Infidel

I've spent the last couple of days devouring Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. It's been a long time since I devoured a book with this kind of desperate hunger, and I think my compulsion to lock myself in my room in order to finish the book surprised even me.

Hirsi Ali is the Somalian-born former Muslim woman turned atheist, women's activist, and member of Dutch Parliament. She is best known as the woman who wrote Submission, the short film that criticises the Quran's pronouncements about women and the carrying out of those prescriptions toward women in Islam. In answer, there were protests and riots throughout Holland, and director Theo Van Gogh was stabbed shot, stabbed 28 times and had his throat cut in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses by a Muslim fundamentalist. A death threat to Hirsi Ali was pinned to Van Gogh's chest. She's been living under high security ever since, and currently lives in the US.

I'd first read about Hirsi Ali when I was in South Africa, and I remember feeling uncomfortable about what she was said to believe in an NYT piece about her rise to Parliament. Hirsi Ali - first and foremost an advocate of Muslim women's rights - believes that in order for Muslim women to become truly emancipated, there's going to need to be a revolution within Islam. She calls it an Enlightenment: a concerted study of the Quran not as the Holy Absolute Word of God but as a text written by human beings, and therefore a text open to interpretation. One of the reasons her film was seen as so obscene was because words of such incredible holiness - the words of the Quran - were written on objects of such incredible baseness - women.

What she wants Muslims to do is, roughly, what Christians have had to do in order to reconcile the words and prescriptions of their faith in the Old and New Testament with modern ideas about freedom of expression, women's rights, the rights of children, incest laws, corporal punishment, and etc.

Though "an eye for an eye" is still set down in the Old Testament and having sex with your father and marrying multiple wives and bloody stonings and chopping people were seen as OK in the text, most Christians like the idea of following the far less bloody New Testament teachings of Jesus: the he who casts the first stone school.

When most Christians describe their faith, they call it a faith of peace, of love. Hirsi Ali argues that when Muslims call Islam a religion of peace, they're flat wrong, because according to their faith, the Quran is holy and absolutely right, and if that's true, it advocates the beating of women, flogging in the streets, hands getting chopped off for stealing, and above all - the slaughtering of anyone who doesn't believe as you do. A number of fundamentalist Christians who insist that the Bible is the absolute word of God can get themselves stuck in the same line of reasoning. She insists it's a package deal, and until Muslims deal with this and come out and say, "Well, really, we understand that we're interpreting the book and we're not to take it literally because these were the ideas set down for the bloody, brutal world the prophet lived in a thousand years ago," then they can't pretend it's a religion that preaches peace.

This is, among other things, why Hirsi Ali is such a controversial figure. The liberal hippie in me was appalled at the idea of telling people how they had to observe their religion. Afterall, what about freedom of religion? That, too, is a freedom of Western society just as much - if not more so (certainly historically!)- than the equality of women. On the other hand, watching anyone justify rape, beheading, slaughter, the confinement of women, and etc. to a holy book of any kind pisses me off. Instead of opening your eyes, making observations, and coming to your own conclusions, there are people who want to swallow somebody else's ideas about the way the world should be as set down a thousand or two thousand years before.

One of the fascinating things about reading Hirsi Ali's book is watching her go down the road of working through all of the contradictions of her faith. When she first questioned the teachings of the Quran, she was told to shut up and believe; to be silent, to submit. Submission to one's husband, one's clan, one's God, was what Islam was all about. Once she escaped to the West she began to delve into these contradictions more deeply with the help of access to a broader range of thinkers, of ideas.

As a writer, one of the most moving parts of the book is when she talks about the impact reading books had on her as a teenager and young adult. They gave her windows into other worlds, into other ways of thinking, and they got her to question the way the world was. Until she was exposed to other ideas, the harsh, brutal world in which she lived, where women believed that their endurance of violence, spousal rape, and etc would put them on the path to Heaven, she believed this was simply the way things were. There was nothing else. Being exposed to other worlds, she realized things could be different. Incredibly so.

I was admittedly uncomfortable with Hirsi Ali's complete embrace of the Western world and her turn from Islam to athism, because I worry that her example is going to be "this is how all Muslim women should be!" She does make very clear, however, that she does not want or believe that her path is the right path for anyone; only the right path for her.

For better or worse, as Westerners, we love stories like this: the brutalized woman who is emancipated in a Western country; gosh yay, look how much better we are than other cultures! We get to pat ourselves on the back. But Hirsi Ali talks about many other women from similar circumstances who did not embrace the West so whole heartedly. I do get the impression that she believes it *is* possible to reconcile Islam with Western values of free speech, individual freedom, but it's going to be a long, bloody road, and she doesn't seem terribly optimistic about it.

And, to be honest, yeah, the West is loads better than anywhere else she talked about for somebody like me. I wouldn't trade places; but I do know that much of the violence in the world, particularly in former colonies, is taking place because of the shitty way things were and are being handled by Western countries. That's not to blame the despots any less, but a number of them would have had a lot less hardware if we'd stop giving it to them.

Radical Islam is very much a reaction *against* the West, and it's going to be the moderates, not the radicals, who are going to work on reconciling these ideas, according to Hirsi Ali. There are always going to be radicals - there are radical fundamentalist Christians who blow up abortion clinics, after all. Above all, though, I feel like Hirsi Ali's crusade - if you want to call it that - is to tell the truth as she sees it. She lived in a world where you didn't talk about the way things really were, how you really felt, what you really wanted. You submitted everything to the will of your parents, your clan, your God.

I trolled Google video for some interviews with her, and one of the most striking things about her is that she's actually incredibly soft-spoken. She's this little, fine-boned woman who does not raise her voice or make wild gestures. She takes her time answering questions. She doesn't let anyone rush her.

Above all, this is a powerful book, and an incredible read. How do you go from being the daughter to a Somalian revolutionary who's got three wives scattered across three countries, living in a two-room concrete block and getting beaten by your mother and cicumcised by your grandmother to becoming a member of the Dutch Parliament and living with constant security because so many people want you dead? I think what struck me so much about the story is that it wasn't that it was impossible. It was that it took courage. Huge amounts of courage. And will.

Anyone who stands up for themselves, for their right to tell the truth: it's not as if that's a physically difficult thing. Sometimes it just takes getting on a train. Buying a ticket. That first step. One foot. You just stand up. You refuse to shut up. It *sounds* so easy. And yet the guts it takes to do that - and to keep doing it, even after suffering bodily harm and being threatened with more of it as a result of your actions - that's the most incredible thing.

The New Routine

Called in available to my temp agencies and scheduled another interview for tomorrow at 10am with yet another temp agency. That'll be three agencies I'm registered with.

In the meantime, on my tax forms, I put down that my occupation was "writer."

It felt much better than writing "employed."

Anyway, more GW edits. The book's going out before Wiscon, come hell or high water.

And So

If I declare myself and business and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $1221.

If I don't declare myself a busines and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $421.

This probably wouldn't have happened if I'd kept all of my con reciepts.

EDIT: Final Federal taxes owed: $553

Yeah, right!

I wonder if I have anything left on any of my credit cards?

Tonight's Song, Stuck on Repeat

Nickelback: Rockstar

I'm through with standin' in line
at clubs I'll never get in
It's like the bottom of the ninth
and I'm never gonna win
this life hasn't turned out
quite the way I want it to be
(Tell me what you want)

I want a brand new house
on an episode of Cribs
And a bathroom I can play baseball in
And a king size tub big enough
for ten plus me
--(Yea, So what you need)--

I need a credit card that's got no limit
And a big black jet with a bedroom in it
Gonna join the mile high club
At thirty-seven thousand feet
--(Been there done that)--

I want a new tour bus full of old guitars
My own star on Hollywood Boulevard
Somewhere between Cher and
James Dean is fine for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life for fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair and change my name

[CHORUS]
'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars and
Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And well...

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I wanna be great like Elvis without the tassels
Hire eight body guards that love to beat up assholes
Sign a couple autographs
So I can eat my meals for free
--(I'll have the quesadilla, ha-ha,)--

I'm gonna dress my ass
with the latest fashion
Get a front door key to the Playboy mansion

Gonna date a centerfold that loves to
blow my money for me
(So how you gonna do it?)

