Interest

The company I work for leases the top ten or twelve floors of a big high rise downtown, and my co-receptionist, Nell, and I receive all of the FedEx, DHL, UPS and messenger deliveries for all ten floors on our floor. We serve as the public reception desk - there's another one on the Executive floor and another on the Legal floor. When we get a delivery, we notify the recipient and they usually come up or down to get it.

Yesterday, one of the women from the Legal department, let's call her Val, stopped by the desk while Nell was away and asked me if I remembered a delivery she'd gotten a week before.

"You know," she said, "the big weird bamboo thing."

"Yea," I said, "I remember that one."

Most people get flowers or balloons or even cookie or candy arrangements, but she'd received a big square vase of living bamboo shoots trained into a sort of umbrella shape. I remember her reading the card and looking puzzled and a little flustered. She actually told us she really didn't want them, and did we want them? Before finally, grudgingly, bringing them upstairs (we have actually had a couple of women refuse deliveries like these from admirers. You'd be surprised)

"Do you remember who delivered it?" Val asked. "I mean, who actually came up here and delivered it?"

"The messenger service," I said. I know the three messengers who work downstairs by name now: Tern, Brett, and Nessa. I once made Brett blush.

"So who are they? They're employed by the building?"

"Yeah. What happens is the messenger services are employed by whatever company sent the gift, and dropped off with the building's service, and then the building's messengers come up here. It's a security thing."

Since 9/11, security downtown has been pretty tight. You have to have a badge to get through the downstairs turnstiles and another badge that allows you access to the inner doors of whatever floor you're on. There's *another* set of doors beyond the reception desks that you have to get buzzed through, as well, in order to access the rooms beyond. I only have a card that's good on my floor and to get passed downstairs security. So I don't have access to any other company floors. If I want to get into them, I have to have somebody who has access to that floor escort me through.

"Good," she said, and she launched into this story about how she was shopping for furniture at Macy's and discussing furniture with one of the salesmen, and she'd casually mentioned that instead of getting something delivered, she'd probably just rent a truck here downtown since she worked at XXX company here at XX South XXX street."

He ended up giving her his card, with, convienently, his home number scrawled on the back.

She didn't think anything of it until a few days later, when this bizarre bamboo tree complete with cheesy poem-of-obvious-interest arrived.

"So there's no way he knows what floor I work on?" she asked me.

"No," I said, "he couldn't have gotten up here."

She was more than a little flustered, and probably overly worried, but you know, when a guy puts his home number on the back of a card, pretty much anybody knows what that means. If she doesn't call you back, it means she's not interested. Sending something to her place of business after one casual conversation, after she *hasn't* called you back... not a great idea.

It was a very strange moment, because I could sympathize with both parties. I'd love to live in a world where sending flowers to a stranger *wasn't* considered an opening move to stalking.

"I've learned my lesson," she said. "I'm never going to be so casual about telling strangers where I work again."

There's this belief that women are totally and absolutely responsible for any assault made against them. They're expected to be constantly alert for psychos, to assume the worst of every nice guy, to guard their behavior closely in case they're mistaken for sluts, for "asking for it," for being too flirty.

And it's a double-edged sword, because if you *are* nice to somebody who turns out to be crazy, then it's your fault if he hacks you up after work cause you were dumb enough to *tell him where you worked* and if you're cool and impersonal toward him you're just some cold frigid man-hating bitch.

More often than not, women who are cool and reserved toward strange men are, in fact, protecting themselves. It's not that we don't want to be nice. I'd love to be nicer to people. But after smiling at guys on the street and having them assume that was some kind of invitation to harrassment or following me home, well, I've learned my lesson too insofar as city living goes.

In conversations with strangers, one of the best ways to establish early on that you're not interested in anything romantic, of course, is to pull the "my boyfriend" card. Jenn used to do this when she worked at a comic book shop full of friendly geeky boys who liked to talk. She loved talking to them - she was just, obviously, never especially interested, so she made up a boyfriend, and made sure so work in a reference to her imaginary boyfriend any time a guy seemed to be getting super friendly (sure, you could make up a girlfriend or tell them about your real girlfriend, I guess, but I there can sometimes be anxiety around outing yourself to strangers because 1) they might give you shittier service/be assholes 2) be even more turned on and pushy at the idea ie "she just needs a good hetero fuck! I'll cure her!" variety). It's a nice way to establish the, "Yes, I like you, but merely in a friendly way!" thing without the guy heading for the hills in embarrassment. The ones who don't back off after this probably aren't the sort you'd want as friends anyway.

It's an interesting dance, and I remember spending a couple of days in the kitchen at work here having lunch with some of the construction guys and Ms. Conner, the janitor, and laughing it up, telling dirty jokes, and generally just having a good time. The problem was, after the second day of that, the recently divorced guy with the type-1 diabetic daughter tried to push that a step further and made a comment about how great it would be if he and I just had casual sex without any strings, and ah, yes, alas, so much for casual joking days in the kitchen. The next time I saw him, I went from friendly to professional, and sadly, I saw him feel the chill, and I was kind of sad about the whole thing, cause we'd had a lot of fun joking around.

Negotiating interest feels like it's one of those invisible privlege things that guys have. If a woman's interested and you blow her off, you're not usually worried about her pulling some psycho shit and stalking you (sure, it happens, but as a society, we don't really train guys to be worried about this sort of behavior). As women, it feels like there's this constant dance around boundaries, around establishing friendliness vs. interest and etc., and if there's any mistake, if a guys *does* go wacko because you turned him down, it's always going to be your fault for not being polite, for not being polite enough, for not mentioning soon enough that you had a boyfriend/girlfriend, for wearing that short skirt, for continuing to even speak in the same space....

Diversions

Speed-reading test. The problem is, you've gotta test for comprehension. It's like asking someone to take a typing test and then not subtracting from their score based on mistakes they make. Hey, I can type 300 words a minute going ASOWHOHD nsdoafnsohf[oweihf aosdjfao sidkjf fajsd pfajsodf!!!

Cheerful hamster for breakfast!

The Speech Accent Archive. English speakers' (native and non-native) accents from around the globe.

Useful phrases. How to say, "Oh my God, there's an ax in my head!" in various lanaguages.

C'mon, you know you wondered.

Well, Fuck

It's snowing again. In March.

The thing is, when I got back to the lower 48 after my two-year stint in Alaska, I got into the habit of assuming that Spring came in... March. This is because in WA State, where I'm originally from, the Spring bulbs spring in... March.

But here in Chicago, Spring does not start until April.

In Alaska, Spring happened in May. By April, I was clawing at the windows waiting for Spring and wondering what the hell all the snow was still doing on the ground, even knowing that yes, indeed, Spring in Fairbanks (AKA: Meltdown) actually happened in May.

I'm always ready for Spring about a month before it's ready for me, no matter where I am.*

* Durban didn't have seasons. It was hot, very hot, or hot and raining.

Solace

When I'm feeling really down about my work, I go to the bookstore downtown or down the street and I stand in front of the SF/F section. Then I open books at random and read the first few lines, the first paragraph.

98% of the time, it makes me feel a lot better.

The rest of the time, I buy the book.

Everybody wins.

My Latest Doctor's Bill

So, I cashed out my 401(K) so I could pay $360 a month for "catastrophic" health insurance, which means they don't pay anything toward any of my medical costs until after I pay $2500 out of pocket. No co-pays, no 50% and certainly no 80% of anything, until I cough $2500 out of my ass this year.

For $1615, I have this dubious form of health insurance through the end of March, which might be real useful if I, like, get hit by a car (knock on wood). Otherwise, basically, I just blew $1615 and gave the government a nice chunk of my retirement savings in the form of taxes.

And I just got my doctor's bill for my January appointment:

Office visit: $90
Comp Metabolic Profile: $50
Hemoglobin A1C: $50
BC/RP DF (no idea what this is): $20

THEN I got the medical bill from the actual LAB that does the work:

Hemoglobin, Glycosylated: $45.50
Comprehen Metabolic Panel: $50

So where am I supposed to get this "extra" $305 when I make $1999 a month and my bills are $1900 a month?

I seriously considered not going to the doctor again until I have health insurance (I mean, REAL insurance), and then I realized that the medical system has insured that I can't do that: I *have to pay someone* to give me my insulin prescriptions.

I have to pay them not only for my meds, but for the privilege of getting the meds that keep me alive.

God bless America.

Details

One of the first things you learn, as a traveler, one of the hardest lessons, is that you always take yourself with you.

This sometimes really sucks.

