Oh!

A brand of yogurt with only 8 carbs!

It takes so little to make me happy these days.

OK, back to work.

At Least I Know How to Keep Myself Occupied

A Little Chat with a "Nice Guy"

I am so amused.

Tootling Around

The Day Job had me working on updating databases yesterday for 4 hours, so I'm working from home today, mainly so I can get shit done that was supposed to be done yesterday.

Also, I just acquired a bunch more books.

This makes me happy.

Sugar Sugar

Die, pancreas, die!

Oh, wait. Already dead.

Oh well.

First Antho

Looks like they're going to try and launch the anthology that my story, "Wonder Maul Doll" is in at World Fantasy in Austin (barring disaster. Which does, of course, happen), and I have an email from one of the editors asking how many of us authors are going to be there.

It's the first story of mine that's going to be in an actual book, and I'd love to be there just to stare over a handful of copies, but tickets to Austin are running at $300. Also, I'm not sure if anybody I'd know really well would be there, and Jenn can't afford to go, so I'd be pretty solo the whole time.

WFC tends to be more of a "pro" con, and if it's anything like last year's WFC, the programming is likely to suck. And you know what? For $150, I want some decent programming.

Perhaps I will be content with my free author's copy and call it a year.

Shit I Need to Do Today/This Weekend

Got back the first of the reader-edits for tDW from my buddy Patrick yesterday.

He pointed out some typos (oh! It's soooo nice to be at the stage of this novel where I'm like, "Hey, yea, check for typos, because I don't intend on trashing this whole book and starting again!"), pacing issues, one rather irritating "but if it's an egalitarian society, and you could only really know who the *mother* of any one kid is, wouldn't the line of succession be through the mother, and wouldn't that hose up this whole problem with the bastard?" bigger sort of issue that I do need to deal with (that's the problem with having written the first half of the first draft of this book when I was 19. You end up with a lot of silly assumptions that end up being important to the plot, but don't really jive with the new society you came up with at 23/25).

The summation of the critique, however, amounted to: "Take this book and SELL IT."

For some reason I had one of those nights last night where I got home and just wanted to feel sorry for myself, but I sucked it up and input some of the edits into the first few chapters of tDW and started on the revisions of the last few chapters I wrote of God's War, which I completed just before the coma. It's a little weird to look back at those chapters because they've got some oddly put-together sentences and very little setting and description of any sort (and what's there is... weirdly worded). Instead, it's full of choppy action scenes involving pistols, whips, blowing up a woman's head, kidnapping, and finding a guy's head in a box.

I'm keeping all of those events, of course (how could I not???), but giving them some setting/padding (yes, sometimes you *need* some padding) and cleaning up the weird sentences.

So, my to-do list for the weekend:

1) finish contract writing passage (I have no idea why this is taking me so long. Denial. Fake writer's block. A need to not pound through it as slap-dash as I did the last one [which I completed with blurry vision and a sugar headache]. I'll push through it this weekend)

2) finish inputting Patrick's edits into tDW

3) finish GW revisions and start on those last 75 pesky fucking pages

4) write thank-you note to Jenn's parents

5) send in prescription claims to health insurance (had to make copies of my reciepts, which I've just finished here at work)

6) write out Strongly Worded Letter to said health insurance for their denial of my last half-day of hospital care. They argued that I was out of "immediate danger" by that time. I'm not sure how I would have a) known this in my sugar-dazed state b) been able to demand that the doctors release me in my sugar-dazed state c) would have been able to go home and give myself insulin shots when most of that day was spent going over how the hell I was going to care for myself post-hospital.

I FUCKING HATE insurance companies.

7) pay the most pertinent of the bills (ie the ones due before the 20th) with the paltry $650 paycheck I just received (oh, the joys of PTO that accrues at a snail's pace of 5 hours per pay period, and no sick pay!).

8) finish reading "On Beauty."

9) order books for as-yet-unnamed Genocide Novel research

10) spend today catching up on all the actual work at work I was supposed to be doing this week, but decided to spend writing emails instead....

Jon Stewart: Still My Secret Boyfriend

"Divorce is not caused because 50% of marriages end in gayness."

Telling Stories

I was chatting with Jenn last night about Meghan's post - some thoughts on sexuality, desire, and labels. And at some point I said something like, "Yea, people really like labels. I mean, I was white and a woman my whole life, but now I'm dating a woman and have a chronic illness. Does this mean I get more diversity points?"

