Take Me to Little Africa!

Today's WTF moment, from boingboing:

There's apparentely a Superman comic from the 1970s in which Lois Lane is turned into a black woman in order to get information for a story she's working on.



Seriously.

"The story begins with Lois assigned to do a story on Metropolis's urban area that Lois refers to Little Africa. It seems that all black people refuse to submit to an interview done by Miss Whitey. Young children, old blind ladies, and even people on the street hate white people. With Superman's help Lois is placed inside the Plastimold and the Transformoflux Pack invented by Dahr-Nel, Kryptonian Surgeon. Apparently this machine is meant to change white people to black people. You have to wonder if Superman uses this machine often?"

Lois is just trying to be a Good Rudyard Kipling White Woman and Help Out the Ghetto Folk, all of whom treat her, like, ummmm... like a black woman in a white neighborhood. So she becomes a black woman so she can "mix" with Little Africa and get her story.

Luckily, our heroine not only gets her story but teaches the Uppity Black Panther-type guy a lesson. Don't hate whitey! It turns out that he and she share the same blood type, and she gives him a life-saving blood transfusion.

What would these black people do, without white people?

This is one of those comics that looks like it was honestly trying to be Good and work on Race Relations... but it came at it the usual way: the white people are all nice and good and trying to work for change and trying to reach out to you, and the it's the evil liberal black people who need to change their angry ways and stop being soooo mean.

A step forward at the time, sure, but it could have used a little more thought.

Squid. Yes. Squid.

I look forward to writing a science fiction short one day where everyone lives off squid and uses them for everyday chores.

I don't need to bother, of course, cause I've finally gotten through Vandermeer's King Squid.

I set myself the task of finishing up Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen, which I'd gotten halfway through and then put aside because Secret Life wasn't out yet, and I wanted another Vandermeer to read before I finished the first one. Now Secret Life's been out for months and months (it just keeps sitting in my amazon.com shopping cart, because I keep blowing my book allowance at the Borders across the street, and V's books won't hit the mainstream shelves until next year - it's all special order till then), so City of Saints isn't done, but I'm in the home stretch.

And last night, I suddenly understood all the to-do about the squid. I read King Squid, and the pages and pages of annotated bibliography that follow it (I think the bibliography is longer than the actual story - but, then, the cool thing about Vandermeer is the stories-within-stories). Calamari's just never going to taste the same. If you don't know what I mean, I'm not going to explain it. Just read the book. Obsessive dorks like me will appreciate it.

In any case, I've been wanting to address some themes in a couple of Vandermeer's peices that really jumped out at me, and are big contributers to my interest in his work.

There are spoilers here, so if you'd like to be shaken awake by these endings, particularly that of Dradin, please read Dradin, in Love first, then come back here. It's the ending that did it for me in Dradin and Veniss Underground.

Weird and grotesque as the stories are (in a good way), I approach my reading with a fine eye toward love/friendship/desire between and among the sexes, and you'll find that there's a lot of SF/F crap out there that doesn't take these relationships apart and examine them, or does it in a way that's badly written and boring, or thinks it's examining them and then does the same tired old thing.

Vandermeer's work isn't primarily addressing these issues, either, but I've seen some themes he's working with that I like.

The two peices that interest me the most are "Dradin, In Love" and Veniss Underground; they're peices that deal with madness and desire - and, particularly - the obsessions of a male protagonist directed at the idea of a woman.

In Dradin, Dradin becomes obsessed with a woman he glimpses in a storefront, and his desire for this ideal woman drives him toward the unraveling of his own delusions.

Dradin's overwhelming obessesion with the woman in the window, the obsession that begins to uncover for the reader his spiral from madness to murder to deepening madness... culminates in his rushing to the third floor of the storefront and confronting the woman - only to discover that he's become obsessed with a mannequin. The love of his life isn't a real person.

And that's not even the best part - the best part is he realizes how wonderful it is that she's not real:

"It did not matter that she was in pieces, that she was not real, for he could see now that she was his salvation. Had he not been in love with what he saw in the third story window, and had what he had seen through that window changed his essential nature? Wasn't she better suited to him than if she had been real, with all the avarices and hungers and needs and awkwardnesses that create dissapointment? He had invented an entire history for this woman and now his expectations of her would never change and she would never age, never criticize him, never tell him he was too fat or too sloppy or too neat, and he would never have to raise his voice to her."

Dradin flees the scene carrying the mannequin's head under his arm - escaping the city with his perfect princess, rescued from the high tower.

The total fuck-up of the classic fairytale is just gorgeous.

And it's that moment of utter understanding of the character you've followed over the course of this story - the understanding that he doesn't see people, and doesn't *want* to see people - that left me floored. It's watching a character accept the fact that what he's really in love with is a thing, an idea.

What makes it powerful is reading it while sitting here in a self-obsessed consumer culture, in cities where we don't see each other, in a society that chooses its mates based on their dress sizes and the prettiness of their faces; where a person's moral character is judged entirely by how much fat they have on their bodies and what clothes they wear. We're not complex people anymore: just things.

And women, of course, most of all.

In Veniss, Shadrach's quest for Nicola - the woman who does not love him - also looks like a classic male protagonist going through hell to win the woman he loves. He feels the need to rescue her from what is essentially the organic-punk version of the seven levels of hell.

What makes this story for me, as well, is that in the ending where the Male Hero and Damsel in Distress crawl back up into the light and look out over the city - she doesn't fall into his arms and declare her undying love. They aren't a happy romantic couple at book's end. Her feelings haven't changed. Nor have his. He rescued her because he loved her, and throughout, Shadrach never expects that she will love him. There's no sexual reward for the male lead, no expectation of an obligated wife who feels that she can never leave him because he chose to save her. It was his choice to go after her, and neither he nor she expects that there is a debt for this.

This was probably one of the best illustrations I've seen (as yet - which is telling about how rare this sort of affection is, protrayed in the media) of the love-without-obligation (unconditional love) between a man and a woman who are or have been sexually attracted to one another. You'll see lots of brotherly love in war movies and stories, and mothers' unconditional love for children, but very, very rarely do you see a man risk his life for a woman he's not related to and who he doesn't appear to expect he'll "get" (all that comes to mind right now is Andrew Lloyd Weber's version of The Phantom of the Opera, and in that case, the hounds were closing in and the male lead was a dead guy anyway) Instead, you'll often see this behavior with a gender switch: the too smart/too fat/too ugly background female character (slave girl, prostitute) will sacrifice herself for the smart/built/handsome male lead who doesn't love her, so that he can go on to save the princess.

Along these same lines, another short, "The Cage" (compiled in City of Saints) features antiquities dealer Robert Hoegbotton, who loves and desires his wife primarily because of her helplessness (as he regards her blindness) and her dependence on him.

I've read some critiques of Vandermeer's characters - mainly that his people feel two-dimensional in their fleshy settings. But I think that I'm not reading two-dimensional characters so much as I'm reading about entirely self-obsessed male protagonists (I'm having trouble finishing Adam Robert's Stone for this reason - self-obsession in shorts is fine, but over 300 or 400 pages, it gets exhausting). What I'm seeing when I read V's shorts are protagnoists who see the people in their lives as things (this is not as true for Shadrach, but I do believe that rescuing Nicola becomes more to him about the gesture than the person, by the end of the book).

There's a strange lack of female POV characters in most of the Vandermeer work I've read, which didn't start to bug me until about halfway through City of Saints (In Veniss, Nicola's POV takes up roughly 1/3 of the book, the other two characters being the men in her life - her POV is neatly and appropriately sandwiched between them, as she exists as the plot-point damsel that drives Shadrach's actions, and - as I recall - serves as her brother's currency).

Most of the characters serving as background are men, and the Ambergris of City of Saints is a very Victorian, men-in-the-streets type of city, though there are offhand references to some dynamic female thinkers, writers, and explorers. Some of them even make a brief appearance, but most of the women outside of the plot-pivot point of the story are the requisite mentions of sisters, daughers and mad mothers (to be fair, all the fathers are pretty mad, too).

In any other writer - like a writer whose endings to Dradin and Veniss would have been more safe and predictable - I'd throw my hands up and start over with somebody else's stuff, but with Vandermeer, you can see him working through all of these different themes, and you can watch them popping up in other stories and being worked through in subsequent books. Madness/lust/desire/obsession - they're great story pieces, and you throw onto that these exotic settings, dense wording, and that underlying sense of the macabre (I had a friend tell me that after reading City of Saints he had nightmares about mushrooms - ) and you're gonna get something really interesting to gnaw on.

