Back in the Saddle

Back in Ohio after a long, good, but tiring break-neck vacation in the Portland/Seattle/Vancouver area. A few highlight below.

Other highlights included: the Space Needle, eating far too much clam chowder, the excellent latte at Pike's Place Market (best I ever had), hanging with my crazy family Saturday night, the incredible view of Seattle from our hotel and amazing back porch and firepit overlooking the ocean at the Seaside beach house.

An all around swell time. More pictures later.















Cannon beach!




















Beating up a defenseless penguin on the Seattle waterfront.




















Pirate store victuals!















Moulton Falls, a bit north of my home town. One of my favorite places.
















Small Powell's bookstore outlet at PDX, right after we arrived on Tuesday.





















Voodoo doughnut Queen. The line to get into this place was half a block long.





















J's very convincing Sasquatch impression at Camp 18 on the way home from Seaside, OR.
















Cannon Beach!





















Falling asleep at the Space Needle while we waited for our table...

I'm a good writer. Now I need to fucking finish things.

For serious.

The Happening

That movie was just... retarded.

The Blood of Heroes

How had I never watched this movie?

Classic late-80s apocalypse movie with strange blood sports that make no sense and people who make a living making armor out of spare tires in a desert wasteland while these pale vampire people rule the abandoned underground cities and watch the more formalized version of the blood sport for fun. It even has Rutger Hauer. It was apparently written by the same guy who wrote Blade Runner, which is how I found it. Comb through IMDB profiles and you can find some interesting stuff.

The surprising part about this movie was that the main character - our plucky hero who wants to join the blood sport team heading through his little town so he can make it to the big leagues in the city - is actually a she, played by Joan Chen of Twin Peaks fame. And holy crap - unlike a lot of other crappy post-apocalypse movies, she actually gets to kick ass! And have meaningless sex! And kick some more ass!

The brutal band of blood sport folks (who go by the ridiculous name "juggers" and run around with chains and dog skulls and yeah, but Mad Max made no sense either handwave handwave) also includes a tough female equivalent of a line backer whose whole face is a mass of scars and a big African American guy with tribal tattoos.

Did I mention that Chen's character breaks people's legs and bites a guy's ear off? Brutal blood sport, right? And she doesn't even have to die at the end! Oh frabjuous day!

J. and I enjoyed this little post-apocalypse romp for its sheer ridiculousness, lame dialogue, silly storyline, and crazy blood sports, but it really stood out to me not because of its B-movieness (I'll watch just about any 80s post-apocalypse show and get some kind of enjoyment out of its craziness), but because it did that thing that is, sadly, really different - I got big brutal heroines and a diverse cast of characters.

I just wish they'd been better actors with a budget and a non-ridiculous script. There's a lot of window dressing here that makes no sense (and let's not even get into the ridiculous of the dog skull thing. Or the chain wielding. Or the... yeah, anyway).

I'm telling you, the Nyx books would be awesome on film.

For a more coherent summary of this bad movie, which helped explain some of the absent, meandering plot to ME, as well, see here (it is worth mentioning - which the reviewer doesn't - that our heroine has sex with two people on the team, not just the team leader, and eyes up some male prostitutes, and she pays no whore price for doing so. Her sexuality feels totally on par with the men's [read: a real person], which I appreciated).

I can be satisfied....

...when just *one* reader "gets" a story.

I'm not sure this makes me a very marketable writer.

I think we are far too in love with being mass-loved. I don't write the sorts of stories that get me mass love. I write about machete-wielding matriarchs.

It does make me wonder, tho, what all of us are writing for? The day job writing pays the bills. The night job writing... more and more these days, I wonder what it's for. It used to be a great way to funnel a lot of anger; a great way to wake people up. We get so complacent in our soft, cozy lives. I've spent the last year oh-so-cozy in mine after nearly two years of terror involving crazy people (one of them being me), chronic illness, job loss, homelessness, grunt work, and soaring medical costs. I live knowing full well that Bad Things can and will happen. You roll the dice. I know what I'm in for. And it makes the soft, quiet, cozy time that much more precious.

I already know what's in the closet. So it does make it hard to visit the horrorshow on purpose at the keyboard every night, when you know it's really out there somewhere - waiting.

Thoughts on Spock/Uhura

One of the quibbles I had about the new Star Trek was the "oh man, the one female character is having sex with her commanding officer" thing. It sucked, cause Uhura was in all other ways such a great update of the character. But see, I was reading this from the perspective of a white chick.

