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One for the Road

Note To Self:

That oatmeal raisin cookie in the pastry case at Boston Stoker downtown may *look* like the Healthiest, Lowest-Carb option of the lot, but it's going to take a lot more than three units of insulin to cover it...

But boy was it good.

Happy Friday.

It's a Start, Anyway

Workadoo

I don't think I've ever spent eight or ten or whatever hours a day writing so many different things. Writing, sure, but writing resumes, executive bios, editing and formating SOPs, writing and revising company handbooks, and squeezing in some of my own fiction at the coffee shop at lunchtime?

Yeah.

It's good for me.

Yar.

Workadoo

I can't tell you how fucking awesome it feels not to be someone's secretary.

More on Women and Gaming

An interview with my buddy Patrick, a writer at Bioware.

The Search Continues...

... to find a dumbbell squat that doesn't *feel* to me like a dumbbell squat, so I may fool myself into thinking that I LOVE squats.

Tonight's variation looked like this (trendy work-out gear not included):


But with, you know, weights like these:



And it all ended up something like this:

Games I Seriously Need To AVOID

It EATS MY LIFE. EATS MY LIFE I TELL YOU!!!

It's like those fucking claw thingie machines that you just keep feeding quarters into, only it's free! EXCEPT FOR ALL THAT TIME IT EATS FROM YOUR LIFE.

But I did make myself work on Black Desert line edits and do laundry beforehand.

OK, back to line edits and some French exercises, but dear LORD that game just ate another HOUR from my life.

NO MORE!

And that would be....

So, Ray Bradbury insists that the public has been "misreading" Fahrenheit 451 since, well, 1952. According to this article he wants to "make news" by speaking out about his real intent behind writing the book. It is not a book about censorship. It is "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature."

And yet:

Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were “minorities.” He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. Only after people stopped reading did the state employ firemen to burn books.

So.... the people... censored... the books?

I'm thinking his issue is more about disuading the belief that it's some heavy-handed government doing all the censoring, and not the people themselves.

It's the people who are participating in their own oppression. They censor and burn their own books.

Governments are run by people, too.

Isn't This Counterproductive?

There's nothing more annoying than having to carb-up after working out because your sugar's low.

Conjugating French Verbs

Where does this other "s" come from????

.........

It's still here!!!!

Missed the Boat

Sunday's a good time for a bike ride...

I realized tonight that I haven't done a lot of purely recreational biking since I got here. Since I don't have a car, the bike is largely a tool to get me from here to there, and though it's great to combine exercise with a bookstore run, I hadn't done a lot of exploring around the neighborhood on my bike.

I love bike riding. It was something I didn't learn to do until I was 12 or 13 because there just weren't a lot of places around my house to learn. I spent most of my biking time at my grandma's house; there was a church parking lot nearby, and the church had this great courtyard where we could ride around these little statues of saints.

I got back into it after getting back from Bellingham and getting my life and health back together. I'd put the bike in the back of my truck and drive over to Lewisville Park and bike around. In Alaska, biking was my primary means of transport and recreation all summer and even much of the winter. It wasn't until my last few months in Chicago that I took it up again.

There's something I like about the freedom of bike riding. It's like that girlish yearning for a horse - all that speed and power. It's probably why I have such an interest in getting a motorcycle - more speed! More power! More freedom!

So tonight I picked a direction and just rode for a few miles down sleepy little streets. The evening was cool and muggy and there were a few people out on their porches. Somebody was having a block party. People played catch with their kids. The gardens were lush and well-landscaped, and despite the people everything was just dead quiet, just a sleepy summer night.

It was one of those nights that I try to wrap up and store away to remember later when things are not so good, when things are low. Because these are the nights you miss if you get hit by a car or hit by a shovel and keel over, you know. These are the nights it's so beautiful to be alive, when it looks like, for the barest moment, that everything really will be all right.

So I wrap these ones up, and I put them away, and I remember them when the winter comes.

Twenty Epics

Through a bit of careful politiking* I finally managed to get a hold of a copy of Twenty Epics, which turns out to be just as fucking awesome a collection and everybody says it is (oh boy is this is rare in a field where a lot of stuff gets overhyped).

