Fucking Sweet

Interview with Christopher Priest in this month's Locus.

Christopher Priest is my hero.

I recommend this (I've read it four times) and this (ah, my inspiration for war and bug tech), to start. It's fantastic mindfucking fiction.

In a totally literary way.

Wow, I Hate My Job

Really, really hate it.

Respond to my resumes, oh Google corp, oh Starbucks Corp, oh Various Businesses Downtown looking for coordinators/admins/assistants/secretaries/receptionists - I will even bring you coffee! Yes! I will stoop so low!

Anything but this disaster, this lowering of the bar one cell tower at a time...

Feminism Is Not A Fucking Dating Service

This whole "nice guy" thing is really making the rounds on the internets.

What's a poor, well-meaning young male to do?

The thing is, Pete continued, I don’t think girls want feminist guys! You know that whole thing where girls aren’t into nice guys but would rather have bad boys? It’s like they say they want one thing, but in reality they want another. If I want to meet girls and have fun, I have a lot more success when I don’t try and be pro-feminist. I mean, why should I be more feminist than the women around me?

And, as we all know, feminism isn't about being a decent human being and adhering to ideas of basic human rights. It's about getting laid.

McBoing gives our intrepid hero some much better advice than Hugo's gentle chortling about how difficult it is to be nice and get laid.

Nice guys do get laid. Trust me. But that's got nothing to do with feminism.

I could tell you that I really wanted to be a smart, strong woman, but men just aren't attracted to strong, smart women. So it wouldn't be in my best interests to be strong and smart, cause then I wouldn't get laid. So I'd make myself less of a person in order to make other people feel better?

People would tell me I was nuts.

And smack me upside the head.

Not chortle coyly.

Some Feminists at the "Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago" Panel

Rebecca Maines Kameron Hurley Susan Marie Groppi- Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago
Originally uploaded by tiellan.

I'll be damned. Sombody *did* get a photo of me at Wiscon.

Oh, SUCK IT UP

Arg.

I REALLY don't want this to become a whiny LJ, dammit.

ARG.

Twenty-One Steps to Writing/Publishing a Novel

Yea.

Just... yea.

On Fear, and Being Stronger

"I'm through accepting limits
'Cuz someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I'll never know!
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love I guess I've lost
Well, if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost!
I'd sooner buy
Defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye
I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down"

- "Defying Gravity," from Wicked: the Musical

"Look before you leap. Then leap."-anon

Jenn suggested that we go out for dinner to celebrate the fact that I've been out of the hospital for a month (this then prompted a long discussion about what should "count" as the date of my "defying death" anniversary. Should it be the 14th, when the paramedics arrived and I got to the hospital? Or the 15th, when I was actually brought into the emergency room [just after midnight], or when I was stabilized, which would have been a few hours after that. But then, I took a turn for the worst and don't remember much of anything from the 15th. So should it be the 16th, when I was finally fully conscious? Or the 18th when I was released from the hospital? Oh, who cares? It's just an excuse for a decent meal).

It feels like it's been a lot longer than a month, mainly because about a hundred significant things have happened between now and then. It's been a busy month, without a lot of time for thinking. I've been doing a lot of... doing -

- visiting friends, Wiscon (including my first panels!), tDW rewrites, insulin routine maintenance, relationship maintenance, movie watching, book reading, contract signing, note writing, long-mad-email-fiascos, weird emotions, low blood sugar nights (again, and again, and again to the point of exhaustion), doctor's appointments, weight lifting, cleaning, sorting, ordering, filing, writing letters to shitty healthcare providers...

I've put on a little weight, which is a relief. When I first got out of the hospital, I'd just spent four days without eating followed by two days of hardly eating because the nasty case of thrush I had made swallowing unbearably painful, to the point where I'd thrash in bed every time I swallowed. At some point that first day back home, I was talking to Jenn and put my hands on my hips. I've got pretty big, wide hips, and I've always had at least an inch of cushioning between the bone and the surface of my skin. But when I posed with hands on hips, I didn't even have to squeeze to realize that I was mostly just skin-over-bone there.

My deep fear of out-of-control weight gain, however, doesn't seem to be materializing. I wasn't eating all that bad before I was sick, but "eating well" and "eating in moderation" is now an enforced state of being. My blood's been high all week, mainly to do with the fact that the doctor cut my noon-day insulin shot. I see him next week, and we'll likely either adjust my Lantus or bring back the noonday shot, which I'd like. I hate the high sugar. It's why I measure what I eat and why I've cut back a carb serving from breakfast and lunch, to try and get it more manageable. I'm trying desperately to keep the sugar levels low because 1) I feel better 2) I don't want to get my feet chopped off

Over the long run, it means keeping me from losing my legs. In the short term, well, having high sugar all week means more problems with my feet, the return of the yeast infection, and a much longer sexual response time.