I'm gonna trade this life
For fortune and fame
I'd even cut my hair
And change my name

'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
we'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
drug dealer on speed dial, well
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

I'm gonna sing those songs
That offend the censors
Gonna pop my pills
from a Pez dispenser
Get washed-up singers writing all my songs
Lip --sync-- 'em every night so I don't get 'em wrong

Well we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in Hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
in the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blond hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
drug dealer on speed dial, well

Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

What Keeps Me Up At Night

"God’s War is a 97,000 word fantasy novel of faith, blood, betrayal and submission played out in the contaminated deserts of Nasheen, a matriarchal state engaged in a centuries-old holy war with polygamous Chenja."

Hm, no, that's not right.

I typed: Polygamous.

No, that means multiple partners of either sex. What's more than one wife?

Poly something. Poly... poly... poly...

::looks it up in actual paper dictionary next to desk:::

Yes, see, that's multiple spouses, not multiple wives.

And... Polyandry. That's more than one husband.

Yum.

OK, can't get distracted.

::looks through poly- words:::

Aha. Here it is.

OK, polygyny.

P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-Y.

That's more than one husband. Yes, says so right here. OK, so that would be:

Polygynous.

:::types::: P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-O-U-S

Hm.

Wait.

But.

Word doesn't recognize this word.

Is this the right word?

Spell it again.

:::types::: P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N-O-U-S

Yes, it says so right here.

Why does Word recognize POLYGAMOUS but not POLYGYNOUS?

Is my dictionary on crack? (possible)

Is Word broken? (probable)

This is the exciting writing life we all dream of.

Mmmmm Query Letters

The only thing I hate drafting more than query letters are synopses.

That's going to be next.

And I just printed out GW AGAIN so I can go through ANOTHER round of line edits.

I hacked and combined several chapters during the last pass, and I need to make sure those run smoothly. I've also got pages and pages of detail notes that I'd like to go back and put into the narrative. They look like minor things: details about school, religion, the literal world building of Nyx's planet from a rock into something more or less habitable, but they're the sorts of details that make a so-so novel a memorable one.

Gee, it's like writing is actual work or something.

I hate that.

The Good German

I picked up a copy of The Good German at Heathrow, mainly because it has this winning first line: "The war had made him famous."

This is a beautifully written thriller set in Berlin just after the German surrender during WWII. The novel revolves around the murder of a nobody American soldier (in the Russian-occupied part of the city) after the "peace," and one American journalist's interest in getting the story. The reason our journalist hero has come back to Berlin, however, is to find his married lover, whom he left behind during the war.

The two stories end up connecting, of course, as they would in any good thriller, and the strength of the setting here really sold this one for me.

Even better than that, it's beautifully plotted.

One of the big things I've been working on - and reading for - is plot. It's another reason I was blazing through Stephen King novels last year. Watching somebody place their pieces and then neatly set them off like a line of dominoes is an exercise I find terribly satsifying, probably becuase it's something I find incredibly difficult to do in my own writing.

Character, setting, sure, lovely, but plot? Knowing where I'm headed before I get there? I still write plot the way I live my life: messy and disjointed and whatever feels right at the time.

I think both my life and my writing may perhaps do a bit better with some structure.

Then again, most real lives aren't so neatly plotted, and you don't get a six-page Sherlock Holmes description of events and motives at the end. How comforting fiction can be, with all those loose ends tied up so neatly...

All fiction is comfort fiction.

Why Positive Feedback Matters

In general, I'm a fan of brutal critiques. I don't need anybody pussy-footing around my ego. If I've written a shit story, I need to know it was a shit story.

The reverse of that, however, is that if I've written a good story, I need to know it was a good story.

This may come as a surprise. Afterall, if you write a brilliant story, you just know it, right? You realize your utter genius and thrust it into the mail and make tons of money and win shiny awards and sell the movie rights, right?

No, not really.

I rarely know if what I'm writing is any good. I secretly hope it is. But I rarely, if ever, know.

Sure, there have been some short stories I liked just as they were. I didn't ask for feedback because I knew I could sell them as-is. And I've sold stories I got feedback on of the "you'll never sell this as-is sort." I've also not sold stories that me and my critiquers thought were great.

That's how it goes.

But when I'm working on projects that take years, that I look at all the time, I have to have outside feedback. I need to have a handful of very different voices telling me how what I'm doing is coming across, because if I'm ridiculous, I need to know I'm ridiculous. If I'm spending years on something totally useless, I'd like somebody to tell me. I may end up disagreeing with them, but at least I'm prepared for that kind of feedback from the Big Bad World.

I like harsh, constructive, detailed critiques for the initial revision phase when I'm fixing everything that's wrong, but once I've gotten 6 or 8 or 12 months into revisions, revisions that sometimes take years, some of the best feedback to have around is the glowing shit. The "this was brilliant!" shit.

For me, this was an email I got from my buddy Julian who read the first draft of GW. He absolutely loved book, and gushed about it, and every time I felt horrible and defeated tonight, I thought about that email, and I pushed through it. Because, believe me, sitting here in Dayton, OH at midnight working on this last round of line edits, it's pretty much all I had. I've wanted to throw in the towel with this book at least half a dozen times tonight (not to mention how many times the last couple of months, particularly after some other critiques).

I keep thinking: "This book is shit! It's the worst! It's going to be horribly embarrassing! What if it IS published, and then people I know READ it, and they say, THIS IS THE WORST SHIT IN THE WORLD! And suddenly they avoid me at social functions and I have no friends and people are very polite in public but talking about my shitty book in private and OH DEAR GOD I'M GOING TO WRITE ANOTHER BOOK AND IT'S GOING TO SIT IN ANOTHER FUCKING DRAWER OH GAWD THAT'S EVEN WORSE."

These are the things that pass through my mind at midnight in Dayton, OH.

The rest of the time, I secretly believe I'm brilliant.

But man, you know, for those Long Dark Teatimes of the Soul, like tonight, line edit pass number three on a book I technically finished in September and wanted to start marketing in February, first-draft-praise-letters are fucking priceless.

I have finished my stack of line edits. I'm going to bed, rereading the whole fucking thing tomorrow, and starting work on my synopsis and query letters.

Gawd.

And Then There Were Some

Some stuff you don't often hear about being done by women.

Women Gladiators:

Wiki

Gladiatrix

Journal of Combative Sport

Women Bullfighters:

La Diosa Rubia

A Few Fighters

Marie Barcelo

Rebuilding

Today was the first time since I moved that I managed to finish the entirety of my morning weights routine. Depression, laziness, and an inadequate room set-up for working out were keeping me from bothering to do it properly. Some of it is also that I don't have a fixed time for getting up in the morning, which is a problem. I'm usually up by 9:30 am, but I'd like to be up at something more reasonable like 7 or 7:30.

A lot of the trick to being unemployed and living off the good graces of others is not to let yourself wallow - you'll end up regretting all that time you wasted once you've got a job again, so I've been making an effort to work out some kind of lay-off routine or schedule.

I've been making an effort to get in some cardio everyday, but I realized yesterday that instead of bike riding or working out on the elliptical, I was starting to get used to the idea of taking long walks instead. Sure, that's better than nothing, but it's not going to get me looking buff again. I've been feeling rather doughy. There's a boxing gym here in Dayton, but that's going to involve me having money, which will involve me being employed. So.

I have a lot of things that need to get done right now, but this week, the focus is getting GW line edits done and getting it in the mail by the end of the month. Seriously. I was supposed to have this out in February, and having a bunch of unfinished projects lying around is driving me crazy.

The good part about living in Dayton is that, you know, I haven't had to move back in with my parents yet. But I stress the "yet." The problem with Dayton is that there aren't a lot of jobs here, and you're lucky to get offered something for more than $8 an hour. As somebody who was used to making nearly $19 full time and $15 an hour as a temp, there's been some sticker shock when interviewing with temp agencies.

I can also get away with not having a car in Dayton. If I moved back home, we're talking insurance, car payment, and worst of all - gas. I can make it in Dayton on $950 a month. I'd need a lot more to make it in BG.

Right now, the plan is to stay here until I can get back on my feet, financially, or until I can get a good job offer elsewhere and afford to move out. As it is, I pretty much blew through the last of everything I had in getting here, and I have a long way to go to build things up again.

