, they get to make tough choices and deal with tough consequences - just like real life. Most women don't get "saved" from having to make a decision by a convenient miscarriage. And, let's face it - well off women like Joan don't generally go to bad doctors, even during the era of illegal abortion (illegal things, as we all know, only apply to poor people, no matter what time period you're in. The rich have always been able to do pretty much what they want).

In fact, the only absolutely wild thing about this show is just how many women Don Draper sleeps with. Thing is, as a successful ad executive in the 60's, this is probably one of the more believable things about this show. It's just hard to believe anybody would have that much mental space to manage their affairs. That said, unlike, say, Nip Tuck (talk about a soap opera!), all of the women he's gone to bed with are distinctive characters, not plot coupons. They have sex with him for their own reasons, and figuring those out and seeing how they gel with his (or not) is one of the best parts of the show. There's something I've liked about nearly every love interest, even the prostitute. Because, again, they're well-rounded, well-acted characters. Not just "Don's love interest this week."

This is a show that I'm drawn to not simply because it's set in an ad agency, but because it deals starkly with relationships between people. How people justify being horrible to other people. How they use (or are used by) others. The decisions we make when it comes to job vs. family. Gender relations in the workplace. Power negotiations.

The best part is that it's not bad guys vs. good guys, either. All through last night's episodes, I kept saying, "Don is such a dog! Ack, he's such a dog!" and then Betty shows up and I'm like, "Ack! She's such a little kid! Such a selfish little kid!" The beauty of this type of show is that not liking one character doesn't mean you have to like the other. Just because Betty married a dog who cheated on her doesn't make her the victim. Not in the least. She negotiates her own life. Makes her own choices. And some of them are nearly as dog-like as Don's. I don't sit around boo-hooing that she's some kind of victim. Nobody is good or bad. They're just people. And they are doing their best with what they've got, in the situations they're in (except Don, who is a dog!).

In fact, what I love about watching Don is watching his moral compass at work. He simply does things without thinking of anybody else. He's truly the most selfish character in the show (which says something considering it's a show that includes Pete Campbell), but he believes that everything he's doing is absolutely right. He does whatever it takes to get what he wants, and not even his family is sacred. It's whoever you need to crawl over to get to the top... and yet, he keeps up this illusion that he's a good husband, father, and family man. The people in his life are there to be used. No more, no less. And when he is done, he simply dumps them. And hands them some money or something. Desperately hoping they will go away.

The supposed irony of this last episode is that Don re-marries before Peggy. But then, Peggy doesn't have a male secretary, so she's at a distinct disadvantage. The best scene, by far, in the finale was the one between Peggy and Joan as they commiserate over their crazy office life and Don's puffed-up pride at his latest engagement. "Here, ladies, you do all the work, and we'll keep drinking and fucking our secretaries, ho-ho."

And yet, just like the characters themselves, the gender relations at the office are not bad guy/good guy. They simply are. Peggy fights for her raise. Joan just says "thank you" when she receives a title but no raise. They come from different schools of how to get ahead in life, and they have far different tool boxes. Watching them negotiate power for themselves inside and outside of the office on par with the mechanics of guys' personal lives is what kept me watching this show in the first place.

Because, as noted, Don Draper is a dog.

And, you know, that's another thing. I've been hoping Joan would dump her ridiculous fiance-and-then-husband forever. The show had one of the most believable rape scenes I've ever seen - non-consensual, not-brute-forced sex - between Joan and her fiance (again, sticking to that "Here's how most things happen to people. Not here's how we imagine things happen to people" idea), and ever since then, I kept hoping she'd dump his ass. But, you know what? Life keeps going. How many people have had non-consensual sex with their significant others? Their relationship keeps going. They have bad times. They have good times. But nobody's all bad. Nothing's all bad.

I love that this show explores why and how people stay together, even if they are sometimes terrible to each other. We love our black-and-white society. We love "Well, he hit you, so leave" or "He cheated on you, so leave." Or "They didn't give you a raise, so leave." Finally, there's something I can actually watch on TV that doesn't say, "Someone did X, so they are they Bad Guy." It says "We're all bad guys. We're all good guys. It's just a matter of how much good and how much bad at this particular time."

I don't know where this show is going, or how long it will stick around, but as long as the writing and acting stays at this caliber (more milkshake scenes, less California threesomes), I'm certainly going to stick around for the ride.

Happy Weekend

2010-11-28T11:42:00.001-05:00

Mine certainly was!

Women, Guns, and Gods: The Horns of Ruin

2010-11-24T08:46:00.002-05:00

I found Tim Akers's last book, Heart of Veridon, by accident at the local bookstore. I enjoyed it so much that I eagerly awaited his next book, The Horns of Ruin... until I read the back cover copy.

See, it had all this stuff that annoys the crap out of me. I'm not a fan of sword and sorcery, or stories about gods, or steampunk, so marketing "sword and sorcery meets steampunk" doesn't work for me (your mileage may vary. Being in marketing, I know this is good marketing; I'm just not the target). You should know that right off before I go into my thoughts on the book. This wasn't really a book I should have enjoyed.

But, you know, Tim Akers is a fucking great writer.

And when you're reading great writing, you forgive a lot.

The Horns of Ruin is about Eva Forge, last paladin of the dead god Morgan. Her cult of Morgan is dying, and the man she's sworn to protect is kidnapped. Great fantasy is about setting as much as the people in it, and the city of Ash is a lovingly detailed, creepy, and arcane city built atop a black lake. There's a whole mythology here, with creepy beings you've never heard of and a huge, detailed history that's spun seamlessly into the story. There's no "pan to the orcs" or "well, you know how elves are." Like VanderMeer's Ambergris, this worldbuilding is done from the ground up.

One of the reasons I was willing to pick this up despite the fact that it dealt with living gods and sword and sorcery is also because Akers did something in Heart of Veridon that was really awesome: he presented the "gods" in that world as really, truly, unknowably alien. Gods became gods because they were creepy things we didn't understand, whose motives could be anything from benign to sinister. You don't know what exactly they are. Or where they came from. Or how you should relate to them. You simply build your faith around them in order to make some kind of sense from the freaky unknowable. When we don't understand something, we kill it or we worship it. Which is especially fitting considering how this particular story goes.

At any rate, I figured that his take on gods would at least be more interesting than your standard fare. And I was not disappointed.

Ash has a very complex magic system based in... well, mythology and history. That is, the mythology and history of *this world,* not our own. The gods were regular guys once, three brothers who quarrelled and fought and backstabbed and won great battles and conquered the city. They were people, once, who amassed their power over time. The idea here is that godhood is something amassed over time. There are many potential gods - the successful ones are those who are able to best gather what may be a finite amount of power around them.

The analogy to real-life politicians/celebrities/robber barons is pretty stark.

I won't pretend to know how the how system works - it's a reasonably fast read. Suffice to say it felt very original for a sword-and-sorcery package, and it was cool watching power invocations in action. There are spells/invocations for speed and strength and battle moves. You invoke to draw on power. It's spell casting seamlessly woven into the history of a place.

And it's this, to me, that's the real strength of the book. The originality of the magic system/casting, the mythology, the way it all ties together to create a city that's very much Other. And did I mention the writing is really good? That means you get to dig your hands into the guts of this city, and it breathes on the page.

This is a spare little book. I say that because though the mythology is huge, it's confined to one city. And the cast of characters is small. The plot's very contained. I'm not sure why that felt odd to me - maybe because so much of fantasy fiction is about conquering the world, not making or unmaking a city.

The characters, unfortunately, felt a little spare as well. Eva is cool - guns, swords, massive power through invoking the strength/power of her god - but she doesn't connect with much of anyone along the way. I know she's supposed to care about her Fratriarch but just wasn't sure... why. Because her cult is all she knows? I knew it because it was said, but for some reason, never felt it. It's tough to write a warrior woman you can connect with. Like Del in Sword Dancer, or Monza from Best Served Cold, you have to cut away big pieces of yourself to make it as a woman and a warrior, to be taken seriously, but both of those books were very good at showing the heroine connecting - or failing to connect - or trying and failing and failing again - with people. And that made them not only interesting, but sympathetic.

Eva didn't really try to connect with anybody. She tried to not hit people in the face because they could further her cause, but some bit of humanity was missing from her, and it made her a little flat. I would buy more of the "cold warrior woman" thing if there was any kind of "got to cut part of yourself away to succeed cause of, you know, sexism" thing at work, but... Thing was, in this world, I didn't get that being a woman was an issue. Nobody really commented on it. It's got one of those "assumed equality" things going on, which is always weird in fantasy fiction, since feudal worlds (even those that have moved on to industrial revolution steampunk) are nearly always exploitative. It's cool if they're not, I'm just always interested in why, and that's not often answered in assumed equality world. I couldn't really figure out this world's social structure, since Eva pretty much just pounded in the head of anybody who got in her way (which was highly entertaining, yes, but did get repetitive). So I wasn't sure how much of that stripping-away-of-self she'd really had to do to be taken seriously. Her cult/invocations gave her great power. People respected that. It was far more important which of the gods you worshipped than what your social class was. Thing is, there's more than scholars and priests running a world, and though we saw a few random workers and got some lines from spear carriers, I wasn't really sure how life was for everybody else.

Because Eva is so one-minded, she never connects with anybody, either. And that's... troubling. I need to care about people in my books, and if there's no love (even muffled), or guilt (even rationalized), or remorse (also rationalized), it's harder to connect. Things glance off Eva like a stone skipping over a lake. This may simply be purposeful - she's been raised to be one-minded - but it made it tough to root for her along the way, even though the fight scenes were cool.

For what it's worth, the book does pass the Bechdel test (though barely), despite the small cast. This is primarily because Eva is paired up with a rogue scholar along the way who knows her own way around the city (the reason it's "barely" is because they're generally talking about how to find the Fratriarch, who is, you know, a guy. And the bad guys and gods are, you know, guys. So though your two primary characters are female, your entire supporting cast - including hordes of baddies - are guys).

Overall, this was a fast, entertaining read. I wanted to love it more than I did, and I suspect some of that had to do with not connecting with Eva. The story is so much in her head that it was hard to get perspective - either on her or on events outside what she believed was immediately important. The pacing was pretty breakneck, too - hardly any breathing/character stretching room between fight scenes. Though I was annoyed at some of the more "fan-fictiony" moments in Best Served Cold where the characters nattered on, I realize that what those did for me was make the characters far more endearing. At the end of the book, you feel like they're your friends in the same way you feel about the crew of Serenity. Even if they're your asshole friends who'd cut you as soon as look at you.

I wanted to be friends with Eva and the rogue scholar. But at the end of the day, they were ascending into something else, and leaving their humanity behind. It fits with the book's themes, but was a little disappointing as a reader.

That said, there's an incredible mythology here, great fight scenes, and some really stellar writing. If you want to go somewhere that's actually fantastic for awhile (or if you ever wondered how cool it would be to have a sword with an "articulated sheath") I'd give this one a whirl.

Not everybody needs to go kicking in heads with their friends, I suppose. Kicking in heads with paladins infused with the power of dead gods can be pretty fun too.

And The Walls Come Tumbling Down...

2010-11-23T18:39:00.000-05:00

Our haunted house gets smooshed.

What 15 Years of Rejection Slips Looks Like

2010-11-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

Something for all you young writers to look forward to! One of the best parts of the digital age is that you will no longer be hauling piles like this across a couple of oceans and dozens of living arrangements. The historian in me loves that I still have a bunch of rejections from defunct magazines.

*Note that the letter I pick up from my now-agent is actually a request to see the rest of the book, not the actual rejection, but she did reject that first book. Just important to note for those of you who are easily discouraged. If one book or story doesn't work, you just write another one.

Revenge of the Blogosphere: Haters & Comment Moderation

2010-11-19T06:02:00.002-05:00

I started this blog back in 2004 as a place to mouth off about my life. It was a natural extension of the long and winding emails I was sending out to groups of friends. Back then, only the "cool kids" were on the Internet anyway, so I didn't feel so strange about posting things in public. Geeks and freaks stilled ruled the net. It was pushing into the mainstream, but I can guarantee that nobody at my day job back in Chicago Googled me in 2005 or even 2006.

There's some fun stuff that comes with blogging. I remember going to a Wiscon the year after I started and how people came up to me and introduced themselves - total strangers - saying they read and followed the blog. It was... weird. As a writer, the cliche is that everybody asks you, "Where do you ideas come from?" In the blogging world, the first thing other bloggers ask you is, "How do you deal with negative comments?"

Blogging is a great way to prepare yourself for when your first book comes out. If you haven't started a blog and you want to be a writer who actually engages the world, I highly recommend it. Because, if you're lucky, you'll say plenty of things on your blog that make people who don't even know you hate you. And people hating you, for a writer, is a very similiar feeling to people hating your book. So you'll grow some thick skin real quick.

It's funny that people who read your posts get far more personal in their attacks than people who read your fiction. If you're lucky, they engage with your actual argument, but more often, they feel it's necessary to personally attack you. Which is weird, since they don't, you know, know you. But blogs are far more personal spaces than books, in part because of the fiction/nonfiction divide and in part because there's not the status confirmed by mega-publisher standing between me and the reader. We read stories differently if they've been published vs. unpublished. I expect published stories to be better. It doesn't mean they are. But I have different expectations. The web has become a great equalizer, and it means there's no longer any ivory tower for you to hide behind when people throw stuff at your crappy arguments.

Now, there are all sorts of things I can infer about a writer from what they write. But I don't know that I've outright called an author a woman-hating faggot, for instance, because of something he'd written.

But when you're loud and offensive and explicitly tackling feminist issues on a blog, the odds of a day going by in which you're not called a man-hating lesbian go up the more you post. Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with being a man-hating lesbian. There are certainly women I find attractive, and certainly some men I strongly dislike. And I suspect the vast majority of people in the world find some women attractive and strongly dislike some men, and vice versa. What gets me is how this stuff is brought out to silence the speaker. To invalidate what they're saying. You could have the best argument in the whole world, but one scream of "man-hating lesbian" and some weirdo thinks they've cut you down.

Um, no.

See, here's the thing, folks. If you choose to live publicly, you have to deal with the haters. And there will always be haters. Far more haters if you have an explicitly political blog. They will send you nasty emails and threaten sexual violence and call you gay, because this is about the extent of the scary stuff they can think of.

That's the good news. Because if it you know how to throw a good right hook and don't find being gay offensive, the world is your oyster.

Yes, really.

I've gotten all sorts of hatred spewed over here in the six years I've been posting to this blog. Thing is, all everybody talks about is the bad stuff (look at this post, even!). What we fail to talk about (and what nobody ever asks me about) is how to deal with the *good* stuff. I've had fan letters and thank-you letters and some really good stories about folks who changed their lives because of a personal story I shared here. I've had letters and comments that literally leave me speechless (or word-less at least). In the face of strong, heartfelt emotion I always have trouble responding, and it's no different with blog comments.

We continually focus on the bad. I know a handful of female bloggers who've deleted their blogs due to harassment. That's a tragedy. I understand it, sure, but it's a tragedy nonetheless.

When you start thinking about quitting, pull up the good conversations. The fan emails. The amazing comments. Remember the lives you're making better.

And just know that harassment comes with the territory. Harassment means you're doing something right. It means you made somebody uncomfortable. It means you're freaking them out and shaking up their worldview. It doesn't mean you need to shut up.

When people ask me how to moderate comments, I actually find it to be a trivial question. It's not about how to moderate comments. It's how to have the courage to keep talking when everybody wants you to shut the hell up. Hatred is exhausting. And we focus on the hatred, of course. We give negative comments three times the attention of positive ones, which always makes it seem like there are more than there really are.

The kind of blogging I do, I realize after my long hiatus, really is about courage. I was worried all the time about what people would think. I was worried about strangers at cons. Stalkers. Potential employers. Work colleagues.

But there's also a lot of good that comes from it. A lot of people who find some value in it. Who take courage from it.

And that makes it all worth it.

You have to figure out what's worth it for you, too. I don't envy the bloggers who've been targeted with hate campaigns from the big conservative or MRA blogs. I don't envy folks with exes who stalk them via their blogs. I don't pretend that "just ignore the haters" works in every instance. But the majority of the time, what we need to go forward is, simply, courage.

And a willingness to hit the "delete" button.

