Conjugating French Verbs

Where does this other "s" come from????

.........

It's still here!!!!

Missed the Boat

Sunday's a good time for a bike ride...

I realized tonight that I haven't done a lot of purely recreational biking since I got here. Since I don't have a car, the bike is largely a tool to get me from here to there, and though it's great to combine exercise with a bookstore run, I hadn't done a lot of exploring around the neighborhood on my bike.

I love bike riding. It was something I didn't learn to do until I was 12 or 13 because there just weren't a lot of places around my house to learn. I spent most of my biking time at my grandma's house; there was a church parking lot nearby, and the church had this great courtyard where we could ride around these little statues of saints.

I got back into it after getting back from Bellingham and getting my life and health back together. I'd put the bike in the back of my truck and drive over to Lewisville Park and bike around. In Alaska, biking was my primary means of transport and recreation all summer and even much of the winter. It wasn't until my last few months in Chicago that I took it up again.

There's something I like about the freedom of bike riding. It's like that girlish yearning for a horse - all that speed and power. It's probably why I have such an interest in getting a motorcycle - more speed! More power! More freedom!

So tonight I picked a direction and just rode for a few miles down sleepy little streets. The evening was cool and muggy and there were a few people out on their porches. Somebody was having a block party. People played catch with their kids. The gardens were lush and well-landscaped, and despite the people everything was just dead quiet, just a sleepy summer night.

It was one of those nights that I try to wrap up and store away to remember later when things are not so good, when things are low. Because these are the nights you miss if you get hit by a car or hit by a shovel and keel over, you know. These are the nights it's so beautiful to be alive, when it looks like, for the barest moment, that everything really will be all right.

So I wrap these ones up, and I put them away, and I remember them when the winter comes.

Twenty Epics

Through a bit of careful politiking* I finally managed to get a hold of a copy of Twenty Epics, which turns out to be just as fucking awesome a collection and everybody says it is (oh boy is this is rare in a field where a lot of stuff gets overhyped).

I had considered writing something for this anthology when it was first announced, being a lover/hater of the fantasy epic - I'm in love with the *feeling* of the epic, but disillusioned by the 11-books-and-counting nature of the Robert Jordan epic.

So this antho had the potential to be pretty much just perfect for a reader like me.

It could have also sucked some serious goats.

But you know, it was put together by Groppi and Moles, so I had some hope.

I loved the way this anthology was put together - there was a careful mix of different lengths and styles and even a couple of SF-y bits in there. I'll just say a few things about the stories that I really enjoyed, and maybe a note or two about why I liked them.

DeNiro's "Have You Any Wool" is a cat-and-mouse Cordwainer Smith-ish epic that does with the far future just what I like done with the far future - it's so alien, so Other, that it reverts back to fantasy, to myth. It's the tale of a young boy aboard a ship that's been sent out to fight wolves that prowl about the stars devouring worlds. The wolves fight each culture by turning its own myths and folktales against it, so:

"Slowly, folklorists and anthropologists took to the front lines. They analyzed what the wolves had transformed. They developed applications of technology that would counter the warping of space-time according to the morphologies of folktales. They would be sheep in wovles' clothing, becoming participants in whatever fantasies the wolves would devise, and then stealthily alter them for tactical advantages. If the wolves mutated a pod settlement into a pastoral scene replete with carillion castles and fair damsels, Parameter shocktroops might become knights, or even trolls."

I mean, really, how fucking cool is that?

Another story that lodged itself in my brain through the sheer power of its imagery was K.D. Wentworth's "The Rose War," an... epic family saga about a family that slowly trains up and eventually interbreeds with an army of roses that they use to devour whole armies (you'll note a common theme running through the stories I enjoyed: blood, war, devouring armies... mmmm).

Christopher Barzak's "The Creation of Birds" had a slow start, but the emotional core of the story steadily took hold of me as I read about a woman who creates birds from paper, ink and starlight and her fucked up relationship with a man who believes he is hording all the stars in the world for her... but will not release them when she asks. This was one of those stories, as I've talked about before, that hit some core emotional truth for me and left me a little sad and breathless in the end.

"The Muse of Empires Lost" by Paul Berger was another far-future fantasy about a young girl living in the belly of a living ship that has long been cut off from its makers. The living ships have created their own ecologies; the ships love and mate and die with no regard for those living on the planets that spawned them, and Jemmi, our heroine, finds herself with a deep attachment to the world that is her ship. When a strange man arrives, sharing Jemmi's ability to alter the will of others to his own, Jemmi finds that she must choose between her attachment to the living ship and a possible godhood on another world.

It took me a long time to figure out whether or not I enjoyed Sandra McDonald's "Life Sentence," because the theme was old and tired: a Korean war veteran finds that he's able to re-live his life again and again from different starting points. In his first few tries, he ends up repeating the same old failures, and I was worried that this was going to be another one of those "sorry, the future is already set and everybody gets fucked no matter what you do!" stories, but that's not ultimately where she went with it, and I was glad I stuck it out.

