Diabetic Rockstar

Diabetic Rockstar appears to be a social networking site for diabetics (primarily, it appears, T1s).

There's a forum where folks can show off their tattoos. Also, I can buy a t-shirt that says "I'm an addict."

Heh heh heh.

Training Sessions

For those of you keeping track at home, our twice-a-week training sessions at work this week consisted of:

5 mins running on the track at the Y, 1 min strength training, 3 minutes running, 1 min strength training, repeat for 40 minutes.

Yum.

Writing Weird Shit

One of the things that always interested me when I was reading Really Weird Shit (like, say, a Mieville or a VanderMeer or even a Catherynne Valente), is this:

Do they come up with all the weird shit in there the first time through, carefully working it all out, or is there just this made dash through the tangle with the occasional cleanup as they go?

Cause what I've discovered is that writing weird, really weird, and staying consistently weird (it might be weird to us, but not the world), isn't something I do on a first pass (and still not something I do well. I'm young. I have a long way to go yet). My drafts sometimes have the rough outline-feel of, say, Titus Alone vs. the fully-formed crackpit that is Gormenghast.

Sure, there's some stuff in there the first time through. I mean, I knew the bakkies would be powered by bugs. I knew there weren't going to be a lot of big animals and most of the protein was just bugs. But it wasn't until the very last couple of drafts (*after* they'd been seen by my crit group and at least one editor) that the chickens got scales and the bakkies belched and got organic guts.

And there are about a million places where I could push the book more than it already is. One of the biggest challenges of Black Desert is knowing that I need to push the level of weird and newness to another level. You can't just write the same shit in the same world over and over again. That defeats the point of having a series. You write a series because the world's so big and cool and weird that you want to open it up and reveal it even more than you did last time. And, ideally, I want to reveal it in a way that doesn't necessarily make it more knowable, but makes it weirder and more interesting and more fucked up. You aren't going to get any hard and fast answers.

One of the things that annoys me about a lot of SF is that there's this need to explain exactly how the world got to be the way it is. Here's the ship's name, where it came from (oh the mystical EARTH!!). But I like writing SF that's so far future it's become fantasy again. I like the Gene Wolfe idea where the world's so ancient they don't really remember anything before it. Sure, they came from the sky, but from another planet? A seed ship? A multitude of worlds? Who knows? And, honestly, within the context of the stories I'm telling on the world, it's not terribly relevant. Who cares? Suffice to say, here's the world they made it, and it's wacky.

The thing with pushing yourself every book is that you push harder every time, and if your head's not hurting, you're not trying hard enough. I sat down last night to clip off my draft and described Tirhani houses and landscape and knew even as I did it that I was going to have to go back over it several times to flesh out the weird. Because most writers, I think, are lazy.

First pass through, all my folks have living rooms and kitchen nooks and mailboxes and happy 50s social pairings, and as I go further, dig deeper, draft after draft, the whole landscape starts to change. There's the ubiquitous Ras Tiegan servant in every house, the bug pillar for collection of message swarms, the organic flooring, the prayer nook, the spider garden, the stairs that no longer lead anywhere. And then you go over it again, and stuff starts breathing and sprouting wings and the kitchen's not black and white anymore, it's technicolor, and you're not even sure it could be called a kitchen now anyway.

Thing is, if I concentrated on the weird shit during my first drafts I'd lose 1) the plot 2) the character relationships.

First run through, it's all about the relationships, with an eye for keeping myself on track with plot everytime folks try and sit down over tea and over-explain themselves. Pieces of the world that are already in place, I can weave those in and they hook up with the plot and the folks, but as I start to push it on the second and third and fourth pass, what happens to the scenery and mechanics does change the character interactions and plot somewhat.

First time through, though, I'm lazy. Lazy writing, lazy ideas. A great example of this was, in God's War Nyx and her team need to cross the war-torn border, so, you know, I have them get in their bakkie and, um... drive across. Cause I needed them to get across the border, yo. Oh sure, there was a brief run-in with some wasp swarms, but it didn't mean anything, didn't add anything, and it made the border a lot less messy and scary that it should have been.

