Sarah Monette's Blog, page 56

5 things because bigotry isn't cool

1. My fellow Americans, please stop with the logical fallacy inherent in blaming all Muslims for 9/11, or saying all Muslims are potential terrorists, or any of the other horrid bigoted things non-Muslim Americans have been saying for the past ten years. It's like blaming all mathematicians for the Unabomber--or all right-of-center Americans for the Oklahoma City bombings, for that matter. It's ignorant and ugly and I'm really damn tired of it.

2. The First Amendment means no one has the right to make you shut up, no matter how much they hate what you're saying. It doesn't mean you get a free pass to say whatever you want without any responsibility for the consequences. It doesn't mean people have to agree with you, and it doesn't mean they have to suck it up and let you have the last word on the subject, either.

3. I heard a white man, a self-described Alaskan "constitutionalist" (the scare-quotes are mine, not his), explaining his politics yesterday. His answer to everything, of which he seemed very proud, was "Kill the liberals." He was not noticeably joking.

4. Glenn Greenwald on the firing of Juan Williams (link via Saladin Ahmed).

5. Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things.

Day 84

Today I ventured out on an expedition with only the soft lace-up ankle brace. I did not fall down or hurt myself or anything else bad.

WIKTORY!

After stopping by the wake for a friend's father, we went over to Willy Street, where we met an Unexpected! Bonus! Friend!, which was excellent. And then I walked--yes, walked, without lurching like a drunk or falling down or going so slowly that passing tortoises were laughing--to Steve's Tattoo to get my captive bead earrings put back in.

I had to take them out for the surgery on my ankle, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get captive beads back in myself, so what with the mobility issues and the not-being-able-to-drive-myself issues--N.b., if you're going to break your ankle, for the love of little red fruitbats, don't break your driving ankle--this was the first chance I'd had. And since for some reason, regular earrings in those holes had been painful to lie on (v. bad when you're spending all day in bed), I'd left the earrings out.

And two of four, both on the left, had closed themselves back up.

Of course, I'd been leaving the earrings out of the other six holes, too, and none of them misbehaved in such a fashion, but go figure.

So I ended up sitting in Steve's for longer than I had anticipated (many thanks to mirrorthaw for, once again, being patient), watching the tattooists go about their business and admiring the art and the bumper stickers on the walls. (My favorite is still MORE FUN THAN A HOT POKER UP THE ASS, because it's an Edward II reference for me, even if it isn't for them, and I have good memories of me and matociquala cracking the piercer up with our geektastic delight.) While sitting there, I figured out my next tattoo: once the swelling finally goes down, I want a dragon on my right ankle. Very possibly Smaug. Or Smaug, because say what you like about the Rankin-Bass Hobbit and I'll agree with you, I had that iron-on decal as a kid, and I wore the shirt until I literally could not cram my rack into it any longer. (I wore out Gollum and Gandalf, too, I think, but iirc did not care for the Rankin-Bass Bilbo.) And it is still a kick-ass dragon.

But that's a matter for when my ankle is functional again, and I have some money in the exchequer for frivolities. Which the way things are going, looks like sometime after they open an ice-rink in Hell.

Also, I don't know the band or the song they were playing, but the refrain, "Dr. Laura, who made you God?" cracked my shit up.

It turned out that I had remembered correctly: that top piercing in my cartilege hurts like a mad bastard. (The piercer was delighted with this phrase and vowed to use it.) And now my left ear is feeling very put upon and sorry for itself, to which I say, too damn bad.

But I do have my earrings back in, which is good because I was going to feel horribly naked at WFC without them.


ETA: Further WIKTORY: I have finished a draft of "Hollywood and Vine" and have printed it out and handed it to my husband. So there, neurotic pink circus poodle!

Industrious, if nothing else.

Well, if nothing else, posting the first-lines meme was enough of a kick in the ass to get me to start submitting things again.

Four completed short stories are now in submission:

1. "Coyote Gets His Own Back" (#4) at Tor.com
2. "Extract from '"I opened the book and read'": Self-Reflexivity and Self-Reinvention in Hôtel Image'" (#7) at The Magazine of Speculative Poetry
3. "Imposters" (#5) at Dark Discoveries
4. "Learning to See Dragons" at Apex (since July 1st, so not technically part of my personal urban renewal here, but still worthy of note!)

I also queried about the two stories that have been in press since 2006.