Hey, Jude

2010-11-18T05:43:00.002-05:00

I don't generally like to mix my personal blog with my day job life, as it's a good rule of thumb to keep the two separate. However, being somebody with a chronic illness that most folks get when they're kids, I have a soft spot for kids with chronic illnesses. I also have a blog that some people do, on occasion, read (especially when I'm ranting about Urban Fantasy, apparently).

My boss's son, Jude, has been suffering from an undiagnosed neurological condition that looks a lot like epilepsy - but all the tests have come back negative, and the drugs for epilepsy don't work. It sucks even more in this case because it's a kid, and it's tough for a kid to tell you what's wrong/what he's experiencing. They have spent many years, many doctors, and many, many dollars trying to figure out what's wrong with him and if there's anything they can do to help control his episodes. You all who've followed my frustrations over health insurance claims and benefits and dollars over the last four years may have some idea of what that's been like for them.

I know SF/F circles move in and out of health offices quite often, being the sorts of people prone to chronic conditions and terrible health (one of the reasons we turned to SF in the first place, come now).

Please take a look at Jude's story and pass it on if you're so inclined. Getting the latest cat picture to the top of Digg is all very well and good, but it's helping out people like this that is the real power of social media. Let's see if somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who can help.

You can contact David and/or learn more at his blog.

God's War Cover Reveal

2010-11-17T06:18:00.001-05:00

Here it is, yo, it all its bad ass glory:

Get you one!!

Why I Fucking Hate Dollhouse

2010-11-17T05:45:00.000-05:00

So I've gotten through all the Pawn Stars available on Netflix, and now I have a stack of gender and Islam books to get through, and you know, hey, sometimes I need a break.

It's been a long week here already and its only Wednesday. I've got a new dog that won't crap outside, bad weather, unresponsive city officials, and lots of day job.

So last night I turned on the TV. Drank a couple beers to get up my courage, and watched a couple more episodes of Dollhouse.

Why? Why oh why?

Because there are, in fact, people who like this show. Who talk on and on about how Whedon is doing this amazing transgressive things with it. Who say it really hits its stride in season 2, and if you can just sit through all the used and abused women until then, it gets really interesting.

Also, of course, I was exhausted and vegetative.

That's always how they get you.

I stopped watching initially after episode 2, when our supposed heroine is hired out to some guy as a whore/target practice. Yeah, I'm serious. It's The Most Dangerous Game. Again, this might be more interesting if I wasn't around to endure this whole "ha ha hee hee isn't that funny" hoax.

As it was, it creeped me the hell out, and I stopped watching.

I wanted to give Whedon credit. You always want to give folks you see as allies credit for stuff. But here's the thing: just because you were responsible for writing and producing the majority of the Buffy series and Firefly was a lot of fun doesn't mean you get a free pass when you're creating bad TV.

Last night I squigged through three more ponderous episodes of misogynistic hate. Sexy ladies being used, abused, wiped, and bought like so much merchandise. You can go on and on about how this is really an in depth critique of modern day human trafficking, or tell me that Whedon really is just building it all up and showing you how bad it is so he can tear it all down.

But the fact is that 1) The Madam isn't actually in charge. She answers to a guy, which she's on the phone with in ep 3 or 4 and 2) Alpha, who plays around with folks and also wipes folks, is a guy 3) And Topher, of course, the genius wiperoo of them all, is a skeevy, nasty sort who I hate more and more as each episode goes on 4) Echo's protector/body guard is a guy 5) the "good guy" trying to save Echo from all these bad people is, of course, a guy. 6) the only female regular character outside of Dollhouse is obsessed with our "good guy" in a romantic way and even brings him meatloaf or lasagna early on (I suspect she's likely a Doll, too).

It's gross.

Really.

It's a bunch of women being used, controlled, and abused by guys. Orbiting guys. Serving guy clients. They aren't always whores. Whooop-dee-doo. Sometimes they are safe-crackers who suddenly become mind-wiped cucumbers. At. every. single. step. along. the. way. these people are people manipulated and controlled. And it doesn't get better. Telling me, "Alpha will help inspire them to be freeee!" or "that FBI guy will help set them freeeee!" or even, "Echo will someday become a super weapon!" are all stupid, boring, cliched, hackneyed things. There is nothing at all redeeming about this show. Not one single thing.

To add insult to injury, Eliza Dushku just doesn't have the acting chops to pull this off. And the overt sexualization of all the women just gets annoying. And the wiping and wiping and wiping gets old. He had a couple episodes to give us the script that she then unpacks and rebels against. I'm just not going to sit through half a dozen or a dozen or two dozen episodes of abusive hate in order to get around to the point.

Knowing that Whedon produced it makes it even more insulting. You always react strongest when somebody you perceive as a part of your "in" group appears to betray you. I still feel the same way about Dollhouse as I did after the second episode: Whedon could have been spending his time creating far better shows. And instead, wasted several years of his life putting together this piece of crap.

Did anyone get past the first two episodes? Why did you keep watching? I only made it through three more because I was a little buzzed and hoping to find something redeeming; you want to be able to find what others find. Was that the only reason ya'll kept watching? Because you kept hoping it'd get better?

Because I have to tell you - it's a physically painful show for me to watch. Every episode, you're just waiting for somebody to sexually assault the heroine. Every. Single. Episode. That gets really exhausting and nerve-wracking. Folks might say, "Hey, good TV should *make* you uncomfortable!" But to what end does my discomfort serve? Will it teach me more about myself or the world to watch a heroine manipulated, controlled, and assaulted for hours on end? Even if she rebels against it later because she gets her special powers? Cause like the UF stuff I gnawed on earlier, she's never going to escape being a doll. She's absolutely surrounded by men manipulating and controlling her.

Smacks a little too close to home for a lot of people, you know? And her getting superpowers as bestowed by somebody else (Alpha or whoever) just isn't going to make up for all the gross human trafficking stuff.

I realize these are interesting things to you, Whedon, and that you'd like us to be uncomfortable. But there's being edgy and transgressive and then there's Hunting for Bambi. Five episodes in, there's still little to nothing to distinguish one from the other, except yours is TV and there's was a marketing ploy.

Here's to hoping that Pawn Stars season 3 shows up on Netflix soon.

Sex, Death, and the End of the World: Thoughts on The Windup Girl

2010-11-16T06:08:00.003-05:00

There has been a lot of ink spilled (real and virtually) about Paulo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. A few months back, I decided to see what all the fuss was about and ordered a copy.

This was a dense book, the type you don't see mass marketed very often, in large part because it throws you right into the story and expects you to catch up. There's no popcorn here along the way. No, "As you know, Bob," just "Here's what I'm doing, ha ha figure it out."

I pushed through the first twenty or so pages thinking I was going to end up putting it back down again. The characters aren't particularly likable. There's really nobody to root for. Toward the end of the book, I realized I wasn't terribly invested in who "won" or died.

That said, the characters are interesting, and that makes all the difference. Exiles and outcasts, expatriates and profiteers... they're all here. Bacigalupi is a great evocateur of worlds, and he captures the heat and stink and chaos of this future Bangkok with great force. This is a book that's very much about the world, the re-emergence of colonization after a spectacular collapse, civil war, and above all, exploration of the world after the terrible repercussions from too much genetic meddling with our food stuffs and our environment.

The host of characters include a scheming expatriate employed by a "Calorie Company" - big ConAgra-like companies that literally control every edible thing that comes on the market. The entire economy is based on calories - fossil fuels have been used up, and energy is measured in literal human calories. Genetically modified animals and people help pick up where fossil fuels let off, but it's been a long climb back into industry.

Part of what seems to have made this book so popular - besides the fact that it's well-written, evocative, and engaging - is that so much of it is so here-and-now newsworthy, which people love. I felt the same thing when I read his take on how big-business-controlled seeds had aided in toppling the world. I'd just finished watching a smattering of documentaries about the monopoly on corn seed and fertilizer of some big companies today, how farmers weren't even allowed to harvest their own corn for planting, because the seeds themselves are patented. Yes, the seeds are patented. They are owned by a corporation.

In the Windup Girl, we get an answer to the question, "What happens when all the seeds are patented, and then there's a blight, and no alternatives around anymore?" We also get an answer to the "What happens if we continue on like we are and the oil runs out" question, too. These are both big concerns. Science fiction has never really been about the future so much as it is about exploring answers to today's questions and concerns. We write our future fiction (and our fantasy fiction) in reaction to what we're experiencing now. The Windup Girl is right there at the forefront.

Big stuff aside, I did want to take a minute to share some thoughts on The Windup Girl herself (the blog's titled Brutal Women, afterall). The whole Asian sex slave robot/genetically tailored pleasure girl slave thing has been done to death. The minute she comes on the scene I was like, "Tra-la, whatever."

But Bacigalupi makes some very interesting choices, here. Though she is created by and owned by men, it's a woman who is her primary on-stage abuser, and the person you hear spewing the most hate at her. As a Windup Girl, she's outcast, hated, feared, and can't walk outside alone without fear of being recycled. Not only that - her flawless skin means she has pores so small that she doesn't regulate heat properly. This is a big problem in sweltering Bangkok at the end of the fossil fuel age, when things like ice and air conditioning are for the super rich... and she's an rich guy's abandoned companion who's been taken up into a petty brothel. That means she's utterly, completely dependent on others. Physically, and genetically. Because she's been bred to be submissive, dependent, with an overwhelming desire to please.

What makes her different that other robo-women? She knows exactly what she's been bred for. She has a painful knowledge of her dependence, even as submitting to her masters' desires fulfills her dog-like need to please, she hates herself for it. She knows it for what it is: bad programming.

And she fights it.

How many times have you done something for somebody that was against your principles? How many times have you done something you were uncomfortable with, or that you didn't really like, but that made somebody else happy? And then afterward you were like, gah, why did I do that?

That's her whole life. It's knowing what free will's like, but never having it.

All that said, she does work hard at rebellion, and in the best of all girl-power stories, she does in fact get weaponized... and the whole place goes to hell. She has been slowly battering against the cage of her genetics for some time, so when she bursts out, it's pretty spectacular, and unpredictably violent (after yesterday's post about women getting weaponized in response to sexual violence, I should have found this more predictable, but the way Bacigalupi sets it up, it's actually not. It felt like an interesting instead of a predictable choice).

everybody's getting stepped on by everybody else.

Overall, this was a good read. If you can get through those first few initial pages without going, "Fuck this, I don't know what the hell is going on!" you'll be fine. Things pick up. Things make sense. Sometimes they make too much sense. And you start to wonder just how fun the world is going to be in 50 years unless we get some electric cars and high-speed trains and stop corporations from controlling the genetic makeup of our foodstuffs.

Which, of course, is exactly what a good SF novel should be doing... freaking me out about the future.

Why I Don’t Read Much Urban Fantasy

2010-11-15T05:57:00.000-05:00

(from here)

Daniel Abraham had an interesting post up about rape and urban fantasy that I’ve been chewing on for awhile. To sum it, it’s some thoughts on women and power as they’re portrayed in urban fantasy. Or, “urban fantasy is a genre sitting on top of a great big huge cultural discomfort about women and power.”

True and true.

Much of urban fantasy, he argues, exists to explore and unpack – among other things - women’s fear of sexual violence. So the best way to explore the issue of women and power and sexual violence may be to not state it explicitly. After all, once you state a book’s overall theme out loud, “Why yes, I am immune to sexual violence and find it quite liberating, but I am also interested in how it has re-shaped my life” it loses some of its power.

I thought it was an interesting thesis, and mulled on it for awhile. I was reminded of the Buffy episode – one of the most disturbing for me – when she loses her powers (taken away from her by a guy, her mentor, as a test. Talk about worst nightmare) and walks down the street, small and afraid, as a group of guys leers and heckles her. It was a profoundly unsettling moment, to see the heroine you love so much for her physical strength get demoted to, well… a woman like us. She doesn’t confront her hecklers like she would have done when she had her superpowers. She just does what we’ve all done at one time or another – hunches up her shoulders, doesn’t make eye contact, and scurries quickly away back into her house.

What Abraham came to realize over the course of the dialogue that ensued after the post went up was that, actually, urban fantasy and its predecessors (i.e. the warrior woman books of yore – which I have a much firmer grasp on, and will talk about more than UF here) pretty much all explicitly use rape and/or sexual violence in the narrative more than you might think. It’s a big old honkin’ cliché that in order to give your heroine an “excuse” to be violent, you have to give her a good, violent reason – like a past rape or intense fear of sexual violence.

There is a long history of literally weaponizing your heroine in response to attack. It happens to guy characters all the time, too (you know, the ones whose wives and daughters are raped and killed in order to spur him on to revenge. Once again: we all get weaponized in response to rape, which is THE WORSE THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN!!). So on the one hand, powerful female characters are weaponized because their guy counterparts were. The thing is, they’re just more likely to have personally felt the violence themselves in addition to acting out violently in retaliation against violence done to others. We made weaponized women heroes who were also victims. The first couple times you read it, it’s interesting. And then it’s not.

I’m re-reading Jennifer Roberson’s Sword Dancer series right now, which I read back when I was 14 or 16, and there it is right there: the ass-kicking female heroine was raped and her family was killed, which spurs the entire arc of her narrative. She becomes cold and hard and goes on a blood rampage after the guy who raped her and killed her family. Red Sonja gets her powers from rape, too. Ash gets raped. Hell, even Veronica Mars gets raped (yes, yes, I’m mixing my media – stories are stories. I am also reminded of “That was the end of Grogan... the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!”).

In Tamora’s Peirce’s Alanna books, she said she created the character with the explicit intention of NOT having her become a warrior based on past experiences with rape or violence. It was just so incredibly overdone, in her reading experience, that she wanted to do something different. She wanted to create a heroine who wanted to be powerful because it felt right and made her feel powerful, not because of what someone had done to her

One commenter in particular took issue with Abraham’s post, and I followed the dialogue with interest. I didn’t find anything he’d said particularly offensive (not loving UF all that much, myself), though the more I thought about the “books about women and power don’t talk about sexual violence” thing the more it seemed weird to me.

Why’s it weird. Well, because UF exists in a version of this world. Even if you can defend yourself from a rape… you are still going to fear rape. Why? Because, you know, you’re a woman. And our society pretty well grinds it into you from day one that rape is THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN TO YOU. Worse than dying, even. You see it much more explicitly in other cultures where women are literally stoned to death or hang themselves after being raped, but you still see it here a lot too. There’s a lot of cultural baggage around rape, which is yet another reason women don’t like to report it. If you report it, you’re presumed guilty in one way or another. Even if you didn’t wear a short skirt, and you fought back, and you weren’t walking “somewhere” alone, or going to your car without pepper spray, or whatever reason people make up so they can make it your fault that somebody attacked you, just being raped still carries the stigma of taint. Of badness. Of brokenness. Dishonor.

So, you know: you are going to carry a lot of internalized stigma around about being raped, even if, you know, on some level, your new shiny powers protect you from it.

After much back-and-forth, Abraham’s anonymous commenter got there, too. She said it much more pointedly than I did, tho:

“As a privileged male, you have the unique opportunity to throw yourself into a situation where your power is taken from you. You feel safe, secure. You don’t think of yourself as a victim. You don’t have a cultural script running through your head about how you should act, dress, talk in the same fashion as a real life woman does. In all probability you’ve created a female protag who mimics more of your real life privilege than a real life female.”

I don’t read much urban fantasy, as stated (the heroines have all started to blur together for me), but I’ve suggested Abraham’s MLN books to others, and I had a few people say that it sounded like it was written by a guy – folks who didn’t know who the pseudonym was for. When people say things like this, I always wonder what they mean. Nobody could really articulate it. But I suspect it has something to do with the above. Because even if you’re Superwoman… you’re still a woman. And the world you live in makes certain that you remember it - superpowers be damned.

Urban fantasy is, indeed, about women and power. Learning to wield it. Negotiate it. Have meaningful relationships while wielding it. In a world where women are starting to make as much or more money than men (in some areas), and are pushing ahead in terms of formal education, this weird power sharing is something we’re all trying to negotiate in real life, too.

Why are guys so intimidated by strong women? Not even Mad Men knows. But urban fantasy books are interested in exploring those themes, too.

The thing is, even with all this perceived power, we still have a lot of cultural baggage trying to push us back down. Outdated ideas about virgins and whores, continued hysteria over what women do with their uteruses, sexual violence and the stigma around it (still primarily for women – when was the last time you heard the epithet “rapist” used against a guy in a negative way?), tricky power negotiations, social baggage around pregnancy and taking time off to be with your kids, stigma around being a stay-at-home mom and stigma about being a working mom (basically, if you’re a woman, you must be doing SOMETHING wrong), and etc.