It wasn't until I watched an episode of Aeon Flux where she infiltrates Bregna by getting dropped over the border with a big load of dead in metal coffins raining from the sky that I realized that a fun way of getting over a border would be to smuggle yourself in with the dead.

Yummy. And not quite ordinary. Is the scene the best it could be? No. I think it could be weirder. But it's a long way from the lazy place it started out, and it means a lot more to the characters and the world. You learn a lot more about how it all fits together with this scene than you do when they just drive across the border (not to mention the sheer suspension of disbelief you'd be requiring of your reader for that one, and I say that as somebody who's writing books about chicks with swords and bad aim who come back from the dead and practice magic with bugs).

There are all sorts of assumptions we make about other worlds, other places, as writers. It's easier that way. Easier to go with our assumptions. And lots of times, we'll look at the impact of a technology on the way lives are lived, physically, but not the way lives are lived, emotionally. What happens to our families? Our friendships? If you take us out of our time and place, who are we? What sorts of morals do we have? Are people really basically born good? What's "good"? What makes us all the same? What makes us different?

It's these questions that really got me writing SF/F. If we strip everything else away, what are we? Who are we, if things are really different?

No, really:

What if things were REALLY different?

And the questions I ask are very personal questions, ones that I've run into in my own life, of course. What if women were measured by strength instead of beauty? What if we could manipulate the fabric of the world? What would it be like to BE the law, and then lose that privilege? What would it be like to feel no fear, no shame, no self-consciousness, about your body? What would a world where the nuclear family was unknown look like? How does changing the nature of the family change the society?

What if cutting off heads was a respectable way to earn a living?

You know, real important shit like that.

But when you ask those questions, you can't be superficial. When you answer those questions superficially you end up re-writing somebody else's book. Your book sounds like every other feminist dystopia of vampire bounty-hunter bodice ripper, and you're just another jelly bean; a thousand flavors, one type.

There's nothing wrong with different flavored jellybeans. The trouble comes when all you have is eighteen flavors of vanilla and not one strawberry, because look at how much everybody likes vanilla! They eat vanilla up! We sell 8 bazillion vanilla-flavored jelly beans a year!

It doesn't mean vanilla's the best jellybean. It just means we haven't tasted anything else yet.

I write the books I write because I wanted this flavor jelly bean.

The hope is that a lot of other people wanted it too.

I guess we'll find out.

And until then, hey, even at this pay rate the writing keeps me in bread and boys, and I, at least, find the books terribly tasty. Can't knock that.

Note

I do not ever want my author bio to read:

"Kameron now lives in (insert small midwestern town name here) with her three cats."

Call me crazy, but I want more than that. At the same time, I also don't want it to read:

"Kameron now lives in (insert small midwestern town name here) with her adoring, supportive attorney husband Walter and their three adorable children, Minnie, Mickey, and Mike."

I think my bio should just say:

"Kameron Hurley subsists primarily on the blood of her enemies and should not be allowed out in direct sunlight. She prefers fucking in Marrakech to boxing in Madrid, but it depends on the time of year. When she's not shooting up in service to her life-sustaining drug habit, she can still drink small children under the table. She lives with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a substantial number of Chipotle burritos and occasionally sees a boy whose name she can't remember, but right now she's probably out at a bar learning French from a one-legged prostitute named Bruno."

At least it's more memorable, and has less of the "inevitable boring death" slant to it.

The inevitable death of us all could at least be spiced up a little.

Oh, the Glamorous Writing Life

Up this morning at 5:30 am, morning weights routine, green tea and a cup of frozen raspberries. Out the door at 7:10, catch the bus at 7:27, at work at 7:45.