I had considered writing something for this anthology when it was first announced, being a lover/hater of the fantasy epic - I'm in love with the *feeling* of the epic, but disillusioned by the 11-books-and-counting nature of the Robert Jordan epic.

So this antho had the potential to be pretty much just perfect for a reader like me.

It could have also sucked some serious goats.

But you know, it was put together by Groppi and Moles, so I had some hope.

I loved the way this anthology was put together - there was a careful mix of different lengths and styles and even a couple of SF-y bits in there. I'll just say a few things about the stories that I really enjoyed, and maybe a note or two about why I liked them.

DeNiro's "Have You Any Wool" is a cat-and-mouse Cordwainer Smith-ish epic that does with the far future just what I like done with the far future - it's so alien, so Other, that it reverts back to fantasy, to myth. It's the tale of a young boy aboard a ship that's been sent out to fight wolves that prowl about the stars devouring worlds. The wolves fight each culture by turning its own myths and folktales against it, so:

"Slowly, folklorists and anthropologists took to the front lines. They analyzed what the wolves had transformed. They developed applications of technology that would counter the warping of space-time according to the morphologies of folktales. They would be sheep in wovles' clothing, becoming participants in whatever fantasies the wolves would devise, and then stealthily alter them for tactical advantages. If the wolves mutated a pod settlement into a pastoral scene replete with carillion castles and fair damsels, Parameter shocktroops might become knights, or even trolls."

I mean, really, how fucking cool is that?

Another story that lodged itself in my brain through the sheer power of its imagery was K.D. Wentworth's "The Rose War," an... epic family saga about a family that slowly trains up and eventually interbreeds with an army of roses that they use to devour whole armies (you'll note a common theme running through the stories I enjoyed: blood, war, devouring armies... mmmm).

Christopher Barzak's "The Creation of Birds" had a slow start, but the emotional core of the story steadily took hold of me as I read about a woman who creates birds from paper, ink and starlight and her fucked up relationship with a man who believes he is hording all the stars in the world for her... but will not release them when she asks. This was one of those stories, as I've talked about before, that hit some core emotional truth for me and left me a little sad and breathless in the end.

"The Muse of Empires Lost" by Paul Berger was another far-future fantasy about a young girl living in the belly of a living ship that has long been cut off from its makers. The living ships have created their own ecologies; the ships love and mate and die with no regard for those living on the planets that spawned them, and Jemmi, our heroine, finds herself with a deep attachment to the world that is her ship. When a strange man arrives, sharing Jemmi's ability to alter the will of others to his own, Jemmi finds that she must choose between her attachment to the living ship and a possible godhood on another world.

It took me a long time to figure out whether or not I enjoyed Sandra McDonald's "Life Sentence," because the theme was old and tired: a Korean war veteran finds that he's able to re-live his life again and again from different starting points. In his first few tries, he ends up repeating the same old failures, and I was worried that this was going to be another one of those "sorry, the future is already set and everybody gets fucked no matter what you do!" stories, but that's not ultimately where she went with it, and I was glad I stuck it out.

I found a sort of female-Elric-bound-to-a-sword story in Mary Robinette Kowal's "Bound Man," which was an interesting take on the warrior-bound-to-sword trope. Li Reiko is ripped away from play with her children to fight trolls in another time thousands of years after the death of her children, among a people utterly foreign to her. As with Elric, the two peoples can somehow miraculously understand one another, and Li Reiko resents her summoners. I enjoyed this one because I'm always looking for what the female version of a Conan/Elric would look like, but I had some quibbles with the end, mainly because this one goes with the "the future is already set!" mode of time travel, and that always bugs me. It also screws with the agency of Li Reiko's daughter, which bugged me.

As someone with some training as a historian, I couldn't help but like Ian McHugh's "The Last Day of Rea" as well. We get a sort of fantasy-SFish story about an inbred dynasty that decides to go up against a small city-state with ties to the stars, and our protagonist is a clever historian who tries to avert the worst of the disaster. I enjoyed the witty protagonist and tongue-in-cheek humor.

