Holidays With the Hurleys

Our annual Chistmas beachtrip commenced once again this year....



Dad, Mom, and my nephew the Cheetoh-head at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. Mmmm cheese.



My sister Jackie-o and the Cheetoh-head.



Great view of Haystack rock from our hotel in Cannon Beach, OR.



My mom, my brother and I pose with our coffees at the Funland gameroom in Seaside.



Don't feed the birds! View from our hotel balcony. I love this hotel.



Cheetoh-head loves this hotel, too. Even when he's not feeding the birds...



My sister, nephew, and brother all pretend they like each other. No small feat!



Cheetoh-head cozies up to the scenery at Camp 18, where we stopped for a great Christmas-eve breakfast. Mmmmmm omelettes.



Christmas morning!



You, too, could get your *second* Nintendo DS at four years old (he broke the one he got last year. Yeah. Spoiled Cheetoh-head).



Snow! We got a rare Chistmas-day snow dusting this year. Cheetoh-head loved it! And I thought it was pretty neat too.



Jackie-o and Cheetoh-head enjoy the snow.



The Hurley kids: youngest, oldest, middle.



The Hurley kids and the Cheetoh-head, kickin' back with the holiday cheer.



Happy holidays to all... and to all a great night.

On a jet plane... With a hipster toy

I'm writing this post from the Dayton airport on my new iPod touch. Hell no - I didn't buy it myself.. I can't even afford to buy beer. Our exec team handed one of these out to all of us at our holiday lunch yesterday. I've never gotten a holiday bomis or gift before. It was incredibly generous and surreal. Sure, I could have used $300 more, but I know my company doesn't have any cash this time of year, either. Let's be thankful for small miracles, yo.

Also, this screen does get annoying to type on, but yo, I can watch youtube videos,check my email, and blog all directly from the airport wifi without pulling pit my bulky laptop. It's pretty slick. Anyway, I'm already delayed into Houston, so it's fixing to be a long night. Nice to have so many different toys available to pass the time.

Wow, I'm really glad this keyboard screen has an automatic spelling correction feature. Oh wow! It moves the cursor wherever I tap my finger in the post - it moved the cursor there! Mmmmm gadgetry.

Ok, I need a drink. Later, peeps.

One For the Road

Quote of the Day

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, "Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?"

Cocteau considered, then said, "I would take the fire."

Cutting Out Love

A lot of my fiction deals with characters who try to stifle or completely eliminate strong emotion. This is a theme I come back to quite a lot, as I tend to hate feeling - and especially exhibiting - strong emotion. Especially strong emotional attachment, like love.

As you grow up, you realize that strong emotion - if you're somebody who feels it - is just something you have to come to grips with and learn how to live with. But there are some folks out there doing research that would, in effect, allow us to turn it off.

I find the idea terrifying and fascinating. It's stuff like this that keeps me writing fiction.

That raises the question of whether it is possible to “treat” this romantic state clinically, as can be done with OCD. The parents of any love-besotted teenager might want to know the answer to that. Dr Fisher suggests it might, indeed, be possible to inhibit feelings of romantic love, but only at its early stages. OCD is characterised by low levels of a chemical called serotonin. Drugs such as Prozac work by keeping serotonin hanging around in the brain for longer than normal, so they might stave off romantic feelings. (This also means that people taking anti-depressants may be jeopardising their ability to fall in love.) But once romantic love begins in earnest, it is one of the strongest drives on Earth. Dr Fisher says it seems to be more powerful than hunger. A little serotonin would be unlikely to stifle it.

(warning: there are some very non-chemical "women are this way and men this way" assumptions stated as fact right after this paragraph that are incredibly, incredibly annoying. I love that the chemical stuff is backed up with studies, but "women prefer rich men, naturally" and "men prefer youth over money" is just stated fact. Excuse me while I laugh. Let me tell you how that works in other societies)

As far as innate vs. learned behavior goes, I found this interesting, too: "Rats can be conditioned to prefer particular types of partner—for example by pairing sexual reward with some kind of cue, such as lemon-scented members of the opposite sex."

Or preferring a tall, rich, old man to a skinny young skater boy. Or preferring a big-boobed blond to a geeky lab tech.

We get far more social points, as women, for marrying rich, and far more social points, as men, for marrying Barbie dolls.

Mmmmm lemony.