Here's a much more interesting take, which turns Spock/Uhura from EpicFail to EpicWin:

Uhura being single in TOS was not empowering.

She was single because the male leads were all white and as a black woman she was less of a person than them, she was less of a person than a white woman, and the fact that this serendipitously ended up meaning that she didn't have to spend all of her time mooning pathetically after dismissive men does not make that any more acceptable.

She got to sit in the back and rarely do anything and have her sexuality ignored not because they respected her so much as a colleague and a person, but because she was not a full, real human being and when you're not a full, real human being the idea that actual people would ever desire you or romance you or love you is ridiculous. You are invisible.

I love it when somebody points something out that makes me read an entire situation totally differently.

#EAFail

For fuck's sake, you guys.

Link roundup.

Busy

Yes. That is me. But I'm alive. Posting will continue when I learn to manage my time more wisely.

"Wonder Maul Doll" Live at Escape Pod!

You can check out my story, "Wonder Maul Doll" today at EscapePod!

Bonus graphic violence warning!

Twitterbots

I think the reason so many porn spammers try to follow Nyx is because she uses the word "fuck" a lot.

Today's Stats

Only had two regular workout days last week instead of four. Annoying. On the other hand, it was a short and busy week.

When J. and I stopped at Wendy's at 1 am for a "snack" on the way home from our fireworks party on Saturday and I ordered a baconater, I turned to him and said, "This is why married people get fat."

"It's one roadtrip!" he protested.

Then I was reminded of why I don't eat fast food anymore. I felt sick after eating the damn thing, and wished I would have just kept to the almonds and string cheese. But oohhhhh the IDEA of a baconator is just... well, the idea is better than the real thing.

Hot hot hot!

15 min free weights this morning
10 min bike ride to work
20 min weight lifting w/ trainer at work
20 min cardio w/ trainer at work
10 min bike ride home
20 min Wii Fit

Hot Eats

Breakfast: Egg mixed with spinach, tomato, & cheese
Lunch: Chicken curry, low carb tortilla, and string cheese
Snack: 2 tbs peanut butter mixed with 1/4 cup peanuts
Dinner: Pork chop and asparagus
Snack: 5 low carb peanut butter cookies (they were DELICIOUS)


Hot Sugar

Breakfast: 98
Lunch: 161 (had to lower my insulin before cardio at the gym)
Post lunch: 209 (I always forget that the peas in the curry have more carbs than I think they do)
Dinner: 77
Post-dinner: 80

East and West

"Superman and his buddies will be uniting with The 99, superheroes already popular in the Middle East and who personify the 99 attributes of Allah.

Created by Kuwaiti-based Teshkeel Media, The 99 are ordinary people who develop special abilities after coming into contact with a mystical glass. They do not have secret identities and include five female superheroes with one, Batina, who is fully veiled.

The characters — created by five writers who have worked either with DC or Marvel — pray or read the Qur'an."

Ok, time to do some searching on Batina...

UPDATE: Open letter from the creator about why he created The 99.

The Writing Life (or, lack thereof)

I worry these days that my writing isn’t as good as it used to be, because all the choices I make seem to be poor ones. I’ll go through a story or a scene and realize that what I chose during the first pass was totally inappropriate. I keep thinking I’ve lost touch with the words, that there’s some kind of innate feeling for plot, character, structure, that went by the wayside. It’s made the last year of writing incredibly slow-going and difficult.

It wasn’t until tonight, as I went through and worked on the heroes story, that I realized what I was doing. There wasn’t anything different about the choices I made the first time through now than there was three years ago. The difference is, they’re *transparently wrong choices* now. As I go through and clean up the words, I’m seeing the errors – and where those errors will lead – a lot sooner than I would have a couple years ago. It’s like playing a chess game. You can see where this one wrong piece is going to get you somewhere you don’t want to go. So you go back, and back, and back, and figure out exactly where it’s going wrong. You fix that piece. You go forward. Then back, back, then forward.

It’s such a slow fucking process that it makes me feel retarded. I feel like I’m making stupid mistakes that I never used to make. But when I look back at my old fiction, I can see the same mistakes. The differences is, when I wrote them then I wasn't aware of them. When I write a story very quickly - something incredibly inspired that I feel in my gut the whole way through - sometimes the emotional weight of it can mask some of the bullshit for me. That's what those nice gut-punching writing sessions were like. Now, usually, my stories come out like this: bursts and spurts and lame-duck circling.

