Sword & Sociology

As I've been ready Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffin, it's gotten me to think about what it is that makes fiction really great for me. Some of this I covered before when reviewing some of VanderMeer's work, and the same issue is hitting me again with Ragamuffin, only in the opposite way.

See, so far this is a nice action-packed little dialogue-and-fight-scenes book, and there was this big rolicking chunk of it that I really enjoyed before this current lull (I'm over halfway done now), but... there's seriously something missing for me. It's got the kick ass female protagonist, and the interesting worlds and characters who are actually not white! and not Christian! Which is great!

But.

It's falling into the same trap that I see a lot of SF books get accused of falling into, which is the: gee gosh bang wow look at all these neat ideas!

Oh, yeah, and there are these cool machine-people-superheros, but they don't really care about anyone or themselves, because they are mechanically enhanced and have very little angst.

See, the problem with creating characters who don't care about anybody and don't reflect on their lives or tell you anything about them... it's hard to love them.

I want to fall in love.

And the people, if not actual robots, end up being rather robotic, emotionally. Some of that I can get because they're weirdly old and partially mechanized, but to me, it smacks of a real conscious desire to ignore the emotional and social ramifications of these sorts of technologies (I mean, look at Carnival! Uber-tech and characters who have intense emotions and huge backstory and everything! It can be done, see). What do really old people dream about? What's their relationship with thier bodies like? What do they think about? Do they even care about people? Do they go through cathartic experiences, or is it all just one long day, and if it's just one long day, what does that *feel* like? What does it *feel* like to be retrofitted to save humanity? Do you ever get drunk and hate yourself? Actively hate yourself, not just pass it off as being "nerves"? Do you still believe in what you're doing?

Because here we have this plot clicking along, this very classic end-of-the-world-savior-from-tyranny thing, but... there's no subplot. There's no emotional core to this story. There's no emotional hero's journey, just people hopping in and out of machinery and neat ideas (which are neat, don't get me wrong). But at the end of the day, I'm getting the feeling that it's going to be one of those books I go, "Well, that was fun," and set aside and forget about. The emotional ramifications of these techologies seems to be sitting somewhere on the backburner and handwaved. Some of this issue might be because we start headhopping early on and it's a short book, so we can't really follow anybody's journey the whole way in any kind of bulk.

But.

I realize that a lot of this is just personal preference - I want to know what the protag *feels* about the fact that she gave up her womb to be a weapon for humanity (what significance is attached to this womb? Hers or her societys? You may think that's a dumb question, but if you think that, you're seriously suffering from an atrophied imagination). I want to know how it *feels* to be a clone. Is this one of those clone-belief systems where they're like robots, or where they're really like siblings? Did they grow up together? Did they laugh and play together? What did she lose when she lost them? Do mechanized people have dreams and memories? Is it really in the best interests of tech to erase or supress "non esstential" memories? What do our memories give us? Can they motivate us? What do we lose when we lose memories? No tech is perfect.

What does it mean to be a man or a woman in any of these societies? Are women "equal" or are wombs more prized and women made even more subserviant because most of humanity is subserviant to an alien race? (I would argue that, historically, you'd find that women are abused most when they're part of a slave system, because they get abuse from their masters and from the frustrated men of thier own species - or would they? And why not, if so?). This is one of those societies that does that weird handwave "well, we'll have women starship captains but we won't ever really talk about sexism" things. There's some passing references to racism, but most racism is speciesism (sp); ie humans are beasts who've recently been kinda sorta "emancipated" just like slaves after the civil war ("yeah, you're free but we own everything and you still have to work for us!").

At Clarion, somebody said what I actually write are "Sword & Sociology" stories. The magic is sort of wishy-washy whatever maybe sorta, there's lots of blood, but mainly what I'm about is how these settings created these social practices, and how these practices shaped different aspects of the society and the people in them. Beliefs about religion and women and men and honor and dignity and wombs and what it is to be a man (and if it even matters) and who's in charge and when and why and the significance of sand... that should all be in there. Your society doesn't exist outside of or removed from the technology. Everything it does, including the ways that people think and feel and the personal relationships and conflicts they get into, are going to be informed by these beliefs and practices.