Script writing in the lobby from 8-10, com meeting from 10-10:30 to communicate assignments and deadlines. Shift from scripts to design changes for company intranet at 11. Lunch is cabbage and pulled pork in a low carb totilla wrap and a spinach salad eaten while reading tips on how to write good web copy.

Intranet & sales process meeting from 1-2, revised sales process up and sent out by 2:30. Approved sales letters given over to intranet manager by 3:00pm.

4:00pm, finalized change process doc done for intranet home page redesign submitted to project manager. 4:30pm, finalized sales brochure mockup sent to graphics designer. 4:45pm, finalized sales brochure sent to videographer.

5:00pm, out the door to catch the bus.

5:11pm on the bus.

5:30pm at home, pack up stuff for a writing night, realize the Starbucks within walking distance is closed.

Steph drops me off at the Books & co down the street.

6:10pm stop by Chipotle across from Books & co. for a quick dinner (steak fajjita burrito, no rice, no beans).

Hole up at Books & co. from 7-9 and squeeze out 1500 bloody, misbegotten words on Black Desert while researching some new fitness routines, bringing me within 500 words of where I'm supposed to be according to my writing schedule.

9:05pm cell phone alarm goes off telling me to pack up and walk to the bus.

9:18pm bus arrives right on time.

9:23pm arrive home. Eat half a dark chocolate bar in the fridge. Roommates tell me pilot light on the furnace went out, so don't try and take a shower or do dishes until morning.

9:25pm unpack computer. Repack gym clothes for personal training session at work.

9:40pm write blog post while reminscing about my glamorous writing life.

This is it, folks.

And you know what?

I love it.

I love my job. Both of them. All of them.

Now somebody needs to start paying me real money for them.

10:00 collapse into bed.

Write Night

Went out to the coffee shop down the street tonight to catch up on my Black Desert writing. Finished up nearly 5K, getting me back within 1K of where I'm actually supposed to be according to my writing schedule.

It was an intense little session. I haven't been that deep in the book in awhile, and when I came out of it I had one of those weird periods of dissonance, where five minutes ago I was in bed with Rhys and his wife in balmy Tirhan in the bloody moonglow, and suddenly I'm trudging down the snow glutted streets of Dayton at 9 o'clock at night wondering where in the hell I am.

Man, I'm a cruel bitch, too. This is that happy jump the narrative takes just before it all goes to hell. This is where you realize just how much the protagonists have to lose, and how hard they fought for it. There are some ichy scenes coming up, and after writing what I did tonight, I have a feeling I'm going to cry through them when I write them. Maybe after.

A whole world, all broken down.

Such a bloody bitch.

I like writing about characters who are drawn to each other but aren't necessarily good for each other. Nyx walks back into your life and you see everything you love destroyed, but some vital piece of you, something you can't name, something you didn't even know was missing, is somehow there again. Whole. Full. Like a missing piece of your heart that chokes you.

Yes, I know: I'm a bloody bitch. But why else would I be a writer?

Stevia

Tastes like concentrated saccharine.

Yech.

Movin On Up

Steph and the Old Man and I had a chat tonight about where we're all at with the living situation. They're happy to have me if I need to stay, but honestly, me and the Old Man have been itching to have our own places for months now. They're not as neat-freaky as I am, and I'm getting tired of picking up dirty dishes and he's tired of me playing loud music. It's not like we want to murder each other, but we both really like our own space, and I've been dying to get my own - he's been dying to get his back.

What triggered the conversation was that they wanted to remodel the bathroom this summer, and to be dead honest, I wanted the hell out of the house before that happened. I've been in the house during major remodeling before, and this one is going to take even longer. I really don't want to be here when it happens.

So I'm pretty much bouncing off the walls right now because oh man do I want my own damn place. Oh man oh man.

If I wanted to live in Ghetto Dayton, I could pay $325 on the north side or downtown, but for $450 I can get a one bedroom near the U of Dayton (OK neighborhood, not ghetto). Take the $350 a month I give over to the CC that'll be paid off when I get my first book check and $250 I currently pay for rent and viola! You have $450 for rent and $150 for utilities.

