I'm Boring Today

Well, it was bound to happen.

For your amusement:
____________________________________________

Morning Absolution

They were still three bounties short of rent when Nyx found the headless body in the trunk.

“You should have put some towels down,” Rhys said.

There had been dog carcasses in the alley that morning, tire treads on burst stomachs, fat rats squealing over tidbits, old women netting rats for stews. The accumulated filth of rotting tissue, blood, sand and the stench of human excrement had sent Rhys out onto the veldt for dawn prayer, and Nyx had grudgingly agreed to take the bakkie out and pick him up. She had made sure to arrive well after the end of prayer, because catching Rhys praying was about as uncomfortable as catching him masturbating. He was a Chenjan conservative, one of the old breed who still bothered adhering to sexual and religious "purity."

In any case, she hadn’t thought to check the trunk.

“Whose is this?” Nyx asked. She was due to pick up a bounty in a quarter of an hour.

She needed the trunk space.

The body was draped in the white burnous of a cleric, gold tassels and all. The feet were bare. Though he had no head, a red newsboy cap was cradled under the left arm.

Nice touch, that.

“Khos’s,” Rhys said.

She should have recognized his work.

Nyx glanced over at Rhys, tried to read him. His dark face was pinched and drawn. He was a skinny man, too slender in the hips and shoulders - he’d been a dancer back in Chenja. He looked seventeen, pushing thirty.

She watched him gather his gear. “I’ll put this in the cab. I forgot about the body,” he said.

“Khos won’t get anything without the head.”

“He’s got a birthmark, Khos says.”

“Khos is an idiot.”

Rhys pinched his mouth. Nyx waited for a word of affirmation, but he only said, “Khos said he was one of the men on the boards. He had me open a file.”

Nyx guessed the body was Chenjan, judging from the color. Black, like Rhys. Chenjans had trouble mixing with the tawny brown of Nasheen. Rhys knew that as well as anyone.

She shut the trunk.

“The boards?” Nyx spat. “Looks like somebody’s going to revoke my license cause Khos can’t keep his bodies buried.”

They were late. Nyx moved around to the cab of the little bakkie, kicked the latch loose and propped open the door. She took the driver’s seat, pumped the ignition pedal. A growl came from under the hood.

“Hit the grill,” Nyx said.

Rhys banged the flat of his hand on the grill. Not much weight behind it. For a man as focused as Rhys, he didn’t have much energy to expend when the situation called for it.

The last time she was in front of a civil rights court, they’d taken away her bounty license for a year. Anneke had gone back to working for Raine, Kos had hit the bottle and the Wall, and Rhys had taken up painting.

Painting.

“Would you put some shit behind it?” Nyx yelled. “You want to go back to whoring-out portraits? Shevaa din!”

Hurry up. Her favorite words in Chenjan. Right after muja-ah shevaa din.
Hurry the fuck up.

Rhys kicked the grill. Better.

The bugs hissed, the engine rumbled.

“In, in, let’s go!” Nyx called.

Rhys gave the bakkie a push and leapt forward as it began rolling down the dusty hill toward the city.

There was a hot desert wind blowing in from the western waste, pushing out the city’s black shroud of smog and settling a misty cloud of red sand - fine as silt - over the cityscape. Dawn had risen, and the new sun - filtered through the silt - caught the world on fire.

It looked like the city was burning.

“Not the best portent,” Rhys said as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black coat. He kept his dark hair cropped, a Chenjan affectation Nyx had always found repulsive. Only slaves wore short hair. She’d told him that once, and he’d said he didn’t do anything for her pleasure. Some days, talking to Rhys was like trying to argue with an antique harem girl.

Nyx shifted gears as the road straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple of fire beetle nymphs wiggled free from a leak in a hose by her feet and flitted out through the open windows. She batted at them, switched pedals.

Punjai was one of the shittier city jewels on the Nasheen crown. It was a border city, meaning Chenja and the Wall were less than a day’s walk across the veldt. It was also a popular way-station for Chenjan terrorists coming into Nasheen and political criminals trying to get out. Most of the city’s wealth came in via trade on the red and black markets: the red being in blood and bounties; the black in sorcery and embargoed Chenjan goods.

The city was a jagged wound, a seething black groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. At the edges of the city, the desert stirred, set free by decades of overgrazing and centuries of heavy warfare that had seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped spirals of the minarets, long since converted to more effective watchtowers equipped with long-range bursts and scatterguns. The only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer was a crumbling black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.

“Taite briefed you on the file?” Rhys asked. He had never trusted her reading ability. Dancers like Rhys got big educations in Chenja - he didn’t put much stock in non-readers. The state schools called her dead dumb. She got her letters backwards.

Nyx watched him fiddle with the frogged tie at his collar. The day was fixing to be scorching, but his public modesty superseded comfort. Chenjan men were like that, always covering up. Such a shame.

“You know,” Nyx said, “if God wanted you naked, you’d have been born that way.”

He stopped his fiddling.

Conservatives.

Under her burnous, Nyx wore little more than a dhoti, breast binding, and her baldric and harness. The hilt of her short sword jutted up from a slit in the burnous.

“Yea," she said, "I looked over the file. Some Chenjan terrorists on the edge of the Chenjan district. Expected to be armed. Good boxers, I heard. They’ve been competing for cash. I sparred with one of them at Faleen.”

“I should have expected they’d be friends of yours,” Rhys said.

“I run with a lot of questionable characters," Nyx said. She wanted to pinch his dark skin, for emphasis. "We’re stopping at the hub. I need to offload your body.”

“I just do Khos's paperwork. Is Anneke in?”

“She’s already posted. Less picky about where she spends morning prayer.”

“I hate this city.”

Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting out from the dash. “Find something useful on. You have a cigarette?”

He obediently switched on the tube. It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at him. Local politics.

“I don’t smoke,” Rhys said.

Nyx grinned and waited for him to start in about bodily impurities. She could use the diversion.

The hunched black smudge of the city grew closer. Umber-clad women moved along the side of the road, balancing baskets on their heads. Girls herded spindly gaggles of geese and a couple of pigs along the drainage ditches flanking the road. A couple of sorceresses in blue and gold carried baskets of beetle creepers and grasshoppers in tiny wooden cages. Big dropping nets hung over their lean shoulders.

“Stop and get yourself a drink, then,” Rhys said, “if you’re looking to pollute yourself.”

There it was.

“I only drink the blood of my enemies,” Nyx said, showing her teeth. She touched one of the dozen silver loops ringing her left ear. Raine’s loop. “And sometimes a whisky and water,” she said. “Partial to dark beer with a little lime.”

Rhys didn’t even look at her.

She considered selling him to a mardana. It was one of her more popular fantasies.

They passed under the burst-scarred main gate, and into Punjai.

They were late.

Edited New York Googlism (For New York Lovers)

new york


new york is book country
new york is nuked
new york is now

new york is having a ball without the snow
new york is a very old city
new york is starting to feel like brezhnev's Moscow

new york is the quick and easy way to sell your car
new york is not enough

new york is "invincible"
new york is committed to rescuing our democracy from the strangle
new york is dedicated to bringing some of the best of new york to the rest of the us

new york is learning
new york is enjoying a renaissance
new york is a densely packed mass of humanity

new york is now available
new york is still downtown

new york is an accredited branch of the ramakrishna order of india
new york is 330 miles long and 283 miles wide
new york is one of the approved charities

new york is 15
new york is een begin voor van der sterren
new york is now available online

new york is not affiliated with any other political party
new york is a catastrophe

new york is "a unique exhibition and sale" of 5287 photographs of the world trade center disaster
new york is here
new york is

new york is 91
new york is short for obvious reasons

new york is the "city that never sleeps"
new york is a new york city
new york is situated in manhattan on fifth avenue and 55th street

new york is still the city that never sleeps
new york is ‘highly concentrated’
new york is the black rat snake

new york is now ornette coleman
new york is "invincible"

new york is too great a city
new york is a city that people easily fall in love with

new york is a place where all the earth's ends meet

Googlism

Brings a whole new meaning to the term "googling yourself":