I'm nearly but not quite fucked.

And I stress the "not quite" part.

In the meantime, I'm spending my days drinking pots of coffee and getting on with Ian and Stephanie's dog. Ian's a materials scientist PhD student, so he's usually out of the house by noon at the latest, and Stephanie works as a medical receptionist, so she's out of here at godawful early hours, and I've got most of the day to myself. Most of which I spend reading and doing line edits and scraping paint off doors, as Ian and Steph have been renovating the house, and it gives me a sense of accomplishment to help out with the more mundane tasks involved in that.

As far as self-esteem goes, yeah, that's been a really fucking tough one. It's been difficult to build that back up, not to wallow in a lot of self-hatred. When you're used to being strong and capable and figuring things out and you suddenly fail, utterly, again, yeah, boy, that's pretty fucking hard. It's the way life is, sure, "Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight," but that doesn't make the falling down or getting up part much easier.

Some of the miserable self-esteem stuff comes from how bad things were back in Chicago. Removing myself from that situation has helped with some of that, but you know, selling a book or having a job or succeeding at something sure as hell would help, too. Being able to afford my meds would help.

You know, every little thing helps.

But I did do some traveling last week, and that was divine. It's nice to just get away from bullshit for awhile and get to a place where you feel hopeful about the future instead of terrified. OK, there's some terror, too, but mostly, hope, and there's nothing like navigating a foreign country to get some of your self esteem back. Just because you fail at things doesn't mean you can't do anything. It just means you failed. And you have to keep trying.

It's like writing a lot of bad books. Doesn't mean they'll all be bad. Just means these ones are bad. It doesn't mean you give up. It means you learn from the last one so you can make the next one even better.

Which also sounds a lot easier than it actually is....

Today's Song, Stuck on Repeat

... while I finish the third round of GW line edits. Line edits are the worst part of the whole process for me. The big revision stuff, that's fun. The actual writing, the revising while writing, the outlining, etc. Fine, fine.

The line edits? The round after round of line edits?

Pure torture.

A Perfect Circle - The Noose

So glad to see you well
Overcome and completely silent now
With heaven's help
You cast your demons out
And not to pull your halo down
Around your neck and tug you off your cloud
But I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends to the dead
To the dead

Recall the deeds as if
They're all someone else's
Atrocious stories
Now you stand reborn before us all
So glad to see you well

And not to pull your halo down
Around your neck and tug you to the ground
But I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends to the dead
To the dead

With your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping
Your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping down

Your halo slipping down
I'm more than just a little curious
How you're planning to go about
Making your amends [repeated]

Your halo slipping down
Your halo slipping down to choke you now

News & Reviews

I moved in with my buddies Ian & Stephanie a few weeks ago, after they graciously offered to put me up rent-free until I can get my staggering credit card debt and jobless (ie temp work only, no perm position) situation all sorted out. Much of my silence has been because of moving logistics, sorting out personal relationships, and interviewing with local temp agencies, and putting back together some sort of writing schedule for the year, since the one I had is pretty much screwed.

And believe me, you wouldn't have wanted to read anything I've had to say the last few weeks, cause most of it has been boo-hoo poor me stuff. Nobody's perfect.

In the meantime, I've done some traveling, read some books, and seen some movies. And been drinking a lot of coffee.

No joke, I've been having a tough time with this transition. There are few things that make you feel more like a loser than having to move in with friends/parents because of a job layoff, sudden chronic illness (and resulting costs), and exploding personal situation, but you know, shit happens, and I've been working really hard at being OK with that whole "shit happens" thing. I mean, I didn't exactly plan on getting a chronic illness and losing my job and etc. I keep thinking I could have handled it all better, but regardless, this is how it's been handled, so I need to stop and breathe for a second and plan and pick myself up again. I'm just lucky that I've got people around who'll help me out and support me while I do that.

I mean, isn't every writer supposed to live in a friends' basement at some point? It'll sound great during the NYT interview. I'm telling you.

In any case:

I read A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, after seeing it several times at Starbucks, at the local bookshop, and hearing about Beah's interview on The Daily Show.

This one starts out really strong - Beah was forced into "service" as a child soldier for the government forces in Sierra Leone in the late 90s. He gives a brutal, detailed account of how he lost his family literally overnight, was captured by soldiers and forced to commit atrocities. I've read a lot of books about conflict in Africa, mainly southern Africa, but Sierra Leone was a new one for me, and Beah gave me a really clear, vivid understanding of the surreal chaos of a violent revolution and how they impact the people who live there how one day the war is something far off, something you hear about, something that will never really affect you, and the next day your entire world is torn apart. You can read all sorts of books by foreign journalists - or even local ones - and dispassionate histories, but this one came from somebody who lived there, lived through it, and hearing his voice was.... powerful. Powerful not just because he was there, but because we hear these voices so rarely. Instead, we hear about conflict 2nd and 3rd hand, from foreigners, journalists, which is certainly better than nothing, but it pales in comparison to these missing voices.

There are some great things he does here - he shows you the good with the bad. There are horrific things done here, things he does and things done to him and those around him, but there are pauses in the narrative for the good things, the human things, the small acts of kindness, the dancing, the game-playing, the snide joking among friends, and long passages that show his love of the physical landscape of the country. Yes, people do terrible things, but they are just people, like everyone else. It's one of those things that everyone says when they hear about people committing atrocities - hacking people up, the mass slaughter of millions - how could they do it? How is that possible? And in Beah's book, you see exactly how that becomes possible. You see the steps along the way, the increasing chaos, the breakdown of the communities, and you can put yourself there and say, "Would I really have reacted so differently?"

No, probably not.

The book drags a little in the middle and then wraps up really quickly with Beah's rehabilitation, some time living with his uncle and becoming a spokesperson for children at a UN conference, and then his rapid flight across the border when Sierra Leone's capital is finally overrun. We don't actually get the nitty-gritty of how he managed to get to America after crossing the border, only that one of the friends he met and kept in touch with after the UN conference in New York agreed to give him a home if he could make it across the border. Because of this, the book seems to end abruptly, and there's nothing tying it together. It simply... is.

Not long after reading this one, I watched Blood Diamond, and I recommend reading Beah's story and then watching this movie if you're at all interested in the complexities of war and revolution in Sierra Leone or even Africa in general, as the politics and players are similiar in many other countries. Blood Diamond gives you an idea of the big players in these conflicts - the international corporations, the revolutionaries, the aid workers, the mercenaries/smugglers, the civilians, pretty much everybody gets a nod here. The cast was talented enough to sort of wash over the idea that they were all sort of stand-ins for their respective groups (black local, white American journalist, white African smuggler), but they all bordered on cliche at one time or another.

Still, it was a powerful film, and after reading Beah's books, the sections about the boy soldiers rang utterly and terribly true, and it made me sit up and pay attention. The people who put this one together did a lot of work. It's good.

Some other movies:

I also finally saw the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale. I put off watching this one because, yeah, I wasn't so sure I'd like the new Bond Guy.

I was wrong.

They brought Bond back from cheese and made him cool again, and that was a neat trick. Brosnan wasn't bad, but the scripts and direction he were given were turning the Bond movies into a parody of Bond movies ("I thought Christmas only comes *once* a year" Oh lord). The women are bad and die, of course, because this is a Bond movie (but then, pretty much everyone who isn't Bond is bad and dies), but you don't watch a Bond movie expecting to get a lot of conversations between women. I do like what they're doing with M; keeping Dench as M was a great decision. She's just excellent. There was some danger of her appearing motherly toward Bond, which they could have done, but because it's Dench, I think they've managed to avoid that route. She also doesn't dress like a nun (or dress like she's pretending to be 14), which you don't see much with older women actresses, and that was cool. She has some good sparring matches with Bond, and you get enough icy coolness from her that you do wonder just what she'd do if Bond ever did piss her off enough to off him.

Somehow, this movie even made having an asthmatic, one-eyed, scarred villain something other than Bond-movie-cliche laughable.

To round out my movie watching, I also watched The Holiday, mainly because it had Jude Law and Kate Winslet. This was one of those movies that could have been really great, but as it was, just sort of... well, was. Jude Law ended up playing the best character, suprisingly, but Kate and Cameron hammed it up too much to be really sympathetic, and instead, came across as a couple of silly girls. I wasn't really rooting for either of them to have boyfriends. I wanted them to sort their lives out themselves first. I wanted them to grow up.

