I'm going to be at Readercon from Thursday to Sunday! I will have with me:

-- An acoustic guitar
-- fresh fruit
-- sewing materials in order to create another zebunkey (see here)
-- leftover Indian food
-- possibly some Munson's Chocolates (the only unabashedly good thing about Connecticut, heh)
-- Grá Linnaea :-D

Neither of us are doing any panels, but I think we're also going to make a concentrated effort to spend more time interacting with other folks this con. If you're going to be there and want to hang out, you should say something! If you aren't going, but have a cool friend who'll be there, you should say something!

I'm a little bit shy around new people, especially at cons, but I truly want to meet you/your cool friends. So leave me a note!

By way of Jonathan Carroll:

"The best description of how it feels like to be schizophrenic came from a catatonic man. He needed eight weeks psychotherapy (without medications) five days a week to be able to move out of the hospital and get back to work. One of his symptoms was that he was constantly bowing. When asked why he did this, he said:

- I don't bow

- Yes you do

- No I don't bow

- Listen, you do this (the psychotherapist bows). That's how one bows. You are bowing.

- No, I don't bow

- But you are doing it right now.

- That's not bowing

- Then what is that?

- It's balancing

- What are you balancing?

- Feelings

- What feelings?

- Fear and loneliness

When the man felt alone he wanted to get near other people (so he leaned forward). When he got close to others he got scared and had to draw back (he stood up straight) but then he felt lonely again...."

In the past few weeks, I've read:

Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne Valente

I read about half of it, actually, and didn't find it compelling enough to continue. As with the first Orphan's Tales, I loved the worldbuilding and invention, and was in turn overwhelmed and delighted by the prose. The downfall of this book was that at some point, the frame story of the boy & the girl in the garden and Dinarzad became more interesting to me than the stories they were telling. I realized I was flipping through pages and pages just to read the next "In the Garden" section, and at that point I sent the book back to the library. Even marvelous invention pales in comparison to really compelling characters, and I just wasn't getting enough of what I wanted.


Summerland, by Michael Chabon

Before this, I'd read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and most of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and found them both interesting and well-written, but not especially squee-worthy.

I love Summerland. It's a uniquely American fantasy book, right down to the bastardization of Ragnarok into "Ragged Rock" (because everyone knows Americans can't pronounce foreign words correctly) and the obsession with baseball. It's not the real America, of course, but it's the true America: a hodgepodge splintered mass of five different mythos with a few unique elements thrown in (the antagonist is Coyote. The protagonist's allies are piskies. They're trying to stop Ragnarok from coming about. And so on) saved by a few plucky kids who aren't rich or supremely talented, but willing to go the distance and do the job. The characterization is excellent: quirky without being unbelievable, and the 12 year old kids come off, more or less, as 12 year old small-town kids.

Woven into the story is a theme of parents abandoning their children; just enough to be noticeably poignant, but so subtle that it didn't all click together until I was into the last fourth of the book. I'm looking forward to rereading it; I suspect the second time through I'll notice little elegances I didn't appreciate the first time round.



Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon

This one didn't appeal to me quite as much; I finished it, but more out of a perverse desire to see what he was going to do with a dead snake and a tuba than anything else. The characters were all obsessed with drugs, sex, artistic inadequacy, academia and their own navels. I had a hard time finding anyone to sympathize with, and was mostly irritated by the protagonist-narrator.

Some books have idiot plots, where the characters are shoehorned into doing really stupid things for the sake of pushing the story forward with no real justification. This was not quite an idiot plot, because the characters did have justification for doing really stupid things; the problem is that the justification was "constantly running around on a mixture of booze, weed and prescription pills." Certainly, this is true to life (especially in a certain set of academia); I just don't really think it's that interesting.

Nonetheless, I finished it; it's well-written, if disagreeable.



Memoirs of a Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber

This one is non-fiction, bought on a whim and finished over a span of 3 or 4 days. Although it's called "memoirs", it's actually a grand, delusional diatribe written by a German judge institutionalized towards the latter half of the 19th century, in which he lays out the "truth" about God, the nature of the soul and how magic/miracles work.