kameron is scheduled to start the ketogenic diet in may
kameron is wearing a
kameron is a purebred pembroke welsh corgi who just turned 5 years old this summer
kameron is the youngest driver on the roster
kameron is
kameron is 15
kameron is a member of the naacp
kameron is a member of sag/aftra and plans on continuing her career in the creative entertainment business
kameron is livid
kameron is awoken by a servant boy
kameron is an adorable caucasian boy
kameron is hardly a reincarnation of moses
kameron is two years old and not yet started
kameron is a more reluctant shopper
kameron is 8
kameron is the technowhiz of the school
kameron is going to tell you her story
kameron is already a car nut
kameron is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
kameron is almost 10
kameron is the greatest boyfriend in the whole world
kameron is shy and extremely sensitive
kameron is 2 yrs old
kameron is fostered in el cajon
kameron is 7 months
kameron is 10
kameron is a young lawyer of russian
kameron is getting the itch to drive and his grand daughter is cheering them all on
kameron is droppin’ like it’s hot with his navy blue
kameron is droppin’ like it’s hot with his navy blue waves pants and his red and white and1 shoes
kameron is a mad scientist who decides to avenge the world by unleashing a
kameron is about 6'5 plus
kameron is sweet and she had
kameron is the current field commander
kameron is 2 and his vocabulary is growing in leaps and bounds
kameron is now on bass
kameron is an illustrator
kameron is working on a minor
kameron is also going to that show
kameron is holding to make pillows for children at the hospital
kameron is a year 6/7 primary teacher
kameron is 13 years old
kameron is five and ash
kameron is 24
kameron is the black/brown tabby
kameron is now walking and getting into everything
kameron is the son of long
kameron is one of the most popular producers in hollywood
kameron is 18 and girl
kameron is a hot latin mixture and is fun too
kameron is a young lawyer of russo
kameron is hot latin mixture and is fun too
kameron is a mad scientist who decides to avenge the world by unleashing a modern version of the biblical ten plagues against
kameron is 100% puerto rican from ontario california who loves to fuck
kameron is a gorgeous 18 yr

Rambling About Writing (novel procrastination)

I’m spending the morning getting some chapters into shape so I can meet my Friday deadline. I started thinking a lot about story, and how I do what I do. I realize I’m not a perfect writer or storyteller (obviously), but the more I read and write the more intuitive the actual process becomes. Sometimes you just “know” when the pacing is off. You know when the dialogue is stilted. You know when something you wrote early on belongs somewhere else.

You want to take people along on a grand adventure in a new place. You want them to identify with and care about the people you choose to take them through it. You want to live a life as interesting as your fiction...

Walking to the train today in shorts and tank top in the 84 degree heat and brilliant morning sun, I had a sudden urge to be in Seattle; to be wandering around the piers, heading out to Elliott Bay Books, buying caramel corn. I longed for that perfect, bookish, writing-intensive summer when I had a full bank account and not a care in the world.

It’s now been five years since I went to Clarion West in Seattle. I was there for six weeks, and yes, the experience changed my life, though not in the way most other Clarionites would think. I have fond memories of that summer, because I was also living on money I solicited from relatives to help me pay for the workshop, and I had enough that I didn’t have to be concerned about overspending myself on meals and books. I had complete and utter freedom. I lived and worked with sixteen other writers, most of whom were as passionate about writing as I was.

I was the fittest I’d been in my life, due mostly to subsisting on rice and eggs and bike riding everywhere in Alaska during the first part of the summer. I was probably still too invested in a friendship with a guy who probably wasn’t the greatest sort to associate with. I’d spent the last year dressing down and pretending to be stupider than I was. I had a lot of drunken Alaska stories. For the first time I was living a life of my own choosing. I may not have made the best choices, but they were different from anything I'd ever done before, and the life I made was mine.

Clarion was great for the writing, sure. As somebody who was so incredibly fucking sick of being the best writer/only writer who finished anything/had sold anything/submitted anything in college writing classes, Clarion was a new experience. I was toe-to-toe with some fantastic people.

But more than “learning” how to write, it was the people who changed my life. It’s the relationships I’ve maintained with a small core group of them that altered what had come before, that really challenged me to look behind the I’ll-go-hide-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods-and-write for 80 years life. I still think that’ll be a fun way to end my life, but now there’s a lot more I want to do in-between.

The writing bit – jolting my experience ahead 2 years in six weeks because of the intensity of the program – was great, but I can honestly say that I’d still have stayed on the writerly path and likely been just as successful, long-term (I ain’t dead yet) without going to Clarion.

What changed my life was that I gained a lot of close friends. Friends who were smart and strong and had mad, crazy lives. Ambitious, driven people who lived in diverse locations. Meaning: I got to go visit them. New Zealand, South Africa… and Jenn here in Chicago, who was quite cool about the idea of rooming up together. We’ve been roomies for two years now, and it’s been a fantastic experience.

And those experiences, those relationships, will change you as well. You’ll learn how to give a shit about people, how to trust them, how to love. You’ll know what it is to respect someone.

That, too, was something I learned at Clarion.

My writing, like my life, is done largely by feel. I couldn’t explain to you why I’m jetsetting to the next big city next year any more than I can tell you why I moved a paragraph of description out of a page of dialogue. Something felt out of place. Moving it to the end felt better, felt right .

To some extent, I’ve viewed my years in Chicago as a recovery from my time in South Africa: grad school, foreign country, living on my own, very little money, crap food, too many cigarettes, too much fear. Far, far too much fear. Before that, I’d lived back home for six months and saved up money while my parents graciously allowed me to stay at their place between academic programs. Unfortunately, being home meant I fell back into bad habits: binge eating, no exercise, the language of self-hate. Launching straight from there to SA wasn’t a great idea.

I’ve needed the recovery time. I have one more year in Chicago to get the last of my shit together, to find some more self confidence, get stronger, leaner, save up some money and find some financial security, and get myself a job that doesn’t make me miserable while still paying the bills.

I have a year to reclaim the summer sun, to find myself a pier, a good bookstore, some caramel corn.

Not neccesarily in that order.

You get the idea.

In Another Life...

.... in another life, I will have a super-metabolism of Doom, and I will be able to eat bagels all day long.

The end.

Hot Time on the Old Towne Tonight

Stepped out of the house today at 6:45am. Local bank clock read: 84 degrees, and climbing.

Real Feel for today is 98 degrees.

I have taken to imitating G, and dressed for my commute today in tank top and shorts. Switched to my corporate linen when I got in.

These hot summer days always put me in mind of Clarion, of traveling, of new cities.

Drunk on a Tuesday

Wow, it's that kind of "week."

Writing and whisky.

It's the best life.

What Plot?

Slow down, slow down!

(Thanks, Greg)

Doing it on Somebody Else's Terms

In truth, women shouldn't have to legitimize themselves as athletes by challenging the guys, but with America's short attention span, it's one of the few ways women find mainstream recognition.

These days, "A League of Their Own" sounds like a quaint notion because the WNBA is the only significant survivor of all the women's pro leagues started over the past eight years.

Why? As one reader pointed out in an e-mail message, the answer may be in the Associated Press report last week on a Pennsylvania State University poll of sports editors. Marie Hardin, one of the researchers, explained that the sports czars weren't giving adequate coverage to women's athletics because they believed the ladies were less interested in sports than men, despite increased participation.

Of course, I would argue that when it's "no big deal" to see men and women competeing against each other, in the same sports, with the same rules, things'll be a better, and we'll worry slightly less about coverage... though it'll be interesting to see who gets props by the media more often, and how much more talent will come into play, rather than "novelty." Of course, by definition, any woman who's "allowed" to "play" with the guys has gotta be twice as brilliant.

The Media Needs to Stop Killing Its Consumers...

Using actual body size based on teens' reports of their height and weight, the researchers found that overall, overweight or underweight teens were only slightly more likely than normal-weight teens to have suicidal tendencies.

But teens who perceived themselves at either weight extreme -- very fat or really skinny -- were more than twice as likely as normal-weight teens to attempt or think about suicide.

When Will it End?

When oh when?

I stopped reading 1/4 of the way through book 8, when I realized the plot had stopped completely and I was getting twenty-page descriptions of clothing and scenerey.

However, as with the Star Wars franchise, I'm invested, and someday, I'm told, the books will end. I should probably start catching up on the reading, as rumor has it there'll be "only" 13 books or so total.

I mean, 8 more years, and it might be done. As he started in 1989, it'll be about time.

Dressing Down: Worklife

It's going to be 94 degrees today here in Chicago, and muggy. I wandered in from the train station to work (about a 12 minute walk) wearing a tank top with my linen pants, and some sensible hiking sandals. A guy on a bike, wearing shorts, tank top, and do-rag, whizzed by me. He hopped off his bike and went into the office ahead of me.

Once inside, I pulled on a "nice" black shirt over the tank top to give the illusion of some semblance of corporate attire. I bumped into G, one of the temps, wearing khaki pants and long-sleeved gray shirt, and realized he'd been the guy on the bike with the do-rag.

Oh, how we love dressing in drag for corporate America, when we'd rather be in shorts and/or sports bras.

I haven't had anything to do at work for at least a week. Blaine bumbled in this morning and asked me if I knew how to do a mail merge so I can work on his wedding invitations. For better or worse, I didn't know how to do a mail merge, and told him to ask Cyllia the secretary.

