On Fantasy Sagas

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

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

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

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

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

Ha. I love all us hippies.

Brutal Women, Babies, and Boy Bands

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

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

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

Mixed Bag O' Links

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

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

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

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

See ya in a few months, Martha.

Thoughts on Life in a General Way

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly nothing for me to mourn about.

I'm just mourning my own delusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I realize I need to be physically and emotionally stronger.

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

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

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

I start over again every morning.

More Thoughts on Fat... and Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gained most of the weight back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once More Into The Breach

Writing & other misc. angst today.

See you Monday.

My Kind of Movie

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

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

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

I really should be writing.

Titles

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

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

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

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

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

Later, My Chiklits

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Writing, Rewriting, & etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just another tired day.

Speaking of Fighting

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

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

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



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

It's worth every minute.

Getting Pissed Off

And then you get us pissed off:

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

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

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

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

There's your thought for the day.

via feministing

No Control For You, Woman!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay awake, people.

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

via Jenn.

Some Mixed Bag Goodness

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

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

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

More later.

Honeymoon's Almost Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men Without Women

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

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

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

Gotta love that Hemingway.

The World Bores Me

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

Ah, The Young

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

And Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How exhausting it must be for them.