What I'm Working On:

God's War, Part One

God's War, Part Two:
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2.

They passed the big water purifying plant just outside the refugee camps. Nasheen didn’t leave out much open water anymore. Chenjan operatives were notorious for poisoning wells.

Faleen was a port city, not the kind by the sea but the kind that took in the ragged handfuls of off-world ships that sputtered into its ancient docking ports every year looking for repairs and supplies and usually, directions. Faleen wasn’t the sort of place anybody off-world was looking for on purpose. Neither was any other place in Nasheen for that matter, or any other place on the planet.

Faleen was where you ended up when you were out of options.

They drove for an hour more before the big ship from New Canaan came into view, rearing above Faleen like some obscene, winged minaret.

They drove past women and girls walking along the highway carrying baskets on their heads and big nets looped over their shoulders. Bugs were big trade to the magicians in Faleen, and everybody was always looking for locusts.

Kine pulled up outside the towering main gate of the dusty city, scattering young girls, sand, and chickens from her path with a blast of her horn. Another cloud of beetles escaped from the leak in the back. Nyx batted them away as she jumped out of the bakkie.

“You watch yourself,” Kine yelled at her.

Nyx raised a hand, and Kine shifted gears and turned back off onto the highway, heading for the coast, and home. Nyx hadn't been to the ocean in an age.

She turned toward the two big slabs of metal that were the main gate into Faleen. They had seen better days as compression doors on an old star carrier.

Nyx pulled up the hood of her burnoose and bled into the traffic heading in through the gate. She found a boy crouching outside a mihrab near the broken tower of a minaret. She tugged at his ear.

He took her to a gangly girl selling a couple other girls in a back alley who demanded a steep fee for showing tourists around Faleen.

Nyx reminded her she was a bēl damê on a blood debt, and the girl worked for the magicians. Barring that, she could always threaten violence, but her stomach hurt and she was really fucking thirsty.

The girl turned gray and acquiesced.

They moved through narrow corridors and skirted around the edges of mud-brick buildings whose precipitous lean threatened a swift death by asphyxiation. At the edge of the wooden gates into the Chenjan quarter, the girl pointed her to a cantina with a bright red awning. On the other side of the cantina was the magician’s traveling boxing gym: never in the same place for two consecutive fights.

Two big women stopped Nyx at the battered blue door of the cantina.

“You have an appointment?”

“Do I look like I have an appointment?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Tell her I’m the bēl damê.”

The women shifted on their feet. “I’ll get her,” the biggest one said.

Nyx pushed at her sore belly and rocked back on her heels. She wondered if they sold morphine before noon. She wondered if any of this was going to work. She had some doubts. Doubt wasn’t good. She knew better.

The woman arrived back at the door and bid her enter. “She’ll see you,” she said.

Nyx ducked after the bouncer and into the dark, smoky interior of the cantina. Dust clotted the thick air, and sand covered most of the floor. It was good for soaking up blood and piss. Boxing fans weren’t the best behaved, and they liked to pack Bashir’s cantina before and after a fight.

Bashir sat at a corner table smoking sweet opium. Nyx could taste it in the air. The woman had a couple bottles of sand-colored whiskey at the table, and someone had left behind a still smoking cigar that smelled a lot like a B-40. Bashir had two teenage boys beside her, both just shy of draft age, maybe sixteen. They were sallow and soft-looking and kept their hair long, braided, and belled. Somebody had kept them out of training - letting adolescent boys go that soft was illegal in most districts, even if they were prostitutes. When they were called up, they wouldn’t last a day at the front - the Chenjans would mash through them like overripe squash.

“Nyxnissa,” Bashir said. She exhaled a plume of rich smoke. Her eyes were big and dark. “Thought I’d seen the last of you.”

“Most people think that,” Nyx said, sliding next to one of the boys. He flinched. “Until I show up again.”

“How was your trip?” Bashir asked. She wore red trousers and stained short coat, but kept her head uncovered. Her skin was a shade paler than those who worked in the desert, but the tough, leathery look of her face said her wealth was recently acquired. Like her boys, she was getting fat and soft at the edges, but unlike the boys she’d fought it out on the sand with the best of them in her youth. There was muscle under the wealth.

“Not as smooth as I hoped,” Nyx said. She pulled off her hood and shrugged out of her burnoose so her shoulders were bare.

Bashir looked her over with a lazy sort of interest. “A bird told me you don’t have what we bargained for.”

“I need a drink,” Nyx said. She hailed the woman at the bar, but Bashir waved her back.

“The bird says you dropped the purse at the butcher’s.”

“I did,” Nyx said. Bashir wasn’t a stupid woman. Being evasive would just get Nyx chopped into more pieces.

“That was a big purse,” Bashir said.