"Yea.. how are you doing with all that?" Jenn asked.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Well, within the last six months you've become visibly queer, and you've got, well, a chronic illness. I mean, how do you feel about all that?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think about it that much. It's all kind of happened so quick, I haven't had time to really think about, look back on it, create a narrative, you know?"

"Ah," Jenn said, "it's like asking you how you're feeling before you've had time to figure it out?"

"Exactly. Why do you think I blog? And before that, sent those huge 17-page stories about my life to the Clarion list? And before that, kept up long correspondences with people? I can't make sense of things until I can get some distance and make stories out of it. I need to know what it all means."

"And as you get older, the stories sort of shift, the more distance you get from them."

"It's creating history. You can see how myths end up being myths. At the core of the story, you've got core events, core feelings, but the way you interprete those changes based on where you are in your life, where you end up. If you go through old letters and correspondence of mine, you can see the emphasis shift as things I thought were important ended up not being important. Also, the older I get, the more I learn, the more I'll reinterprete events."

What I realized while we talked was the reason I write fiction, and the reason the reason I took to the blogging form so well.

I figure out what I'm feeling, dissect emotional responses, what events mean to me, by creating narratives, by telling stories. Until I can step back and look at how everything fits together, I have a difficult time talking about it. Ask me how I "feel" about something, and I'll struggle to find some sort of inarticulate response that "sounds good" at the time. Ask me in writing, when I can tell you the story - and that I can do.

I had to hear Jenn tell me the story of my time in the hospital for nearly a week before I could get it all together in my head and try to work out a narrative that I could post here (and I still think a lot of that post doesn't make much sense. Which is probably more truthful, since nothing made sense to me either).

I wonder if I'm just weirdly divorced from my feelings while I'm feeling them, or if storytelling is just my way of coping with strong emotion.

What I'm Reading

And, this.

This is what I do when I'm prentending I don't owe writing work to anybody....

Sweet! Liberation Means Not Shaving My Legs...

(via Feminist Reprise)

Lame

I hate measuring pasta.

It feels so anal-retentive.

I mean, I have good reason. But still.

Stabilizing

Well, the altered dose of insulin is working out well - no low blood sugar episodes since I cut back from 30 to 26 units in the morning.

Now we'll see how that changes with intense exercise. I do my free weights in the morning, and about an hour of walking a day, but if I'm going to start the boxing classes again in August, I need to know how pushing up my heartrate for 45-60 minutes is going to alter my sugar levels.

Have an appointment with Dr. S at the end of the month for follow-up. That *should* be the appointment where we lock in my insulin dosage. It generally takes some time for sugar levels to even out to the point where you can gauge how different types of insulin interact with you personally (everybody's body reacts slightly differently, as I understand it).

Deep breath. This is manageable.

There Are Days...

As regular readers know, I've struggled with coming to terms with my weight for a long time. I'm always thinking I should be smaller. Even when I realized what a benefit it was to be 5'9" and pushing 200 lbs (if you know how to hold yourself, people get out of your way), I still sat around angsting about it. When you're told that any woman over 120 lbs is undesirable, you get a little jumpy (Sex is a powerful motivator; I like sex). Who doesn't want to be movie-stock beautiful?

Pair all that with concerned relatives adding their two cents about how you need to lose and lose and lose for "health" reasons, every magazine cover screaming "thin!", and a society increasingly worried about all the fat people (oh, no, *I* don't want to be a fat person who puts a drain on our non-existent healthcare system!), and it becomes a backbrain obession.

During some of my worst days, I'd contemplate getting gastic bypass surgery. For better or worse, of course, I would never qualify for it. The one time I hit the 100 lbs overweight mark, I did so for a very brief period. And here I am, sicker than snot, 176 lbs and *still* overweight by society's standards.

The rules weren't made for me.

And you wonder why this country has a food obsession?

Of course, the real reason I could never seriously contemplate cutting my stomach up until it was the size of my thumb is because I like to eat.

Oh yes.