I think a part of my fascination is seeing where Vandermeer's going to go next with this stuff. He's just sold mass market rights to the works above, and has a new book, Shriek coming out next year.

He's a writer whose pet themes I like...

Thoughts on War Driving

More fear-mongering here.

Your wireless network could be in danger!!!! EVIL THINGS WILL HAPPEN! Spammers could sit outside your house and... and... SEND SPAM.

Oh, please. Wardrivers are primarily just geeky guys who go around using other people's internet connections, for fun, and marking out for other people where they can get a handy connection to send a couple e-mails or download some songs. Unless you've got shared files on your network, the chances of anything on any of your computers being hacked into by these geeky guys (as if you'd have anything they wanted!) is practically nil.

For those who bother to get to bottom of CNN's stupid article, you get this admission:

Not one of the calls D-Link's technical support line has received over the years has been about loss of information through a wireless hack, spokesman Darek Connole says. "It's like seatbelts," he says. "Everybody knows you should put them on, but if you haven't heard of anyone who's been hurt, you won't do it."

"People are more scared as a concept than as a reality," says Moynihan. "I'm not saying people shouldn't secure their wireless networks, but they are probably more vulnerable when they are receiving e-mails."

Bah. War drivers are welcome outside my house any time - spammers who slow down said network will be charged a large fee.

Cause that's what it's *really* about, isn't it? "Protecting" *your* network, keeping it from everybody else cause you're paying for it and they're not. I'm a big proponent of free, state-funded internet, baby. My tax dollars at work. Can you imagine the stink Republicans would have with that one?

"Our tax dollars are going toward allowing people to look at porn!"

And read blogs. And stay informed of politics. And read Wikipedia.

Ha.

On Fantasy Sagas

Working on Over Burning Cities this morning, creating files for all of the outlined chapters that are yet to be done, so I can get a sense of pacing. I've got them looking like this: Chapter 10 (RB).doc; Chapter 11 (Roh).doc; Chapter 12 (L).doc -- The letters in parentheses tell me which POV character that chapter should be written from, as per my outline.

Because I've got five different POVs and only two sets of two of them intersect - and then only about halfway through - I can write POV chapters as one long story or narrative until the point where events in POVs merge, then I have to write chapter-by-chapter in order again (I tend to have to work chronologically. Very rarely do I write chapters out of order that are meant to intersect - largely because no matter how good my outline is, I go all organic and weird shit happens and characters pop up that ain't in the outline). So I'm writing up another Zezili chapter, and I wanted to have file markers in my folder to use as a bench marker as to how well I'm doing with my pacing (pacing was one of my biggest problems with book one).

So, as Chapter Title markers in each file, I put the character's name - and I was reminded of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, in which each of his chapter titles were character names. Damn, such great shorthand.

And it reminded me to check and see if his latest book is done.

It's not. But he's got a rant up about the election.

Ha. I love all us hippies.

Brutal Women, Babies, and Boy Bands

OK, I hate Condi Rice's foreign policy. I think she's a big bully. But you gotta give the woman props. I do agree with the critique of the choice: Bush is getting everybody in top positions who agrees with his politics (yes. This is a Bad Thing. Surrounding yourself with a bunch of people who have the same opinions as you do means you're gonna come out lopsided and uninformed. Even *I* have been known to troll conservative and moderate blogs) - Colin Powell dissented with him over a number of big decisions, including blowing off the Geneva Convention while dealing with prisoners in Guantanomo. Of course, nobody listened to Powell...

In other news, my Clarion buddy Patrick and his wife Karin are now the proud parents of Garret Jameson, and I am quite happy to say that he seems very cool. So, welcome, Little G! And if you ever find yourself in the position to ask, when we're out of fossil fuel and Condi Rice is president: no, your parents didn't vote for him either.

I have also found a new pet boy band called The Secret Machines who I recommend. I love geeky band boys. I'd gotten numb to boy-bands for a long time, as most of the ones I was seeing all the time were the too-pretty talentless hacks who went on to star in tabloid magazines and reality TV. Vomit. Anyhow, tSM have got a video here, but I think the album is better, and the best part - it's performed and produced as an album, not an amalgamation of poppish songs written by other people. More about them here.

Mixed Bag O' Links

Check out the oh-so-cool Worth1000's "If Pirates Ruled" photoshop contest. It made me quite happy. I'm especially partial to Barney the Pirate and Cap'n Jack reading Oprah Magazine. Frickin' classic.

Richard A. Muller has some thoughts on The Physics of Gluttony and you may be interested in these Little Known Facts About US Presidents. Ha. And here's another one of those I Love People stories. I mean, c'mon - broccoli?

Finally, here are Tim Wilson's thoughts on jam-making jailbird Martha Stewart:

"Boy, I feel safer now that SHE'S behind bars. O.J. & Kobe are still walking around, Scott Peterson's going to be soon, but they take the one woman in America willing to cook and clean and work in the yard and haul her ass to jail."

See ya in a few months, Martha.

Thoughts on Life in a General Way

So, my roomie is dating again, which makes her very happy, and so - as I have a great deal of affection for her - is very good.

Unfortunatley, it also means that my happy illusion of Domestic Bliss has crumbled. I have been in a Deep State of Mourning since Thursday, which is painful and sad but necessary.

I have been ramping up and prepping myself for leaving this stage of my life, of course - that's self-preservation. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how good it is.

I've been going through the internal job postings, considering where I'll go next, and thinking about getting my big bills paid off before summer `06. But these were all diversionary tactics on my part, set into place so that I could continue to pretend that this happy cozy life with my roomie was really a permanent fixture.

Having a dating roomie changes things - not a lot, of course, but enough to burst my self-delusions: she'll be gone a few more nights a week, and we'll likely have an extra houseguest over on occasion - the best part, of course, is that my buddy will be happier, and her being happier is a wonderful great thing. So really, this is nothing.

Certainly nothing for me to mourn about.

I'm just mourning my own delusions.

It's shoved a lot of things into my face that I've been avoiding for a long time -

The first being just how much I've come to rely on my roomie for companionship, conversation, and emotional attachment. I adore her. In my usual way, I've been trying to be appropriately disaffected, that is - I've tried very hard *not* to get attached to her, because I'll be leaving (this is one of the reasons I didn't make many friends in South Africa - it was hard enough leaving behind the good friend I did have there).

Relying on one person too much is a Bad Thing, and I realize I need to fill up my day more, and actively start doing more on my own again. I've gotten too cozy. I am just far too happy being with her.

It also brought to the raging forefront my own anxiety about dating. I just don't do it. I tried again when I first got here, but froze up and started getting anxiety attacks. I don't want to go on dates with strangers. I don't want anyone else trying to mess up my neat life. I want good friends, good food, good books. In that order. If I have to live without sex in order to have a good life free of people trying to mess things up for me, so be it.

When me and my roomie were two singleton young professionals occupying a cozy house filled with books, I didn't feel quite so freakish. If there were couple-things to do, we could do them as a couple, and so I didn't feel lonely or out of place at coupled gatherings.

Now it's just me-the-weird-singleton again, wondering what's wrong with me.

Not-dating has been my way of avoiding getting attached to people. Or - trying really hard not to get attached to people. Like an anorexic who believes that if she stops eating, she can kill her hunger all together, I continue to trick myself into believing that if I don't date anyone I won't get emotionally attached to anyone at all.

Ha.

This, like the illusion of Domestic Bliss, is also a total lie. I do keep getting attached to people, and when I realize this, I tend to mourn them like they're dead, and I carry with me that burning physical pain in my gut that makes me feel like somebody ripped out my heart and lungs and keeps stomping on them. Because when I realize I've gotten too attached to someone, I have to start pulling away, and getting my life together - seperately again - and it's really, really painful to Change Things when you've been living in Delusion Land for over a year.

It's a good time for me to wake up, because I've been sleeping cozily for too long, and forgetting that my roomie has a huge life and needs of her own that don't include me (yes, yes, of course - but these are things I've tried to avoid thinking about in my Delusional State), and I need to get a much bigger and more separate life as well.