Kate was doing this miserable Bridget Jones routine (that can be a fun character, but I didn't believe her gumption in the end because I never saw it the whole way through, whereas when Renee Zellweger played it, I believed Bridget's transformation; I felt like Bridget did a little growing up), and Cameron was just doing LA-parody, which wasn't so much her fault - a lot of that was definately a directorial choice.

And you know, there's nothing more miserable than writers writing about writers or movie people making movies about movie people. It's a real turnoff.

A lot of what didn't work for me was also the fact that none of the pairings in the movie had actual chemistry. Cameron and Jude Law have tons of sex, and though I believed the chemistry on his end (I believed it was *acted* but I believed in the acting), she wasn't really clicking much with him, and Kate and Jack Black were just... weirdly paired. It's like you get two people together who were supposed to play the "best friend" role in other movies and then put them together as a leading copule and they still play "best friend" with each other. Which, yes, I realize was what they were going for, but generally, when two people who've played best friend to others get together and you know, get hot on each other, they do actually get hot around each other and have hot, wild sex. Insead, these two get two kisses, and they're not hot kisses at ALL. I didn't believe their connection in the least.

Jude and Kate, as brother and sister, had way more chemistry than any other pairing in the movie.

I also watched parts of Night at the Museum, but Jumanji was better, even if this movie did have Owen Wilson in it.

Overheard at a Bookstore Today in Dayton, OH

"Well, I'm looking at getting either one of these Left Behind books or this Sarah Waters book."

IDOL

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!

If You Could Balance a Flip Phone on Your Nose Would You Use it to Save the World?

Zeroes.

"The 300" Workout

With the Iron Diva's "scaled for stronger female clients" workout assessment.

When All Else Fails...

At least there are Pirates.

Radio Silence (for a time)

Some Seasonings

Star Wars Wiki.

Bullshit bingo for the workplace (something to do during all those meetings!)

Seahenge.

Cryogenic frogs.

The Miracle Fruit.

Universal doormat.

Excerpt Meme (because I'm too headfull [tm] to make up my own content today)

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

“No, long before that. What was left of you was sent here to Faleen because it has the highest concentration of magicians outside of Mushtallah. They called me in because I was your regular magician and had your case history.”

(hey, it caught me in the middle of a dialogue)

Lost words

Lost words.

Why is it so Cold Today?

Why? Why? Why?

Man, My Ass Hurts

I got up at 5:30 am this morning and it was cold and dark outside and I thought, "What the fuck am I doing? It's cold and dark outside."

But by the time I was cognizant enough to realize how stupid this was, I'd already taken my adjusted Lantus dose, and half an hour later, my adjusted Novolog dose, so ready or not, I was biking to work.

It took less than an hour to get up there this morning, because there was no headwind. The weather wasn't bad at all and I thought: yeah, hey, I can do this!

Coming home was a different story.

My ass hurt all day from this morning's biking and the biking I did last night, and getting on the bike again tonight wasn't exactly something I was looking forward to. I somehow got lost looking for the cross-street that would get me back onto the lake path. I ended up spending more time on the street. The headwind was a bitch.

It was really fucking cold.

It was so cold along the lakefront that I stopped and pulled out my insulin from my bag and tugged it inside my double layer of coats because I was worried it was going to freeze.

The wind sent up waves along the bike path, and yea, all that displaced water froze. There were battered ice chunks all over the place, and it started to get dark around 6ish and I still had at least three miles to go.

I was tired. The headwind was bad. I blame that fucking headwind.

I was so tired, and I kept going. I just kept going, and that's what I told myself, though my legs wobbled and it hurt to breathe in the cold air: I just have to keep going. And it reminded me of this post, and then I thought, how weird is it when your own life reminds you of your own life? I mean, I'm not chugging down the lakefront thinking, "This is just like that one episode of Buffy!" I'm thinking, "fuck, yea, I've been through this before. And I did OK that time. I can do it again."

Maybe this is what it's like to be old.

I don't mind it, really.

Because I kept going. I just kept going. The last six or eights months have been like that. Just keep going. Just keep going. It'll be OK. It'll be OK. You can do this. It will get better.

For somebody that doesn't put any trust in any God, who doesn't believe in much of anything at all, I sure do run a lot on blind faith.

I had to walk the bike the last four blocks or so, after I came off the lakefront, because I didn't trust myself to be able to navigate those last few blocks on the street without getting hit by a car. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else and my toes were numb.

I carried my bike up three flights of steps and then sank into a hot bath.

I'm saving $80 a month in transit costs. I'm saving at least 6.5 units of insulin a day.

Someday, it will be spring, and I will not be fighting a frozen headwind coming in off the lake, throwing ice in my face.

Someday.

Until then.... yeah.

Keep going.

Where I'm Going to Be In 26 Days:

Thank God.

The Kama Sutra of Reading

Dancing

I have now successfully paid (or partially paid, in the case of the doctors' bills), all of my bills except for the one from unemployment. The Office says they "overpaid" me by $65, and they'd like that money back. During the 4 weeks I was out of work, I received a whopping $655 from the State. That's not even enough to cover rent and utilities.

At some point, you just have to laugh.

In the meantime, things around here have fallen by the wayside. There's a lot of cleaning that hasn't gotten done, and I spent much of my evening hours catching up on the shithole that has become my home. I'm so behind on Black Desert that I've had to re-forecast the completion date on my novel schedule. My writing work this year is really tightly packed, so even being two weeks behind really throws everything else off.

I've also been thinking about putting tDW back into circulation. This will require me to read through it again, and make any changes I feel are neccessary. The worldbuilding in tDW isn't as complex as in the GW books, which may or may not be a problem.

I'm also hip-dip in yet ANOTHER round of line edits for GW, the last set before it sees daylight, and they're taking a long time. A lot of this work is synching it up with what's going on in Black Desert and, you know, making the plot make coherent sense.

You know, little things.

The characters and setting are cool, tho.

I have a whopping two stories currently in the mail, and I think I'm going to sit down and work on another writing schedule - a more detailed one - in order to fit in all the writing and other activities I'd like to get in. Right now I'm having a lot of trouble staying motivated, which is probably because I'm so awash in concerns like grocery money and finding a real job (I'm covered for "catastrophes" insurance-wise until the end of March. After that, I don't know where the money will come from in order to save my ass if I get hit by a car).

I've also committed to a trip to Spain at the end of the month with David, for which I've already bought my plane tickets and made hotel reservations, so financially-able or not, that's coming up as well. Basically, the $800 "leftover" from the 401(K) check of $2000 that *didn't* go toward health insurance is going toward spending money for Spain ($300) and covering the time I'll be out of work ($500).

Getting by on a knife edge... it's like being in college again!

Only, with more debt!

One of the big things I finally did today is head downtown and buy a decent bike, a chain, a foot pump, and a tire repair kit (I was able to "afford" to pay cash for this through aforementioned creative accounting). I then road the bike from my office downtown to my place in Uptown and timed myself. It took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to go the 7-8 miles from there to here, and that was with two stops to adjust the pressure in the tires and a blustery headwind that probably made the sweltering 30-degree weather feel like the teens. But hey, it beats -30, and my hope is that now that it's March, we're going to avoid extremes like that and I can bike from downtown to home twice a day.

This does a lot of things for me. It'll save me $80 in transit costs a month, get rid of my doctor's shit about my weight (I was 204 at WFC and I'm holding steady now at 206 - 14 miles of bike riding five days a week will likely alter that), and result in me using less insulin. Insulin is fucktastically expensive, and I'll be dropping my basel Lantus insulin from 16 units to 14 a day and subtracting two units of breakfast insulin to start. I started out from downtown with a 156 number (hmmmm cinnamon dolce latte with free Starbucks card!) and an hour after getting home, I was at 68, so it'll kill the hell out of my sugar, which is great.