But when you've got primarily dialoge and fight scenes book, awesome and exciting as those are, you end up writing a book about people that it's much more difficult to fall in love with (particularly if you head hop a lot) and who might be interesting, but not interesting enough to remember afterward because you don't spend enough time with them and don't go on an emotional journey with them.

I'm not saying that's happening with this particular book (the shrug, whatever aftereffect), cause I'm not done yet and a proper review is coming, but I have a bad feeling about it. Which really sucks, because I picked this book up and put it back down three times in the bookstore and then came back and finally bought it because I was afriad somebody else would buy it; I wanted a book about Nashara (the ass-kicking heroine), but Nashara's now cloned herself into a ship and more than half the book is now from other people's POVs, and gosh-gee-whiz-bang ideas aren't enough to keep me jumping up and down about it.

We'll see how it goes.

Spoilers

Also, the Titanic sinks.

Remember, you were warned.

Why Am I So Tired?

Things are good-crazy, but that means there's a lot of work to do, and man, sometimes it makes my brain hurt.

Ragamuffin

pg 105

"All ten of us were women, Jamar. We gave up our wombs and in return were fitted with quantum computers running intrusion devices that can overpower lamina and make it extensions of our minds. It would be like being one with your ship, but anywhere. Your mind replicates, copying itself endlessly until you have control of all it is in contact with."

He looked at her, face pained. "Your wombs?"

"I saw what happened to the other nine when they attacked the Hongguo who intercepted our ship. They destroyed the Hongguo ship, but their bodies died as they took over the Hongguo ship's lamina. It's bomb. You can't unexplode it, and when it happens, you are that lamina. You're no longer human."

Wait a minute. HAS HER WOMB BEEN REPLACED BY A BOMB? (is this the only place they could put it? A womb is not really a huge organ, you know. Did they take out her pancreas, too? Why not her pancreas? And her appendix? And half of her small intestine? Surely she lost a lot more than her womb? And why, as a clone, would she attach any significance to her womb? But then, how does their brand of cloning work? Do they birth their own clone babies in wombs or vats? This is what happens when there are big chunks of missing backstory)

Oh, you can bet I'm going to be writing up a review of this one.

Gummi Bear Death!

KEWL (yes, I'm supposed to be working... can you tell?).

One-Sentence Stories

When sharing music becomes foreplay, you know you have something beautiful.

He knows to keep an eye on my hands, as the length of my finger nails is in direct proportion to how content I am with my life.

You never wrote back, and today I stopped expecting you to.

Night after night I stare at my phone in anticipation until I realize you're too busy doing blow in strange people's houses to bother with me.

More here.

Why Star Wars Fans Hate Star Wars

One of the best fan rants ever:

Maybe I’ll put it like this. To be a Star Wars fan, one must possess the ability to see a million different failures and downfalls, and then somehow assemble them into a greater picture of perfection. Every true Star Wars fan is a Luke Skywalker, looking at his twisted, evil father, and somehow seeing good.

Purported American Apparel Tag

From here. Real or not, I'm still waiting for a day when this is a given, not a privilege or an employer's recruitment bargaining chip.

Indeed!

Garbage In, Garbage Out

I've been working on some requested edits for God's War this week. Revising can be a hell of a lot of fun when you get feedback of the "I'd like more of this! and this! and this!!" variety. Not so fun when you get the "I'm not sure why this doesn't work, but could you make it work?" variety.

These are fun edits.

One of the biggest writing lessons I've learned over the years is that if I want to write good stuff, I need to absorb an incredible amount of media, and whenever possible, a heap of real-world traveling, socializing, listening to others' stories. And it needs to be varied. And it needs to different. And it needs to be good.

I used to think that writers and "creative" people were just these natural geniuses, and everybody else was a bigger genius than me and that's why I had to work so hard but they just pulled all this stuff out of their heads that was New! and Different! and Kewl! and they SOLD it!

