Rune was a coastal city, a loose collection of homesteads perched along the edge of a wooded isthmus that thrust itself into the sea at the far eastern edge of Nasheen. It was the sort of place that made Nyx’s belly ache and her palms sweat, being surrounded on three sides by all that water, only one road back to the desert; or maybe all that discomfort was just the sen and the whiskey. Too much of anything these days made Nyx feel old and skittish, like some dying piece of bug tech.
She stood over a munitions table on Anneke’s salt-battered porch with a dozen pieces of decaying tech spread out in front of her. She had her cane resting against the side of the table, and if she didn’t reach out her hands too far from the wide sleeves of her coat, she didn’t have to look at her two-toned skin.
Half of Anneke’s brood of children clustered around her, their dark little fingers clutching at the edge of the table. Their faces were smeared in mud and loam. Just beyond the sweeping eaves of the tiled porch, feathers of rain blew down from the leaden sky. The world smelled of pine and mud and the peculiar stink of the oak hybrids, a rosy tannin smell that got a lot worse when you burned it; not that anyone out here was burning wood. The fine was three hundred notes and a stint in prison. The only time Nyx had ever smelled burning wood was at the front.
The other half of Anneke’s thirteen were out in the yard squealing in the mud. They had a covered well out there, and a big covered bug bin for refuse. They’d gotten a permit to cut down some trees, and there were still three or four big bulbous stumps the color of honey rearing up from the black soil. The latrine was out back, swarming with dung beetles, and whenever the rain let up, the place was crawling with mosquitoes big as Nyx’s thumbnail. But it had been raining since Nyx arrived, and the wet got into everything. The wood and synthetics of the weather-blown house were warped and perpetually damp. Nyx could feel the wet through her shoes.
She’d left Eshe and Suha at a local dive in town. They’d gotten some coastal gear, including Nyx’s coat and proper shoes, at a secondhand store. She hadn’t planned on buying anything, but she forgot how cold the coast was. During the winter season in the desert, the days were shorter, and the winds were high. She forgot that winter on the coast meant something far more uncomfortable.
Anneke sat up on the porch railing smoking a pipe that smelled of marijuana more than sen, and in her lithe, calloused hands she held the barrel of a z1090 scattergun with a bulb of acid on the backend that turned the thing into a flamethrower for about forty seconds before burning itself out. They were good for burning out the nests of fire ants that took up residence at the edges of cleared land. Nyx and her mother had taken those out once a month back at the farm in Mushirah and stalked the property line, looking for the tell-tale heap of neatly cut grass and leaves.
Nyx was in the middle of taking apart a black beetle cutter mine. She’d already shown the kids how to diffuse it, but Anneke was looking to teach the little bastards all about how to defend themselves in a pinch. Her boys would be headed to the front, and the girls who didn’t become hired guns would probably end up there, too.
“This is a real easy one once you get it to this point,” Nyx explained to the children. Their eyes were big and black, like Anneke’s, but they were all pretty tall; six years old and most of them already reached Anneke’s shoulder. Not that that was saying much. Anneke had always been a little shit.
“What you’re probably never going to get intact is a good fuse, so you’ll need to use the trigger from the one you took apart or from something else you scrounged, yeah?”
A couple of the kids nodded. Nyx had once asked Anneke how she kept her children away from all the guns she had in the house. The place was crawling with munitions.
“I don’t,” Anneke had explained. “Most of `em are a better shot than me. Now let’s unload some mines. I don’t got anybody around who can teach them munitions. Glad you stopped by.”
It was as if Anneke had retired to the coast to build her own private army for the end of the war. If the end ever came.
Nyx looked out over the porch rail at the other six children playing in the mud. The mine was heavy as an avocado in her hand; but not nearly so tasty.
The kids, being kids, had formed ever-changing alliances. The ones out playing among the stumps wanted nothing to do with the ones dissecting mines on the porch. Not today, anyway. Tomorrow the alliances might change, and there would be two different groups, or three, and tonight they might all act like one big happy organism for a short time during dinner. But Nyx didn’t count on the latter. She’d had too much experience with her own siblings.
Anneke’s kids were more openly physical than Nyx and her lot had been, but maybe that was because Nyx’s mother had hated violence. She’d wanted them all to grow up to be farmers and tax clerks, however unrealistic an idea that might have been. When Nyx and her brothers started street fighting, they’d done it at a small mining town just south of Mushirah, in secret.
Eventually, they would all learn to fight in the state schools, and the boys would all die, because they were Nasheenian, and that’s what Nasheenian boys did. The girls fought too, of course, but they didn’t die as often. Not that way.
Instead, Nyx thought, looking over at Anneke, we grow old and bitter and fat and sit out on our porches by the sea, breeding more boys to feed to the desert. She remembered finding the eyeless body of her sister, one arm flung over the side of the tub, mouth gaping, bloody beetles lapping up the blood on the floor, a sheen of spidermites skating across the pinkish water. There were all sorts of other ways to die in Nasheen.
“So once you get the trigger,” Nyx continued, turning back to her attentive audience, “you’ll need to pair it back up with the cistern, here. Sometimes it’s not a great fit, but if you’re wearing repellent” - she showed them her greasy hand – “you can generally give it a good twist without a fatal reaction and bang it on there.”
She deftly pulled off the broken trigger and slipped on the new one. A couple taps with a smooth stone, and the thing was patched up enough to be workable. She held up the little mine, no bigger than her palm, with the round green trigger at the top. “You make sure that trigger’s flush with the ground. The organic mesh here at the top, that blends in to whatever you set it up flush with.”
“But how do you diffuse it if it’s already set?” one of the girls asked.
“You call in a pro,” Nyx said.
Anneke snorted. Nyx shot her a look, but Anneke ignored her and started pulling her gun apart and laying it all out on the other side of the big amber table.
The house behind them was empty; Anneke had left the compounds when her kids were three or four and bundled them all up to the south where there was still some homesteading to be done for people who didn’t mind the occasional Heidian raid or raft full of Mhorian refugees.
From the porch, Nyx couldn’t see the ocean, but she could hear it, and smell it, and that was almost as bad. The whole idea of that soupy-salt sea put her off dinner, but she needed to find Rhys, and this was a good place to start.
The kids on the porch asked her some questions about placement, about timing, about weight restrictions. It was like being back at school, only on the other side of the table. Nyx had hated school, but she didn’t mind it so much from this side.
When the kids started reaching out to play with the scattered tech on the table, Anneke lifted her head and barked at them. “All right, that’s enough! Ya’ll go get wet!”
The kids giggled and pounded down off the porch and into the rain. Nyx watched them go, the little mine still resting in her palm.
Anneke had four boys and nine girls; not a bad spread, really. Most of them ran in packs, but they had their black beetle, too, a solitary girl who’d been out there since Nyx arrived, building a little mud village at the edge of the woods.
The boys and two of the girls from the porch started playing a capture the hill sort of game on top of one of the tree stumps, shoving each other off and declaring themselves the victor. The other group continued to play at their stick fighting, and now that there was another group out there, they started stalking them, running to thump them before they went back to thumping each other.
Nyx started to clean up the gear and pack it away. She wondered how long it would take for one of the groups to decide it was time to stomp through the black beetle’s mud town out there on the edge. They would destroy everything, eventually, and beat themselves bruised by the end of the night. Nyx had done the same when she was a kid.
“I’m surprised you don’t have some old man here,” Nyx said to Anneke. She’d always imagined Anneke settling in with some man and deserting to Mhoria or Ras Tieg. Raising kids at the coast just didn’t seem to fit.
Anneke snorted. “Coastal men are sour as old piss. Just a bunch of ugly, bitter, bloody old soldiers. The good ones all had sweethearts long before. All those women wait.”
“You should take up with a woman, then. It’s lonely out here.” Nyx tugged at the collar of her coat. It was too cold here to rely on a burnous. The nights would be even colder. She listened to the low roar of the sea as she removed the trigger from the cutter mine.
“I got thirteen kids, Nyx. I ain’t lonely.”
“You know what I mean. Maybe you’re not too keen on the sex, but that’s a cold bed.”
“You’re one to talk of cold beds.”
“The desert’s warm enough.”
“Uh-huh,” Anneke said, and spit on the porch. She took the pipe out of her mouth and grinned. “You got lots of women in Mushtallah?”
Nyx shrugged and took up a seat on one of the porch chairs. She watched two of the girls with sticks stalk toward the girl playing in the mud, the solitary one. Here was the destruction Nyx had been waiting for. Nothing anybody created really lasted.
We’re all a bunch of bloody, brutal cowards, she thought, and grimaced.
“Come on, Nyx, I know you ain’t retired. Why the hell you come out here? You fucking hate the coast.”
“Yeah, well, wanted to make sure your kids were getting a good education.”
“That so?” Anneke grinned. “Don’t catshit me. You seen my kids.”
“Any of these kids shifters or magicians?” Yeah, she’d seen Anneke’s kids back in the compounds, back when they were just a brood of anonymous squalling babies. She hadn’t had any idea what to do with them back then. Now that they could shoot a gun, they were a lot more interesting.
“I sure fucking hope not.”