And so goes the only sort-of project I've been asked to do all week: my boss's wedding invitations.

Oh, what a life.

Sucks to Be a Woman

Woke up at 2:30am, pouring sweat, jerked out of a nightmare in which I'd dreamed that I'd yanked out my IUD, to the tune of much blood and pain.

Reassured myself that no, really, all was still in place. Took a couple of Motrin this morning.

Sucks to be a woman.

Bloody womb fiction, here I come.

Fannish Labors of Love

You'll appreciate this, Jenn.

And I thought my character database was nutty... But then, I'm the actual author.

Wow.

Fans are great.

Welcome to Summer

It's another beautiful day in Chicago-land, my chiklits.

Finished editing and fixing the headers for Book One. It was a bitch and a half: cut 30,604 words. I dreampt Saturday night that I was cutting more words, proving that I really can write in my sleep... Have now tentatively retitled Book One The Dragon's Wall

I can already hear the wails from prospective readers:

"But there aren't any dragons in this book!!"

Tough nookies.

Moving straight back into working on God's War, which has got a revised "first draft" schedule, since things have been so off the last six months:

Part one: July 20th

Part two: August 31st

Part three: October 1st

Revised draft: December 31st

Word Count goal: Nothing more that 100K, please sweet fuck. I'll save the egregious word counts for Book 2 of the fantasy saga, which has also got a revised schedule (I'm about 5 chapters in)

Schedule for Over Burning Cities (Book 2) :

(but there aren't any cities in this book! oh, sorry)

Chapters 1-10: October 15th

Chapters 11-20: January 15th

Chapters 21-30: March 31st

Chapters 30-39: May 1st

Chapters 40-45: June 15th

Revised Draft: September 1st, 2006

I enjoy keeping busy.

Books! Books! Books!

The Number of Books I Own:

Jenn has a detailed spreadsheet, but suffice to say that by last count, we had a combined total of about 1500. Though Jenn continually has books arriving via mail from half.com and I went to WisCon and spent too much money, so we're liking moving past that count real quick. If Jenn's SO moves in with us in August, we'll have over 2,000 books in the house.

That's so cool.

The Book I'm Currently Reading:

I'm reading a lot of books. The Labyrinth, Homicide in the Biblical World, The Hours (continually), Ahab's Wife, Collapse, The Koran, The Origin of Satan, Gloriana, Orlando, The Persian Boy, Shriek: An Afterword, The House of Blue Mangoes, Dreaming By the Book, Strike Sparks, etc. etc.

Someday, I might finish some of those. I better, because I keep opening up new ones.

Last Book I Bought:

I buy in batches. Neveryona, The Dialectic of Sex, Affinity, and The Labyrinth.

Last Book I Read:

Million Dollar Baby

Five Books That Have Meant a Lot to Me:

The Hours by Michael Cunngingham.

A nearly perfect book that seeks to understand the entirety of three lives by giving you one day in that person's life, and watching them touch each other. The final "connection" at the end was too much for me, but I've read the book at least a dozen times, and continually have it open. When I get to the end, I start over. I can recite some of it by heart.

What I enjoy(ed) about this book is that it feels so intimately true. He captures the experiences and thoughts of these women existing within the social confines of their particular eras, and their internal turmoils and everyday concerns and joys strike something within me every time. You feel like you're reading a book about your own life, about different versions of your life, a book that will get you through the hours and onto the next and the next.

The best sorts of books can tell you something about your life, the good and the bad, and this is one of those books.

Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce

I read this book when I was ten. I'd already been writing a number of short stories by that time, about runaways and mad scientists, and a couple about this scullery maid who was really a princess. True to tropes, she got saved a lot by the stable boy who was really a prince. They had adventures and everything, but she was small and frail and very fem and very pretty: just the sort of woman every dorky female writer would write about - you know, wish-fulfillment.

I hadn't yet struck upon the warrior-woman theme because it just didn't seem possible. After all, women were smaller and frailer than men, and the fact that I wasn't meant that I was just a freak, and should spend the rest of my life dieting to excess in order to be smaller and never quite standing up straight so I wouldn't seem so tall.

Then I read about this girl my own age who tricked her father and swapped places with her brother and went off cross-dressing and trained to be a knight. She was smaller than most of the boys, but she bested some of them at some things, and some of them bested her at other things: in other words, she was just another one of the gang, not overly great at everything, not overly bad at anything. She was training alongside them and holding her own.

As the series went on, she even got to have sex with multiple guys (though, alas, not all at once), though I wished more would have been said about contraception, as she never got pregnant. But hey, you can't be picky.

Looking back, this is the book that really got me thinking about how things could and were different than what I'd been socialized to believe about men's and women's places, and biology as destiny. In no small part, I think it probably helped me on some level to not be so self-conscious as I got taller and taller and continually outweighed most of the boys in my class right up until the 8th grade.

There are some books that can catch you early enough, and challenge you to change your view of everything. That was this book.

On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ

I had to pick a Joanna Russ book because she makes me weak at the knees. She's the best of the militant 70s feminist SF authors, and I own a great deal of what she's published, fiction and nonfiction. Everybody always makes a big deal about The Female Man, and yea, it's a good book, but I'd have to say the one that challenged me the most and got me to think about myself, about desire, was On Strike Against God. It's a semi-autobiographical books about Russ coming to grips with her sexuality through long therapy sessions with male therapists who told her she was frigid at best, unnatural at worst. It catalogues her long internal debate with herself about what her dreams about women "really" meant, how having crushes on women may really mean that yes, she was attracted to women, and goes through one awful hetero date after another without really finding any kind of fulfillment from it, and finally, at the ripe old age of nearly 40, she braces herself for a gay bar and ends up having an affair with a female friend during which the two of them declare that if god says what they're doing is wrong, well, fuck, they're "On Strike Against God," then.

This was the book that really made me come to grips with that whole, "You know, I think I'm sometimes attracted to women," thing. I was always very clear that I was attracted to men, so that wasn't an issue, but at sixteen and again at seventeen I had a couple of serious crushes on women that I spent the next seven or eight years trying to justify to myself as something other than actual sexual attraction. As I've gotten older, I've had a handful more crushes on women, and I'm old enough now to recognize them as just that. It's not that I want to be those women, or I'm jealous of them, or blah blah blah, no really, it's actual desire. And that's cool. That's part of me, and that's OK.

Reading about Russ trying to do the same sort of justification of her own desire, and reading about some of her earlier (though not her later experiences with men, as I've not had much trouble there) experiences with desire, I couldn't help but feel slapped in the face with things that were incredibly parallel to my own experiences. And when you're reading about something that's that close, there comes a point when you have to owe up to it.

Good stuff.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

My mom sent me this book while I was living in Durban, because it was on my amazon.com wishlist, and she happened to have a copy. I read it on the beach a couple of days after turning in my Master's thesis, the last days of a year and a half in a foreign country described by one friend as "The most dangerous place outside a war zone," where I'd spent most of my time living on peri-peri rice, cigarettes, red wine, and weekly binge sessions.

A third of those in the province were HIV/AIDS positive, the media was blaring about brutal violence, every gathering I went to, somebody knew somebody who'd been raped, stabbed, burglarized, carjacked or killed. I realize now that I was probably more hyper-paranoid than I should have been, but I was living on my own for the first time, going to grad school, living in a foreign country, and bat-shit crazy out of my mind. The thing with living alone with stories of all that death and violence around you, is that every day you're alive, you feel really lucky to be alive, and when you go out and get drunk, you get really, really drunk and you have a really good time because, hot damn! - you're alive.

And I sat on the beach in Durban, and I read this book, and I just started crying. It was the strangest thing. If I'd have read it two years before, I'd have shrugged and moved on, but instead, I drank and savored every word of it, and cried, because life was this beautiful, fragile thing, and it could all be over at any moment.

I go back to that book when I want to remember that, when I need to remember how lucky I am.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Poor Emma. Raised on romance novels with particular ideas about the way that love and marriage and life would be, and ending up sorely disappointed.

As a child who'd grown up on books and Disney movies, I good really relate to Emma, particularly at the time I was assigned to read this book in junior college. I'd broken up, badly, with my highschool boyfriend, had to deal with some post-breakup stalking, and was recovering from being evicted from my first apartment because I couldn't pay the rent.

It wasn't exactly the way the script was supposed to go.

When I turned thirteen, I remember looking out the window of my parents' room and thinking, "OK, I'm a teenager. I'm ready for my life to start. I'm ready for somebody to come along like they do in the books and notice me and see all of my talent and potential and show me this big, great life."

What I learned in the real world was that if you try and live your life by somebody else's ideals, by the way you think it "should" be, you're going to have a really unfulfilling life and eat rat poison.

And rat poison just never appealed to me.