What really fascinated me was how complex and far-reaching his delusional system had become in order to reconcile his hallucinations and his conviction in his own sanity. One early passage talks about taking a walk in the garden with one of the asylum attendants, and seeing the face of God illuminate the sky. The attendant, Schreber notes, did not react to this astounding phenomenon; therefore, he concludes, the attendant must not be truly human, but a "fleeting-improvised-man" [a sort of energy-based simulacrum, that was created out of thin air in order to interact with Schreber].

Later on, he notes repeatedly that his claims may sound unorthodox, but based on the evidence of his senses and his experiences it must be admitted, even by the most negative of skeptics, that they were true. Even now and again he questions the validity of his experiences, but always reaches the conclusion that he was not hallucinating and isn't a madman, though he understand why other people might think so.

It's rather religious, dense and occasionally hard to follow, but recommended if you're interested in delusional systems, or in unreliable narrators.



Am now reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, which will probably take me the rest of my life to finish, but is nonetheless seriously cool.

blazepoet's most recent entry mentions a "things to do before you die" list.

I would like to propose a new list: Things I Wish I Hadn't Had to Do Before I Died.

Today's entry: Driven a car without working brakes halfway around Windsor.


I am actually ridiculously lucky -- because I only had one client in the car, a nonverbal and generally easy-going fellow who didn't start panicking; because I was driving him to his mother's house, so I was already going slow in order to look at the house numbers; because the road was pretty much deserted; because I didn't hit any red lights or stop signs; because I was fairly close to the house when the brakes went out. All I had to do was drift down the street, into the driveway, hit the emergency brake and put the car in park.

Then I called my manager, who came over to check it out and said "well, if you put your foot on it really really hard it'll stop ... so let's drive it over to the auto shop." So. More driving. This time with stop signs and left turns and red lights, but thankfully not many cars. And again, got there in one piece, despite the rather upsetting hissing noise emanating from the brake pedal any time I stepped on it.



Gah ... not even an hour before this happened my manager & I were driving a full load of passengers in that car, on the highway, through Hartford, during rush hour. If they'd stopped working then, I'm sure we would have crashed. And it probably would have been a fairly nasty crash, too.

Sometimes you just have to be grateful for small favors.

This time last year, I was at Week 1 of Clarion, madly crushing on systemcrasher and trying to adjust to the utter surreality that is San Diego/writing workshops/Clarion. And writing. And workshopping. And being around other writers.

In honor of all of this (and because, one year later, I am writing ANOTHER story about Baba Yaga), here's the first scene of the story I workshopped in Week 1:


Baba Yaga's hut stands on chicken legs somewhere in New York City; it is impossible to say where, for witches are not popular, nor believed in, and Baba Yaga would like to keep it that way. When she suspects someone has taken an undue interest in her modest little home, it rises on its skinny legs and finds a new alleyway to squat in. The witch follows behind with a broom made of white birch, sweeping away all traces.

Those who do know of Baba Yaga keep their mouths shut, some out of fear and some out of gratitude.

This is what is generally known about Baba Yaga: she has iron teeth. She flies around in a mortar and pestle, and sounds like death when she screams. Her cat was once the prime minister of Uganda's son. Her combs turn into forests and her tea towels into rivers when thrown on the ground. She does not like questions or small children, but keeps her promises. Her interior design tastes run towards bones and matryoshka dolls, and she's as old as memory itself. She cannot die, because she's hidden her heart away somewhere safe, and never tells anyone the location.

Baba Yaga has no friends and no family. It's only the children, the Mashas and Vasilisas, the Ivans and Vasilisys, who come to see her nowadays. She tries to capture them, set them impossible tasks to keep them there forever, but they slip through her fingers like grain. After all, what reason have they to stay? Witches are almost as bad as stepmothers, and everyone knows what happens to them.