It may still be true that there are wacky brain-full geniuses out there who pull this stuff out of thier asses, but what I've found is that I'm more likely to spit out stuff of the kind of quality and variety that I absorb. One of the reasons I majored in history is because I believed it would expose me to more stories than I'd get as an English major (I figured I was already reading all those books - history would force me to read different kinds of stories), and being a better writer is one of the reasons I'm a crazy credit card traveler. Traveling, for me, is like a drug. I get high on the very idea of all the great ways I can use all the material.

If I spend a lot of time reading Dragonlance novels and watching bad tv sitcoms, I'm going to write something that comes out like a bad Dragonlance novel sitcom (it may have been all very well and good to write Dragonlance back in the day, but there's nothing new or fresh about it now; if you think there is, you're probably just new to the genre, or very young).

Garbage in, garbage out.

I didn't realize how much I did this until I had somebody asking me a bunch of questions about God's War: how did I come up with the bug magic system? The setting? The holy war ideas? The word "bel dame"?

And you know, when you pick out ideas like that, I can tell you where I got them individually (as a whole, tho, I'll have to tell you it's Schenectady, of course).

The bugs came from living in South Africa in a - quite literally - coackroach-infested flat that was also full of geckos and flying ants - swarms of flying ants - on occasion. It wasn't like visiting Disneyworld where it's hot outside and maybe you see a big moth and then you go back into the air conditioned superplex. No, there was no air conditioning. There was no fake superplex (OK, there was the Gateway mall , let's be fair. But basically, there was the Gateway mall and then... everything else). Bugs were just sort of a fact of life. I'll never forget walking past this huge house one day that was covered - completely covered - from roof to sidewalk with thick plastic sheeting. The vans out front announced the fact that this house was being fumigated.

Bugs, man.

Bugs were a fact of life.

And where does "bel dame" come from? "Bel Dame" is actually an ancient word from Biblical times (Assyrian? Babylonian? I forget now) that meant a person who was hired by a family whose relative had been killed in order to apprehend the person who committed the crime and collect "blood debt" - either by killing the person or getting their family to pay the other family blood money in lieu of, well, blood. (it also is reminescent of "belle dame" - a beautiful woman or beautiful mother. And "bel dam" - an old woman or a witch). It was reading a book about the practice of ancient blood debt that gave me the foundation for the bel dames and ideas about swapping blood and organs for bread.

Everything else came from books, from media. I did a library search at the Northwestern University Library and made a list of books I was interested in; they were all about ancient Assyria, Iraq, Iran (ancient Peria), guerilla warfare, Islamic history, Islamic women, Islam in general, warfare in general. Jenn would pick these up for me from the Northwestern library ten at a time, and I'd go through them like I was writing another Master's thesis.

I started trying to teach myself Arabic. I started dying from diabetes.

I wrote the opening line for the book, "Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert," a few weeks after I got my IUD, and was experiencing so much blood and pain that I just wanted to rip the fucking fucker out. IUD + dying of diabetes means you're going to start writing some pretty fucked up shit about the body and one's relationship to the body.

Those themes get hit even harder in book two. As do themes about loss, dependence, death, and rebuilding.

It all goes in there, one way or another. I still write down particularly witty quotes or witty plot devices from books and movies. I spent last night collecting all of the extra quotes and details and interesting characters pieces that I hadn't managed to get into the book the first time. Now, I can go through and check them all off when I've added them.

My fourth disk of Rome is now in the mail. I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, and re-reviewing In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. I'm still hip-deep in William T Vollmann's abridged version of the classic morality-of-violence epic, Rising Up and Rising Down.

Today I picked up a copy of The Kite Runner and Ragamuffin. I'm going through my book of Insects and my book of Poisons to pull out some details about bugs and get some inspiration for fleshing out my biological weapons.

This stuff doesn't come from nowhere.