One of the cool things about the anthology was the stylistically diverse stories that snuck in here, the infamous "Choose Your Own Epic Adventure," and the chaptered and numbered biblical epic, "The Book of Ant" and Ya Hoon Lee's cleverly laid out "Hopscotch" all played with narrative set-up that added a lot of variety to the anthology. And yeah, "Epic, The" is a bit cutesy, but not in a sugary way.

I'm not a huge fan of anthologies or story collections, cause you know, there's usually only one or two stories you actually like, a bunch that are mediocre and several that you just never even finished.

I finished all of these, didn't actively hate any of them, and I can only think of one or two that I found actively mediocre.

That's pretty fucking impressive.

Pick up a copy.

This ride is totally worth it.

----------------------------

*Which consisted of me saying, "Hey Moles, give me a fucking copy!" when two promotional extras were handed to him at the con in my presence. I am nothing if not subtle....

And Vice Versa...

Breathtaking Wallpapers

This is my new one.

Here's more.

One for the Road

Sorting Out the AirCon Issue

Things here at Casa de B. have been pretty sluggish as of late do in large part to the aircon situation. It's hotter than hell here (OK, 80s and 90s, not that real feel 115 I had in Chicago last year, but hey), and we've just turned on the aircon today (I am not paying for it, so it's not like I can gun for it, though now that I'm employed I do hope to pay for at least my portion of utilities bills next month).

What this means, though, is that there's been a lot of half-hearted working out, blogging, and writing-revising this week, which should hopefully be kicked back into full gear now that I'm not constantly thinking about how fucking hot it is.

I'm sure Jared Diamond would have something to say about climate and productivity. In South Africa, productivity pretty much just went out the window for two months during the summer. It was just too hot to move.

And I Woke Up

I had a dream that I was watching "the real" season/show finale of "Buffy," and everyone was running around this enormous, dim library about as big as a 20-storey warehouse with books on all walls and this huge hanging candelabra of shelves coming down from the top and everyone was being hunted by the things in the books, which were really things from their pasts come to life.

And it came time for Buffy to die, because she had somehow become evil, and people were killing people left and right and somebody said she deserved to die because none of this would have happened if she hadn't fallen in love with a vampire. Falling in love with a vampire had drawn evil to her, and she'd been stalked by that evil, and eventually turned evil herself.

And at the very end, as somebody (me?) held her by the hair and got ready to plunge in the dagger, this ghost comes out of one of the books, and it's this guy I knew from high school theater who was supposed to be her "real" long-lost love, the guy she was "supposed" to be with cause *he really loved her,* but he died somewhere along the way, just another body lost to the cause, and he gasps, "No! Let me do it. Her heart belongs to me."

And this huge audience leans in, gasping, as if the fourth wall's been broken, and all of these fans, mostly women from fourteen to fifty-five, take these huge gasping breaths and lean in expectantly. Some of them start to tear up and prepare to sob. The air goes heavy with anticipation. They want Buffy - the good Buffy - to end up with the man who loved her.

And I hand over the knife, because some part of me wants her to be with him too, because *he loved her so much.* I hand over the knife without thinking too much, because this is the script. This is the way it should go. This is how all the stories turn out.

He does not cut open her chest. He jams the dagger into her forehead and cleaves her face in two.

A hot white light pours out of her, and Buffy's soul leaves her body. He embraces her ghostly form in his. And we know she's good and he's good and all is right with the world.

The expectant audience sheds its tears, and the shadows of the big book-world flicker, and I'm kneeling there next to the body, the story-part of me feeling happy that I have helped make everything right with the world, and the not-dream part of me thinking, "Oh God why would I want it to end up this way? She's not evil because she dated a vampire. She's broken and bruised because she's had to fight all the evil in the world, and when you have to fight evil, you become a little bit evil yourself. She doesn't love him, and the strength of his love will never make her love him."

So the audience wept with joy at the reunited lovers and the woman redeemed by a man with a weapon, and I held the bloody dagger in my hands, and I woke up.

This feeling is what all of my fiction is about.