Baba Yaga is not a Yankees or a Mets fan. She stays home, weaves cloth and makes her own bread, and waits for the next child to knock on her door.
#



(Also? Venus flytrap robots.)

Eugene reminds me very much of Lawrence, which I visited a few years back when tmseay was still living there. It has one foot in city and one foot in suburbia, with a university at the heart of the city; not as beautiful as Boston, but there is public transport and decent Indian food and excellent peaches.

systemcrasher is house-dogsitting for some people in a gated community up in the hills. The dog in question is named Lancelot, a half-greyhound half-lab mix who enjoys going after my baked goods and other people's dogs.

I've read three books in the past two days (1 Nero Wolfe, 2 Ellery Queens) wherein husbands pretended to be insane killers in order to protect their wives, who were in point of fact the true insane killers.

In one, the woman kills her just-adopted infant because he's actually her husband's illegitimate child.

In another, the woman has been running around killing her husband's former patients (OB-GYN) because her two children, who were also delivered by said husband, were stillborns.

Though I haven't read it recently, there's also an Agatha Christie where a woman meets someone, realizes they gave her German measles while she was pregnant many years ago (and caused her only child to be born an imbecile) and promptly kills her.

Vague bells of misogyny ring in my head, but I'm not quite sure what they're pointing out: the gallantry of husbands, the assumption that their wives must be shielded? The obsession with childbirth and the insanity that comes from not being able to give birth?

Christie gets a pass from me, because I've read about all types of femmes from her and I am reasonably sure that this is not How Women Act for Christie; this is just how One Woman Acts (in this case, a beautiful, terribly neurotic actress with no stability and a fondness for children.) Rex Stout's females I'm used to, but Ellery Queen ... I'd read so few Ellery Queens before, and I loved the tv show so very much when I was a kid. And I simply can't read any of the novels because his female characters/lack thereof bother me so much. It's plain sloppy, uninteresting writing.


(And also, a depressing amount of his mysteries follow the pattern "Ellery exposes one person as the murderer, person confesses or acts in ways that confirm Ellery's suspicions, then AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR Ellery discovers that the Murderer is actually shielding the True Murderer -- but it's too late! or nearly too late! And the story ends with a mixed sense of triumph and guilt." Once you've realized this, it's pretty easy to figure out who the True Murderer is.

The tv show was also pretty formulaic, but AWESOMELY so. Every episode, the murder victim left a totally abstract "dying clue" which you then had to free-associate with the suspects until you found a connection. It was ridiculous and fun and impossible to guess the first time around.)

I suspect it's just a juxtaposition of timing that's hitting me oddly; I'm trying to write a short story about a woman whose child is given to witches by her husband, and what she does to regain her child. And it's weird to write about a woman in the context of being a mother -- not really something I've done before, though I write a lot of stories about daughters and witches -- and I'm hoping it doesn't turn out ridiculous and overblown and untrue.

In other news, I am going to OREGON tomorrow to hang out with systemcrasher, which I am super super excited about. We haven't seen each other since April and it's been a rough couple of months for a wide variety of reasons. So getting 3-ish days to spend together, on the eve of our Clarionniversary, is going to be excellent.

Courtesy of my cell phone, adorable kitten pictures:


Ginger is kind of a girly-girl cat, kind of a princess.


Fay is Ginger's sister; she's the spunky fierce one. If she were a heroine in a sword & sorcery, she'd be redheaded.


Mr. Bubbles is their brother. When you dangle a bit of string in front of him, he goes for your arm instead. He knows what's causing all the trouble.

Slept for about 11 hours and think I may be human again. Only time will tell if I'm a lazy bad human, though, or a good productive one who gets through the housework & paperwork on her day off.

Am practicing for my future as a crazy cat lady by catsitting for 7 cats. Three of which are kittens.

(And my digital camera is broken. THERE IS NO GOD.)

Attempting cell phone pictures, but sort of exhausted tonight and working 13 hours tomorrow, so Kittens Saga: Episode 2 may have to be on Saturday.