And that really sucks.

Overall, things are much better: the blood will get sorted out with the doctor again next week. I've been doing my weights routine regularly, and today was the first time in - I dunno, months - that I've been able to add reps without feeling like I'm going to die. I feel a *lot* stronger. Jenn and I are going to make a pilgramage to the local sports store and get me a 50 lb free weight (just one, for now), which'll mean upping the weight, lowering the reps for a couple of my morning exercises.

Jenn also suggested I go back to yoga this Friday. It's been a month, afterall. I'm mostly as "better" as I'm going to get.

I've been putting off a lot of things, like getting back to the gym.

A lot of that has to do with fear.

As much as I want to not be afraid, or just pretend I'm not afraid, I am.

But life goes on (unless you die. ha ha). I can't just keep coming home and reading books. Not that that's a bad thing, but I realized the other day that I've been hiding a lot at home lately. I've gotten better. I took a couple long walks on my own this weekend (with some hard candy in my pocket, just in case), and I walk a lot at the nature preserve across the street from where I work, which is how I get in my hour of walking every day. But mostly, I've been afraid.

Jenn's going to be gone several weekends and a couple of weeks this summer for various business psych conferences. I'm looking forward to it because there's a secret part of me that's really terrified of being by myself in the house again. I need to spend time by myself just to get my confidence back, just to convince myself that I'm not going to fall into a coma and die alone and get eaten by dogs.

Back when I was 19, I decided to change my whole life. I wasn't going to rely on anyone else. I wasn't going to become attached to anyone else, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be dependent on anyone else for the rest of my life.

And I still want those things, even now. I still find strength in it.

I have some traveling coming up as well. I'll be flying out to Ohio for Thanksgiving with my buddies Ian and Stephanie, and in October, my parents are flying the whole family out to Florida for a trip to Disneyworld. And all of that will be good for me, too.

It's a bit like being in a car wreck. Afterward, you really, really don't want to drive a car again. And the best thing to do is drive yourself home again right afterward.

Yoga on Friday will be good for me. If I collapse, there's a whole roomful of people who can call 911.

Heh.

And I think that there's still a small, secret part of me that worries now that the summer's spinning out and Jenn's going to all her conferences and getting ready to start the job markets process (her whole last year here will basically be sending out applications and flying out for job talks), that worries about What Happens Next.

I've started brainstorming the module I'm writing for the gaming job in Edmonton, and if I *do* get the job, I'd like to take a couple weeks and do some traveling between the end-date for Chicago and the new-date in Canada. I want to scream a big fuck you at the world and do most of it on my own.

But buried deep in me, as well, is the idea of moving on past this life and into the new one and figuring out who the hell would want to hang out with somebody like me. It's not a big thing, but I think about it. Sick people aren't terribly attractive. I worry about my limits. I worry about my restrictions. I planned an 11-day Macchu Pichu hike for my 30th birthday. I'm wondering if I have to postpone that until my 40th. I'm wondering what I can do. I won't know until I try.

I think I'm afraid I'll find limits.

I think about all the things I want to do. Things that I *will* do out of sheer stubbornnes, but... but I think about it.

Because as much as I try to stand up straight and get my shit together, things are harder. I knew they would be harder, and now the anger's starting to get to me, the anger everybody said would come.

Mostly, I'm angry at myself.

I'm angry at my fear, my self-loathing. I'm angry that I spent so many years figuring out how to be strong and live on my own only to be hit with a dependency. I've worked very hard to do what I've done and be the person I am. It's why I react so strongly when I'm with people who want to change me, who say I'm emotionally distant, too aggressive in my speech, too straightforward, too intimidating.

Oh, fuck you.

I was not always this way. I know that better than anyone. I've been the screaming, crying, blubbering housebound who kowtowed to an overbearing boyfriend, back in the day. I hate that person, and anybody who wants me to go back to being her can kiss my ass.

I remember that when B and I broke up, he spent the following days and weeks writing terrible stuff to me and about me. He insulted my friends. He said I "disgusted" him. He insulted my writing. He said I'd never make it as writer (one of the greatest things about allowing somebody to get close to you is that they know *exactly* where to hit you when they decide they never really loved you). He insinuated that by breaking up with him, I was giving up on love. I didn't understand love. I would never be in love. I would always be alone, exploring dead cities. He said I wasn't a fighter. If I was really a fighter, I'd have kept pushing through our masochistic relationship, which was killing us both.

Oh, fuck you.

I'm not a perfect person. Strong emotion scares me. Getting out of bed in the morning scares me. Going into a coma and dying scares me.

Not living the life I want because I'm afraid scares me even more.