You default to the best and worst in yourself when you strip everything else away, and you figure out how much of who you are is tied to place and how much of you is something you carry with you, always, the same way you carry your heart, your lungs, your faulty pancreas.

I figured this out in Alaska, when I bought a one way ticket to Fairbanks and decided to start over in a little town at the edge of nowhere. The whole world was wide open, and I believed I could be anyone I wanted to be. I broke a lot of my own rules. I drank too much and ran around with drug addicts and drank home brewed beer and carried around a rifle and collected stories. I biked everywhere, worked out regularly, and said yes to nearly every party invitation. I didn’t want to be a sedentary wallflower anymore. I wanted to build somebody different.

But when things got bad, when somebody’s girlfriend threatened to kill me, when I got brushed off by the guy I was – for some bizarre reason – pursuing, I would default to old ways of dealing with stress. I’d retreat to my room, sleep a lot, eat ice cream sandwiches and yogurt pretzels. I would stop saying yes to invitations. Bruised from all the effort it took to be with people only to get hit over the head, I knew how to retreat, how to protect myself, and I reverted to those ways of comforting myself, though I knew that by reverting to those old habits, it was just a step to the right of reverting to everything else I was, everything I had been and had hated.

I made a lot of headway toward being somebody I wanted to be, in Alaska, but I still spent far too much of my vacation in Juneau sleeping in the hotel room and eating overpriced steak. I learned to love to be alone, and I kept loving people who didn’t care about me, because believe me, loving people who don’t love you is really cozy and safe and totally free of obligations. I built a lot of my own safe spaces, and I’ve spent much of my 20s in a constant state of advance and retreat, advance and retreat, running out of the trenches waving my arms and screaming and then holing up somewhere and sobbing hysterically before the next push.

In South Africa, I played the same sort of game, rushing outside and going to parties and a couple of clubs in an attempt to be extroverted and pretend I was slim and blond and brilliant. Mostly, social interactions left me with a horrible feeling that I had somehow failed. I had failed to be pretty enough, well dressed enough, witty enough, brave enough. I spent most of my time in South Africa drinking Laborie Pinotage and smoking Peter Stuvyesant cigarettes.

I also wrote a thesis and finished a book and was asked to measure my worth in cows.

Thus, it wasn’t all self-immolation, but the undercurrent was there, because when I became fearful, when I was uncertain (which was pretty much my entire time in SA), I retreated back to old modes of behavior, old ways of dealing with stress – sleeping and eating; retreating inward. Being fearful.

When I was under pressure, the fear often won out over my drive to be better, do better, to learn new ways of coping.

I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is to change oneself, to alter these childhood patterns that we learned to keep us safe.

I can learn other ways of behaving; I can even learn to cope differently and consistently apply those new methods. But when everything breaks, when my new lives fail, what I find at core, after I’ve stripped it all down, are those same coping mechanisms that have worked so well for me in the past.

But there are other things I find, too.

When everything else fails me, when people fail me, when my body fails me, there is something else I reach for, something I carry with me just as I carry those bad habits, something that keeps me going when I have nothing and no one else (or feel that way, at least). I push myself back up. I have books to write. Places to see. Things to accomplish. Miles and miles to run before I sleep. I have lists and lists of things I need to be doing, things that I’ll be happy once I’ve done, completed, made steps toward, but I’m never completely satisfied, because the closer I get to these goals, the further out the goals move. I can’t ever die, really, because I have too much to do.

When I sit down and open the book of my life, there are things I want to see there, and those things are huge and big, things you see out there in the stars; I want everything. I want the whole world; I want more than I can hold.

So despite getting knocked down, despite watching myself fall off the wagon during the worst of it, I still reach for those huge things; that big life, the one where I’m tootling around Rome and have a beach house and a couple of other vacation houses and I make a living writing and I take up a whole shelf at the book store and I travel wherever the hell I want, and I am happy and spend time on the beach and I have good friends, good food, good coffee, good conversation. I’m strong, and I’m healthy, and I am surrounded by people I love more than my life.

Sometimes I feel bad that I still want those things, I feel foolish and youthful and I think, “Man, why don’t I just settle into the fact that I’ll be a bitter secretary my whole life!”

And then I remember that the reason I don’t do that is because, well, it’s not true.

That’s not the life I want. It’s not the life I’m going to have. I’ve been presented with a good deal of different lives to choose from in the last decade, and despite several things having been chosen for me (dead pancreas), I’ve chosen the life I wanted wherever possible. I have a very clear idea what I want. I’m down, yeah. I’ve been down before. I’ll be down again. But every time I’ve hit a wall I’ve gotten back up again with a clearer idea of who I am, what I want, what I can do.

Because yea, you know, we all carry these things with us through our travels, through life: we carry the bad things, the broken pancreases, the reversion to red wine and binge eating as a means of getting through a shitty day, but there’s the good stuff, too. There’s the passion. There’s the determination. There’s the blind stubbornness in the face of overwhelming odds. There’s the drive. There’s the persistence. Always, the persistence.

I fall and I fall and I fall and I fall…

It’s not a perfect life I’ve lived. I could weave a pretty good story from some of the highlights, but the brutal truth is that the highlights aren’t living. We leave out the drudgery. The getting up everyday, the persistence. We write about the big heroism, the great war, the big book sale, the wedding, the funeral, the birth, the marriage.

But life is about how you lived on turnips and spent long hours reading outdated magazines during the bombing of the city, and the big box of rejection slips in your garage and that night when you got the rejection from Ellen Datlow and cried because it was just the perfect way to top off the perfect shitty fucking day, and it’s how you courted somebody you really thought you should marry but weren’t sure and had nightmares for months that you’d lose them and how you fell all over yourself trying to be too perfect, trying to be just right; it’s how you dealt with the daily quiet grief of death, how you ate your eggs alone every morning afterward with this big hole in your life; and how you make that marriage work during the horrible times when you’re both being assholes and you’re exhausted because there’s no money and everyone in the whole world looks like a better mate than whoever the hell this person is you ended up with, and how you get up every day, after, and how you learn to love them again.

Life is the details. It’s in the lows between the markers where we spend most of our lives. It’s in the imperfect times. The boring times. Those long stretches of desert that not everybody gets through, but that I slog through on my way to the big hills, the grand vistas.

Life is the stuff you blog about.

Strange & Unusual Dictionaries

Including dictionaries of all-vowel words, all-consonant words, and one letter words.

Fuck the Sugar

Note to self: yea, you know, all those complex carbs you know you can't eat anymore but you decided to get all pissed off and eat anyway?

Yea, that's why you had headaches all last week and felt like your feet were going to fall off at night.

A bagel once a week is fine. A bagel followed the next day by some pizza, and the next day by half a muffin and a croissant, and etc... no. No, really, you can't do that anymore.

Nice thought, tho.

Choice

Games, Like Crack

Improve your spacial reasoning skills! Trounce others online!

Make the biggest snowball ever! Trounce others online!

Kill slugs! Pretend to kill other people's slugs!

Ne fume pas! Trounce smokers!

Yeah, it was another great ass-kissing day here in balmy Chicago...

Campbell Award Eligibility

Well, it looks like I'm still eligible for the Campbell award for Best New SF/F writer (2nd year of eligibility) because of the screwy rules regarding when Strange Horizons became a pro market.

For anyone interested in voting, here's the list of eligible nominees.

SO VOTE! No pressure. :)

As usual, I'm a pretty small fish (I mean, Naomi Novik, Justine? Sarah Monette? And then there's Meghan McCarron and Cherie Priest. Yea, right).

Tra la.

Is it Spring Yet?

Really, any time now, folks.

Free Hugs

On Thursday night I was walking home from work downtown when I saw a woman on the corner of Washington and State holding up a Free Hugs sign. I'd already seen the original Free Hugs video on YouTube, so I had a little shot of happiness at seeing somebody out in Chicago doing the same and prepared to step hastily by and get to my train.

But as I passed by and saw her hugging people, my step faltered, and I wanted to turn back.

I really wanted a hug.

Here was this person offering some bit of comfort without requesting anything in return, without obligation, without any power-crazy or twisted ulterior motives (that's the idea, anyway). You don't see that a lot. You don't get unconditional comfort or affection all that often.

It made me wonder if this is what the appeal of prostitution is, that you can pay someone to pretend to care about you for an hour. The difference, in this case, of course, is that Free Hugs are given without the need to receive anything in turn. I'm not shaking hands or giving out blow jobs because I can't pay my rent. It's done out of pure compassion as opposed to desperation/material gain.

