Back On the Road

No bleeding, no depression, no yeast infections... ah, why, yes! It's time to hit the road again.

Did an experimental jog tonight: slow, short, easy and rather dismal. The second half turned into walk-jog-walk-jog-oh-fuck-it-walk.

The IUD started banging at my insides toward the end, just little twinges of occasional cramping. Not bad (I took a couple Motrin a few hours before), and if all goes as they say it will, I should be pain-free in a couple months. It was good to start out now to see where I'm at with that. I wish they made a smaller device for women who haven't had kids - I'd really rather that thing wasn't banging around all the time. In any case, I have confidence that my body will get used to it, and I'll be back together in no time.

The idea is to get a couple weeks of MA classes back in before my membership runs out - I'm going to let it expire over the summer and sign back up in September, mainly to save the money. Things are agonizingly tight right now, and heading to WisCon didn't do me any good.

I've been keeping up on the power walks at work - that's an hour every day, and my free weights in the morning, so I'm healthy, but not buff, and you know, honestly, I have a secret desire to be buff. The day I can tell a set day job to shove it so I can spend some time getting into actual shape will be a fucking fantastic day.

In other news, I've been reading a lot about boxing, as I've got a couple of shorts and a novel with a protagonist who's taken it up, and I'm interested in seeing how other authors handle writing about boxing (B is very good at this, and his blog is great for that).

I'm also currently in the process of cutting 31,000 words from the first book of my fantasy saga before it hits the road again with agents. I picked up a couple more names at WisCon, and I figured, shit, why not? So that's getting cleaned up while the day job is slow, and at night I'm coming home and working on my blood and sand bisexual shapeshifiting bounty hunter novel and stories, which hold a special place in my brutal little heart.

Those stories are gonna rock.

Overall, life is definately smoothing out again, most importantly on the health front. I really took a nose dive for three or four months, and coming up out of that has been a bitch and a half. Now it's all back to working to where I was, writing and shape wise, and surpassing that.

No big thing.

It's a good life.

Straw Dogs Meets Deliverance: Oh Boy, I Sure Do Want to Sign Up For That One

Some people just don't know when to retire.

The red bandanna and the hunter's knife are back: Sylvester Stallone is set to reprise his role as Vietnam vet John Rambo, 17 years after his last outing.

Stallone, now 58, will don combat trousers for a fourth time, this time to slug it out against American white supremacists bent on killing his wife and daughter. In the new film, the grunting killing machine has turned middle-class family man and has "assimilated into the tapestry of America," according Stallone, who is also the movie's scriptwriter. He promises a film in the vein of Straw Dogs and Deliverance.

It reads like something from The Onion.

How Long Until the Government Starts Monitoring What You Eat?

In the past, his parents had no clue when he bought a treat at school. Now, thanks to a new school-lunch monitoring system, they can check over the Internet and learn about that secret cookie.

Health officials hope it will increase parents' involvement in what their kids eat at school. It's a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.

"My parents do care about what I eat. They try, like, to keep up with it," said Hughes, a 14-year-old student at Marietta Middle School.

Because it's best that your children learn right away that you don't trust them to make good decisions, and more than that, that you don't respect them. This way, your children will remain child-like and dependent all their lives.

What good sheep-like citizens they will make!

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

As an SF writer, I wonder, could you start requiring your lover to "test" their love for you with a brain scan?

Ah, think of all the dystopian possibilities...

The Holy Womb of Antioch

"Love can't save you Padme. Only my new powers can do that."

"Hold me like you did by the lake in Naboo."

And I'm thinking, "Sweet fuck, why?"

To his credit Hayden Christiansen really gave it his all. He told the story he wanted to tell, he worked as best he could with the lame dialogue and sudden loyalty-switching scene that had very little lead-up. It was a poorly written script. Lucas spent the first half of the movie lovingly panning through long, drawn-out shuttle docking sequences, and must have realized two-thirds of the way through the film that he was actually telling a story that somehow involved the actions of people, and he spent the last half of the movie cutting through a series of quick-cut scenes of the most disrespectful sort that not only insult your actors, but insult your own worldbuilding skills, so that Super Jedi who can "sense" things with the force get taken out by a couple of blaster-shots to the back (in fact, only two Jedi besides Obi-wan actually get any sort of actual fight scene when they get turned on, both of them being men).