“Yeah, well, me too.” Nyx leaned back in the chair until the back of it touched the wall behind her, left her feet dangling. The girls were circling the town builder now. She had her back to them, hunched over the mud town, protective.
“I got a note,” Nyx said. “Another pretty fucked up one.”
“And you took it,” Anneke said, resigned.
“Yeah.”
“You get blown apart before or after?”
“During, actually.”
“Great portent, you know. Rhys would say it was.”
Nyx lost her words, then, and just nodded instead. Yes, he would have said that.
Anneke did not look up from her work. “You come out here for help? I can refer you to a good munitions girl.”
“I’m not looking for a great girl. I’ve got one of those back in town.”
“Who?”
“Suhaila Asad.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“No joke. She’s worked with some good bel dames. Comes highly recommended.”
“Didn’t she help shut you up in a trunk once?”
“Didn’t you shoot me once?”
“Eh, totally different thing.” Anneke’s hands worked all the while on the gun, strong and sure. One piece, another, laying it all out. Like a poem or a song. “So you ain’t retired.”
“No.”
The two girls thumped their sticks next to the girls’ town. Splattered mud. The little builder started, then slowly reached out, picked up a glob of mud.
Fucking clobber them, Nyx thought. She palmed some sen and tucked it under her tongue.
“You get any letters?” Anneke asked. “From Tirhan, I mean.”
Nyx felt her gut go icy. It wasn’t because of the sea, this time. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded colder than the air. Much colder. Where had that voice come from? What did she care? She wasn’t any lonelier than Anneke. She had a whole team. She knew how to rebuild. Shit got fucked up. You just kept on rebuilding until they killed you.
The girl holding the mud said something to one of the girls with the stick.
“I been getting letters,” Anneke said.
Nyx tightened her hands into fists, relaxed. “How long?”
“Couple years.”
“You never said anything.”
“Naw. You never asked.”
“Because I don’t care,” Nyx said. “Whatever life they’re out there building, I want no part of it.”
“No?
“No.”
“Then why are you out here?”
Nyx firmed her jaw, watched the girl with the stick stared out over the mud town. Her stick-sister curled a lip.
They’ll mash it up any time now, Nyx thought. She saw it all as if it had already happened. The ruined town. The tears. The triumphant hoots of the destroyers. She had seen the same thing played out a hundred times at the front, a hundred more since then.
The little builder said something else.
The stick girl lowered her stick. She set it down next to her. She knelt in the mud, started digging some kind of moat around the town.
Their sister, the one still standing over them with the stick, glowered.
Nyx would have given a buck to know what that little builder had said.
“I need his address,” Nyx said. “I know they don’t want me out there, but he’s got some information from the last job that I need. I figured you might have an address for him.”
And then the girl with the stick brought down her stick over her sister’s head. Not the head of the builder, no, but the girl who’d defected.
All three girls started screaming, and the screaming made Anneke turn up her head.
“Hey now, fucking enough!” Anneke yelled. She jumped off the railing and into the mud and stalked over to the girls.
Blood was running down the defector’s face. The girls were tall, sure, but Anneke was still bigger, and she was mom. She smacked all three girls upside the head and sent them inside to clean up.
The girl stalked inside, the defector taking up the rear, the little builder in the middle.
Nyx watched all three of them go past. The only one with her head up was the one still carrying the stick. None of them looked at Nyx.
“You clean yourselves up and go get dinner ready. It’s not done when I get in, I put all three of you to digging out the latrine! You understand?” Anneke yelled after them.
Anneke swung back up onto the porch. She settled in and spit on her cleaning rag.
“Don’t ever fucking have kids,” Anneke said.
“I’m not planning on it,” Nyx said. She took a deep breath. “You give me the address?”
“You know I will, boss. I just don’t think he’ll be too happy to see you come around cause you need something from him.”
“It’s better than me poking around for no reason. I’ll get my shit and go.”
“You’re not looking for a magician?”
“I’ve got some magicians I can sign. I don’t need him.”
Anneke nodded. She slid off the porch rail. “I’ll be a minute,” she said. “You want some sugar soda?”
“No, thanks."
Anneke went inside, and Nyx watched the rest of the children play out in the drizzly yard. She was tired.
Anneke returned with a small, greasy bundle of folded organic paper in hand. She shoved it toward Nyx.
Nyx raised a brow. “I said I needed an address, not a dissertation.”
“Yeah, well, you might what to know what’s going on before you get there.”
Nyx took the letters. She wasn’t going to read any letters. Anneke should have known that. It would take her days to get through these, and she didn’t have days worth of time.
“Yeah, whatever,” Nyx said, and tucked the paper into her coat pocket. “These coded for you?”
“Sure, but they weren’t tailored to destruct. All the words are still intact.”
“Thanks.” Nyx righted herself in the chair and stood. “I should head out before it starts getting dark.”
“Where you spending the night? That bakkie leaks, I’ll wager.”
Nyx thought about a night in Anneke’s busy house. The stink of the ocean, and all those little feet, those thirteen anxious, spirited voices. You’d never get lonely.
“Naw, I’ll take off.” She reached forward and took her hat; another coastal affectation. She pulled the brim low. “I’ve got a place downtown with my team.”
“God, not that trashy hotel.”
“You and me stayed in worse.”
“Ain’t that the fucking truth.”
The sky opened up then, let out a tremendous gush of water that sent the remaining children shrieking.
“Come on in!” Anneke yelled at them, and the little groups disbanded and ran through the growing puddles. They pounded up onto the porch with mud splattered faces, the hems of their trousers dirty, faces bruised and scratched from rough and tumble fights for dominance.
Nyx watched them all clomp inside. The formerly quiet house lit up with the sound of them and the yard quieted. The kids were unshuttering the globes inside, spilling light. A warm orange glow slanted out onto the porch. Nyx stood on the edge of it.
Anneke crossed her little greasy arms. “You sure you want to drive in this?”
“Good practice.”
“For what, the Flood?”
Nyx grinned and touched the brim of her hat. “You take care out here.”
“Watch yourself, old woman.”
“You too, boss,” Nyx said. She stepped out into the swampy yard and made her way over the graveled walk, past the girl’s little mud village. She looked over and saw that the muddy rivulets of rain had cut through it, the river through Babylon, carving away the shoddy little mud globs and stick roofs of the world. The detritus of the mud town washed out over the graveled walk. Building the moat and the roads had just made it easier for the water to get in.
Nyx opened the bakkie door, drenched, and slid in. She shut the door, pulled off her wet coat and dripping hat.
For a moment, she gazed back at the porch, at Anneke standing in the orange glow of the doorway of her house, and she felt something like loss or regret or maybe the smoke from Anneke’s pipe had just made her nauseous.
A houseful of noisy children by the sea, a wet coastal city on the edge of winter. It was everything she’d never wanted.
So what do you want, then, Nyxnissa?
And the answer came, unexpected, stupid:
I don’t want to die alone.
Because out here on the edge of everything, in the cold, with her sick stomach and her pounding head, she felt it creeping up on her. Death, like birth. Inevitable. Close. The stuff that kept it all going. Slipping away. Sand.
It wasn’t the kids she longed for, or some brain-addled terrorized soldier or a woman who worshipped her like a minor god. It was less than that, and more: she didn’t want to die alone in some ditch somewhere, bloody and helpless, and get eaten by cats or slowly devoured by fire ants.
She wanted to die with a head full of white hair. She wanted that warm orange glow. She wanted to die warm. For the first time in her life, she wanted someone to hold her hand.
It was the worst sort of dream for somebody to have, in her line of work. It was the dream you could never make come true. It was or it wasn’t. All you had to decide was what to do with the time you had.
Anneke moved away from the light of the doorway and went back to cleaning her weapons.
Nyx started the bakkie and backed up down the drive.
She had a long way to go, and the rain wasn’t letting up.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Black Desert: Excerpt
In Which My Exhaustion Finally Catches Up With Me...
Boy, what a shitty time it's been.
But I will catch up on my sleep, at least. Sleeeeep.
Also, I have a mighty hankering for Chipotle. Me and the guys at work keep talking about the damn place nonstop and then don't go.
No, really, I have nothing else of interest to talk about. Me and one of my work buddies worked on SOPs all fucking day. Would you like me to ghost a machine for you? Cause I probably could, now. My head is full of technicalese.
Also, the scripting in .bat files reminds me of Neverwinter Nights.
Which reminds me: I have a frickin' job in Edmonton I need to reapply to. You gotta look on the brightside, yo. Work, work, work.
And....
Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep (I better not dream about writing SOPs).
More on the Fabulous Writing Life!
Got my check last week for my Year's Best sale and cashed it yesterday. Yippeee!
Friends and relations, however, were rather horrified to learn that the going rate for a Year's Best anthology sale is... about $100.
I could say that nobody writes for the money, but actually, I now write for a living. So, let's say: nobody writes *fiction* for the money.
Except maybe Dan Brown and Stephen King. Maybe Danielle Steele. And I think JK Rowling has so much money now that money is just a moot point.
For Travis... (to clear up a terminology dispute)
Your Score: Modern, Cool Nerd
60 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 39% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.
Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!
Congratulations!
Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST
| Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test |
----------------------------------------------------
See, I may be a nerd, but I scored NEARLY AS HIGH on geekery!
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Mists of Avalon
No, I've never read the book. No idea why. Just never could get into it, which is sort of sad, you know, being a feminist SF/F writer who's never read it.
But I did manage to sit through the 3-hour miniseries, which I'd heard was really awful, so I wasn't expecting much.
All right, no, it's not a perfect movie. By any stretch. It's of the same calibur as any other just-more-than-B-budget SF/F movie. There's some cheesy lines and awkward pacing and a lot of plot holes and I think that over the years Angelica Houston has just started playing One Character (an interesting character, sure, but still just one character). And yes, the slow-mo INCEST and continual INCEST flashbacks (INCEST... Did you know there was INCEST??) get really annoying and creepy. But.
But when you actually sit down and watch a movie where everybody sitting around and talking is a woman, all the major characters are women, and all the people running the plot are women... it's one of those eye-opening experiences where you realize, once again, "Oh, hey, yeah, women don't actually *do* much in other movies, do they?"
Some people have issue with the whole "evil women" thing. Yes, there are some evil women in the show, and it's said that all the evil is cause of the women's own damn fault, but honestly, I'd rather these women were actors than passive victims, you know?
I was also really happy with the take on the whole Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle (why wasn't there more THREESOME slow-mo flashbacks? Mmmmmm THREESOME flashbacks. Sorry, where was I?). I've always like the idea that Arthur knew what was going on and was totally for it cause he loved them both.
I always thought that idea was pretty hot.
Sadly, like any other just-above-B-grade movie, there's a lot of cheese. I'll say that whoever played Morgaine fucking rocked. Arthur was OK and Lancelot was hot but in a boring way, and Guinevere was kind of sappy, but Mordred was cool, if slightly over the top.
I mean, you give this thing a better screenplay, switch out a couple of the actors, move the Merlin character to an even smaller bit part, and cut out all the slow-mo INCEST (and add in more slow-mo THREESOME sex! Umm... sorry) and it might have been about four times more entertaining.
As it was, some of the evil women were a bit one note, I would have liked less of the guys all together (I felt like they were trying to add more of them than the story actually needed in order to draw in a larger audience; could be wrong, but that's what it felt like), a mother Goddess figure who wasn't so much just one-note hippie-incest and a hotter lifemate for Morgaine, who rocked.
Did I mention that Morgaine rocked?
Must Be About That Time...
... time to print out the book again!
Wheeeeeeee!
Ya'll have no idea how great it'll be to get this fucker out the door.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Unreal Tournament
The guys at work tend to get together for LAN parties on occasion, so I figured I'd pick up some first-person shooter games and try my hand at it so I could join in. This is definately one of those games that, after a certain point, you just have to play with other people, otherwise it starts to get real old real fast.
OK, that's not really fair. I'm having far too much fun, actually. This is the reason I do not, as a rule, play a lot of video games. They can eat my life. But you know, when you can't go out kickboxing for real, there's nothing better than blowing up your enemies into tiny bits.
Also, there are butch badass women to choose from; in fact, quite a few female characters to choose from, and I always appreciate that. Also, there are fun gaming lines in here, and it makes for good research. That's write, I'm doing *research* for game writing, yo.
Plus, blowing up my enemies into tiny bits.
Mmmm delicious.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
The Mod Workshop
Some people collect comic books. Some people collect GI Joes. Some people collect those little fake knights that you paint.
I collect.... well, MLPs. I also create pony mods, an art with a short but glorious history.
Steph and the Old Man have a big basement, and Stephanie has set up a nice little quilting corner on her side of the basement for herself:
And on my side of the basement... well, I set up my pony modding workshop and was finally able to display all the ponies (mods and standards) that I've had to keep boxed up because I didn't have any shelves for them (Friday was my first Real Money pay day since, you know, I was laid off in December). 
Why yes, those are ponies in various states of disassembly there on the table: 
I haven't been at this very long, so I'm not up to making stuff like this, this or this, but I'm working with what I've got, and I have a lot of fun with it. When you get really good, pony mods go for anywhere from $20-$110, but if you try and break it down in time and materials, believe me, it's not a real investment. It's like writing short fiction, actually.
A few where the pics actually turned out:
My Nyx Mod
Misc.: 
In my actual collection, I have some goodies (flutters w/wings - $20 a pop if they're in good condition): 
But I'd wager the whole collection isn't worth more than $600 or so, as I don't have a $500 collection of these (though I wouldn't mind one). 
So if you were every burningly curious about what I do when I'm not working, writing, learning French, applying for jobs at the UN, watching Netflix movies, reading books about middle eastern history and violence, playing video games, or obsessively hitting my "Stumbleupon" button, well...
Wonder no more.
State of the Gimp
"Wow, that's a really great hematoma you've got there!" my podiatrist exclaimed.
"Um, yeah."
"How did you do this? You did a really great job on this."
"Ummmm....." Scaling the Great Wall of China! Bungee Jumping! Saving a small kitten! "Running to catch the bus," I said.
"No kidding?"
Yeah. So, it'll be another 3 weeks in my air cast, which isn't so bad because I can walk in it and I don't need crutches anymore, and I'm hardly taking any Ibuprofen anymore. The bad news is, 3 more weeks (at LEAST) with no kickboxing classes or up-and-down step exercises like the elliptical here at home. She recommended I take up yoga and pilates in the meantime, which is great, but I pay $89 a month for frickin' kickboxing classes that I now can't take until after Switzerland.
Blast.
Basically, she said that I did some severe trauma to a couple of my tendons, and if I jumped back into anything too quickly - like kickboxing - that I'd end up snapping the tendon and have to do something really fun like, you know, tendon surgery.
And you know: I've had enough of hospitals, thanks.
In the meantime, I'm watching a lot of movies, working at learning some new video games, and getting my pony mod workshop in the basement set back up now that all the ceiling tiles have been ripped out.
It could have been a lot worse, I know. I'm just glad I didn't break anything and all my tendons are intact.
Also, all this time lying around the house means those fucking edits got done, and the latest version of the book will get out the door to the appropriate editor and agent by the 31st.
Sometimes it takes a kick in the ass.
P.S. It's also worth noting that, according to the podiatrist, my sprain was healing up "right on track." Being a diabetic means that stuff usually takes a lot longer to heal for us than other people, so it's a testament to my 1) great numbers 2) relative youth that it's healing up just like it's supposed to. Stuff like this is one of the reasons I strive to have really great numbers, and why I'm so strict about what I eat (people love to give me shit about all the stuff I avoid, but... well, this is why).
Friday, August 17, 2007
Better Than an iPhone
For me, anyway. And if they can make an iPhone, they can make one of these. It's not hard, yo.
(thanks, David)
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The Writing Push
I've finished all the GW edits for this push, so now I get to start my week of writing vacation; things may be a little quiet here, too. My brain's pretty fried, but the book's better, and after a week to set, I'll read it over one last time and get it out the door just before I leave for Switzerland.
And now... a week-long writing break full of French lessons and Netflix movies and video games.
Mmmmmmm.
Mystery Solved
I ran out of vicoden, so I switched to the massive Ibuprofen prescription the doctor gave me. Sometime during my yawning and eye-rubbing sessions today after getting over 8 hours of sleep last night, I looked at the fine print on the prescription bottle and read that "may cause drowsiness" warning.
Man. You know, the vicoden didn't hit me this way; I guess my body has no love for high doses of Ibuprofen.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Rough Cut
OK, adding that war scene in Azam? Far too much fun, and might be just filler, but it means I can write things like this added excerpt from God's War:
------
Rhys heard a low whine start up from outside, too high for the muezzin. He cocked his head. He knew the sound, but couldn’t place it.
Anneke turned to look out the window, and Khos pushed himself away from the wall.
“Fucking incoming!” Nyx yelled, and before Rhys had time to understand what she was yelling about, he was on a pallet on the floor with Nyx on top of him.
A heavy thud and whump shook the whole house, and something rained against the unfiltered glass.
Anneke scrambled across the floor in front of him toward a gear bag stowed against the far wall. Nyx pulled herself off Rhys, and he realized his face was wet with her sweat. His whole body tingled. There was some bug in the air, something… He looked toward the window and saw centipedes crawling along the outside.
“Anneke!” Nyx said, and she had pulled off her burnous and pulled a duel-barreled acid rifle from one of the gear bags.
Anneke threw Rhys a scattergun.
Rhys shook his head. “I don’t –“
“They’re coming in ground!” Nyx said, her shoulder pressed against the gauzy window frame, one eye on the world outside.
“Ground?” Rhys said.
“Means Nasheenians are in the city,” Anneke said, scrambling past him, shotgun slung over her shoulder, sniper rifle in hand.
Khos said, “You see them?”
“I’ve got a scout in the alley,” Nyx said. “Cancel that. He’s waving his fucking squad through. Fuck.”
Khos pulled both pistols.
Rhys’s hands were shaking. He raised one arm, closed his eyes, looked for a swarm. Several responded. Four wild, and two locked and specialized. Whatever squad was coming down the alley, they had at least one magician with them.