Having superpowers doesn’t peel away all the social baggage. In fact, it actually HIGHLIGHTS the social baggage so it stands out starkly and ridiculously for what it is. Superpowers say, “Hey, I’m buff and tough, so… why do I still think all these made-up rules apply to me? Why do I still care so much about being skinny and having a boyfriend?”

It’s a lot easier to critique society when you obviously no longer fit within its confines. It’s also easier to talk about how lonely you are in it because you don’t fit in it.

So, women and sexual violence. A lot more of it in your woman-power fantasies than you might think. Because, women with superpowers are still women.

Which, if you think about it, is also a really good sum up of women’s places now: We can make our own money, get great high-power jobs, take boxing classes, mouth off, have sex outside of marriage (and even enjoy it!) and take on all the trappings of power… but… well… at the end of the day, we are still women – and being called “Women” means we get to deal with all that that means to our culture. And there are still men (and other women) who go to great pains to remind us of this, and who try and use those reminders to strip away our power.

Now, all that said, and understanding Anon’s issues with a guy boldly stating that his heroine just wasn’t going to worry about rape because she was just never going to get raped cause of her powers… I have to say that I’ve got a pretty similar stance in my fiction - though I've had to take my heroines off this planet in order to do it in a way that I feel is believable, sadly.

I have that stance in direct reaction against the “strong woman got raped and now she’s allowed to be violent!” cliché. I prefer working in worlds where rape carries no stigma. Or carries some other stigma (preferably a horrifically negative one for, you know, the person perpetrating the crime as opposed to the victim). I want worlds where rape makes no sense. Where it’s not a weapon of war or control. It’s a violent thing, certainly, but not socially acceptable as it is in this society (yes, it is. I just skimmed some recent rom-com where the heroine turns down our hero half a dozen times – he shows up at her work, her apartment, and calls her a lot. She turns him down every time. Then, at time number eight, changes her mind and they hook up. What message is this kind of story sending to guys? Mass media still markets “passion” and “romance” to guys as “not giving up when she says no.” And then we all wonder why there’s a disconnect).

Committing sexual violence - which is a particular type of violence that goes out of its way to remind women that they’re women, and Other – has ridden off into the world of cliché for me. No doubt that, as Anon says, these books are helpful for survivors of abuse, which is still 1 in 4 in this country. They help us realize that yes, in fact, life does go on, and we can grieve, and go forward.

But I'm tired of reading about abused women. My master's thesis looked at how the African National Congress recruited female fighters during the war against apartheid. I have stacks and stacks of real-life stories about violence perpetrated against women in every country. I'm a feminist blogger, and read the stats and facts and figures every day. I get images of women being abused all the time. Yes, it's real life. Yes, terrible things happen.

But that's not all there is to life. And I feel that seeing only negative images of women - of women abused, hurt, scared, exploited, harrassed - every day all the time is only going to make you hate being a woman even more.

Think about that. If all you ever saw about, say, an imaginary country called Valynna were sad, unhappy people, would you want to become a citizen of Valynna? What if you already were a citizen? Would you feel better or worse about being a member of that country if all you saw all the time was the worst of what could happen to you?

I made a conscious choice in my work on this blog waaaay back in 2004 that I wasn't going to post images of women being abused. I was going to post images of happy women, strong women, powerful women, successful women. Yes, I would talk about the unique challenges we have, the abuses, the power struggles, the objectification, but I carefully chose those sidebar images to portray strong, vibrant, happy women. I am tired to see suffering women all the time. Because though it may be *a* truth, it is not *the* truth, any more than any one experience stands in for all experiences.

When I look for heroines, I look for heroines who choose violence as a tool because it works for them, not because it’s thrust upon them. I want heroines who are powerful for power’s sake. Who are honestly, truly, really, scary. Not sexy-scary. Not girl-next-door-scary. But genuinely someone who you’d be terrified to bump into in a dark alley. Because they are so good and unapologetic about what they do.

And I just don’t find that in any believable character in UF. Not anybody who's got an interesting setting, at any rate. Because the setting... our world, even Changed... is still our world. With all the same bullshit.

Joanna Russ once said that the reason she started writing science fiction was because it was the genre where you were allowed to imagine how “things can be really different.”

UF lets us address issues of power and sex and violence as women in a changing world. Our changing world. I deal with that every day. I’m not so interested in writing it or reading it.

What I’m interested in is what makes us women. And who we’d be… with the same parts… but somewhere else. I want to pull off all the baggage and put on some different loads and see how people interact. I am tired of rape and leering and cat calls and expectations to have kids or not, or get married or not, or whatever.

I want to imagine how things could be really different.

My turnoff with UF is pretty much the exact opposite of what Abraham argued as being not there (or what shouldn't be there): women in these books are still bound by the cultural rules of being women, including the threat of sexual violence. They are merely exceptions when people know about their powers. If they don’t know about their powers, they are still going to be treated like women. And though there is endless delight in watching them combat people’s stereotypes, there are still far too many of those moments when the heroine creeps away into the night, hunching her shoulders, leery of cat-calls.

It’s a not-fun world. An uncomfortable world. A world we’re certainly working on making a better place.

But not the world I'm primarily interested in writing my spec fiction in.

Because it's the world I have to live in and write non-fiction about every day.

I am tired of seeing women getting beat up and crapped on. I want to imagine something different.

Defenders of shows like Dollhouse would say that you have to show all the bad stuff before you show the rebellion against it. I respect that.

Trouble is, people get lost a lot in the bad stuff, and they forget why it was it was bad in the first place. Instead of being "bad" it just becomes the "norm."

Finch: The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

2010-11-12T06:00:00.005-05:00

Finch's gun is awesome.

I’ve been a Jeff VanderMeer fan ever since I read the novella Dradin, In Love. It had so many of the things I love: a mad, unreliable narrator; weird setting; lush worldbuilding; and a perfect, simple, brutally honest reveal that told you mountains about the narrator and what he really wanted out of life.

There were some fun stories in City of Saints and Madmen, but I didn’t love any of them the same way I did Dradin. After Dradin, I loved Veniss, Underground best. More twisted scenery, broken narrators, piles of bodies and darkness and did I mention the broken people? The Situation was another delightful read for me, which took all the weird worldbuilding and set it on top of a workplace satire that any desk jockey could relate to.

The thing with much of VanderMeer’s fiction is that most of the narrators are not likable. You don’t read VanderMeer if you want to read about heroes (his most heroic character is probably Shadrach from Veniss, Underground. Probably, again, one of the most honest heroes I’ve encountered in fiction in awhile. Heroism is about doing what you know is right, not doing something because you believe you’ll get something out of it – whether it’s fame or riches or, in this case, the girl).

And that brings us to Finch.

Finch isn’t a hero. He was so much of a non-hero that I found myself, at best, ambivalent about him. Even when we find out his prior identity, it’s really not terribly interesting.

What Finch has is an incredible, amazing, nightmare-inducing world the likes of which I haven’t experienced since Veniss, Underground. The book would literally give me weird dreams when I read it before bed. Only reading Lovecraft has ever given me those same dark, slippery sorts of nightmares. The ones that crawl around in your head and whisper crazy things that leave you feeling a bit dirty and confused come morning.

Finch is a strong book, and probably one of the best plotted I’ve seen from VanderMeer. If you can get past the unlikeable main character, there’s a whole hideous new world here to sink your teeth into. It’s not pretty. It’s not heroic. It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s what makes it so scary.

VanderMeer’s venomous mushroom folk are true aliens, the kind whose powers and technology and motives you realize you’ll never be certain of (they actually lose a little of their scariness toward the end when we get too much telling about their motives, but I’m not sure how tension could have been sustained without knowing something about what they were doing). I love their slimy memory holes, their leaky organic guns, the edible bullets (edible bullets!!), the addictive mushroom fumes, the contaminated areas.

This book is fantasy worldbuilding at its best.

I had some issues with the narrative – particularly how the protagonist seemed to be pushed and pulled and used by other forces, which, again, made him so much less heroic (being a used object is always less heroic than being an active agent), but that’s a personal preference in my heroes. This hero was purposely non-heroic, and he stayed that way the whole way through. It reminded me a little of Hobb’s title character in the Assassin books – it’s a story about the catalyst for change, not about the heroes.

I was also pleased to see a big leap here in the quality of VanderMeer’s heroines. Ya’ll might not have noticed this, but it was something I took issue with very early on (and was what sparked my initial correspondence with VanderMeer).

Shriek had a female narrator, but, alas, she was just so dislikable for me that I was never able to finish the book. Finch was, to me, a stronger and more engaging book, and I ate it up like candy. It also had some really engaging female supporting characters. The possibly-turncoat-lover – who made the leap from “Yawn, it’s the woman who exists to have sex with the hero” stereotype to full-blown character with one particularly cutting line toward the end (very a much a “The women men don’t see” type of line), the bookish information gatherer with her own secrets, and the rebel queen, of course (every good book needs a rebel queen). All three were strong, complex people that really stood out for me along the way, and, I think, greatly contributed to my enjoyment of the book (rebel queeeeeeeeen!).

That said, this isn’t a book for everybody. It’s weird. It’s grotesque. It will, likely, give you nightmares. And Finch, the character, is kind of boring.

But.

Ambergris is not boring. It's amazing. And the civil war, mushroom war, and life-in-alien-occupied-Ambergris-slice-of-life is so incredibly worth reading if you’re a lover of intense worldbuilding that I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Of course there are also some plot holes, a little over-explaining at the end, and some dues-ex-machina-ing (also at the end), and a few too many nods to Shriek (which, as noted, I didn’t finish), and there’s that protagonist thing....

But if you love the type of fantasy that takes you somewhere else… with something else, Finch is a very fine romp.

Moonfail: Or, Why I Look Forward to Being a Dinosaur

2010-11-11T08:35:00.001-05:00

I've followed the whole crazy E. Moon debacle since September, and experienced much the same reaction others did to Moon's initial post. Some nodding along for awhile, raising eyebrows at a bit of the one-for-all view of citizenship, and then gaping at the bizarre turn it took with "Assimilate or you're just asking for what you get" rhetoric. And then it launched into something akin to, "You don't know how good you have it! We've been so tolerant! We could have thrown you all in concentration camps like we did to the Japanese!" (no, those are not direct quotes. Please read the link to the original post)

Weird.

Yes, it was certainly weird, and if it had been an essay about feminism and how women should just assimilate into patriarchal culture if they didn't want to have stuff thrown at them, I think there would have been a stronger and clearer response from the Wiscon committee up front. But then, any big decision made by committee is an epically long, bitter, drawn-out process. It's why I don't like going to neighborhood committee meetings. You get the same kind of dynamic: one or two people ranting on about their own pet projects/beliefs, one or two people actually contributing something useful, and a silent minority slowly seething with resentment of the committee's incompetence while another half dozen people check what's happening on Facebook on their smart phones.

I'm pretty surprised the con had the guts to step up and recind Moon's GOH status. You have to figure out who you are and what you stand for in order to do that. And you have to be willing to piss a lot of people off. People are worried about what this means for future GOH's. And they should worry. Because if you've got some intolerance built into you (and anybody who's been raised in a racist, misogynist, fearful, intolerant society like, you know, pretty much all of them, is going to have some), at some point it will leak out. And there will be some places you aren't honored at.

Big deal. Get over it.

Yes.

Get over it.

I don't expect to be invited as a guest of honor by the Tea Party, either.

What hurts for Moon - and what worries many Wiscon-goers - is that it was their own community which they felt turned on them. When your community makes a leap forward and you don't... well, you get left behind. That's how it is.

Today's radicals are tomorrow's dinosaurs.

Yes, that's a good thing. I want tomorrow's society to be far more tolerant and progressive than I am with my in-built biases and knee-jerk misogyny (you have no idea how difficult it was to give Nyx female friends in the bel dame books. Or how weird it was to not make every token spear-carrier a guy. There are a lot of biases I had to be hyper-aware of, and on re-reading it now years after writing it, I can see a whole lot of misogyny in there. And let's not even get into the whole "holy war" thing. That's the subject of another post).

This wouldn't have happened five or ten years ago. For some reason it reminded me of when David Moles posted all those quotes from Harlan-apologists from the private SFWA boards to a public forum (David took this post down some time after the fact, but I found an old post regarding the issue by Gwenda). Back then, the big outrage was about the breach of privacy on an internet forum (even more laughable today, I know, with the Facebook privacy fiasco. Nothing on the internet is ever really private), not a backlash in response to the sexism of some of the public's most beloved SF/F authors.

In this case, of course, Moon posted her own thoughts to a public forum, so there was no one to blame for her comments but herself. And, true to her convictions, she stuck by them even after learning why others found them so appalling.Which, again, is fine. Nobody's saying you can't be a bigot. I say bigoted things all the time. But I shouldn't be suprised when somebody calls me on it. And - at the very least - I can sit down and think hard about why I'm being called out as a bigot, and re-think my position in light of new evidence and/or arguements against my position (a very good recent example of how a civil dialogue and rethinking is up here about Daniel Abraham's thoughts on rape in Urban Fantasy. Do read the comments. Anon really nails it in the line-by-line deconstruction. This is also something I'd like to tackle in another post).

Moon didn't do that. This is why, in large part, I think the invitation was rescinded. We're all bigots. What makes Wiscon cool is the fact that it's a space where we can talk about why we're bigots, and figure out ways to combat our skewed worldview.

Cons are notoriously bad at making controversial decisions, especially ones that have to do with pissing off their much-beloved writers. Much of Moonfail shows the strength of the LJ POC community and allies inside SF3. Fans decide what a con is and who should be honored. Wiscon wouldn't think to invite Orson Scott Card or Harlan Ellison, no matter how progressive they personally believe themselves to be (ahhh, sorry, let me stop laughing).

Wiscon is a political con. But, more specifically, Wiscon is a feminist con, not a con about combating racism and encouraging religious tolerance - even if the new mission statement makes a nod to that (it's been pointed out that the U.S.'s latest freak-out about Islam isn't racism, but intolerance of religion. If the two weren't linked, however, we wouldn't be seeing the 20% of Americans who fervently believe that our bi-racial president is a Muslim, despite all evidence to the contrary. Part of race and ethnicity is religion, culture. See anti-semitism. Racism and anti-semitism are taboo in most circles now, but it's now OK in a LOT of circles to spew hatred and fear of Muslims. The hilarious part about that is that this country was founded on religious tolerance).

I'd argue that everybody who attends Wiscon enjoys the idea that they're supporting diversity, but what we saw in the Moon fiasco is that when it comes down to critiquing one of their own, about half the Wiscon crowd will support the cause of feminism over racism and religious tolerance. Looking at the comments in the SF3 thread, this is pretty obvious. Wiscon is a feminist con, they say. Bigotry be damned. So, in their view, Moon should still be honored at a con whose mission statement is, among other things, about eliminating racism and promoting peace, love, understanding and all that.

Sorry. That's not how change works.

As one of the biggest racist, misogynist bigots I know (having grown up in a racist, misogynist culture I'm not sure how anybody can honestly say anything else), I recognize that I'll be among the writers who never goes to Wiscon as GOH. That's cool. And Moon and others who this will likely happen to in future should also be cool with it. It's not like there aren't plenty of other non-political cons who are going to honor you with a GOH invite. Just not Wiscon.

Wiscon made a stand for something. It let folks know what was acceptable and unacceptable in a GOH. Are they silencing anyone? Did they delete somebody's post? Bar Moon from coming to Wiscon all together? Of course not. They just said, in essence, "This is no longer someone who we see as supporting the mission of Wiscon."(though I do wish they had made a more clear statement of *why* the invite was rescinded, instead of just saying it was rescinded).

And, see, that's the deal, isn't it? In Serenity, the assassin chasing our heroes notes that in the perfect society he's building, there will be no place for him. His actions, he knows, will make his job - and killers like him - obsolete. In a a world where race and class and gender don't matter, we're all dinosaurs. And though I certainly hope that distant future looks more like the happy-go-lucky Star Trek universe than the fascist Firefly universe, I have to acknowledge that there's no place for me in it.

I hate to tell you this, kids, but think about all those "old folks" who we look at as being big bigots. Guess who those bigoted "old folks" are going to be in 30-40 years?

They will be us.

And you know what? If society's come so far that some of our most progressive people today are seen as tomorrow's bigoted assholes, I am cool with that. Because it means we've made some progress.

And that's the whole damn point of all this screaming and yelling and ranting and grief, isn't it?