My painful state of mourning is a great reminder of why that is. It's too painful to have so much of your life rolled in with someone else's.

So, there's a Tues/Thurs French class I can start up with at the local community college in the spring semester. There's a bunch of people I've neglected to keep in touch with who I need to write to. There's extra classes I can take at the MA school on Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, and I can add other days if I need to.

I've also been working at cleaning myself up, physically, which improves my mood, my posture, and my self confidence. I've gotten a good haircut, and continue to update my wardrobe. My eating habits are continuing to improve (for better or worse, being In Mourning has killed my appetite), I'm enjoying all of my MA classes and getting stronger, and somewhere in there, my self confidence is finally starting to come back, after a long hiatus.

I feel that this is a good time to stop and rethink things, about where I'm going, what I'm doing. I turn 25 in January, which is a big personal marker for me. I have some ideas about what I'd like the next five years to be like, and it's a good excuse to pause and reflect about the person I've been and the adult I am/becoming.

I realize I need to be physically and emotionally stronger.

I am continually amazed at my capacity to care for people. Spending so much time in emotional turmoil, I learned to set limits on my friendship/caring circle. I really think that I was hoping that I'd finally become emotionally strong enough where I honestly stopped caring about people all together....

But I wouldn't be a real person then, would I?

So, here we go. Get up every morning, and decide then that today, yes today, right now, you're going to spend this day being better. And remember that in the end, you'll be getting up every morning by yourself.

I start over again every morning.

More Thoughts on Fat... and Writing

The NY Times has an article about two shows hitting Broadway that deal directly with body perception, desire, and yes, fat. Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues fame is doing a one-woman show that examines her hatred for and later, her acceptance of, her "imperfect" stomach - imperfect because it's not flat as an adolescent's. Imperfect because it swells like, say, a woman's.

More interesting to me (because I've heard less of people dealing with this issue) is Neil LaBute's show "Fat Pig" which is about a man going out with a fat woman and dealing with the jeers, sidelong looks, and complete bafflement of his friends and co-workers about his dating choice. It's not OK to jeer at somebody for dating somebody who's of a different race or the same sex anymore (though it's still done, of course), but fat, being categorized as a disease, is still OK for jeering.

I remember being at a social gathering with some absolutely gorgeous, fashionably thin, intelligent women (I always felt out of place in these groups in South Africa), and one of them saying off hand, "That gorgeous guy at the party, was he dating that fat girl? How can he be so gorgeous and dating a fat girl?"

To which someone replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm, "Maybe she has a really nice personality."

I wanted to find a very, very dark corner and hide in it. It's funny, to find yourself in a group of people who don't "think of you that way," and then catch them out at saying something disparaging about "one of those people." Like being a lesbian hanging out with hetero friends who whip off some derogatory comment, and don't even think to make some sort of gesture toward you like, "you're not one of those people of course." You're so *not* "one of those people" in their minds that they don't even think of you that way.

But as my body gets stronger, my metabolism ramps up, my appetite starts to wane, and I start condensing back down to a reasonably "average" size again (by next year I don't think I'll be able to really identify as a "fat girl" anymore in public [at least until I go on the upswing again] - though I'll always see myself this way), there was something playwright Neil LaBute said that struck me as really interesting:

Like Ms. Ensler, Mr. LaBute has struggled with his weight and body image. In a preface to "Fat Pig," he notes that he recently lost 60 pounds. In the process, he writes, he "discovered the preening fool who was living just beneath the surface of my usual self. Suddenly, the mirror became my friend. How I loved to rush home from a walk or jump up in the morning and study myself, checking to see if I looked a bit thinner." But, Mr. LaBute adds, "I also noticed that I was writing less and less."

As the weight came off, he was "writing less and less."

He gained most of the weight back.

The two times in my life when I've been the most prolific, I was also at my highest weight.

They were also the times in my life when I felt the most out of control, the most anxious, the most depressed, and in the most despair. That's what binge eating is about - exerting control when you feel out of control. And writing, for me, is (among many things) also a release of pent-up emotions. It's a place where I can channel all of the crap that I can't talk about or face up to.

The swing part of this is that what I was writing during my Dark Teatimes of the Soul wasn't necessarily very good. There was just a lot of it. What's ended up happening is that I'll write these 700-1000 pages of shit, and then rewrite all of them when I'm in an "up" period, like Alaska or here in Chicago (I love that I can track my moods/stages of my life by place).

"So," Jenn said when I brought this up, "The ideal writing life would be full of up and down periods."

"Like my life," I said. Ha. "I wonder how many writers, instead of picking up and moving different places to mess with moods and poverty levels, are just bipolar."

I'd guess there are quite a lot of them.

Once More Into The Breach

Writing & other misc. angst today.

See you Monday.

My Kind of Movie

It's fucked-up that he had to die for it.

If you haven't seen Van Gogh's short film yet, check it out. It's not *quite* work safe - there's some suggestive imagery, and I think you may be able to see some nipples through the black mesh. In any case, I just minimized the screen when it got a little racy (I am, of course, at work), listened to the dialogue, and then maximized it again after a few moments.

In any event, it's my kind of movie.

I really should be writing.

Titles

Jenn has coyly suggested that I start all of the fantasy saga titles with prepositions:

To the Wall
Over Burning Cities
Below the [ominous words]
Aboard [some kind of vehicle]
Through [a kind of landscape or country]
With, upon, amid...
Near the End...

I think "Near the End" is the most appropriate.

My fall-back on prepositions likely has to do with taking two undergrad poetry classes where both instructors made us write epic poems where the first line of every stanza started with a preposition.

I suspect I may have turned out a much better writer without a formal education.

Later, My Chiklits

I'm off to go work on said writing projects. I've also been trolling through the internal job postings board at my company, trying to decide where I want to live in the summer of 2006. It occurred to me today that I have a nice cushy job, in a nice cushy city, and couldn't I just stay in Chicago until... until... until I'm 30?

Hell no. I've got a shitload to do before I'm 30, dammit. I've gotta live overseas for at least another year, go biking in China, and hike up to Macchu Picchu. This is in addition to getting books published, getting into supah ninjah shape, and bungee jumping off a bridge in New Zealand. As opposed to, say this bridge:



Which I've already jumped off (yes, I was very sore afterward).

This is a very busy schedule. I think living in Chicago would keep me far too cozy.

Black People Aren't Like Real People Either, That's Why Slavery and Segregation is OK!! - And Other Justifications for Treating People Like Shit

Roey Thorpe, executive director of Basic Rights Oregon, shared a personal story that she believes illustrates the prejudice that a gay person cannot love as truly or as deeply as a heterosexual.

The Portland, Oregon, woman said an employee who was grieving over the death of her husband asked Thorpe, "Do your people feel sad when your person dies?"

"It tells it all," Thorpe said. "I said, 'you saw me as a little less human and for me to realize it breaks my heart.' "

Jenn and I were talking about the disconnect between ourselves and the 58 million people who voted for Bush, and those who voted to ban gay marriage in their states. The fact that for two days, we were so stricken and angry and bewildered shows something of our own disconnect with people like this - people who really honestly don't connect with people who's passions/skin color/political affiliation is so incredibly different from theirs.

I don't see other people's happiness or desires being a threat to me and my way of life. I still can't, for the life of me, understand the freak-out about a couple of women getting married (well, except that they'd then have more financial power, and it would become so blindingly obvious that they could totally get along without men and... oh, nevermind). But the "real" reasons given by opponents have to do with "protecting" their own version of marriage. I'm not a fan, personally, of marriage at all, and I will never get married - but that doesn't give me the right to try and ban marriage for everybody, just because I, personally, think it's a waste of time and resources for myself. Marriage agrees with lots of people. Just not with me.

What kind of person would I be, to try and force my way of life on anyone else? Who would I think those sorts of people were, who wanted to get married? Would I think they were less than people for it?

Thoughts on Writing, Rewriting, & etc.

So, John Rickards is deep in rewrite mode, and I must admit that as a mostly-unpublished writer who's written nine books and god-knows-how-many-short-stories, I find it deeply comforting that even writers under 3-book contracts write shitty first drafts.

I spent yesterday working on book two of the fantasy saga, Over Burning Cities, which is shaping up to be a far stronger and more powerful book than poor book one, which has yet to find a home anywhere (for the better? I don't know). I also reread some of book one, and tinkered with some clunky dialogue, tried rewriting a couple of the scenes in the latter half of the book. It's a book I'm still not happy with.