What I learned from Emma was that I needed to live my own life, set my own path, and not wait for someone else to "save" me from my life. I needed to figure out not what the books and stories and other people thought I should do with this great cool life, but what I wanted to do. And it's a life that hasn't been easy, hasn't been predictable, and so far, hasn't ended in me eating rat poison.

I figure I'm doing pretty good.

Snip, Snip, Shit, Bring Out the Machete...

5,849 words left to cut to get me to 140K. I've cut 25,982 so far during this pass.

Exhausting work, but I'd just put it off too damn long. It was about time it got done. It's a reasonable book length now, and the story's been scraped down to the core, no extraneous bullshit.

Still, tiring. Should finish by tomorrow, and then I'll have no book-guilt regarding this one. It's a clean shot.

Off to a Good Start, Then...

A British couple -- the record holders for the world's longest marriage — said on Tuesday their success was down to a glass of whisky, a glass of sherry and the word “sorry.”

I think that's a good way to maintain any relationship...

Waiting Out the Zombie Apocalypse in Style: A Battle Guide

...the only really cool thing about global depopulation is all the freed-up architectural masterpieces.

So, you've arrived in the fantastical city of saints and madmen... let's see how long you last!

Ah, yes, my typical experience in a new city:


FATED TO (DIE IN A) FIGHT


You last about halfway through your first night in
Ambergris - or perhaps until the darkness just
before dawn, if you're lucky. You are killed in
a random bar brawl, a street fight you
inadvertently started or an artistically
violent argument. Your body disappears before
dawn and you are not remembered.


How Would You Fare in Ambergris?
brought to you by Quizilla

Holy CRAP!! It's DONE!!!!

Done, I tell you!!! DONE~!!!!!

(thanks, Lysha)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Oh, god, this is the most boring chapter ever.

In Search of that Pesky Hetero Gene

That one gene, the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior - a kind of master sexual gene [in fruit flies] that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males.

My favorite bit of that? Describing homosexual male behavior as "passive."

I mean, all females are totally passive sexual partners, so males who go after other males or are interested in other males must be passive, too. My other favorite assumption in that is that females "act like males" when courting females, and males "act like females" when being courted. Why aren't they described as "acting like females interested in other females" or "acting like males interested in other males"?

They real key is this, of course:

But no one dreamed that simply activating the normally dormant male portion of the gene in a female fly could cause a genetic female to display the whole elaborate panoply of male fruit fly foreplay.

Key being, "dormant."

Yea. It was already there.

In all of them.

I Love Stealing From BFB

Ah, fat prejudice: the last one that's still PC.

"...fat people just don't work as hard or produce as much. I'll never hire a fat person, and I'll never say that for attribution. Whether true or not for the overweight population as a whole, I can't say, but it sure is my experience, and I hire based on my experience."

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Surreal Moment of the Night

... flipping to the History Channel and seeing Terrence Cole, the head of the U of Alaska Fairbanks history department, talking about the discovery of Kayak Island.

Sometimes I forgot what a cool education I had.

The INFERNOKRUSHER Movement

Screw all this wishy-washy feel-good emotion-character bullshit. SF writers need to blow more shit up.

Cuttings

Considering that the first draft of this book was just over 200K, I find it incredibly admirable that I'm getting it down to 140K.

This is going to be the leanest fantasy epic ever.

Trust me.

Have I mentioned recently how great it is to have a job with long down periods where I can get paid $18 an hour to write and edit my own books and drink Starbucks-quality coffee?

It's a charmed life.

Confessionals (not mine!)

"I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone."

Good Morning, Chiklits

It's another beautiful day in Chicago-towne.

Good Self Esteem = Better Health Than Weight Loss

No shit.

I'd like them to replicate this with a bigger sample, though - and include men. What's up with all these fucking "weight loss" studies if the "obesity epidemic" has to do with *all* Americans?

Ah, that's right, because women are still targeted more than men. Evil Womanly Fat Takes Up Too Much Space in America. Substantial women are really fucking scary.

Good news is, you can be substantial, scary, and healthy too. Imagine that.

Behavior change and self-acceptance trump dieting hands-down when it comes to achieving long-term health improvements in obese women, according to a two-year study by nutrition researchers at the University of California, Davis.

The findings suggest that significant improvements in overall health can be made, regardless of weight loss, when women learn to recognize and follow internal hunger cues and begin feeling better about their size and shape. Results of the study will appear in the June issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.


(via BFB)

Back On the Road

No bleeding, no depression, no yeast infections... ah, why, yes! It's time to hit the road again.

Did an experimental jog tonight: slow, short, easy and rather dismal. The second half turned into walk-jog-walk-jog-oh-fuck-it-walk.

The IUD started banging at my insides toward the end, just little twinges of occasional cramping. Not bad (I took a couple Motrin a few hours before), and if all goes as they say it will, I should be pain-free in a couple months. It was good to start out now to see where I'm at with that. I wish they made a smaller device for women who haven't had kids - I'd really rather that thing wasn't banging around all the time. In any case, I have confidence that my body will get used to it, and I'll be back together in no time.

The idea is to get a couple weeks of MA classes back in before my membership runs out - I'm going to let it expire over the summer and sign back up in September, mainly to save the money. Things are agonizingly tight right now, and heading to WisCon didn't do me any good.

I've been keeping up on the power walks at work - that's an hour every day, and my free weights in the morning, so I'm healthy, but not buff, and you know, honestly, I have a secret desire to be buff. The day I can tell a set day job to shove it so I can spend some time getting into actual shape will be a fucking fantastic day.

In other news, I've been reading a lot about boxing, as I've got a couple of shorts and a novel with a protagonist who's taken it up, and I'm interested in seeing how other authors handle writing about boxing (B is very good at this, and his blog is great for that).

I'm also currently in the process of cutting 31,000 words from the first book of my fantasy saga before it hits the road again with agents. I picked up a couple more names at WisCon, and I figured, shit, why not? So that's getting cleaned up while the day job is slow, and at night I'm coming home and working on my blood and sand bisexual shapeshifiting bounty hunter novel and stories, which hold a special place in my brutal little heart.

Those stories are gonna rock.

Overall, life is definately smoothing out again, most importantly on the health front. I really took a nose dive for three or four months, and coming up out of that has been a bitch and a half. Now it's all back to working to where I was, writing and shape wise, and surpassing that.

No big thing.

It's a good life.

Straw Dogs Meets Deliverance: Oh Boy, I Sure Do Want to Sign Up For That One

Some people just don't know when to retire.

The red bandanna and the hunter's knife are back: Sylvester Stallone is set to reprise his role as Vietnam vet John Rambo, 17 years after his last outing.

Stallone, now 58, will don combat trousers for a fourth time, this time to slug it out against American white supremacists bent on killing his wife and daughter. In the new film, the grunting killing machine has turned middle-class family man and has "assimilated into the tapestry of America," according Stallone, who is also the movie's scriptwriter. He promises a film in the vein of Straw Dogs and Deliverance.

It reads like something from The Onion.

How Long Until the Government Starts Monitoring What You Eat?

In the past, his parents had no clue when he bought a treat at school. Now, thanks to a new school-lunch monitoring system, they can check over the Internet and learn about that secret cookie.

Health officials hope it will increase parents' involvement in what their kids eat at school. It's a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.

"My parents do care about what I eat. They try, like, to keep up with it," said Hughes, a 14-year-old student at Marietta Middle School.

Because it's best that your children learn right away that you don't trust them to make good decisions, and more than that, that you don't respect them. This way, your children will remain child-like and dependent all their lives.

What good sheep-like citizens they will make!

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

As an SF writer, I wonder, could you start requiring your lover to "test" their love for you with a brain scan?

Ah, think of all the dystopian possibilities...

The Holy Womb of Antioch

"Love can't save you Padme. Only my new powers can do that."

"Hold me like you did by the lake in Naboo."

And I'm thinking, "Sweet fuck, why?"

To his credit Hayden Christiansen really gave it his all. He told the story he wanted to tell, he worked as best he could with the lame dialogue and sudden loyalty-switching scene that had very little lead-up. It was a poorly written script. Lucas spent the first half of the movie lovingly panning through long, drawn-out shuttle docking sequences, and must have realized two-thirds of the way through the film that he was actually telling a story that somehow involved the actions of people, and he spent the last half of the movie cutting through a series of quick-cut scenes of the most disrespectful sort that not only insult your actors, but insult your own worldbuilding skills, so that Super Jedi who can "sense" things with the force get taken out by a couple of blaster-shots to the back (in fact, only two Jedi besides Obi-wan actually get any sort of actual fight scene when they get turned on, both of them being men).