And man, did I want to turn around and go back, to the point where I started crying there in the street, because I couldn't believe that it was possible for anyone to give me something without desperately needing something back, without taking something away from me, and I was so, so tired; after the year or two I've had, I felt like I had nothing to give to anyone, and I couldn't turn back and receive that hug because I didn't have anything to give her in return.

So I cried on the way home on the train, and I thought about a world full of free hugs, of compassion without obligation, of being able to give of yourself without fear of having someone try and take it all away.

I would like to live in a world like that, or even a world where I believed that was possible.

One of the best heroines I've come across in a really long time is Nausicaa of comic book fame. She's strong and compassionate and will fight if she needs to, but prefers negotiation and the showing of love and compassion over brute force if possible. I loved the idea that that heroine could exist. The idea of nonviolence and universal love as a means of changing the world is what draws me to stories of people like Ghandi or Jesus or even MLK. I want to believe that love can change the world. I write about bloody, violent, mean people who fight hate with hate; they're the sort of monsters created by societies that use hate against hate, that keep order through strength and submission.

That is not the world I want to live in, and it's not the world I want to believe in. I write about it because it fascinates me, and because I hope that someday, if I can understand it, I can find an alternative to it, one that I really believe in. I don't buy the idea that all we need to do is stand in a circle and put flowers in our hair and dance around saying "I believe in fairies!" (what about health care? Who's going to make insulin? Who's going to do the laundry and build the houses and make great medical breakthroughs if we're all standing around in a circle all day patting each other on the back?), but I know that there's an alternative to all this blood and anger and hate.

Sometimes I feel that what I do with a lot of my writing is take all of the anger and hate and violence that I've absorbed from the world and try and excise it through writing. Otherwise I just turn it inward, and it seethes inside of me and treies to claw itself out, and it chews me to pieces. I'm tired of being full of self-loathing.

I want to be able to let good things in, to appreciate all that good stuff, all those free hugs, without the desperate fear that by letting those things in, by releasing all the fear and anger, I'll become weak and vulnerable.

The only way to learn how to fly is to let everything go. I know that, but the fear of falling, the fear of falling... that's the worst fear of all.

Revolutionaries

The Secret Lives of Secretaries (Blowjob Edition)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

One For the Road

Random Word Generator

When you need just the right word... that doesn't actually exist.

Plotting Failure

Plot should really be a very simple thing.

Something bad happens to someone.

Then things get worse.

I'm pretty good at heaping on trouble, I'm just not sure that in the end, any of it makes any sense. Being a sort of "sit down and see what happens" writer, the whole process of discovery thing when I'm writing a book is great. The horrific result of writing this way, however, is that I spend years rewriting in order to figure out how the plot sticks together.

Character, setting, dialogue: I started out being pretty strong at character, worked real hard at setting, worked my ass off at dialogue, and now I feel competent at all of this. What has continued to elude me is... plot.

Not even "something bad happens. Then things get worse." Oh yes, THINGS GET WORSE. But why? How do I tie all that together and make it resonate?

I just sat down and revised an old story of mine from Clarion, the template character for the one I'm currently writing several books about, and I managed to tie up some of the themes so that when you get to the end you go, "Oh." (Well, *I* went "oh." It has yet to be seen if anyone else will). It's taken me seven years to make this story something more than a "so what?" story.

And that, at core, is I think what my problem is: when I'm not careful, I can write a lot of "so what?" stories. That's all well and good if you're content to go running around a wacky world with fucked up, wacky (often violent) people, but it's not usually until halfway through the story that I either find my point, or... I don't, and I have to trash the story. Then, once you actually find your point (if you do at all), you have to go back and make sure you set all that up at the beginning. If I'm *really* cool I can write forward by constantly looking back at the beginning of the story and trusting that everything I need for the end was totally frontloaded at the beginning by my really kewl subconscious.

Right now, that's sort of how I'm swinging things, but I want to be really good at plot, the nuts and bolts kind, not just the bordering-on-didactic kind. I want all the world's political pieces to come together. I want everybody running on their little plot highways to smack into each other and make the reader go "Oh! Of course!"

Basically, I want to be BRILLIANT.

So I suppose that's nothing new.

Worst. Fight Scene. Ever

Come now, who didn't LOVE this show?

I think Kirk should have just taken his mask off and screamed, "AHA!!!"

I Felt Terrible....

... when I was sick. But I could wear such cute clothes!

Indeed, I am well aware of the fucked-uppedness of that.

"What kept me sane throughout the diet, and stopped me from tipping over the edge and wanting to keep the new skinny self I'd worked so hard to achieve, was the realisation that my life was no better, or more successful, or colourful, when I was thin than before."

The Secret Lives of Secretaries

Yesterday, Nell and I discovered that someone has been stealing the handsoap bottles in the kitchen and in the coffee bar behind our reception desk at work (yes, we have a coffee bar behind the reception desk). Now we're missing a huge jug of Jergens lotion.

We have no idea who's doing this, or why they need that much handsoap. Or that much lotion.

In any case, it's not like it's a big deal. The head guy in the office upstairs made $238 million last year.

It might sound really exciting to have a plasma TV in the reception area you're working in, but believe me, 24 hours of CNN is really mind-numbing when the day's biggest stories are who gets to bury Anna Nicole Smith and Is Britney's Haircut Prelude to a Stint in Rehab? (the answer is yes, apparently). These are the sorts of things no reasonable human being really needs to know. And yet.

I figure if things get real dull we can always spice it up by ordering condoms for the bathrooms and renting out the conference rooms by the hour.

We'll need to order more lotion.

Gendered Writing

Surprise! If you write from a male POV, you must be a male writer, and if you write from a female POV, you must be a female writer.

All hail the gender genie!

I think this would have been more amusing if I didn't peg the whole insert male POV scene followed by "try again" and then insert female POV scene. That was way too predictable.

(via making light)

Call Me Crazy...

... but when I was a kid, I didn't think, "Golly gee, I want to be a professional Executive Assistant!"

And yet, these people exist.

Granted, in downtown Chicago they're making six figures. But really, who would have thunk it?

There are Few Things More Annoying...

... than a 52 number right after you've brushed your teeth.

Dammit.

Man, I Hope I Get That Interview...

... or I'm going to need to get a weekend gig at Starbucks.

"Girlfriend in a Coma, I Know/I Know - It's Serious"*

I have been trying to write up a post about writing and trauma for the last hour, inspired by this post.

I guess I'm still in a bad enough place that I don't feel like I can talk about it. Of course, much of my reluctance is that so much of the current situation would also be talking about the private business of somebody else, and that's not kewl.

So here I am.

Suffice to say that things have not been great for me or my roommate/Clarionmate/formergirlfriend/friend for the last year. There were bad relationships prior to us getting together, professional failures before and after we got together, a bad breakup, subsequent meltdowns, more professional failures, a job layoff, and let's not even get started on the whole, "Surprise you have a chronic illness"/"OMG Kameron's in a coma in the bathroom fucking shit fuck fuck fuck!!" thing. Cause that's some heavy shit to deal with on top of everything else. Or, shit to deal with as a nice appetizer before the meltdown.

We've chosen to deal with our pain and grief in very different ways, and I hope that, just as I'm rebuilding, she will continue to rebuild as well, and in twenty years we'll be better people.

Because, yes, at the end of the day, you do have to go on. If you don't go on, you die. If you choose to dwell in the darkness, it will devour you. You must find a new life outside of that. It's not like you're going to forget the darkness, it's not like it's going to go away, but you can build a place in the sun somewhere, knowing that the sun is all the brighter because you are one of those who knows what it's like in the dark.

I wrote the bulk of GW when I was slowly dying, when my personal relationships were bouncing all over the place just like my sugar numbers, during a time where I wasn't doing a lot of higher level thinking. It was all about this thing, and the next thing, and sleeping, and drinking water, mmmm sweet sweet water....

It's no surprise that when I was done with GW and still recovering from the mess of my life, dealing with a lot of resulting emotional craziness on both ends in this house, that I decided that GW wasn't a book, it was bookS. I didn't want to start my next stand-alone project just yet. I needed to work with this character and this world. I wanted to work through the issues I had to deal with in the life of this bloody, strong, brutally traumatized woman who masked all her weakness with witticism and pretended she was fine when she wasn't, and was, in reality, only alive because of the good graces or serious fuckups of others, and who knew it, but told herself a lot of stories about why that wasn't so, becuase those were the stories she needed to tell herself in order to go on.