I feel like a completely broken writer because I can actually see where things are broken. It’s not that they weren’t broken before. It’s just that I can see it now. And it gets me stuck.

I’d call it a blessing, except that’s it’s slowed my writing down considerably, in no small part because it’s caused a total lack of confidence. I just sit here and look at all these broken pieces and I think, “How the hell do these fit together?”

I’m working through the writing funk slowly, but it’s torturous, and it’s been paralyzing me this last year. I started up regular writing times again this week, for the first time in... well, the first time since I had a book 1 deadline. I gave up regular writing times when I moved out of Steph and the Old Man's place, and writing has been sporadic since then. Again, I don’t know if this is good or bad. There’s a big change going on in my writing life, and I don’t know if it’s for the best or not. I won’t know for awhile yet.

I can see broken things now. I just need to stop letting that paralyze me. Failure only really happens when you give up, and not writing much this last year has come perilously close to that. Sticking in the trenches… well, I don’t know. Sometimes you get to hop into another trench on down the line. You get to advance. But in the meantime, you’re keeping your head down a lot, and pissing in a bucket, and that does get old after awhile. I mean, when you start drinking your urine out of the bucket, do you figure you've been in long enough to quit? Or do you wait for dehydration to set in and just pray for rain?

I'm thinking I'll dig a well.

Must be a holiday

Heavy thump-thump of fireworks outside my window. We're less than a mile away from the downtown fireworks show, which plays on the 3rd and 4th. I can see the fireworks from my window here as I'm typing. If I wanted a proper show, I only need to walk out my front door and sit out on the grass in the park next to my house. J. and I did that during the memorial day fireworks.

I really like this house, especially now, when the weather's not too hot or too cold. Everything in my life feels just right.

This Month's Budget

June Budget = -$176.49

+ $247.85 in celebratory expenses

= -$424.34 last month.

All of that went on my credit card, but at least the IRS got their payment for the month?

Bah.

Doing math for July.

Burn Notice

I love this show. Yes, it's formulaic, and silly at times, but man - it's got smart writing and consistently strong female characters, which you just don't see very often in these "damsel in distress" types of shows (let's face it - you don't see this very often, period). I like that all the characters aren't white bread (this is Miami, afterall), tho they could do a lot better on that front (I heard season three mixes it up a bit more, but I'm only halfway thru season 2 right now).

I also love the formulaic episode paired with movement of the overall "bigger" plot. Reminds me a bit of Quantum Leap in that sense. Each episode is self-contained, but there's a bigger story riding just underneath, to the point where it ends up being the subplot.

Smart writing, lovable characters.

Yeah, you just don't see enough of that.

New Writing Time

Some work-in-progress. Trying to get back on the wagon here. I've got a new writing time from 8-9:30 every night. Let's try it on for size.

I've tried starting this particular story several times, but this is the first opening I've written where the setting feels right and the main character isn't a total asshole.

----------------
Yousra had always feared the bodies. Not the ones she killed, no, but the ones out on the hill that the heroes had left to the dung beetles and markflies. The children she killed were marked for death from birth – deformed children, dumb and blind, their twisted bodies already rotten and gangrenous in the womb. Those were the bodies she was tasked with gutting and burning before dawn. Some wombs drew up the pollution of the world, condensed it, spat it back out. That offal was hers.

But the bodies on the hill were men, just men. Tawny and smooth-featured, they were beautiful, all of them... The heroes skinned them from claws to tail and left them to die in the sun. A reminder to others of what waited for them beyond the thorny fence of the village. Some nights, before the double dawn, Yousra would climb up on the hill amid the babies' ashes and listen to the men scream from beyond the thorn fence.

Most days, she merely did her duty and came home. Burned her clothes. Washed her hair in her mothers' blood. Then she slept the peculiar sleep of the priests, the sleep-that-was-not. Her body remained alert while she dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed. Sometimes she remembered the conversations she had with those who visited while she slept, but more often – especially now – she remembered little more than the dreaming.

So when Ashet, the priest from the neighboring village, greeted her that day and said they had an appointment, she followed after him willingly, blindly. She pulled on a fresh robe of hemp and thorns and tied her machete at her hip. She had never done much more with the machete than murder the village's mewling monsters and cut back weeds, but the weight of it comforted her. A silly thing, to fear another priest enough to wear her machete. What did she have to fear, from a priest? They were not heroes. She knew that well enough. But she also knew that as things got worse, the people were becoming more desperate. Just three days before, a woman burned her husbands and herself. She had run out beyond the thorn fence, covered in flaming pitch, and died screaming and clawing at the earth.