And I opened up "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek" (#2) and made a stab at putting more of the cool/important stuff in the story. We will see what matociquala and mirrorthaw think of it.

The next step is to open "Hollywood and Vine" (#1) and see about making the protagonist pick his goddamn agency up off the floor and use it.

Day 82

Accomplishments:

1. Drabble cleaned up and submitted to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. (That's #7 on the list.)
2. Bought stamps.
Ergo, 3. Walked to post office and back. (With the boot.)
4. Got cat-sitter booked for WFC.
5. Physical therapy: the therapist is teaching me not to walk like a drunk again.
6. Took a bath.
Ergo, 7. Got in and out of the bathtub by myself for the first time since July 31st.

That's really not too shabby.

Day 81

This morning, the orthopedist gave me the all clear to start getting rid of the walking boot.

Yeehaw! says I.

I spent part of this afternoon calling first my HMO (which does not cover acupuncture treatments) and then the acupuncture clinic which is within walking distance. The acupuncturist was very nice and perfectly honest. The answer here, as with everything else about RLS, is "Maybe." Which, at $60 a session, is a rather expensive ambivalence.

But I note two things:
1. My GP's nurse offered to put in a referral to a neurologist, but warned me it takes 6 to 8 weeks to get an appointment. Also, when I asked, she said it was about 50/50 whether they'd be able actually to help or not. So, neurology offers no better odds than acupuncture.

2. The acupuncturist talked about chi and blood stasis, as opposed to the orthopedist, who said essentially, "Nobody knows why," but they agreed that the return to normal motion should make the RLS quiet down.

I bothered mirrorthaw at work, and we agreed that the best thing was to wait until after WFC: give the increased dosage of Requip and my new and very exciting mobility a chance to work before we try other, expensive and/or time consuming options which may or may not do anything anyway. And hope that something starts working before I run out of Vicodin, because I don't think my GP's going to give me any more. At least now, though, if I need to get up in the middle of the night, I can just go ahead and damn well get up, without having to plan it out like a land war in Asia.

In the meantime, even though I'm having a lousy day on other health fronts (ME: Meat, is this nausea really necessary? MEAT: Bleah.), I am absolutely loving the fact that I'm wandering around the house barefoot. It's like a freaking dream come true.

Day 80, plus the foundering ship of my writing career

The RLS is giving me hell. Ironically and illogically, it seems to be getting worse as I become more mobile. We've just upped the dose of Requip, and hopefully that will improve things SOON, but in the meantime, I'm taking more narcotics than my GP is happy with, and it's actually not knocking the RLS out very effectively anyway.

HULK SMASH.

I am also still in the Hell of the Unreceived Edit Letter, and while I am trying to make constructive use of my time (going through The Goblin Emperor again on my own recognizance to fix the things I know are wrong, getting mirrorthaw to poke more holes in my worldbuilding, etc.), it's hard to stay focused, especially when part of my brain is SCREAMING, "Publish or perish! Publish or perish!" and I can't seem to finish a short story to save my goddamn life.

So, it's the first line meme again, this time arranged by estimated closeness to completion, in hopes that it will help me organize this embarrassing plethora of unfinished stories into a list of manageable tasks.

Well, it's worth a try, anyway.

IN PRESS:
"Ashes, Ashes" at All Hallows
"Extract from 'Horror in Pierre Lucerne: Suburbia, Alienation, and the Rejection of Community'" at The Magazine of Speculative Poetry
"Why Do You Linger?" at Subterranean

[just to remind myself that they're out there]

IN SUBMISSION:
Yes! There is one story in submission at this time: "Learning to See Dragons" at Apex Magazine.

IN COLLABORATION:
with matociquala: An Apprentice to Elves
Tin laced her fingers together across her gravid belly and frowned along her nose at the feeble human child.
[Third wolf book.]

IN PROGRESS:
Shadow Unit: "Hope Is Stronger Than Love"
Everyone had had to bring a brown-bag lunch.

[This isn't part of the list proper, because it's bespoken. But I still have to finish it.]

1. "Hollywood and Vine: A Still Life with Wolves"
Wolves prowl the Sunset Strip. You can tell them by the way their eyes reflect the street lights. You don't get in their cars or follow them down alleys, no matter what they promise. You made that mistake once, and you know just how lucky you are that you came out alive, mostly in one piece, and not infected with anything worse than the clap.

Hollywood has taught you a whole new definition of "lucky."