And on the one hand, I worry that the GW books will end up being nothing more than Mary Sue-ish books, the sort of cathartic writing we all have to do every once in a while to get through the worst of things. On the other hand, I think they could be some of the best of what writers do: culling all the shit and blood in our own lives, mixing it up with what we've seen and heard and read of others, and making something new and powerful and wonderful out of it, something people can connect with.

That would be great if it happened.

In the meantime, it certainly gets *me* through the day, and believe me, right now, that's a really fucking great thing.

*

Writers' Rooms

Theirs.

And mine: old and new.

Names I've Given My Hardware

I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them - my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it "The Beast" because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).

I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.

When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it "bird" because of it's small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).

When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It's reasonably light, but far from compact, and I've got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.

It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God's War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW's heroine: Nyx.

My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx's female sidekick: Anneke (that's the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).

If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.

Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.

When the Plucky Heroine Stomps Her Foot and Tosses Her Hair, You Know She Means Business

I've been trying to get through Martha Wells's City of Bones for a while now, mainly because it's got a blasted-out desert setting with Old Ruines, bugs, mutants, and pirates, which sounded a lot like GW's world to me, and I wanted to see how somebody else handled that sort of setting.

And yea, you know, the world's cool and all, but it lacks a certain richness, mostly due to the writing style, and, worst offense of all - the characters are completely unlikable. I really don't care if either of them live or die, and they just aren't interesting.

There are great prose writers and great story writers, and if you're great at story or great at prose, I'll read you (I think writers like Catherynne Valente are great at prose, and writers like Stephen King are great at story - I'll read both, but for different reasons, and I'll get different things out of them), but great story means I need to enjoy reading about the characters. I want to be invested. It's not that they have to be likable: they just have to interesting.

Though SF/F has come a long way with it's female characters, they tend to suffer a similiar fate shared by their male counterparts, which is that they end up getting two or three character traits assigned to them, and in the same way a bad actor starts raising their voice during a particularly emotional scene as if to say "LOOK AT ME, I'M ACTING!!!!" these characters display their formulaic template of "plucky heroine" traits: stomp their feet, clench their fists, tug their braids, and then verbally spar with the Brooding Hero who doesn't get laid because he's "misunderstood," and then we move on.

The thing with this sort of set up - plucky heroine & brooding hero - is that that template *can work.* And when it *does* work - when it's done well - you can create characters people really love (Mal & Inara of Firefly, Alanna & her Thief King in the Alanna books, that Kushiel's Dart chick and the brooding celibate warrior guy in the first of the Kushiel books, etc); you know, the sort of characters people like to write slash fiction about. heh heh

The problem is when people get lazy, and they reach for that "plucky heroine" template and just scribble somebody in, like this Elen character in City of Bones. When she's feeling strong emotion, when we're given a scene meant to illustrate how Plucky & Independent she is, she does one of those clench-my-fists-and-stomp-my-foot things that I find really annoying. You see the same problem with Nynaveave in the Jordan books. When she feels particularly plucky, she'll tug her braid and stomp her foot, and then you know she means business! (this is amusing the first couple of times in book one. By book six, you want her to die quickly and suddenly; you hope a tree will fall on her).

I wonder how much of this is just plain cardboard character writing and how much of it is just seeing a lot of people rush to write Strong, Plucky Heroines without really knowing how to do that because most mainstream literature was about Brooding Male Heroes. The template you *did* drawn from that had strong female characters was romance, and I'm wondering how many of those Plucky Space Opera Heroines were originally conceived as pure Romance heroines.

So you end up with these women characters who may be smart and spunky, but they're pretty childish and vulnerable, too (again, how much of this is just poor and/or lazy writing?). After all, if she was *too* capable, and governed her emotions a little more diplomatically, then she wouldn't *really* be a female character, she'd just be a Guy in Drag.

I guess I've just never bought the idea that a fully realized female character who didn't act like a fourteen year old at thirty-five was "a guy in drag."

The Mounting Cost of Living

I received a bill in the mail today for $1617.73.

This is the amount of money I owe to COBRA if I'd like to have continuing medical coverage through March. I have paid $360 of that, which leaves me to come up with roughly $1250 by March 10th or forfeit my ability to be insured through COBRA.

I am currently making $15 an hour as a temp receptionist in the wake of my December layoff, which is a pay cut of about $4 an hour and another, what, missing $400 a year in matching 401(K) benefits. The layoff also meant the dissolution of my high-deductible-though-free (yes, free) health insurance, which is what kept me from going bankrupt when I spent four days in the ICU in May.

All those medical bills and a couple of blown-out computers have left me with roughly 10K in credit card debt (I was bemoaning the fact that I owned nearly 3K about this time last year. Oh, what I'd give to owe 3K!), which I'm paying off, minimum payment a month, $200. Rent and utilities are $750 a month. Medical supplies are $100-150. Gym fee is $109. Student loans are a whopping $300. I've gotten groceries down to $70 a week when I'm playing it lean. Transit costs are $90 a month.

I can almost make it with these bills at $15 an hour, cause I can clear nearly 2K a month, and bills above add up to $1900. Every three months, my endocrinologist charges me $95 for a 20-minute check up, so yea, those are tight numbers. Real tight. But I could almost make it.

What this slim little budget fails to provide for, of course, is that $360 a month in health insurance.

I try to keep my spirits, up, yo, but it's math like this that makes me "grimly optimistic" instead of, you know, optimistic.

It's also why I'm not a math major.

Numbers are cold, cold things.

Sometimes, just in order to get yourself going forward, to not give up, to stay resolute, you have to just say "Fuck it."

I don't think a lot about how I'll get through all this. I just get through it. I think, sometimes, that if I stopped and thought about it, I might not be able to get up again.

Close your eyes and leap.

The Greatest Gift

"We allow each other to work. That's the greatest gift a husband can give a wife and a wife can give a husband. Especially when they're both artists."

- Helen Mirren, on marriage

Lessons

You can give it all you got, and squeeze blood from stones, and you can give a little more after that.

Writing Down the Bones

One of the things I've tried very hard to do with my adult life is to be a strong woman. I took it for granted that I was nominally intelligent: I could put a sentence together and pass a test without homework and I didn't put my hand on the stove just to see what would happen.

What I never had - or felt I never had - was physical strength. I always felt big and uncoordinated, and all attempts to lose weight were met with fierce resistance from a body that will never see a size smaller than two digits.

It took me a long time not only to accept that but to embrace it, and to begin building myself not based on the template I was given by the popular media, but a template that a body like mine could find more immediately useful; something far more realistic and attainable. I started taking boxing lessons and lifting 30 lb weights and going jogging, and I firmed up and got super strong and finally started to feel comfortable in my body. I started to define myself by how far I could run, how much weight I could lift, how good I felt when I threw a punch.

All that changed when I started to get sick, and found myself rapidly falling toward the fulfillment of that media template in the skinny department but spiralling futher and futher away from the goals I'd set for myself - the ones that really mattered.

It's hard to fall off the path I created for myself. I worked a long time to get comfortable in my own skin, to find my own strength, and to feel like that was all brutally ripped away from me with the unexpected devastation of a natural disaster was... well, devastating.

One of the most horrifying parts of coming out of my sugar coma and being able to think clearly again, to look forward, was my deep fear that now, finally, after all this work and all this time, after I finding the strength in myself, after learning to love and accept myself - all that was being taken away from me. I wasn't going to be strong anymore. I couldn't be this person I wanted to be. I had to take on the shroud of an invalid and live out the life of some other person, someone I had not chosen to be.

And that hurt. That was hard.

Worse: it wasn't true.

But when you're getting to know your new body, your new condition, when you're learning how everything works now that something is broken, you aren't sure what's true, what's not, what's possible and what's pure fantasy. You read up on all the horror stories and you lie in bed at night and you fight all those feelings of despair and you tell yourself, "I'm going to be different." It's what I've told myself about writing fiction for the last fifteen years: failure, giving up, that's what happens to other people. I'm going to work hard at this. I'm going to succeed.

And, like the writing, there are days when I feel like a total fool. You wonder if being delusional is really the appropriate way of handling yourself. Maybe you should be preparing for a different kind of future. Maybe you should be studying tax law and forgetting about climbing around Peru. Maybe you should just be small and quiet and weak.

There's already a template there to step into. Pull on that hopeless shroud! Complain about how "hard" it is cause you have a "condition"! Just hide under your bed and feed on your own feelings of self-hate and self-disgust at your body's own weakness, at your inability to cope like the strong woman you were supposed to be.