The tragedy of this movie is watching what is, at core, a really great story about how power corrupts, and how you kill what you love, and turn yourself into a monster. It's absolutely fascinating to watch someone who's a great "idea" guy fuck up stuff like the actual telling of a story: he has no intuitive sense of narrative drive, of how to cut a scene, of when to trust his actors to deepen a scene, of when to edit a fight scene because they all look alike. In fact, he's not even sure of the right balance between fight scenes and character/plot scenes. Any scene with dialogue is almost always painful. Ewan McGregor is about the only one who can do anything at all with the shitty dialogue, though Hayden gives it his all: you can tell that he was holding out for this movie and fuck George if he wanted him to play it wooden, cause this is why he signed up for this shit, to be fucking Darth Vader.

And then, of course, there's the Holy Womb of Antioch.

I mean, Padme.

The Senator, right? Busy doing senatorial things, meeting with people, having her own subplot, caught up in negotiating with Jedi and telling Palpatine to fuck off and engaging in long talks with the new Queen about domestic policy and...

Oh, I'm sorry, I was thinking of the wrong movie.

In fact, every scene Padme is in, she's sitting on a couch or standing at a window or standing on the balcony staring blankly at something, pregnant, (because everyone knows pregnant women live like invalids) waiting for the scene to start. Waiting for Anakin or some Jedi to come in and break up her staring-at-the-wall reverie. Natalie Portman checked out of this movie a long time ago. And who can blame her? It was utterly obvious from the writing that she was only there as a peice of scenery. Her hair and clothes changed drastically with every scene; she was a walking, talking set peice.

And her death scene? Oh, yea, death scene in childbed in the 80th century! The robots attending her surmise that "There's nothing physically wrong with her. She just seems to have lost the will to live."

Lost. the. will. to. live.

Luckily, she lives long enough to contort her face into what resemebles the face one would make during a particularly troublesome bowel movement, and squirt!-squirt! - there's Luck and Leia! Isn't that cute! I'm the director, and I'm just going to blast through all this silly plot and character stuff here at the end, cause everybody already knows what's going to happen. I'm going to let the next three movies in the series inform just how significant this moment is, so I don't have to work at it and write actual dialogue that makes sense!

So the men and robots make the decision to "operate" quickly to "save the babies" - an operation which essentially consists of her delivering the kids the regular way, not via Cesaerean, so I'm not sure what planet these robots came from where they thought natural childbirth was an operation, but they should probably be mindwiped.

But lo! Padme's death is appropriately celebrated like any good female martyr's - there's a great parade through the streets and she's in an open coffin with flowers all over her like good virginal Snow White. Having fulfilled her purpose for living, the Holy Womb is delivered unto the underworld. All hail the holy womb!

And this is the end, purpose, and plot we get for the only female heroine in the entire movie. She exists to give birth to Darth Vader's kids. No hopes, desires, dreams of her own, except to escape back to Naboo with Vader and raise up his babies. Um, hello, isn't she a Senator? Isn't there work to do? Shouldn't she have scenes where she did work? Couldn't she have been better involved in the plot? I'd almost rather she didn't have any scenes at all and the babies were just sent off to Obi-wan to distribute, but we were supposed to have these stupid scenes with Vader and Padme where they had this obvious love and chemistry for each other, so we could see why he'd go crazy and go all dark thinking that she'd die unless he had his "new powers."

It's such an incredibly sad movie to watch because you can see all these really neat set peices: the image of the Jedi temple burning, Anakin going in to kill all of the Jedi - including the children, the plausible scenerio of how a president/prime minister becomes a despot by ruling through fear, all of Yoda's extreme coolness, Obi-wan's affection for Anakin. All ruined, just ruined, because the delivery was for shit.

I just didn't buy it. It was poorly written, and the actors were insulted with very little slow scene time in which to emote or at least pretend to feel something. Instead it was "line, line, line, CUT: new scene line, line, line: CUT."

Luke! Leia!

The end.

Thank God. Because really, Luke and Leia are way more interesting in the next three movies than just about anybody got to be in these three movies, so the sooner we get back to them, the better.