I found a sort of female-Elric-bound-to-a-sword story in Mary Robinette Kowal's "Bound Man," which was an interesting take on the warrior-bound-to-sword trope. Li Reiko is ripped away from play with her children to fight trolls in another time thousands of years after the death of her children, among a people utterly foreign to her. As with Elric, the two peoples can somehow miraculously understand one another, and Li Reiko resents her summoners. I enjoyed this one because I'm always looking for what the female version of a Conan/Elric would look like, but I had some quibbles with the end, mainly because this one goes with the "the future is already set!" mode of time travel, and that always bugs me. It also screws with the agency of Li Reiko's daughter, which bugged me.

As someone with some training as a historian, I couldn't help but like Ian McHugh's "The Last Day of Rea" as well. We get a sort of fantasy-SFish story about an inbred dynasty that decides to go up against a small city-state with ties to the stars, and our protagonist is a clever historian who tries to avert the worst of the disaster. I enjoyed the witty protagonist and tongue-in-cheek humor.

One of the cool things about the anthology was the stylistically diverse stories that snuck in here, the infamous "Choose Your Own Epic Adventure," and the chaptered and numbered biblical epic, "The Book of Ant" and Ya Hoon Lee's cleverly laid out "Hopscotch" all played with narrative set-up that added a lot of variety to the anthology. And yeah, "Epic, The" is a bit cutesy, but not in a sugary way.

I'm not a huge fan of anthologies or story collections, cause you know, there's usually only one or two stories you actually like, a bunch that are mediocre and several that you just never even finished.

I finished all of these, didn't actively hate any of them, and I can only think of one or two that I found actively mediocre.

That's pretty fucking impressive.

Pick up a copy.

This ride is totally worth it.

----------------------------

*Which consisted of me saying, "Hey Moles, give me a fucking copy!" when two promotional extras were handed to him at the con in my presence. I am nothing if not subtle....

And Vice Versa...

Breathtaking Wallpapers

This is my new one.

Here's more.

One for the Road

Sorting Out the AirCon Issue

Things here at Casa de B. have been pretty sluggish as of late do in large part to the aircon situation. It's hotter than hell here (OK, 80s and 90s, not that real feel 115 I had in Chicago last year, but hey), and we've just turned on the aircon today (I am not paying for it, so it's not like I can gun for it, though now that I'm employed I do hope to pay for at least my portion of utilities bills next month).

What this means, though, is that there's been a lot of half-hearted working out, blogging, and writing-revising this week, which should hopefully be kicked back into full gear now that I'm not constantly thinking about how fucking hot it is.

I'm sure Jared Diamond would have something to say about climate and productivity. In South Africa, productivity pretty much just went out the window for two months during the summer. It was just too hot to move.

And I Woke Up

I had a dream that I was watching "the real" season/show finale of "Buffy," and everyone was running around this enormous, dim library about as big as a 20-storey warehouse with books on all walls and this huge hanging candelabra of shelves coming down from the top and everyone was being hunted by the things in the books, which were really things from their pasts come to life.

And it came time for Buffy to die, because she had somehow become evil, and people were killing people left and right and somebody said she deserved to die because none of this would have happened if she hadn't fallen in love with a vampire. Falling in love with a vampire had drawn evil to her, and she'd been stalked by that evil, and eventually turned evil herself.

And at the very end, as somebody (me?) held her by the hair and got ready to plunge in the dagger, this ghost comes out of one of the books, and it's this guy I knew from high school theater who was supposed to be her "real" long-lost love, the guy she was "supposed" to be with cause *he really loved her,* but he died somewhere along the way, just another body lost to the cause, and he gasps, "No! Let me do it. Her heart belongs to me."

And this huge audience leans in, gasping, as if the fourth wall's been broken, and all of these fans, mostly women from fourteen to fifty-five, take these huge gasping breaths and lean in expectantly. Some of them start to tear up and prepare to sob. The air goes heavy with anticipation. They want Buffy - the good Buffy - to end up with the man who loved her.

And I hand over the knife, because some part of me wants her to be with him too, because *he loved her so much.* I hand over the knife without thinking too much, because this is the script. This is the way it should go. This is how all the stories turn out.

He does not cut open her chest. He jams the dagger into her forehead and cleaves her face in two.

A hot white light pours out of her, and Buffy's soul leaves her body. He embraces her ghostly form in his. And we know she's good and he's good and all is right with the world.

The expectant audience sheds its tears, and the shadows of the big book-world flicker, and I'm kneeling there next to the body, the story-part of me feeling happy that I have helped make everything right with the world, and the not-dream part of me thinking, "Oh God why would I want it to end up this way? She's not evil because she dated a vampire. She's broken and bruised because she's had to fight all the evil in the world, and when you have to fight evil, you become a little bit evil yourself. She doesn't love him, and the strength of his love will never make her love him."

So the audience wept with joy at the reunited lovers and the woman redeemed by a man with a weapon, and I held the bloody dagger in my hands, and I woke up.

This feeling is what all of my fiction is about.

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.