You can flog yourself with this shit forever, but it's not going to get you out from under the bed.

One of the hardest things I've had to do is give myself time to pick myself up again. I wanted to spend a couple of months setting things in order, learning my limits, and emerge like a phoenix. I wanted to be better this minute, this hour, today!

I have learned a lot about my limits since May, and some of those limits have been disappointing, but most of them have been surprising. I can still do all the crazy shit I want to do. It's just going to be harder. Some days that does get me down; it feels overwhelming. It feels like the whole sky is going to fall down, and it feels too big for me to bear, and then I flog myself for being so weak minded, so stupid, when did I become so weak?

The hardest lesson of all has been to measure out when I need to be hard on myself so I don't hide under the bed and when I need to ease up to allow myself the time to heal that I need. I have a whole new template to create. The last time I did it, it took me ten years. At least now I have a base to work with now, something I was very happy with, but learning to accept myself, to create a whole new conception of self, to some extent, that's taking so much longer than I was ever prepared for.

It is such a long road. I realize life keeps going until it stops, and, like writing, it doesn't get easier, but it's supposed to get better.

I am working toward a better place. A stronger place. With some patches perhaps, some addendums, some allowances for error.

There is always someone I'm striving to be, and I try to live like I'm already that person. It's why it's so difficult now to act when I feel so lost.

Year's Best SF 12

I was going to wait until they officially posted the TOC, cause there's always the chance of the story getting cut, but I've seen a couple of other people mention that they've got stories coming out in it, so hey:

My short story, The Women of Our Occupation, should be coming out in Cramer & Hartwell's Year's Best SF 12 this spring.

If you buy a copy, I'll even sign it for free!

BW is Back! Long Live BW!

& etc.

Let's Be Bad Guys

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

Come and visit my new blog:

http://kameronhurley.blogspot.com/

And remember to change your links!

Comments are now closed.

THIS BLOG IS NOW UP AGAIN (2/12/07)

They Want to Send Me to Indy Again

Oh sweet jesus.

Review & Interview: "Occupation"

Eric Joel Bresin, Clarion grad and Tangent reviewer has a review up of "The Women of Our Occupation," (I am trying very hard not to argue with my reviewers...) and a short interview with me (my third!).

Have at it.

Gee, Ya Think?

The standard measure of obesity known as body mass index, or BMI, is badly flawed and a more accurate gauge should be developed, according to doctors in the United States.

Gee, you think that a random height/weight calculation that's not adjusted for *actual* body mass percentages, let alone gender and fitness level, might be a bad indicator of overall health?

I've always considered it about as scientific as phrenology, myself.

How many more years are we gonna get this thing thrown at us before it's retired?

Writing in Friday’s Lancet medical journal, the researchers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., found that patients with a low BMI had a higher risk of death from heart disease than those with normal BMI.

At the same time overweight patients had better survival rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI.

Some Stolen Goodies

Reversed Proverbs.

Do not Troll the Feed
Let lying dogs sleep

Wave rock. Kewl.

Check out some volcanic smoke rings.

(all stolen from Spy's Spice)

Lazy Weekend

Took Friday off and spent most of the weekend sleeping, which is how I tend to deal with stress. Finished reading a few books that I'd been sitting on for awhile, cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, vacuumed the throw rugs, watered the plants indoors and out, did the laundry, packed my gym clothes for the week, cooked some tomato soup and made a salad for lunch.

I gave myself the weekend to relax. One weekend where I tried really hard not to think about all the things I wasn't doing, the things I should be doing, because I needed a break from gnawing at myself. I think I've been mostly successful. Lord knows I've gotten a lot of reading done. I'm hoping the long downtime will help kick-start my week. Jenn's gone until the 28th, and then it'll be September, and I'll have another long weekend, one where I'll hopefully get some shit done.

September.

Honestly, I'm looking forward to cool nights and a blanket of leaves.

Mmmmmm...

Whiskey.

OK, I'm only allowed to have one shot of it these days, but I'm learning how to nurse it....

Sugar, Sugar

My weight has stabilized! My doctor's not putting me on drugs! My sugar is good! I got more free insulin! They stuck me with needles again! But it was OK!

It Sure is Dark in Here

I got up this morning at my usual time - about 5:20 am - and pulled out my mat and my weights and gazed out the big bay windows and realized... it was dark outside.

I'd been noticing the shortening of the days, of course, but for some reason it just really struck me last night, and again this morning. We're losing the light. The summer's almost gone. My god, what happened to my summer?

Well, three months ago, I woke up in a hospital. For three months, my whole summer, I've been doing... this.

The last couple of weeks, I've been pretty deeply depressed, suffereing from those weird moodswings that you're well aware are crazy. The recognition is good, because it keeps you from acting on them. But they're there, and in order to not act on them, you have to acknowledge them. One morning, you feel like you're a loser and not accomplishing anything and you should just overdose on insulin and die, and by that afternoon things aren't so bad, and you're not bad at this writing thing, and then that evening life is shit again and you have no talent and you're going to die alone and be eaten by dogs.

It's a totally irrational way to live.

There's been a lot of turmoil here, trying to restore my friendship with Jenn post-breakup, dealing with sugar levels and weight gain and the huge gaping hole in my life where my writing used to be. I keep opening up files and staring at sentences and moving things around. This morning, I wanted to burn The Dragon's Wall and bathe in the ashes. And watching my summer tick by... going... going.. gone.

Jenn and I had a long talk last night, and she's made some decisions to better take care of herself, and I've been working very hard at being more emotionally demonstrative (in addition to repairing our friendship, she has her own huge issues as well - she's going out on the job market this year, and the world is full of fuckers), and some of my extreme terror died down. I had this huge fear that we wouldn't be able to repair anything, that we wouldn't be friends anymore, that I'd have to move out - somehow (god knows I can't afford it) - and we'd never speak again, and I'd have to tack up my friendship with Jenn as one more thing I'd lost to diabetes.

Because, really, what a lot of this crushing weight has been these last three months is trying to figure out how I'm going to live my life; how I'm going to fit in the rest of my life around this huge chronic illness. And yes, it's manageable, but I haven't been totally sure *how* manageable. That's something that takes a lot of time and experience and experimentation. Things are getting easier - I'm figuring out the diet/insulin dosage equations; I have a cooling travel pack for insulin that makes it easy for me to go wherever I want with my insulin; I have very few low sugar episodes that wipe me out for forty five minutes at a stretch; I know it's possible to go to the gym and not wake up in a hospital.

And some of what I've realized, coming again and again back to the page, to the pages I wrote before I got sick, or pages I was writing while I was progressively getting sicker, is that some of the things I was interested in, the approach I took, the worldview I had, the way I felt, has changed. It's changed a lot.

I don't know that I can express exactly *how* it's changed, but there's something very different in me when I look at what I've written now, and more often than not, I wonder what the hell I was thinking, or I think of totally different roads for stories to go in than I'd thought I was going in before.

I've been listening a lot to the soundtrack to Solaris, because it's haunting and creepy and it brings me into this silent, still place where I look out at the world and I can see that everything's different. Not darker. Not lighter. Just... different.

People, you know, we don't really change. We're always going to be, at core, who we are. It takes a profound emotional experience to alter you significantly, dramatically, in a short amount of time. Other changes happen more slowly, they creep up on you, until one day you wake up and you don't recognize the person you used to be.

It's not so dramatic as that for me, but there's some kind of difference. And it's strange and it's scary and I'm not sure what's going to happen on the other side of it, but it is what it is.

I lost a summer, but I think I'm getting a whole other life.

Or at least, quite literally - another shot at it.

I Had the Strangest Feeling This Morning...

... that something interesting is about to happen.

I'm the Most Dangerous Kind of Feminist!

Do I get a cookie? Do I? Do I?

The Brilliant Educated Girl: This is a girl with one hell of a mind, and because of it she spends too much time thinking. Whether she feels she deserves more simply because she is smarter, or she was filled with feminist propaganda in an institution of higher learning, there is no greater threat to Man's sacrosanct position as master than the BEG. To make matters worse BEGs are usually FAGs (Fucking Angry Girls). These girls are pissed, and imminently capable of furthering the feminist agenda. They often have a softer face in public in order to obfuscate their true nature. They may marry men, but only after they have busted their balls. The whole concept of proverbial castration is the creation of the BEG. Note that BEGs tend to be liberal with the occasional (fanatic) conservative. Conservatives are just too dumb to fall into this category. Kameron Hurley seems to fit into this category perfectly."