We're looking at a June 1 or July 1 move out/move-in date, so I'll start my planning accordingly. By the end of March/April I'll be doing serious apartment hunting (it's also a great time of year to pick up apartments near UD cause the students are leaving for the summer). We can do all the moving with the truck and car they've got, so no rental van necessary. I haven't bought, well, pretty much anything since I moved in, so the actual moving of stuff will just be a couple big pieces of furniture and lots of books.

Waiting for the summer means waiting for the book check and a little more job security at work (as of June, I'll have been there a year). And also means I'll move before the bathroom remodel (OH THANK YOU GOD).

I'm so frickin' happy to be in a place where I'm actually, you know, physically and mentally and financially capable of being on my own again. It's been a fucking rough two years. Steph is broken up about me going, but I was like, um, yo: that's how you know you did a good job. The busted up bird is able to fly on its own again.

You guys did good.

(OMG I GET TO BUY MY FRENCH PERFUME AGAIN!!!! AND LIGHT SCENTED CANDLES!!! AND USE APRICOT FASHWASH!!! OMG!!!!)

Recipes that Should be Illegal

Seriously, yo. This is one of those "cruelty to diabetics" recipes.

Also, they're selling Girl Scout cookies at work next week.

God's War Posters

Make your own!

Dating 101

If you go on a date with a girl and:

1) she does not contact you for a week (no call, text, e-mail)
2) you do not contact her for a week (no call, text, e-mail)

She will likely make the assumption that you're aware she is not interested, and has already happily assumed you are not interested as well.

So when you do call, a week later, she will be very Perplexed.

I have book deadlines now. Tra-la.

At this point, it'd take a pretty swoon-worthy date to pull my attention away from the book deadlines.

I have yet to have one of those.

Bowling, Beer, & Brutal Women

Steph and I went bowling tonight for free with a bunch of her coworkers. She works for a fairly large medical practice, so they'd reserved 26 lanes for their annual bowling tournament. Because the weather was icy, the other folks who were supposed to be in our team didn't show up, so it was me and Steph bowling, badly, in lane 26, drinking beer, calling out insults, giving each other high fives and snark for 3 games.

I dressed in one of my most comfortable, relaxed outfits. Long flared jeans and green T-shirt with a black zip up vest and hemp necklace choker, and I spent a lot of time with my thumbs hooked in my pockets and sidling up to the lane and being all cocky and walking tall, and oh man, it felt good. And as I bowled with Steph I realized, again, how good it feels to just act like myself. To swill beer and snark and walk like somebody who has her shit together. I actually haven't done that in awhile. People find me intimidating sometimes, and out here, I just feel.... well, this just doesn't feel like a place I can be me, sometimes. A lot of this came from the not-Boyfriend, I realize, who was terrified of the fact that I talked too loud and walked too confident, terrified of how I presented myself; not because he didn't like it (oh indeed he did), but because he was terrified of what other people would think of me. There's a lot of that "but oh God what would the herd think!" mentality out here.

And as I looked at the assembly of Steph's coworkers, I realized, again, how obviously and absurdly we just don't fit in here. Or, at least, in this subset of Ohio. These people have completely different values. They consider different things when they pick a spouse. Lives are run on guilt and obligation more than independence and commitment. It's like, you're supposed to have a life that's a certain way, and that's the life you make, even if you want something completely different. You build what you're supposed to have, even if it makes you miserable.

It's the weirdest thing out here that you get people my age who are on their second marriage or divorced and already have 3 or more kids. The "starter marriage" thing gets started early out here. You pick somebody based on... I don't know. I've always been incredibly picky about that. You build a life based on... I don't know. Not what I base mine on, that's for sure. Your goals, hopes, dreams, aspirations... nothing at all like mine. Interests, passions... I have so little in common with anybody out here, and I realized how odd and out of place that's made me feel.