Where Have All the Brutal Women Gone?

2010-11-10T20:53:00.002-05:00

One of the things that bled out of me after I got sick was all the rage and anger and angst. Oh sure, I get upset at things still, but I no longer get worked up into a blind rage. Whenever I start getting worked up, it hits a certain pitch and then it all bleeds out of me, like water. This is unfortunate for a lot of reasons, among them being that anger, despair, and self-hate drove a lot of my motivation. This came up a lot in my personal life, where folks told me that in order to be happy, I’d need to cut out the self-hate. At which point I said, “Well, yeah, that’s great, but… what does that leave me with?”

Not a whole lot, apparently. I find it very hard to get worked up or passionate about much of anything these days. It does come and go sometimes. My writing has finally crept back a bit, after a year-and-change book depression when GW got canceled by the prior publisher. I find a lot of pleasure in writing book 3 these days, primarily because I’ve done that thing that writers do – gave my protagonist a similar issue to tackle. She recently came back from the dead, got a whole lot of extra time… and now she’s not really sure what to do about it.

Mortality can be like that.

I got sick four years ago… you’d think I’d be over it by now. You’d think that’d be enough time to go through the grieving process. But I suspect there are many stages of grieving, and when you have a full life with a lot of other, immediate feed-and-clothe-and-medicate-myself things to tackle, you don’t spend a lot of time working through your “Holy crap I’m a cripple now” issues.

I very nearly gave my protagonist a chronic illness in book 2, just to see how she’d deal with it. But as I worked through that version of the draft, I just wasn’t buying it. Not only because it felt far too Mary Sue-ish but also because, well… I enjoy writing the Nyx books because I get to write about a physically powerful and capable female protagonist. When you take away her physical power, she’s just another woman. Just as vulnerable and frail and potentially weak and fearful as any other person (not just women, but I know my aversion to making her physically weak has a lot to do with her sex. Lack of power is especially terrifying to women, and certainly to me). And, you know, that’s just not something I want to spend my time writing about. I spend a lot of time living it. Why stay up at night writing about victims?

Because that’s what it feels like sometimes. It feels like somebody took a shovel to the back of my head. Just got right on up behind me and swung before I could even turn around (of course, if I’d turned around, I’d be dead. The fact that I came so close to dying – and that dying is so much easier for me now than before – is something else I deal with). There is nothing you can do to prepare for illness, for disability. With violent attacks, we like to feel that we have some kind of power. That if we just trained hard enough, ran fast enough, hit hard enough, that we could avoid violence. Violent attacks, at least, we can pretend we have some kind of fighting chance against. It’s why I started lifting weights. It’s why I started boxing. I wanted a body I could control. After a lifetime of hating my body, I found some peace in knowing it was very good at knocking over a 200 lb punching bag with a good right hook. There was some comfort in that.

Getting sick was like starting all over again. Suddenly all my worst food addictions weren’t in my head at all – there were tangible, physical symptoms of my need for immediate glucose (symptoms like convulsions and eventual death). Food had been the enemy for so long, for me, and now it was both the enemy and the cure. Sugar’s too high, your body slowly rots. Sugar’s too low, you go into a coma and die.

Better figure out the balance, lady, or you’ll die.

It’s frustrating, and exhausting, to be so aware of your personal care. Your own mortality. I get sick of it sometimes. Sick with my own mortality.

In that way, I’m not sure how much of my current malaise has to do with being 30 now and how much has to do with simple stress and my poor eating habits over the last year, both of which affect me much more strongly now. Some people might be able to shrug off the effect of stress and food on their health, but when you can measure its effects with a glucose monitor, it’s less easy to brush it aside.

I should have died back in 2006. I’ve had four years of extra time to mull that over. But when I look at it some days, it just feels like Nyx out on her porch at the coast in book 3, pissing and drinking and fucking her life away. Sure, a lot of life events have happened. Good, wonderful, passionate things.

But most days, life doesn’t feel as big and bold as it once did. It feels closed and exhausting and unimaginative. Dull-eyed.

I know what I need to do. That’s the rub, there. My recent A1c was deplorable. My eating habits have degraded to the point of farce. I am tired all the time and when I get excited about anything at all these days, it feels very surreal.

I would like to live a big, bold, passionate life.

I’m just so tired all the time.

And I know where my feeling of power and health comes from – it’s from lifting weights, and boxing, and those horrible, horrible, deplorable, teeth-gnashing 3-mile jogs I was doing on the Chicago waterfront.

I know I need those things to feel better. But I no longer have the self-hate to drive me to do them.

Just a lot of extra time.

A lot of fucking and drinking at the end of the world.

Why I Haven't Posted in Awhile

2010-11-09T20:42:00.003-05:00

Someday this will be a real, live book!

2010-10-11T21:02:00.000-04:00

Someday SOON, even!

Page proofs have arrived for STET'ing.

All That's Fit to Print

2010-10-05T19:38:00.000-04:00

God's War, the novel I started back in the misty-haze of post-graduate school in Chicago, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com (and Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Night Shade's site, of course).

Proofs are in the mail, and I'm told there will be cover art to weep over (one way or another) quite soon. I've also purchased the domain www.godswarbook.com, though I'm not sure how I'm going to maintain that in addition to this site, which... well... as you can see, isn't getting updated as often as it needs to.

Day jobbery + writing book 3 + proofing book 1 + buying a house + moving + desperate need for a vacation are all kinda wrecking havoc with my ability to produce quality content after about 3pm.

The good news is, World Fantasy is coming up, I'm drinking beer again, and oh yeah... GOD'S WAR has a February 2011 publication date. Perfect way to say "I love you" to that special brutal woman in your life...

Not in love yet? Check out the book trailer...

Toss a Coin

2010-09-07T06:23:00.001-04:00

You CAN Learn...

2010-09-03T18:17:00.000-04:00

Having a Baby...

2010-09-01T06:17:00.000-04:00

Me: Just one more push! We've just got one more!

Steph: YOU SAID THAT THE LAST FIVE TIMES!!!!!!!!!

Me: I meant, one more in this set.

Because baby-birthing is the ultimate total fitness workout.

First They Came For...

2010-08-27T13:43:00.000-04:00

They came first for the gays and the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't gay, or a Jew.

Then they came for the immigrants and the socialists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an immigrant or a socialist.

Then they came for the Muslims,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muslim.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

(re-imagined)

Seriously, you guys. Stop with the historical wheel of hate, OK? As somebody with a background in historical studies, it gets really depressing, and leaves me with very little hope for a future that doesn't look like V for Vendetta.

I'm Not Sure Yet if This is Depressing Or Not

2010-07-27T20:39:00.002-04:00

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”
– Joseph Campbell

Three Things Make a Post. Pity I Only Have One...

2010-07-24T19:40:00.000-04:00

Started writing a post about The Windup Girl, then was beaten out by the heat.

Tra-la.

Have been spending most of my updating time on Facebook, as it's faster and easier to update than the blog when all you've got are a couple of links and some piecemeal reactions to random life events. Too much work blogging means too little personal blogging, and that is kind of a problem.

Hoping for a day without a heat index of 100+ and humid. May free up the brain pan some.

For the Record...

2010-07-07T19:21:00.000-04:00

... the nearest Meetup group that shows up when ones searches for "feminism" is in Louisville.

I suspect searching for something like "women's studies" would end up with similar results.

There is a gay Christians group, however.

You've got a long way to go, Ohio.

God's War & Infidel Book Contract Arrived Today

2010-06-29T19:57:00.000-04:00

(yes, yes, this is the SECOND one. It's a wacky business)

Need I say more?

Words for the Road

2010-06-23T06:27:00.002-04:00

"As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it."
-Eckhart Tolle

2010-06-20T18:31:00.000-04:00

Half our cauliflowers appear to have been eaten by some kind of fungus, but these two turned out lovely, and we'll be turning them into a fine cauliflower mash tomorrow.

And here's what our garden currently look like, after harvesting some peas, a tomato, two cauliflowers, and two broccoli (including harvest of broccoli florets after initial head harvest):

I've been growing more keenly aware of where my food comes from (and what it's actually made out of) the last couple of years. I grew up eating fast food. My parents both worked at a fast food company for 25 years. It was just... what you ate. It never occurred to me that you should eat any differently. I didn't spend much time in the produce aisle until I was 18 and interested in dropping some weight I'd put on while on the pill. Switching to fruits, vegetables, and protein meant dropping 60 lbs in about 6-8 months. It felt almost effortless.

I've read all the books - like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food - and watched all the shows, like King Corn, Supersize Me, and Food, Inc.I know how we got here. And I know why.
These days, I work hard to eat well.

And, of course, that's just it - I have to work hard to eat well. Folks who haven't tried it really don't know just how tough it is. Fast food, prepared food, soda, crackers, canned soup, frozen meals... these are revolutionary, time saving victuals that make it possible to feed a tremendous number of people on a very small amount of land with 80% of the base made of up just one versatile commodity crop - corn.

And it's a blessing.

Yes, it's killing us prematurely, because we have no defense against a double bacon cheeseburger. It sets off all of our primitive pleasure centers. Why not eat them all day?

Because, of course, you'll die of malnutrition. But you'll keep doing it, and doing it, like a rat with a way to self-administer cocaine. Giving up carbs is really hard to do. Even before I was sick, I'd get the shakes, and intense cravings. Then there are the visual cues, which are constant. As somebody in marketing and advertising, I know just how helpless we can be in the face of $5.99 single-topping pizza specials, particularly when you're exhausted after work, haven't eaten in six hours, and are faced with the prospect of an hour's cooking time before food ingestion.

It's amazing that we can feed ourselves so cheaply and easily in this country. Try growing a garden. Try losing half your cauliflower crop to fungus, like we did. "It's a good thing we're not relying on any of this to feed ourselves," I told J. as I pulled out the cauliflower. Our little garden is just for fun. When we get a house with more land, we'll likely be able to feed more of ourselves with it, but even a "for fun" garden is disappointing when you discover half your land was wasted on crops that don't feed you.

As sympathetic as I am to the bullshit and poison that's ended up in our food, I'm also very much aware of how things were before cheap food. Farming is not a fun life. Food doesn't just roll out of the truck at the end of the day, full-formed. And after you grow it, you know... then you need to cook it. And that takes time. And planning.

On the one hand, the West is addicted to a diet that's killing us. On the other hand, we spend less than 20% of our income on food and spend less than, what, 10 hours a week? preparing food (on average). As somebody who's had to rebuild her entire conception of food from the ground up, I'm still sympathetic to the thinking behind where we are today.

There is another way to eat, I know, somewhere between industrialized, corn-fed fake food and fungus-ridden-today-we're-eating-dirt-grown-your-own-grass food. There are farmer's markets. Local agriculture. All that jazz. But that doesn't take into account how people are going to eat during the winter, or those precious spring months when you're growing what you'll gorge on come end of summer. You end up eating a lot of turnips and jam and drinking a lot of vodka.

What''s on offer now is so damn good that's it's been a struggle to break the pizza-burgers-prepared-food-cycle. Taking that next step - the parsley-at-all-meals-turnips-all-winter step - is something I just don't know that I can do if I want to continue to maintain a modern lifestyle.

There's a better way to eat. And I'm still struggling to find it.

What We Eat

2010-06-20T16:40:00.000-04:00

I made the switch to eating like a real person back in Chicago (I lived well in Alaska, too, but fell on hard times in South Africa where I subsisted mainly on peri-peri rice, spinach pies, and Woolworth's prepared foods), but I'm still sometimes impressed at the amount of shrubbery that goes into the shopping cart each week.

The older (and creakier) I get, the more I pay attention to what I eat. Getting sick four years ago only made it easier to make the correlation between mood and what I was eating.

Words for the Road

2010-06-18T06:22:00.002-04:00

Greatness

2010-06-08T06:19:00.002-04:00

SOMEDAY

2010-06-07T19:26:00.002-04:00

Someday I will write something besides radio spots and social media strategies again.

SOMEDAY.

Happy Happy

2010-06-01T06:26:00.000-04:00

Five False Myths About Gender Differences

2010-05-27T20:53:00.000-04:00

Blah, blah, blah... But say it enough times and maybe folks will start to look a the world a little differently. Can't change something if you don't know what's broken.

One for the Road

2010-05-27T20:38:00.000-04:00

"Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none."
- Benjamin Franklin

Ok, besides 1, 2 and 5 I'm doing pretty well.

Where's My Pony?

2010-05-27T06:16:00.000-04:00

(Via hannah)

An Oldie But A Goodie

2010-05-25T20:14:00.003-04:00

Food. Get Some.

2010-05-18T20:59:00.000-04:00

Have been a crazy Mad Men fool lately. Look! Here's a picture of some excellent food at Boulevard Haus to distract you!

Am looking forward to upcoming vacation mainly because it means I can unplug from social media pursuits for a whole three days and work on some actual fiction. I've got Babylon and Iron Maiden languishing out there on Dropbox.What's the use of a mobile file management system if you never use it?

Also, boxing classes start when I get back from the Left Coast. Yeah, yeah, delay involves a sprained right finger, which involves a bad dog and a leash. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Man, I'm looking forward to this vacation. Just wish it was another three or four days longer.

Ass-Kicking Heroines Unite

2010-05-18T06:24:00.000-04:00

"In her interview with TrekMovie last November, the actress (Zoe Saldana) said that she wanted to "kick some ass" in a fight scene in the Star Trek sequel, and more recently she has revealed that JJ Abrams has agreed to give her that fight scene."

Apparently, she used to pretend she was Ripley and Sarah Conner as a kid. WIN.

See, folks? It's all connected.

Level Up

2010-05-10T06:25:00.002-04:00

Switched from 5 lb weights during my morning circuit to 10 lb weights. Yes, yes, I can heft my 20 lb and 30 lb for limited exercises, but 3 minutes of strength followed by cardio followed by strength again is a liiiittle tougher. Two weeks with the 5 lbs was just enough for me to start getting bored. Now it's 10 lbs and I felt like I was gonna die again.

Good times.

Hoping to max out at 20lbs with these (was doing 12-15 at the gym back when I was doing circuit, but at home, I only have 10's and 20's. So they'll be another hefty level up here sometime in a couple weeks).

How Does Your Graden Grow?

2010-05-09T13:40:00.000-04:00

Quite remarkably, it turns out. Raised beds all the way!

Cilantro.

Full garden

First broccoli florets.

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and red onions.

Tomatoes, peas, eggplants, yellow squash, red onions.

In Which the World Doesn't End

2010-05-05T06:30:00.000-04:00

Some time back, I misplaced my flash drive at the new day job, most likely while moving my office from downstairs to up. Long searches in old office, new office, and three different possible bags I may have stowed it in turned up nothing. The last backup of the files I had on the flash drive was from November 12th, saved to my laptop.

This was deeply crappy, but not a total fail, as I had printed out recent copies of Babylon and Iron Maiden. But it did mean lack of get-up-and-go due to the fact that, you know, I was going to have to retype at least half of 100 pages worth of stuff.

Last night I was going through my old laptop one last time to see if maybe I'd created another flash drive backup before that one, and lo and behold, I found that I'd recently replaced the Babylon file in the actual Babylon subfolder in my novels folder on my hard drive. So, I hadn't backed up the whole flash drive (most of that info doesn't change), but I *did* back up the stuff I was working on.

I'd started backing up projects I was regularly working to my laptop on back in December, with just such a scenerio in mind (copying over the whole drive got tedious). I really miss that damn flash drive, but at least I don't have to retype most of Babylon from scratch.

Now I need to effing get back to work on it.

Moral is, as ever: always backup.

Yes, Mercenaries Die. That's Why You're Getting Paid So Damn Much

2010-05-02T21:05:00.002-04:00

Watched a documentary tonight about profiteering in the Iraq war by private companies like Halliburton, Caci, Titan, Blackwater, and others. I'm always amused that the same folks protesting using tax money to provide healthcare to their neighbors didn't raise a peep when Halliburton was charging U.S. taxpayers $100 a pop to do a load of laundry for soldiers, and whose blatant disregard for said soldiers' health resulted in death and dismemberment of troops and civilians.

But that stuff's old news. Halliburton and the private contractors' abuses are a rant for a whole nother post. Don't get me started.

In this instance, what struck me as interesting was the way they portrayed the civilian contractors as totally naive casualties of war. These folks went over there with a passionate desire to help, yes, and they felt fucked over when it turned out they were just part of a profiteering system.

BUT.

