The Protagonist Gets a Tree

Happy Holidays!

(and thanks to Stephanie, our wingman, for all the great photos!)

Happy Thanksgiving

NOM NOM NOM

Quote of the Evening

"I don't want to survive. I want to LIVE."
- The Captain, WALL-E

Thankful

I have a good many things to be thankful for, but it really hit home today as I was browsing through these blog archives.

The last five years have been nothing short of... harrowing? Amazing? Harrowing and amazing, perhaps. In any case, it's made me even more incredibly thankful for where I'm at right now. 2006/2007 is a particularly bitter and amazing year of archives. When you read about just how bad things had gotten, it's nothing short of a bloody fucking miracle that I'm where I'm at now.

I'm awestruck at how things have turned out.

Thanks to all the regular readers who have shared this incredibly weird, rocky, wild ride. And thanks for sticking with me as the beat goes on.

Here's to another (hopefully less harrowing) five years...





























Remember, as I oft-repeated at the end of every blog post:

"Tomorrow will be better."

Branded: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

New guest blog post up at Ecstatic Days: Branded: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

HealthCare Concerns

Is anyone else really concerned that the latest "health screening reversals" have targeted women? See mammograms, and pelvic exams. I have yet to see the "let's stop screening men for prostate cancer" and "forget the colonoscopies" announcement.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Short animation based on the Ray Bradbury story of the same name.

In Case There Was Any Doubt About Who's Creating Your Media...

... and why it's still assumed that every audience member is straight, white, upper-middle class, and male.

WGA report examining employment and earnings trends for writers in the Hollywood industry:

2009 Executive Summary (.pdf)
2009 Hollywood Writers Report (.pdf)

(via deadbrowalking)

Book Rejection Bingo

In conversation, a writing buddy of mine expressed interest in tracking down a "book rejection BINGO" card. I'm startled to say that, after much searching, I failed to find one.

So.... I made one!

Quote of the Day

"Don't worry about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'
- anon

100 Words

New guest blog post over at Ecstatic Days, 100 Words.

Your Daily Dose of Privilege

How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men

Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced

And for the record, yes, I do risk assessments all the time. If you're born female, you learn how to do this from the time you're very small. A woman would have to live in the absolute bread basket of rich, white, young, and gated suburbian privilege to not do a threat assessment every time she walks down the street (in fact, I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't do a threat assessment every time a strange man talks to her).

We grow up with stories about how it's our duty to protect ourselves from being raped, attacked, abused, murdered, and mutilated. And we hear stories all the time of female friends and family members who've been abused and harassed by men - sometimes strangers and sometimes men they love. It's pretty clear from the culture at large that nobody else is going to "save" us from institutionalized male aggression. I'm surprised that more male commenters on the Schrodinger post didn't seem to realize that. That's privilege, I guess.

Why do you think I took up boxing in Chicago? Do you have any idea how much women in get harassed on the street, trains, and buses, particularly in big cities? I'd say, at least twice a week I had some guy yelling something at me in Chicago, making inappropriate or uninvited comments, or otherwise trying to strike up unwanted conversation.

"Fuck off," works very, very well. Yes, you feel like a steely bitch for saying it. But men generally accept "fuck off" a lot more often than the nervous smiles we've been trained to give them. They may yell back at you, but they do fuck off. The polite, nervous "no"s never work.

It's hard to rework your training, and I hate that so much of the "fuck off" thing has to rely on women re-training themselves. This is why posts like the above are so important. Changing the culture of male aggression means changing the way men interact with women, not just the way we respond. If you're going to change anything, it takes concerted effort on both sides, not just boxing lessons and foul language from potential victims.

And, you know, I'll take foul language and good right hook over that terrified nervous rabbit feeling I get when I'm trying to be polite to some stranger who thinks that because I'm a woman he has the right to poke at me.

This doesn't happen as much to guys because 1) they're seen as people 2) they're seen as people who will kick the shit out of you if you keep fucking with them.

I can't do much to change #1, but I can take some action on #2.

Dollhouse

Oh, thank God.

YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.

Whedon is wasting his time on this one. Think of the incredible shows he could be creating RIGHT NOW but hasn't been for the last year and a half because he's been hip-deep in this piece of crap.

You can love two or three series from a writer, and hate their third. It's okay. It's allowed. Sometimes writers fail. It happens. I would have much rather he was attempting something great, like Firefly, than this piece of crap.

Moving on.

Recommended: Heart of Veridon

I picked up Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers, quite by accident. I was actually looking for Graceling and something by somebody named Connelly. I couldn’t find the Connelly and once I picked up Graceling, the prose on the first few pages was just so dull I couldn’t get myself to buy it.

Veridon was sitting on the shelf with the cover facing outward, and who isn’t going to pick up a book with a rotting, menacing, mechanical angel on the cover?

So I did. Read a few paragraphs.

It only takes a few paragraphs to know whether or not a writer actually knows how to write. It only takes a few sentences to figure out if they’re writing the type of story you’re interested in.

I didn't even get to the end of the first page. I bought the book.

This is an incredibly good read. It has its flaws – which I’ll go into later – but man, what a read! This is an incredible, creepy, messed up little Victorian/noir/steampunk/bug tech world full of massively screwed up people.

I loved it.

Way more readable than anything by Mieville, and far more boneshaking than Boneshaker (which has, alas, been consigned to the bottom of my reading pile after I discovered there's very little in this book that's shaking my bones, 70+ pages in).