Just In Case I'm Tempted to Mope Around This Holiday, Some Perspective

Number of queries my agent received this year: Approximately 8,000

Partial manuscripts she requested for review: 49

Full manuscripts requested: 18

Number of new clients signed: 5

One of those five was me.

I think I'm going to take myself out to dinner tonight and just take some time to appreciate that.

My Kind of Valentine's Day Card

One For the Road

Um. Tax Season. Yeah

This morning, I was pushed into our mock store and given the task of assisting in the direction of the training scripts I wrote a couple weeks ago. I got to feed lines, read off-screen dialogue to get scenes moving, check off scenes and setup folks for the next shot, and track what we were filming and what still needed to be done.

It was a humbling and educational experience. The best part was watching people change and morph the scripts as we went in response to the constraints of the shots/resources and based on their actual experience ("She's not going to say return. She's going to say "check."").

It was really clear just then why the dialogue in film scripts is kept so minimal, too. They start waxing on for long paragraphs - particularly when you're not working with pro actors - and people get lost, out of breath, start to sound like Babylon 5 monologuers. I think it really is true: you can have great dialogue and crap actors or bad dialogue and great actors, but not both at once.

The stuff that was short and choppy, that was written with just the right store-appropriate lingo and that the support folks got to have fun with? Yeah, that came out the best.

I learned a lot.

I love my job.

If They Can Only Make the Real Thing Look Even Half This Cool

Then... squeeeeeeeeeee!

This is why I love fans. And mashups. And fanfic.

HBO had better fucking make the series look even half this cool.

For serious.

Merry Christmas

Insurance won't cover my pump.

$2,180 up front, and $281 per month after that.

Oh well, it was a nice idea.

I can't even afford a new mattress for Christmas.

Tra-la

Things I Wonder About

1) It's not the cold I mind so much, it's the dark. I always hit my lowest point during this time of year, and it has a lot to do with all that dark, overcompensating with too much eating (used to be pizza and nachos, now it's cheese-covered broccoli and sausage), too much brooding, and lots of meaningless arty projects and reading. When I get back from the holiday break, it will be getting light again! I always feel better when I get back from holidays with the family, because I know we're coming out of the Long Dark.

2) Is it really worth continuing to write books that nobody reads? How many years should you be writing books nobody reads? I mean, really. And even then, it's not like you're in it for the money. I'm starting to think I might feel *worse* having sold a book for 2K than not selling it at all.

3) Is is possible to have a boyfriend that you never see? I suppose that's a rather redundant questions, since I was in a year-long relationship with somebody I only saw, like, 5 times, and a year-long relationship with someone I only saw, maybe, a grand total of 14 or 15 weekends. It occurs to me that I've spent more time with my current boyfriend - real time - than I did with either of those folks. Sad.

Have I mentioned I'm bad at relationships?

I guess it's possible to be dating, but hard to have a relationship. Though I'm not exactly sure what a relationship would look like anyway. So it's best to just stop thinking about it?

And yet, here I am, stuck without seeing The Boyfriend, properly, all week, and faced with another week seeing him briefly (once), and then another week with the folks where, of course, I won't see him, and here I am, missing him stupidly and hating myself for it. I hate feeling like some kind of weakling woman. Truth is, no matter who it was, no matter the gender, I'd feel stupid and weak for missing them. I hate wanting people around, especially when it's one person in particular. I always feel about eight kinds of stupid, and it feels, always, always - like such an incredible weakness. I want to cut it out of me like a cancer.

I miss him. I miss hanging out with my friend.

And I hate myself for that.

4) The problem with eating so much cheese with my broccoli is that I'm about three more cheese-broccoli encounters away from having to buy new pants. Have I mentioned I can't wait until the Long Dark is lessening? Summer is going to be so lovely. Oh, the bikerides! The jogging! The trips to the park! Oh, the freedom!

5) Can kick-ass heroines really be physically kick ass if they suffer from a physical disability? How do you make a really physically strong, compelling, kick-ass heroine who has, say, no legs, a gimp leg, or, for the sake of argument, something like diabetes? So she can't really get very far without a handful of lifesavers. And why don't we write about more heroines like this? Is it really because it's so hard to imagine (it's not - the idea of a heroine crawling out of her wheelchair scrambling for a gun and popping sombody off comes to mind) or is it because, as SF/F writers, we're much more likely to write stories about people who are physically free? Because so many of us suffer from allergies, disability, poor health, etc? We read to escape our bodies; we game to escape our bodies. Why would we write about broken bodies? Don't most of us write to escape those?