I like my strong, butch personae. Not only has it gotten me pretty far, but I physically feel better when I step into it. When I try to quiet down and fem up, I feel stupid. I feel like a liar, and I feel weak and completely powerless. I'm just not me. But at least I "fit in" right?

Fuck that.

As I bowled, badly, and swilled beer tonight, I realized how far I'd come from where I'd been. I liked who I was (also, I really miss drinking, but I digress). I miss feeling safe, among folks who accept me for who I am. I don't trust anybody here to accept me for me. Not one bit. Everybody I've met out here wants me to change to fit their conception of what a good little girl should be (except Steph and the Old Man, of course).

And you know what?

That's not me. I don't accept your religions blindly. I don't agree with your politics. I don't agree with a lot of your hypocritical family values. I don't believe your gay son is going to hell and I don't believe your daughter only has her looks and breeding potential going for her. I don't think the height of refinement is beer and pizza on a Friday night, but it sure can be fun. Now let's discuss some literature and do explain to me why you think Bush's foreign policy is making friends and influencing people. Show me you can use your head. Demonstrate to me that you're not a sheep. I don't care what you believe so long as I know you got there by actually thinking about it. Do you just accept things that people tell you? Is what you have always enough?

Because it's never enough for me. And I realize that, out here, that makes me weird. It also means I'll never be as happy as most of these folks. Will I live a more interesting life? Maybe. Depends on your definition of interesting. One life isn't any better than the other, but I'm clear that the life that's OK for most folks out here isn't OK for me, and I get tired of feeling like I'm in the figurative closet all the time, trying to figure out how I can dress better and fem up and lose weight and dumb down my conversation so people take me seriously.

Fuck that.

God, you know, sitting there swilling beer and trading insults with Steph, I realized how much I miss being me. I miss being the me I was before I got sick. The whiskey-drinking, risk-taking nomad who never got attached to her lovers and ran around the world writing books. I liked that. And you know, when I came here, and my body had betrayed me and my world fell apart and it didn't look like the books were going anywhere, I built another life for myself, in my head. A life that would be different than the one I had. Not better or worse, but different. I found somebody I loved. I had a job a loved. I could get a little house and a garden and a dog and put my energy into building a life and a family and doing all those things that folks out here did. Not better or worse, just... different than what I was.

And tonight I realized just what I was planning to give up, how much of myself was getting lost along the way. Not better, not worse: different. A different self.

Did I like that different path? I don't know. Again, it was just... different. It wasn't what I had. It wasn't who I was tonight.

My dad said that my blog sounded a lot different since I moved to Dayton, and it's true. When you get hit with a shovel, when your whole world gets turned upside down, you have to decide where you're at, what happened, what needs to change. I wanted the boy and the dog and the garden and the house, not necessarily in that order.

Now I have no idea what I want or who I am, because all I want to do is swill whiskey and fuck the night away and chain smoke and get on a plane to Marrakech... and then I realize I already did that, and it brought me here.

So where do I go from here?

I don't know. I feel alive on nights like tonight, yes. But I was happy with the boy and the garden and the dog, too. Maybe they aren't mutually exclusive.

When somebody loves you, they love you for everything you are, good, bad, butch, brutal, bad bowler. And I'm all of those things and a lot more. Pretending I'm not, hiding it, covering it up, pretending that *all* I want is the garden and the house and not the midnight fucking in Marrakech, is a lie. It's gutting half of myself. It's sacrificing one to get the other.

I shouldn't have to sacrifice it. Those parts of myself should make each other stronger. Gutting one guts the other. I can't live a life that's half a person. I can't live half a life.

Now how do I get the house and the garden and the fucking in Marrakech?

This is the real question.

Shit

I feel like it.