In Heart of Veridon, our protagonist is Jacob Burn, an outcast “noble” with a bum reconstituted Pilot’s engine in his chest that once allowed him to fly zepliners. It's basically a steampunk version of hooking into a spaceship and becoming one with it in order to fly it. After getting cast out by his family, Jacob’s been doing odd jobs for a shady crime boss named Valentine, which has led him on board the particular zepliner, Glory of Days, which we find ourselves on in the beginning of the book.

Suffice to say, Glory of Days doesn’t quite make it back into Veridon, the city at the heart of this novel. It’s hijacked by an unknown group or groups of people who go ravaging through the ship. With his dying breath, an old acquaintance of Jacob’s who he bumped into on the ship hands him a mysterious Cog – basically a religious relict in this world – and tells him to bring it back to the city.

Then, more chaos. Shooting. Blood. Crashing.

Mmmm mmmmm.

It’s a fantastic novel opener, and things just keep going. I love the worldbuilding in this book, and the religions are… beautiful. I have never seen gods and religions done with just this right blend of sadness and creepy.You see, there are things in the world of Veridon that its residents did not and do not understand. Things that we, the reader, still don’t understand, and so they worship them. They create entire temples around them. It’s the first time I’ve convincingly seen gods created out of what are, quite possibly, advanced/aging races and/or their relics. What I love about this is that is speaks so… poignantly about the human need to make sense from nonsense, to control what they don’t understand and completely botch it in the process, and to worship what we fear in order to feel that we have some control over it.

Now, I have a lot of love for this book – I stayed up late last night to finish it, and it only took me a couple days to read because I was picking it up whenever I had a spare moment – but it does have its flaws.

The female lead carries a sword and a shotgun at one point. She’s tough as nails, full of secrets, and has no qualms being a whore, to boot - and I was desperately hoping Akers would pull an Ever After at the end of this one and she wouldn’t need any saving. But, well. There are two more female characters – both tough, calculating, and vindictive. Neither has a great end. I was secretly hoping that one of them would break free and just torch the whole fucking city. You’ll know which one when you read it.

Bah. This was more than a little disappointing. On the one hand, bad things happen to pretty much everybody in the book. On the other hand, there aren’t a whole lot of female background characters, so these were the only ones I had to root for, and they were pretty badly treated there at the end. That said: they were certainly cool enough to root for, and disappointing as the ending was in that regard, I appreciated a book that gave me a full cast of fleshed out characters.

There were a couple of annoying structural flaws. The first was that Jacob keeps repeating what’s just happened to him to characters not in the know. We have to sit through his version of events every time he fills somebody in on them. It got old, even when it was over in just a couple paragraphs. A one line, “I filled him in on what happened,” would have been fine. Overall, folks sat around and talked a little too much (as a writer, I felt I recognized this is as the writerly, "Holy shit, a lot of shit just happened. I'll have my characters sit around and figure the plot out while I take a breather."), and there at the end, the bad guys were actually *inviting* Jacob to ask them why they did what they did, you know, so they could exposit their reasons for being so bad. It was the classic bad guy monologue. It was a little silly.

Finally, there’s Jacob’s motives. There at the end, I was just like, “Dude, give up already! Give him the relic and have him destroy the fucking city!” (OK, yes, I may have been on the side of the chick who wanted to burn the city to the ground. But if I’d been fucked over so much by this city, it’s what I’d want too. I was totally on her side. It’s a creepy city). Jacob’s motivation for wanting to save the city was… strangely absent. I kept looking at what people had done to him, how much he’d been screwed over, how toxic and creepy the place was, and I just couldn’t figure out why he kept going when any reasonable person who have stopped (especially at the end, when he’s fighting this crazy rotting mechanical angel in a scene that, oddly, put me in mind of the end battle between Deckard and Roy in Bladerunner).

Overall, the characters were put together very well. Everybody had their own secrets and motives – many of which weren’t even totally revealed at the end. They were complex characters. I remember being struck, in the beginning, at how Jacob’s voice would weave between street tough and educated nobility. It really did that. I initially thought this was a clunky first-time novelist mistake, until I realized that, in fact, the character had been raised a noble and simply spent the five or so years in exile as a street tough. The strange voice changes made a lot more sense.

In fact, some of what makes this book such a good page turner is that Jacob is incredibly unpredictable. At one point, when the calvary comes in toward the end of the book, he refuses their help. Yes. Refuses. He gets out and the book goes on and you’re like, “What the hell? That was a comfortable trope you just totally stomped on!”

He makes a lot of mistakes. Mistakes that get people killed and get him into deeper trouble. He’s not a hero, he’s tragically human, and tragically flawed, and it shows every step of the way. I like flawed heroes. Jacob is a good one.

In any case, this is a wonderfully wild ride. Rotting angels, fish people, half-mechanical people, bizarre alien gods, steampunk tech, bug tech, shotguns, outcasts, folks coming back from the dead, folks who can’t die, crazy mods, zepliners, chicks with swords (or, at least, a large knife), and lots of gunfights and backstabbing and double-crosses.

What’s not to like?

Did I mention there’s a chick with a shotgun? And a totally rotting half-mechanical angel on the cover?

Good.

Prince of Persia

Sooo.... let me get this straight. You had folks like this chick and this guy to carry this movie:




And YOU CHOSE this guy and this chick?