Even while on the strictest of diets I could give myself a celebratory meal. I could go out and eat whatever I wanted. Oh, sure, if you do Atkins too long and try and eat a plateful of pasta, you might get sick, but eating it *is* possible. Even after I broke my binge eating cycle, it was still really nice to just be able to sit down and eat a whole box of macoroni & cheese every once in a while. B & I used to order great heaps of nachos and hot dogs and waffle fries and watch old episodes of Dr Who during the weekends I'd fly to NY. We went all out. It was great. We had enormous breakfasts at the local diner, and I could drink cranberry juice and eat bagels and hashbrowns all in the same sitting. It was a social thing, a celebration thing. We sat and talked and ate and ate, and then I'd go home and get right back into my usual routine.

For better or worse, I can't eat like that anymore. Not even on "special occasions."

Oh, that fucking shovel.

One of the things my doctor said to me the day they released me from the hospital was that I was going to feel a *lot* better once they let me out and started me up on the insulin.

He was right.

Best I can figure, I started getting sick sometime in late July/early August of last year. That's when I went into PP for the first time with the recurring yeast infections. That was almost a year ago. I have no idea how I pushed through this for so long. No idea at all, except through sheer delusion; an inability to link all my symptoms to one core body failure.

The increasing thirst began not long after I started continuously combating the runaway yeast (high blood sugar = happy yeast who thrive on sugar), until the last couple of days where I did nothing but drink and pee, drink and pee. My formerly healthy sex drive was unraveling for months before the final fall (I justified this with the "I'm so tired and stressed" excuse as well). Climbing up the stairs got tougher and tougher. I just thought I was tired. I couldn't get up at my usual 5:25 am alarm. I started going into work late one day a week, then two, then three. Me, late for work! The startling weight loss started, I think, in September/October. I bought new clothes at Christmas and more clothes after I dropped a size - a whole size! - six weeks later.

And oh, how I ate! I was hungry all the time. Sure, I kept to "healthy" stuff: yogurt, popcorn, soup, omelettes. But toward the end I was stopping off and getting stuff to eat that I hadn't touched regularly in over two years: hot dogs at the 7-eleven, BBQ potato chips, cheese dip & chips. I stopped ordering my cheeseburgers without the fries. I *needed* those fries. I ordered dessert more often.

I started noticing increasing problems with my gums. They were receding. And bleeding. I realized I was going to have to go into the dentist soon. I bought some Listerine, but that didn't seem to help.

And oh, the yeast infections! The never-ending, anti-fungal cream resistant fuckers! PP told me it was the IUD, likely. Just irritating my uterus, no big deal. And I thought, I'm stressed out. It's just stress. That's why I'm so tired, that's why I'm falling apart. I'm falling apart because I'm just doing so much. Trying to be better. Trying to be the best at everything. I'm just falling apart.

That's something I've been thinking a lot about since I stabilized: I was falling apart. I was really, really, sick. But there I was, flying to NY every other month until February, then flying every week to Indy. Doing my weights routine every morning (the last two weeks before the coma, this got tougher and tougher. I was just so tired, and no matter how I tried, I couldn't seem to increase my reps, and I wasn't gaining any more muscle mass). I finished rewriting tDW, cutting 100 pages, cleaning up logical inconsistencies. I wrote over 200 pages of God's War. I kept sending out stories (and sold two of them). I went to World Fantasy and somehow managed to get out of bed before 10am (and kept wondering why I was so tired). I started taking yoga classes (I also stopped going to these the last few weeks before the coma, as well). I ended one relationship and started another one. I got a work promotion that meant more responsibilities, more stress. I blogged right up until two days before I was hospitalized.

I remember thinking, this last year or so, how I just wasn't getting anything done. Everything felt so goddamn hard, and I figured it was just hard because, well, I had to work harder than other people.

I beat myself up because I wasn't writing enough, wasn't going to the gym enough, wasn't teaching myself Arabic, hadn't gotten back into boxing classes. There was always something I wasn't doing enough of, something I should be doing.

Looking back on it, I'm amazed at how high-functioning I was. Either I was 1) really strong and delusional 2) just delusional.

And you know what the worst part is?

When I got home from the hospital, taking the stairs one at a time, resting on the landing, my vision blurry, suffering from a massive high-sugar headache, I went to my room and opened up the closet and looked for my favorite sweat pants.

They weren't there, of course. The doctors had cut them off me at the hospital.

I stood there beneath the lintel in a pair of loose size 12 jeans, my wrists and arms covered in bruises and half-healed wounds, and the first more-than-this-moment thought that my addled, mixed-up, sugar-saturated brain thought was, "Oh my God. I'm going to gain all the weight back. I'm going to get fatter again. I'm going to have to buy new clothes, again. Oh God, oh God."

