Black Desert: Excerpt

Safina ma Raj had taken a flying leap off the minaret of Aludra’s central mosque, the Hagia Sarat, three days before Nyx drove into town.

Nyx got there in time for the blood arbiter’s dissemination of Safina’s possessions outside the same mosque, on the same stained stones where Safina’s body had burst like an overcooked blood melon. Safina’s twelve daughters and the beaten-up, battle scarred old man who passed for her husband had gathered in the square that morning for the reading, but the daughters were all tax clerks and the husband was deaf and blind, so though Eshe had some success trying to charm the clerks, none of the women had had contact with Safina in nearly a decade, and the husband was so grief stricken he merely put his hands over his face and sobbed.

Nyx walked with a cane, and had her hood up. She and her team lingered at the rear of Safina’s brood while the blood arbiter sorted through various daughters’ claims to their mother’s paltry wealth.

Yah Reza had given Nyx an extra long burnous with wide sleeves. It was also organic, which kept her a lot cooler, a good thing considering how much she had to cover herself up now. She was chewing sen, but the pain was still pretty bad, and her new skin itched like hell. Eshe stood next to her, looking anxious and girlish with his long hair and belled trousers. Suha sat on the lip of the fountain behind them, her hood up as well, pistols visible.

“So she’s dead,” Eshe said, passing Nyx a water bottle.

“Seems to be,” Nyx said. She shifted her weight to her right foot and leaned a little more on the cane. She hated the cane, but she figured she could always use it to bash somebody’s head in if she started feeling gimpy.

“You think the bel dames killed her?” Eshe asked.

“Likely.”

“So now what?”

“Well, they did narrow our options.”

Nyx wished the bel dames had killed Safina before Nyx had Suha drive them all the way out to Aludra. It would have saved them a fistful of notes and some pretty precious time. The Queen’s “compensation” for Nyx’s appearance in Mushira had been generous, but the magicians in Faleen were asking for a trainload of bugs in return for her four days of reconstitution, and she wasn’t willing to work it all off at the morgues this time. The only reason Yah Reza had let her walk away was because she figured Nyx was still on good terms with the Queen, though what the hell gave her that impression, Nyx didn’t know. Maybe being alive after nearly assassinating the Queen’s security tech was enough.

“What happens if they killed the other bel dame too?” Eshe asked.

Nyx grinned and spit sen. “Oh no, they’re not going to kill the other one,” Nyx said. “Alharazad doesn’t die.”

Suha grunted. “You two should have a lot in common, then.”

“You wouldn’t believe,” Nyx said.

Interrobang

It sounds vaguely dirty and illegal, don't you think?

Official Dayjob Title:

"Document Writer."

I'll take it!

I Wonder How She Did It!

Solid flesh!

In just one week!

One for the Road

Wifi eats babies.

Thank you, and good night!

Chairs for Booklovers

I want, like, four of these.

In Which the Protagonist is Offered a Writing Job

For serious, yo.

Writing up that mock business proposal paid off.

I've been tentatively offered a temp-to-possible-hire position in downtown Dayton for what I'll refer to here as a financial services firm (the universe must be trying to tell me something...).

Writing jobs of any sort are like fucking gold, even if, as with this position, you're mainly rewriting training manuals and writing up press releases and creating web content.

During the interview, one of the guys asked me if the writing was my passion or if I was more passionate about my previous job as a project coordinator. For the first time, I could answer that question truthfully without blowing the interview.

"Oh no," I said, "the writing is my passion. It's what I do."

I interviewed this morning and got the call from the temp agency about tomorrow's "start date" and "undetermined length of assignment" about an hour ago, so I'm sill just... stunned.

There's a trial period, of course - that's why it's a temp and not a straight hire. It could turn out we don't click and I'm not able to produce what they're looking for, but you know what?

I don't think they'll get anybody more motivated to knock the fucking thing out of the fucking park.

Fucking A. writing job. writing job. writing job.

French AIDS Awareness Campaign

Um.

I'm speechless.

Seriously.

Bloody Brilliant

Puppetry without the puppets. Or, rather, high wiring in real life... without the high wires.

Or something.

Kewl, in any case.

Note To Self:

Do not go out and buy things every time you have a "good" interview.

This makes bad financial sense.

Kay, thnx.

Because After Awhile, You Can Write Just About Anything

Spent much of the day writing up a mock business proposal for a part-time business proposal writer position that one of the temp agencies called me up for.

It was funny, because you know, I've never written a business proposal. I've assisted in writing business proposals; I'm familiar with the format and the lingo because I spent some time working on them at my old dayjob at the telcom place, but I worked on pieces of it: editing, layout, information gathering. Okay, well, maybe technically there *were* parts of it I wrote, though I wrote them mainly by cribbing from old proposals. Which, really, is how you do them all.