Since last Friday when we agreed to the book contract, I've been allowing myself to eat pretty indiscriminately (there have been Chipotle runs, beer and cake, frosted cookies, chocolate cream pie, nachos, and more), and I've only worked out once this week. Some of this also has to do with a lot of work and lingering personal life stress, and the stress and unhealthy eating habits feed one another. The more stressed I am, the more I want to eat shit. The more shit I eat, the worse I feel. The more shit I eat, the more I don't care that I'm eating shit and feeling like shit. I haven't eaten so much shit the entire time since I got diagnosed as I have this week.

I've spent the whole week feeling up and down, mostly eight kinds of down, and now I'm just kind of weepy and exhausted.

I hate that I have to be so hyper-vigilant about food and exercise all the time. I hate that I can't eat what I want. I hate that I feel like shit, and the only way to get feeling level again is to tighten my control back up again and practice that hyper-vigilance.

I think that sometimes I just get tired of living under that tight control all the time. Sometimes I just want to bust out. Then I do, and this is where it gets me. I have to keep myself under control if I want to live any kind of life worth living.

Whine. Whine. Whine.

Quote of the Day

"A useless life is but an early death."
- JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Iphigenia in Tauris

Revelation

Man, it's been awhile since I got behind on e-mail. My day job is eating my life. In a *good* way, mind. It's keeping my brain busy, challenging, rewarding, but yeah, after this big sales project is done I'll need to slow down a little.

Because the Spice Must Flow

"She found him in the magicians' gym, where she should have expected him all along."

Which then explains why I was stuck for two months while she stood there waiting at his door. She was looking in the wrong place.

And just like that, the words come purling down the pipe once again.

Funny how that is.

Classic

The Only Reason to Live in Ohio

Cause after I pay off some debts in May, I'll have freed up $450 a month.

And then I'll get something like this.

It must be Spring Fever. I'm dying for my own place, even though Steph and the Old Man are happy to have me another year and staying here another year would make more sense.

We'll see how the job goes and what the bills look like this summer and see what makes the most sense.

But man, I'm itching for my own place.

Still Waiting at the Door

I'm about 2 months behind on my self-imposed deadline for Black Desert.

I was supposed to have a draft by next month, but it looks like it'll be May instead, with heavy revisions and something of a caliber that could be submitted to my editor by September or so (yes, I'm a heavy rewriter. Not just as I go - which is also heavy rewriting - but heavy rewriting after I have the draft. Until I know the final shape of the book, I can't edit it properly. It's complicated. I'll rant about it another time).

In any case, I usually have some trouble in the Dreaded Middle of a book, and tax season and heartbreak didn't exactly help the already muddy middle.

This weekend, I realized my sticking point in the narrative was that point in the book when Nyx knocks on Rhys's door for the first time in six years. And then... I stopped.

I wrote some scenes ahead of that, the scene where she meets Khos and Inaya, some later scenes of violence and destruction and trippy shapeshifting, but it was this point in the story, when she's gotta knock on the door of the guy who turned his back on her to make his own life that stuck me.

I've continued writing around the scene. I just keep staring at it. Tomorrow I'll be writing the thing out in a plain old notebook. Sometimes when I get stuck, taking it to another writing medium helps.

There's more I want to say about this particular sticking point, but I think I'll leave it at that for now.

Tomorrow I get through it, cause I've got two full-time jobs here now, and deadlines, yo.

Oddities of the Midwest

In conversation with somebody here in Dayton, I heard that he'd gone "snowboarding" over the weekend. How odd, I thought. Where the hell does somebody go skiing for a weekend in the middle of Ohio?

You have to understand, I'm from the Pacific Northwest. If we want to go skiing, you know, we drive the two hours to the Mountain. If we want to go to the beach, we drive the two hours to the beach.

This is Dayton, OH. Where the hell do you go skiing?

Well, it turns out, here in Middle America, find a hill and make some snow.

No, seriously.

Um, folks? If you like skiing, move within driving distance of actual mountains. They make snow out here.

They make snow.

I'm sorry, I know I really shouldn't find this shocking, but fake snow on a bumpy hill in the middle of the midwest, and you call that skiing?

No, no people.