“Don’t fire unless I call it,” Nyx said.
“Boss?” Anneke said.
“They’re Nasheenians. Don’t fire without my call.”
“Nyx – “ Khos said.
“Nyxnissa,” Rhys said, opening his eyes. He saw the sweat beading her forehead, her glistening bare arms. The gun was heavy, and as she stood against the window frame in her short tunic and knee-high trousers, baldric too tight, he saw the power in her arms, the muscle under her flesh. He had felt it when she pushed him to the floor, the weight of her.
She turned to them, outlined in the blue haze of the coming night, and in her face, the hard jaw and suddenly flat, fathomless eyes, he saw the woman who had burned at the front. He was suddenly breathless.
“I said you don’t fire without my call. Those are my boys,” Nyx said.
------------------
Sometimes I just can't help myself.
Conferring Status
Why do so many forms in Ohio ask for my "marital status"? Is this something I'm just noticing now because I've been to so many doctors the last year, or is this something you see more often in Ohio?
Maybe I'm just annoyed at the idea of describing myself based on a legal relationship. I mean, I'm not planning on getting married, so does that mean I'll be perpetually single my whole life? I don't mind this, of course, since I do live an effectively single life (minus some important bits, obviously), but I don't see what my marital status has to do with the current state of my health or the symptoms I'm suffering from.
When I went into the ER for my ankle, the admitting nurse asked me if I was "currently in a living situation with people I trust." This seems to be a better question to ask someone receiving care than whether or not they're single. Just because they're married doesn't mean they trust or live with their partner, and just because they're single doesn't mean they don't live with and/or don't trust their partner (and I have no idea what bearing "divorced" or "separated" would have, either and especially).
And no, it's not under the "insurance" heading, so I can't really see what the purpose is.
Fewer Things Make You Feel Like a Bigger Idiot...
... than spilling coffee all over yourself first thing in the morning.
I will now reek of coffee all damn day.
Monday, August 13, 2007
%^$#*&$^*##@!! Book
Why, yes, the line edits I actually *wrote down* are in for all 500 pages.
Is the latest rewrite "done"? No, no of course not, because I have about four notes still in my head and then another printing because there's extraneous infodumping that can now come out, somewhere, somehow, because this book should not be over 100K and it's topping out at nearly 108K.
And I am tired and my eyes want to bleed.
Oh, they BLEED.
BLEED, I TELL YOU.
(on the upside, I only paid $70 for meds today! It was a bloody fucking miracle. I gave them the card, and it was $70! I've never gotten out of there for under $150! Huzzah!)
BLEED, I TELL YOU.
Edit til Your Eyes Bleed
I don't actively HATE God's War yet, but I'm telling you, with 150 of 500 pages of line edits still to enter, it's starting to get to me.
I must be almost done.
Why I'm A Power Feminist
Because until the world is perfect, you sometimes still have to play dirty:
Armed with my new tips and tricks, I laced up my skates and headed out to face the jungle that is childhood. When the boys confronted me again, I dared them to mess with me. One ballsy kid lunged towards me with the intent of pushing me down. Quickly, I kicked that kid squarely between the legs with my skate. He crumpled to the ground as I hysterically screamed at his friends, “I’LL EAT YOUR EYES! I’LL EAT ALL OF YOUR EYES!” Terrified, those boys got up and ran like Hell. I’ve never felt so empowered in my entire life.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
What I Did Today
Aside from line edits.
Steph and I went over to the German Fest at the Dayton fairgrounds. It was a small crowd and not a big event or anything, but we ate schnitzel and german potato salad and got our faces painted and went on some rides and did a little shopping, and Stephanie won me a prize!
It is a FROG! I think I shall call him Dilbert.
Steph also very kindly bought me a lovely pendant as, she insists, a belated birthday gift. I reminded her I still owed her $100. She shrugged. And it really is a lovely pendant: 
I picked up something else, too. The thing with living with Stephanie's Old Man is, of course, that he's allergic to almost everything with scent, which means no scented candles, and because so many candles come with scent these days, I just didn't bother getting any new ones, and I threw out a lot of my old candle holders when I moved here in March.
But for $5 at the German Fest, I picked up this little fake flickering candle holder: 
And I even have a place for it right next to my bracelets from Durban:
You know, if you've got great friends and great food (and health insurance), Dayton's not so bad... Next fest (the fair is coming up in a couple weeks), we'll have proper festival pics.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Today's Song, Stuck on Repeat
... as I finish up the last 20 pages of the latest round of GW line edits. Fitting song for the last push of this, I think.
Burning Bridges - Christ Pureka
This is a story of burning bridges
and allowing time to pass
this is a story of forgiveness
and breaking things in my hands
this is a story of understanding
you can't choose who you love
and this is a story of soft skin
and rats in the walls
well you can't just pass along
the pain that comes around
you'll go dizzy until you fall
and I know you didn't mean to let me down
but you let me down so hard
this is a story of loaded glances
and leaning in too far
this is a story of vague advances
and confessions in smoky bars
so now I am walking down the sidewalk
and I am singing to myself
and I'm going to leave it all behind me now
'cause I don't need this,
I just don't need this
and you can't...
these memories are talking and talking
and I'll do anything to shut 'em up
I've got the pillow over my head
but they won't stop
no, no they won't stop
some fantasies are never meant to be
realized at all
and some regrets could be prevented
if you read the writing on the wall
oh and sometimes you say "you know nothing can happen"
and then she leans over and lifts off your glasses
and the next thing you know you're just tangled and guilty
and you've got a head full of liquor and perfume
oh and when did you leave me
and when did you find her
and tell me is this just what you wanted...
Fats, Carbs, Sugar and Inflammation
My last day in the hospital last year, I spoke with a nutritionist about my new "diabetic diet."
For those of you unfamiliar with how diabetes works, a short general explanation: I have an autoimmune disease which was triggered by "who knows what" but likely some kind of virus that told my immune system that the cells in my pancreas that produce insulin were foreign cells and needed to be slaughtered ruthlessly. Insulin is the stuff that enables your cells to pull the sugar/glucose out of your blood and use it for energy. Everything you eat is converted by your body into some amount of glucose, but the amount of glucose depends on the type of food you eat. Vegetables, meat, eggs, cheese, any sort of protein, these foods all have a really, really low to 0 glucose conversion rate. I can eat cheese to my heart's content and not worry about my glucose levels.
I have to take a shot of insulin every time I eat a substantial meal (snacks like cheese, small amounts of nuts, some carrots, I usually don't bother, cause it doesn't affect my sugar by more than like 10 points or so). The insulin clears the glucose out of my blood by enabling the cells to process it; the cells sweep the glucose out of my bloodstream, and all is well. High blood sugar, or consistently having high blood sugar (particularly over 180/200 or so), means your body gets sluggish, you can't think properly, wounds take longer to heal, and your body slowly breaks down because it can't get enough energy from the food you're eating; all that sugar's still stuck in your blood, turning you into one big slushy. Being a slushy is very uncomfortable. Believe me, I know. Eventually, when you get over, say 700 or 800 or 900, you go into a coma and eventually die because your heart and brain can't get enough energy to survive.
Complex carbs like straight sugar, juice, donuts, bread, pasta, stuff like that, that's all pretty much pure glucose. Your body just immediately converts it all into sugar. Pizza is often the worst to deal with, because the absorbtion of glucose is slowed by the cheese, so by the time your insulin whot hits (30-90 minutes after you take the shot) and you think you've got it all covered, you get a slow spike overnight or during the day and end up with another high number. It's complicated and a pain in the ass. Anyway, high sugar foods tend to give me headaches for the hour or so I eat them before the insulin kicks in, so as a general rule, I avoid them. They also make my life miserable insofar as trying to calculate the right amount of insulin to take, cause I don't eat them all the time and so don't have a correct set amount (except for, say, pancakes, which I eat on weekends. Because I eat a pancake every weekend, I know the exactly right amount to take, and I use whole wheat flour, so the glucose is absorbed slowly, and doesn't give me that sugar-spike headache).
So, now, knowing all of this, you would think that the overwhelming recommendation for diabetics, then, would be to eat a low carb diet, right? I mean, that's what I do: it avoids sugar spikes and means I use less insulin and have less glucose in my blood at all times. Sure, there's the occasional splurge, but for the most part, living on tortillas instead of bread is a great idea if you don't want to feel like a sluggish lump all day. Surely, doctors recommend this kind of thig?
Wrong.
Well, wrong as of about 1940 or so. Prior to that, and especially prior to the advent of insulin in 1921, people realized that those t1 diabetics who ate a low carb diet and exercised vigorously lived longer than those who didn't.
What changed?
The food pyramid. Farm subsidies. Our American obsession with all things corn-related began, and we started ingesting high fructose corn syrup and filling stuff with carb-laden fillers. Suddenly, carbs were in and fat was out, and Americans started suffering from a lot of health problems like heart disease and diabetes that they hadn't seen much before. Some of that, of course, was due to the fact that we didn't use to live as long. But some of that was because high levels of glucose in your bloodstream will wear down your arteries over time; they create a higher level of inflammation in your arteries, which increases your body's resistance to insulin, which means your body pumps out more insulin, which means you become more resistant, and the more insulin you produce, the more weight you gain, the more insulin resistant you become, the more insulin you produce, the more weight you gain... and etc.