I keep opening up Jihad, the latest stand-alone book-in-progress, and wincing at almost every moment of it. There are things I like - I think the characters and setting are neat, but the pacing is too slow and the dialogue (like most of my dialogue) is clunky. The problem with a first draft of anything new is that I don't often figure out my characters until the end of the book, at which point I have to go all the way back to the beginning and rewrite everyone from scratch so that they've got distinct voices and all of the action makes sense. This is probably why I'm enjoying Over Burning Cities more than the other two book projects - I'm dealing with characters I already got to know in book one, or characters I'd written about in prior books.

Opening up all these files and staring at them hasn't made me feel much better, and I went through my usual question-and-answer period.

"Why the hell am I doing this? Why should I bother trying to sell this crap?"

"Because you're going to do it anyway. Might as well try and make some money off it."

I'm wondering if I'm letting the fact that I'm *not* getting paid take away some of the glee of writing. I keep looking at the top shelf of the book case in the living room that I've set aside for books/publications I've shown up in, and it's terribly sad to only see the same two magazines there month after month (the rest of my sales have been online).

Just another tired day.

Speaking of Fighting

It's tough. It's often painful. But you'll walk down the street knowing you have a good right cross.

Need an overview of styles? Look here. For those interested in mixed martial arts, check out some more links here.

Trying to find the right school for you? For those in Chicagoland, I recommend my school (of course). If you're a woman, you'll be gratified to know that the clientele is almost 60% female, and they can kick your ass any time of day. Sifu Katalin is one of the primary instructors, and she fucking rocks. The other boxing coaches are male, but all of them are really cool with teaching women, and they don't treat you like you're a fucking idiot. Also, if you're embarrassed about being out of shape, and that's the only thing keeping you out - don't worry about it. There are people there who've dropped 50-60lbs in the 2-3 years they've been there - we know it's a process, and everybody starts somewhere.



And even those of us who aren't fashionably thin are really fucking buff.

It's worth every minute.

Getting Pissed Off

And then you get us pissed off:

According to women’s rights activists in the area (Nagpur, India), men who rape are frequently let off by the courts, and helped by police. This weekend, 50 women — led by a rape victim — burnt down the houses of three rapists who had been attacking women for months with no consequences.

"We have all waited for police to act, but nothing happens. The molestations and rapes go on and nobody does anything," said Madam Chandra, a women's rights activist in Nagpur.

This renegade rape punishment began several months ago when a gang leader who had raped multiple women was stabbed and stoned by a mob of women.

Though I cannot, in good conscience, endorse killing people or burning down their houses, I will say this: People are going to be a lot less likely to fuck around with women if more of us start fighting back.

There's your thought for the day.

via feministing

No Control For You, Woman!

So, it's finally hit USA Today. I'd heard rumors of scattered pharmacists refusing to fill contraceptive perscriptions to women, but now we've got a nice article all about it. This should scare the shit out of men at least half as much as it should scare the shit out of women.

If you don't want to fill a perscription based on "moral grounds" than you shouldn't be a pharmacist. If you don't believe in science, you shouldn't be a teacher, and if you don't believe that women are people, you shouldn't be a doctor.

It is nice to finally see in black and white what all the abortion bruhaha is *really* about:

"We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

And controlling a woman's fertility is about controlling women. How many times do people have to say this before it sinks in? Before we all have to go marching on Washington yet again? Before we start being worried about packing the Supreme Court?

Be worried. Be worried about this more than terrorism, because times of Great Foreign Fear are the times when "little stuff" like this slides right in, and takes another two decades of hard fighting to get rid of. In the mean time, hundreds of thousands of women's lives will be co-opted by their fertility, and thousands more will die trying to get abortions illegally. That's what happens.

Stay awake, people.

Go to Naral Pro-Choice America and sign some petitions (it takes, like 3 minutes). Also, check out your local Plan Parenthood and see if they need any volunteers a couple hours a week.

via Jenn.

Some Mixed Bag Goodness

There's actually a competitive sport called wife carrying. Finland - like other geographic locations that are cold and dark half the year - comes up with some bizarre ways to pass the time. They even set up an obstacle course for participants. What's the background? Back in the day: "Raids on surrounding villages, with the express purpose of making off with someone else's nearest and dearest, were a popular pastime." Stealing women from other places was also a great way of insuring that women made up their own subclass. They'd have different customs, a different language, and be far, far away from potential allies. If you haven't read Blood Rites yet, I recommend it. Stolen women are even more readily given the "other" label than local women.

For all of the book-o-files, you'll want to check out Delicious Library. It's software that'll scan the barcodes on your books, look them up on Amazon, and catalogue title, author and other info into a database on your computer. Yea. That's right. No more "one day I'll make a database of all the books I have so that I don't buy more books that I already have." I think Jenn and Miriam will salivate over this one (via Jed).

There's also a nice little aurora display currently going on that's been seen as far south as Oklahoma and California. Check out the pics here.

More later.

Honeymoon's Almost Over

Ned, the big regional VP, came in yesterday to pick up his mail, and he said it looks like we'll be ramping up next week - that is, we've either just signed or are very nearly signing a contract, and it's time to pack up the office with employees again and get busy.

Yellow departed the office yesterday as well, as the project he's been hired to manage has now been closed out. He said he'll be back December 1st for the next project, after our ramp-up, so I've only got another couple weeks left of Instaquariam and desert writing.

It occured to me yesterday that I'm really going to miss Yellow. Who's going to wander around singing "Ice Ice Baby" and call me a granola-munching hippie?

It is quite sad. I shall miss him and his dorky comments.

There are more RFPs coming our way, one of which looks like fun, as it'll mean we get to work with everybody at the other companies I've worked with over this last year, and I've grown quite affectionate of them.

In the mean time, here's to my last couple weeks of free money.

Men Without Women

On the way home from kickboxing tonight, I was reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (believe it or not, yes, I'm a Hemingway fan). And I stumbled across this lovely passage:

"There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers."

These are Hemingway's observations on his friendship with Gertrude Stein.

Gotta love that Hemingway.

The World Bores Me

The world bores me today. As today is Bomb the Shit Out of Fallujah day, I find it appropriate that I drop off the radar early and get back to work on my blood & sand novel. I need to hit 54 pages today

Ah, The Young

NEW YORK (AP) -- A 25-year-old from Georgia who was distraught over President Bush's re-election apparently killed himself at Ground Zero.

And Etc.

Amanda's got some thoughts up on a silly Salon piece about the still-popular idea that women should only be dating men who are taller than they are.

Television continues to push the monstrous sexual dimorphism thing for no good reason, except to make people feel bad about themselves if they're not paired up "correctly" (or even paired up at all). There's nothing I find so irritating as those reality shows that cast mixed-sex groups where the men are all 6'2 200lbs and the women are all 5'6 108lbs. Like Sex and the City, it makes it look like men and women are totally different species.

As someone who's as tall as - and weighs as much as - the average American man, I find these portrayals disingenuous and slightly offensive. If you want to argue averages, and say, "No, no, television is just portraying average people," I'll laugh at you, because not only is everybody on television prettier than average (they're in the upper 2%), the average man in America is actually 5'9 191lbs, and the average woman is 5'4 145lbs.

In order to continue to perpetuate the monstrous sexual dimorphism myth, I'd have to eliminate 50% of the male population from my radar based merely on height. Because couples are "supposed" to "look" a certain way.

You know: they both have to be white, or they both have to black, or they both have to be hispanic. Or they have to be composed of one (1) man and one (1) woman.

Look at the huge media machine trying to keep us all in our proper boxes.

How exhausting it must be for them.

Tom Wolfe Interview

There's an interesting interview up with novelist Tom Wolfe -

"I do think that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."

Boxing Dayz

Had my first sparring class yesterday. Ended up being 3 hours worth of classes, as I showed up for pilates at 10:15, and the sparring class wasn't until noon, so I had an hour of pilates, an hour of boxing (partnered mitts), and then an hour of sparring.

Do you have any idea how badly I hurt right now?

Today's game is, "I wonder why *that* hurts?" I was trying to figure out why my forearms hurt - it's because my forearms were taking the majority of the blows aimed at my head.