It's funny how many things you do at some jobs that you just don't think about having done; I didn't immediately think, "Oh yes, I should apply for business proposal positions!" but when the recruiter talked about the job, I realized it actually sounded like something I could do. I didn't have any writing samples for proposals because, well, those are confidential, so I suggested to him that I just write up one for a fake company with a fake history and fake scope of work.

There are benefits to being a fantasy writer, you know.

And it made me realize that after writing for so many years on so many varied topics, well, after awhile you can write just about anything.

Ode to My Brilliance

So, I forgot my cell phone charger in the room at Wiscon, and my battery is dead. I've got another interview tomorrow, which I was able to set up just as the phone started sending off its dying beeps.

I pulled up some online maps for the local Radio Shack and found one less than two miles away. As I was about to get out the door I thought, "Ha ha! I will be clever and call them to make sure they have a motorola cell phone charger! That way I won't have biked all the way out there for nothing."

So I cleverly picked up my phone, stared at the blank screen... and remembered that my phone was dead.

It's the thought that counts.

One for the Road

Working Out is Hard, Yo

Especially in 80 degree weather. After six days off.

I hate squats.

Have I mentioned how much I hate squats?

Yeah, these aren't getting added to the new nighttime weights routine.

The Essay Generator

No need to make up your own bullshit ever again!

When the Jokes Don't Even Make Sense Anymore

I was idly plugging away at my stumbleupon toolbar and happened across a tired old joke that plays on expected gendered behaviors. It's something like this: a guy's in bed with his girlfriend and really wants to have sex with her, but once he's all buttered up, she says she's really not in the mood and why can't we just cuddle? and doesn't he want her for more than the fulfillment of his sexual desires? So the next day he goes out shopping with her, tells her to buy anything she wants, and watches her work herself into an "orgasmic fit" at the idea of purchasing all of these items. Then they get to the register and he says he no longer feels like buying her anything, and doesn't she want him for more than his ability to buy her things?

The tone was from the first person male POV, with the shopping scene deliberately set up as a cool "ploy" to get his "point" across. It was mean-spirited.

But what struck me about this particularly gendered joke of the sort I see all the time was not just that it was stupidly sexist, but that this joke's "punchline" relies on gendered norms that are completely foreign to my experience. It was a joke based on a shared assumption of behaviors. But it was an assumption I didn't share, cause it wasn't true in my life, so it wasn't funny.

When you tell a joke, you're playing on people's actual experiences. You're ribbing at everyday behaviors, everyday truths, and for the first time I realized that these jokes weren't funny just because they were sexist or crass, but merely because, well they didn't make fun of true experiences. It didn't take behaviors out of context and make me look at them in new ways because this isn't the way my relationships with people have ever worked.

I don't find orgasmic fulfillment in shopping. It makes me feel *worse* about myself. And I'm generally the one who conflates sex with emotional fulfillment in a relationship (yes, I'm working on that). The men in my life don't really buy me things. I struggle to be as fair and equal as possible in the purchasing of shared meals and trips, even when unemployed.

This joke didn't make fun of my life.

It made me think about the shelf-life of sexism, workplace harrassment, etc. The more we live lives that *don't* fit stereotypes and these rigid and absolute gender norms, the more people who speak in these terms look dated, old-fashioned. When an unmarried woman announces she's pregnant these days, the first question out of people's mouths isn't immediately, "When's the wedding?"

I suppose it's too much to hope that sexism will just "go out of style," but certain forms of it have, and I'm watching the rest follow suit. It's why I can understand the fear and terror and violence of the people watching it go; the desperate cry of people watching an entire system of oppression, a system that's kept them in power, headed for the door.

There are days when I worry that it really will take some kind of bloody, radical revolution to get to an egalitarian society. The problem with starting a society based on bloody revolution is that then you have to figure out how to police the bloody-handed revolutionaries. That world isn't any better. I don't really want a Joanna Russ world. What starts with fire and blood often ends with fire and blood.

In the End, Everybody DIES

Not exactly uplifting, is it? (wait for the gifs to begin scrolling - it's a little slow)

Going Home

I want to be better.

Blogging Will Save the World!

Blogging will not save the world.

I'm going to say that again: screaming on the internet will not save the world.

But it can be a good place to start.

Blogs are great places, but I see them more as testing grounds - as initial steps, as consciousness-raising - more than I see them as real, solid activism. They're a form of, maybe, virtual activism. It's where you go to find your voice and speak to others who've shared some of your experiences in the world and want to converse about a common cause or interest.

The trick is to then use this voice you've found online and speak out in the real world. If something is fucked up, you need to be able to say it's fucked up just as easily in real life as you can online.