I'm sorry, what planet are you living on, Hollywood? Because it's not the same planet I'm living on.

Also, it looks like a terrible movie.

Sunshine

This was not a bad movie.

No, really!

I’m a sucker for psychological horror in spaaaaaaace and this was a prime example of that. It’s not a great movie, but it was... entertaining. This may have been because I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from it.

The conceit behind Sunshine is ridiculous, of course. If you’re watching a movie for SCIENCE you should probably just… stop. The premise is, hey, the sun is dying! Humanity launches a manned spaceflight to save it! By launching some sort of superior nuclear physics-thing bomb into the sun!

Really!

This is why it took me so long to see this movie. How utterly stupid, right? I haven’t seen The Core either, and I was leery of this damn thing turning into the ridiculous gore-fest that was Event Horizon. I’ll take crappy science over crappy, nonsensical gore any day (I found Sunshine far creepier than Event Horizon, actually. It's all about what you don't know and what you don't see. The more gore, the more ridiculous the movie, for me. I prefer subtlety).

But, see, Sunshine had what a lot of crappy-science movies don’t have: an excellent cast, great effects, tight and suspenseful direction, AMAZING soundtrack, and wonderfully creepy shenanigans. All that… in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace.

And who doesn’t love adventures in space?

The cast included Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh, which gives you an idea of how seriously (B+/A- movie actor seriously) the cast took it movie. And trust me, that helps. It reminded me a lot of alien in that way – you put a strong cast and creepy direction into a lost in space movie, and you can carry it a long way.

The cast was reasonably diverse, split pretty evenly between white and Asian characters (tho at the end of the day, it was still white guys saving the world and fighting each other. The captain, psychologist, and navigation guys all check out pretty early. And the female characters only seemed to make it so far into the movie so somebody could be menaced at the end – would have preferred it was the navigation chick who got frozen to death trying to save the ship instead of held off til the end so she would go down with the male lead, but - you win some, you lose some).

Overall, it was a well-paced movie right up until those last 10-15 minutes, when things got weird. And yes, in case you’re wondering, in a movie about a group of people who are *restarting the sun* there are a LOT of moments where you just have to let them handwave-handwave their way out of things. Like how the fuck is he hanging onto the ass-end of a spaceship whose rockets just went off must be ignored… and there are lots of cut-aways of even more improbable scenes like how he then opened up the airlock and crawled inside while the rocket boosters are STILL GOING OFF (and let's not get started with the whole "oxygen garden" business, or the space walking suits, or the ridiculous observation window).

But if you liked Pitch Black, I think you’ll like Sunshine. Good cast and a lot of fun so long as you don’t think about it too much. I rate it slightly better than Babylon A.D., mainly because the ending to that fucking movie was about on par with Padme’s “lost the will to live” bullshit. I will make many allowances for my SF popcorn, but empty vessel female characters are not one of them.

God's War Update

Guest post over at Ecstatic Days about Surviving the Book Contract that Wasn't.

I am not pleased

NOT PLEASED AT ALL.

Maine, Or, the Legacy of Why We Don't Vote on Human Rights Issues

"Someone in power is finally going to state the obvious truth that gay marriage is absolutely necessary, and they're not going to put it up for a vote, because that's not what you do with basic human rights. You don't let six wolves and four sheep vote on what to have for dinner (or in this case, what, fifty-two wolves and forty-eight sheep?).

The National Guard will stand outside the courthouses and force you to grow the hell up, and you will be remembered in history like those sad ugly white people yelling at the black kids coming to class.

And this isn't the fifties. This is the twenty-first century. Your bisexual grandkids will still be able to Google your sorry ass and see that you were a spiteful hateful closeminded bigot. They'll have your lying ads, annotated with footnotes showing how you knew you were lying at the time. They'll have your ugly homophobic comments and your hate-filled fake news reports captured in crystal clarity on whatever magical Internet++ they're using decades from now. And they're going to be ashamed of you.

All you've done -- all you've accomplished with your lies and hate and fearmongering -- is to delay the inevitable. In the next few years, every widow who loses her home because she "wasn't really married" to her life partner, and the life partner's kids have a good lawyer? Every man who dies scared and alone because the man who should have been his husband wasn't allowed to be at his bedside? Every not-spouse who dies because of not-health-coverage, coverage they would have gotten were they married? Every one of those things that happens between now and whenever the National Guard puts a little learnin' on you? That's on you.

That's your legacy.

(read the rest)

Heart of Veridon

Picked this one up on a whim at Books & co today while I was looking for something else (ended up passing on the other one and got this and Best Served Cold instead).

Folks, I may be in love. I'm 30 pages in and really hoping he doesn't screw it up.

Proper review when I finish, but the guy sure knows how to take you on a bloody, weird, wild ride.

If chicks with swords show up later, I'll have no complaints!

Why is it...

... that so many "lit" stories are about 1) whiny emo college students 2) whiny sub-par college professors?

I wonder, indeed.

Insurance is Officially Back Up

And not a fucking moment too soon. I have $2500 worth of pods that should have been in the mail last week.

The delay means I'll be on shots from tonight until at least tomorrow when/if the shipment arrives. They've been holding it since Monday, likely waiting for the fucking payment to process. Not looking forward to a whole weekend of shots, so let's hope the shipment arrives tomorrow, shall we?