It's also going to go a long way toward improving my fitness level, which I haven't been happy with since I started getting sick. WisCon is going to mark the one-year anniversery of the whole "suprise, you have a chronic illness!" thing, and after a year of ups and downs and adjustments and craziness and job layoffs and bizarre interpersonal events related to my personal life, it would be nice to be at a place where I felt physically and mentally put back together again. I think I'm moving toward that place. Now that Jenn's been feeling better, I have more time to devout to fixing all of the stuff inside and outside of me that's been broken.

The last couple of weeks I've had a lot of trouble staying focused. It has to do with feeling overwhelmed: whenever I have a moment to myself, I just sort of wander around aimlessly, playing Cossaks, opening up the gaming company module, opening up story files, clicking obsessively on the Stumbleupon button, mentally noting the fact that the bathroom hasn't been cleaned in two weeks and wondering who's going to do something about that, etc.

One of the other good things about the long bikerides is that it's going to give me a lot of time to myself to think things through. At home, I'm spending a lot of mental energy helping Jenn through her rough times with school, and on the train, there are so many people you need to be aware of that you can't totally retreat, and at work, well... at work it's my job to pretend I like people and be friendly, and there's nothing more exhausting for an introvert than to spend all day being nice to people.

Since over five miles of the bike ride is actually along the paved lakefront path, I don't have to worry the whole time about getting hit by a car, and I can sort some things out in my head about what I need to do, how I need to sort through my time, and most of all, how to get myself back into a positive mindset.

You know, the whole power-feminism brutal women mindset.

I had a lot of fun doing all-weather biking in Alaska, and it did a lot for me and my moods, my strength, and getting myself sorted out in the head after a long winter hanging out with less than virtous characters. I came out of that winter and started my summer with bike rides, Clarion, some success at my actual field of study, a decision to go to grad school and leave Alaska, and etc. I had a map that got me closer to what I wanted.

I wouldn't mind having one of those again.

Not the knowing what I want part: rest assured, I know exactly what I want.

It's the map I'm having trouble with.

Without Comment

Interest

The company I work for leases the top ten or twelve floors of a big high rise downtown, and my co-receptionist, Nell, and I receive all of the FedEx, DHL, UPS and messenger deliveries for all ten floors on our floor. We serve as the public reception desk - there's another one on the Executive floor and another on the Legal floor. When we get a delivery, we notify the recipient and they usually come up or down to get it.

Yesterday, one of the women from the Legal department, let's call her Val, stopped by the desk while Nell was away and asked me if I remembered a delivery she'd gotten a week before.

"You know," she said, "the big weird bamboo thing."

"Yea," I said, "I remember that one."

Most people get flowers or balloons or even cookie or candy arrangements, but she'd received a big square vase of living bamboo shoots trained into a sort of umbrella shape. I remember her reading the card and looking puzzled and a little flustered. She actually told us she really didn't want them, and did we want them? Before finally, grudgingly, bringing them upstairs (we have actually had a couple of women refuse deliveries like these from admirers. You'd be surprised)

"Do you remember who delivered it?" Val asked. "I mean, who actually came up here and delivered it?"

"The messenger service," I said. I know the three messengers who work downstairs by name now: Tern, Brett, and Nessa. I once made Brett blush.

"So who are they? They're employed by the building?"

"Yeah. What happens is the messenger services are employed by whatever company sent the gift, and dropped off with the building's service, and then the building's messengers come up here. It's a security thing."

Since 9/11, security downtown has been pretty tight. You have to have a badge to get through the downstairs turnstiles and another badge that allows you access to the inner doors of whatever floor you're on. There's *another* set of doors beyond the reception desks that you have to get buzzed through, as well, in order to access the rooms beyond. I only have a card that's good on my floor and to get passed downstairs security. So I don't have access to any other company floors. If I want to get into them, I have to have somebody who has access to that floor escort me through.

"Good," she said, and she launched into this story about how she was shopping for furniture at Macy's and discussing furniture with one of the salesmen, and she'd casually mentioned that instead of getting something delivered, she'd probably just rent a truck here downtown since she worked at XXX company here at XX South XXX street."

He ended up giving her his card, with, convienently, his home number scrawled on the back.

She didn't think anything of it until a few days later, when this bizarre bamboo tree complete with cheesy poem-of-obvious-interest arrived.

"So there's no way he knows what floor I work on?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "he couldn't have gotten up here."

She was more than a little flustered, and probably overly worried, but you know, when a guy puts his home number on the back of a card, pretty much anybody knows what that means. If she doesn't call you back, it means she's not interested. Sending something to her place of business after one casual conversation, after she *hasn't* called you back... not a great idea.

It was a very strange moment, because I could sympathize with both parties. I'd love to live in a world where sending flowers to a stranger *wasn't* considered an opening move to stalking.

"I've learned my lesson," she said. "I'm never going to be so casual about telling strangers where I work again."

There's this belief that women are totally and absolutely responsible for any assault made against them. They're expected to be constantly alert for psychos, to assume the worst of every nice guy, to guard their behavior closely in case they're mistaken for sluts, for "asking for it," for being too flirty.

And it's a double-edged sword, because if you *are* nice to somebody who turns out to be crazy, then it's your fault if he hacks you up after work cause you were dumb enough to *tell him where you worked* and if you're cool and impersonal toward him you're just some cold frigid man-hating bitch.

More often than not, women who are cool and reserved toward strange men are, in fact, protecting themselves. It's not that we don't want to be nice. I'd love to be nicer to people. But after smiling at guys on the street and having them assume that was some kind of invitation to harrassment or following me home, well, I've learned my lesson too insofar as city living goes.

In conversations with strangers, one of the best ways to establish early on that you're not interested in anything romantic, of course, is to pull the "my boyfriend" card. Jenn used to do this when she worked at a comic book shop full of friendly geeky boys who liked to talk. She loved talking to them - she was just, obviously, never especially interested, so she made up a boyfriend, and made sure so work in a reference to her imaginary boyfriend any time a guy seemed to be getting super friendly (sure, you could make up a girlfriend or tell them about your real girlfriend, I guess, but I there can sometimes be anxiety around outing yourself to strangers because 1) they might give you shittier service/be assholes 2) be even more turned on and pushy at the idea ie "she just needs a good hetero fuck! I'll cure her!" variety). It's a nice way to establish the, "Yes, I like you, but merely in a friendly way!" thing without the guy heading for the hills in embarrassment. The ones who don't back off after this probably aren't the sort you'd want as friends anyway.

It's an interesting dance, and I remember spending a couple of days in the kitchen at work here having lunch with some of the construction guys and Ms. Conner, the janitor, and laughing it up, telling dirty jokes, and generally just having a good time. The problem was, after the second day of that, the recently divorced guy with the type-1 diabetic daughter tried to push that a step further and made a comment about how great it would be if he and I just had casual sex without any strings, and ah, yes, alas, so much for casual joking days in the kitchen. The next time I saw him, I went from friendly to professional, and sadly, I saw him feel the chill, and I was kind of sad about the whole thing, cause we'd had a lot of fun joking around.

Negotiating interest feels like it's one of those invisible privlege things that guys have. If a woman's interested and you blow her off, you're not usually worried about her pulling some psycho shit and stalking you (sure, it happens, but as a society, we don't really train guys to be worried about this sort of behavior). As women, it feels like there's this constant dance around boundaries, around establishing friendliness vs. interest and etc., and if there's any mistake, if a guys *does* go wacko because you turned him down, it's always going to be your fault for not being polite, for not being polite enough, for not mentioning soon enough that you had a boyfriend/girlfriend, for wearing that short skirt, for continuing to even speak in the same space....

Diversions

Speed-reading test. The problem is, you've gotta test for comprehension. It's like asking someone to take a typing test and then not subtracting from their score based on mistakes they make. Hey, I can type 300 words a minute going ASOWHOHD nsdoafnsohf[oweihf aosdjfao sidkjf fajsd pfajsodf!!!

Cheerful hamster for breakfast!

The Speech Accent Archive. English speakers' (native and non-native) accents from around the globe.

Useful phrases. How to say, "Oh my God, there's an ax in my head!" in various lanaguages.

C'mon, you know you wondered.

Well, Fuck

It's snowing again. In March.

The thing is, when I got back to the lower 48 after my two-year stint in Alaska, I got into the habit of assuming that Spring came in... March. This is because in WA State, where I'm originally from, the Spring bulbs spring in... March.

But here in Chicago, Spring does not start until April.