Nyx leaned back against the seat. The boy next to her had a hold of his glass, but wasn’t drinking.

“Where’d you pick these two up?” Nyx asked.

“Aren’t they lovely?” Bashir said. Her dark eyes glinted in the low light. The place was too cheap for bulbs. They were still using worms in glass. “They were a gift.”

Nyx felt suddenly uncomfortable. She cut a look at the door. The place was mostly empty. The woman at the bar was still wiping the same length of counter she’d been mopping up when Nyx dropped in.

Nyx knew the answer, but asked anyway.

“Who gave them to you?”

Bashir showed her teeth.

“You’ll get shit from the magicians for crossing a bēl damê,” Nyx said.

“Will I?” Bashir said. “Even a bēl damê who sells her womb out for black money?”

“I do a little side work.”

“What would your sisters say?

“Leave the family out of it.”

Bashir clucked her tongue. She prodded at one of the boys with her opium pipe. “Pretty aren’t they? So much better than the ones that come back old and scarred from the front.”

“I’ve seen better,” Nyx said. And she’d certainly fucked better.

“Raine can be very generous,” Bashir said, fixing her gaze back on Nyx, “when I have something he wants.”

“How much am I going for?” Nyx said. Her hands itched for a blade that she no longer owned.

“More than the purse you were carrying,” Bashir said.

Well, that was something.

The boy beside Nyx took his hand away from his drink.
The woman behind the bar moved toward the kitchen.

Well.

Nyx kicked up onto the tabletop before the boy could steady the pistol in his other hand. The gun went off with a burst of yellow smoke.

She threw a low roundhouse kick to the other boy’s face and leapt off the table before Bashir got her scattergun free.

Reflex sent her running for the back door, spewing sand behind her. Too late, she remembered who taught her the back-door default retreat. She would have had better luck with the bouncers at the front.

Nyx shouldered into the kitchen, knocked past a startled blind cook, and ran headlong out the open back alley.

A strong arm shot out and slammed into her throat. Nyx was going so fast it took her off her feet.

She hit the sand and rolled.

Still choking, she tried to get to her feet, but a big man already had hold of one of her arms.

He twisted it behind her and forced her face back into the sand. She turned her head at the last minute, so only her cheek thrust against the burning ground. She saw three pairs of dirty feet in front of her, two in sandals, one bare. She strained her eyes up to catch their faces.

Little, ropy-muscled Anneke hadn’t broken a sweat. She stood chewing a wad of sen, one arm supporting the weight of the rifle she kept lodged just under her shoulder. The other feet belonged to skinny half-breed Taite and big, broad-shouldered Dakar, whose face was so pale he couldn’t go outside unless it was covered.

“You must be desperate,” Nyx said, spitting sand, sucking in air through her bruised throat, “To take on Taite and Anneke as your muscle.”

“That’s all the greeting I get?” Raine asked. He pulled her up, kept a grip on her arm, and tugged off her burnoose.

“Where you lose your gear, girl? I taught you better.” He shook the burnoose off on the ground, thinking she’d hidden something in it.

She made a grunting laugh. He didn’t know how hard-up she was.

“You’re clean,” he said, half a question.

He was half right. She had one more thing to sell and one more thing to do, but if she was lucky, only the magicians knew that.

Raine cuffed her hands with sticky bands and turned her around to face him. He draped her burnoose back over her.

“You know how much you’re going for?” he asked.

“Over fifty,” Nyx said.

Raine was a big man, a head taller than Nyx, just as dark and twice as massive. His face was broad and flat and stamped in two black, fathomless, expressionless eyes, like deep water from a tribal well. The hilt of a good blade cut through a slit in his brown burnoose. He was pushing Bashir’s age: men didn’t come back from the front until after they were forty or dead. Mostly, they came back dead.

Raine was an exception.

It made him dangerous.

Another Reason to Love What I Do

I'm sitting here at work researching opium (the smell of it, particularly) and collecting slang terms for marijuana.

No, I've never done illegal drugs in my life.

But I write about a lot of people who do them.

Fun, fun, fun.

More Places to Exercise Capitalism

Hey, J.Jill now has a 14W-28W women's clothing line.

Sweet.

Of course, I doubt you can get those sizes in the store, cause then both big and small women would be able to... shop together! Unlike at places like, say, Ann Taylor, and let's not even talk about Abercrombie and it's size "00" fetish.

The Book Census!

My wacky roommate has performed the bi-annual book census of our apartment:

January 2005

Apt Total: 1541

Kameron: 486
Jenn: 1055

Kameron's%: 31.5%
Jenn's %: 68.5

June 2005

Apt Total: 1606

Kameron: 524
Jenn: 1082

Kameron's%: 32.6%
Jenn's %: 67.8

As you can see from these fine numbers, the percentage of books that are mine in the house has gone up by 1.1 percentage points.