However, I will say that I'm pretty sure kittens hold the secret to perpetual motion machinery. And the little fuckers keep going after my Chinese food.

... I left the room briefly to get chocolate and got back in time to see Fay (spunky calico kitten) execute a flying kick off my laptop screen. Holy crap.

I'm still alive. I've been fighting a terrible cold, which means that pretty much I spend all my time working, sleeping or notwriting, and thus have no brain for livejournal.

But I've also discovered Jack Conte, and sort of fangirlishly love his music, and wish I was writing again so I could write stories for his songs:




The next few weeks feel like I'm dropping back into travel and lack-of-home craziness again; staying over at my best friend's house for a few days to help take care of the cats (6) and german shepherds (2). Overtime + truncated weekend. Hopping on a plane over to the west coast to spend a few days with systemcrasher; another week of wonked-up work schedule, and then Readercon.

Read Diana Wynne Jones' A Sudden Wild Magic over the weekend. I'm not sure how I feel about her adult fiction; her writing is so simple and direct (and I'm so used to reading her YA) that it's vaguely disconcerting when her characters start talking about kamikase sex. But I do like this one (nothing tops Witch Week, though.) It deals with a lot of the same ideas as Deep Secret, but hooks its fingernails much deeper into the character's psyches; the one thing that really separated it from her other books, for me, was how intensely in pain the characters were. DWJ writes some fairly dark things, but never has any of her other work felt so raw.

Have the second Orphan's Tales and Voltaire's Candide waiting to be read. Alphabetical proximity leads to odd clusterings of books.

"Nita suddenly found herself looking at a moment long ago: a small Dairine, maybe five years old, running down the sidewalk outside the house, oblivious -- then tripping and falling. Dairine had pushed herself up on her hands and, after a long pause, started to cry ... but then came the laughter of the kids down the street, the ones toward whom she'd been running. Nita had been struck by the sight of Dairine's face working, puckering, as she tried to decide what to do, then steadying into a downturned mouth and thunderous frown, a scowl of furious determination. Dairine got up, and said just one thing: "No." Knees bleeding, she wiped her face, and walked slowly back to the house, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched like a small fist with resolve.

I don't think I've seen her cry since, Nita thought. And so Dairine had gone on, for so long, expressing herself almost entirely through toughness. But now the shell had cracked, and who would have ever known that there was such pain and fear contained inside it?"

--Diane Duane, The Wizard's Dilemma

Got Indian food on my way home from work in order to celebrate being hired full-time (exact same job, exact same hours, but now with health insurance & 2 weeks paid vacation). Pudina paratha is delicious; chicken naan is mildly disappointing.

Also, the director of my agency is possibly one of the most charismatic people I've ever met. After our meeting today I walked out going, "I want to work here for the rest of my life, I am so incredibly lucky to have this job", despite the fact that I generally dislike Connecticut and am rather lonely here.

But really, this is probably one of the best jobs in the world.

(And may I say that about every job I ever have.)

Salvador Dali on a gameshow:



Alan Garner's essay "Valley of the Demon":
'Much later, having extricated my arm, cleared a space, and wound my hand back in, I'd traced what was carved on the hidden reverse:

“The print of a woman's shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead.” '

In my childhood are two books inexplicably linked by a sense of melancholy, mystery, and incompletion: Alan Garner's Elidor and Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe. Each feels like a grand adventure which I'm standing just outside of: looking into a house, perhaps, through a dusty windowpane -- catching glimpses of magic here and there until a door inside the house swings shut, and all that's left is faint footsteps and laughter.

I'm rather delighted to know that he thinks in more or less the same way that Elidor feels in my head, and looking forward to tracking down his other books.

From the introduction to my collection of Dashiell Hammett novels:

"But he was a man who kept his work, and his plans for work, in angry privacy and even I would not have been answered if I had ever asked, and maybe because I never asked is why I was with him until the last day of his life." -- Lillian Hellman

Today, I am graduating college.