The company I worked for back in Chicago was among those called on by Halliburton and others as subcontractors in Iraq, and you know what? The package they offer you is pretty sweet. 2.5 times your base salary plus combat pay, generous vacation time, and you only had to sign a 6-12 month contract. I'd have been getting paid almost $100,000 as a project assistant/glorified admin. I gnawed hard on this and finally decided that, you know, we made the mess, we should go over there and fix it.

That was the moral piece I needed to push me over there.

But let's be honest, folks.

It sure as fuck wasn't moralitythat got me interested.

It was that sweet, sweet, $100,000.

The morality just made me feel better about it when I sent off my resume.

Anybody who went over to rebuild Iraq as a private contractor was doing so as a mercenary. As a mercenary, there are certain things you're going to expect: 1) you'll be in a lot of danger, and there's a real possibility you'll come back dead or maimed, 2) because of this, you'll be paid an assload of money 3) because you're a mercenary and are expendable, your employer really doesn't care too terribly about your safety.

Time and again I was struck by these families' outrage that their son/brother/husband had gone over into a war zone to make 100-120-140K driving a truck or 200-250-300K setting up water sanitation sites and being absolutely stunned that they'd been hurt/maimed/killed.

Death is a horrible, horrible thing, but if a soldier dies in a war, do we ask why the government didn't do more to protect them? These days, perhaps we do. Why didn't they have better armor, better intelligence, better logistics? We demand amazing things from our government and rightly so. In a perfect world the war machine would run magnificently and folks whose countries we invade wouldn't fight back. But this is what war is. War is dirty and messy and horrifying and people die. Did we expect something different?

Maybe this is just because I've read and written so much about war, and because so much of my family has served in war (including the Iraq war). Maybe it's also because when I sent in my resume for consideration as a private contractor in Iraq subcontracted to Halliburton that I was very, very clear about just what kind of shitstorm that would entail. I would likely have been one of the folks in the video decrying the abuses of Halliburton as far as waste and endangering soldiers' lives, but I don't know that I'd have been upset because Halliburton put me in a war zone.

Halliburton didn't put me in a war zone.

I had a price, and Halliburton was willing to pay it.

That's what being a mercenary is, and it's not all candy and roses and "hey I'll drive a trunk for 100K and come home smelling like the desert."

Anybody who thinks they're getting paid 100K just to drive a trunk is woefully naive of what the fuck a war zone is, and has absolutely no conception of what it'd be like to be a member of a country that's just been invaded, no matter how right or just or patriotic the invaders feel.

Are we really all this isolated and naive? Do we all make the same sorts of moral justifications like the one I made back then, ("wellllll... we broke it, so we really should fix i"t) to make ourselves feel better about being profiteering mercenaries? You can pretty it up any way you like, but if you were to offer the same job ("drive a truck and get shot at") to somebody for 20-40K, see just how many sign up for patriotism.

The ones who signed up for patriotism are the soldiers. You know, the ones actually getting paid the shit money to get shot at in the desert. Everybody else is a fucking mercenary.

Me included.

At the end of the day, I was not among the folks selected to go oversees. But I would have gone. For $100K to pay off all those student loans and credit card debt and come back with a fresh new start?

You're damn right I'd risk driving a truck across a mine field for that.

Fitnessery

2010-04-30T09:41:00.000-04:00

The long winter was rough on my fitness level and my jeans size, as I've noted before. When I realized two months ago that I'd gone up a size over the winter, I realized it was time to get my crap together. The problem is, it's difficult to figure out the best way to get your crap together when you're already working out several times a week.

For me, it's about finding the right balance of intensity and endurance. For nearly a year, I've been up at 5:30 in the morning doing 30 minutes of pilates and free weights, but it was just so low intensity that about all it was good for was flexibility and casual activity maintenance. I was getting about 20 minutes on the elliptical a couple nights a week, too, but this was dramatically different to my workout back in November, when I had two solid 30-40 minute workouts through my day job fitness program every week (suspended in December), plus five days a week of pilates, plus biking to work five days a week, plus another 3-4 days on the elliptical. Good weather is good for fitness.

But if my fitness level drops, my mood and energy start going wonky, and it very quickly gets tougher to fit into my existing clothes - and we all know how much I hate shopping for clothes.

When I got on the scale a couple months ago, I discovered I'd gained a whopping 18 lbs over the winter. Seriously? I thought, in just four months? Besides the money-spend on clothes shopping (I've long given up hating myself over weight. It's not so much asthetic as practical anymore), the frustration, for me, was the I just didn't feel very good. I was having more trouble controlling my blood sugar, I was more down than usual, and I just didn't have any energy. Going to bed at 8:00 pm sounded like a fine idea some nights. Not because I did anything exhausting, but because I felt depressed.

So, even with a modicum of fitness in the mix (30 minutes in the morning and 2-3 days in the evening), I was not at my best.

By concentrating on cleaning up my diet (oh, I do love that low-carb coffee cake, but eating one a week was a little much), I easily dropped 6 lbs in a couple weeks, but without the fitness part, I was still tired all the time, with wonky sugar, and still stuck buying new jeans.

It was time to mix up my fitness routine. The new day job was great for switching up my fitness routine, so when I started there at the end of March, I started biking six miles roundtrip. With all the lights and switcheroos, it takes about 20-25 minutes to get there in the morning and again to get home at night.

But this still wasn't cutting it.

Pilates, relaxing as it was in the morning, wasn't the best use of my time either. The great thing about my morning routine was that - unlike my afternoon elliptical slacking - I did it every morning without fail. So I needed something in that timeslot that was going to make the best use of my time.

See, I always put off changing my workout routines as long as possible because, of course, there are a couple days of insulin adjustment involved, and highs and lows and math and needles are always annoying at 5:30 in the morning (for those interested, the magic formula was calculating 10 carbs for breakfast instead of 12 and then rounding down the number of insulin units my meter calculated for me, unless my blood sugar is below 90 during my morning test, at which point rounding up is actually better).

So I went ahead and pulled out my copy of Jillian's 30-Day Shred and said, "OK, it's time."(and if you think Jillian is like some Jane Fonda "squeeze your butt while wearing a leotard" thing, think again. Her videos are the closest thing to the tough-love circuit training I was getting at the POW gym back in Chicago, with the same immediate results).

This 25 minute cardio and strength routine regularly kicked my ass when I first got it, but I'd set it aside for awhile and moved on. So Monday morning I got up at 5:20 a.m. just to make sure I had enough time in case of sugar wackiness, changed my clothes, and got started. At the end of it, I realized that all that bike riding had indeed actually been paying off, because my endurance was much better than the last time I'd done the workout.

What I love about this routine is that the fitness, energy and endurance improvements are evident pretty much immediately. On day one I was bouncing around at 6:00 a.m. ready to start the day. By day two, I noticed a marked improvement in my bike riding and on day three the workout was already a lot easier. Last night, I noticed better definition in my arms, and this morning I stepped on the scale for the weekly weigh in and found that I'd dropped 2 lbs. Not bad for 25 minutes in the morning (and another 40-50 minutes a day of bike riding, of course, but the morning workout was the only thing I changed).

I also went ahead and took another look at my diet to make sure I'm making the best use of my calories. I made the switch from almond flour to soy flour, which has half the calories and only 4 more carbs per serving (and still less than half the carbs of regular flour). It's also cheaper, so: win!

The last big push will be to break my new daily popcorn habit at the day job. We have a popcorn machine here at work, and I regularly eat 2 cups of popcorn as a complement to my lunch. That's an extra 200 calories a day, which doesn't sound like much until you realize that's 4,000 calories a month.

It's the little things, you know? They add up.

At any rate, this week has been bursting with far more energy and alertness, much improved sugar numbers, and a noticeable toning of my legs and arms, which has gone a long way toward improving my strength on the bike, too.

I'm still looking at trying to fit in at least two more workouts per week, preferably at the boxing gym downtown. Downsizing freed up some cash for J. and I and it looks like we'll be able to start boxing classes next month. I figure that's another 2 hours of fitness a week, which should be about right to get me to the level I'm most comfortable at.

It's funny, you know, because there certainly is a genetic component to how *easily* one can lose weight. For those of us with the best of the survival genes, it's not that we *can't* be 150 lbs (or 185 lbs, in my case. I don't ever want to see the tail end of 170 ever again), it's that doing so requires a lot *more* effort than most people. In fact, I don't expect to see that wishy-washy 185 by making these changes. What I want out of this is to get me at the fitness level I'd prefer and get me back into November's jeans.

That's it.

And to do that will require about 1.5-2.5 hours of exercise 5-6 days a week. That's just how fun it is to be me. And probably another reason why I get so pissed off all the time when people assume that anybody clocking in at over 200 lbs must just be lazy and sit around eating donuts all the time. This is what it takes for me, personally, to clock in at around 200 lbs. More than that requires extreme self-deprevation of the 1400 calories per day and 2-3 hours exercise 6 days a week, and you know what? That's not the life I want to live. I love my body. I love being big and strong and scary. If I'm too hungry to throw a good right hook, what's the point?

I'm all about practicality, people.

Keep Calm and Carry On

2010-04-30T09:13:00.000-04:00

Because in the face of Nazi invasion, this is generally the best thing you can do as a civilian.

Well, that, and join the resistance. But for those of us often overwhelmed by simple daily living, it's not a bad mantra for life-crazy. Sometimes we get worked up over the daily grind like it *is* a Nazi invasion, and you know? Not so much.

Lunchtime Limbo

2010-04-29T12:49:00.003-04:00

While I have a few minutes here at lunch, how about some updatitude:

Pandorum was a great little lower-budget SF movie about one of my favorite tropes, which isn't done enough in movies (likely for budgeting issues). Also, unlike most French films and pretty much all apocalypse novels/movies, the desperate folks were far more interested in eating the ass-kicking female character than raping her, which I appreciated. Because, you know, when you're starving and desperate you're far more likely to eat somebody than rape them (dunno what you all feel like doing when starving, but sex - forced or consentual - generally isn't the first thing that comes to mind). Also, space zombies.

The longer I work at an ad agency, the more I love Mad Men. Am on season 2 and still in love. I had somebody say they thought all of these characters are intensely unlikeable, so they couldn't watch it. I actually find all of these characters intensely interesting because of their crazy faults. I love watching how other people justify their poor behavior. I love watching people put home/work into neat little boxes and pretending those worlds will never meet. I love watching the lies and half-truths and understandings people come to that allow them to do business every day. And I love watching that struggle. In part, what I love so much about this show is that nobody is perfect. Even more, I love watching people navigate a social climate slightly different from my own. They say that folks who read a lot of books tend to be more empathetic, in part because they're exposed to so many different points of view. I don't have to agree with what you're doing to understand why you did it. Mad Men is a wonderful romp through rich-white-people-are-crazy-land.

I finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, which was a great little SF jaunt. Atwood's poo-pooing at SF the last few years had really turned me off to her, and I'd forgotten what a good writer she is (if you haven't read The Handmaid's Tale, how is it you're a reader of this blog??). It's a solid little book about gene splicing and the end of the world. Strong female protagonists, rich setting, fun thought experiment, and did I mention end of the world? However, unlike Pandorom, she did fall into the "all bad men want to do is rape women especially during the apocalypse when they are starving" thing, which was a tougher suspension of disbelief than aforementioned gene-splicing apocalypse. Have I mentioned that there are certain sexist tropes that just annoy the tar out of me? She does also seem to have a love of exploring the social intricacies of whorehouses, as many of the scenes at a whorehouse in this book reminded me of some of similiar tone/feel from The Handmaid's Tale. I'll be picking up Oryx and Crake and giving Atwood another go.

My preference for PCs has evolved into blind hatred for Macs now that I'm spending my 9 hour days in front of one at the new day job. Control click THIS, Mac!!! Yeah, not a fan.

Also, actually pulled out and submitted an old trunk story a couple weeks ago. I haven't had anything in circulation in a few months, and it was nice to get something out there. Need to get back on that writing schedule that I'd redone and then had to can when all the free time I was expecting wonderfully dried up. No complaints! Just paperwork.

Annnnnnnnd.... I'm off.

You Know You Haven't Blogged in Awhile When...

2010-04-28T19:03:00.000-04:00

... you've got half a dozen spam comments to clean out. I'm alive, just work-busy and busy-busy with some promo projects for God's War (really want to have a killer FB page and flash-based site for the book. I know, I know, but fans love flash).

I promise, more content soon.

Happiness is...

2010-04-13T19:16:00.002-04:00

In the Bag

2010-04-02T22:27:00.000-04:00

Book 3 work this weekend. Also, bumped into yet another person who doesn't know what a "copywriter" does. Has the term just totally died out, or do folks just think magazine copy and web page copy gets cooked up all by itself?

Hrm. I blame blogging. I supposed that if just anybody can "publish" some words online, there can't actually be a job that *pays* you to do that... heh.

Open Letter to Proflowers.com (Scam)

2010-04-01T20:59:00.002-04:00

Dear Bill Strauss,

I am writing to let you know that I am among the hundreds of people who have been defrauded of over $100 by your company's deceptive and misleading business practices. As I'm sure you're aware, customers who order flowers from Proflowers.com or goodies from CherryMoonFarms.com or those of your partners are lured into getting "free shipping" coupons or other discounts for clicking a coupon that shows up at the end of their order or in their email box after they order - what they don't realize is that clicking the coupon itself automatically enters them in a recurring subscription to an "Easy Saver" program at $14.95 a month.

Nowhere on the coupon does it state that clicking the link will automatically enroll them in this program. *After,* they click, they're told what the program is. Like many consumers, this is where I stopped. I did not continue enrolling in the program (foolishly thinking I'd have had to enter my cc information, or at least click an "OK" or "Agree" button. Ha! So naive!). Since I had deliberately chosen not to save my credit card information on your site, I believed this meant my information was secure, as I hadn't signed up for anything and a third party biller shouldn't have had access to my credit card information.

As I hadn't been using my credit card much the last 9 months (I have been working diligently to pay this off), I had no reason to check over my statements... not until the last month, when I had to lean on my credit card to get by between jobs. And then I found out what you guys were up to.

This deceptive little cash cow, I know, was concocted by Encore Marketing . The fact that they can't name you directly as the client in their "successful" case study on their website (which I can't directly link to because they built their site in flash, which tells you what a premier marketing company this is) is very telling about how proud both of you are with this strategy.

As a communications professional familiar with firms who have a similarly short-term profit strategy, I wanted to advise you against continuing these deceptive practices. I understand that charging folks $14.95 a month is wonderful for positive monthly cash flow. But I've also seen how quickly complaints pile up on the complaints boards (here and here to name a few) and the news stories that start highlighting consumers who've been defrauded, and I've seen how repeat business dries up, forcing companies to rely on more and more deceptive marketing practices just to make ends meet. The "ProFlowers is a scam" group on Facebook only has 15 friends as of yet, but I figure if I put out a few Facebook ads - investing no more than you and your company defrauded me of - will help it get some traffic.

I am incredibly disappointed in this practice not just because, you know, it's wrong, but because your products are so *good.* You have *great products.* You don't need to be fraudulent and deceptive and defraud people's grandmothers of $14.95 a month plus the inevitable 18-25% interest rate they're being charged by their crappy-ass bank.

You can run a better company than that.

I am currently working through your company's customer service channels to get all the fraudulent charges refunded to my account in full. That said, getting back the interest that's been charged to my card for these charges will be harder. I pity the grandmothers who have 20% interest rates.

Until then, I'll be sharing my Proflowers/Cherry Moon Farms horror story on my blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and engaging with your lively Facebook fans. I have also filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and am working on one for the Attorney General.

Shame on you. And shame on Proflowers.com.

Good luck.

Kameron Hurley

UPDATE:

This is why you complain, people:

Dear Mr.(sic) Hurley,

Please accept my most sincere apologies. I was recently informed that you enrolled in our EasySaver Rewards partner program and that enrollment in this program was not your intention. I have called EasySaver Rewards on your behalf in order to cancel your membership and procure a refund. When I called I found that your membership has already been cancelled and the refund of $14.95 has already been applied. I then had them refund the additional charges of $149.50 (10 months x $14.95 a month) and $1.95, the full amount of fees charged to you for this program. In most cases you will see the refund appear on your billing statement in just a few days, however please allow 1-2 billing cycles for the refunds to process, depending on the terms of your specific card issuer. We have a partnership with EasySaver Rewards where we provide customers an opportunity to click on and enroll in their service from our “order confirmation page” after placing an order with us. I’d like to apologize for any confusion you may have had over the enrollment process with this partner offer.