Because you'll find that it's a fuck of a lot easier to rip into the latest asshattery published by the Washington Post than it is to point out your coworker's blatent sexism during a morning meeting. It's a lot scarier to actually do than to talk about (like most things).

I remember standing around with some coworkers waiting for a meeting to start and having one of the guys make a "joke" about how one of our coworkers must be "shooting blanks" because they found out his wife was having "another" girl. For the first time in a long time, the not-coolness of it struck me deeply enough that I spoke up and said, "Wow, you've just offended every woman here."

And I spoke up in part because of the voice I'd found on this blog. How could I be the writer of a blog called "Brutal Women" and be too terrified to call out a simple example of blatent sexism?

He laughed about it of course, and there were efforts made to move on to another subject, but I remember how difficult and terrifying it was to say that in the workplace to people I had to work with every day. Nobody wants to lose their job or get shunned by everybody else and have their job made horrible because you're that fucking Nazi who "can't take a joke."

But nobody wants to live in the fucked up beat-you-down-somebody's-gotta-be-top heirarchy either.

I got tired of people saying they "just didn't know" something was not cool, offensive, abusive, etc. If you *tell* them they're being sexist, at least you can take away that particular excuse, and maybe your courage can give other people courage. When enough people say no, you have a movement. Behavior changes.

While at Wiscon this weekend, I had somebody introduce me to somebody else as another writer's girlfriend.

One sentence. Full stop.

I laughed out loud and said, "Wow, I can't believe you just introduced me that way at a feminist SF con when I have a story coming out in a Year's Best SF on Tuesday."

I tried to be very good-natured about it, and she was actually a little embarassed about it I think, because it was something she did without even thinking about it. It was a funny thing, too, to be at a professional con and have the entirety of my writing career erased and my identity boiled down to "that chick who's sleeping with so-and-so."

These are all little things, of course, personal things. But if we let these sorts of things go, what else will we let go? The first step to altering behavior isn't to ignore it or smile at it or make excuses for it. The first step is to change your own behavior and call out those normalized behavior in others.

I love to babble online, becuase it is, largely, safe. I can delete comments all I want. I can choose to share or not share things with certain people. I can control whether or not there are comments at all. I have yet to be fired from a job for something I said online (knock on wood). There isn't a lot of danger in it.

What's dangerous is speaking out at the office and confronting harrassers on the street.

It takes courage. It's fucking hard. And terrifying.

But it's the only way we'll ever change anything.

The alternative to speaking out is not speaking out, and that's worse. Silence in this culture implies consent (however fucked up that fucking fucked up idea is). By not speaking out, I am consenting. That's how it's read, no matter that I'm not speaking up because I'm afraid to be beaten, raped, harrassed, fired, etc.

It's going to be read as consentual, because the means of oppression in this society are just so damned normalized.

And you know what? I want to live in a world that's really different. And in that world, the sorts of sexist, oppressive people-like-me-are-better-than-you-and-we'll-force-you-to-fuck-us-to-prove-it stuff that people say everyday is *not* normal, and it's *not* OK, and if I can wrap my head around this idea - that the language of equality, of valuing individuals based on their humanity and not on their race, or class, or gender, is the *norm,* then when I hear these things spoken, they're all the more shocking. They're missives from another world where somebody's got to be on top. Where a woman's value is based on the man (always a man!) who she's attached to, and if you can't beat somebody else into submission then you'll be the one who's beaten.

That is not the world I want to live in. I have to speak from somewhere else.

Sure is a good thing I'm a fantasy writer.

Makes it easier to believe it can be different.

Traveling Sugar

I know my numbers are going to be "off" when I travel, but for some reason this particular con had me running particularly high numbers (I was 313 at lunch today. 313! I haven't seen a number that high since my pizza splurge at Christmas!). I blame some of that on the dessert thing last night; I probably should have gone with something like the fruit cup and the chocolate covered strawberries instead of the fruitcup and the chocolate cheesecake and then having dinner.

My mistake was not setting my alarm for 2am to re-adjust my insulin dosage. I was so tired I just thought, "oh, fuck it" and tested at 215 this morning.

I'm not going to bother logging any of these numbers, BTW. I know exactly why I got them, and the a1c doesn't lie, so there's really no point in logging them just so my new endocrinologist can wag her finger at me and say something brilliant like, "You should lose weight!"

No, what I should do is start working out at cons.

In my spare time.

OK, so maybe I just need to make better choices at the dessert bar and when I have to have the Governor's club pastry breakfast, stick to half a bagel and the fruit dish instead of a whole bagel and the fruit dish.

Subsequent cons should also be less stressful, which I think is really going to help.