In this study out of Hamburg, Germany, researchers recently compared artery inflammation (which is correlated with the breakdown of said arteries) and how severe it was based on one of three kinds of fast food meals from McDonald's that they ate: high fat, medium fat, low fat.
They honestly thought that the low fat meal was going to have less of a damaging effect on arterial damage. I mean, less fat, less damage, right?
So there are big differences in the fat grams of each meal, but if you actually look at the carb count for all three meals: it's exactly the same.
The result?
All three meals damaged arteries in the same way.
As Jackie pointed out in the comments section to another post, inflammation and insulin resistance are linked. The more inflammed your arteries (which is what happens when they have to process a lot of glucose produced by ingesting lots of carbs), the more insulin resistant you are. I highly suspect that this is why taking a couple of vicoden for the past week has resulted in sugar numbers that have not once tested above 120. Even during a "good" week, I'll have a 130 or 150 number on occasion. The last number I saw that was over 120 (134) was on the 30th of July (have I also mentioned that that extreme hunger I've been experiencing all day has been totally nipped in the bud? I'm not hungry until lunch, am full before I finish eating lunch, and not hungry again until dinner: you know, like a normal person. I've been desperate to figure out why I was suffereing from this extreme hunger all the time, and living without it is... is... really nice).
As one response to the study says:
... eating is an inflammatory event just like breathing. We have to do both, but we pay the price. During inflammation the endothelial cells don’t function optimally. So getting rid of the huge load of carbohydrate and the accompanying inflammatory effect of the food (and, don’t forget, high glycemic carbs are the most inflammatory of all the macronutrients) inhibits the normal action of the endothelial cells. Anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary knowledge of the nutritional aspects of physiology would have predicted that the FMD would have declined about the same with all of these meals.
And another response to a wealth of other studies on inflammation:
What the nutritional research appears to conclude in the aggregate is that the processes involved in the things we worry about (e.g. cardiovascular disease etc.) are actually inflammation-based and linked to both existing levels of bodyfat (primarily visceral fat) along with insulin. Consumption of fats -- from plant sources, fish, and "good saturated" fats -- ameliorates much of these processes, and controlling carbohydrate intake does the rest. I even read a new study yesterday about the link between inflammation and cancer. Substances such as TNF-alpha and IL-6 are starting to look very nasty indeed, and these are definitely linked to visceral fat deposit and carbohydrate intake.
What I find stunning, then, is that 1) diabetics, like me, are still told to eat a high carb, low fat diet (what saved my numbers was reading Dr. Berstein's The Diabetes Solution, written by a t1 who's done a lot of study on the effects of low carb diets and diabetics) 2) never once told to, say, take a couple aspirin or ibuprofen every day to cut down on inflammation caused by eating and therefore even out my numbers cheaply.
Instead, my last endo wanted to give me blood pressure medication that made me dizzy (my blood pressure was already low to begin with), get me on metformin (which costs a shitload more than aspirin, let me tell you), and I've been searching desperately for some kind of anti-depressant cocktail that might in some way assuage my appetite.
Hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of drugs....
You know how much I paid for my generic version of vicoden?
$4.96
Yeah.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Choose Your Own Adventures That Never Quite Made It...
Read the rest (be sure to click on the page numbers at the bottom - there's several pages of Choose Your Own Adventure goodness....)
The Civil War in 4 Minutes
I took a whole course on the Civil War, and being a history buff, it's something I have some passing knowledge about (that is, more than most, but it's not my interest or my specialty). That said, it didn't occur to me how the north had won that battle, strategy-wise, until I saw this visual representation of the war from Lincoln's election until the south surrendered.
For years, they just sort of hammered away at each other's edges until they either got the idea or just finally managed to carve the south in two by working thier way down the Mississippi river. Sherman's march to the sea was all about creating another line, cutting up the south once again, blocking off supplies and reinforcements from one part of the south to another. Once they got that Mississippi line down the middle, the south was screwed.
Great battle strategy stuff.
Christmas in August
My insulin has, technically, expired this week, and as we all know, I don't want to pull what I did a month ago and use expired insulin for 2 months and watch my health deteriorate because I was living on credit cards and too fucking poor to live adequately.
But I wanted to wait just a little bit longer because...
My health insurance card arrived in the mail today.
FUCKING CHRISTMAS.
Here's what I *was* paying out of pocket vs. what I will now be paying out of pocket each month:
Lantus - THEN: 76.70 NOW: $30.00
Novolog - THEN: $83.27 now: $30.00
Testing strips - THEN: $60 NOW: $20
Syringes - THEN: $26.50 NOW: $10
Total per-month cost (this is just drugs that keep me alive, not the bazillion doctor's visits I have a year):
THEN: $160.34
NOW: $70.34
The best part?
THIS INSURANCE IS FREE AND PAID 100% BY THE COMPANY.
Fucking CHRISTMAS I'M TELLING YOU.
Now I need to see how much they'll pay for monitors and pumps... Muwahaha aha haa aaa.
Geeky Passions
In a discussion about the origins of the word "geek," a coworker pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for the word, where, among the uncited definitions, I found this:
A definition common among self-identified geeks is: "one who is primarily motivated by passion," indicating somebody whose reasoning and decision making is always first and foremost based on her passions rather than things like financial reward or social acceptance. Geeks do not see the typical "geeky" interests as interesting, but as objects of passionate devotion. The idea that the pursuit of personal passions should be the fundamental driving force to all decisions could be considered the most basic shared tenet among geeks of all varieties. Geeks consider such pursuits to be their own defining characteristic.
Geeks are people who pursue things passionately?
Definately not a Webster's definition, but I'm fascinated by the idea that there are self-identified geeks who use the word that way. I wonder if it's total hooey or the wiki writer was speaking from personal experience.
I am also interested in the default "she" in that particular definition.
Just Call Me Tina
The IT boys have decided they should just call me Tina...
Tina the Tech Writer: She's the technical writer in Dilbert's engineering department. Tina believes any conversation within hearing distance is intended as an insult to her profession and her gender. She strives to maintain her dignity while surrounded by engineers who don't have a proper respect for her work.
I love everyone.
Though I must say, there's definitely a Dilbert character for everyone...
Seriously, I'm Rocking the House, Here
I'm wondering if this sugar-goodness is just the vicoden? Maybe I should take a couple aspirin regularly, cause this stuff is great for my numbers (for those late to the show, a "normal" person's blood sugar is 80. When I was in a coma in the hospital last year I was something closer to 860).
107
102
67
107
86
66
82
98
112
93
98
82
114
99
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Is it September Yet?
This whole hang-out-with-your-boyfriend-five-times-a-year thing?
Tough. Manageable, and works for us, but tough. Particularly the last couple weeks at the tail end of the three month stretches.
Tough.
Good thing I've got so much shit to do.
One for the Road
My life is one big loop of working writing and novel writing. I'm not complaining, mind, it's just that it means I'm far more prone to lose track of time these days.
Um
"Now, being a predominantly fantasy writer, I don’t often deal with race (as we know it, I mean) in my writing."
Ummmmm.
Um?
Are there any other fantasy writers out there who consciously write work that they believe "doesn't deal" with race? For serious?
I mean, SERIOUSLY?
Please Do Edify Me…
As to why it is that 80% of the time you read one of those “Americans are all so FAT!” articles that the only gender whose FATNESS is measured from one decade to the next is… women? You can't tell me that it's about "AMERICANS" who are getting fatter and nobody did any comparisons on male weight (I have fat rants in droves, but this particularly sexist thing about all the fat talk drives me even battier than all the gross assumptions about fat people).
But then, men are SUPPOSED to be bigger. The truly grotesque are the women, who are all supposed to be taking up less space. And it's the women who should feel really bad about it, because they'll pay more money to get rid of it, and fail. Because women gain weight even more easily than their male American counterparts.
Holier than thou.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
eXistenZ
Sorry, movie-makers, I already read the Chris Priest novel with the similiar name, and it was way better. It even got written a year earlier, minus the silly sexual "game pod" imagery and with actual characters.
Letting Go
One of the hardest parts about writing professionally; that is, writing in the corporate world, is letting go of things you know you could do better if you just had more time.
Deadlines come hard and fast. You often don’t have enough information to work with (and sometimes you’re just making up filler with no information at all), and you have to just do your best and get it out the door.
Fiction can feel like this sometimes, too (if only I held onto this book for another 5 years, it would be PERFECT because in 5 years I’ll be BRILLIANTER!), but the last couple of books I’ve worked on, I feel I’ve made them very nearly the best they could be, at the time, with what I had to work with and what my brain would actually parse and digest (GW gets better over time with more input and of course, there are so many months between edits that I tend to improve between drafts, but each time I finish it, I nearly always feel it’s the best I could do with what I had).