Two Girls -UPDATED

A first pass at video creation with Windows Movie Maker. Cinematic art it ain't, but it looks like if you can navigate PowerPoint 7, you can navigate Movie Maker. This is a pretty hack job I did in a few hours. I'll be interested to see how I can improve things as I figure out what the hell I'm doing. Some of the transitions are still running a little fast.

Video is based on the unpublished short, Two Girls (I wanted to start with a story I didn't mind messing up). View below or go directly to my my YouTube channel.

Website address at the end is still, obviously, not live, but I've started adding it to things in anticipation of the day.



I'm still not sure if giving me these sorts of tools is a good idea or not...

First, they come for...

"I was Jewish. There was no doubt in my mind (what would happen). I left in 34. Hilter had taken over in 33. A girl... and a physicist... and Jewish. Well, that's a combination that had no chance! (laughs) That was clear."

-Hilde Levi, refugee physicist from Nazi Germany (from here)

The Power of Books

(more here)

Mantisland

You know you want to check out the rest....

Exquisite photos. I may be ordering some prints (now that I may no longer be dirt desperate uninsured poor!) if I can figure out how.

Light At the End of the Tunnel

There appears to be some light at the end of the health insurance tunnel, which is good cause today was the day I was going to drop $1154 on health care premiums through Sinclair.

I was able to place my pod order without a problem (!! really !!), and tho our account still shows up as "inactive," I'm told that doctors are taking and processing the claims, which will be back up to date by the time anything we do this week actually gets processed, so at least we don't have to pay out of pocket at the hospital or get turned away.

Still paying out of pocket for prescriptions, but that wasn't my urgent concern. The terror and sleepless nights were in trying to figure out how to come up with $1100 for my pump supplies and $3,000 for J's twice-yearly post-cancer scan (which he was due to have last week).

We are both a lot less hysterical now, and should hopefully be sleeping a lot better. Man, what a nightmare. It's not quite over, but it's a fuck of a lot less urgent. It's like the difference between wondering how you'll survive and just wondering how many nights a week you'll be eating ramen.

Oh, there was some other good news today, too.

As J said, "IT'S LIKE CHRISTMAS!"

Women in the Fight

Images of Women in WWII.

(via Elizabeth Bear)

The Autumn Feast!

Full set here. Here's what we cooked:

Ranch Style Chicken
Sweet-Roasted Rosemary Acorn Squash Wedges
Spicy Pumpkin Soup

Maple syrup substitute for the pumpkin soup and acorn squash consisted of Splenda mixed with no-carb maple "syrup" substitute. Honey called for in the ranch style chicken was substituted with no-carb maple "syrup" (and turned out very well!).

Booklife

So, I'm, like, a writer fighting to get my first book into stores. At least into Kindles? Published would be great. It's been languishing, but hopefully that'll change soonish.

Anyway, I'm also an introvert. I write books. I don't market them. I'm an introvert by nature... it's one of the reasons I became a writer. One of the toughest things for introverted writers to negotiate has always been the marketing of their books, and with the rise of ever more "social" and viral ways to market books, the landscape has gotten tougher to manage. Most of the time, I feel little overwhelmed.

I'm often caught in this weird place where people tell me I share too much, or too little, or don't engage enough, or engage too much. And you know, all I want to do is write. I can write here or plunk away in cool silence in this big 1890s house, but at some point, if you want anybody to read anything you write, you need to crawl out of the house and back into the world.

Booklife came to me at just the right time. I'd sold a book, had it get caught in limbo, and was happily cocooning in my real life. Trouble is there are two big parts to The Writing Life. There's the writing, and there's the marketing. There's the interacting with the world, and there's creating worlds. Today, it often feels like I can do one or the other but not both at once. And... well, let's say that interacting with the world makes me tired. I'm in marketing at the day job, and that means people and politics and social media all day. It's the last thing I want to do when I come home.

I enjoyed Booklife because I got to see how another writer negotiated the writing vs. marketing portions of life. Because let me tell you - it often feels like they're directly opposing forces. He gives some great strategies on how to move from writing to marketing mode and leverage social media tools. Yes, the tools he talks about may be obsolete soon, but the rules of social media (thus far) are pretty portable across mediums.

For me, it was the right book at the right time. How do you interact with the world without exhausting yourself? How do you withdraw enough that you can be creative but not lose momentum with your social media audience? It's a tough negotiation that I'm right smack in the middle of right now, and seeing how VanderMeer is negotiating his own booklife was... comforting? I want to know it can be done. That I can build a writing career and still have some part of my life that's still mine. I need enough left to create something.

Because I've spent a year being battered around by publishing woes, and I'm far too young and unpublished to become a bitter midlister just yet.

The Irrational Politics of Web 2.0

ME: One of the folks I know is dating one of my exes! And she unfriended me on LJ!

J: Well, yanno, that’s what happens when you start dating someone. You have to unfriend all their exes on the LJ, honey. It's, like, a rule or something.

ME: But!

J: It's a RULE.

ME: But!!!

J: When was the last time you talked to this person?

ME: Well… um. I haven’t been going to cons, really, which is where everyone is… and, um, OK, I don’t comment much on the blogs anymore, and um…. I sort of dropped off the face of the writing earth last year. But!! I do LIKE her!! Now she will NEVER TALK TO ME AGAIN.

J: I think you will be OK.

ME: So I guess I shouldn’t friend her on Facebook?

J: Probably not.

This is the trouble with web 2.0. Sometimes it makes you feel just like you did in high school, and the feelings are just as ridiculously irrational.