If you have the opportunity and would like to discuss this with me in further detail, my phone number is 858.909.3785. I am typically in the office from 8am to 5pm, Pacific Time. I am also always available via email. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if there is ever anything more I can do for you.

Sincerely,

EDITED NAME FOR REP PRIVACY

My Response:

Hi REP NAME,

Thank you for your prompt response. The monetary expenditure was terrible for me, but I know it was worse for others who have cards with higher interest rates right now. I'm more devastated by the deception. Your company has some excellent products, and it's a shame that I can no longer recommend Proflowers or their affiliates in good conscience.

Thank you again. I'll be watching my account for the credit.

Best,

Kameron

Things Which Are Great

2010-03-28T11:50:00.001-04:00

I've been busy with the new day jobbe, but wanted to share some things which are great:

Alice in Wonderland
Never been a fan of Alice in Wonderland. Annoying little kid wandering around a crazy place eating and drinking indiscrimiately and poo-pooing about like it's all a great inconvenience. Tim Burton's take (with a lovely script by Linda Woolverton), was absolutely stunning. Not just visually, which you expect from a Tim Burton film, but a fantastic coming-of-age-and-finding-yourself story about a 19 year old Alice whose destiny it is to lead a rebellion against the Red Queen. Yes, really! Check out the Joan of Arc armor! There were some heavy-handed moments, but nothing so egregious as you wouldn't expect it in a fairytale. It was wonderfully cool to see a girl-comes-of-age movie (she even ends up on the prow of a ship at the end... like Titanic!) where she gets to pick up a sword and slay a real dragon. The performances are all amazing, too. Anne Hathaway as The White Queen takes herself just-not-seriously-enough to make her incredibly likable. Helena Bonham Carter is a perfect Red Queen, and though Depp is often over the deep end, it's not too terribly annoying because he's not on screen the whole time. Mia Wasikowska is a strange Alice - I especially like the dark circles under her eyes - but the strangeness is what makes her so interesting. Great story, great actors, great visuals - and, have I mentioned? - Alice gets to slay? Yeah. Highly recommended.

Dragon Age: Awakenings
This is the sequel/expansion for Dragon Age: Origins. I am a sucker for a lot of Bioware games, primarily because they're full of great stories, great characters, and a level of interaction with other characters that you just don't get in any other game. It's a tough followup to Dragon Age: Origins. Origins was longer, had more in depth relationships with the characters, and all that. Awakenings got off to a rough, slow start, with lots of installation issues, game crashing, and annoying lack of access to character conversations. Once you figure out their new system for character interaction, it gets easier (basically, you can't talk to your folks any time you want. When you unlock a prompt, it either automatically starts the dialogue, or you have to select an object to trigger the conversation). But, you know, the gear is better, you make more money, and the choices are sacrifice this or sacrifice that. Lots of ambiguity. Lots of gray. I love that. Also, ass kicking female characters. There's still the requisite "chick with boobs hanging out," but as with Origins, they're not *all* that way, which is what makes the difference, to me, between a lazy, sexist game and one that acknowledges that hey, yeah, woman have different characters and personalities, too! They don't all run around with their boobs hanging out! Was also pleased that my golem armor didn't have the obligatory boob-enhancements. What the hell kind of armor forms a breasplate with two custom boob-protrusions? Really? Nice to get away from that at the end with my warrior and the Sigrun the dwarf rogue. Also, very nice Buffy moment there at the beginning with Mhairi. Love you too, Bioware. Overall, A-.

Health Insurance Reform Passes

2010-03-22T10:00:00.000-04:00

Freaking out? Here's a great party-neutral fact sheet of what you can expect the next couple of years.

For me, this means I don't have to spend my nights filled with terror about whether or not I'll be laid off or how we'll pay for J's cancer scans. It means I'm not chained to a day job for the rest of my life. It means that if I do start to make it as a freelance writer, I'll be able to afford to stay home and write books if I want to.

What a lot of people don't realize is that the biggest dream I lost four years ago when I got t1 was the dream of being a full time writer someday (that, and being a licensed scuba diver. Needless to say, the writer thing was far more tragic). It's going to be very interesting to see what kind of explosion in entrepreneurism we have now that we don't have to be employed in order to afford healthcare.

Is it a perfect bill? Of course not. It's going to be messy to implement, and people will freak out. It will be a rough ride. But when I explain the madness that was being uninsurable to my nieces and nephews in twenty years, they'll look at me like we were some kind of crazy barbarians living in a madhouse distopia.

And, to be honest, if you had an illness like mine, if you fought with insurance companies the way I did, if you had to scream and cry and beg for care you were actually entitled to (let alone try to afford uncovered care) - you were.

New Book Trailer!

2010-03-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

New! And! Improved!

God's War by Kameron Hurley - Book Trailer from Kameron Hurley on Vimeo.

One for the Road

2010-03-19T07:56:00.000-04:00

I am engaged in lots of web-pagery today. Here's one for the road:

Steampunk Africa

2010-03-18T16:13:00.000-04:00

"Virtuoso" New comic of a steampunk Africa that never was...

My Ideal Nyx

2010-03-18T13:09:00.000-04:00

My first pick for the movie version of Nyx was always Michelle Rodriguez, but she's a bit short for the role (5'5), and notoriously a lot of trouble on the set.

A far better pick, I discovered (while watching Rome) would be a buffed-out Zuleikha Robinson (who clocks in at nearly 5'8, which is closer to Nyx's 5'10/11), who's apparently picked up a gig on Lost and some other tv shows since I first saw her in Rome. Maybe I can convince her to do the audio book version?

Interview

2010-03-17T08:53:00.002-04:00

Interview up with me at The Daily Femme! Check it out.

WIP: Iron Maiden

2010-03-14T22:21:00.006-04:00

In the beginning we were a Legion of 500 worlds – intrepid warriors, travelers, seers and mystics.

The first world to fall was Moswen, along the Outer Rim, swallowed by a foreign sun at the edge of known space. The second was Jung Mei. She fell from the Core – spinning, breathless, screaming – and tried to turn home, too late. She was last seen orbiting a dying star. Then the Valente clipped the Ken’ichi on the Inner Rim, and lost her inertia. The Legion listened to her dying beacon for a hundred years. Her voice faltered, then faded… then died. There was no place in the Legion for the wounded, the stragglers. We had not yet reached the Edge.

It was the Edge that broke us. When we came to the Edge we saw nothing ahead of us but blackness. We had lost nearly a hundred worlds by then – to stardust, collisions, failures, insurrection, and blight.

But that was nothing compared to what was to come.

Because when we went over the Edge, something came over with us.

- Addendum 176, The Annals of the Legion, 442 AD

1. Zahrah

I do all my dreaming in the dark. That’s all it is out here - a world of darkness. The old bottom world mechanics who work for my mother say they heard stories from their folks about a time before the darkness, when you woke up to the bright burst of light that was the Edge. But to me, the Edge is just another point of light that helps the Legion navigate the darkness. It’s the big smear we point our sextants to in nav class. The last gasp of a dying galaxy.

My mother’s in charge of our family’s worlds in the Legion - the Katarzyna worlds. Her mother and her mother’s mother boarded, mobbed, and manned the Katarzyna 1 and 2 back before I was born. They pounded them so good that nobody’s even sure what they were called before that. It was my mother who took the neighboring worlds, Aatai and Sjorka, and made them Katarzyna 3 and 4. That’s us. Our family. Katarzyna. And it’s a name that’s feared and respected all along the Outer Rim. My mother says it’s the name that will unite the Legion. I’m pretty proud of that.

My mother’s proud, too. She worked hard for it. She once brought me out to the great docking hall and opened up all the bay doors with her big iron fist. The shields were all intact, of course, but it was still thrilling, standing there at the edge of space and looking into the black. From the docking hall you can see the nearest of the Outer Rim worlds – Katarzyna 2-6, Dima, Matrona, and the two FA satellites. If you look deeper, you can see The Tern, the big world they hijacked from the Core forty years ago, and out past that, a hint of the Jagadev and the Naabhi worlds, and then – the Bhavaja worlds. All four of them.

“All this is going to be yours, Zahrah,” my mother said, sweeping her iron arm out toward the worlds slowly spinning in the darkness around the Core, the black well that keeps us together as we push farther and farther from the Edge.

She reached toward the dim shape of the nearest Bhavaja world, so it looked as if she cupped it in her palm. Then she closed her iron fist around it. I heard the metal grind and creak – solid metal skinning a heated organic core. I had seen her crush men’s heads with that hand.

“But you’ll have to fight for it,” she said. She shook out her hand, as if to rid herself of the dust of the shattered world. “Just as I did. And my mother before me. Everything here on the Outer Rim comes with a cost. You understand that?”

“I know what keeps the worlds spinning,” I said. I looked up at her. She’s taller than me by a head. Every time I see some short, umber-skinned sub-captain or petty lord, I wonder if he was my father.

Everybody on the Katarzyna worlds - the Aatai and Sjorka refugees, the indentured castes in the lower wards, even the mechanic’s guild and grower’s union and the man who was my father – they all pay a fealty tax to my family in blood or bone. That’s bodies for our grinder, genetic material for kids like me, or labor to keep the world running and the armies moving. And we have a lot of armies on the move these days, now that the Bhavaja are on the move again.

My mother looked back out into the spinning worlds in the darkness. “It’s more than just the Outer Rim,” she said. “A seer prophesized it.”

“Which one?” I asked. I know most of my mother’s seers, the spidery crones and broken old men who make a living off our family’s offal down in the sludge hall.

“She came to me before you were born,” she said. “Never told you about her. I wanted you to see me take Aatai and Sjorka, first. I wanted you to know what’s possible.”

She pointed her metal hand out toward the hijacked Core world, The Tern. It didn’t quite sit right in space. It wobbled more and more with every rotation of the Legion. Forty years it had been out there, my mother said. Someone or something had brought it up out of the Core back when my mother was born, thinking they could escape the Legion and chart a new course. But some other world had crippled it on the way out of the Core, or maybe it’d clipped a world out there, or they’d killed or maimed whatever group or thing had hijacked it. Now it hung out here on the Outer Rim, deceivingly dark, like some derelict. But it wasn’t a derelict - not yet.

“Every year I assault The Tern. You know why?” my mother asked.

“It’s part of the Outer Rim. It should be Katarzyna,” I said.

“You need to think bigger than that, Zahrah. What use do I have for a Core world?”

I watched the jagged black hull of The Tern. It was easily a hundred thousand jumps from where I stood, but I always hoped I’d see some sign of life – a flicker of light, the reflection from a survey pod, the shimmering umbilicus of a resource-strapped space walker.

“I’ve been watching that world my whole life,” my mother said. “And in the eight assaults I’ve made on The Tern, I’ve brought in no pods, no refugees, no fighters. That defense grid is automated. There’s nothing alive in there. All we need to do is wear down the grid and take the world back.”

“Back?”

“Back to the Core,” my mother said.

Nobody talked much about the Core out here. It was the first time I heard her mention it. We’re Outer Rim people - the fittest, the strongest, the keenest. It’s our sacrifices that have kept the Legion together this long. We’re the first and last line of defense. Controlling the Outer Rim meant controlling the Legion, everybody said. They couldn’t survive without the goods we brought in. They’d never survive the terrors we protected them from.

To reach the Core, you had to go through the black spaces of the Outer Rim where world after world fell had fallen among the stars, then through the Inner Rim worlds, navigating the debris and deitritus of four hundred lost and broken and embattled worlds. Then deeper, into the Rim where the worlds got bigger and the spaces between them got smaller. And finally, through the dark, shimmering Fade that protected the Core worlds. Nobody had been through the Fade, not since the Legion had reached the Edge.

Nobody but The Tern, anyway. And they were headed the other way.

“We take the Core, we take the Legion,” my mother said.

“I thought owning the Outer Rim meant owning the Legion,” I said. I come from a line of conquerors. Why hadn’t I thought of taking the Core?

My mother grimaced. “That’s a cheap story we tell ourselves to make this life mean something. No.” She heaved her big metal arm out toward the worlds of the Outer Rim. “If I wait until we’ve broken the Bhavarja to mount an assault on The Tern, it could be another decade before we’re in a position to take it again. With The Tern, we can cripple every Bhavaja world from here to the point.”

She turned and met my look. Hard face, grim as some dead spacer. Her eyes met mine. It’s always hard to meet my mother’s look. Her pupils are enormous. They swallow all the color in her eyes, even in bright light. Like most of us, she wears goggles when we navigate the inner core of the world.

She pushed her metal fist into my chest. The metal was warm. “We can take it all, Zahrah,” she said. “But we will have to sacrifice everything to do it. You understand that?”

I took a shallow breath. “I trained my whole life for this,” I said.

I wake up every morning in the darkness, for this.

My mother pulled her hand away. My chest was still warm where the metal had touched me.

“Tomorrow you come of age,” she said. “Tomorrow I give you an army. Tomorrow we take The Tern.” She crossed her arms, flesh and metal. “And then – the Legion.”

New Digs!

2010-03-14T19:11:00.001-04:00

All settled into the new digs. Check it out! (everything here but pics of J's room, which he's still putting together a bit)

(Click here for full set)

Twilight Vs. Buffy

2010-03-14T18:43:00.000-04:00

You know what Buffy did when she had to choose between the guy she wanted and saving the world? She fucking killed the guy. Duh. Sometimes you have to kill what you love to save the world. That's a real story. Ripping off your shirt to show off your sparkle and cliff diving because you can't live without a guy is fetishized 50s porn. When the sum total of your choices is - should I screw this guy or should I screw this guy? - you're living in a pretty boring world.

C'mon now, people. Where's my backlash against the backlash?

2010

2010-03-08T08:04:00.000-05:00

A little stunned that the first woman to win Best Director won in 2010.

That's two-thousand-and-ten, people.

At least this happened before the flying cars?

Oh, How I Love Thee....

2010-03-02T06:09:00.000-05:00

J. and I have nearly finished the first full season of Farscape. Last night, he looked up some actors on IMDB to see what else they'd done, then came back into our room and said, deadpan, "Did you know that most of the actors are Australian?"

Oh, J....

Looking forward...

2010-02-26T19:21:00.001-05:00

... to spring.

Whip It

2010-02-22T06:03:00.002-05:00

Nice little feel-good movie with all the right cliches (for most of the movie, I felt like I was watching Bend it Like Beckham) - but it nicely jettisons the not-so-nice cliches. This is a girl power movie, and it doesn't mistake itself for a rom-com (thank god). It may be the only movie I know where the girl tells the guy to shove it (and he's not explicitly a bad person) and her consolation prize isn't another guy... it's to just keep living her life on her terms. It's a movie about a woman finding her voice, her confidence, and reveling in her own physical strength while forming strong friendships with other women. You don't see that often... usually it's "I found a man and it solved my life!" Not so, here.

What I really came away with was just how physical these women get to be. When you watch them knocking each other over, wrestling, hitting each other on the back, jumping around, horsing around, what you realize is how meek and soft and non-threatening women are trained to be, and how rare it is to see this. It was cool to see how things could be really different, and what women's culture could be like if we moved just one step to the left.

Moving Daze

2010-02-21T15:38:00.000-05:00

The move to the new digs is beginning. We pick up the keys next weekend, and have started packing today. Or, in my case, cleaning up all the fucking stacks of paper in my room to *prepare* for moving. Figure we'll get keys next Saturday, spend Saturday cleaning the place up, Saturday night and Sunday moving smaller boxes, and then do an official move-in weekend March 6th.

We decided to do this mainly to cut down on utility costs, since we'll be paying for both places during March. Better to clean out the big house, jack it down to 50 and stop running the space heaters, and jack up the other house to 65 and sign up for budget billing, which is $100 per month (last month's gas bill for this house was a whopping $371).

So... here goes.

Fitness Update

2010-02-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

I made it a point to work in some pilates and a nice long walk with my niece while I was back in the PNW. This wasn't tough, as the weather was great. I ended up eating a piece of French bread too many while at home, and the numbers during my first day or two traveling weren't great (but that tends to happen anyway, when I travel). Overall, though, my average BG has gone down a few points (from 144 to 138 - which corresponds with a 5.9-6 A1c), and my morning readings have gone down about 20 points, on average. Still a ways to go - I'm looking for an average number of 120-125 (which would get me a 5.5-5.7 A1c).