The tragedy of this movie is watching what is, at core, a really great story about how power corrupts, and how you kill what you love, and turn yourself into a monster. It's absolutely fascinating to watch someone who's a great "idea" guy fuck up stuff like the actual telling of a story: he has no intuitive sense of narrative drive, of how to cut a scene, of when to trust his actors to deepen a scene, of when to edit a fight scene because they all look alike. In fact, he's not even sure of the right balance between fight scenes and character/plot scenes. Any scene with dialogue is almost always painful. Ewan McGregor is about the only one who can do anything at all with the shitty dialogue, though Hayden gives it his all: you can tell that he was holding out for this movie and fuck George if he wanted him to play it wooden, cause this is why he signed up for this shit, to be fucking Darth Vader.

And then, of course, there's the Holy Womb of Antioch.

I mean, Padme.

The Senator, right? Busy doing senatorial things, meeting with people, having her own subplot, caught up in negotiating with Jedi and telling Palpatine to fuck off and engaging in long talks with the new Queen about domestic policy and...

Oh, I'm sorry, I was thinking of the wrong movie.

In fact, every scene Padme is in, she's sitting on a couch or standing at a window or standing on the balcony staring blankly at something, pregnant, (because everyone knows pregnant women live like invalids) waiting for the scene to start. Waiting for Anakin or some Jedi to come in and break up her staring-at-the-wall reverie. Natalie Portman checked out of this movie a long time ago. And who can blame her? It was utterly obvious from the writing that she was only there as a peice of scenery. Her hair and clothes changed drastically with every scene; she was a walking, talking set peice.

And her death scene? Oh, yea, death scene in childbed in the 80th century! The robots attending her surmise that "There's nothing physically wrong with her. She just seems to have lost the will to live."

Lost. the. will. to. live.

Luckily, she lives long enough to contort her face into what resemebles the face one would make during a particularly troublesome bowel movement, and squirt!-squirt! - there's Luck and Leia! Isn't that cute! I'm the director, and I'm just going to blast through all this silly plot and character stuff here at the end, cause everybody already knows what's going to happen. I'm going to let the next three movies in the series inform just how significant this moment is, so I don't have to work at it and write actual dialogue that makes sense!

So the men and robots make the decision to "operate" quickly to "save the babies" - an operation which essentially consists of her delivering the kids the regular way, not via Cesaerean, so I'm not sure what planet these robots came from where they thought natural childbirth was an operation, but they should probably be mindwiped.

But lo! Padme's death is appropriately celebrated like any good female martyr's - there's a great parade through the streets and she's in an open coffin with flowers all over her like good virginal Snow White. Having fulfilled her purpose for living, the Holy Womb is delivered unto the underworld. All hail the holy womb!

And this is the end, purpose, and plot we get for the only female heroine in the entire movie. She exists to give birth to Darth Vader's kids. No hopes, desires, dreams of her own, except to escape back to Naboo with Vader and raise up his babies. Um, hello, isn't she a Senator? Isn't there work to do? Shouldn't she have scenes where she did work? Couldn't she have been better involved in the plot? I'd almost rather she didn't have any scenes at all and the babies were just sent off to Obi-wan to distribute, but we were supposed to have these stupid scenes with Vader and Padme where they had this obvious love and chemistry for each other, so we could see why he'd go crazy and go all dark thinking that she'd die unless he had his "new powers."

It's such an incredibly sad movie to watch because you can see all these really neat set peices: the image of the Jedi temple burning, Anakin going in to kill all of the Jedi - including the children, the plausible scenerio of how a president/prime minister becomes a despot by ruling through fear, all of Yoda's extreme coolness, Obi-wan's affection for Anakin. All ruined, just ruined, because the delivery was for shit.

I just didn't buy it. It was poorly written, and the actors were insulted with very little slow scene time in which to emote or at least pretend to feel something. Instead it was "line, line, line, CUT: new scene line, line, line: CUT."

Luke! Leia!

The end.

Thank God. Because really, Luke and Leia are way more interesting in the next three movies than just about anybody got to be in these three movies, so the sooner we get back to them, the better.

If anyone ever comes to my house and discovers that I own any of these three prequels, please feel free to put me out of my misery.

Memorial Day

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men [sic] to die in."
- George McGovern


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

"Draft beer; not people."
-Author Unknown

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate."
-George McGovern

What I'm Working On Tonight

God's War

1.

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jax, and lost it two rounds later when Jax hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium, and the wine she’d gotten in exchange for her womb. But she did get Jax to bed, and loser or not, in the desert after dark that was something.

Especially considering Nyx’s profession.

“What are you after?” Jax murmured in her good ear. They lay tangled in the sheets like old lovers, a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food, and most of her clothing.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Nyx said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for a lot of people.

Jax could only get her halfway there.

Nyx woke sometime after dawn prayer with a hangover and what felt like a wad of cotton in her belly. The pain wasn’t supposed to kick in until noon. She should have started drinking to prep for the pain, but she had another sort of boxer to meet in Faleen, and four women and a eunuch on her tail looking for a womb she’d dumped at the butcher’s. They would take her without the womb, of course, but dumping it kept them occupied in the fleshpots a day longer.

She pulled on her burnoose and pushed into the short hall. Jax was long gone, and the cantina was mostly empty. There was a room charge to pay, the cantina keeper told her. She put breakfast on the tab and slipped out the back.

A girl was selling sand cats in a pool of smoke weeping out from the back end of the cantina. It was a bad day for smog, even this far outside the cities. The thick air trapped the smoke too close, cloying close. Nyx pulled her gutra over her face, tucked it up under the aghal.

“You seen any bakkies on this road?” she asked the kid.

The girl spit red. “You want a sand cat?”

The kittens in the cage were bloody, half-starved. Flies circled them. The girl didn’t look much better.

Nyx was shit and gone from Punjai.

She walked. She looked back, once, at the smoky cantina and the starving girl, and wondered who they were burning back there.

The sun bled across the big angry sky. The road was unpaved, mostly sand and gravel. She had traded her good sandals for directions out of the fleshpots, too dopey to figure her way out on her own. Under the burnoose, she wore little more than a dhoti and breast binding. She had an old baldric - her dead partner’s - buckled too tight.

All the sheaths were empty. Had been for some time.

She was reminded of some proverb about meeting God empty-handed, but morning prayer had come and gone, and she hadn’t knelt. Her knees weren’t calloused anymore. Not from praying, away.

She hitched a ride on the back of a snarling cat-pulled cart just before midday, and by late afternoon she found a bodega and a call box and a sign telling her she was thirty miles from Faleen.

She made a call.

Two hours later, Kine pulled up in a bakkie spewing red roaches from its back end.

Kine leaned over and pushed the door out.

“You’ve got a leak in your exhaust,” Nyx said, sliding onto the seat.

Kine was an unremarkable woman, big in the hips and slight in the bust, average height, long face. Her hands had the brown, worn, sinewy look of old leather, but her face was younger, fleshier. She wore an embroidered housecoat and hijab over her dark hair, but Nyx figured there was very little on underneath the coat. It was a hot day.

“What’s her name?” Kine asked, shifting the bakkie into gear.

“Who?”

“I can smell her,” Kine said.

“I lost a bet,” Nyx said.

“Where’s Tej?”

“Dead. I couldn’t get him back over the border.”

Kine pursed her lips, a thousand daggers of disapproval in her dark eyes. She never frowned, never that, but the tight mouth held back words her God didn’t permit her to say. Nyx knew that well enough. She’d known Kine long before she went conservative.

They blew back out onto the road. The shocks in the bakkie were going out.

“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked.

“Faleen.”

Nyx looked out the window, watched the flat white desert turn to dunes.

“A ship just came in from New Canaan,” Kine said. Faleen was a landlocked city. Only one kind of ship docked there. “If you’re looking for the magicians –“

“Which sect?”

“Yebez. This is God’s war we’re fighting. They want a part in it.”

“God didn’t say anything to me about it. Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. She leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.

“No,” Kine said. She pinched her mouth again, then - “How did you lose Tej?”

Nyx was bleeding again. She could feel it. She needed something stronger than liquor.

“You have any weapons on you?” Nyx asked. She kicked the radio tube. It rattled. All the news was behind her.

“Who’s tracking you?”

“What is this, the fourth inquisition?”

“Nyxnissa?”

Nyx pulled her gutra free, dipped her head out the open window. The air was clearing up.

“Raine,” she said.

Kine’s face scrunched up like a prune. She shifted gears. The bakkie rattled and picked up speed. Dust and dead beetles roiled behind them.

“You’re putting me in a pot, sister-mine,” Kine said.

“I wouldn’t be blood if I didn’t.”

“I’ll drop you at the gate, no farther.”

The gate was good.

“You never could get a man back over the border,” Kine said. Her expression hadn’t changed. She had liked all of Nyx’s partners, even the men. Kine thought she was a good progressive conservative for putting up with Nyx's male partners.