Corp writing has been more and less frustrating. More because, wow, you want everything you write to sparkle, but less because this isn’t your baby, your passion, your book. At the same time, I get off on taking crap and making it all make sense. I enjoy written communication; I fall in love with words. Reading can make for great foreplay (so can writing, for that matter), and good prose is terribly sexy.
But I know that I’m getting paid to produce something smart and legible on time to deadline, and Really Great whenever I possibly can. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, and move on and don’t dwell on it. You’re getting paid to produce, not to fall in love. You’re getting paid for product, not for passion.
But I confess that I often just can’t help slugging around a bit of both.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Buy Me "Love"
Fantastic documentary about Japanese "host bars" where women go to pay men to entertain them (and certainly, sometimes, more).
You really should watch the whole thing. I thought the film maker did a great job exploring a number of the complexities involved in this kind of work from the perspective of the hosts and clients (one of the more interesting tidbits: 70-80% of the women who pay extravegent sums for male attention in host bars make that money workingas prostitutes. Watch these sorts of industries perpetuate themselves).
Just Bleed on Your Phone
David's been half-jokingly asking me ever since he saw my cellphone-sized glucose meter when they were going to integrate a glucose meter and a cell phone.
"Soon," I'd say.
And here it is.
Monday, August 06, 2007
Math is HARD
Daniel Abraham observes:
Ms. L suggests that Ms. M is insufficiently feminist because she is encouraging middle school girls to learn math by pointing out that being smart is not inconsistent with shopping and fashion and the consumerism that all us good lefties decry as bad and which middle school girls seem to think is just too nifty for words. If Ms. M wants to be a good role model for girls, she shouldn't do it (Ms. L suggests) by celebrating Gucci handbags....
Ms. L doesn't want math-smart girls. She wants TOTALLY LIBERATED, SELF-EMPOWERED middle-school girls RIGHT NOW, and anything less than total enlightenment is falling short. Which is great if what you want is the illusion of the moral high ground. And since that's not actually possible, it lets her off the hook for any effort toward incremental change.
True/False? Debatable? Totally on crack?
Have at it.
Condoms Beat AIDS
I mean, it's no worse than that whole guys-dressed-up-as-blobs trying to get through the gate video they showed us in third grade.
Certainly more entertaining.
Off to the Races
Despite th ankle silliness, my sugar's been pretty good the last couple of weeks. A sample from the last few days:
116
118
82
106
72
108
93
76
102
80
56
109
112
61
134
107
102
No idea how I'm doing this. A surprising lack of stress, perhaps. I mean: knowing you have health insurance is a beautiful thing.
Also, staying away from those chips at Chipotle? And toffee peanuts?
Priceless.
The Boys Found the Blog
... or, rather, I knew *somebody* at work had found the blog a couple of weeks ago because I found a second IP address sharing the same ISP as my my work IP. I waited around a bit for somebody to say something, but nobody did, so I shrugged it off.
I mean, dude, I work all day with IT guys: all one of them has to do is Google my name, and every hit that comes up is... me.
But today one of the guys came in and said something to somebody else about how he's only a year younger than me....
And my head shot up and I asked, "How did you know how old I am?" In part, I'm sure, because I was waiting to figure out who'd found the blog.
He quite happily directed everyone to brutalwomen.blogspot.com where my Ohio coworkers had their suspicions confirmed:
I am, indeed, from the left coast.
In any case, no harm, no foul. Regularly scheduled blogging here won't change, but if I have any awesome work stories, they'll all go in the locked LJ.
Hi, guys!
Sunday, August 05, 2007
The 237 Reasons to Have Sex
And, here's the list of the 237 reasons to have sex thus far recorded and tabulated for SCIENCE. Do be sure to nominate your own....
Let Your Protagonist Be Ugly
Mary Sue is a term originating in fan fiction, for a phenomenon that has probably existed since a Cro-Magnon teenager scratched a stick figure single-handedly slaying mammoths on a cave wall.
The above is a short list of stuff you can do with your characters to avoid the Mary Sue syndrome: that is, the creation of a too-perfect, too-beautiful, infallible main character who makes every reader roll their eyes. I used to think that this was stuff that other writers thought about all the time, and I noted that I had very few really beautiful protagonists because I wanted them to operate in a society where they didn't have that going for them and had to rely on wits and/or brute strength or some other characteristic. At the same time, I'd make secondary characters who were beautiful and terribly flawed, so one of their best assets was their looks, and they knew it. Beauty is a character trait that will affect how you're seen and treated in the rest of the world, just like gender, just like race, just like education and background. You have to take it into consideration.
I don't remember who I was talking to, a couple of pro or semi-pro writers, and one of them said, in conversation, "You know, actually, now that I think about, all of my protagonists are traditionally attractive."
It's not that you can't do this, of course: the Kushiel books do this. It's just that it's one more interesting thing you can put into your character's pot, one more hurdle and/or obstacle they have to overcome, one more trait.
This goes for smarts, too. I think that, as geeks, we want to create people who never fuck up, who are smarter than everybody else, who never get into situations they can't *really* get out of, and who don't have to rely on other people; just their own smarts.
I remember reading the draft of a friend's book and realizing, at the end, that every single plan that one of the characters came up with.... worked. And I don't just mean "got the result they wanted," but every single plan came off exactly like she said it would, in exactly the right way. Halfway through the book, I didn't feel any sort of tension or suspense when she put a plan into motion, because... well, they always came off without a hitch.
I like to write about characters who fuck up. Not stupid characters, mind, but characters who fuck up because they weren't well informed, or somebody was informed more than they were, or they anticipated everything but this one thing. I like putting people in a place where they fail, because seeing a character fail, and seeing how they react to that, tells you an incredible amount about them. And creates a hell of a lot of suspense.
Angst, done well, is a fantastic tool too, but angst to the point of inaction kills your book. I've read a lot of first drafts from morose, angsty, depressed writers who drink too much who then open their books with a morose, angsty, depressed hero who drinks too much. It's not like you can't *do* this (Yiddish Policeman's Union is a good example of an angsty, depressed protagonist who drinks too much, but DOES something), it's that yes, you must DO something. Your character can wallow, but they need to act, they need to move, they need to progress the narrative, and they had better be doing far more action than angst in the beginning, in particular. I'm not going to feel sorry for some angsty protagonist I just met.
Some of this is just going to be personal author preference, I know. I don't like to write about beautiful protagonists: I like to write about unattractive but driven protagonists who angst after the beautiful secondary characters. I like to write about characters who fuck up. I probably default to this because that's my experience of life, and writing it up any other way would feel dishonest. That's not to say, again, that I haven't written dumb, beautiful characters or wily, beautiful characters, because I have (indeed, those people exist too), but these aren't the stories and conflicts I'm drawn to, they're not the ones I best sympathize with.
There is, I think, certainly some wish-fulfillment in much of the fiction we all write (which is probably why all the genre writers - SF/F, thriller, romance, etc get all the shit form the literary folks who think writing about drunk writers who can't get laid in New York is somehow realer and more noteworthy than writing about hard-up interstellar bounty hunters who save the world and get laid), though it's not necessarily a wish-fulfillment embodied in the character; perhaps merely the situation. It's the idea that we can all be powerful, we can all make a difference. And what I like to show, what I like to write about, is how we can all make a difference, we can all change the world, no matter how imperfect and fucked-up we may sometimes be (other writers' mileage and motives vary wildly, but that's mine).
If my protagonist can change the world while being illiterate, wombless, only carrying around one good kidney, with three fingers on her right hand, no money to her name, a not-beautiful face, a nice ass, a bad shot, and a fair ability in a boxing ring, I mean, really, you and me - with my faulty immune system, sprained ankle, graduate education and money in the bank - we really don't have any excuses.
The Navy Does "Hey Ya"
This is probably a far more effective recruiting video than anything they've got out there now. Enjoy.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Men & Women: Not So Different
I mean, it's like, we come from the same planet and similiar cultures and everything.
After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations.
I mean, who would have guessed that the number one reason people have sex is "Because I was attracted to the person."
Baffling, really.
What attractiveness means to different people (no matter the gender) varies quite a bit, which is why some people would argue that the title is a misnomer. I'd argue, in fact, that the title's right on. A lot of women, growing up, hear that it makes us better people to be attracted to people primarily based on how "good" they are, and men are told it's better to be attracted to people based on how "hot" the person is (socially determined standards of "attractive" of course). I think both genders factor in personality and looks, and those things influence each other to a huge degree, so sure, you're going to bed with someone cause you're attracted to them: what attraction is, what is means, varies wildly from person to person (which is why even those of us who are socially deemed "unattractive" by the media at large are still having lots of hot sex).
There were social things that were pretty unsurprising, too, like the fact that women were more likely to have sex to "please a partner" (or to say they wanted to have sex to please a partner: absolutely, there's patriarchy and coersion and etc. to deal with, but I think men are more likely to omit this or pretend it's something else, or even just more likely to refuse to have sex if they don't feel like it because of privilige, I think).
The aggrevating thing about this "study" was that they left out all the good parts. Like, women rank "wanted to give sexual partner a sexually trasmitted disease" at the bottom of their list of reasons why they have sex, but they don't say where men ranked this one (!). Why the omisson? Because it ranked #2 or because it ranked second to last? And then there's this tantalizing quote at the end:
“Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some added,” Meston said.
