Fannish Labors of Love

You'll appreciate this, Jenn.

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

Wow.

Fans are great.

Welcome to Summer

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

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

I can already hear the wails from prospective readers:

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

Tough nookies.

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

Part one: July 20th

Part two: August 31st

Part three: October 1st

Revised draft: December 31st

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

Schedule for Over Burning Cities (Book 2) :

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

Chapters 1-10: October 15th

Chapters 11-20: January 15th

Chapters 21-30: March 31st

Chapters 30-39: May 1st

Chapters 40-45: June 15th

Revised Draft: September 1st, 2006

I enjoy keeping busy.

Books! Books! Books!

The Number of Books I Own:

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

That's so cool.

The Book I'm Currently Reading:

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

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

Last Book I Bought:

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

Last Book I Read:

Million Dollar Baby

Five Books That Have Meant a Lot to Me:

The Hours by Michael Cunngingham.

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

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

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

Alanna: The First Adventure, by Tamora Pierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ

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

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

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

Good stuff.

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

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

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

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

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

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

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

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

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

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

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

And rat poison just never appealed to me.

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

I figure I'm doing pretty good.

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

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

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

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

Off to a Good Start, Then...

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

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

Waiting Out the Zombie Apocalypse in Style: A Battle Guide

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

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

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


FATED TO (DIE IN A) FIGHT


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


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

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

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

(thanks, Lysha)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

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

In Search of that Pesky Hetero Gene

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

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

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

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

They real key is this, of course:

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

Key being, "dormant."

Yea. It was already there.

In all of them.

I Love Stealing From BFB

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

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

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Surreal Moment of the Night

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

Sometimes I forgot what a cool education I had.

The INFERNOKRUSHER Movement

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

Cuttings

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

This is going to be the leanest fantasy epic ever.

Trust me.

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

It's a charmed life.

Confessionals (not mine!)

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

Good Morning, Chiklits

It's another beautiful day in Chicago-towne.

Good Self Esteem = Better Health Than Weight Loss

No shit.

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

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

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

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

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


(via BFB)

Back On the Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those stories are gonna rock.

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

No big thing.

It's a good life.

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

Some people just don't know when to retire.

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

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

It reads like something from The Onion.

How Long Until the Government Starts Monitoring What You Eat?

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

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

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

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

What good sheep-like citizens they will make!