At a certain point in my life, I realized I couldn't blame anybody else for the way I lived my life. I couldn't blame my parents because I overate. I couldn't blame my parents because I was bad with money. I couldn't blame crappy boyfriends for my terror of committment (Me: "I don't want to get married. I mean, being with Crappy Boyfriend #1 pretty much put me off that. He kept pushing and pushing, like a ring was a collar, like once I say yes I'd never be able to leave." My buddy Ian: "So you're basically avoiding marrying other men or forming strong committments because of some high school boyfriend you had." Me: "Yes. It was a bad experience. It formed my conception of what marriage meant to most guys." My buddy Ian: "Well then, he wins, doesn't he?" Oh. Shit). I couldn't blame a lack of physical activity on my historically sedentary lifestyle. I couldn't blame teachers for convincing me I was stupid, or assholes who told me "you can't." And I can't blame my pancreas for exploding and leaving me to figure out how to live my life without it.

Instead, I'm caught in this neverending loop of fear and anger, anger and fear. And it drives me, it drives me, because if I stop too long to think, if I think too much, I'm going to feel sorry for myself. I'm going to spend too many nights crying for no reason at all and saying, "I can't" when I don't even know what's possible.

But you know what? It fucking occurs to me that the sorts of people who cry and say I can't every night and never get out of bed because it scares them, they aren't the fighters. They're just tired, because it's too hard. I understand that. I understand how hard it is. But it's not the life I'm living, nor the one I want to live.

So what the fuck does that make me?

I've been called some pretty terrible things in my time. I've called myself even worse.

I remember my mom telling me once that she could never do the things that I've done or am doing because she'd be too afraid.

There's a false assumption in those sorts of statements.

It assumes that people who "do stuff" aren't afraid. It assumes that when you step into a ring, that big motherfucker in front of you doesn't - just for a moment - scare the living shit out of you. It assumes that I never have a crises of confidence, that I don't sit around fighting myself, my own assumptions, my own fears, everyday.

But I am afraid, and I do fight, every day.

I am getting better. I will be better, if only through sheer determination.

Because that's pretty much all I'm running on right now -

Blind faith, anger, fear.

And maybe a little hope.

Hope that I made myself into the sort of person who can get up and push back. Hope that I already know myself and my limitations (none), and that where I can go from here, what I can do, will surprise even me.

"You're the only person I know who can leap off a cliff into empty air and fly." - Jenn

Oh!

A brand of yogurt with only 8 carbs!

It takes so little to make me happy these days.

OK, back to work.

At Least I Know How to Keep Myself Occupied

A Little Chat with a "Nice Guy"

I am so amused.

Tootling Around

The Day Job had me working on updating databases yesterday for 4 hours, so I'm working from home today, mainly so I can get shit done that was supposed to be done yesterday.

Also, I just acquired a bunch more books.

This makes me happy.

Sugar Sugar

Die, pancreas, die!

Oh, wait. Already dead.

Oh well.

First Antho

Looks like they're going to try and launch the anthology that my story, "Wonder Maul Doll" is in at World Fantasy in Austin (barring disaster. Which does, of course, happen), and I have an email from one of the editors asking how many of us authors are going to be there.

It's the first story of mine that's going to be in an actual book, and I'd love to be there just to stare over a handful of copies, but tickets to Austin are running at $300. Also, I'm not sure if anybody I'd know really well would be there, and Jenn can't afford to go, so I'd be pretty solo the whole time.

WFC tends to be more of a "pro" con, and if it's anything like last year's WFC, the programming is likely to suck. And you know what? For $150, I want some decent programming.

Perhaps I will be content with my free author's copy and call it a year.

Shit I Need to Do Today/This Weekend

Got back the first of the reader-edits for tDW from my buddy Patrick yesterday.

He pointed out some typos (oh! It's soooo nice to be at the stage of this novel where I'm like, "Hey, yea, check for typos, because I don't intend on trashing this whole book and starting again!"), pacing issues, one rather irritating "but if it's an egalitarian society, and you could only really know who the *mother* of any one kid is, wouldn't the line of succession be through the mother, and wouldn't that hose up this whole problem with the bastard?" bigger sort of issue that I do need to deal with (that's the problem with having written the first half of the first draft of this book when I was 19. You end up with a lot of silly assumptions that end up being important to the plot, but don't really jive with the new society you came up with at 23/25).

The summation of the critique, however, amounted to: "Take this book and SELL IT."

For some reason I had one of those nights last night where I got home and just wanted to feel sorry for myself, but I sucked it up and input some of the edits into the first few chapters of tDW and started on the revisions of the last few chapters I wrote of God's War, which I completed just before the coma. It's a little weird to look back at those chapters because they've got some oddly put-together sentences and very little setting and description of any sort (and what's there is... weirdly worded). Instead, it's full of choppy action scenes involving pistols, whips, blowing up a woman's head, kidnapping, and finding a guy's head in a box.