In Alaska, Spring happened in May. By April, I was clawing at the windows waiting for Spring and wondering what the hell all the snow was still doing on the ground, even knowing that yes, indeed, Spring in Fairbanks (AKA: Meltdown) actually happened in May.

I'm always ready for Spring about a month before it's ready for me, no matter where I am.*

* Durban didn't have seasons. It was hot, very hot, or hot and raining.

Solace

When I'm feeling really down about my work, I go to the bookstore downtown or down the street and I stand in front of the SF/F section. Then I open books at random and read the first few lines, the first paragraph.

98% of the time, it makes me feel a lot better.

The rest of the time, I buy the book.

Everybody wins.

My Latest Doctor's Bill

So, I cashed out my 401(K) so I could pay $360 a month for "catastrophic" health insurance, which means they don't pay anything toward any of my medical costs until after I pay $2500 out of pocket. No co-pays, no 50% and certainly no 80% of anything, until I cough $2500 out of my ass this year.

For $1615, I have this dubious form of health insurance through the end of March, which might be real useful if I, like, get hit by a car (knock on wood). Otherwise, basically, I just blew $1615 and gave the government a nice chunk of my retirement savings in the form of taxes.

And I just got my doctor's bill for my January appointment:

Office visit: $90
Comp Metabolic Profile: $50
Hemoglobin A1C: $50
BC/RP DF (no idea what this is): $20

THEN I got the medical bill from the actual LAB that does the work:

Hemoglobin, Glycosylated: $45.50
Comprehen Metabolic Panel: $50

So where am I supposed to get this "extra" $305 when I make $1999 a month and my bills are $1900 a month?

I seriously considered not going to the doctor again until I have health insurance (I mean, REAL insurance), and then I realized that the medical system has insured that I can't do that: I *have to pay someone* to give me my insulin prescriptions.

I have to pay them not only for my meds, but for the privilege of getting the meds that keep me alive.

God bless America.

Details

One of the first things you learn, as a traveler, one of the hardest lessons, is that you always take yourself with you.

This sometimes really sucks.

You default to the best and worst in yourself when you strip everything else away, and you figure out how much of who you are is tied to place and how much of you is something you carry with you, always, the same way you carry your heart, your lungs, your faulty pancreas.

I figured this out in Alaska, when I bought a one way ticket to Fairbanks and decided to start over in a little town at the edge of nowhere. The whole world was wide open, and I believed I could be anyone I wanted to be. I broke a lot of my own rules. I drank too much and ran around with drug addicts and drank home brewed beer and carried around a rifle and collected stories. I biked everywhere, worked out regularly, and said yes to nearly every party invitation. I didn’t want to be a sedentary wallflower anymore. I wanted to build somebody different.

But when things got bad, when somebody’s girlfriend threatened to kill me, when I got brushed off by the guy I was – for some bizarre reason – pursuing, I would default to old ways of dealing with stress. I’d retreat to my room, sleep a lot, eat ice cream sandwiches and yogurt pretzels. I would stop saying yes to invitations. Bruised from all the effort it took to be with people only to get hit over the head, I knew how to retreat, how to protect myself, and I reverted to those ways of comforting myself, though I knew that by reverting to those old habits, it was just a step to the right of reverting to everything else I was, everything I had been and had hated.

I made a lot of headway toward being somebody I wanted to be, in Alaska, but I still spent far too much of my vacation in Juneau sleeping in the hotel room and eating overpriced steak. I learned to love to be alone, and I kept loving people who didn’t care about me, because believe me, loving people who don’t love you is really cozy and safe and totally free of obligations. I built a lot of my own safe spaces, and I’ve spent much of my 20s in a constant state of advance and retreat, advance and retreat, running out of the trenches waving my arms and screaming and then holing up somewhere and sobbing hysterically before the next push.

In South Africa, I played the same sort of game, rushing outside and going to parties and a couple of clubs in an attempt to be extroverted and pretend I was slim and blond and brilliant. Mostly, social interactions left me with a horrible feeling that I had somehow failed. I had failed to be pretty enough, well dressed enough, witty enough, brave enough. I spent most of my time in South Africa drinking Laborie Pinotage and smoking Peter Stuvyesant cigarettes.

I also wrote a thesis and finished a book and was asked to measure my worth in cows.

Thus, it wasn’t all self-immolation, but the undercurrent was there, because when I became fearful, when I was uncertain (which was pretty much my entire time in SA), I retreated back to old modes of behavior, old ways of dealing with stress – sleeping and eating; retreating inward. Being fearful.

When I was under pressure, the fear often won out over my drive to be better, do better, to learn new ways of coping.

I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is to change oneself, to alter these childhood patterns that we learned to keep us safe.

I can learn other ways of behaving; I can even learn to cope differently and consistently apply those new methods. But when everything breaks, when my new lives fail, what I find at core, after I’ve stripped it all down, are those same coping mechanisms that have worked so well for me in the past.

But there are other things I find, too.

When everything else fails me, when people fail me, when my body fails me, there is something else I reach for, something I carry with me just as I carry those bad habits, something that keeps me going when I have nothing and no one else (or feel that way, at least). I push myself back up. I have books to write. Places to see. Things to accomplish. Miles and miles to run before I sleep. I have lists and lists of things I need to be doing, things that I’ll be happy once I’ve done, completed, made steps toward, but I’m never completely satisfied, because the closer I get to these goals, the further out the goals move. I can’t ever die, really, because I have too much to do.

When I sit down and open the book of my life, there are things I want to see there, and those things are huge and big, things you see out there in the stars; I want everything. I want the whole world; I want more than I can hold.

So despite getting knocked down, despite watching myself fall off the wagon during the worst of it, I still reach for those huge things; that big life, the one where I’m tootling around Rome and have a beach house and a couple of other vacation houses and I make a living writing and I take up a whole shelf at the book store and I travel wherever the hell I want, and I am happy and spend time on the beach and I have good friends, good food, good coffee, good conversation. I’m strong, and I’m healthy, and I am surrounded by people I love more than my life.

Sometimes I feel bad that I still want those things, I feel foolish and youthful and I think, “Man, why don’t I just settle into the fact that I’ll be a bitter secretary my whole life!”

And then I remember that the reason I don’t do that is because, well, it’s not true.

That’s not the life I want. It’s not the life I’m going to have. I’ve been presented with a good deal of different lives to choose from in the last decade, and despite several things having been chosen for me (dead pancreas), I’ve chosen the life I wanted wherever possible. I have a very clear idea what I want. I’m down, yeah. I’ve been down before. I’ll be down again. But every time I’ve hit a wall I’ve gotten back up again with a clearer idea of who I am, what I want, what I can do.

Because yea, you know, we all carry these things with us through our travels, through life: we carry the bad things, the broken pancreases, the reversion to red wine and binge eating as a means of getting through a shitty day, but there’s the good stuff, too. There’s the passion. There’s the determination. There’s the blind stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds. There’s the drive. There’s the persistence. Always, the persistence.

I fall and I fall and I fall and I fall…

It’s not a perfect life I’ve lived. I could weave a pretty good story from some of the highlights, but the brutal truth is that the highlights aren’t living. We leave out the drudgery. The getting up everyday, the persistence. We write about the big heroism, the great war, the big book sale, the wedding, the funeral, the birth, the marriage.

But life is about how you lived on turnips and spent long hours reading outdated magazines during the bombing of the city, and the big box of rejection slips in your garage and that night when you got the rejection from Ellen Datlow and cried because it was just the perfect way to top off the perfect shitty fucking day, and it’s how you courted somebody you really thought you should marry but weren’t sure and had nightmares for months that you’d lose them and how you fell all over yourself trying to be too perfect, trying to be just right; it’s how you dealt with the daily quiet grief of death, how you ate your eggs alone every morning afterward with this big hole in your life; and how you make that marriage work during the horrible times when you’re both being assholes and you’re exhausted because there’s no money and everyone in the whole world looks like a better mate than whoever the hell this person is you ended up with, and how you get up every day, after, and how you learn to love them again.

Life is the details. It’s in the lows between the markers where we spend most of our lives. It’s in the imperfect times. The boring times. Those long stretches of desert that not everybody gets through, but that I slog through on my way to the big hills, the grand vistas.