[This story is essentially finished, except for (a.) the part wherein I need my protagonist to actually protag, and (b.) my sneaking conviction that it's actually embarrassingly bad and therefore should not see the light of day. I need to finish rewriting the climax to give the poor bastard some agency, and then I need to send the fucker out, whether I think it's any good or not.]

2."The Devil in Gaylord's Creek"
We'd been hearing rumors about the Devil being in Gaylord's Creek for days before we got there.

[This story is finished, and has even been out in the marketplace, and I persist in liking it. I need to find a way to get more of the cool shit into the story rather than hiding it away like a squirrel for winter.]

3. "(Un)fallen"
The pain is intense, sharp, and localizes itself gradually, as Vij comes closer to consciousness, into a throbbing knot on the back of ser skull, just behind ser left ear. Se reaches to touch it, groans as that wakes a whole new set of pains through ser left shoulder and arm, and only then wonders why se is corporeal at all.

[I have a draft of this, but it doesn't work. Like Rwanda, the infrastructure's fucked.* I need to figure out how to make the action the characters take commensurate with the problem they face.]

4. "Coyote Gets His Own Back"
Luther shot the coyote bitch on Wednesday. She didn't make a sound, just fell ass over teakettle into the defile, blood blooming across her neck and chest. She was dead--there was no doubt about that, then or later.

[This is the story I cannot sell, because I think it does exactly what it's supposed to, and no editor on the planet agrees with me. I don't know if there's anything to be done about that or not.]

5. "Imposters"
They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna's Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life.

[This story, which is a Ghoul Hunters story, is also finished and also will not sell.]

6. [untitled]
The windship Pellucid heeled over, her sails filling as they caught the wind called the Mariah, one of the winds that blew so steadily across the Abandon that they had been mapped more than a century before: the Mariah, the Medusa, and the Mother of Angels, which had another name among windship crews.

[I have a finished draft at 9,600 words and the strong feeling that something is missing. Also the strong feeling that the story is embarrassingly bad and should not see the light of day. I seem to be suffering from that a lot lately. Note to self: getting dumped by your publisher and forced to change your name to get anyone to touch your pariah-like self is apparently very bad for the ego.

[Further note for the audience at home: there's a reason narcotics are commonly called downers.]

7. Extract from "'I opened the book and read': Self-Reflexivity and Self-Reinvention in Hôtel Image"
Within the novel Hôtel Image is the nightclub Hôtel Image, "dark, dubious, deviant" (15), and within the nightclub Hôtel Image is the novel Hôtel Image, prosaically bound in pea-green cloth.

[This is a kind of companion piece to "Extract from Pierre Lucerne," which I successfully sold to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry. It's not a poem, but it's not quite anything else, either. Probably I need to see if MSP is interested, since they bought the first one.]

8. [untitled]
RECORD OF DISCOVERY OF FIVE (5) CORPSES

[No title, but most of a plot, and a huge technical problem in how to write the damn thing. Speaking of things that aren't quite poems.]

9. "The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool"
The Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool, had been grounded for thirty years, since the successful implementation of Chen and Tiedemann's q-curve drive had made her and all her sisters obsolete.

[I'm not sure I'm ever going to figure out how to write this story. I have two drafts, both egregiously wrong, and no clue how to make it work. This seems to be what my brain thinks science fiction is for.]

10. "The Werewolf Laura Stiles"
Callum pushed back from his desk violently, as if physical distance could get him farther away from the collection of mistakes currently masquerading as the English 201 midterm.

[Finished draft, except (a.) it seems to think it's the first chapter of a novel, and (b.) the plot makes no sense of any kind. And (c.) again with the embarrassingly bad.]

11. Thirdhop Scarp
The current owner of Thirdhop Scarp claims that the name is a contraction of "third hope," but this is etymologically dubious in the extreme; still improbable but far more likely is the local explanation: that if you fall off the escarpment, you reach the bottom in three hops.

[This is the novella that will not die.]

12. The Marriage of True Minds
Sanspiro Base is a company town all the way.

[Another novella. Also science fiction, plus a number of other things. And I'm having trouble with voice, of all the stupid things to have trouble with.]

13. "Doc Holliday Makes a Deal"
I died on November 8, 1887. It was not a pleasant experience. Even less pleasant, however, was finding that death was not a permanent and irrevocable state of being in which a man could lie quiet and be eaten by worms as it pleased them. As it turned out, death was anything but.