If anyone ever comes to my house and discovers that I own any of these three prequels, please feel free to put me out of my misery.

Memorial Day

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men [sic] to die in."
- George McGovern


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

"Draft beer; not people."
-Author Unknown

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate."
-George McGovern

What I'm Working On Tonight

God's War

1.

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jax, and lost it two rounds later when Jax hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium, and the wine she’d gotten in exchange for her womb. But she did get Jax to bed, and loser or not, in the desert after dark that was something.

Especially considering Nyx’s profession.

“What are you after?” Jax murmured in her good ear. They lay tangled in the sheets like old lovers, a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food, and most of her clothing.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Nyx said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for a lot of people.

Jax could only get her halfway there.

Nyx woke sometime after dawn prayer with a hangover and what felt like a wad of cotton in her belly. The pain wasn’t supposed to kick in until noon. She should have started drinking to prep for the pain, but she had another sort of boxer to meet in Faleen, and four women and a eunuch on her tail looking for a womb she’d dumped at the butcher’s. They would take her without the womb, of course, but dumping it kept them occupied in the fleshpots a day longer.

She pulled on her burnoose and pushed into the short hall. Jax was long gone, and the cantina was mostly empty. There was a room charge to pay, the cantina keeper told her. She put breakfast on the tab and slipped out the back.

A girl was selling sand cats in a pool of smoke weeping out from the back end of the cantina. It was a bad day for smog, even this far outside the cities. The thick air trapped the smoke too close, cloying close. Nyx pulled her gutra over her face, tucked it up under the aghal.

“You seen any bakkies on this road?” she asked the kid.

The girl spit red. “You want a sand cat?”

The kittens in the cage were bloody, half-starved. Flies circled them. The girl didn’t look much better.

Nyx was shit and gone from Punjai.

She walked. She looked back, once, at the smoky cantina and the starving girl, and wondered who they were burning back there.

The sun bled across the big angry sky. The road was unpaved, mostly sand and gravel. She had traded her good sandals for directions out of the fleshpots, too dopey to figure her way out on her own. Under the burnoose, she wore little more than a dhoti and breast binding. She had an old baldric - her dead partner’s - buckled too tight.

All the sheaths were empty. Had been for some time.

She was reminded of some proverb about meeting God empty-handed, but morning prayer had come and gone, and she hadn’t knelt. Her knees weren’t calloused anymore. Not from praying, away.

She hitched a ride on the back of a snarling cat-pulled cart just before midday, and by late afternoon she found a bodega and a call box and a sign telling her she was thirty miles from Faleen.

She made a call.

Two hours later, Kine pulled up in a bakkie spewing red roaches from its back end.

Kine leaned over and pushed the door out.

“You’ve got a leak in your exhaust,” Nyx said, sliding onto the seat.

Kine was an unremarkable woman, big in the hips and slight in the bust, average height, long face. Her hands had the brown, worn, sinewy look of old leather, but her face was younger, fleshier. She wore an embroidered housecoat and hijab over her dark hair, but Nyx figured there was very little on underneath the coat. It was a hot day.

“What’s her name?” Kine asked, shifting the bakkie into gear.

“Who?”

“I can smell her,” Kine said.

“I lost a bet,” Nyx said.

“Where’s Tej?”

“Dead. I couldn’t get him back over the border.”

Kine pursed her lips, a thousand daggers of disapproval in her dark eyes. She never frowned, never that, but the tight mouth held back words her God didn’t permit her to say. Nyx knew that well enough. She’d known Kine long before she went conservative.

They blew back out onto the road. The shocks in the bakkie were going out.

“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked.

“Faleen.”

Nyx looked out the window, watched the flat white desert turn to dunes.

“A ship just came in from New Canaan,” Kine said. Faleen was a landlocked city. Only one kind of ship docked there. “If you’re looking for the magicians –“

“Which sect?”

“Yebez. This is God’s war we’re fighting. They want a part in it.”

“God didn’t say anything to me about it. Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. She leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.

“No,” Kine said. She pinched her mouth again, then - “How did you lose Tej?”

Nyx was bleeding again. She could feel it. She needed something stronger than liquor.

“You have any weapons on you?” Nyx asked. She kicked the radio tube. It rattled. All the news was behind her.

“Who’s tracking you?”