Eliminating all that coffee cake and low-carb (read: almond flour) treats after dinner also allowed me to drop 6 lbs, which gets me closer to my maintenance weight again.Still, the last few days of traveling churned over some of the good work I've done, so it's good that I'm back in my routine.

Now that the eating part is back on track, I realize that much of what led to this sudden jump in weight over the holidays wasn't just coffee cake: I haven't ridden my bike to work since early December (cold and snow), and our twice-a-week workouts at the day job were canceled back in November. That means I'm getting at least 2.5 hours less physical activity every week, and that adds up.

Winter is holding on - we're expecting more snow this weekend - but the new house is a little further from work, so when biking weather arrives again, I'll be putting in a little extra. Not sure what to do about the lack of midday workouts. I'm considering switching my tough workout to the morning and the pilates to the evening to ensure that I get in the tough workout (I'm more insulin resistant in the morning, so it makes sense to workout more then. One of the big obstacles I face with evening workouts is low sugar).

Overall, I'm feeling a little better, but still doughier than I'd like. Would love to take up boxing again when/if i can afford it. We'll see how much we can sock away once we're settling in our new digs.

Dinner

2010-02-18T12:21:00.002-05:00

Propaganda

2010-02-18T11:43:00.002-05:00

More here.

Dangerous Thoughts!

2010-02-17T12:41:00.002-05:00

God's War Finds a New Publisher!

2010-02-15T16:55:00.000-05:00

I am uber-pleased to announce that God's War and its sequel, Infidel, have been accepted for publication by the ever-awesome Nightshade Books.

Most of ya'll know that GW got lost in the shuffle at another publisher last year, so I'm pretty pleased to find it a home again - and a pretty awesome home at that.

The best part being, of course:

THE COVER WILL NOT SUCK (you can take a look at some Nightshade covers here).

Looking like GW will be out the first half of next year (2011), so the wait is still on (publishing is a very slow business), but it's got a home again. Progress is being made. Huzzah!

Stay tuned.

Yes, Ohio Drivers Really Do Suck

2010-02-14T18:54:00.001-05:00

Every time I come back to the PNW, I'm struck by just how well everyone drives.

Yes, yes, I know we have a hatred for drivers in every state (everyone's a bad driver who isn't us!), but after living in Ohio and Illinois and driving around Indiana a lot, I learned a new appreciation for PNW drivers. But how much of this was just my own bias? So I decided to look up the states with the top 10 worst driving records. AND LO AND BEHOLD....

Here are the states with the worst rate of traffic accidents, in order:

1.) Pennsylvania
2.) Michigan
3.) Illinois
4.) Ohio
5.) Georgia
6.) Minnesota
7.) Virginia
8.) Indiana
9.) Texas
10.) Wisconsin

See, I am not just biased! Ohio and Indiana really *are* full of bad drivers!

Back in the PNW

2010-02-12T23:09:00.000-05:00

I'm back in the PNW (Pacific Northwest) for my grandmother's funeral this weekend. I'd have much preferred being back in the PNW on a happier occasion, but since I'm here, I'm trying to make the best of it.

The air here is different, did you know that? Clear and clean; tinged with evergreen. I love it. I miss it. I miss the big trees and the water and the 40-50 degree "winter" weather. I miss eating fresh fish.

I do not, however, miss the cost of living. I stood in the grocery store this afternoon suffering from quite literal sticker shock. Stuff here was often $1-2 more than I would have paid back in OH. Gas was 30 cents a gallon more expensive. But you know what? Folks are a lot more friendly. And they know how to drive as if there may actually be other human beings in those big hucks of metal they share the road with.

I'm sitting in bed now with the window open, listening to the frogs in my parents' pond out back gettin' on their early-spring song in the otherwise silent night, and man... I do love the PNW.

But who can afford to live here?

In any case, here's a picture of my niece, Kaylee, who is training to be a carpenter or perhaps an engineer, as you can see from how skillfully she removed this slat from one of the kitchen chairs. I anticipate getting her some overalls with a teddy bear patch at some point.

With a career like that in her future, she will have no trouble getting along in the PNW!

Yes, Book 2 is Done, Yo

2010-02-08T17:06:00.002-05:00

Quote of the Day

2010-02-08T12:13:00.000-05:00

"Don't smell like sunsets and baby powder. Smell like Jet Fighters and punching."
- Old Spice body wash ad

(I shit you not!)

Quote of the Day

2010-02-05T08:34:00.000-05:00

"(on the creation of gendered fantasy genres in bookstores).... one which is full of boys' stuff like blood and killing, which is for boys and which boys should read, and one which is full of stuff that girls enjoy, like blood and fucking, which is for girls and which girls should read."

I'm not sure if graduating from "romance" to "blood and fucking" is an improvement (Twilight, best I understand, doesn't have much of either. It's pretty straight romance), but put in those particular terms, it does remind me that there's a primed but largely untapped "blood and fucking" market (Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold" is a good example of a true "blood and fucking" book). I know this, of course, but every time somebody passed on GW because they thought it was "unmarketable" really threw me for a loop.

Book 2 Revision Progress, in Pictures

2010-02-02T08:53:00.000-05:00

What Book 2 SHOULD look like:

What Book 2 looks like right now:

New Digs

2010-02-01T08:45:00.000-05:00

After much wringing of hands and moaning over our $900 rent payment and crazy utility bills, J. and I decided to downsize.

We can afford our current place perfectly during the summer and passably during the winter, but we're looking for a place we could afford should one of us lose our jobs. Crazy economy, and all. We also wanted something with a slightly more efficient heating system (no more radiators!), a fenced yard, a garage, and a liberal pet policy that would let us have a dog.

Enter our solution: $665 a month. Slightly better neighborhood. 2 car garage. Forced air heat. 700 sq feet smaller. Still has 3 bedrooms. Lacks a shower upstairs, but has one downstairs. Needs some extra 3-prong plugs upstairs, but we've got them in the kitchen and upstairs in what will be J's office (I have no problem using converters. He shudders at the thought).

We'll still be paying out the ass for utilities during Dec/Jan/Feb, but the furnace is more efficient and total sq ft is smaller, and I've learned my lesson about the whole "put plastic sheeting over the windows" thing. I detest the white trash idea of "winterizing" my house with plastic sheeting. But then, I grew up in the PNW, where it doesn't generally get below 40 degrees for very long. Winterizing is still a foreign idea. We're def. doing it next year.

We've filled out all the paperwork, so we'll see how it turns out. Move date would be around March 15th.

Click for full set.

What I'm Doing Today: Lunch and Line Edits

2010-01-30T13:57:00.000-05:00

Regenerative Medicine

2010-01-26T16:05:00.002-05:00

Not as far off as you might think (also, unsurprisingly, using the battlefield as its testing ground).

Things That Need Doing

2010-01-26T06:19:00.006-05:00

Stepped on the scale today for the first time in, what, six months? When I was living at my old apt, I was very good at weighing myself once a month and making adjustments accordingly. It kept my weight steady and my clothes fitting and all was well. Now that my house is so damn cold, I'm less inclined to strip and step on a scale. So I've avoided it since at least October when the house started getting chilly.

I knew I'd put on 10lbs or so since J. and I moved in together. I actually managed to get that back down to +5 before the holidays. Then came the holidays, and winter, and tax season, and this really great website with low carb coffee cake recipes...

Despite getting up at 5:30 in the morning to do 30 minutes of exercise and another 20-25 minutes 3 times a week when I get home, it just hasn't been enough to make up for the coffee cake and cold house. They've also cut the workout program at work, which means no more twice-weekly strength training sessions and no more gym membership.

What happened is just what I suspected would happen when I ceased being vigilant - I've gained a retarded amount of weight since J. and I first met a year and a half ago - most of which I've put on in the last 4 months of coffee cakes and cold houses. Nobody believes me when I say this is what happens when I stop paying attention.

What actually moved me to get back on the scale was my crazy sugar numbers. My blood sugar has been a lot harder to control, and far more frustrating. I wanted to know if the weight gain was indeed substantial enough that it may be causing insulin resistance. And oh yes, dear reader - it is.

There are some quick and easy changes I'm making right away: no more low carb cookies and coffee cakes, for one (do you have any idea how many calories are in almond flour?), and sticking to the lunch I bring into work instead of adding snacks from the free salad bar at work. I did manage to eliminate my peanut butter/low carb English muffin fix way back, which is how I curbed the initial weight gain and got things back under control. But now there's that coffee cake thing...

My 20 minutes pilates/15 min free weights workout each morning is pretty solid. What I need to work on now is getting at least 30 minutes 5x a week of cardio instead of the current 20-25 3x a week. A lot of the problem with getting this in is wonky sugar numbers. Some days I turn my insulin off at 3:45 and I can workout for 50 minutes. Other days, I turn it off at the same time and I can only workout for 20 and then my sugar crashes and I start to tremble and all the energy goes out of me and I have that intense hunger spike and desire to burn the world to the ground. I need to get this timing right if I'm going to workout properly every day after work.

I'm also working toward doing at least 40 more minutes on Sat or Sun to get me to 6 days. 6 days a week of 30-50 min a day is pretty much the only thing that moves me. It's just a really tough routine to put into place during the best of times, and right now the house is cold and I've got a crazy day job and personal deadlines.

But. The alternative is very bad. This is a good reminder of what happens to me when I don't stay on top of maintaining my weight with monthly weigh-ins. I know some folks thought this was odd - if you're happy with your weight, why be so vigilant?

Here's why: because aside from that whole immune disorder thing, I have great genes. I'm very good at packing weight away, and when you have aforementioned immune disorder, this is a very bad habit to get into. I have been displeased with my numbers, and not feeling well to boot. Now I have a better idea of why. I'm still quite pleased with how I look (I spent a long time learning how to like myself, and reorienting how my self worth was measured in a society with weird ways of measuring worth, particularly in women), but my numbers are bad, so I don't feel as well, and I'm not throwing out my wardrobe because I'd rather eat coffee cake.

So, here's what we're going to do to get back to maintenance:

Monday/Weds/Friday

Workout: 20 min pilates. 15 min free weights
Breakfast: 2 eggs w/spinach
Workout: Bike to work (if not snowing, more than 20 degrees out)
Lunch: Leftovers. No more salad bar additionals.
Workout: Bike home (if not snowing, more than 20 degrees out)
Workout: 25-30 minutes elliptical
Dinner: Entree and side. No more tortillas/low carb bread
Dessert: Yogurt and berries

Tuesday/Thursday

Workout: 20 min pilates. 15 min free weights
Breakfast: 2 eggs w/spinach
Workout: Bike to work (if not snowing, more than 20 degrees out)
Lunch: Leftovers. No more salad bar additionals.
Workout: Bike home (if not snowing, more than 20 degrees out)
Workout: 25-30 minutes elliptical. 25 minutes circuit training.
Dinner: Entree and side. No more tortillas/low carb bread
Dessert: Yogurt and berries

Saturday

Breakfast: Low carb pancakes (no almond flour makes a big difference)
Workout: 40 min circuit training
Lunch: Soup/sandwich/leftovers. No more "it's a special occasion" carbs
Dinner: Entree and side. No more tortillas/low carb bread
Dessert: Yogurt and berries

Sunday

Breakfast: Low carb pancakes
Workout: 15-20 minutes elliptical
Lunch: Soup/sandwich/leftovers. Ditto above carb curb.
Dinner: Entree and side. No more tortillas/low carb bread
Dessert: Yogurt and berries

This eliminates the low carb bread/tortillas I've been snacking on and low carb/high calorie coffee cakes and cookies I've been making. I think this alone will make a big difference. I'm telling you, I could live on low carb coffee cake forever.

I'm not terribly happy with this, but I'm less happy with my sugar numbers right now. If I'm going to do some of the things I'd like to do this year, it's also very important that I get into some semblance of fighting shape. And all this happy-happy-joy-joy stuff has aided me in becoming a bit doughier than I'd like.

Thing is, you want to be a certain kind of person, you have to start living like that kind of person, no matter how frustrating it may be. And there's a certain type of person I'd like to be. And she works out a lot more than I've been able to the last few months. It's too bad she doesn't eat as much coffee cake as I'd like, either, but them's the breaks.

Imagination

2010-01-25T16:39:00.000-05:00

Oh, Syfy, tell me this is not the real ad for Caprica

2010-01-22T13:13:00.002-05:00

Barf. Seriously?

SERIOUSLY??

Former NASA Engineer's Comments on a Very Old Story

2010-01-22T13:09:00.002-05:00

Old, but relevant, to me and many others my age. I remember watching this happen, and it turned me off becoming an astronaut forever:

"Well, the question was, did the cold weather (because it was a very, unusually cold day) affect the performance of the O-rings? Everyone was saying, “No, no, no!” because they were covering their rear ends. Richard Feynman, who was the Nobel Prize winner in physics, was on this commission. He took an O-ring and he stuck it in a glass of ice water, took it out, and snapped it. Then nobody could deny it. But all up the line, the management had just ignored the evidence. The reason is because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be doing his State of the Union speech that night. He wanted to be able to say, “We have civilians in space!” There was a lot of pressure to launch it. So they said, “We’re going to go ahead and launch it even though the weather’s too cold.” So, they went ahead and launched it, and it blew up. I felt like we had blown those people up—like we at NASA had failed those people. That completely took the wind out of my sails."

I get so angry when politics trumps coming fucking sense.

Tonight's Song, Stuck on Repeat

2010-01-20T20:22:00.003-05:00

This is War
30 Seconds to Mars
(from here, naturally. Tho it's on repeat for writing-related reasons!)

A warning to the people
The good and the evil
This is war
To the soldier, the civillian
The martyr, the victim
This is war

It's the moment of truth and the moment to lie
The moment to live and the moment to die
The moment to fight, the moment to fight, to fight, to fight, to fight

To the right, to the left
We will fight to the death
To the Edge of the Earth
It's a brave new world from the last to the first

To the right, to the left
We will fight to the death
To the Edge of the Earth
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world

A warning to the prophet, the liar, the honest
This is war
To the leader, the pariah, the victim, the messiah
This is war

It's the moment of truth and the moment to lie
The moment to live and the moment to die
The moment to fight, the moment to fight, to fight, to fight, to fight

To the right
To the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
From the last to the first

To the right
To the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world

I do believe in the light
Raise your hands up to the sky
The fight is done
The war is won
Lift your hands
Towards the sun
Towards the sun
Towards the sun
Towards the sun
The war is won

It's the moment of truth and the moment to lie
The moment to live and the moment to die
The moment to fight, the moment to fight, to fight, to fight, to fight

To the right
To the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
From the last to the first

To the right
To the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world

A brave new world
The war is won
The war is won
A brave new world

I believe in nothing
Not the end and not the start
I believe in nothing
Not the earth and not the stars
I believe in nothing
Not the day and not the dark
I believe in nothing
But the beating of our hearts
I believe in nothing
One hundred suns until we part
I believe in nothing
Not in satan, not in god
I believe in nothing
Not in peace and not in war
I believe in nothing
But the truth of who we are

Too much day job

2010-01-19T19:46:00.000-05:00

Not enough freelancing.

Yes, Girls Play Video Games

2010-01-15T13:37:00.002-05:00

Oh, the Alistair love!

BioWare writers do know how to woo the geek girls (me included. I did, uh, in fact, do a google search on this topic which led me here for, uh, personal reasons?). We're always around playing your games, you know, you just don't hear about it until we finally get something that's, you know, actually made for us.

Donutman767: i never realized so many girls played this game until i read the comments
kingkarlone: You can thank Allistair for that.

Alistair Dragon Age love here.

Everybody's a Critic

2010-01-12T12:50:00.000-05:00

"A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it."

— The Economist

Tonight's Agenda

2010-01-07T19:42:00.004-05:00

I'd rather it snowed another 6 inches so I could work from home tomorrow, instead of just another 2, which will make it annoying and slow to get into work, but not annoying and slow enough to work from home.

Etc. It's a rough life.

Anyway, new project in the works tonight, already outlined and chapter one'd. Will post excerpt soon.

That's Why You Suffer!

2010-01-07T12:50:00.001-05:00

Nice.

Don't Fail: On Turning 30

2010-01-05T09:59:00.002-05:00

Failing in obscurity is easy. Failing in public is hard.

There was a lot I wanted done by the time I turned 30. Like, you know, publishing a book (or three). I expected to “be a writer” by the time I was 24. When 25 came and went with no book sale, I quietly hunkered down and got back to work. When I signed a 3 book deal at 28, I figured I was golden. I’d have my first book published before I was 30! Then the contract got canceled, and I haven’t been sure at all what to do next.