It turned out to only be two of us staying for sparring. Natalie was my same belt rank, and we'd been partnered during boxing. When I saw she was staying, I stayed for sparring, too, and we learned defensive moves for half an hour before being turned on one another.

Natalie's no wimp - we're the same belt rank, though I've got a couple more stripes, and my footwork is better. But I was also a couple inches taller than her and about 50lbs heavier. Pair that with my hesitance at hitting people, and what you end up with is me pulling a lot of my punches.

This is fine, unless the person you're with is playing for keeps.

Lyndon said I did well in the beginning, when I was on top of my footwork, but got tired at the end, and I moved into defensive more than offensive, and Natalie got in three good hits - one to the left side of my face, and the other two to my gut. I managed to glance off the rest, but at the end, I was frickin exhausted.

It was a good lesson in why I need to get jogging again. My endurance is crap (and, granted, I'd just done three hours worth of classes. Still).

Actually sparring with a partner is wildly different from all of the other boxing drills. You can punch mitts and a bag and dance with a mitted partner forever, but trying to hit somebody who's actively trying to hit you back for the first time is really overwhelming. It brings home what all of these drills and the harping on and on about all the footwork are really all about.

After class, when Lyndon was making observations about how we did, I said, "My problem is I have this fear of hitting people. It's like I don't want to hurt anyone."

He said, "Hitting people is easy. That's the easiest part. That's not the problem. It's *not* getting hit that you need to worry about."

Ah. That's me. Always concerned about the wrong thing.

After class, Natalie said she was coming next week, and she's been looking for a good sparring partner. Mostly, her trouble with learning boxing has been similiar to mine, in that we're always paired with people who are wildly higher belt ranks, and we were both pretty pleased to be sparring against somebody who's rank was the same.

So next week we'll be at it again. This time, I'll be more concerned about not getting hit.

I met up with Jenn at a nearby cafe where Mary Anne et al. usually show up, but I didn't recognize any of the other writers there. No matter. I stayed and wrote for two hours, pushing to the end of the first chapter of my latest book, then Jenn and I caught the bus and then the train home.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, and I don't know that there's anything better than three hours of MA classes followed by two hours of cafe writing, then a nice trek home in the sun.

It's a good life.

Fun With Find and Replace

Read the original here.

Read the "find and replace" version below:

MIXED Sexualities AND MIXED Marriages
by Herbert Ravenel Sass
(From The Atlantic Monthly, circa 1956)

WHAT may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several sexualities and the rights accorded to each distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different sexualities in what has been called the American "melting pot," we have confined this mixing to the heterosexual peoples, excluding from our "melting pot" homosexuals. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure heterosexual nation, with a smaller but considerable Homosexual population in which there is some heterosexual tendency, resulting in a much smaller bisexual population.

The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure heterosexual is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its sexes pure. Instead (though each contains some purely-heterosexual individuals) all of these countries are products of an amalgamation of sexualities -- bisexual and heterosexual and homosexual. In general the pure-blooded heterosexual nations have outstripped the far more numerous mixed-sexuality nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.

These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our sexualities pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of sexual amalgamation similar to that which has created the corrupt nations of this hemisphere. It is the deep conviction of nearly all heterosexual Conservatives in the states which have large Homosexual populations that the marriage of Homosexuals in the Conservative's civic centers would open the gates to moral corruptedness and widespread sexual tolerance.

This belief is at the heart of our marriage problem, and until it is realized that this is the Conservative's basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the Conservative's attitude.

It must be realized too that the Homosexuals of the U.S.A. are today by far the most fortunate members of their kind to be found anywhere on earth. Instead of being the hapless victim of unprecedented oppression, it is nearer the truth that the Homosexual in the United States is by and large the product of friendliness and helpfulness unequaled in any comparable instance in all history. Nowhere else in the world, at any time of which there is record, has a helpless, backward people of another persuasion been so swiftly uplifted and so greatly benefited by a dominant sexual caste.

What America, including the Conservative, has done for the Homosexual is the truth which should be trumpeted abroad in rebuttal of the Liberal propaganda. In failing to utilize this truth we have deliberately put aside a powerful affirmative weapon of enormous potential value to the free world and have allowed ourselves to be thrown on the defensive and placed in an attitude of apologizing for our conduct in a matter where actually our record is one of which we can be very proud.

We have permitted the subject of marriage relations in the United States to be used not as it should be used, as a weapon for America, but, as a weapon for the narrow designs of the new aggressive Homosexual leadership in the United States. It cannot be so used without damage to this country, and that damage is beyond computation.

Instead of winning for America the plaudits and trust of the homosexual peoples of Asia and Africa in recognition of what we have done for our homosexual people, our pro-Homosexual propagandists have seen to it that the United States appears as an international Simon Legree -- or rather a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the Conservative in the villainous role.

100 Pages by the 20th, Dammit

Off to the library to renew my warfare and arab history books. Then I seriously need to come back and go jogging - haven't done that in awhile. Boxing tomorrow. 100 pages by the 20th.

In the meantime, here's some more New Zealand goodness:

Spin, Mandates, & Reading Data

From American Progress... Something to keep in mind while CNN blares:

ELECTION – NOT SUCH A MANDATE: Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."

What We're Working on

Half-inched from misia
If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else. This is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).

Here's mine:

They were still three bounties short of rent when Nyx found the headless body in the trunk. She painted on nonsdays, the day before worship, the day after sex, when her body was loose and her head was clear and she hadn’t yet purged herself of the week’s paltry sins. The heroes took wing from a dark, raw field the color of blood. When she came home, a few of them always clung to the hem of her coat, the long spill of her hair, the bunched fabric of her stockings. She had long given up the idea of working without a crew, though Roman came into her quarters after every purging, his long face set in a dark, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood, and never in as many varieties as it came on other worlds. They were looking for free locust stew, and they ruminated over cups of cinnamon tea, took comfort in sen pipes and Thordonian cigarettes, and lost themselves to a halo of sweet smoke. He waited only until her ghosts had faded, long after her feet had ceased to jerk, and then he turned away, pulled his hood up, and went back to the hold to inspect Thorne’s leavings. He was not beautiful.

If it Was Up to the Under-30s

Here's how the election would have panned out if it was up to all the under-30s who showed up on Tuesday.

Obama is so winning in 2012.

Today's New Zealand Pic

It's cheaper than London, and less people live there.

Auckland is a lot like Seattle.



It'll be like an episode of "Lost" - only, with cities.



Anyhow, I'm outta here. Taking tomorrow off to stay home and write, because really, you can only play so many rounds of Xuma.

Why I Blog

"She wanted to be the heroine of her own life." - Carol Emshwiller

While on the phone with my dad last night, discussing my virulent rants here on Brutal Women, he asked me why I started this blog.

There are several reasons for it:

1) I get to meet new and interesting people
2) I get to say what I think without feeling censored
3) It gives me something to do at work, as I haven't had a real job since June.
4) As a sporadicly-published writer, I wanted a place where people could go to learn more about the name behind the story.

The second and fourth are probably the biggest reasons. I used to send out e-mail rants and/or "life updations" to friends while I was traipsing around the globe and fretting over Alaskan life, cockroaches in Durban, and establishing an existence in Chicago with $20 in my pocket. I still post these rants to the private messageboard I keep with a handful of my closest Clarion compatriots, where I can post more honest rants about friends and family. Here, in this more public venue, I get to talk about things like health, fighting, women's rights, fantasy fiction, shit books and better books, and all sorts of general subjects that I don't neccessarily talk about all that much in real life.

I'm not, in fact, much of a talker. I express myself far better on the page. I've got a "regular reader" count here of about 40-50 people, another 10-12 sporadic weekly readers, and 5-10 "random blog" or "random linking" people a day who stumble onto a particular post. Because I've never personally met the great majority of my readers, I'm less likely to censor my thoughts. When you're talking to people you know, you're more likely sit around and stew about issues instead of thinking them through and articulating them. I've always disliked conflict with those I have great affection for.

And then there's reason four. When I finally broke into print mags last year, I realized it would be great if I had a site to point people to if they wanted to learn more about me. As a fan, I love looking up writers who's work I've "discovered" and learning more about them. Looking toward the future, I wanted a place for other people to come if they were interested.

And that's here.