Life is the stuff you blog about.

Strange & Unusual Dictionaries

Including dictionaries of all-vowel words, all-consonant words, and one letter words.

Fuck the Sugar

Note to self: yea, you know, all those complex carbs you know you can't eat anymore but you decided to get all pissed off and eat anyway?

Yea, that's why you had headaches all last week and felt like your feet were going to fall off at night.

A bagel once a week is fine. A bagel followed the next day by some pizza, and the next day by half a muffin and a croissant, and etc... no. No, really, you can't do that anymore.

Nice thought, tho.

Choice

Games, Like Crack

Improve your spacial reasoning skills! Trounce others online!

Make the biggest snowball ever! Trounce others online!

Kill slugs! Pretend to kill other people's slugs!

Ne fume pas! Trounce smokers!

Yeah, it was another great ass-kissing day here in balmy Chicago...

Campbell Award Eligibility

Well, it looks like I'm still eligible for the Campbell award for Best New SF/F writer (2nd year of eligibility) because of the screwy rules regarding when Strange Horizons became a pro market.

For anyone interested in voting, here's the list of eligible nominees.

SO VOTE! No pressure. :)

As usual, I'm a pretty small fish (I mean, Naomi Novik, Justine? Sarah Monette? And then there's Meghan McCarron and Cherie Priest. Yea, right).

Tra la.

Is it Spring Yet?

Really, any time now, folks.

Free Hugs

On Thursday night I was walking home from work downtown when I saw a woman on the corner of Washington and State holding up a Free Hugs sign. I'd already seen the original Free Hugs video on YouTube, so I had a little shot of happiness at seeing somebody out in Chicago doing the same and prepared to step hastily by and get to my train.

But as I passed by and saw her hugging people, my step faltered, and I wanted to turn back.

I really wanted a hug.

Here was this person offering some bit of comfort without requesting anything in return, without obligation, without any power-crazy or twisted ulterior motives (that's the idea, anyway). You don't see that a lot. You don't get unconditional comfort or affection all that often.

It made me wonder if this is what the appeal of prostitution is, that you can pay someone to pretend to care about you for an hour. The difference, in this case, of course, is that Free Hugs are given without the need to receive anything in turn. I'm not shaking hands or giving out blow jobs because I can't pay my rent. It's done out of pure compassion as opposed to desperation/material gain.

And man, did I want to turn around and go back, to the point where I started crying there in the street, because I couldn't believe that it was possible for anyone to give me something without desperately needing something back, without taking something away from me, and I was so, so tired; after the year or two I've had, I felt like I had nothing to give to anyone, and I couldn't turn back and receive that hug because I didn't have anything to give her in return.

So I cried on the way home on the train, and I thought about a world full of free hugs, of compassion without obligation, of being able to give of yourself without fear of having someone try and take it all away.

I would like to live in a world like that, or even a world where I believed that was possible.

One of the best heroines I've come across in a really long time is Nausicaa of comic book fame. She's strong and compassionate and will fight if she needs to, but prefers negotiation and the showing of love and compassion over brute force if possible. I loved the idea that that heroine could exist. The idea of nonviolence and universal love as a means of changing the world is what draws me to stories of people like Ghandi or Jesus or even MLK. I want to believe that love can change the world. I write about bloody, violent, mean people who fight hate with hate; they're the sort of monsters created by societies that use hate against hate, that keep order through strength and submission.

That is not the world I want to live in, and it's not the world I want to believe in. I write about it because it fascinates me, and because I hope that someday, if I can understand it, I can find an alternative to it, one that I really believe in. I don't buy the idea that all we need to do is stand in a circle and put flowers in our hair and dance around saying "I believe in fairies!" (what about health care? Who's going to make insulin? Who's going to do the laundry and build the houses and make great medical breakthroughs if we're all standing around in a circle all day patting each other on the back?), but I know that there's an alternative to all this blood and anger and hate.

Sometimes I feel that what I do with a lot of my writing is take all of the anger and hate and violence that I've absorbed from the world and try and excise it through writing. Otherwise I just turn it inward, and it seethes inside of me and treies to claw itself out, and it chews me to pieces. I'm tired of being full of self-loathing.

I want to be able to let good things in, to appreciate all that good stuff, all those free hugs, without the desperate fear that by letting those things in, by releasing all the fear and anger, I'll become weak and vulnerable.

The only way to learn how to fly is to let everything go. I know that, but the fear of falling, the fear of falling... that's the worst fear of all.

Revolutionaries

The Secret Lives of Secretaries (Blowjob Edition)

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One For the Road

Random Word Generator

When you need just the right word... that doesn't actually exist.

Plotting Failure

Plot should really be a very simple thing.

Something bad happens to someone.

Then things get worse.

I'm pretty good at heaping on trouble, I'm just not sure that in the end, any of it makes any sense. Being a sort of "sit down and see what happens" writer, the whole process of discovery thing when I'm writing a book is great. The horrific result of writing this way, however, is that I spend years rewriting in order to figure out how the plot sticks together.

Character, setting, dialogue: I started out being pretty strong at character, worked real hard at setting, worked my ass off at dialogue, and now I feel competent at all of this. What has continued to elude me is... plot.

Not even "something bad happens. Then things get worse." Oh yes, THINGS GET WORSE. But why? How do I tie all that together and make it resonate?

I just sat down and revised an old story of mine from Clarion, the template character for the one I'm currently writing several books about, and I managed to tie up some of the themes so that when you get to the end you go, "Oh." (Well, *I* went "oh." It has yet to be seen if anyone else will). It's taken me seven years to make this story something more than a "so what?" story.

And that, at core, is I think what my problem is: when I'm not careful, I can write a lot of "so what?" stories. That's all well and good if you're content to go running around a wacky world with fucked up, wacky (often violent) people, but it's not usually until halfway through the story that I either find my point, or... I don't, and I have to trash the story. Then, once you actually find your point (if you do at all), you have to go back and make sure you set all that up at the beginning. If I'm *really* cool I can write forward by constantly looking back at the beginning of the story and trusting that everything I need for the end was totally frontloaded at the beginning by my really kewl subconscious.

Right now, that's sort of how I'm swinging things, but I want to be really good at plot, the nuts and bolts kind, not just the bordering-on-didactic kind. I want all the world's political pieces to come together. I want everybody running on their little plot highways to smack into each other and make the reader go "Oh! Of course!"

Basically, I want to be BRILLIANT.

So I suppose that's nothing new.

Worst. Fight Scene. Ever

Come now, who didn't LOVE this show?

I think Kirk should have just taken his mask off and screamed, "AHA!!!"

I Felt Terrible....

... when I was sick. But I could wear such cute clothes!

Indeed, I am well aware of the fucked-uppedness of that.

"What kept me sane throughout the diet, and stopped me from tipping over the edge and wanting to keep the new skinny self I'd worked so hard to achieve, was the realisation that my life was no better, or more successful, or colourful, when I was thin than before."

The Secret Lives of Secretaries

Yesterday, Nell and I discovered that someone has been stealing the handsoap bottles in the kitchen and in the coffee bar behind our reception desk at work (yes, we have a coffee bar behind the reception desk). Now we're missing a huge jug of Jergens lotion.

We have no idea who's doing this, or why they need that much handsoap. Or that much lotion.

In any case, it's not like it's a big deal. The head guy in the office upstairs made $238 million last year.

It might sound really exciting to have a plasma TV in the reception area you're working in, but believe me, 24 hours of CNN is really mind-numbing when the day's biggest stories are who gets to bury Anna Nicole Smith and Is Britney's Haircut Prelude to a Stint in Rehab? (the answer is yes, apparently). These are the sorts of things no reasonable human being really needs to know. And yet.

I figure if things get real dull we can always spice it up by ordering condoms for the bathrooms and renting out the conference rooms by the hour.

We'll need to order more lotion.

Gendered Writing

Surprise! If you write from a male POV, you must be a male writer, and if you write from a female POV, you must be a female writer.

All hail the gender genie!

I think this would have been more amusing if I didn't peg the whole insert male POV scene followed by "try again" and then insert female POV scene. That was way too predictable.

(via making light)

Call Me Crazy...

... but when I was a kid, I didn't think, "Golly gee, I want to be a professional Executive Assistant!"