This is most excellent.

I must continue to excel at my book-buying skills while my roommate continues to buy less, unawares of my Supah Ninjah skills.

Something Troubling in the Dark

There's been something bugging me about this Dark Cabal site that I mentioned a couple days ago. Reading Nick's take got me to thinking.

Now that I've had time to read over some more entries I'm thinking:

You've gone to all this trouble to be anonymous and super-secret about your identities... so why aren't you taking advantage of that and really critiquing the field, you know, real balls-to-the-wall taking to task of issues that deeply bother you, in a sweet brutal style?

Instead, there's very much just a sense of "I like this story, read it. Only vote for good stories. I don't like these new kewl stories."

The end.

I'm not sure why you'd go to all of this trouble unless you had something really witty and dynamic to say, something you thought would get you so ostracized by the writers and editors of SF/F that you had to hide behind a screen name.

Anything less is just silly. Why not owe up to it?

Night Thoughts

Packing for NY, getting ready to show the apartment again, writing up a proper description of a city that doesn't exist. Drinking wine like water, as it's the only other beverage besides water that we have in the house... I'm behind on my e-mail, so apologies to those I haven't gotten back to. Going to try and catch up tomorrow before my night-flight.

Got some good books. Off into the blue again tomorrow.

What's `at, Huh?

Yea, I'm awake.

I think.

"The Bounty's on Me."

Faleen is not a border city.

I love what I do.

You are the Revisionist Feminist

You scored 66% Gender-Abolitionist, 80% Sexually Liberal, and 80 % Socialist

You are the Revisionist Feminist! You are, by far, the most philosophical, the most sexually-liberated, and the most politically extreme variety of feminist. You are very, very freedom-oriented. You abhor oppression in all forms. For instance, your views on sexual liberation and reproductive control adequately reflect your devotion to personal freedom. Not only that, but you also feel gender needs to be destroyed to maximize equality and freedom, because accepting socially-constructed gender roles binds women into false categories and places upon them an unneeded identity. Gender should not be a part of one's identity, but rather an irrelevant aspect of their physical bodies, such as their hair length or nose shape. Not only that, but Revisionist Feminists are political extremists and feel very strongly that the oppression of class society is a big part of the cause of women's oppression. Basically, a Revisionist feels that cultural ideas of gender, political class, and repressive sexual morality all work together to oppress women, and the only way to truly escape this oppression is to challenge all of these problems directly and extremely. You are a Marxist, a Gender Abolitionist, and a Liberal Feminist all rolled into one.

The other feminist types:

The Housewife

The Marxist

The Liberal

The Liberal Extremist

The Gender Abolitionist

The Radical

The Gender-Liberal

The Revisionist

Second Quote of the Day:

"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

- Audre Lorde

(via Kaete)

I'm Always Worried When Something Experienced By More Than Half the Population is Categorized as an "Illness"

Just like medicalizing the female body (sure, women are over half the population, but their bodies are "weird" and "other". Huh?)...

In a report released last week, researchers estimated that more than half of Americans would develop mental disorders in their lives, raising questions about where mental health ends and illness begins.

In fact, psychiatrists have no good answer, and the boundary between mental illness and normal mental struggle has become a battle line dividing the profession into two viscerally opposed camps.

Or maybe our society's so fucked up that we're *causing* mental disorders?

Oh, sorry, that's not gonna fly... everybody has to be HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY to get up and work a shitty job they hate all day so they can eat crap food and then get pissed on by friends and media for being fat and ugly and unacceptable and then they can't buy the right clothes, they're not married yet, OH dear GOD, I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN, there's no money in a 401(K), everyone tells them they're behind, behind, behind in the rat race, WHY DON'T YOU LIKE LIVING IN CITIES??, crime is UP, their vision sucks, they're UGLY dorks, and should DIE DIE DIE... And they WILL because every day on tv you read all about the HORRIBLE things that happen to pretty, affluent young white girls EVERY DAY. And if it could happen to THEM it could happen to YOU.

Um. Yea.

Where's the wiggle room for "normal human variation"? The more we move toward a society that's supposed to think, act, look, and experience everything in exactly the same way, the more worried I get.

Maybe it's not the people who are fucked up. In fact, maybe what everybody's exhibiting are normal reactions to excessive stress.

Song for the Day, Stuck on Repeat

Mr Brightside by the Killers

Today's Advice:

Be a Pirate today, The Law is coming Tomorrow!

(via Lysha)

Basho (Two Haiku)

has B.o.

Swamp mist, eyes water -
Why is that monk still wearing
Winter robes in June?



ah, soB

A yellow snake eats
The robin's lone precious egg -
You motherfucker



- by Francis Heaney

(via Jenn)

Bitching About SF: Now, With an Out!