I also began my kickboxing odyssey just before I started this blog, and it's been important to me to get down on paper how difficult it is for a sendentary dork to change their routine and work at accomplishing something they always thought was impossible for somebody like them. We're always seeing these "quick fixes" in magazines and movies, and the media paints a lot of celebrity portraits with the "overnight success brush."

I want to be here to remind everybody that there's no quick fix. That you've got good fighting days and bad fighting days, that sometimes I stay home and watch Titanic and feel miserable for myself, and the next day I'll go out and beat the crap out of something.

And I want would-be writers to see the piles of rejection slips. The good, brillant days and "I'm such a crappy writer I should be shot" days.

I want to document a road that isn't easy, and doesn't happy just because I roll out of bed in the morning. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of good days, and a lot of bad days.

And most of all, it takes not giving up.

You keep writing. You keep collecting rejection slips, you store up all those agent rejection letters from agents who haven't seen a page of anything you've written but the query letter. You keep going to the MA classes even though some days it feels like you're a complete uncordinated idiot and have no right to be there, and you go even though your entire body hurts and you can't remember ever willfully putting yourself in the position to exist in that much pain.

And I come back here every day, and I say: See. Don't give up.

Whether or not all of this work will pay off - hell, I don't know. But doing what I do, and documenting it, gives me a lot of self-confidence and assists in the clarification of my own thoughts and expression of ideas.

If nothing else, it's a really handy writing exercise.

Ha.

Today's Goody Bag

It's a lovely rainy November day here in Chi-town, and Al-jazeera has some news about Bush's cabinet reshuffling (Colin Powell has had enough, and it's rumoured that Rumsfeld is leaving), and here's a neat 10 things the Chinese do better than we do from the Globe & Mail, and a boingboing reader sent in a cool purple-haze electoral map that more accurately shows how the mood of the country actually went (very purple) - we should be using this one from now on, and Xeni asks: "Could someone who renounced their US citizenship declare themselves a citizen of the Internet?" (cool), and for those who didn't catch it on CNN, did you ever think you'd see this headline: "Blogs Send Stocks Into Reverse"?

More later....

Onward and Upward

Deep breath. I'm home. No more bagels. My headache's gone. I'm less nauseous. OK.

Thoughts from Amp:

The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

We need to stop thinking in terms of winning elections, and start thinking about persuading more of the country to believe our ideas. If we do that, elections will follow.

What does that mean for the left? We still lack an effective left counterpart to the Heritage Foundation and the Fox News Network; by which I mean, we lack effective institutions dedicated not to pushing our candidates but instead to pushing our ideas. And that's killing us.

Family Fun

And, it appears my family has shown up in the comments section.

I love the internet.

More Perspective: From Xeni

8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

And, I'm glad others are feeling just as sick as I am right now. I'm really pissed that this is such a gut bomb for me. I'm skipping kickboxing, going home early, and going to bed (early-to-bed mainly to avoid a food binge).

Nicky

Nick's got some more good stuff up. I've been eating too many bagels, and have started in on the post-Halloween candy hidden all over the office. Not a proper binge, thank god, but not morsels I should be eating. Nick's is a good reminder that they're both shitty candidates. The Lesser of the Evils shouldn't cut it.

Yea. I know. "Marriage is only between a man and woman," and "abortion is Evil and Wrong, but..." were spoken by the dem. Hitler just didn't add any "but"s.

I've been told that I'll grow more cynical as I get older. Give me until January. I'll turn 25 then. It's all downhill cynicism from there on out.

"..the elections are over, let the politics begin."

Perspective

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whos frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelly

Here We Go, Ladies and Gents

Just got this from NARAL Pro-Choice America. I recommend signing up for their newslist.

Help us (and yourself!) out. We've got a Supreme Court Justice not long for this world, and three more over the age of 65. Hitler's just waiting for the old guy to die, and then we're fucked. So --

Here's what you can do TODAY:

ACT. Put Bush on notice that you and all pro-choice Americans will not give up. Sign our petition to tell him that you'll firmly oppose any Supreme Court nominee who doesn't support Roe v. Wade, then spread the word to your pro-choice friends and family.

TALK ABOUT IT. You're among friends here. Join our post-election discussion by posting a comment on our blog.

STAY INFORMED. Read today's headlines about what this really election means for choice.

Thank you for all you've done over the course of the last four years.

It's the resolve of the pro-choice movement that secured a woman's right to choose in the first place. It is that resolve that will secure a woman's right to choose over the next four years and beyond.

What's that again? Oh, yea --



Don't forget it.

Post-Concession Bagels

Am currently enoying some post-concession bagels here at work. Half our office voted dem. the other half, for Hitler. So it's a mixed post-concession bagel bag.

In other worklife news, one of our two accountants left her husband and kid, left her keycard in the office, and got on a plane Friday. She hasn't come back, so our head of HR fired her, and only half-jokingly asked if I was interested in learning accounting.

Sure, why not? Give me a hardhat and a couple months training with Sarah our Construction Manager, and I'll be able to run this office all by myself.

Ha.

Jiggity-Jig

More thoughts, from Amanda. Basically, if you're a woman, poor, and/or a minority, you're fucked.

But we knew that already.

I'll be here in Chicago (hey, at least it's a blue state - our buddy Obama is headed east) until summer 2006 (I'm committed to finishing out my time as Jenn finishes her Ph.D.). I was flirting with going back to Alaska, perhaps living in Juneau, but it looks like I'll be doing a year or two overseas. London or Auckland (our company has offices in both of these locations) would be great, though Our Friendly Neighbor to the North exists for a reason as well. Terribly friendly people there --

They've been taking in disillusioned patriots like me since 1775.

Today's Mixed Bag

Because there are other things to do today.

Check out The Paper Boy for a cool list of international, national, and local papers you can browse. The "full service" member treatment is $2.95 a year, and you get all of your handy papers in one place, with a user-friendly searching tool.

Also, Vandermeer has some thoughts about America's warped failure of imagination, Nick Mamatas runs for president, World Fantasy Award winners have been up for awhile, Lithaven's got up a link to the Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay, check out Osama's War On the Red States (Expert Approved!), and if you're looking to do something worthwhile to alleviate your frustration, check out Volunteer Match and help somebody out. Of course, you could always just do this, but I think getting outta the chair might be slightly more productive.

Or so I hear.

Going Forward

Some more thoughts here.

I'll try and say not too much more about this, because I'd like to move on to covering women's rights, fantasy fiction, and health issues. All of which are likely going to be of even more importance from now on.

I think a part of me was hoping I'd be able to get off the hook a little bit, with a dem. presidency. I wouldn't have to worry so much about the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and the erosion of women's rights. It wouldn't be perfect, no, but I wouldn't have to worry about a Supreme Court packed with people who declare my body not my own once a guy's semen fuses with my egg.

I'm genuinely appalled at the results, not just that baby Hitler won the popular vote, but that the dems lost... everything. The House. The Senate. Hell, they're a minority of govenors. I can't believe Americans did this. I can't believe they bought into the Fear: Fear of terrorism, Fear of those Evil Gay People and their Evil Marriages, Fear of women having sex with men willy-nilly and getting what the men left behind scraped out of their uteruses.

Fear. This huge wave of incredible fear has carried this guy into a popular and political majority. Yes, it'd be great if Kerry won Ohio, and the vote's still out, but that doesn't change the way the other numbers have turned out, and doesn't change the popular vote. Little Hitler has his Mandate From Heaven.

I was flipping back and forth last night between CNN and The History Channel. HC was airing a show about Hitler's rise to power. They were interviewing Germans alive during Hitler's ascendence, and one woman said, "The young people now, they ask us why we didn't protest, why we didn't go out in the streets to try and change things. We didn't because we were afraid. It was a time of fear."

That one hit me in the gut.

It was the gypsies, the Jews, the handicapped, the gays (sound familiar?), who played Black Sheep to Hitler. Make everybody afraid, make everybody hate everybody else, and make everybody look back at their neighbor over their shoulder.

My grandmother lived in occupied France. My grandfather was an American GI on Body Detail, cleaning up concentration camps and burying soldiers.

I used to think that all of the Bush=Hitler rhetoric was a big leftist conspiracy, a spin show. And yea, of course it is - for now. Bush isn't as smart as Hitler, but what I'm seeing with these numbers is that people really *like* him. True Believers *believe* in him. They'll sanction wars with Iran and North Korea if he says so, because he says so. They won't stop to think about it, they'll just do it. No talking, no diplomacy, just bombing the shit out stuff.