Particularly because I’m terribly happy for both of them.

Scurvy Dogs (happy Friday)

This is Not My Beautiful Life...

I first noticed this phenomenon in the photos of folks I have on my Yahoo IM chat list. More often than not, women with young children would use the photo of their children as their avatar photo. The first couple times, you figure, hey, they're just really proud of their kids. Then I saw my mom use a photo of my neice and nephew as her user pic on Facebook and I thought... huh?

On the one hand, as the author points out, it's almost refreshing to see a focus other than me-me-me on traditionally me-centric social media sites. On the other hand... um? I'm proud of a good many things in my life, and no doubt if I ever have a child, I'll be proud of them too, but why use the photo as a stand in for... me?

There are plenty of photos of folks with their best friends, mothers *with* their kids, fathers with their kids, and of course, whole families together that sit in as user pics. So it's not like this is as huge a trend as the author points out. But it does come up often enough for me to go "hm," too. I haven't seen any fathers use pics of their children as their user photo, for instance. But I may just not be looking, or I don't note them as much when I see them?

I wonder if it's a mix of pride and guilt? Are you more likely to see working mothers using photos of their kids as avatars? I don't buy that it's about creating anonymity, as there are plenty of folks who just use objects/random scenery shots to hide behind. Is it really a flight from aging, like the author suggests? I don't buy into that so much. I'd be interested to find the commonalities and differences among men and women alike (because there must be some guy, somewhere) who use their children's photos for their social media pics.

I'd be interested, for instance, if it's more likely working moms or stay at home moms who do it. Or is there a class distinction? Is it really an age difference? Do over-30s just view the web differently, and shy away from its me-centric nature more than 20-somethings? Or has our culture really shifted... now that we all have less children, we invest more in them... and more of ourselves in them, and carry them close the same way we would anything else we'd invested so much of our youth in?

Children have always been a source of pride. I just can't ever see my grandmother posting a photo of her children as her user pic, if I could ever get her to join FB...

Batten Down the Hatches

I've spent some time tightening up our budget this week, which is rough to say the least. Monday morning I'll be sending J. in to Sinclair community college with a credit card authorization giving UHC $1145 to cover the two of us through J's account since they're no longer honoring my work account.

As noted elsewhere, I can't go more than 60 days without coverage, and tho once this whole debacle is sorted out they'll retroactively cover me for the gap... well, let's just say I don't want any paperwork in exsitence anywhere that says I went more than 60 days without coverage. I have to live my whole life as a t1, and trust me - insurance companies will find every crazy way possible to shunt the most expensive folks from their ranks. And I'm one of them. And tho I could fight them when they pulled out that "no coverage since Sep 1st" letter... it would take 6 months to sort out, and I would be fighting it my whole life. Every time I changed insurance providers or J. or I had a big medical bill, they'd root through our account. We'd never escape it.

So Monday morning we're out $1154. It's an 80/20 plan, so we've started stuffing money toward paying for expenses. He's got an MRI every 6 months that runs $3,000. My drugs, if I drop my pump and get real lean, may "only" run $350 if I'm careful. Add that to regular endo appointments for me and port flushes for him (J.'s a cancer survivor. There's another year of follow-up before he's insurable again outside a major employer-sponsored group plan), and we're looking at about $11-12,000 a year in bare bones medical expenses. You figure we'll need to come up with, what, $2400-3000 of that out of pocket in addition to the $1145.

Hopefully we'll only be out coverage for 3-6 months. So let's say $1500 out of pocket over the next 3 months in addition to the $1145.

That's an extra $500 a month we need to pull from thin air (not counting the $1145, which is going on the credit card I had nearly paid off).

Sorry this has become the "all shitty health insurance, all the time blog," the last couple of weeks, but these issues weigh pretty heavily on me, and getting all the facts and numbers down on paper actually helps me cope and process the whole thing.

I've shaved about $150 from the budget right now by tossing out netflix and severely cutting our "misc./fun" budget from $200 a month to $100 a month (we already live pretty lean. You don't go from having $17,000 in credit card debt to $2,800 in 3 years if you aren't already living lean). We'll be making up the rest by paying a little less toward that fucking credit card bill (did I mention I was just $2,800 and 5 months away from paying it off completely?), and relying on J's new part-time job. I'm also working on hunting down a few freelance gigs. One of the roughest things going on right now is that my student loans have come due this month. That was fine when the credit card was going to be paid off. Now I have to juggle those with the CC payments and medical costs.

We'll make it through this. But it doesn't make me any happier about it. The most frustrating part is that it's totally out of my hands. At least when UHC was only fucking *me* over, I had some control over it. I could spend hours and hours yelling at them and get the issue resolved. Now I'm totally powerless to do anything but pay for a second policy. That's incredibly, brutally frustrating. Because ya'll know me: I'm a fighter. I fight to the end. Being on the passive end of this whole fiasco drives me crazy.

So, I'm doing what I can. Cutting back, paying bills, eating a lot of soup and beanless chili... Recipes to come! Because when it looks like everything is crap, it's good to remember that you can still afford to eat. And with how rough it is out there right now, that's nothing to sniff at.

Happy 80th to Le Guin

Happy 80th birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Here's to many more! (and many more books!)

Pathfinder

This was not the movie I wanted to see. See, I wanted somebody to take the opportunity to tell the story about complex, fully developed Native American societies whoopin some Viking ass.