Well, not really -- I'm working, so I'm actually going to the Shad Derby with one of my clients -- but if I weren't working, today I would be graduating college. As it is, today my diploma is getting mailed to me.

Today, all of the people who entered with me in fall '05 and survived 4 years at Simon's Rock are graduating. And it's weird -- even though I was largely reclusive, even though many of my closest friends of this class dropped out or transferred, I still feel as though my family is being scattered.

Congrats, you guys. Let's all get really rich, meet back here in 10 years, and buy the castle, yeah?


(And I realized about two weeks ago that in the stress & heartache & confusion of finishing all my classes last semester, I COMPLETELY neglected to have an acknowledgements/dedication page on my thesis. That was Not Right of me. So:

Thank you, Gabriel, for being a wonderful academic advisor, for arranging to sell me textbooks clandestinely one day, for giving me 3 semesters of Arabic, feeding us pickled turnips and rose petal syrup and telling us stories about brothels in Lebanon.

Thank you Ginny & Anne, the terrifying thesis duo, for giving me both strict deadlines and sympathy, for helping me design a study & sort out the resulting messy data, and most importantly, for deeming my thesis good enough to pass.

Thank you, Nancy B. & Colette, for introducing me to the complete mindgasm that is linguistics and ESL teaching.

Thank you Fidget, Holly & Mariah, who struck the right balance between leaving me alone and insisting I come socialize. Thank you my far-spread social network (Em and Grá and Julia, Clarionmates, Torin).

Thank you, Andrew-Alec-Dan M-Abby-Nirvana-Jared-Zeek-Mac-Vincent-Laura-Paul. Thank you, Mark Vecchio, thank you, Paul Naamon, thank you, my rock wall regulars. Thank you Will & Jeff & the breakfast crew. Thank you Saleem. Thank you, windchime tree. Thanks, Simon's Rock.

Thank you for a mindblowing 3.5 years.)

Today at training for work, the woman sitting next to me couldn't figure out how many 125 mg pills she would need in order to get 375 mg of medication without a calculator. God help her poor clients.


Cool Stuff:
From theferrett: Snapshot stories.

From systemcrasher:

www.marriedtothesea.com

Have been sleeping terribly, eating terribly, and spending my waking hours in 85% bitch mode (except toward my clients, because they have enough crap to deal with.) But incredibly, I'm still functioning. Even getting things done. Even writing.

( starts out sexual. gets kinda creepy. )

Started off as a freewrite with systemcrasher's latest composition looping in the backround, and quickly became a response to a story Kathleen wrote a couple of months back, about the other half of the writer-muse relationship. Although my take looks quite different than hers from the surface (and I can't wait till she announces where she sold it, so I can nag you all to get a copy), I think they have the same heart: that it's unnerving to find yourself dissected and rearranged in the name of art, but also sort of awesome to realize that you can be made into something beautiful and polished.

Kathleen dropped me a note informing me that two "lovely" (her word, not mine) photos of me from ICFA are in the latest issue of Locus. Cool beans -- I'm betting those are the group shots with Rick, Sheila & the other two awardees who could make it. I'll have to see if I can get a copy somewhere.

This is the second (or possibly the third? Did the Alpha class photos from '05 or '06 get into Locus?) time I've had a photo in Locus, which is not bad for someone who still hasn't made a pro sale, and has been utterly slacking on writing the past few weeks. Missed the deadline for hobbit_em's story; hoping I will make the deadline for fairfeather's (give or take a day.)

I've been writing. I just haven't been writing a lot, or consistently, or well. Most importantly, I haven't been finishing anything, and that's really rough on my psyche. I want to get all of these stories out of my head and onto paper because right now there are just too many.

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.


(Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch
this declaration of the mastery
of God who, with magnificent irony,
granted me both the gift of books and the night.)

--Borges

From April 20 to May 3, I worked:

79.5 regular hours
11.5 overtime hours
9 overnight hours