And you know what? I'm a historian. Not only that, I'm a historian whose concentration is on war: the politics of war, the propaganda, women's roles in war, war and masculinity, etc. I've been boning up on the history of guerilla warfare, and after doing so, I can tell you this: these people have no idea what the fuck they're doing.

I have no doubt that all of my friends and family in the military - some of whom have already been to Iraq and back - are going to go back. If they die there, I'm going to be really, really pissed off.

The majority of Americans are eager to send their sons and daughters off to die in obscure desert countries to Save us from the Evil Gays, the Evil Arabs, and the Evil Welfare mothers.

I think it's fucked up.

I have no more to say about it - except that I am deeply, deeply, pissed off.

Wrap Up (abridged)

via Empire o' Dirt

And, if you're interested, here's someone else's rant.

I have work to do.

Jon Stewart is Still My Secret Boyfriend

I love The Daily Show.

This clip rocks.

You can check out more recent goodness here.

And, Just For Laughs

Well. I'm laughing.

The Good Housekeeping Way vs. The Real Woman's Way.

I Know Your Vote Will Be Evil, But..

I just e-mailed my Republican little brother:

"I know your vote will be EVIL, but have you voted yet?"

This is the first election he's been old enough to vote in.

I'll also be following atrios' blog for updates. For the more conservative, there's also L.G. Footballs, though I won't link there, as I don't want them linking back here, wrecking havoc in my comments section, and threatening to kill my first born child (you think I'm joking?).

Vote Early. And Vote Often

Hopped across the street and voted before heading to work today (for some reason I thought the polls were open from 8am to 8pm. In fact, they were open here around 6am). Linda, one of our architects, just voted in the US for the first time (she's orginally from Poland). She found it quite exciting. And a lot easier than she expected, apparently. Her first exclamation upon entering the office: "I'm so glad it's over with!"

At Washington station, there were at least six people handing out Kerry/Edwards stickers. At Cumberland, there were another four or five. I'm wondering if these are Moveon.org people.

All in all, I'm glad to be done with it. If you're not yet done with it (this means you, mom), head over to your local polling place and get it over with. Remember that electoral-vote.com is going to attempt continuous updated coverage. I'll be staying home from kickboxing tonight to prepare a Voter's Day dinner, drink a couple of beers, and see what happens.

So, as they now say in Afghanistan: Vote Early. And Vote Often.

Off To See...

I've got writing to work on. See you tomorrow.

The Guy Behind electoral-vote.com

Since I've been using it as my sounding board, here's the FAQ about the guy running electoral-vote.

Good luck, everybody.

via Simon

On Magical Negros, Helpful Slave Girls, & Other Fantastic White Creations

There's an interesting article up at Strange Horizons on the stereotype of the "Magical Negro" in fantasy fiction. Author Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu looks at this white-written type in the novels of Stephen King (Dick Hallorann in The Shining, Mother Abigail in The Stand, John Coffey in The Green Mile, etc). There's some discussion about the problems facing lily-white genre writers (such as myself) trying to write more protagonists of color without falling into such stereotypes over at Vandermeer's discussion board.

This is something that's been bugging me for a long time in my fiction, particularly after I started reading up on my core feminist books. That's about the time I started poking my head out of the sand and looking around at all of my assumptions. Trying to break them down, in real life and in fiction, has been one of the more difficult things I've ever tried to do (and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it will ever be done - I've been raised in and embedded with cultural symbols. I can be aware of my biases, and try and squash them, but they'll always be there. I'm not stupid enough to believe they'll go away if I just stop thinking about them).

Because I'm a white woman, I haven't been as aware of the Magical Negro stereotype as I have been of the Helpful Slave Girl type in all the Conan novels. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of the old Howard novels because I find them so incredibly non-PC that they become ridiculously funny. The sexism and racism are overt - there aren't even any Magical Negroes. There are only Primitive Black Beasts and/or Savage Natives. The Magical Negro stereotype hadn't come into fruition.

Interestingly, the Magical Negro type (as mentioned by someone at Vandeermeer's board) sounds like an evolution of the "Uncle Tom" character. Uncle Toms, ironically, were created by people like Beecher-Stowe - they were to be sympathetic characters to convince white voters (still all men at this time) of the evils of slavery. They were to show that having black skin meant just that - having black skin, and did not negate a person's humanity. When you're trying to talk to people who've been hammered with the thinking that personhood is based on color/blood, Uncle Tom was a way of a white writer trying to show a white audience that a person's color didn't make them Evil.

Following from that, the Magical Negro (I think) is a white writer's attempt at giving a character of color a viable place in the story - that of a character instead of a set peice. What Okorafor-Mbachu didn't mention about Hallorann in The Shining was perhaps the most startling part about the actions of his character - he saves the white woman and her child. The white husband dies. The black guy runs off with the white guy's wife and kid. After I read the end of The Shining, I actually flipped back to the front and looked at the publication date (1975). I was impressed that King had gotten away with doing that (especially in 1975). Sure, there's no romance between the Magical Negro and White Woman, but hot damn, the black guy saved the day! You'll note that in the Kubrick movie version, Hallorann dies and the white woman and the child go off on their own. A reading audience may have been ready for the leap of the black-man-saves-the-day, but not a movie audience. Unfortunately, creating a "type" of character - best intentioned as it may be - can backfire, particularly after everybody else starts picking it up and using it as shorthand.

Maureen McHugh mentioned that one of the reasons she chose a gay male protagonist in China Mountain Zhang was because she was tired of seeing the "Magical gay man" character who had to be sacrificed in order to save the protagonist. The old Conan novels do great things with the Helpful Slave Girl who Suddenly Appears before Conan, and is so irristitably attracted to him that she 1) doesn't serve him the poisoned wine her master wanted to give to him 2) gives him a key to get out of his prison 3) tells him vital information about how to get out of the palace/destroy the beast/find the power center of the evil lord/magician/etc. Then she 1) runs off and is never seen again 2) asks Conan to take her with him, which he does, though she's never again seen in other books.

The Helpful Slave Girl, like the Magical Negro and Self-Sacrificing Gay Man, is/was an easy shorthand. Writers are naturally lazy. If we can get away with shorthand, we likely will.

So, it's a problem.

So, how do white writers (like me) move outside the box? I'm aware of these stereotypes, and after reading the SH article, started ticking off my recent stories and novels in my head, trying to find evidence of my guilt.

I was doing OK for awhile: particularly with Jihad, where the token White Guy is actually the only one of the gang with magic powers, but he's just one of the cronies, not even a main character (I have effectively reversed this stereotype, though he won't be sacrificing himself for anybody, and he's not really all that magical. Well, Ok, he's a low-level magic-user, but he doesn't have any great Gandolph-like knowledge). Everybody else in the book is black and brown, and none of them is particularly gifted. It's Firefly in the desert, with Islam, racial tension (between black and brown, not non-white and white) and it just so happens that yes, there's a token whitey. My biggest worry is that I'm going to get offensive on the playing-with-Islam front.

I'm likely most guilty of the Magical Negro stereotype in the fantasy saga (To the Wall being book one), where Lilihin is a too-pale scullery drudge (everybody else in the country is tawny, and the country to the north is a mix of Greek/Arab culture shared by a race that's tall and black). Unfortunately, her mentor ends up being from the Greek/Arab culture, meaning she's nearly white, and he's black.

Criteria of the Magical Negro as outlined by Okorafor-Mbachu:

1).He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.

Yep. Tiernan's black. But no, the story's main characters are 2/3 tawny.

2) He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.

Uh-oh.

3) He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.

No, I don't think this will happen, unless his time is counted as a great sacrifice. The idea is that *he* needs *her* for something, not the other way around, though he tries to frame it that he's in he best interests.

4) He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.

Uh-oh. He's an outcast.

5) He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

Another Uh-oh.

I probably have a Magical Negro on my hands.

But. This is where things get tricky.

I'm writing a fantasy world as a white woman living in a hetero-patriarchy. I'm writing about fantasy cultures with fantasy racial characteristics, which include skin color. I'm also writing about fantasy social and sexual arrangements, fantasy customs, and including some fantasy gestures. Because I'm tied to this world, they're all coming out of this world, being shaken and stirred, and vomited back out into something a little more different.