There's a site that's been set up by some writers in the SF/F field called "Dark Cabal." (their tagline? "Vote for Stories. Not for Friends.) Over there, they have the ability to bitch about the state of SF/F, awards, and the shortcomings of certain books, a bit like I do here.

The difference is, they do it anonymously.

SF/F is a pretty tight-knit crowd. Everybody knows everybody. If I bitch about a book here, there's a high liklihood of me bumping into the writer one day, or relying on a book blurb from said writer if I ever get something out there.

It's a great place to bitch about people like gabe, Trent, Dave, Card, Brin, and Goodkind.

But then, I can do that here, so what's the point?

Well, I'm not famous.

There's a lot of freedom in that.

Brutal Women: There's More Than One Way to Fight Back

Last fall I wrote about Mukhtaran Bibi, a woman who was sentenced by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang-raped because of an infraction supposedly committed by her brother. Four men raped Ms. Mukhtaran, then village leaders forced her to walk home nearly naked in front of a jeering crowd of 300.

Ms. Mukhtaran was supposed to have committed suicide. Instead, with the backing of a local Islamic leader, she fought back and testified against her persecutors. Six were convicted.

Then Ms. Mukhtaran, who believed that the best way to overcome such abuses was through better education, used her compensation money to start two schools in her village, one for boys and the other for girls. She went out of her way to enroll the children of her attackers in the schools, showing that she bore no grudges.

Stolen Exchange

Yea, I'd read the Card article on fat earlier, and I couldn't figure out what was bothering me so much about it, because, of course, I mostly agreed (bah!).

But luckily, Alas caught Card's bizarre lack of self-reflection:

You think fat people don’t know how they’re despised? You think they don’t want to be different?

Gosh, Orson, like all those Mormon fags you condemn to hell with righteous indignation because you just can't understand why they can't "control" themselves?

But of course, some people don't mind being fat [or otherwise "other"], or may, in fact [horror!] enjoy it: I do have a deep fear of being small and weak and enjoy being big and strong, but, ahem, I digress.

Funny that he writes that sentence without any self-reflection at all.

See, being biased against people "who just are that way" is always oh so much less moral when the "group" in question is one you're a part of...

Card is a fucktard. The sooner everybody realizes they're in the same goddamn boat, the better.

We'll be able to get more shit done.

Movin' On Up

Had a couple of guys come by to view our apartment yesterday. As I showed one of them the living room I said, "If you've got fewer books that we do, there's actually a lot more room in here."

He laughed and said, "Oh, I've got more books than you do."

Then he walked into the dining room and its Wall-O-Books.

"OK," he said, "Maybe not."

And he hadn't even seen mine or Jenn's room yet...

Me, Jenn, and Jenn's SO are gonna be moving up to the third floor where we'll have three bedrooms and a neat 3-way split for rent and possibly utilities. We'll also be at the top of the brownstone building, meaning our back porch will no longer be a thoroughfare (I have secret hopes that I can get a punching bag and put it out there), no pounding from upstairs neighbors, and we can leave the windows open as much as we want.... ahhhhh. As somebody who lives to have the windows open, that's a major plus.

The downside?

We're not sure how we're going to fit all three people's books up there...

Overall, it'll be a fun move. We're relinquishing our place August 1st, likely moving upstairs a little before that, as soon as our upstairs people vacate (she's going to law school in Milwaukee). If anybody's interested in a 2 bedroom in Uptown for 1K a month, have I got a deal for you...

In other news, things are pretty good on this front. I'm heading to New York Thursday night to hang out with B for the weekend, which should be nice and relaxing. He intends to bust out a bottle of champagne, we'll likely see Batman Begins, and then watch some pro boxing on Saturday (at some point I'm actually going to be able to follow the who's who of pro boxing). Should be a good time.

Jenn's SO is in London, so I get to be her date tonight, and we're going to see if we can catch Howl's Moving Castle. I have no idea what this movie's about, but I keep seeing the name everywhere...

The writing is... writing, research is being done, and I'm feeling good about it.

It's looking to be a fantastic week.

Foiled Again

The last two workdays I've gone to go out on my daily powerwalk, the heavens have opened up and dump rained - *after* I've already gotten into my walking clothes.

Damn weather.

It's All Relative

The thermostat here in the house says 80 degrees. That's with the aid of a box air conditioner and a room fan.

Yet when I walked in from outside, it felt like a 69 degree oasis.

Afterall, it's closer to 98 degrees outside...

I've never been good with hot weather. Fuck knows how I survived Durban.

I also committed the mortal sin of watering my plants every other day instead of every day... and my cilantro has paid a bitter price.

Sad.

OK, back to work. I'm working. Really.