“Tej was a good boy. The only one of yours I liked. You kill good men for a lost cause.”

“Raine always got us back out.”

“Raine isn’t a bēl damê, he’s a bounty hunter.”

“There’s not much difference.

“It’s all the difference in the world, in God’s eyes.”

They’d turned off the gravel track and onto the 101 Highway that bisected northern Nasheen from the Chenjan border to the sea. Splintered red rock jutted up from the dunes or lay scattered among them. A careful eye could spot the shimmering casings of unexploded bursts lining the highway. The road signs were popular shooting targets for Chenjan operatives and Nasheenian protestors, and most of the metal markers were pocked with bullet holes and smeared in burst residue.

Nyx supposed that there were worse places to go to sell the last of what she had, but she couldn’t think of any. Except maybe Chenja. And she’d already given Chenja enough of her. And enough of everyone else.

She tightened her baldric.

Eighteen miles to Faleen.

Wiscon....

... was great. Had to leave early due to scheduling and life events, and etc. but I had a blast. Got to meet great people, had a great time.

Looking forward to next year. It'll totally rock the house.

Things are great.

What I Love About Wiscon

It's incredibly nice to find your people. It's incredibly surreal to have several people stop you in the hall and go, "Kameron Hurley? Brutal Women? I love your blog!"

Next year, I'd rather they were loving my fiction. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

Next year. The fiction will pay off. I'm passionate. I believe in it. Things can be really different.

And now I will cease drunken posting, in case I get myself in trouble by talking about James Frenkel.

Ahem. Yea.

Also, need to call Simon and Ashley at some point - dude, let's do lunch.

Sidenote

hahah ahah aha

The hotel "decency" filter won't let me view my blog... because it has words like "fucked" in it.

Tell them to join the Real World.

Wiscon

Rocks.

I am a little drunk.

Why Yes, It's Friday Random Quiz Day. I'm Lazy.

Your Birthdate: January 12

Being born on the 12th day of the month (3 energy) is likely to add a good bit of vitality to your life. The energy of 3 allows you bounce back rapidly from setbacks, physical or mental. There is a restlessness in your nature, but you seem to be able to portray an easygoing, sometimes "couldn't care less" attitude. You have a natural ability to express yourself in public, and you always make a very good impression. Good with words, you excel in writing, speaking, and possibly singing. You are energetic and always a good conversationalist. You have a keen imagination, but you tend to scatter your energies and become involved with too may superficial matters. Your mind is practical and rational despite this tendency to jump about. You are affectionate and loving - but very sensitive. You are subject to rapid ups and downs.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Your Deadly Sins

Pride: 80%

Greed: 40%

Sloth: 40%

Envy: 20%

Gluttony: 20%

Lust: 20%

Wrath: 20%

Chance You'll Go to Hell: 34%

You will become famous - and subsequently killed by a stalker.

How Sinful Are You?

I Get Paid Tomorrow

Oh, sweet lord, thank you.

I've really got to figure out how to pay for dinner dates and books at the same time.

Truly, one of the great challenges of our age.

Kitten WAR

Because every kitten must have its day...

KITTENWAR

Men Are Stupider Than Women, Which is Why Women Succeed in Life and Men Succeed In Business

Oh, I'm sorry, John, wasn't that what you were saying? No?

On average, the women made as much as the men under either system (individual or group money games). But when they were offered a choice for the next round - take the piece rate or compete in a tournament - most women declined to compete, even the ones who had done the best in the earlier rounds. Most men chose the tournament, even the ones who had done the worst.

Because men are stupid and need to glorify their egos, and women are content with their lot.

Or maybe because women aren't encouraged to be competitive, because it's incredibly "intimidating" and "unfeminine" and unless she's a lesbian, she'll never get laid again.

Oh, sorry, not your conclusion John?

The men's eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs.

Because men are stupid and egotistical, and women are raised with a sense of modesty and Christian self-abasement.

Oh, wrong again.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," Professor Niederle said. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."

You can argue that this difference is due to social influences, although I suspect it's largely innate, a byproduct of evolution and testosterone.

::insert sloooooow screeeaaam:::

Oh, yes, testoserone, that happy hormone. Let's try this out. Put a bunch of menstrating women in a room with a group of men. This is the time of the month when men's body chemistry is most similiar to women's, hormone-wise.

See what changes.

What, nothing?

OK, pump women full of testoserone, so they grow a beard and get an enlarged clitoris, and then run the experiment again.

Still the same?

Gee, I wonder what the problem could be then!

OK, sit a few female-to-male transexuals down with some men who were born with --

Gee, tougher to control other factors for that one, huh? And a smaller sample.

Oh, dear.

Why is it that everytime somebody argues about "some" men succeeding above and beyond "some" women, that the issue of testoserone comes up? How about the family background of the applicant, how about looking at the amount of confidence their parents inspired in them, or looking at their birth order? Why always concentrate on the sex?

Thoughts on Education

In reading this article at the NY Times about the differences between those who stay and complete college and those who don't, I was reminded of my own experience (and, in fact, continuing experience) with the educational system. Low-income students and students of families who did not graduate from college - unsurprisingly - still have a more difficult time getting to college and sticking with it to get the degree.

There's really no question as to why. If you've got a family who expects you'll go to college, who all graduated from college and - miracle of miracles - who will pay for it if you go, you've got a big social and financial system behind you urging you on. Shit, I had a family who would have disowned me if I didn't get a degree, but I sure as hell contemplated *not* completing my undergraduate degree a couple of times.

Why?

Cause I'm now 30K in debt, and making only 40K a year as a result. In fact, the only reason I even considered graduate school at all was because a collective of relatives agreed to help me pay tuition costs. I still worked for my plane ticket and the money to pay my bills before I headed overseas, but at the end of graduate school, at least my debt rack-up remained the same.

What kept me going when I was 19/20 wasn't so much my love of education (though I certainly have a love learning), it was family pressure to finish. My parents pounded me and my brother and sister over the head about the importance of a college education. My mother had waited to go back to school until she had kids - and she said it was one of the stupidest things she'd done, to try and go to work, go to school, and raise kids, and she didn't recommend that route. My dad finished a couple of semesters of college courses, but it became abundantly clear when he went back on the job market that nobody was hiring anybody without a college degree anymore, and he fought tooth and nail to get a job that paid the bills, even with over twenty years of restaurant experience, five years of that at the VP level.

The job market isn't a fun place.

I found out the same thing here in Chicago when I tried to get a job, and ended up working for $11 an hour as a temp before this position became permanent. I was so desperate to work that I was ready to apply at Starbuck's - with a Master's Degree.

How fucked up is that?

When it comes to education, for me, it's now all about the money. Where will the money come from? How many more student loan people are going to call me about late payments? How much more financial harrassment will I endure to get another degree, to broaden my horizons, expand my skill base?

My answer is: a lot.

The reason I have that answer is because I've grown up in a family that takes great pride in education, that knows it's worth, and who have raised me with those same values.

For better or worse, I keep going.

It's the money that's a bitch.

Just Drink More Coffee

The lean and the restless.

Wiscon Approaches

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am ready to get out of town...

And, of course, looking forward to getting paid on Friday. It's gonna be a great Friday. Why isn't today Friday, dammit?

Until You Experience This, You Just Can't Really Comprehend It

The ParaGard may cause a 50 to 75 percent increase in menstrual flow.

Why yes, yes it does.

Heavier and longer menstrual periods, more common during the first 2 to 3 months

Patience, young grasshopper, patience. I figure that it's healthier than being pregnant, and less depressing than a pill. And in three months, I won't be selling all this extra blood for Satanic rituals.

I'll certainly miss the extra income.

Shit I Could Never Do

Be an IT support person. You get the same lameass questions from lameass people who don't read the fucking access directions before they fucking call you.

Home Again, Home Again

I'm in a blistering bad mood. Heading out today at 4pm.

Gonna go get some coffee.

It's just one of those days.

What I'm Working On:

Year of Wonders
____________________________________________

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. She liked the light on nonsdays, and she sat at her window in her robe, legs spread, watching the light spill over the city. The breeze was hot and heavy, humid as a den of lovers. The wind smelled of the sea. If she gazed over the blue tiles of the city, gazed just there, between the great towers of the church temple and the storage silos blocking the tail-end of the bay, she could just see the glint of the sea.

All she ever painted was the sea. The light on the sea, the city and the sea. She had moved out of her studio three times, trying to get a better view of the sea, but violence and poverty always sent her away from the core of the city and the beachfront tenant houses. She sat in her rented room and painted a dream of the sea cut through in a sliver of real light. When she slept, she dreamt of the sea.