Like what? What was missing? What were the top things people wrote in? And where's a copy of the comprehensive list of 237?
Why does the AP always leave out the most interesting parts and make the huge "news" story about the "well duh" part?
Friday, August 03, 2007
Independence
Another night, another attempt at making some kind of stupidly unnecessary move as a symbol of my independence, another four hours in an emergency room.
I had a lot of time to think about my foolish symbols of independence, the unnecessary treks I make and tasks I perform in order to prove I'm not dependent on other people, on insulin, on breathing; to pretend I'm somehow unlike other people, somehow removed from everyone else.
I fought hard for my independence in my early twenties, fought to show how strong and brave and emotionless I was. I could buy one way tickets to Alaska and live in third world countries and stop dating all together for six years, because all that would prove how strong I was, how coldly unemotional, how removed from this tide of people, from the social networks that keep us alive.
I did that for a long time, and I know it was a reaction. It was a reaction to a bad relationship, where I'd depended on somebody to do stuff who was actually inept, where I'd given up too much of myself, thinking that he knew what he was doing. I lost myself slowly over those two years, and then rapidly during the six months we lived together. I tried too hard to please somebody who was really just a scared kid like me, who really didn't know much more than me. If we could have been partners, if he could have admitted weakness, maybe things would have worked out better ie not in an abusive clusterfuck way. But neither of us would owe up to the fact that he wasn't invincible, and then the whole thing fell apart, and we tore each other up.
Sometimes, people say, when you're abused, you become like the person who abused you, because you see that they had power; you, too, want to be powerful, so you emulate them. What I learned, I think, was all of the things I hated about myself. I hated my blind trust. I hated my inability to fight back. I hated the screaming, sobbing person I became during a conflict. I hated who I became in that relationship, and for years, I avoided relationships because I believed they made me weak, dependent. They would turn me into that screaming, sobbing, wreck of a woman, and I didn't want to be that. I wanted to be somebody who wrote books and bought one way plane tickets. I wanted to learn French and learn how to fight.
The diabetes thing should have been a wake up call, should have torn me back from that other place. I was still having trouble with relationships, with, I believe the complaint was, at the time, "my inability to connect" or "a lack of connection." I formed relationships in such a way that I would always be OK if I stepped away from them. I made sure I didn't rely on them for anything: for money, for emotional support, for a trip to the bank. When you relied on people, it made you weak. People let you down. People weren't perfect.
But it was Jenn who saved my life and found me in a coma and called 911, and Jenn who sat with me two nights in the ICU, sleeping on two chairs pushed together, holding my hand every time they dug into my veins looking for a line. It was Jenn who cut things for me when I came home too sore to move my hands, and Jenn who offered me everything, anything, whatever I needed.
This was love.
But to me, it was dependence. I pushed it away. I railed against it. I had to prove I was strong, prove I was still me, prove that I could do anything. I could fly.
Obviously, there were other issues involved, but that was a big one I was dealing with, one I was unable to deal with. I'd spent so long working so hard at not relying on other people that to not only have that freely offered, but to actually, in fact, sometimes really need that.... it was devastating. It was heartbreaking. It shook the core of who I was, who'd I'd become, what I'd made of myself.
I didn't know who I'd be anymore, if I wasn't this woman I'd built.
I lost a friend in part because of my inability to depend on others, to accept love and affection and just plain friendship, but that wasn't enough. No, I couldn't inconvenience people. I had to prove I was strong.
It took a harrowing, horrible situation in Chicago to make me accept Steph & the Old Man's offer to stay here in Dayton. Things had to spiral into some kind of chaotic nightmare, and telling you how ingrained this idea was in me - this idea that I should not count on or rely on others - and yet, I moved to Dayton anyway, tells you how bad things had gotten in Chicago.
By accepting the offer, I hoped I was making some progress. Here I was accepting kindness, relying on others for a roof over my head. But no, I had to continue to do needless, stupid things, like not ask for rides to places they could easily take me and map out convoluted bus routes instead. Refuse to "inconvenience" them by asking for a trip to the grocery store because really, I could get most everything on my bike, and I didn't really *need* any pop or anything really heavy. If everyone was home, I didn't *need* to work out in the living room. If everyone was around, I didn't *need* to eat with them, because I was independent. I'm strong. I can do anything.
And tonight I came home, and, me being me, I needed a copy of The 300. Because I'm me, and it's payday. There's a Wal-Mart three miles down the street, but I didn't want to bike there because I wanted to pick up a book shelf for my pony mods, too. Steph was home, but she was visiting with her mother and sister in law, and you know, I didn't want to inconvenience anyone. I didn't want to get in the way.
So instead of asking Stephanie for a ride down the street to get the shelf, I took a half hour bus ride down south to the Dayton Mall. I wandered around the way-out-there Wal-Mart, lost track of time, and stood in a big ass line with my movie, waiting to check out, realizing I wouldn't have time to get the shelf anyway. By the time I finished the transaction, I had four minutes to make the next bus.
I ran. I bolted out of the store and I ran like mad, because, this being Dayton, the next bus wasn't for an hour and a half, and me being me, I wasn't going to call Steph or the Old Man to come pick me up because I'd missed the bus. I would have to find something to do for an hour and a half, and it was Friday night, and I just wanted to get home.
Within sight of the bus station, I tripped over the curb and went down hard.
I rolled my right ankle and came up wincing. One look down, and I knew something was very wrong.
There was a fist-sized swelling on my right ankle.
Well, fuck.
I limped the rest of the way to the bus station and propped my leg up. I started getting those rolling waves of black flashes across my vision. I wanted to throw up. I thought I was going to pass out. My ankle kept swelling.
I called Stephanie as my bus pulled up and told her to come and get me and haul me over to the Miami Valley emergency room.
And when Stephanie and the Old Man arrived, the first thing Stephanie said, of course, with a sigh, was, "You realize we would have come and picked you up if you missed this bus."
Yes. Of course I knew that.
But I didn't want to rely on them. I didn't want to inconvenience anyone. I wanted to be strong and independent.
But I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic. This desire makes no logical sense anymore. I can't pretend I wouldn't die without insulin. I can't pretend I won't die without other people to make that insulin, and the other tools I need to survive. But I can try and make myself less of a burden. I can try and be strong.
But these days, all my attempts to be strong just end up being attempts at being stupid.
And there I was, lying once again in a hospital bed in the Miami Valley emergency room, waiting for the X-ray results to come in, thinking about how lessons are repeated until they're learned.
Tonight, I learned how to be a funny patient. I joked with the staff and was loud and gregarious when I was not hobbling or haggling with the security people who delayed my progress. The X-ray tech was hot, and I waxed on with the billing clerk about what it's like being a document writer for a tax company. He remembered me from my last visit to this emergency room, and we joked about suing the RTA.
Hospitals, at some point, become terribly funny, because once something is done, it cannot be undone. Once you make a decision, a foolish action, you must live with it.
And you must learn from it.
Because if you don't, it will be repeated.
I stared down at the fist-sized swelling on my ankle and thought about surgery, about broken bones, about half a dozen bad possibilities. I prepared for those while the Old Man waited for me out in the waiting room as the hours of his Friday night ticked by.
A nurse swung by and gave me some vicodin.
The friendly, boisterous doctor showed up with the X-ray results and exclaimed:
"It's not broken!"
"It's not?" I said, with a great rush of breath, an enormous sense of relief. Another tragedy averted. Another foolish warning given.
"You've severely sprained it, though," he said. "You've chipped some of the bone on that knobby bone here on the inside of your ankle. Sometimes severe swelling is good, because it means you took most of the strain on your tendons and all the fleshy bits here."
Thank god for the fleshy bits.
"We'll set you up with an air cast you can strap on and take off for showerings, but you'll need to be on crutches for a week. Here's a prescription for some more vicodin and a doctor to call for a follow-up appointment."
Not broken.
No surgery. No blood. No needles. No months lugging around a clunky cast. No crutches in Switzerland.
Sometimes I have to stop and wonder why I'm so lucky.
"Thank you," I said.
And as I made my way back into the waiting room, there was the Old Man waiting for me, saying, "So you didn't die? Too bad. I wanted all your stuff!" because he knows, more than anybody else here, how you deal with the never ending fight with your body, with the world, with failure and rebirth:
Humor and sarcasm.
I am so lucky.
When I came home and sat down with Stephanie and her mother-in-law at the table, I owed up to it, I told them, "I know this is a lesson. I know it'll happen again unless I learn it."
"People need people," Steph's mother-in-law said. "It's really OK. It's how we survive. We need each other."
But I don't want to need anything. I don't want anyone to need me. I want something else, some phantom strength; I want to be a superhero.
But the person I want to be isn't human.
I went to bed and rearranged everything and made sure the laptop extension cord can reach the bed and put the phone next to me and the hard candy near by and settled in for a long weekend of meals in bed and writing.
Writing in a world about a woman who thinks she lives, somehow, outside of the world, apart from it, a woman who believes she can live without love, while her body breaks down around her.