If I'm angry about anything regarding this whole thing, I'm angry about that. About that thought; angry that the first real thought I had outside of, "Take this step. Then this step," was "Oh God, I'm going to get fat."

I'd been given back my life, and I was hysterical about how much bread I was going to have to eat.

That's fucked up.

And then I sit here and stare at my lunch - soup, peanut butter sandwich, some peanuts - and I'm so hungry I could cry. I want to eat and eat, because even during the worst days, when my parents had money problems and we were living on scrambled eggs and macoroni and cheese, we were still OK so long as we could eat. There was such comfort in food, in abundance, in over-indulgence. It was something you could choose, control - or not - as you wished. It was warmth and comfort on a cold night, when the whole world was going to shit.

Now I have to measure out my comfort in half-cups and quarter-cups and teaspoons and chocolate pieces.

It's a small - so small - price to pay for being alive.

I've always hated some part of this body, some terrible fatty, imperfect thing about it. Some stupid thing. Now it's really broken. Some core system has malfunctioned, imploded.

All I could think about was, "Will I gain 20 lbs? Am I going to start the cycle all over again?"

And what I want to think, the place I want to be, is:

"How much longer until I can run out into the world and kick somebody's ass?"

Because I'm blessed. I know it.

A dead pancreas doesn't mean I can't write. Or teach myself Arabic. Or go back to boxing. It doesn't mean anything like that at all.

But there are days when that's hard to remember.

Whatever

Scalzi, on framing arguments against the same-sex marriage ban, instead of accepting the anti-gay-rhetoric of the right and engaging on their terms:

1. Same-sex marriage already exists in the United States. It has for two years. The definition of marriage in the US already includes members of the same sex marrying each other.

2. By pressing for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between men and women, it is the marriage bigots who are looking to change the definition of marriage.

3. The language of the proposed constitutional amendment would end thousands of legal marriages -- both the same marriages that legally exist now and all the same-sex marriages that would occur between now and whenever the theoretical moment would be that the 37th state ratified the amendment.

4. The proposed constitutional amendment would make second-class citizens of all same-sex married couples by stripping them of a marital status they currently enjoy, while allowing all other legally married couples to continue being married.

Read the rest

Writing About...

Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans---

(via the most awesome Mistress Krista)

Life During Wartime

Good stuff.

Though I'm wondering where, exactly, all the women's voices are. I know they didn't all die passively in wars. The one-voice-of-the-ten who may be a woman talks about her servant going off to war.

WTF?

Regender! Regender!

Motivation

Create your own "motivational" poster here!

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

He fights pirates.

Also, McNinja vs. McDonalds.

(via Hal)

Writing Women: A Virtual Panel Discussion

"Lately, I've been thinking about craft and how storytelling relates to social and cultural norms and values. One thing that both amuses and troubles me is the idea that when a story is told from the male perspective, it's considered universal, yet when a story is told from a female perspective, it's somehow particular to women, or must fit into a defined category - commercial, literary, etc. and marginalized or examined with scrutiny... and yet, women are presumed by publishers to be the majority of book consumers in the United States. One only has to look back to the outcry over the National Book Awards just two years ago for a perfect example, or more recently, to the conversation around the 2005 round-up of people's favorite books -- how few works by women or featuring female principal characters appeared on lists compared to the usual fare."

I'm ready for the panel that's all about the "troubles" of writing from a "male perspective," myself. After all, writing about men is writing about people. Writing about women is writing about "the feminine perspective."

Can we stop that kind of men=people women=Other thinking, please? It gets old.

I was a little put off by one author's view - "I would say there’s an invitation to the reader (or audience) – an open seduction – that is not the same with a male character."

So all women vibe seduction, but men can't be sexy? I suppose if you assume a male audience, you've got a Fear of Homophobia (cause women being bi is OK, but men lusting the cock is not) if you say male characters seduce. I'd go so far as to say that every great character in fiction is, in some way, sexy. They seduce. That's why you keep reading about them, no matter the sex.

And then there's this comment: "I also write from the male point of view. I do find a difference between the two perspectives. There is often something softer about the women's perspective; the men can be more connected to the world, less to family in my fiction."

At least she qualified that with, "In my fiction."

There are some interesting observations, however, particularly when they contradict what they just said three paragraphs up with actual experiences.

Gee, I miss Wiscon.