6) Why isn't there a deragatory term for a man who has sex with prostitutes/only has sex he has to pay for? Really, that's pretty much something you'd assume would get the lowliest of losers tag. But then, is it just that a woman's worth is measured in how hot men find her and a man's worth is measured in how many women he can force (or convince - through money, looks, whatever) to fuck him?

And how do we change this perception? What would a society that had as many deragatory terms for johns as we do for prostitutes look like?

7) I didn't end up doing any of the work-writing I figured I'd do this weekend. I didn't have to do it, but I figured I *should* do it. I'll have time to do it in the morning, but for some reason, I feel guilt.

8) I want to buy my own house. I'll be taking steps to finally do this after the holiday. Paying off credit cards is all well and good, but I need savings in case I get laid off in April. And if I don't get laid off - well, it's time to start planning for the future. No one's going to do it for me, and I have to stop hoping that something great is going to happen that will solve all my problems. I would like my writing to start paying off, yes, but I'm starting to push 30 here, and it's time to put some security measures in place in case it's another 10 or 20 years before that actually happens.

9) I miss being around other writers. I miss talking to people about books and writing - not just online, but in person. I miss my friend Jenn. I miss us dissecting books and movies. I miss talking to David about SFWA hijinks and the latest jaunt to some foreign locale. I miss intelligent academic discourse. I miss having people around who I had so much in common with. Sure, I love learning all the new stuff, but most of the time, I feel like I'm trying so hard to learn about all this other stuff, but I've got nobody else around who's interested in what I find most interesting. It's time to hit up the SF book club at The Greene and the writer's group, even if it sucks. There are important parts of me that need some exercising, cause there's a big hole in me without them. It feels so lonely.

10) For serious, that was too much broccoli and cheese.

Headache

I think I'm ready for the holidays to be over.

No Country For Old Men

Disappointing for those of us who really like the good (or at least the "better") folks to live, but a thrilling, bloody, suspenseful, incredibly well-acted and wonderfully scripted little movie. It's a darker, grittier, smarter version of Unforgiven.

Also: blood and guns and assasins and drug deals gone wrong!

Great performances all around; smart, tough, engaging characters (again, if you're not going to give me films focusing on female heroines, then the least you can fucking do is write female characters that Don't Suck. This film succeeds there).

A film to watch, but not something you're going to buy and keep around for comfort food.

Presents for You!

I got this from Karen Meisner.

I will send a gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment here on my blog.

I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days (likely sooner than later). This may end up being almost anything (but probably books or pony mods, depending on your preference. OK, really, it could be anything).

The only thing you have to do in return is “pay it forward” by making a similar agreement on your own blog/journal.

Snapshots from the Writing Life

Snapshots from the life of a tech-writer-working-for-health-insurance (who also happens to be a freelance-fiction-author-working-to-pay-off-credit-card-debt-and-maintain-sanity):

5:35 am: Wake up, test sugar and check email. Take 15 u Lantus shot and breakfast bolus. Shots always come first thing.

5:35-5:50am: morning free weights and situps routine. I don't wake up properly until I do this.

5:50-6:05am: Make today's lunch, brew coffee, and defrost 1 cup blueberries for breakfast. Yup, same thing every morning. Keeps my sugar regulated.

6:05-6:20am: Eat breakfast, drink coffee, catch up on blogs, reply to email.

6:20-6:40am: Shower, brush teeth, etc.

6:40-7:10am: Dress, pack up gym clothes and etc., do hair, wash dishes (if I don't do dishes now, there will be a huge pile when I get home. The roomies do not own a dishwasher. *I* am the dishwasher)

7:10am: depart the house and go wait for the bus. Catch up on any midnight text messages from The Boyfriend and reply with something snarky.

7:40am: arrive at work.

7:40-8:00am: Make coffee, check intranet portal and email, put out any fires from the night before.

8:00-8:20am: First of the IT guys arrives. Bitch, catch up on gossip, discuss any fires from the night before.

8:20-12:00pm: "Work" of various sorts. Mostly organizing intranet stories, formatting and editing SOPs, playing Gold Miner and Turret Wars, writing 800-1000 words of Black Desert and surfing the internet if things are slow, writing up at least one emergency last-minute "OMG we needed this two weeks ago!" project, and throwing things at the hardware guys in the other room.