“What is this, the fourth inquisition?”

“Nyxnissa?”

Nyx pulled her gutra free, dipped her head out the open window. The air was clearing up.

“Raine,” she said.

Kine’s face scrunched up like a prune. She shifted gears. The bakkie rattled and picked up speed. Dust and dead beetles roiled behind them.

“You’re putting me in a pot, sister-mine,” Kine said.

“I wouldn’t be blood if I didn’t.”

“I’ll drop you at the gate, no farther.”

The gate was good.

“You never could get a man back over the border,” Kine said. Her expression hadn’t changed. She had liked all of Nyx’s partners, even the men. Kine thought she was a good progressive conservative for putting up with Nyx's male partners.

“Tej was a good boy. The only one of yours I liked. You kill good men for a lost cause.”

“Raine always got us back out.”

“Raine isn’t a bēl damê, he’s a bounty hunter.”

“There’s not much difference.

“It’s all the difference in the world, in God’s eyes.”

They’d turned off the gravel track and onto the 101 Highway that bisected northern Nasheen from the Chenjan border to the sea. Splintered red rock jutted up from the dunes or lay scattered among them. A careful eye could spot the shimmering casings of unexploded bursts lining the highway. The road signs were popular shooting targets for Chenjan operatives and Nasheenian protestors, and most of the metal markers were pocked with bullet holes and smeared in burst residue.

Nyx supposed that there were worse places to go to sell the last of what she had, but she couldn’t think of any. Except maybe Chenja. And she’d already given Chenja enough of her. And enough of everyone else.

She tightened her baldric.

Eighteen miles to Faleen.

Wiscon....

... was great. Had to leave early due to scheduling and life events, and etc. but I had a blast. Got to meet great people, had a great time.

Looking forward to next year. It'll totally rock the house.

Things are great.

What I Love About Wiscon

It's incredibly nice to find your people. It's incredibly surreal to have several people stop you in the hall and go, "Kameron Hurley? Brutal Women? I love your blog!"

Next year, I'd rather they were loving my fiction. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

Next year. The fiction will pay off. I'm passionate. I believe in it. Things can be really different.

And now I will cease drunken posting, in case I get myself in trouble by talking about James Frenkel.

Ahem. Yea.

Also, need to call Simon and Ashley at some point - dude, let's do lunch.

Sidenote

hahah ahah aha

The hotel "decency" filter won't let me view my blog... because it has words like "fucked" in it.

Tell them to join the Real World.

Wiscon

Rocks.

I am a little drunk.

Why Yes, It's Friday Random Quiz Day. I'm Lazy.

Your Birthdate: January 12

Being born on the 12th day of the month (3 energy) is likely to add a good bit of vitality to your life. The energy of 3 allows you bounce back rapidly from setbacks, physical or mental. There is a restlessness in your nature, but you seem to be able to portray an easygoing, sometimes "couldn't care less" attitude. You have a natural ability to express yourself in public, and you always make a very good impression. Good with words, you excel in writing, speaking, and possibly singing. You are energetic and always a good conversationalist. You have a keen imagination, but you tend to scatter your energies and become involved with too may superficial matters. Your mind is practical and rational despite this tendency to jump about. You are affectionate and loving - but very sensitive. You are subject to rapid ups and downs.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Your Deadly Sins

Pride: 80%

Greed: 40%

Sloth: 40%

Envy: 20%

Gluttony: 20%

Lust: 20%

Wrath: 20%

Chance You'll Go to Hell: 34%

You will become famous - and subsequently killed by a stalker.

How Sinful Are You?

I Get Paid Tomorrow

Oh, sweet lord, thank you.

I've really got to figure out how to pay for dinner dates and books at the same time.

Truly, one of the great challenges of our age.

Kitten WAR

Because every kitten must have its day...

KITTENWAR

Men Are Stupider Than Women, Which is Why Women Succeed in Life and Men Succeed In Business

Oh, I'm sorry, John, wasn't that what you were saying? No?

On average, the women made as much as the men under either system (individual or group money games). But when they were offered a choice for the next round - take the piece rate or compete in a tournament - most women declined to compete, even the ones who had done the best in the earlier rounds. Most men chose the tournament, even the ones who had done the worst.