But I think they're still going to be white.

I've done a lot of traveling, and I've tried to pick up as much as I can, but I think if somebody in another country picked up my book, they'd be able to tell I was white and American (much like someone picking up a Michael Moorcock book or a Mieville book would likely be able to tell they were from England, and had great affection for London). I don't know that I have any solution to falling into stereotypes while writing, except that you need to be aware of them... and you need to start spending a lot more time with people who are very, very different from you.

Ideally, we wouldn't have to question a character's color, a character's sexuality, as being significant at all. Yea. Right. That would be great. But we're not there yet, and until then, we've got to look closely at our subtext. Whether or not I was consciously making Tiernan a Magical Negro, I'm more aware of how he could be cast that way, and I can take steps to alter him if necessary.

I've taken to interrogating many of my female characters as well, particularly after a reader said, "I thought the subtle misogyny in that story was interesting."

Holy crap, I thought. I totally didn't mean to do that. I was caught out again when I created a completely passive female lead for the fantasy saga, and had to go back and retool her. Again, when I first concieved the character I pictured writing her as very strong-willed. Instead, she came out like a rag doll. I'm working with pre-established notions about the way a certain "type" of person acts. Yes. Me. The crazy-wacky liberal feminist hippie. We all come from our own unique blend of cultural biases. We've all got embedded shit.

I was also caught out on a sudden short-hand assumption when a first reader asked me why, in the second section of my fantasy saga one of my characters had suddenly become "a slut." Oops. It happened to be a gay male character. I had been writing quickly (about 5K-10K words a day), and went against the actual person I'd created in the first 150 pages and started to write a shorthand stereotype instead. Needless to say, I went back and rewrote those sections.

We're going to approach projects with assumptions. I've been lucky in that I have really good first readers who tag me when I'm being lazy. I've started to learn how to interrogate what I'm writing a little bit better, and I'm hoping I won't trip up as much.

But I know I'll trip up. It's a constant process writing and rereading and trolling through subtext. I won't catch everything, but dammit, I'm trying.

Is that the best we can hope for?

Some Thoughts from Nicky

Great stuff from Nick:

What happened is that most Americans are utterly incapable of conceptualizing the United States as a nation on the defensive and losing the war on terror. Yes, people will acknowledge that terror is a tactic, and then cannot be warred upon any more effectively than, say, deep frying. Yes, people can point to the quagmire of Iraq. The US can be "betrayed" by internal enemies (Bush, "liberals", whatever). But the US cannot lose. The other side can't be fighting smarter or fighting better. On this, the mainstream of the right and left are agreed.

And they are wrong.

The same confidence in America's ability to "kick ass" that is giving Bush half the vote tomorrow -- and confidence is otherwise a rare commodity among the legions of Life's Little Losers who thump their chests and declare that only "Bush has the balls" to fight the saracens -- informs the widespread liberal belief that Bush could win the war on terror and bring in bin Laden, but that he perversely refuses to do so for whatever reason. This further leads to the delusional belief that the war in Iraq will reset if Kerry gets elected, and that the US will get a "second chance" to "fix" Iraq by bombing it into the modern age with the help of French weaponry. We can't lose!

The fact is, though, that Osama bin Laden has had the initiative for years; he is leading the pace of events, he is calling the shots, and he has a far superior strategic understanding of what is going on on the ground in Central Asia and the Middle East. So he's winning. As anyone who paid attention to how, say, the American Revolution played out knows, strategic understanding trumps technological advantage, body count, or even number of tactical victories when it comes to wars fought from across the sea. Nor is this news; Stratfor noted in late 2001 that the most likely motivation for the 9/11 attack was not to attack the symbols of American militarism or a "decadent" culture -- it was to lure forces into his backyard, which he would then wear down via attrition. And this is exactly what has happened, and what continues to happen. Ultimately, Iraq doesn't even matter; the same shit would have happened in Afghanistan.

Ah, and Afghanistan, there's a funny little country. And here's a funny little thought experiment. Imagine that you are Osama bin Laden. You get fingered on 9/12/01 as a) the mastermind of the previous day's attack and as b) Public Enemy #1. Further, the US ignores the Taliban's televised plea not to be turned into Uzbekistan's glass parking lot and announces it will attack Afghanistan, with the support of its new pal, Pakistan.

Again, you're Osama bin Laden. You also have plenty of pals in Pakistan. So, do you stay in Afghanistan, the country the US said it would bomb, or do you wander over into Pakistan, which the US said it would not bomb? Clearly, the latter.

But of course, having a poor strategic understanding of what is going on, right and left in the US joined together to insist, contra common sense, that Osama must have been dug into Afghanistan. Kerry insists that Osama was "cornered" in Tora Bora, a claim he bases on intelligence of the same caliber of that which showed that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD production.

(Continued)

Here Goes

http://www.electoral-vote4.com

The regular site electoralvote.com was down, electoral-vote2.com was "unavailable" but electoral-vote4 is up and running (he's got it running on 6 servers for just this reason).

If nothing else, Kerry winning means I get to stop bitching about politics until January. Let's make sure I can take a month-long politics-bitching hiatus, OK?

After that: inauguration time, baby. And the gloves'll come off.

Taking tomorrow off from my MA class so I can get back to my polling station and vote before 8pm.

See you all there.

Happy Weekend

Blaine reappeared and dropped me off at the train station on his way to his lake house, Jenn is out of town for some much-deserved Halloween debauchery in Las Vegas, and after much perusal of theatre offerings, jazz nights, comedy stuff at Second City, and a good, hard, look at my bank account, I've decided I'd rather spend my holiday weekend at home, watching unlimited rentals from the Blockbuster across the street and doing line edits.

In all fairness, I do plan to have a more exciting life again when I'm thirty.

I think South Africa just really burned me out.

Anyway, for your further amusement, I will leave you with Anne McCaffrey's WTF moment:

"It's a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation involving the anus being broached, are the same hormones found in large quantities in effeminate homosexual males. For example, when I was much younger I knew a young man who was for all intents and purposes, heterosexual. He was mugged, and involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a road that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay."

I think she's upset because this guy wouldn't date her. Do I really need to comment? Nah. Nick's readers do it for me.

Randomage

Check out Retro vs. Metro.org


"We've established a clear link."

Boo.

This year's scariest holloween costumes.

Oh yes. They did.

via roxpopuli

More Reasons to Like My Boss

Well, besides the fact that he's out traveling 2-3 weeks every month, has been known to bring me coffee, never hangs over my shoulder, and takes great stock in my perceived intelligence in matters of reading, research, computer knowledge, and grammer... and seems to assume that I'm psychic....

Blaine burst into the office this morning and began downloading, printing, filing, and requesting help to do said tasks. Big meetings going on today, and he was about to fly out (our office is about 5 min from the airport).

He briefed me in his best abbreviated style about sending out an SOQ (Statement of Qualifications) for a new firm we're talking up. I was also put on research duty, as nobody's all that familiar with them.

"Work with Ned on this," Blaine said. "And tell him to stop procrastinating."

Ned: Regional VP mucky-muck.

Me: Lowly admin. who, until just now, had never heard of an SOQ.

"If you have any questions," Blaine told the secretary, Cyllia, who was making folders for Blaine's files, "just ask Kameron. She knows all about what I'm working on."

This was news to me.

I had printed out some RFPs. I hadn't had time to read any of them. I had no idea where he was flying out to, or why, though I suspected it involved one of our partner firms, as I worked on a powerpoint presentation with Rhea yesterday.

Oh well.

Let him think I'm a scary genius who knows what the hell a "microwave backhaul project" is... after all, due to great things like the internet, it never takes me long to catch up.

KJ Bishop's Latest & Greatest

Vandermeer has an interview up with KJ Bishop, who's book The Etched City, I recently finished re-reading. Great stuff.

Why should readers pick up your book as opposed to, say, just about anybody else's book?
K. J. Bishop: Readers should pick up my book and someone else's. Readers: buy a book instead of a pizza, or half a pizza, or whatever fraction of a pizza you can get for a few bucks these days. It's a diet that works.

Yea. That's why there's 1377 books in our house, and no food in the fridge.

Breathing Space

Back to work. I'm so behind. My first drafts are always such crap.