12:00-1:00pm: Lunch. Sugar test and shoot. Again, usually pretty standard cause of the sugar issue. Low-carb wrap, spinach salad, string cheese, almonds.

1:00-5:00pm: Meetings, retooling people's emails, uploading documents to the library, posting and replying to franchisee questions in the Forum, getting into arguments about politics and call routing systems with the other IT folks, texting The Boyfriend to see what his schedule is for the day and if we're going out for burgers or movies. If we are, the schedule below is all off. If not, the rest of the day goes like this:

5:00-5:45pm: Waiting for the bus and on the bus, either to the gym or home, depending on my mood. Twice a week to the gym, three times a week, back home, but I don't yet have set days.

5:45-6:30 or 7:00pm: Working out, either at home or at the gym. Sugar test and correction if necessary. 30-40 minutes of that is cardio while watching a Netflix video. If at the gym, I also do about 15-20 min worth of weights. After working out, catch up on text messages from The Boyfriend and reply with something snarky.

7:00-8:00pm: If at the gym, I'm getting dressed and commuting back home. If I'm at home, I'm making dinner and catching up on dishes and blogs. Test and shoot insulin before dinner, natch. If at home, catch up with Steph about her day or field snarky comments from the Old Man.

8:00-9:30pm: Finishing up whatever scheduled work on Black Desert that I didn't get done during the day. Catch up on blogs if I was at the gym, dinner if I was at the gym. Watch Netflix video, read, work on my French, work on pony mods.

9:30-10:00pm: Get ready for bed. If I haven't been reading, I'm certainly reading now, or just sitting in bed thinking about all the stuff I have to do tomorrow, angsting about various things, wishing I was having sex, and plotting through the next day's work on Black Desert.

10:00pm: Send a text message to The Boyfriend telling him that if he's still at work, it's time for him to go home.

10:01pm: The Boyfriend texts back that he's leaving work.

11:00pm: The Boyfriend texts me saying that no, really, he's really leaving work now.

12:30am: Text message from The Boyfriend about how he just did something really cool in Halo, nearly got pulled over/hit a racoon/got into an accident or how some piece of hardware just exploded. I am not likely to wake up and read any of this until I'm at the bus stop the next morning.

1:00am (twice a week or so): Nighttime sugar test and correction. I set my cell phone alarm and test for these if I've eaten something non-standard for dinner (that is, something with more than 30 grams of carbs - my sugar tends to rise alarmingly overnight when I do this).

And, now that I've written all that down, it looks incredibly regimented. To be honest, it is, but not in a bad way. I have no problem doing other things when stuff comes up, but this is the standard I default to when there's nothing else going on, and you know - it's kinda nice to have a set default. I do a lot better with a routine, especially now that I'm diabetic.

I also tend to get a hell of a lot more done.

Rome: Finale

Perfect. Absolutely fucking perfect.

At least they realized, the second time around, to keep their time in Egypt short. Whoever the fuck cast that chick as Cleopatra should have been fired. She's the weakest part of the show. Dump her for somebody who's actually interesting, and it would have been a perfect show.

But really, if that's my only complaint?

And Attia, there at the end?

Oh yes, perfect.

Perfect arc, perfect return.

Why can't all television be this good?

Book Love & Book Buying 101

150 pages into Undertow, they were still having tea and discussing plot.

There’s nothing inherently WRONG with having tea and discussing plot, but you know, you do it enough times, for enough pages, and it gets really dull.

Also, I had a tough time connecting with any of these characters. The assassin is dull and whiny. Cricket gets interesting 2/3rds of the way through, but by then, it was all just random explosions and quantum physics over tea, and I didn’t care enough about the people it was happening to. I mean, it was Neat Idea SF, but no really dynamic people I cared about fueling the story.

I also don’t know why the setting never resonated with me. I mean, it’s a lush, humid, watery world, and there are bugs and smells and things, but it wasn’t… it just never connected with me. I didn’t feel like I was there.

I’m always interested as to what makes the difference, for me, between actually being immersed in a setting and feeling like I’m looking at it through a window. Do I need to have the emotional connect to the characters before I can feel it? Do I need to have the characters more immersed in the setting, that is, do I need to connect with them and they need to connect with it, so I feel some kind of connection to it? Or is it all just writing trickery, some kind of magical combination of words, some writerly technique that does this? No idea.

This reading experience left me rather desperate to read about characters I cared about running around in a fully realized setting that I connected with. I’ve had a hell of a time finding good fiction these days. I picked up the Kushiel book about Poor, Abused Imriel Who’s Only Third in Line for the Throne, and I just wanted to vomit, the kid was so damned annoying.