Because men are stupid and need to glorify their egos, and women are content with their lot.

Or maybe because women aren't encouraged to be competitive, because it's incredibly "intimidating" and "unfeminine" and unless she's a lesbian, she'll never get laid again.

Oh, sorry, not your conclusion John?

The men's eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs.

Because men are stupid and egotistical, and women are raised with a sense of modesty and Christian self-abasement.

Oh, wrong again.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," Professor Niederle said. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."

You can argue that this difference is due to social influences, although I suspect it's largely innate, a byproduct of evolution and testosterone.

::insert sloooooow screeeaaam:::

Oh, yes, testoserone, that happy hormone. Let's try this out. Put a bunch of menstrating women in a room with a group of men. This is the time of the month when men's body chemistry is most similiar to women's, hormone-wise.

See what changes.

What, nothing?

OK, pump women full of testoserone, so they grow a beard and get an enlarged clitoris, and then run the experiment again.

Still the same?

Gee, I wonder what the problem could be then!

OK, sit a few female-to-male transexuals down with some men who were born with --

Gee, tougher to control other factors for that one, huh? And a smaller sample.

Oh, dear.

Why is it that everytime somebody argues about "some" men succeeding above and beyond "some" women, that the issue of testoserone comes up? How about the family background of the applicant, how about looking at the amount of confidence their parents inspired in them, or looking at their birth order? Why always concentrate on the sex?

Thoughts on Education

In reading this article at the NY Times about the differences between those who stay and complete college and those who don't, I was reminded of my own experience (and, in fact, continuing experience) with the educational system. Low-income students and students of families who did not graduate from college - unsurprisingly - still have a more difficult time getting to college and sticking with it to get the degree.

There's really no question as to why. If you've got a family who expects you'll go to college, who all graduated from college and - miracle of miracles - who will pay for it if you go, you've got a big social and financial system behind you urging you on. Shit, I had a family who would have disowned me if I didn't get a degree, but I sure as hell contemplated *not* completing my undergraduate degree a couple of times.

Why?

Cause I'm now 30K in debt, and making only 40K a year as a result. In fact, the only reason I even considered graduate school at all was because a collective of relatives agreed to help me pay tuition costs. I still worked for my plane ticket and the money to pay my bills before I headed overseas, but at the end of graduate school, at least my debt rack-up remained the same.

What kept me going when I was 19/20 wasn't so much my love of education (though I certainly have a love learning), it was family pressure to finish. My parents pounded me and my brother and sister over the head about the importance of a college education. My mother had waited to go back to school until she had kids - and she said it was one of the stupidest things she'd done, to try and go to work, go to school, and raise kids, and she didn't recommend that route. My dad finished a couple of semesters of college courses, but it became abundantly clear when he went back on the job market that nobody was hiring anybody without a college degree anymore, and he fought tooth and nail to get a job that paid the bills, even with over twenty years of restaurant experience, five years of that at the VP level.

The job market isn't a fun place.

I found out the same thing here in Chicago when I tried to get a job, and ended up working for $11 an hour as a temp before this position became permanent. I was so desperate to work that I was ready to apply at Starbuck's - with a Master's Degree.

How fucked up is that?

When it comes to education, for me, it's now all about the money. Where will the money come from? How many more student loan people are going to call me about late payments? How much more financial harrassment will I endure to get another degree, to broaden my horizons, expand my skill base?

My answer is: a lot.

The reason I have that answer is because I've grown up in a family that takes great pride in education, that knows it's worth, and who have raised me with those same values.

For better or worse, I keep going.

It's the money that's a bitch.

Just Drink More Coffee

The lean and the restless.

Wiscon Approaches

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am ready to get out of town...

And, of course, looking forward to getting paid on Friday. It's gonna be a great Friday. Why isn't today Friday, dammit?

Until You Experience This, You Just Can't Really Comprehend It

The ParaGard may cause a 50 to 75 percent increase in menstrual flow.

Why yes, yes it does.

Heavier and longer menstrual periods, more common during the first 2 to 3 months

Patience, young grasshopper, patience. I figure that it's healthier than being pregnant, and less depressing than a pill. And in three months, I won't be selling all this extra blood for Satanic rituals.

I'll certainly miss the extra income.