Oh, how I love the internets!!!

When is a Book Not Worth $4.99?

These are the questions that plague me.

How Much Is it Worth To Extend Your Life? (and, for how long?)

Before the discovery of insulin in 1921 (by a Canadian! Who says the Canadians don't do anything useful!), by the time you were diagnosed with type I diabetes, you maybe had a couple of months to live.

In my case, since I was lame and didn't go to the hospital until I dropped into a coma and Jenn called an ambulance, I would have died that night.

In fact, today is my three-months-yay-I'm-still-alive-anniversary-date.

In fact, as the cardiologist from Durban pointed out to me in the ICU, if I would have been living in South Africa in the 1980s and come in in as bad a shape I was, I would have died anyway. They wouldn't have had the resources to save me.

If you're wondering how much saving a life costs, it's about 30K (in this instance, at least). My insurance covered all but 6-8K of that. To extend my life, it costs me about $1800-2500 a year in medical visits and supplies.

That's a doable amount of money. Not great, not spectacular, but - like the disease - manageable.

I'm basically living on borrowed time, extending a life that should have ended three months ago, and extending that life costs money. I've weighed the potential risks and benefits, and you know, I figure $2500 a year is a small price to pay to live. I spend more a year on food, and I need that to live, too.

But what happens when extending your life a year, a month, a week, costs 30K? When one month of treatment is 4K, and the average person on that treatment only gets three more months?

What's the worth of your life every month? I'm delaying the inevitable because it's possible that "the inevitable" is another 60-70 years away.

But what happens when "the inevitable" is a month, a week, a day, an hour?

What's the hourly worth of your life?

Because I want to say that every minute, every hour, is priceless. You can't measure that. You can't put a sticker tag on it. But somebody's putting a price on your life, and it's you who's stuck in the middle, wondering whether you should feed your children or give yourself another hour to help find them a better place to live when you're gone.

How do you measure a life?

Note to Self --

Three units of insulin for the evening meal really is too much, even when you're having a square of low-carb chocolate afterwards.

My doctor can also kiss my ass when it comes to this insulin resistance thing. I'm down to 25 u of the long-lasting stuff in the morning, 3-5 units of the short acting at breakfast, 1-2 u at lunch, and 1-2 u at dinner.

This is down from 27 u of the long-lasting stuff, and 4-10 units of the short acting at every meal.

Low carb diets rock for diabetics.

I have also never eaten so many damn vegetables in my life.

Also: candied pecans are God's food.

I'm telling you: GOD'S FOOD.

Writing Today

Because it's good for me.

When I Can Take A Breath....

I realize what's missing.

I haven't been writing.

Opening word files, staring at dialoge, moving around sentences. But no long stretches of writing. No long stays in somewhere-else.

How quickly I fall apart.

Gender Bias in SF

Jed's got some thoughts up on gender bias in the SF/F sub/accepetance rate. I found this tidbit a bit close to home for myself:

...it seems plausible to me (though I have only anecdotal evidence) that there’s potential for vicious circles here; if women perceive a magazine as not being a good place for women to get published, they may be less likely to submit there.

Ah. Yes. I suddenly realize I don't remember the last time I submitted to the Mag of SF/F, despite their speedy return times...

And then there are days....

... when I wonder why on earth I haven't deleted this damn blog yet.

EDIT: Oh, nevermind. *Now* I remember...

Hacienda Chicago

No email. No phone messages. No one in the house but me.

I realize it's been a long time since I had breathing space, time to just sit and be still. There have been moments; pale, fleeting moments where I believed that this time, yes, this time, I'd find my narrative, I'd piece together all of the random events of my life and build a new story out of them. A story with a purpose, a message - a story that gave me hope for everything that had been, and everything that would be.

It's that - that reflection - that you miss when you're trying so hard to function, to be strong for other people, to safeguard yourself from pain - your pain and the pain you inflict on others - and that's a tough thing, because it's that quiet space, those still moments, when you remember how to live.

I've gotten suckered into a dreadful system the last three years of my life, a system that ensures I have a steady paycheck and a lazy mind, and every step of the way, every sunny morning, I've told myself not to get too content, too complacent. I knew that the moment I was truly happy, I'd lose everything.

I have been happy here, and there are things I'm very happy with now, but I've learned that we're not here to be happy, or maybe that we're not here to experience long, uninterrupted spells of happiness. Just as peace is merely the time between wars, happiness feels like it's the time between woe, disaster, sacrifice, despair. It's longing for those moments of absolute happiness that keep you going through the worst of it; the dark nights, the terrible days.

I spent a week in Juneau after I graduated from the U of Alaska in Fairbanks. I packed up a backpack and stayed in a low-slung hotel along the waterfront and watched the rain come in and the boats go by. I spent too much money on steak dinners and carmel corn. I took the little sky car up the side of one of the big sloping mountains that met the sea. I ate a mediocre meal at the terribly overpriced restaurant at the top. I ordered a lot of alcohol. I went to museums. I slept in. I watched the rain. I was alone. There were moments of happiness, and moments of depression and despair. Here I was in one of the most beautiful cities I'd ever seen, and it was just me, and I was spending most of it sleeping. Why was that? Fear? Depression? Anxiety?

I have lived and breathed and shit fear for so long that there are some days I don't know how I would function without it. There's no time to be happy when you're always looking on and out, toward the next mountain, back at the hill you didn't climb, the path you didn't take, the road you should go down next.

This month, I was supposed to move to New York. The first year I was here, I'd decided to move to Denver. And yet here I sit in Hacienda Chicago in my perfect apartment, my comfortable room, this space I've carved out for myself in a new city so far from where I've come. I am still here because there is happiness in it. Some days.

There are no mountains to climb here, and all the paths are tired and worn. This was supposed to be a pit stop. This is not going to be the rest of my life. I needed a short break to recover from South Africa before I moved on. I wonder if South Africa hit me harder than I thought it did. I've been having a lot of dreams about South Africa, about hot nights and loud music and bugs. Always the bugs. I don't know what the dreams mean. I don't know why now.

I've been happy here. At times. Sometimes.

I'm not a fool. I realize the one thing you can never escape when you run off to new cities, new countries, new continents, is yourself. It's why I try so hard to be the best person I can be, to never be satisfied with what I am, but strive toward who I could be. Sometimes I wonder if that's dangerous. If I'm too hard on myself. And then I'm afraid of what I'll become if I don't push myself, if I don't want more, better, everything, the world.

Because I've seen who I can be when I just let myself be.

I think I'm all right with never being content. I'll be satiated waiting for those absolute brilliant moments of happiness, those shining moments between the long stretches of darkness.

I think that will be enough for me.

The Story of My Life (continuing with the "all about me" line of posting)

Sat on the bus on the way home and dreamed up who'd I'd cast in a movie about the story of my life.

The song I hope I'll be able to roll during the ending credits is The Beatles' "Baby You're a Rich Man."
Hey, I'm a fantasy writer.

This is what I do.

ABC Meme...

A – Africa, of course. I did my graduate work in South Africa from 2002-2003. I was based out of Durban, which is right there on the Indian Ocean and has a fabulous and famous waterfront area that you walk past a bunch of brothels and porn shops to get to (prostitution is legal: pimps are not). I spent a lot of time at the waterfront when I needed to unwind. It’s where I first read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Also, I was first stung by a jellyfish out on that beach.

I traveled to Cape Town a couple of times, and Johannesburg, once. I flew into East London and proceeded to take several dubious modes of transportation through rural Africa and to the site of Fort Hare University in the tiny town of Alice. Alice has three or four grocery stores, a bank, and a gas station. Oh, and the university.

There’s not much in rural South Africa except cows. And people are only half-joking when they ask you what you think your worth is, in cows.

B – Books. I love books. I first had sex in a bookstore. Had most of my first sexual experiences in a bookstore. My boyfriend at the time had a grandmother who owned a used bookstore. He had the keys.

It was fun.

I find books terribly erotic now, though I don’t know if said eroticism of books predates my experiences in the bookstore. Could be, not sure.

C – Clarion. I went to Clarion West in 2000, after getting rejected two years before. I was on the waiting list. Luckily, somebody decided not to go, so I got in. It was one of those strange experiences that changes your life completely and utterly and forever.

I met a group of people who challenged all of my assumptions: about my writing, about myself, about my life.

And they have since become some of the best and dearest friends I’ve ever had.