Instead, it's just another cliched ramble about "noble savages" getting saved by The Great White Hope.

It was like watching 10,000 BC... in Saskatchewan.

What Would...

OmniPod Upgrade: Solo Patch

Slimmer than my current pod... but the big bonus - as you can see on some of the later pictures - is that the default medical adhesive is (WAIT FOR IT!!): hypafix.

Watch the video demo here.

Smart. Smart. Smart. Smart. "Hey, let's make our *default* medical adhesive the one that folks *won't develop a medical adhesive allergy to*!"

Yes. Let's!

These aren't yet for sale (and battling to get insurance to cover them... let's not get into that), but it's fun to see the tech improving for insulin pumps. Looks like there will be a huge cost savings, as the base is replaced every 3 MONTHS instead of every 3 days (the plastic interior is replaced every 3 days with the Solo, but should cost less than replacing the whole mechanism, like you do with the omipod now, every 3 days). Another awesome feature: being able to bolus even without the remote.

And I can get a remote in red!

Love it. Love it. Love it.

I just ordered a demo kit.

Welcome Back to the Ranks of the Uninsured

Last Saturday, I was alerted that UHC had dropped my insurance coverage due to an "administrative" error. I had been completely uninsured since October 1st.

Now, I have dealt with a lot of “administrative” errors at United Healthcare. Every three months, I spend about 6 hours over three days on the phone screaming at customer service reps, their supervisors, rapid resolution managers, *their* supervisors, customer care coordinators, benefit coordinators, and (when you finally reach somebody with any weight in the hierarchy), the actual medical “advisors” who approve and deny my actual claims.

You learn the buzzwords. “Attorney general.” “Lawyer.” “Sue.” “Medical necessity.” “Death.” And, “Gross negligence.”

And in about three days, you get shipped the medical hardware they approved for you a year before.

Yes, I go through this every time I need my medical hardware. But it does get covered. You know, eventually.

Folks who have yet to experience a major medical issue are often ignorant of how insurance companies actually work. They are also largely ignorant of what happens when you get a major illness like any form of cancer, diabetes (including juvenile, the immune disorder that I’ve got),lupus, CFS, or any of the long list of over 30 “uninsurable” medical conditions that – as my shorthand name implies – means that you are completely uninsurable outside a major employer group plan… for life.

Let me say that again:

If you get a chronic illness and/or cancer, any form of cancer, you are TOTALLY UNINSURABLE for at least 24 months. And in the case of certain cancers like leukemia, you are uninsured FOR LIFE outside of an large employer-sponsored plan (so long as you go less than 60 days without coverage. More about that later).

If your employer drops you for any reason – because you’re laid off, because they don’t pay their bill, because of an “administrative” error – you have just 60 days to find major medical coverage through another company, or you will be totally uninsurable for 12-24 months EVEN UNDER AN EMPLOYER SPONSORED PLAN. That’s right: 60 days without coverage and I will have to wait 12-24 months to get insurance covered for the insulin that keeps me breathing. After 60 days, insulin becomes part of me “pre-existing condition” and will not be covered – EVEN UNDER A MAJOR EMPLOYER SPONSORED PLAN – for 12-24 months.

If I bare bones my medical costs, I’m out about $300-$500 a month. Right now, I’m out about $8,000 a year in medical costs with the pump. If I go back to shots and get a cheaper, crappy testing meter (testing strips alone run me $180-$250 a month), I can winnow that down to that $300-$500 range.

And that’s JUST TO STAY ALIVE.

That doesn’t include any preventative care. I’d have to drop my 4x yearly endocrinologist visits, gyno care, urgency care visits for antibiotics, etc. That $300-$500 covers the costs of keeping me breathing.

That’s why I include health insurance benefits in my salary negotiations. If I have a comprehensive plan, I can put up with being paid a little bit less.

But when you drop my insurance… you’ve effectively cut my monthly salary by over $500.

And when you drop my insurance… the clock starts ticking.

I have been uninsured for 17 days.

I have just 43 days to get comprehensive coverage, or I become uninsurable EVEN UNDER AN EMPLOYER SPONSORED GROUP PLAN.

I have been here before. When I was diagnosed three years ago, I had very cheap health insurance with a very high deductible. But I was "insured." And I was about to find out just how incredibly "lucky" that was.

What “insurance” means is that I was out ONLY $6,500 out of pocket for my 3 days in the ICU instead of $30,000.

That’s what being “insured” means. It means you get forcibly fucked, but not gang raped.

Over the next few months (again, as an insured person), I was still spending $300 a month out of pocket for medical expenses. I had a $2500 deductible and 80/20 plan. I was shelling out a lot of hard earned cash to stay alive. But hey, we all need to pay to stay alive, right?

And I was INSURED.

Six months after being diagnosed, I was laid off.

COBRA was nearly $400 a month. Rent was $550. Utilities were $200. Unemployment was $328 a week.

You do the math.

I was forced to either cash out my 401(k) or become uninsured completely.

I cashed out my 401(k).

I started living on expired insulin and reused my needles. I saw my endo half as much as recommended. I did the bare minimum I had to to stay alive.

When money ran out, I moved in with friends in Dayton. I lived in their spare bedroom rent free. I continued to live on expired insulin. I had trouble paying for food. I went almost 30 days without insurance.