And I guess, really, it shouldn't be any surprise. What makes good writers isn't just being able to put down a sentence. If writing a good book was easy, we'd all be bestsellers and/or award winners and everybody would've finished a book and every one of them would be this wacky, unique blend of media and life experiences.

But that doesn't really happen.

I remember reading Perdido Street Station for the first time in South Africa. It wasn't, I thought, a great book. The plot was a mess and I wasn't particularly drawn to any of the characters. But it was wild and messy and fucked up, and the stuff on the page raised the bar for ideas in the genre, in fantasy, for me. Elves and swords were all very nice and good. Genocide and feudalism were fine. But this was something else. It was pushing toward that other place, that someplace that was really different.

And it's been my goal, since Clarion, to push the envelope. To take everything I do and push it just a little bit more, twist it in the opposite way that I'm inclined to twist it. I don't ever want to get charged with "a failure of the imagination" again.

If you want to keep getting better, if you want to be really different, you have to do that the whole way. You have to challenge yourself. You have to stop eating garbage. You have to pull in all the stuff you love, you admire, the stuff that twists up your head. And a lot of is, yes, a great deal of it, is going to be about you. All that emotion, all those experiences, are funnelled through you. It takes some courage. And a lot of hard work.

You can certainly make a living not doing that, but that's not the reason I got into writing genre fiction.

If I wanted to make a decent living, I would have become an investment banker.

Do I Even Want to Total Up All These Chipotle Receipts?

When the house (including the bathroom and kitchen) is busted down and out for replumbing and rewiring for a week, just how many times did I go to Chipotle?

Man, this is a big stack of receipts. I need to get back on budget.

I also need to sit down and re-budget based on my new salary. Pretty much the only change, though, should be allotting more for credit cards and less for meds...

Real Age Calculator

Even with diabetes, this odd little hippie test insists I shall live until 90.

This is mainly because all of my grandparents and great grandparents are in their 80s and 90s.

Diabetes genes + Logevity genes = me.

I have no idea what the "real age" part of this test means. Apparently, I have the body of a 10 year old. No idea.

(via jlundberg)

Ancient Egyptian Prosthetic Toe

Purely aesthetic or completely practical?

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night.

The Fountain: Two Sentence Reviews

Man must accept death.
Woman must die.

or:

No Plot.
Pretty Pictures.

Becoming Insurance Savvy

I know nothing about insurance. Really, nothing. My crash course in how my insurance actually worked was my second day in the hospital, after having come out of a coma 24 hours before, when a woman from the hospital’s billing department called me and asked what my insurance information was. At that point, I couldn’t feel my feed and my head still felt like it was, literally, full of molasses. Luckily, Jenn had my wallet handy, and I read my information to them over the phone.

A woman with a clipboard was back the next day, while I sat in a puddle of urine from a leaking catheter and a smear of my own blood because my period has started, and said, “You do know that you have a rather high deductible. Can you pay us something right now?”

“Sure,” I said. But I think that at that point, Jenn and the wallet had left, and I was on my own, and I figured I would pay part of that to shut them the hell up as soon as I got the bill.

Because I’d never bothered to submit any of my receipts to my insurance provider. With a $2500 deductible, you just figure you’ve got exactly what I had: catastrophic insurance. Something that’s only useful if you get hit by a shovel, but everyday stuff, all of my antibiotics and gyno costs and birth control costs and the doctor’s visits, I’d just pay all of those out of pocket. I was young and invincible, so I didn’t feel I had to pay much attention to health insurance.

All that changed on May 15th of last year.

I received a $28,000 hospital bill and a slew of other, unrelated bills. The doctors who treat you aren’t actually employed by the hospital. They charge you bills in *additional* to the room and board and machine costs the hospital charges you. So there was a $600 cardiologist bill, a $500 endocrinologist bill, a $400 ambulance bill, and all these random bills for tests, lab tests, I didn’t have any idea what any of these tests were for. There were X-ray charges from when the cardiologist ordered that I get a chest X-ray because I was having trouble swallowing. The endocrinologist later figured out all I had was thrush caused by bacteria from the oxygen tube, and treated it with some $4 antibiotic that I was charged $20 for.