D – Dogs. I worked weekends cleaning up dog kennels at a vet clinic in my hometown for about six months. Not a long time, and literally shit work, but there were times when I enjoyed it. I liked getting to know all the animals, especially all of the dogs. I’d take them all out to the outside kennels, clean the indoor kennels, and then trot them all back in and spray down the concrete outside.

There were these two regular dog boarders, these little Dachshunds called Lewis & Clark, who were always delightful to see. They were friendly and familiar and always excited to go out.

We had a couple of dogs at home: a German shepherd mix called Ranger who we had to give away because he dug holes in the yard and howled, and two golden retrievers, Sandy and Dusty, good dogs, both.

When I’d spin stories about living out my life in a little cabin in Alaska, writing books, I’d always include a mention of the two husky dogs I’d have around for company. Just me and a couple of dogs living out in the woods while I wrote stories… it sounded great at the time… Still does, some days.

E – Europe. I’ve been twice. The first time with my high school French class when I was 17. We traveled through France, Monaco, and Italy. We had a toga party, complete with red wine and a giant watermelon, and wandered the Forum and ate pizza and slugged through giant bottles of coke.

The second time, I went with my brother and his French class, and we hit London, France, Switzerland and Italy. I went dancing at a club in Florence and sat out in the piazza drinking black Russians and watching men juggle fire until late in the night.

They are good memories.

F – French. I’m French. Sort of. My paternal grandmother is from France, and my father and his three sisters were all born there. My grandmother lived in Nancy, France and grew up during the Nazi occupation. Her father was in the French underground, and was arrested numerous times.

Because my grandmother’s French, my cousins and I all took bare-bones French courses in high school or college. Well, I took French courses in college. There are eighteen or nineteen of us, all told, but of all the cousins, my brother and I are the only ones who’ve got BA degrees. We have a couple cousins who joined the army and are posted in Iraq, and thus far, only one of us has gotten married. Two have had children, including my sister.

G – Girls. It’s no secret, obviously, that I’ve had crushes on girls since I was 16 or 17 or so. It’s something that does come into play in my view of the world, and because it doesn’t happen that often, when I desire women it comes as quite a shock to my system, and it’s usually quite startling. Whether this is because it doesn’t happen often or it doesn’t happen often because of some kind of latent homophobia on my part that results in me only noticing women when they really do it for me, I don’t know.

Oddly enough, I may have no problem writing bisexual female leads (I was writing bisexual female leads before acknowledging I was a little queer), but writing out-and-out-all-girls-only lesbian characters as leads has proved to be a lot tougher.

H – Help. I’m bad at asking for it. I often say I don’t need it. When they threw me in the back of the ambulance, after I’d been lost to a diabetic coma for nearly half an hour, Jenn could still hear me slurring, “I’m fine! I’m fine!” to the paramedics as they put me on oxygen and started to try and dilute my acidic blood.

I’m not sure where I got this idea that I had to be strong and independent. My parents, I suppose. My mom had this thing where she wanted to raise, “Whole, healthy and empowered adults.” And I guess I took that to heart. I heard, “empowered” as “strong” and “independent,” and I worked very hard to not lean on them as soon as I was able. To the point where I only ask them for things if I’m in absolute desperate need, at the end of my rope.

Some of this may be because I’m also an oldest child, and was always the one told to “look after” my siblings, and expected to be responsible.

When we spoke of other people who still lived with their parents, or relied on other people, we spoke of them with scorn. Non-independence was a sign of weakness.

When Jenn asked if she should call my parents, when I was in the hospital, I told her no. I didn’t want to bother them. I didn’t want to bother anybody. I felt bad enough for having gotten sick and inconvenienced Jenn. The idea that I’d freak my parents out was just too much.

But when it looked like I was going to be in the hospital for awhile, I finally said yes, she could call them.

And I still feel guilty about it.

I – Injuries. Aside from the diabetes? I’ve never broken a bone. OK, well, I broke the tip of my right index finger when I was trying to clean grass out of the lawnmower, and one of the blades wacked the tip of my finger in two. The nail grew back a little funny.

I had chicken pox pretty late, when I was 13 or 14, and still have a couple of scars on my face from it. The most famous is above my left eyebrow, which one of my friends called my “third eye” for months afterward.

Most of my injuries have been cuts and bruises. I only ever needed stitches for the broken finger. I was a pretty resilient kid, all told, which is why the last few years of increasing sickness as my pancreas broke down were really startling.

J – Joking. My family is big on the harassment. Maybe I should have put this under “H.” We harass the shit out of each other. It started out as a form of affection, but it’s gotten far more biting over the years as we’ve all grown old and cynical.

You’ll always know how comfortable I am with you or how much I care about you by how much I harass you. Also, by how many silly songs I make up about you. When I start up with the silly songs, it’s all over.

K – That’s “Kameron. With a K.” Every time. I spell it out every time people are putting my name on forms, more often than I spell out “Hurley.”

“Kameron with a K” is supposedly a reference to my Aunt Karen, my mother’s sister who died at 16, and some movie star’s daughter whose name was “Kameron.”

It’s also a wonderfully androgynous name, and I still get a small thrill when people write to “Mr. Hurley…” Though that happens less and less these days.

L – Love. I’m a hopeless romantic. I’ve tried to get over that, because it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble, and tied me to a lot of people I probably shouldn’t have tied myself to. But I keep coming back to it, and I don’t know why.

I’m a fantasy writer, so I guess I’m just screwed.

I always had this idea of having this ideal buddy. See, we would be great friends in every way, and travel around the world together, having adventures. Motorcycling around Rome, drinking red wine in little cafes in Paris, hiking in Peru, that sort of thing. Only, we were really attracted to each other, too, so there were these long weekends having breakfast in bed in these little hotels in Bolivia (the “first time we met” scene in Mr. & Mrs. Smith where they get drunk and dance in the rain and then have coffee in the deserted hotel while smoke rises over the city at dawn… uber-hot. I did consider becoming a war correspondent for awhile) and fighting off big bugs and reading big books and maybe owning this house on a beach, that has a punching bag on the porch, and I could go jogging on the beach in the morning, and we’d argue about politics and talk about the best way to immobilize an opponent, and we’d have this big table outside and our friends would all come over and we’d have dinner parties where there was good liquor, good food, good coffee, and then we’d say goodnight to everyone and go to bed and have hot sex and plan a cycling tour of Tuscany… yea.

Yea.

I don’t know why I can’t get it out of my head, or why I want it so much, or why I still dream about it… I think maybe because I’ve very much created who I want to be by thinking about who I wanted to be, and then being that, and I think I somehow believe that if I’m very clear about the life I want, I can create that too.

Problem is, you can’t create someone who wants that life – and you – too. They’re either there or they aren’t. They either want you and that life and it works, or it doesn’t. Not that you aren’t going to have to fight hard for it, if it turns out you both want it. But it’s hard to find. And sometimes I wonder if it’s a life I’ll need to live on my own.

I think the toughest part, for me, is the realization that at some point, that person's gotta go from being a friend, to being a partner. And that's the scary transition part, for me.

But I have hope. Always, hope.

I’m a fantasy writer.

M – Matriarchs. My family has a lot of good ones. My mother’s mother swam across the Columbia River and took up rowing when she was 50 or so. She’s worked on the board of numerous charities, and was named “Women of the Year” for Vancouver, WA. She attends a ton of charities, and raised four kids and got an MA degree after her divorce.

I have a great-aunt who used to be married to my mom’s uncle who’s currently spending her summers traveling around the country and writing us all “Wandering Woman” emails every time she hits a library or friend’s house. She camps out in various places, spent some time in Alaska, and even visited here in Chicago once during her wanderings.

My father’s mother grew up in France during the Nazi occupation in WWII, and she has a lot of great stories. Raised five kids on a shoestring budget, and knows just how to get what she wants. Taught herself English.

My mom raised three kids, cleaned the house, and got her BA and MA while working full time at the same company my dad worked for, in the same position. She’s the one who had all the old feminist books, and after I retreated home after breaking off my first relationship, I found them.

And so here we are.

N – Numbers. Never been good with them. I wanted to be an astronaut for awhile, until the Challenger blew up, which made me reconsider but not abandon that hope, and then a couple years later I found out I didn't understand numbers and that whole idea sort of went to hell.

Not sure why I find numbers so confusing. I can sort out other symbols, right? I know how to put a sentence together. Not perfectly, mind you, but competently. I can read up a storm. Maybe it's the pairing of numbers and letters that throws me. I know how letters should be read. Telling me they're something else in addition to what they symbolize, for me - the sounds - just throws me off.