Yousra and Ashet walked to the edge of the village, side by side. She nearly took his hand. It would have been polite. But instead, they strolled along the thorn fence a hands' length apart. Above them, the heroes' ships roared across the purple sky, so high up they were merely silver thrushes.

The big amber leaves of the walking trees shivered as they passed. Every year, the trees grew a new root, pulled up the old, and slowly crept out past the thorn fence. Another three or four years and half their flock would have escaped the thorn fence. Half the flock gone over into the wastelands, the unprotected lands, would leave their fields with barely enough shelter from the ravages of the autumn winds. Ten years more, and the fields would simply blow away.

“Have you thought much upon my offer?” Ashet asked.

Yousra had to think long and hard about that. What was the last offer he'd put to her?

“The marriage?” she said, because in her mind, all of his requests – for milking ale, more time at the village school, a day with her lending library – blurred together into one long litany of need, a black hole of desires she had no interest in filling.

“Marriage is an outdated notion,” he said. “We make families from the dust out here, or no families at all. My brother is anxious to meet with you. I believe the three of us will be a fine fit.”

A fine fit, three to a bed. Yousra had never wanted more than two husbands. She was not greedy. A man to work the fields and bring in income, and a man to raise her babies and keep her house. But there were fewer and fewer women now, and she had to think of the others first. If she wanted to be headwoman someday, she must do what was right for the village, not her comfort. Was it fair to expect her sisters to marry three brothers, while she took only two?

“I'm thinking on it,” she said, which was a polite way to refuse. He knew that as well as she, but he persisted.

“It would be a good life, Yousra. My brother has a fine farm in --”

“I've seen his farm,” Yousra said. She'd tended every farm for thirty kilometers in every direction. Every farm left within the thorn fence. Fewer every year, as the wasteland encroached. “I delivered his wife's babies. All of them.”

“Yes,” Ashet said, and his expression darkened. He fell silent.

Yousra tried to remember the wife, but could recall nothing of her but the sour smell of milk and wine gone to vinegar. Yousra had delivered her twins – two sets of them – all monsters. The woman killed herself not long after. She was not the first. Would not be the last. A waste and a terror, to lose so many women to pollution and madness.

“Is it the labor you fear?” Ashet asked.

Yousra looked at him sideways, then turned away, to look out past the fence. Out on the dry, desiccated land, the skeleton of a thorn tree marked the horizon. In her youth, the tree marked the beginning of her mother's starch farm. Three hundred acres of soy, yams, and grizzled water pears. Waves and waves of it, all through the growing season. Now... just death. Barren and diseased, like Yousra's people. She absently touched the machete at her hip, thought of the dead woman.

“I don't fear birth. I fear that marriages and more children won't be what saves us.”

Ashet smiled. “It's the only thing that can.”

“Is it? To continue with a way of life that's dying? When a man comes to you with a rotten wound, do you tell him to continue with his work?”

“We aren't rotten.”

“Aren't we?” She pointed out beyond the skeletal tree. “My mothers are buried out there. Their bodies ate them from the inside, long before the heroes came. Something rotten has been planted here, and we must cut it out.”

Ashet sighed. He pulled his hands behind his back, paused. “Marry us, Yousra. There is still happiness to be had here.”

“Happiness, yes,” Yousra said, but she was not looking at him. She was looking out at the tree. “But not a future.”

On "Promoting" Obesity

Isn't there some inherent sexism in focusing on the weight of a woman who is making a living because of her singing and songwriting skills? Does every Jack Black interview have to include "relevant" information about his weight? Seth Rogen became a star without a svelte physique. No one cared if we posted about those guys without mentioning their weight, but women must be small and tiny and delicate and therefore feminine, right? And let's not pretend this is a health issue: We see images of stars smoking and drinking and frighteningly thin, and never get emails about how we're "promoting" those unhealthy lifestyles.

Tofu Shirataki

Low carb pasta (no, really!). A blend of yam and tofu that... tastes like noodles! For serious!

I ate a huge plate of this last night that only cost me 25 carbs. HUGE PLATE. It was excellent!

Right after we took our first bite, J. insisted that he's been itching to make me a threeway... (I knew it).

What about low-carb chili, you ask? That's why Skyline chili was invented.

Halva: Fudge for Diabetics

2.5 carbs a serving. No joke! It is tasty and delicious!

This was a totally random find at Jungle Jim's yesterday.

Eating well gets easier and easier as I expand my shopping range.