So I went to the bookstore and actually started looking for another Bear novel, Dust (my experience with Undertow was with the book, not the author, as I did enjoy Carnival, though it had some of the same general issues for me), but alas, Dust’s official release date isn’t until the 26th, so finding it is a bit like a treasure hunt.

So I went through other books. Books after books.

After much browsing, it came down to KJ Parker’s Devices and Desires or Daniel Abraham’s A Betrayal in Winter.

Now, I read and more or less enjoyed Abraham’s first book in the series, but did not Love it, so I wasn’t totally sold on the second. I like the setting, and some of the characters, but I never really fell in love with anyone, and when I’m reading, I tend to either need to fall in love with a character or feel some kind of emotional reasonance while reading. I did neither of these with Abraham’s book, but you know: it had good women characters, an interesting setting, and a new fantasy world with an interesting magic system and dynamic landscape.

The KJ Parker book was quite lovely, beautifully written, and had some really interesting concepts. It was also half as much as Abraham’s book and twice as long. More for my money, and all that.

So, what decided me?

Well, I opened up KJ Parker’s book several times at random and read big sections. All three places I opened to were full of situations, conversations, and fights between and among men. Every single scene was 100% full of male characters. There was not one woman to be seen (this may be one reason I haven’t finished Jonanthan Strange and Mr. Norrell, either).

I opened up Abraham’s book several times at random, and you know what? There were women characters in there who TALKED and EVERYTHING. Some of the chapters were even ENTIRELY FROM THE POV OF A WOMAN!!! IMAGINE!!!

And, to be honest, I’ve gotten tired of stories All About Men. I’ve gotten tired of stories that ignore me or tell me I’m stupid or are, merely, indifferent. It’s as if the author didn’t even deliberately ignore, they just forgot. I read stories about men all day long. Mostly, stories about men doing terrible things to women (it’s called The News). I’m tired of reading about nothing but men all day long. Your book doesn’t even have to be, you know ALL women. Just acknowledging that women exist in your world may even be enough! That’s how desperate I’ve gotten.

So I sat down with A Betrayal in Winter, and ah yes, here it is, the difference between books that I remember and books that I don’t. Though he does that annoying Martin thing where he introduces a character in the Prologue and makes you care for him and then kills him, well, you know, he proves up front that he can write characters I’m interested in. I may not fall in love with them, you know, but they are interesting, and I’m invested in their adventures.

And, you know, as ever, the women characters Don’t Suck. Honestly, you have no idea how rare it is in SF/F just to find more than one woman character, and have her Not Suck. Abraham’s women characters don’t suck. I may be annoyed that most of them are defined by their relationships to men, but you know, when dealing with some of the societies he’s built, that’s how they’re defined in those societies, and it’s not like the men aren’t defined by their relationships to other men, either. Just sad that all those societies are like that. In, you know, fantasy.

You gotta mix it up sometimes.

In any case, I’m enjoying the Abraham book, even if there still aren't any women chopping off people's heads.

I'm sure they'll get there. Maybe there will be a Rome-like network of women playing politics behind this big brothers-who-kill-each-other-for-the-throne thing? I mean, maybe not all of them shuffle home in defeat when they're husband is toast, but become active players. Like women do when all the men are off at war all the time. I don't buy that we all just sat around sewing, or that all that sewing was totally benign.

I'm just saying.

UPDATE: pg 57 of A Betrayal in Winter. Yes, indeed, we do get to the Rome-like female politicking and backstabbing... yay!

Well, That's Done

Registered for Wiscon today. I'd been back and forth about going for awhile, but Jackie was looking for a roommate, and *I* was looking for a roommate, and it started to seem like a good idea again.

So, it's on.

22 Days

I stepped out of the elevator at work this morning and was confronted by a big countdown paper sign that said "22 Days."

Ah, yes... It's now 22 days until Tax Season.

If you didn't know that, well, then, like me, you've never worked in the tax business before. It's like a whole other way to live, an entirely new seasonal model. "Christmas is in February" is my new mantra.

Things are balls-to-the-wall (tits to the wall? I like that expression much better) from now until February 20th.

And if I still have a job in May, it means I did well and we made money. If I don't, we (and/or I) didn't.

Tra-la.

1500 stores open January 2nd.

Wheeeee!