I signed up with my temp company’s health insurance plan. It was cheap, and nearly worthless. It covered NO pre-existing conditions for 12 months. It was completely useless to pay for any of my diabetes drugs or appointments or any hospital stays I may incur that had anything to do with my illness.

But by signing up for it, it insured I didn’t go more than 60 days without coverage and become totally uninsurable under a “real” insurance plan.

By the time I got employed at my current job, I had over $17,000 in credit card debt. Over half of that was related to medical expenses. The other half was composed primarily of moving, traveling, and grocery expenses.

At my new job, I got day one health insurance coverage. I paid $20 for insulin and nothing for syringes. Co-pays were minimal. Costs were suddenly manageable. I could start living on non-expired insulin again. I had fewer crazy lows and started seeing an endocrinologist again. Life improved remarkably.

When we switched plans to a no-deductible plan, my health insurance costs went down to basically nothing. I now pay just $50 a month for coverage for J. and I.
It sounds too good to be true…

And, of course, that’s because it sometimes... is.

I spent the first 6 months of the new plan arguing with UHC because my account had some kind of “administrative” error that required me to pay the $1,000 deductible out of pocket instead of through the company HRA. Six months this went on. Six months. After six months, they finally “reimbursed” me for the $1,000 out of pocket.

OK. Fine.

Then came the whole fiasco with trying to get my insulin pump approved. It took a year of Insulet fighting with my insurance company before they got approval. Then once they had approval, the paperwork was filed incorrectly. We fought for weeks over that to get Insulet paid. But every three months, UHC found some reason or another not to send my shipment. The shipment they'd APPROVED a year before.

They couldn’t find my paperwork. Or my paperwork was automatically denied because it wasn’t processed correctly. Or there was now an in-network provider for my pump… but no one had the actual phone number of the in-network provider (it took me three days and six hours of screaming and threats to get… a... phone number. I’m serious).

And now… now I’m 12 days from needing my next shipment, and here we go again.

UHC once again dropped coverage. Not just for me, but for everybody at the company. Just dropped it. “Oops.” Just like that.

And just like that, I’m completely uninsured.

I have $186 worth of testing strips that I need to come up with the cash for next week. I have $90 worth of insulin I need to get the week after that.

And I have 43 days to find insurance again. Or J. and I will be turning off our heat completely and living primarily on rice, hot dogs, and expired insulin.

Welcome to America. We have the best healthcare system in the world.

And this is how it works.

Quote of the Day

"In my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign... of promise, you keep writing anyway."

-Junot Diaz

Support of Public Services Health Insurance

Apparently, John Boehner hasn't "met one American" who supports a public health insurance option (you know, like our public postal option, public library option, and public security [police] option). I think our current public services have improved the public good and kept private costs down for the same services, and I believe it will do the same for health insurance.

If you think so too, you can sign the petition here.

It Occurs to Me...

... that I shared a lot more on "teh Internets" when "everybody" wasn't reading it.

Sad.

In other news... I got the biggest of my book checks today! Big CC debt will all be paid off on Monday!

Divide and Conquer

Excellent.

Katha Pollitt Moneyshot

"The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

No wonder Middle America hates them."

Read the rest.

Someday I Will Be Famous Enough to Fix My Covers

I saw the initial row over this, but somehow the resolution totally passed me by (I don't spend nearly as much time on the internets these days). There are lots of stories about SF/F publishers whitewashing covers. So even if you've got a heroine who's a far darker shade of pale, it's unlikely it'll be seen on the bookshelf.

This was one of those, "Yeah, and this surprises people because...?" But it's important to remember that our silence as authors can be read as complicity. If you don't say something publicly - even if you're fuming - readers assume you're just going along with it. And that's a shame. Because as somebody who has sometimes wanted to drag a publisher out and kick them in the shins publicly, I can tell you I'm not so keen on doing it because it means, you know, I might be out a meal ticket.

That said, I need to choose my battles. Because if I end up with a whitewashed cover someday, I'm going to have to say something about it. Even if it means the loss of a meal ticket. Because at the end of the day, it's about systematic silencing, erasing. It's about lying.

That said - and understanding what JL was up against - I find this to be a pretty cool win.

Bloomsbury backs down in Larbalestier race row

Spicest Soup in the Universe

I made it, I did.

Also, I am back from a weeklong vacation, which was very nice.

And now I have a whole lot of work to do.

My First Podcast Interview!

Podcast interview with me at Buena Vista U! (oh man, I had no idea she was going to use *all* this stuff)

Listen in!

Quote of the Day

"Tarantino, I think, gets a lot of pleasure out of demonstrating over and over again that you can get the 18-45 male audience that Hollywood desires into seats, and you can give them a story about a hyper-competent female hero who kicks ass in every way, and they won’t run screaming out of the theater clutching their balls in fear."

Pretty much...ditto everything she says in this review. It was a fantastic movie, and in my opinion - Tarantino's best.

(read the rest)

Boxers, Before & After Fights

Before and after.

(via Tyim)

Perspective

"He bested the heroes, killed the defenders, overtook the world. Then he killed the narrator and he was the villain no more."
- Vijayendra Mohanty

How (not ) to Write About Africa

I've read Binyavanga Wainaina's essay How (not) to Write About Africa a few times, but here's a great spin on it: How (not) to Write About Africa read by Djimon Hounsou.

(via deadbrowalking)

You can bet this is showing up in a GW book or two....