But her dreams did not sell. Whoring kept her in rent and paint and sometimes bread. She liked her life. She loved her view of the sea. She did not want for lovers, just bread, for sometimes she felt she lived on the view and the dreams, and that was enough.

She was twenty-two, paint-smeared and starving.

When a man knocked at her door asking for a commission, she assumed it was a euphemism for sex, and told him he would have to wait until the day before nonsday. He laughed, and she offered him weak tea.

He sat with her on the floor of the studio and stared at the cluttered wall hung in a splash of canvases; a thousand shades of blue and violet and white and yellow, orange and gray, all dabbed and mixed and lovingly kissed so they could create this: the sea.

“I would like you to paint me,” he said. “As you paint the sea.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I dream of the sea.”

He leaned toward her. He was broad and angular, but not frightening. Men did not frighten her. Only violence. And men knew nothing of violence in the blue-tiled city. That was a woman’s vocation.

“I want you to dream of me,” he said.

He was not beautiful. But then, neither was she. It was not a city for the beautiful.


The Boxing Magicians of Faleen
________________________________________________________

For hours they stood on the edge of the road watching the cars while the dust settled in their hair and cicadas clung to the hems of their trousers. They had come from the boxing in Faleen and their eyes were black shadows and their clawed hands were tinged a faint violet, thick with swelling.

They were magicians, magnificent, resplendent in amber and topaz robes that covered their thick, powerful bodies. The black shadows of their eyes told nothing of where they’d been, why they waited, but you could always mark the boxing magicians of Faleen. They stood in the world like it was a transient thing, as temporary as a dawn wind. They stood as if they would outlast it.

Arran had seen them as soon as they alighted from the bus. They emerged from the cloud of roaches spewed from the bus’s exhaust and remained on the far side of the ditch, speaking low among themselves and watching the traffic coming back out from the city after afternoon prayer.

“You think we should offer them something, mother?” Arran asked the woman working beside him. He held the basket of roach eggs as she repaired the burst walls of the house, sealed the eggs over with mud and straw.

She was a big woman, fleshy in the hips and thighs, broad in the face and heavy in the bosom, her breasts so large that Arran once dreamed that he suffocated against them in her warm embrace. He had not known her long, only a season. His birth mother worked in government, somewhere in Punjai on the edge of the desert, along the Chenjan border where the worst of the skirmishes still blazed. He had been farmed out to families further inland from the fighting, to be raised up until he was old enough to go to war and kill the Chenjans that left his birth mother with no time for children. It wasn’t long off, he was nearly fourteen, and he’d seen the sixteen year old men marching off to war along the road after their graduation in Faleen. Not long. Not long at all.

This new mother spared a black look at the magicians, and spat a red pulp of kaj onto the dirt. “Offer them water. Magicians don’t go for liquor, this time of day. Go ask your sister to dole it out. And don’t linger. Magicians don’t like boys.”

Arran abandoned the basket and bolted around the back of the house to where his sister Jax was sparring with some local girls. They said that magicians could tell the future. They could tell you how you’d do in the war, how many Chenjans you would kill, how much honor you’d get back in Nasheen, how long you would be remembered.

“Jax, ma says to dole out some water,” he said.

Jax parried a blow from her partner with her left forearm, dipped away, pushed back from the sparring circle

“What?” she said. Sweat poured down her long, flat face. Her dark skin was covered over in a fine reddish dust. She had twisted her dark hair back into a knot of braids. All the girls did their hair that way, these days. He’d once begged to be allowed to grow his hair long, but every mother he’d had scolded him for it. What would a boy do with long hair? Get it caught by some Chenjan, likely.

“There’s magicians on the road!” he said, and immediately regretted it.

The other girls looked over at him. Jax’s sparring partner, and the three watching.

“What kind of magicians? From Faleen?” Jax said. She retrieved her long robe and rubbed her face with it.

Arran rocked back on his heels. “Mother wants water for them. She says I should –“

“We’ll take it out,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, grinned. “You want your fortune told? I heard they give you good ones, if you bring them some bugs. Arran, give me your locust.”

“No,” Arran said. He’d caught the locust a month before, when a swarm came through and he and Jax and their mother had gone out to cover over the fields with organic netting. The locust had clung to the sleeve of his jacket, and when he saw it spread its amber and lavender wings, he caught it up in his hands and knew he had to keep it. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Don’t be a maggot,” Jax said. She shrugged into her robe, cut a look at her sparring partner, some lanky girl named Trinh who lived at a farm an hour’s walk away.

“It’s mine,” Arran said. “Just give me the water. Ma said –“

“Piss on what ma said. Let’s go see what these magicians are like,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, and they bled past Arran and back around to the front of the house.

Arran hopped after them. “Don’t! Ma said I...”

Jax unlocked the well and pumped out some water into a bowl at the base of the house. She handed the bowl to Trinh.

“Shut up, Arran,” Jax said. “What do you think they’d have to say to you? Boys all end up the same, dead and buried in Chenja. Who gives a fuck about a boy’s future?”


Cheira-Cheira
______________________________________________


Cheira had named the ship after herself, and she still sat at mealtimes in the hub with lists of names at her elbows and a mask of liquor vapor in her hand. None of her crews had ever seen her eat. She did not keep her crews long (nameless bodies abandoned; deep space) because after a time they became dull and desiccated (and she left them on the crust of a colonial waste wearing thorns in their hair, clinging tightly to the lead rope of a solitary ox the color of old blood). She’d named the ship without any hint of irony. The idea that Cheira had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the ship's moniker, and her Second, Roman, amused himself often at the expense of her baptizmal humor.

Roman would come into Cheira’s quarters after the purging of every crew, 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.

His visage was his gift to her stagnation.

"Why don't we go on," he would say. "We can manage the cortex on our own. Engineers take up space. I can handle repairs. And the mercenaries… You're a better miss than any of them."

"There's the matter of the prisoner," she would say.

And he would throw up his broad, scarred hands and sigh and say, "Yes, there's the prisoner."

It was Cheira’s duty, her obsession, her vocation, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling stair from the cortex to the holding tank every six hours. She greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with a blank stare and an unconscious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war.

The body’s eyes were closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tubes and wires. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the long black tube suctioned against the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment. Sometimes, it did not react at all, but remained still, unmoving (a mermaid trapped in ice).

After recording the convulsion - or lack of one - Cheira often went straight back into the cortex. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, purring recording console that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become. She lost track of time (in these intimate reveries), often. After twelve hours of contemplation, she would hear Roman do a sensor sweep of the ship. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a filmy liquor the tarry consistency of fuel oil. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up floatsam and jetsom in the seams between the stars.

When the next filler contract arrived in Cheira’s room, Roman wanted a new crew. He was lonely, he said, after she left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam.

She let Roman pick the crew, and he navigated them a path into Stile, a dusty ring of settlements on the edges of an asteroid belt circling a bloated, dying star. His brother worked in the scrap constellations around Stile, digging through old ships, piecing together their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

Cheira had not seen Roman's brother in a decade, when speaking of the war, of genocide, in terms outside the propagandic, was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments whose whores and buggers and creep cleaners called them void, diseased (marked for a dry asphyxiation in a torn cargo hull aboard a drifting ship in limitless space).

She did not greet Roman’s brother when he came aboard, but waited until he sought her out in the cortex. She stared out at the projection screen, the long loop of the asteroid belt. Bits of space debris bumped against the hull, bits of rocks and bodies, glass shards and scraps of metal so small they were worth less than the energy to gather them.

She heard him walk up the stair into the cortex. Heard him hesitate on the threshold.

"This your ship?" he said.

She had expected to feel nothing at his voice, but like the body in her hull, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. She felt a sort of pain.

She swiveled in her chair. He did not take up the doorway as Roman did, but inhabited it in the loose way he inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around himself like a shroud , blurring the edges of his surrounds. He had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, he had atrophied, and though he was thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and the loss of muscle. His eyes were black as Roman's, but their color was the only feature they shared. He was coffee black to Roman's sallow cream, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, with the doe-like eyes of an oversized marionette.

He stepped into the cortex, and the ship hummed. She patted the console, and it quieted.

"You look terrible," he said.

"I was thinking the same of you," she said.

"Roman says you need an engineer."

"We don't, but we do."

"Cryptic, intriguing. I brought my work."

"Desecrate the hull and I'll have your sack."

"Haven't you had it?"

"It's been a long time."

"I have no doubt."

She regarded him. Something inside of her stirred, something dark, a gray gauze. "Where are the others?" she said.

His name was Luck.

#

Roman's tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his foundlings to meet with her, the first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was a startling burst of color. No one remembered the last time they'd seen yellow hair. The war, maybe.

The other was a mercenary, a tall, long-limbed man as dark as the girl was light. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a silver circlet above his ears; half of one ear was missing. He carried a charged gun at either hip, a shotgun across his back. He smelled of blood and metal.