I traveled all around the world in my 20s. England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, South Africa, New Zealand. I’ve lived in Alaska and South Africa and Chicago. I learned how to throw a passable right hook. I started building a career as a copywriter and communications manager. I got an Associate’s Degree, a Bachelor’s Degree, a Master’s Degree, and started a Marketing Management degree. I went to Clarion. I accidently got married, which is supposed to be a Great Life Event, but which was never really on my “to do” list, so I don’t consider it an accomplishment, just a fortuitous partnership. My 20s was a screaming good time, sure, but also a time of terrible fear and uncertainty. I got diagnosed with a chronic illness, one that has left me permanently dependent on insulin (insulin or DEATH, yay!). I went crazy, dated crazy folks, spent far too much time flying in and out of New York City and Indianapolis, became all but homeless, acquired massive amounts of student loan and credit card debt, got said debt under control, and wrote three or four books.

That’s all fine and good, but it’s not enough for me. It’s never enough for me. And, to me, I see more of the failure there than the success. It’s just how I’m wired. The failures just sit there and gape at me. The last few years have been full of failure, of pulling myself up out of failure, of building some kind of life from the ashes of crazy misery.

I wanted to have traveled the whole world by 30. I wanted Egypt, China, Peru, Japan, India, Puerto Rico, Easter Island, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Australia, and far more time in New Zealand. I wanted to have 3-4 books in circulation. I wanted to be a passable boxer. I wanted to be regularly running three miles. I certainly didn’t want to be living in Ohio.

I will go to all those places, in time. I’ll get the books out there. I’ll be a passable boxer. I’ll run regularly. And I will get out of Ohio.

But not today.

Not today.

And that, to me, feels like some kind of failure on my part. Lots of folks are struggling with the publishing industry right now. It’s remaking itself, and what I thought of as success when I was 12 may not be the kind of success I end up creating. Being a writer is going to look different in the future (after all, despite the cognitive dissonance that such a date causes for me, it IS the year 2010). Traveling looks a lot different too: both in costs and sheer ease of travel.
Getting on a plane just isn’t as fun as it used to be, and that won’t change for awhile. Traveling is rougher when you’re lugging around insulin, too. Not impossible, not impractical, but… different. And I’m still trying to figure out who I am now that I feel so totally disconnected from the crazy screaming terrified person I used to be.

I know all of this. I know the world is different. I know I am different. But it doesn’t keep me from thinking I’ve failed at 30, the same way I thought I’d failed at 24 because I wasn’t “a writer.”

Yet, here I am making a living as a copywriter, with full benefits (uncertain as the job market may be for everybody – including me - right now). My personal writing is stutter-start-jerk-jitter-squee, but it does crank along – painful word by painful word. And that’s another huge change: I never expected that my personal writing would ever be so incredibly painful and difficult. I’d heard about this happening to other folks, these 6 months-to-a-decade writing slumps, but I never imagined it would happen to me. I *had* to write. Writing kept me sane.

Thing is, I’m not nearly so crazy anymore. And that means I don’t *need* that outlet with the same crazy desperation I used to. More and more, writing is something I do to pay the bills, not something I do to relax or unwind.

And that’s been a problem.

Cause see, despite my long, un-done to-do list, despite my wretched embarrassment about not doing more before 30, despite all the writing that isn’t getting done, despite the house I can barely afford to heat…. I’m strangely happy.

Sometimes I attribute all of the writing block to the weird saneness, all the happy-happy putter-putter bubbliness that is my personal life.

But this weekend, while cleaning up my room, I found a box my editor had sent me after the God’s War contract was canceled. It contained several copy-edited copies of the manuscript with page inserts and a bit of typesetting for the intro bits. And I opened the box and my heart sank. I got that weird, heavy lump right there in the pit of my stomach that makes my breath feel heavy. I spent a few minutes going through the box. At first, I resolved to work on the copyedits right then. I'd resolved to do this months ago when the box first arrived. But somehow.. somehow... lost the will to do it. But I had the whole day to myself today. Why not check this off this to-do list? Why not --

Then the feeling passed, just as quickly as it had risen. And I re-packed the box and put it back under my desk, willing myself to forget about it for another week, or another month, or another six months.

And maybe that’s the trouble. Everything I associate with my personal writing right now is profoundly negative. I keep picking up the critiques from my first-pass readers for Black Desert, and all the negative stuff just leaps out at me. And there’s this profound depression that comes over me, and I think, “It’s not going to get any better. I’m going to work on it and it will get worse.” And then I pack those letters away again, too.

I’ve rewritten Black Desert once now, and need to print it out and copyedit it to make sure I caught all the big plot changes I made the second time through. But I don’t. I just open up the draft on occasion and rewrite a scene or a paragraph and then pack it away again.

There’s just no joy in it at all for me. And I don’t know what to do about it.
Everything is supposed to be OK when you sell a book. Certain things are supposed to happen. Then they don’t. And though I’ve gotten slightly more productive the last few months, the book depression is still there. I have a feeling I may need to start a new series entirely just to get away from the negative feelings that get dredged up every time I open this one (at least until I resell it).

I’m starting to wonder if that may be the trouble with my life, really. Or, rather, not my life but my *feelings* about my life. I’m still judging myself on what I used to want and who I used to be. And I still don’t know what it is that *I* want *now.*

I know what I love. I love my partner. I love our life together. I love the big old house we’re renting (tho I would like to be able to afford to heat it). I love reading. I love school. I like my career. I like my job. I like traveling, still. I like to get in the car and go. I love just being still.

Stillness. I still revel in absolute stillness.

Some days I wonder if I’m suffering from a mild form of PTSD. Three years seems like a long time to crave stillness, even after the crazy that was chronic illness/Chicago crazy/unemployment/homelessness.

Stillness.

There are a lot of stories I’d enjoy telling, I know. But some days even opening up a Word file causes a deep, sinking feeling of depression. I open it and think, “What’s the point?”

And that may be the trouble, too. Because I don’t have the answer to that question. I don’t know what the point of anything is, really. I just know I want to live. I love life with a sickening, bubbly rush of sweetness. I love it because I know how close I am – all the time – to losing it. Staying alive – while maintaining my quality of life – is really hard work for me.

I only have so many spoons.

And I’m just not spending them on things that don’t make me bubbly-joyful anymore, not unless those things are absolutely vital to survival.

There are things about my old life that I was happy to part with.

There are things about my old life that I want back.

We'll see how much I get back and how much I never needed in the next 30 years. I know something needs to change, soon. I just don't know what it is.

Quiet

2009-12-27T20:15:00.000-05:00

My long "holiday" was, well, a working holiday. My life is full of Day Jobbe right now, and not a lot else.

More as it happens.

Avatar

2009-12-18T23:05:00.001-05:00

Did not suck.

What a relief.

Woman, Domesticated

2009-12-16T16:09:00.002-05:00

Oh, how I love The Onion...

"A valuable commodity with seemingly endless uses, the woman has played a crucial role throughout human history," noted historian Alan Helbling said. "Not only could she be trained to perform a variety of tasks, but once her spirit was broken and her energies reined in, she could be taught to come whenever she was called."

Blood & Women & Swords, OH YEAH

2009-12-15T17:50:00.005-05:00

Why yes, I'm a sucker for women with swords... isn't everyone?

One of the big issues I have with a lot of ye olde Sword & Sorceress type stories is that the women hauling around the swords just aren't that scary. I can't explain this except to say that, you know, I'm a fan of the cheesy awful that is Conan, and... I'm looking for a heroine that can kick the shit out of him.

Best Served Cold's heroine, Monza, is that heroine.

This book was an easy sell with the cover, but not so much the first few pages. The first 11 or 12 pages are kinda dull, really. Insipid people, insipid conversations, completely generic fantasy lite setting. Seriously, the setting was making me yawn. But according to the cover copy, this was a pretty solid rampaging revenge story, so I stuck it out.

I was not disappointed.

By page, what, 36? you're going, "OH HOLY FUCK YO!" and Abercrombie gives you the big book opener you need to have to drive a revenge plot. You know, the thing that somebody does to you that's so terrible that it can drive the whole bloody book all the way through. And trust me, it's tough to justify the blood in this book. The big book opener goes a long way toward getting you there.

This book isn't for everybody. It's savagely brutal (I'm not making apologies for GW gore ever again). The people are decidedly unlikable. They're the types of people who would survive and thrive in a world at perpetual war, and that means they are NOT NICE. So if you're looking for nice people in bad situations, well. This isn't it.

But they're *interesting* people, and that's what kept me reading. The cast is classically well done (reminded me of when I read my first Dragonlance novel... in a GOOD way). Folks are always backbiting, backstabbing. There are constantly shifting alliances and folks trying to play people off other folks. Old wounds and past events come into play. They're wacky, driven, crazy folks, and I enjoyed watching them bicker (that said, there were some rather useless "fan fiction" scenes which added nothing but character squee. But not so many that I threw the book out. Just enough to roll my eyes).

I loved the main character, Monza, our sword-wielding heroine, primarily because she was not nice or honorable, and she was very, very scary. She's out for herself. There's no huge realization or change at the end. Just sort of a slow ebb and flow that made the ending satisfying but not syrupy. I loved, loved, loved the reversal between her and her initially optimistic sidekick. I found the fact that she's supposed to be very good looking rather annoying (I do wonder how truly model-looking anybody in this world would look, but then, attractiveness is relative, so who knows what her face really looks like out there?), but Abercrombie made up for this with a few very nice, telling details about what it's like to be a woman leading men (no easy comraderie with your men, who might take a pat on the back as come-on; always have to be the hard ass to keep from seeming too soft and having guys take advantage; always careful who you sleep with [if you sleep with anyone at all], etc.).

And that brings me to another plus for this novel. At one point, the team on board for the revenge plot has three women and three men. The balance shifts as the book goes on, but I was genuinely startled to realize that there was an entire scene central to the plot (a torture scene, no less!) which consisted entirely of female characters (our heroine, a mercenary, a poisoner, and a courtesan). Yes, it sucks that something like that is so surprising. But still neat when it happens. You just don't see it a lot in fantasy epics.

The book was plotted like a dream, and I keep paging back through it to look at what Abercrombie did with this plot. My biggest complaint, as noted, was the bland fantasy lite setting. Incredibly disappointing with a well-plotted story like this with such great characters, brutality - and have I mentioned the plotting?

So, if you're looking for new weird, this is not your cup of tea. But if you like strong female heroes, bloody battles, complex and twisted anti-heroes, and... if you just want a good, page-turning romp with cool but nasty folks, this is definitely the book for you.

Recommended, with aforementioned reservations.

Dance & Etc.

2009-12-14T13:00:00.001-05:00

Back At It

2009-12-07T06:15:00.004-05:00

Up at 5:30 this morning to add 20 min of pilates onto my 15 min morning free weights routine. *Damn* I am out of shape.

This thing with having a chronic illness is that you just notice more when you're lazy about taking care of yourself. During the last couple of weeks of sporadic workouts and weird food, I've been experiencing some mysterious aches and pains - especially in my core - and inflammation. There is likely also weight gain tied to this, as my clothes aren't feeling so hot on me, either. I just can't get away with letting things slide for a few weeks. I just feel it too much now.

Not that there's been complete fail, mind. I still bike to work 5 days a week, do my morning weight routine 5 days a week, and even during last week's laziness, I still worked out for 20 min on the elliptical twice that week. It's just that... well, it's not enough for somebody with a sendentary job and wonky immune system.

A couple of weeks of pilates and getting back on track with my after-work workouts on the elliptical should help. 5 days a week pilates, 4 days on the elliptical - in addition to weights and bike riding commute - should do the trick.

I've also been combating some hunger issues. I'd been getting wacky-hungry at work between 9-10am and vainly searching for food. Some of this is just stress eating, but it's stress eating triggered by mild hunger. I went ahead and added a little more protein to breakfast - two scrambled eggs w/spinach in the morning instead of just one egg - and that seems to have done the trick (an extra 70 calorie egg in the morning beats a 350 calorie english muffin with peanut butter at 10am).

As we head toward the holidays, I'm being more mindful of what I eat. One of the drawbacks to getting the pump is that it made me a lot less careful with what I ate - and my #s and my body are paying for that. It's time to stop. I'm a carb addict, which means it's incredibly hard to change my habits when I get used to indulging again. Too much "well, it's the holidays!" means shitty sugar numbers, shitty health, and shitty mood.

And you know, I'd like to stick around those extra 15 years.

I've Got a Lot of Holiday Cheer... But Here's Some Folks Who Could Use Some

2009-12-05T18:59:00.005-05:00

There have been a lot of people hard-up for money this year. And without fail, I found that I could, in fact, afford to give to those really hard up. Not a lot: $10 here, $20 there ($50 in one case, but there was a kid involved!). It's going to continue being rough out there for a long while yet.

A couple months ago, the rug got pulled out from under me when our insurance company pulled a smash and grab and “accidently” revoked our health insurance for three and a half weeks. It was a rough time, and looking rougher as things wound on.

But UHC did eventually fix the issue, J. got a part-time job in addition to his full-time school, and my day job continues to pay for things like $90 a week in groceries and the roof over our heads. If things are a little cold and lean sometimes, it’s because we chose to rent a big old 1850s house that we knew came with a lot of excess utility bills, and I’ve got a lot of student loan debt clawing at me. The good news is that the reason it's clawing at me is because I *can actually afford to start paying on it* now that I paid off over $10,000 in credit card debt. Things are lean because I'm paying off old debt and correctly managing my money. Correctly managing one's money always feels lean to me. Growing up, I thought that being "poor" meant not getting everything you wanted. I have since actually tasted what poor is like, and understand that this is nowhere near that.

It’s been a good year. I’ve done some traveling back at the WA coast to visit family, had a fantastic Florida vacation with J, and continue to enjoy the day job. My biggest complaints right now are that we can’t afford to heat the house above 55 and I have to wait until I’ve saved the money to buy the digital camera I want (been working hard not to rack up that credit card debt again). I mean, c’mon, really? Boo hoo, life is rough because I don’t have a flat screen tv…?

Yeah.

I’m comfortable, just not comfortable enough to stop trying to hustle up writing jobs as they come in, because heating the house and actually saving more than $50 a month would really be nice. Not totally necessary, but nice.

Anyway. There were lots of folks who offered to help me out when the health insurance thing was looking scary. Here are some far more deserving folks for your hard earned dollars this holiday season (they are certainly getting some of mine, and as noted, mine have been a tad lean).

Clarion West
SF/F writing bootcamp. Changed my life. But it’s a bitch to dredge up the money for this. I got lucky, and solicited friends and family, who collectively paid my way to Clarion. Not everybody has that kind of support network to draw from. To be honest, I didn’t think I did either. I begged for money in desperation. I was incredibly lucky folks were so generous. Be one of those generous folks for another writer.

Planned Parenthood
Keep women’s reproductive services easy, convenient, safe, and confidential. Good luck getting that from a lot of women’s clinics these days. PP is constantly under siege, because they do some of the most incredible work. I’ve been a client since I’ve been having sex, and they’ve always been a literal godsend.

Kiva
This is actually a micro-loans site. I love this idea. Basically, you give small loan amounts of $25+ to entrepreneurs all over the world. Sometimes it takes as little as $100 for a woman to start her own small business in her home village/neighborhood/community/city. And it completely changes their lives. I’m partial toward giving to women entrepreneurs, of course. It’s traditionally harder for women to get the money and support together, and it’s a huge ego/status boost when you become the primary breadwinner. It also means you don’t have to put up with so much crap from men with money. Skip the lattes for a week, and give somebody the ability to support themselves.

And a particular individual
J. is a cancer survivor (two years cancer-free in May). We met a few months after he finished his chemo/radiation combo. I knew going in that there's a chance it can recur, just as he knew about my own chronic illness and those 15 extra years - on average - that I won't have. So this one hit a little close to home. If it hits home for you (or if you’re simply a good soul), please do help her out. Cancer and other long, lingering illnesses take incredible courage, tenacity, and huge amounts of money to surmount (as I know with my own chronic illness, particularly in that first year of recovery/adjustment after four days in the ICU). We all battle dragons, but whether or not we win or lose, there’s a lot of wreckage and rebuilding that needs to take place when all is said and done. $10 to assist in rebuilding lives sure beats downloading an album you don’t need from iTunes.

Paypal address is: johanna_mead AT yahoo.com

Thanks to all.