Moscowitz is founder of the International Security Coalition of Clergy, whose mission is to train Jews in self-defense and advance fighting techniques in the event of a terrorist attack on a synagogue. He says business was slow for his Coalition until May, when the FBI arrested a group accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in The Bronx. But now Moscowitz's 100-hour synagogue self-defense course is in high demand.

Squee

Lena Headey, my favorite Spartan (and second fav Sarah Conner) is playing Cersei.

OMG.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!

Quote of the Day

"We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale."

The Importance of Tragedy

One of the things I always thought odd about American taste in fiction and cinema is our aversion to tragedy. Filmmakers, in particular, are constantly changing movie endings for American audiences to "lighten" them up. Many British books just aren't carted over the ocean for the simple fact that they're just "too depressing."

I had a lot of trouble understanding this phenomenon. I figured it had something to do with our belief in the American Spirit and Manifest Destiny. I figured we were terrified of tragedy, and in love with the idea that science and progress and good, god-fearing folks could overcome everything.

But it still bugged me. Because I love tragedy. I love watching the inexorable trudging on events toward a inevitable end knowing there's no way to stop it... but watching our heroes bravely try anyway. I like the cathartic rush.

Then I watched this TED talk with Alain de Botton and was suddenly stuck by what he had to say about our aversion to tragedy. Tragedy, he points out, was created to teach us compassion. Instead of looking at somebody who's down on their luck and saying, "God, she's such a loser. She must have done something pretty terrible to end up that way," we learn the old "there but for the grace of god go I" lesson. We learn that each person who's down on their luck isn't a loser, but merely "unfortunate."

But in America, we don't believe in misfortune. We believe in pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We figure that bankrupt people living out of a friend's house, unemployed, with chronic medical conditions, working temp jobs, are just... losers. Lazy. Meritless. After all, if they worked hard and had merit, they'd be winners, right? They'd be successful American entrepreneurs.

But what our American dream ignores - each and every time - is the influence of tragedy on people's lives. We don't like tragedy. We don't like the idea that sometimes you really do get hit on the back of the head with a shovel for no reason. Sometimes, shit happens.

Because if shit happens, then we can't ignore the bum on the street. We can't plead entitlement for healthcare. We can't just say, "If you don't own your own house, you're a loser," or "if you don't have a car, you're a loser."

Without tragedy, without teaching compassion and morality by putting us all in the shoes of good people who experience bad things, we look down on the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt, the destitute, with scorn, derision, and not one ounce of compassion. After all, they must have *done* something (or *not* done something) to get there, right? I'm good, I'm hard working. That will never happen to *me.*

I mourn our lack of tragedy.

Excuse me, ma'am, I'm busy trying to figure out which way I'll choose to prevent you from receiving healthcare

In conversation with my mother:

"Well, with this Obamacare thing, we'll all get rationed healthcare."

"Mom, do you even know what `public option' means?"

"The government's taking over healthcare!"

"Mom, the government isn't running healthcare. All they want to do is expand Medicare to cover people who don't have insurance or are underinsured. That's it."

(long pause)

"Are you SURE?"

"Yes, mom. I have a chronic health condition. This is something I actually looked into."

"Well, what's to stop employers from just dropping our insurance then, if there's a public option?"

"Because Medicare SUCKS, mom. Doctors treat you like crap. You still pay copays for insurance. It's a shitty insurance program for poor and desperate people. Nobody fucking wants to be on Medicare. But for poor people, or people with chronic conditions, or other folks who can't afford health insurance - it's *something.*"

"But --"

"Ok, mom. Think of it this way. It's like the post office. You can go to the post office and have a letter sent for cheap, and it takes 5-7 days to get there, right? And you wait in a long line and the employees are surly. Or you can go to UPS or Fedex and get it shipped overnight and walk right up to the counter and everyone treats you great. You still get your letter sent. It's just that the service and speed you get from the post office sucks compared to UPS and Fedex. But! It's affordable. The postal service makes it possible for everyone to send a letter, not just rich people. All they want to do is create an insurance version of the U.S. postal service. And the post office certainly hasn't put DHL, Fedex, or UPS out of business."

"Are you SURE?"

"Yes, mom."

"But... then why do they make it sound like a government takeover of healthcare?"

"Speaking as somebody in marketing and communications, I can tell you exactly what I'd say as a communications manager at a big insurance company... and `government takeover of healthcare' is it. These are the same talking points the insurance companies dragged out back in 1993, the last time we tried to get healthcare reform going. Because the other stuff in this bill - which the insurance companies aren't keen on advertising - is that there's going to be a lot more regulation for the insurance companies. Dropping bank regulations on the banking industry in the 90s helped create the greedy meltdown last year, and having an unregulated insurance industry is what's turning health care into a greedy meltdown. The bill will eliminate lifetime caps on coverage and force them to cover people with pre-existing conditions (among other things). These companies make billions of dollars a year. This is their marketing strategy. Tell people the government's taking over healthcare, and people freak out. I do a lot of marketing stuff. I provide people with a lot of talking points. Now think of somebody who's making about 8 times what I make sending press releases to every talk show host and major news outlet in America about what's become a totally political issue and spending millions in money lobbying your representatives. Scary talking points make much better news than `expanding Medicare.' People who are afraid are really easy to manipulate."

"Well, I just don't know how it'll all turn out."

"I don't either. But it'll be really interesting to find out."

(for those interested, here is the actual latest version of the bill. Wiki-like forum where you can actually comment on diff't sections of the bill. Very cool.)