And yet, these people exist.

Granted, in downtown Chicago they're making six figures. But really, who would have thunk it?

There are Few Things More Annoying...

... than a 52 number right after you've brushed your teeth.

Dammit.

Man, I Hope I Get That Interview...

... or I'm going to need to get a weekend gig at Starbucks.

"Girlfriend in a Coma, I Know/I Know - It's Serious"*

I have been trying to write up a post about writing and trauma for the last hour, inspired by this post.

I guess I'm still in a bad enough place that I don't feel like I can talk about it. Of course, much of my reluctance is that so much of the current situation would also be talking about the private business of somebody else, and that's not kewl.

So here I am.

Suffice to say that things have not been great for me or my roommate/Clarionmate/formergirlfriend/friend for the last year. There were bad relationships prior to us getting together, professional failures before and after we got together, a bad breakup, subsequent meltdowns, more professional failures, a job layoff, and let's not even get started on the whole, "Surprise you have a chronic illness"/"OMG Kameron's in a coma in the bathroom fucking shit fuck fuck fuck!!" thing. Cause that's some heavy shit to deal with on top of everything else. Or, shit to deal with as a nice appetizer before the meltdown.

We've chosen to deal with our pain and grief in very different ways, and I hope that, just as I'm rebuilding, she will continue to rebuild as well, and in twenty years we'll be better people.

Because, yes, at the end of the day, you do have to go on. If you don't go on, you die. If you choose to dwell in the darkness, it will devour you. You must find a new life outside of that. It's not like you're going to forget the darkness, it's not like it's going to go away, but you can build a place in the sun somewhere, knowing that the sun is all the brighter because you are one of those who knows what it's like in the dark.

I wrote the bulk of GW when I was slowly dying, when my personal relationships were bouncing all over the place just like my sugar numbers, during a time where I wasn't doing a lot of higher level thinking. It was all about this thing, and the next thing, and sleeping, and drinking water, mmmm sweet sweet water....

It's no surprise that when I was done with GW and still recovering from the mess of my life, dealing with a lot of resulting emotional craziness on both ends in this house, that I decided that GW wasn't a book, it was bookS. I didn't want to start my next stand-alone project just yet. I needed to work with this character and this world. I wanted to work through the issues I had to deal with in the life of this bloody, strong, brutally traumatized woman who masked all her weakness with witticism and pretended she was fine when she wasn't, and was, in reality, only alive because of the good graces or serious fuckups of others, and who knew it, but told herself a lot of stories about why that wasn't so, becuase those were the stories she needed to tell herself in order to go on.

And on the one hand, I worry that the GW books will end up being nothing more than Mary Sue-ish books, the sort of cathartic writing we all have to do every once in a while to get through the worst of things. On the other hand, I think they could be some of the best of what writers do: culling all the shit and blood in our own lives, mixing it up with what we've seen and heard and read of others, and making something new and powerful and wonderful out of it, something people can connect with.

That would be great if it happened.

In the meantime, it certainly gets *me* through the day, and believe me, right now, that's a really fucking great thing.

*

Writers' Rooms

Theirs.

And mine: old and new.

Names I've Given My Hardware

I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them - my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it "The Beast" because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).

I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.

When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it "bird" because of it's small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).

When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It's reasonably light, but far from compact, and I've got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.

It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God's War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW's heroine: Nyx.

My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx's female sidekick: Anneke (that's the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).

If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.

Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.

When the Plucky Heroine Stomps Her Foot and Tosses Her Hair, You Know She Means Business

I've been trying to get through Martha Wells's City of Bones for a while now, mainly because it's got a blasted-out desert setting with Old Ruines, bugs, mutants, and pirates, which sounded a lot like GW's world to me, and I wanted to see how somebody else handled that sort of setting.

And yea, you know, the world's cool and all, but it lacks a certain richness, mostly due to the writing style, and, worst offense of all - the characters are completely unlikable. I really don't care if either of them live or die, and they just aren't interesting.

There are great prose writers and great story writers, and if you're great at story or great at prose, I'll read you (I think writers like Catherynne Valente are great at prose, and writers like Stephen King are great at story - I'll read both, but for different reasons, and I'll get different things out of them), but great story means I need to enjoy reading about the characters. I want to be invested. It's not that they have to be likable: they just have to interesting.

Though SF/F has come a long way with it's female characters, they tend to suffer a similiar fate shared by their male counterparts, which is that they end up getting two or three character traits assigned to them, and in the same way a bad actor starts raising their voice during a particularly emotional scene as if to say "LOOK AT ME, I'M ACTING!!!!" these characters display their formulaic template of "plucky heroine" traits: stomp their feet, clench their fists, tug their braids, and then verbally spar with the Brooding Hero who doesn't get laid because he's "misunderstood," and then we move on.

The thing with this sort of set up - plucky heroine & brooding hero - is that that template *can work.* And when it *does* work - when it's done well - you can create characters people really love (Mal & Inara of Firefly, Alanna & her Thief King in the Alanna books, that Kushiel's Dart chick and the brooding celibate warrior guy in the first of the Kushiel books, etc); you know, the sort of characters people like to write slash fiction about. heh heh

The problem is when people get lazy, and they reach for that "plucky heroine" template and just scribble somebody in, like this Elen character in City of Bones. When she's feeling strong emotion, when we're given a scene meant to illustrate how Plucky & Independent she is, she does one of those clench-my-fists-and-stomp-my-foot things that I find really annoying. You see the same problem with Nynaveave in the Jordan books. When she feels particularly plucky, she'll tug her braid and stomp her foot, and then you know she means business! (this is amusing the first couple of times in book one. By book six, you want her to die quickly and suddenly; you hope a tree will fall on her).

I wonder how much of this is just plain cardboard character writing and how much of it is just seeing a lot of people rush to write Strong, Plucky Heroines without really knowing how to do that because most mainstream literature was about Brooding Male Heroes. The template you *did* drawn from that had strong female characters was romance, and I'm wondering how many of those Plucky Space Opera Heroines were originally conceived as pure Romance heroines.

So you end up with these women characters who may be smart and spunky, but they're pretty childish and vulnerable, too (again, how much of this is just poor and/or lazy writing?). After all, if she was *too* capable, and governed her emotions a little more diplomatically, then she wouldn't *really* be a female character, she'd just be a Guy in Drag.

I guess I've just never bought the idea that a fully realized female character who didn't act like a fourteen year old at thirty-five was "a guy in drag."

The Mounting Cost of Living

I received a bill in the mail today for $1617.73.

This is the amount of money I owe to COBRA if I'd like to have continuing medical coverage through March. I have paid $360 of that, which leaves me to come up with roughly $1250 by March 10th or forfeit my ability to be insured through COBRA.

I am currently making $15 an hour as a temp receptionist in the wake of my December layoff, which is a pay cut of about $4 an hour and another, what, missing $400 a year in matching 401(K) benefits. The layoff also meant the dissolution of my high-deductible-though-free (yes, free) health insurance, which is what kept me from going bankrupt when I spent four days in the ICU in May.

All those medical bills and a couple of blown-out computers have left me with roughly 10K in credit card debt (I was bemoaning the fact that I owned nearly 3K about this time last year. Oh, what I'd give to owe 3K!), which I'm paying off, minimum payment a month, $200. Rent and utilities are $750 a month. Medical supplies are $100-150. Gym fee is $109. Student loans are a whopping $300. I've gotten groceries down to $70 a week when I'm playing it lean. Transit costs are $90 a month.

I can almost make it with these bills at $15 an hour, cause I can clear nearly 2K a month, and bills above add up to $1900. Every three months, my endocrinologist charges me $95 for a 20-minute check up, so yea, those are tight numbers. Real tight. But I could almost make it.

What this slim little budget fails to provide for, of course, is that $360 a month in health insurance.

I try to keep my spirits, up, yo, but it's math like this that makes me "grimly optimistic" instead of, you know, optimistic.

It's also why I'm not a math major.

Numbers are cold, cold things.

Sometimes, just in order to get yourself going forward, to not give up, to stay resolute, you have to just say "Fuck it."

I don't think a lot about how I'll get through all this. I just get through it. I think, sometimes, that if I stopped and thought about it, I might not be able to get up again.

Close your eyes and leap.