At least I have no illusions about where my core emotional story arcs come from.
There's not much else to think about when you're staring at the ceiling in the emergency room.
Except maybe that hot X-ray tech.
And my surprising ability to squeeze out just one more breath of life, just a little bit longer.
Overdosing
8 + 8 would be 16, not 32.
Which would mean one unit of insulin, not two.
This is why you should never work and shoot up at the same time...
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Life
I've been living and breathing God's War edits for the last week and subsisting primarily on Chipotle burritoes and working internet-distraction-free at the local Books&Co.
Seriously, living and breathing edits. I write work-related stuff all day and do edits on my own time, come home, work out, bike to Chipotle, bike to Books&Co and write all night.
Yo ho a writer's life for me.
My brain feels like a wrung-out sponge. I've added fifty pages of new text and cleaned up some dodgy scenes. It's a better book. I read the end of a scene tonight and nearly cried, whether because the book's so damn good that I feel for the character in a way I didn't before, or just because I've been so immersed in this damn thing that I couldn't help getting a little weepy at all the pathos cause I'm spending more time with these people than I am with people in real life.
Either way:
Yo ho.
Ragamuffin (Redux)
Man, I wanted to love this book. Really, really wanted to love this book.
I hadn’t read any of Buckell’s stuff before, but I’d heard about it; it sounded like a great concept: space opera with a cast of characters with Caribbean heritage. I mean, dreadlocks and big guns and ships with awesome names like the Starfunk Ayatollah (the fucking STARFUNK AYTOLLAH! Seriously. It was great). I mean, really, it shouldn’t get much better than that.
I picked up Ragamuffin because of the lead character. It opens with Nashara, a kick-ass female heroine with no qualms about randomly killing people as necessary. She lives in a planetary society linked by wormhole technology and humans on most worlds are ruled over by the “Satrapy,” mind-controlling alien creatures who bend other races – including humans – to their will. Humans have, officially, been “emancipated,” but just like emancipation for slaves after the civil war, it’s a shallow, paper emancipation, and most human beings still live on worlds where they’re second-class, ghettoized citizens. All human-created technology is outlawed, and anybody ferrying it is killed.
Nashara just so happens to be from a world that’s created some human technology, a sort of virus she’s got in her head. When her world was cut off from the network of wormholes for their rebellion against the aliens, she and nine clones just like her were created, upgraded with tech and implanted with this computer virus, and sent out into the stars to get the tech to the people on another world. Nashara’s sisters, we learn, sacrificed themselves so she could get away when they were intercepted, and she’s been planet-hopping through the wormholes to get to the right planet. The planet’s the sort of home world, best I could tell, of the Ragamuffins, a group of interstellar pirates with aforementioned Caribbean heritage. Or, one of the sort of homeworlds. Or something. Yes, some of the history is confusing.
The first half of this book was pretty satisfying, especially the breakneck battle to get Nashara and some Ragamuffins she’d bumped into through a ship full of mind-controlled humans to save a girl with knowledge of the station and steal a starship and then flee with the starship from a group of folks doing the dirty work of the mind-controlling aliens who’ve decided that humans are tricky bastards and need to be wiped out of the wormhole system all together, not just cut off when they rebel.
The second half of the book jumps back to the planet Nashara’s trying to get to, the one that’s been cut off, a society full of Azteca (yes, the society is just what it sounds like) who also happen to have some older humans around of Ragamuffin descent who have actual tech in their heads from three hundred years before, when they were cut off from the wormhole. There’s negotiations going on between the two major countries, which are rudely interrupted when one of the wormholes suddenly re-opens and the alien race that had once warred with them returns.
Now, OK, I was having some issue with this book before, but when we abruptly shifted from mostly-Nashara’s POV and worldview to totally these other people in Azteca land’s worldview, it was like I was starting the whole book over again. I felt myself suffering from the old George R.R. Martin syndrome, ie “But I don’t *care* about any of these characters. Where are all the characters I was starting to sympathize with?”
It felt like two entirely different books. In longer books, you might be able to get away with this, but Ragamuffin is a quick, short book with short, sharp chapters. There were times when it felt like I was reading an outline for a series. I mean, it’s all about the attempted genocide of the human race. Sure, you can do that in a book, but it’s really hard to read a book with so little time in so many characters’ heads and still care about the outcome.
And when Nashara literally loses and leaves her body, effectively dies, in order to perpetuate copies of herself on other ships…. When your strong female lead who you’re already trying really hard not to be annoyed with for being a clone (Oh, those female hive minds!), ends up copy after copy after copy on other ships, becomes ships, becomes a virus, well… I have a strong aversion to the women-as-robots cliché. Sure, lots of people in this universe are technologically hopped up, but even the grizzled old meshed-out captain of the dying ship she first hitches a ride on breaks down and cries there toward the end, and he still has a physical body that can be killed and obliterated. I guess Nashara does too, sort of, there at the end, but it really wouldn’t matter because she’s mostly just projecting herself everywhere anyway. Her brain is somewhere else, not actually in her body. She’s sort of severed and cut in half, half a person. It bugged me. There’s something less human about someone who cannot die. I can’t explain it. Perhaps that’s another post.
And this brings up another issue, which is that the issue of women and emancipation isn’t discussed… at all. Women are assumed equal (really? When all humans are slaves, women are considered *equal* slaves, even though they have very lucrative wombs?), but again, looking at the place of women in oppressed societies, and having some background studying the role of women in a lot of guerilla movements, it’s not like those issues go away even among the rebels, they’re just subsumed by the larger cause. You don’t talk about sexism and the fact that your commander keeps demanding sex from you because you’re all “comrades” and you’re not supposed to rock the boat. It’s race emancipation first, and once that happens, women are going to get kicked back into the kitchen every time unless they fight like hell for it, because you might be “comrades” during the war, but after the war, you’re still just a woman.
Those issues weren’t in here much, and they don’t show up much in any book that assumes the “all women are equal, natch” philosophy (there’s one weird moment of sexism where somebody says something to the effect of “and you’re siding with that *woman*” like woman is a derogatory term, a curse word, less than man, just as we use it today. It was actually jarring because there’s really not much else in there. Nashara is regarded differently, once, because of her skin color, but not that I can recall, because of her gender).
I don’t think we actually know what equality *looks* like, so we brush the actual issues that would be involved in equality under the table and handwave it. There are a couple of references to Nashara’s womb – the fact that it was taken out in order to make room for all of her mechanical tech, and the fact that she doesn’t have one so can’t “settle down and make babies” (a statement made, tongue-in-cheek, by another character, but never expanded on). Does she even *want* to “make babies”? Do women even make babies anymore, or do they breed them in jars? I mean, they have clones. Are the cloned embryos just implanted into women (and, again, doesn’t this make women for valuable and therefore make people want to control them more)? Did they take Nashara’s womb out and save it in a jar to make it part of the breeding program? Does she even care? If this organ is actually significant (it does come up in conversation twice), what’s the significance? Is physically reproducing an important thing to mechanically enhanced people who’ll live, basically, forever?
I’m picking on the womb issues here, but it’s sort of representative, I think, of thinking through the way that a society’s social mores work and how technology effects and changes and informs those cultural mores.
In a break-neck pace book like this, you barely get enough time to sympathize or get to know any of the characters at all, let alone understand their cultures, which is a serious shame because, again, Caribbean-heritage society! I mean, how cool? But that’s not explored much in depth, either. They speak differently and you see bits of a burial ceremony, and they make decisions by consensus, but the actual way they live and breathe and work is sort of missing, here, because the plot gets in the way (!).
Stories about genocide and alien masters and gun-running and awesome ship battles are great, but in a book this size, I think the cast needed to be pared down and the chapters should have alternated between the Azteca world and Nashara’s stuff with more regularity right up front to help that sort of stop/start of getting-to-know you time. Dividing it in two made it feel like two books. You can get away with a late-start POV/world change in a longer book, but getting there and staying there for a hundred pages when the book is, what, 300 pages? Is a stretch.
I’ve heard older writers (usually midlist, but anyway) complain that the media and marketing machine is obsessed with “new” writers and “young” writers and gives them all of the attention while ignoring the midlisters’ work. I can understand some of the salivating expectation people have for newer writers, because new writers bring fresh voices and ideas with them. However, what we’re not so good at is stuff like plot, pacing, the nitty-gritty details of story, of how to write an emotional arc, how to flesh out a world or a character.
This is stuff that it takes a long time to learn, bashing your head against the desk everyday and writing book after book. You write a few books, you start to get it down, and it’s why I look at writers like Buckell and others who have all this great stuff, this great potential, these great ideas and unique voices and I think, “You know, after he writes about three more books, he could really kick some ass.”
However, the reason some more experienced writers end up getting the cold shoulder is because they *don’t* get better with each subsequent book. They go, “Hey, this book sold as is! I’ll keep writing books just like this!”
And then they’re pissed off because readers and the media machine don’t pay any attention to them.
These are the ones you run from like the plague.
But something tells me Buckell won’t be one of those plague-writers.
To sum up: not the technically best book in the world, but stay tuned for future stuff.