I'm keeping all of those events, of course (how could I not???), but giving them some setting/padding (yes, sometimes you *need* some padding) and cleaning up the weird sentences.

So, my to-do list for the weekend:

1) finish contract writing passage (I have no idea why this is taking me so long. Denial. Fake writer's block. A need to not pound through it as slap-dash as I did the last one [which I completed with blurry vision and a sugar headache]. I'll push through it this weekend)

2) finish inputting Patrick's edits into tDW

3) finish GW revisions and start on those last 75 pesky fucking pages

4) write thank-you note to Jenn's parents

5) send in prescription claims to health insurance (had to make copies of my reciepts, which I've just finished here at work)

6) write out Strongly Worded Letter to said health insurance for their denial of my last half-day of hospital care. They argued that I was out of "immediate danger" by that time. I'm not sure how I would have a) known this in my sugar-dazed state b) been able to demand that the doctors release me in my sugar-dazed state c) would have been able to go home and give myself insulin shots when most of that day was spent going over how the hell I was going to care for myself post-hospital.

I FUCKING HATE insurance companies.

7) pay the most pertinent of the bills (ie the ones due before the 20th) with the paltry $650 paycheck I just received (oh, the joys of PTO that accrues at a snail's pace of 5 hours per pay period, and no sick pay!).

8) finish reading "On Beauty."

9) order books for as-yet-unnamed Genocide Novel research

10) spend today catching up on all the actual work at work I was supposed to be doing this week, but decided to spend writing emails instead....

Jon Stewart: Still My Secret Boyfriend

"Divorce is not caused because 50% of marriages end in gayness."

Telling Stories

I was chatting with Jenn last night about Meghan's post - some thoughts on sexuality, desire, and labels. And at some point I said something like, "Yea, people really like labels. I mean, I was white and a woman my whole life, but now I'm dating a woman and have a chronic illness. Does this mean I get more diversity points?"

"Yea.. how are you doing with all that?" Jenn asked.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Well, within the last six months you've become visibly queer, and you've got, well, a chronic illness. I mean, how do you feel about all that?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think about it that much. It's all kind of happened so quick, I haven't had time to really think about, look back on it, create a narrative, you know?"

"Ah," Jenn said, "it's like asking you how you're feeling before you've had time to figure it out?"

"Exactly. Why do you think I blog? And before that, sent those huge 17-page stories about my life to the Clarion list? And before that, kept up long correspondences with people? I can't make sense of things until I can get some distance and make stories out of it. I need to know what it all means."

"And as you get older, the stories sort of shift, the more distance you get from them."

"It's creating history. You can see how myths end up being myths. At the core of the story, you've got core events, core feelings, but the way you interprete those changes based on where you are in your life, where you end up. If you go through old letters and correspondence of mine, you can see the emphasis shift as things I thought were important ended up not being important. Also, the older I get, the more I learn, the more I'll reinterprete events."

What I realized while we talked was the reason I write fiction, and the reason the reason I took to the blogging form so well.

I figure out what I'm feeling, dissect emotional responses, what events mean to me, by creating narratives, by telling stories. Until I can step back and look at how everything fits together, I have a difficult time talking about it. Ask me how I "feel" about something, and I'll struggle to find some sort of inarticulate response that "sounds good" at the time. Ask me in writing, when I can tell you the story - and that I can do.

I had to hear Jenn tell me the story of my time in the hospital for nearly a week before I could get it all together in my head and try to work out a narrative that I could post here (and I still think a lot of that post doesn't make much sense. Which is probably more truthful, since nothing made sense to me either).

I wonder if I'm just weirdly divorced from my feelings while I'm feeling them, or if storytelling is just my way of coping with strong emotion.

What I'm Reading

And, this.

This is what I do when I'm prentending I don't owe writing work to anybody....

Sweet! Liberation Means Not Shaving My Legs...

(via Feminist Reprise)

Lame

I hate measuring pasta.

It feels so anal-retentive.

I mean, I have good reason. But still.

Stabilizing

Well, the altered dose of insulin is working out well - no low blood sugar episodes since I cut back from 30 to 26 units in the morning.

Now we'll see how that changes with intense exercise. I do my free weights in the morning, and about an hour of walking a day, but if I'm going to start the boxing classes again in August, I need to know how pushing up my heartrate for 45-60 minutes is going to alter my sugar levels.

Have an appointment with Dr. S at the end of the month for follow-up. That *should* be the appointment where we lock in my insulin dosage. It generally takes some time for sugar levels to even out to the point where you can gauge how different types of insulin interact with you personally (everybody's body reacts slightly differently, as I understand it).

Deep breath. This is manageable.