O – Open relationships. Tried this a couple of times. Never worked. I was also invited into a threesome once, but said no. I was partial to the girl, but not the guy. If only she would have married the guy I really did want to have sex with….

Oh well.

I think I’m too much of a hopeless romantic for much in the alternative romance department. I’ve tried, and I think I’m built for monogamy. Or, at least, serial monogamy.

It’s really a depressing thing, cause you know, I’d like to live this great radical life to match some of the interesting fiction I write, but... but… yea.

P – Passion. It’s what drives me, and what I’m attracted to in others. I have a passion for a great many things, but writing in particular, and being the best I can be at what I do. I’m in a constant competition with myself, and I have a belief in myself, in what I can do, that pushes me through the worst of times, and keeps me going long after I believe I can’t.

Q – Queer. I’ve always thought of myself as a little queer. Not just in the sexual sense, but in pretty much every way. I always felt too big and tall. I felt too smart. I felt not smart enough. I never saw a place where I really fit. I was always the square peg. I was always waiting around for somebody to harass me, to throw something at me, to steal something of mine because they thought I was weird or different or strange… queer. I read too many books. I had few social skills. I was either too traditional or not traditional enough.

You just can't win. May as well be yourself.

R – Ryman. There are people who say things to you that change your life. Geoff Ryman said something very simple to me, and very obvious. But, you know, I was 20.

If I wanted to be a better writer, he said, I needed to travel widely and read outside the genre.

And my life has never been the same since.

S – Siblings. I have two. My sister, Jacqueline, is 2 years younger than me. She works at my parents’ pizza place and makes ends meet with welfare checks. This is because she has a lot of credit card bills and a two and a half year old - my nephew, Christopher. We don’t really talk much because we don’t have much in common. We maybe exchange a few sentences a year, at Christmas.

We had to deal with a lot of the same issues, growing up, particularly about Weight and Boys. The two were mutually exclusive things in our world, so when she finally figured out how to lose the weight by not eating, and realized that now the boys would follow, she got a little carried away. As did they. Hence, I have a nephew. And she’s still often searching for a sense of self-worth in the arms of boys.

My brother Steven in five years younger than I am. My parents only planned on having two children, but my brother made it through a diaphragm and spermacide combo, forever proving that he is capable of overcoming any obstacle. He reads Time and Newsweek regularly and has a Bachelor’s Degree. He’s applying for an MBA program next year and wants to go into business for himself. In the meantime: he also works at my dad’s pizza joint for his tuition money. He’s a big gamer, and spent some time as a professional pirate. He runs six miles a day and puts half of everything he makes in the bank.

He and I get along pretty well. He votes Republican, but supports abortion rights and gay marriage. We differ on our attitudes about foreign policy and welfare reform…

T – Talented. I got used to hearing that word a lot. Never “brilliant.” Never “genius.” Just “talented.” “You have talent.” I heard this about two things in my life: about my writing, and about my acting in high school theater.

To really pursue theater, you have to be thin. Thinner than me, anyway. If you think competition in the writing world is cut throat, it’s about a bazillion times worse in Hollywood. Unless you’re uber-pretty. And then it’s just slightly easier.

And anyway, writing was my first love. I still enjoy acting, but it would have sucked up my life in the way that writing has, and I’d rather give all that to writing.

U – Ulcers. Foot ulcers, to be precise. You see foot ulcers in a lot in diabetic people because people with diabetes have sluggish blood flow, and you see that manifest itself a lot in problems with the hands and feet. If you get a sore on your foot, it’s more likely to get infected because it takes so long to heal. These are the sores than can reach to the bone, eat your whole foot, and result in amputation if left to fester.

I appear to have my first foot ulcer, which is just a little blemish on my big toe that I had assumed was a wart for some time. Now that I know what foot ulcers are, I realize that it’s probably an early stage ulcer as opposed to a wart.

I shall become very familiar with a podiatrist from now on. You treat foot ulcers by scraping them every few weeks, keeping them moist, and trying to take the weight off them by wearing special insoles.

Rapid treatment of foot ulcers means less chance of foot amputation in future.

So, like I said: I’m going to get real friendly with a podiatrist this month.

V – Vacations. Me and my family went on a lot of them. When we had no money, we drove to Reno and Disneyland and Bend, OR and Seaside. When we had money, we flew to Vegas and Disneyworld… and stayed at Really Nice Hotels in Cannon Beach. We saw a lot of museums. I soaked up a lot of history. I learned how to run into the bathroom at the McDonald’s while my dad ordered food at the drive through and got done fast enough so that when he pulled up with the food, I was ready to hop back into the car.

My dad used to time our arrival at our destination by the minute, and it was a big game to see how close to the allotted time he could get us there. We listened to a lot of radio stations. I had a lot of fights with my siblings. I read a lot of books by the light of the headlights of the cars behind us.

W – Wild sex. What’s the wildest place I’ve had sex?

I’m not going to tell you. Ask me some time. It’s a good story.

X – Xhosa is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa. I was more familiar with Zulu, living in Durban, but they’re similar languages. There are three letters in Zulu that you pronounce using “clicks.”

One is represented by the letter “c” and is a soft short click you make with your tongue pressed just behind your front teeth. Another is represented by the letter “q” and sounds like the popping of a cork. Finally, there’s the one represented by the letter “x” which ends up in fellow students’ names, like the “q” and the “c” so you gotta figure it out. The “x” is like the sound somebody makes when they’re urging on a horse, but you don’t open your mouth to make it, and it involves pressing one side of your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It was always the toughest one for me, and I still stumble over it.

Y – Yo-yo dieting. Weight was and is a big deal in my family. Real big. I remember someone commenting on my weight when I was as young as six or seven years old, and me not understanding what was wrong with me. The weight of me and my siblings was a constant discussion topic at family gatherings. We were the only fat kids in the whole flock of cousins on either side of the family, and we knew it. And just in case we didn’t know it, grandparents and great-grandparents and uncles and aunts liked to remind us.

We had fucked up ideas about food, I don’t argue with that, but we also come from fat folk. My dad’s a type II diabetic. One of his sisters just had gastric bypass surgery. My mother and maternal grandmother are obsessive about their weight, the gain and loss of every pound, and have been since the time I was small.

I was harassed endlessly in school about my weight, right up until high school when I got so wrapped up in theater than I forgot to eat, and even then, I was never small. My sister also figured out that not eating was a great way to lose weight, though she ended up doing it more purposely than I did, until she ended up passing out at a friend’s house. When she got pregnant, she started the weight loop all over again, and is still running that hamster wheel.

After my father’s heart attack, my brother started running three miles a day and measuring his food. He cut out all forms of sugary drinks and started living on diet Pepsi. In the last couple of years, he’s increased those runs from 3 miles to 6-9 miles a day. He’s now 6’1” and 180 lbs, and he works his ass off at it, every day, to stay that way.

My yo-yos have been equally extreme, and I’m still not sure where I’m going to end up yet.

Z – Zero. The number of times I’ve gone bungee jumping in New Zealand. I really, really need to remedy that.

According to The Diabetic Athlete, plenty of Type 1 diabetics skydive, so I figure there ain't nothing holding me back but a plane ticket...

Pain in the Ass

Bumped into Mr. T, one of the architects, in the breakroom. He's been on a "work imbalance" schedule the last few weeks, meaning he's not laid off, but he's only allowed to work a couple days a week.

"How are you feeling?" he said.

"Pretty good, actually."

"So what was it you had? You had diabetes, wasn't it?"

"Yea. I have no pancreas."

"So you have this for the rest of your life, right?"

"Yup. No pancreas."

"Oh, yea, you know, this woman who runs marathons with me wife, she got it. She has this little pump thing with her all the time."

"An insulin pump, yea."

"Yea, and she's out there running marathons. So it's manageable, I guess."

"Yea," I said, "it's manageable. It's just a pain in the ass."

Fat Bugs

I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of people taking up the idea that "being fat" really is a disease, but at least somebody's digging into some of the complexities of the what's going on.

The most unhealthy I've ever been was also the thinnest I've ever been.

Related note: Women who feel good about their bodies are more likely to eat well.

Gee, you think?

As a former binge eater, I can tell you that a lot of the binge triggers have to do with stress, carb addiction, and - a really low sense of self-worth. Why should I take care of myself, my body, if I'm fat and therefore worthless?

I really want the way we talk about bodies to change, because this shit is really counterproductive. Self-hate sells a lot of diet products, make-up and hand lotion, but it pretty much kills you in the quality of life department..