All of these bills were submitted to my insurance company. I had to pay my $2500 and 80% of hospital bill, but after I shelled out 6-7K or so for meds, supplies, my portion of the hospital bill and assorted 80%s of the other bills, they finally started to cover 100% of everything. I’d reached my out of pocket limit, apparently. I wasn’t aware that I had one. I thought I’d always be paying my 80% after my deductible.

With my catastrophic plan, I didn’t have to worry about a primary care doctor or in and out of network or anything like that, I figured, because what was the difference between covering 100% and covering 80% when you were shelling out $2500 a year regardless before you saw any benefit from it?

But, now.

Well, now I have another slew of insurance choices, and tricky things like choosing an “in network primary care physician,” which I’ve never bothered to do before. Why would I choose a “primary care” physician? If it was gyno related, I’d go to a gynecologist. When it was a sore throat, I’d go to a walk-in clinic.

Now I have to see the gyno, an endocrinologist every three months, a podiatrist (recommended) once a year, and the usual vision check every year, plus, of course, anything that comes up as far as complications or additions goes (sore throat, pelvic pain, bronchitis, etc). I go to the pharmacy for meds at least twice a month (I have to pick up testing strips at least that often, and I *should* be getting insulin once a month, but I keep trying to make it last longer than it should).

What this means is that I’ve finally reached the point where I finally have to fully and completely deal with America’s fucked up, confusing, incredibly inefficient and debilitating healthcare system. I have to choose something called a “primary care” physician if I want 100% of my costs to be paid, but it can’t be a truly useful primary care physician for me, like an endocrinologist. It’s going to end up being somebody who does the work of a walk-in clinic and prescribes antibiotics for sore throats.

My new endocrinologist only agreed to see me so long as I was clear that she would *not* fill the role of my primary care physician. She refused to be listed as such, even if, my some strange coincidence, the plan I was a part of had her name on it.

There are a lot of really confusing things in here, and they’re worded really awkwardly like this one under the list of “Limitations and Exclusions” for my new health plan. It says, “Unless stated otherwise, no coverage will be provided or paid for or on account of:” and number 4 is: “Prescription drugs, including insulin and syringes, vitamins, unless medically necessary for a medical condition and nonprescription drugs or medicines, except for diabetes supplies.”

What?

I had to read this three times before I realized they weren’t saying, “We won’t cover insulin.” They were saying “we’ll only cover insulin if it’s medically necessary.”

Which is fine, but that’s a really fucked up way to phrase that, and it made me really apprehensive for about three minutes.

Why is insurance coverage so hard? This shouldn’t be rocket science. This shouldn’t be hard. If you’re sick, you should be able to get better. You should be able to choose the best way to get better; the best doctor, or the most convenient doctor. You should be able to pay your $20 co-pay for anything. Fucking *anything* and go home and get better.

These policies have been written and created to provide the least amount of care possible to the healthiest number of people possible. Which might make a lot of money for somebody else in the end, but is going to ultimately result in a lot of unhealthy and ultimately dead people who aren’t any good to anybody.

HIRED

As of tomorrow at 8:00 am, I will officially be an employee of the financial services company downtown, working (officially!) as a document, technical, and copywriter.

Benefits start first day.

I'm not allowed to disclose how much I make according to the Employee Handbook or I'll be fired, but I'll say it's more than I made as a temp in Chicago but less than I made as an employee in Chicago.

Basically: I'll be making just enough.

WITH FIRST DAY BENEFITS AND $20 PERSCRIPTION CO-PAYS~!!!!

I Have the Sweetest HR Manager

They were doing July birthdays today, with cake, and the HR Manager went out and got a sugarfree pie.. just for me.

I still have to take a shot for it, but it's less likely to give me a headache.

How terribly sweet.

Digging In

OK. Here we go.