"Do they have whole names?" Cheira asked Roman.

"Hanah Tohl," the little pilot said, holding out her little hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by a lot of the young, to touch when first meeting.

The other one, the mercenary, sneered at the open hand, said, "Dax Al-hamin. And in whose service are we?"

"Cheira's," Cheira said. "The ship and I."

"Cheira, is that a Kip name?" Hanah said. She had pulled her hand back in. She was smiling broadly. Her teeth were too white, not her own.

"It's nobody's but hers," Roman said. "And the ship's Cheira-Cheira. You'll say hello to her later."

Cheira sat with the new crew over supper. She unrolled her lists. She wrote Hanah Tohl and Dax Al-hamin.

Roman filled Cheira's vapor tank. He had not given her a plate.

"You ain't eating?" Hanah said.

Cheira merely raised her eyes. She put the mask to her face, inhaled.

"Cheira doesn't like questions," Roman said. "Don't ask them."

"You say we are in transport," Dax said. “I signed on for a job.”

Cheira pushed her vapor canister at Roman, and he stood and refilled it.
Roman said, "We have an indefinite transport contract with the Authority. We take on odd jobs to supplement that."

"What did you do before?" Hanah asked.

"There was nothing before," Roman said. He set Cheira's canister back at her elbow.

"So what happened to your crew?" Hanah asked.

Dax snorted.

Cheira looked sidelong at Roman. She picked at her teeth, heard someone behind her, glanced back.

Luck slipped in through the vibrating door, a tardy shadow.

“Food looks recycled,” Luck said.

“You expected something else?” Cheira said levelly.

“There’s no before, and no crews,” Roman said, clearing up the obnoxious pilot’s question. “We take on crews only as we need them. We’re being asked to deliver cargo to some Authority swanks. We’re taking you all on to assist with pickup and transport.”

“Where we going?” Dax asked.

“Tutara,” Roman said.

Dax leaned back in his chair, crossed his big arms. “They still have cargo on Tutara?”

“We’ll find out,” Roman said.

“Cargo? What sort of cargo?” Hanah asked.

Dax fixed a black stare on her. “Bodies,” he said.

“Whose bodies?” Hanah said. She fiddled with her liquor mask. Cheira wondered if Roman had watered it down to crew rations yet. Best not get them used to excess.

“Abandoned colonists,” Roman said. “The ones who took the slow boat to the outer systems. Bad timing on their part, and bad tech.”

“We invented faster drives while they slept,” Luck said.

Cheira frowned at him. Luck had never invented anything of the sort.

“And when they arrived,” Roman continued, “the terras they’d intended to settle were already colonized by faster ships run by their great-grandchildren. Colonizers who set down first get first rights, so extraneous cargo was diverted to Tutara.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Hanah said.

“What, salvaging?” Roman said.

Cheira wondered if Hanah had ever sold her womb. It was practically the same thing. Just body parts. Dumb tender kid. Where had Roman dredged up this one?

She finished another canister of liquor and shook it. It was time to feed the prisoner.

She pushed back from the table.

Roman caught her eye. “You’ll excuse Cheira. She has an engagement. I’ll finish the briefing.”

Bodies in space (It was always an interesting ride).
_______________________________________________________

$1.94

The amount of money I currently have in my checking account until I get paid on Friday, just in time for Wiscon.

Oh, joy.

And also: first monthly bleeding with an IUD - ha ahaha oh, what joy, what fun for everyone! With all this blood, I could throw a party, or take part in a Satanic ritual. Blood rites, indeed.

Straight women really get screwed on this whole contraception deal. I'm told it'll be 1-3 months before I even out. It beats depression, but it sure as hell knocks ya flat the first month.

I Don't Worship Your God!

(via Nicky)

Friday Beer Blogging

Hey, c'mon, you know it's beer he's drinking!!



Though a proper pirate would be partaking of rum. The pirate's drink of choice.



This one, however, looks rather gross.

And am I the only one whose mind went right to the gutter with this one?

It's been a mind-numbing number cruncher of a week.

Happy Friday. Happy drinking! Happy pirating!

Here's Another Exciting Installment of: I Want to Live in Big Brother America!!

The best and worst part about democracy? Not only does everybody get to say whatever they want, which is great, but they get to pretend that what they want and believe should legally be what everybody else wants and believes.

Of course, totalitarian states aren't much different, except for that first part. It's just a step to right.

A recent caller to my radio program, Linda, supports the tax (on fast food).

Linda: I'm hoping this tax will motivate people, get them to do their own cooking.

Larry: Why?

Linda: There are too many fat people -- they're all going to fast-food places. . . . I'm so glad they're doing this. . . . Because they're fat, fat, fat. They're eating the wrong food. Stay home, do your own good cooking.

Larry: Do you engage in any kind of conduct that other people might condemn, Linda? Do you drink?

Linda: No . . .

Larry: Do you watch TV?

Linda: Yes, and I watch those terrible commercials from fast-food places, and I get angry. They should tax those commercials, too.

Larry: Maybe they ought to tax you for watching so much television. Why don't you get up and exercise more?

Linda: People have no restraint. They need to be restrained.

Larry: You think the job of the legislature is to restrain them by taxing their behavior?

Linda: They're fat. They're unhealthy, they have diabetes, they have high blood pressure, and they're at the fast-food place -- and their children watch them, and then the children go there, too. It's a disgrace! Cook, cook, cook.

Larry: What do you do when they cook junk . . . when they cook fried foods?

Linda: No, no. They have to cook healthy food.

Larry: How are you going to ensure that? This tax makes the price go up, and more people are cooking at home. How do you guarantee they won't cook the same crap they went out to buy before?

Linda: If we have enough talk about healthy food, someday people will realize they have to cook healthy foods.

Larry: Why don't you contribute to a fund for television Public Service Announcements, advising people what they should do? Why are you going to legislators to tax other people's behavior that you don't like? Unbelievable.

Linda: Why are the Oriental people and European people much healthier than the American people? The American people are obese! . . . I'm horrified by how many obese people there are.

Larry: What about Asians who are here? . . . Are they overweight?

Linda: Not as much as American people.

Larry: Well, how do you suppose they manage not to walk into a restaurant and get fat? And whatever they're doing, why can't everybody else do it, too?

Linda: That food is bad. Your mother can tell you that.

Larry: Should we tax people who order fried chicken at restaurants?

Linda: Why, that's bad, too! Yes, yes, all that bad food should be stopped. . . .

Larry: So tax hikes for health are OK.

Linda: Something has to be done. It's a start.

Larry: Why are you concerned about how fat people are?

Linda: People end up in the hospital, and we're paying for their health problems. Not only that, but even to look at them! They're disgusting to look at! Every time I come back from the store or walk around, I come back furious, seeing how fat they are!

Larry: I bet if you see a fat person smoking a cigarette, you're ready to have a heart attack, aren't you?

Linda: No, cigarettes don't bother me. I'm not a smoker, but it doesn't bother me as much as looking at an obese person. I mean, don't they have mirrors? Don't they look in the mirror and go, "Oh my God, I have to do something about this weight"?

Friday Quotes

"Obscure references, pretentious phrases and ostentatious vocabulary will not be mistaken for eloquence."

"For a while I've been trying to find my passion," Jonah said. "But I haven't been passionately trying to find my passion."

"The separation of church and state was an idea created by the devil to keep good Christian people from ruling this great land."
- Justin Crowe, Carnivale

Another Study You Won't Hear About Around Valentine's Day

Later Moms, Longer Lives

Waiting to have children may add years to a woman’s life, says Jenni Pettay of the University of Turku in Finland. The evolutionary biologist analyzed 5,000 birth records from four generations of 17th- and 18th-century Finns and found that women who waited the longest before having their first child were statistically more likely to live longer. The delay in childbirth seems to be inherited: Late mothers’ daughters also tended to become late mothers themselves. (Late was defined as after 30.)

Previous research has suggested that women who delay having children live longer. But none of these studies was able to determine if the longevity was due to cultural factors, such as a higher socioeconomic class or better living conditions. Pettay got around those issues by studying women from a homogeneous population who did not have access to contraception or advanced medical care.

Still, Pettay says, it’s culture, not genes, that explains why Westerners delay parenthood: “In modern society there tends to be a low number of offspring per couple, so natural selection isn’t at work. But this study does suggest there may be benefits to later motherhood that evolved to counteract the decrease in total fertility years, such as living longer to provide care to grandchildren.”

—Jocelyn Selim

Workaday, Workadoo

Every morning, this goddamn printer jams. We have a new coffee maker, but no new printer.

Priorities, afterall.

Just Keep Writing

Eventually, something will make sense.