This Probably Works Better When You're Not Really Self-Conscious

As I expected, associating "Good" and "Vabbenif" happens a lot more quickly in my lizard brain, but then, as shown, associating the pale figure with *anything* was something I did a lot more than with the dark figure. Try it for yourself.

At least, I think that's how I read these numbers ("0" was average. But... Um, I'm not sure what "average" meant. Anyway, this is what it said):

Good and Vabbenif=0.04
Bad and Vabbenif=-0.42
Good and Reemolap=0.213
Bad and Reemolap=0.164

(stolen from ABW)

A Scrap of Land and 2 Dollars in a Coffee Can

Stephanie's Old Man's parents, Nancy and Brian, are in town this week doing home repairs. They're amazing. They're replumbing and rewiring the whole house. Last night, Nancy and Stephanie took acetone and sandpaper to all the cabinets in the little kitchen to prep them for new paint and new doors.

Today I came home to see Nancy finishing up the paint. I went to the worn, stained old sink to wash my dishes and found that.. the sink was white. "Holy shit," I said. "How the hell did you get that out? This sink was *brown*! I thought they'd have to replace the whole thing!"

The lighting and medicine cabinet have been yanked out of the wall in the bathroom. Brian's adding a much-needed outlet in the kitchen.

I came home early, after my ultrasound appointment, feeling surly and sorry for myself, raging at all the weight gain, my out of control body, angry at lab techs who can't tell me anything, just push and prod and pat me on the head and send me on my way until they write up a "report" in "two or three days." I was angry at my credit card debt, my reliance on others. I was angry at the fuckhats at the temp agency who refuse to negotiate my contract. Angry, full of despair, sorry for myself.

I came home and saw the house re-ordered, all this great work being done, life going on. Life going on, regardless. Life. Beautiful, exquisite life.

"When Stephanie gets home," Brian said, "we'll go to Home Depot and pick up some new light fixtures for the bathroom."

Real light fixtures in the bathroom. That work.

Stephanie came home not long after, and Nancy spoke with her in the kitchen, updated her on the work, and Stephanie wandered through the house, marveling at the changes.

A few minutes later, Stephanie came to the door of my room, red-faced and teary-eyed, and said, "I'm sorry, I'm feeling really sappy right now. Can I tell you I love you and give you a hug?"

And, me being me, thinking this is some new disaster, I say, "Oh gawd, are you OK?"

"Oh yes," she said, "I was just driving home in the car after a crappy day at work, and this song came on, you know, this song where this guy talks about how much he hates his stupid job and hates life and things really suck and then he says, `but I have this scrap of land and a couple dollars in a coffee can,' and says how lucky he is to have these things, just these little things. And then I started to think about my diabetic roommate and my husband who's allergic to air and I come home and my in-laws are here fixing my house out of the goodness of their heart, and I own a house, and I have this stupid dog, and I just got so happy, and I felt so lucky, and I want to give you all a hug because I'm stupid and sappy."

And, god help me, I started getting teary-eyed too, and I gave her a hug.

We have so much. We are so goddamn lucky. Because the other thing I thought about, again, on the way back from the hospital, was mortality. How I keep hanging on. How I still want more. More of this. Of the scrap of land and the house repairs and the stupid job negotiations and words to write and slapfights to get into. I want so much more of it.

And I know, everyday, how lucky I am for every one of these moments, whether I'm fat or thin or dying of ovarian cancer or diabetes or whatever. I have a sappy friend from highschool and her husband who's allergic to air, and their bad dog and their hugely kind-hearted, generous relatives, and words and words and words. I love my job. I love my books. I love the people in my life. Even the ones who are far away. And I want so much more of it.

Perhaps that's where all of my frustration comes from with the continuing health issues, the constant fight for one more breath of air, one more shot. Sometimes I wonder if I'm fighting for more than my share. I keep thinking that my continued existence is somehow tempting fate, fucking god, swearing in the face of death. Every minute more I fight for feels like one minute more I didn't deserve.

And I want it nonetheless.

It's just all so beautiful.