[Shorthand here would be Doc Holliday, Demon Hunter. And I'm stuck because I don't know what name the Devil's using.]

14. "The Tale of Two Dead Mice"
Once upon a time, there were two dead mice, white and small and sleek.

[Plot? Hello?]

15. "The Queen in Winter"
There were five queens in the creche. Beulah, Pauline, Camille, Thelma, and Katrina. Beulah was the favorite, and one night after the nurses had gone to bed, the others ganged up on her. There were only four queens after that.

[Ditto.]

16. "The Skyscrapers of Bianch'Elen"
Long ago, in a world none of them can remember, the vampires were taught to dance.

[And ditto.]

17. [untitled]
The woman in my office had been dead for five days when I found her. The smell was unbearable, but the ghost was worse.

[And one more.]

18. The Second Son
On the twenty-fourth of April, Medraut dreamed of Loheris again.

[I know the mystery and the solution to the mystery. I just can't figure out how to write the actual scenes. Also, all the Eliot quotes are going to make this a right bastard to get permissions for, if I ever finish it anyway.]

19. Cormorant Child
With a shriek of protesting metal, the hatch opened, and Mule fell out of the palace-ship into the long grass of the Edrin Valley. He was trying to run before he made it to his feet.

[This is waiting (a.) for me to figure out the SFnal archaeology of the culture, and (b.) for a little more distance from The Goblin Emperor, because I really don't want to write ANOTHER book about the Problem of Kingship just at the moment.]

20. Blue Lace Agate
They hadn't caught the shoggoth larva smuggles yet, but the head of the BPI's southeast hub had other things on his mind: "And, ah, how are you and Sharpton doing, Keller?"

21. "Under Babylon"
Mick Sharpton's howl of outrage--"oh fuck no!"--was clearly audible in the junior agents' office.

22. "Crossing Styx"
"Think of it as a vacation," Jamie suggested. Mick's reply was physically impossible, but very creative.

23. "The Brides of Nyarlathotep"
The Renault case refused to break. Snapshots of the victims had gone up on the corkboard in the briefing room, one by one, and most of the agents in the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations' southeast hub could recite their names by heart: Lydia Renault, age 27; Mary Anne Sumner, age 24; Dale Kelton, age 25; Joella Barber, age 24. And they were waiting, sick and helpless, for number five.

[Mick and Jamie are waiting very patiently for me to get my shit together and tell some stories about them. Sorry, guys.]

24. Black Hart Circle
There were four in the game. Deep play, deeper than the pockets of at least two of them. Lydia Nash might be as collected as a woman choosing a new hat, but Esme Collier and Kori Fletcher were out of their depth, and Fan Carpenter didn't look any too comfortable either.

[I need some external conflict, or at least something for the other characters to be doing.]

25. "The Mercy Seat"
The terrible irony in Katharine Blood's name became apparent in her death.

26. "To Die for Moonlight"/"The Moon Key"
I cut off her head before I buried her.
OR
Queen Titania was dead.

[No working on other Booth stories until "Thirdhop Scarp" is cleared out of the goddamn way.]

27. "The Bone Jesus"

[Not sure I've got the right approach to this one, so original first line withdrawn.]

28. "The Kitsune's Tragedy"
My mother was kitsune. When I was born kitsune, too, she cursed the fates and slew the midwife and raised me as a daughter.

[I'd love to figure out how to make this one work, but so far, no dice.]

29. The Sidhetown Tigers
Jefferson Finch was a lousy pitcher, but he was the best we had.

[Emphatically ditto. I have the characters and the plot, but I cannot for the life of me get the world to make sense.]

30. [untitled]
It was noon before the new wheeler said anything to me.

[Talking horses! Eeee! But Draco and Hennessey have the second half of their plot, and nothing for the beginning. And I have no idea how to make their world plausible.]

31. [untitled]
When a full-bird Colonel of the Interstellar Military Corps, Medical Division, tells you that you're a miracle, you believe her.

[Another science fiction story. This one seems determined to be a bait-and-switch, and I don't know if I can pull it off.]

32. [untitled]
The crime-scene tape was gone from the basketball court.

[The problem with mysteries is, they have to have plots before you write them.]

33. [untitled]
"What are you doing, sister-wife?"

[Talking lions. But they have no plot at all. Nothing, actually, but this line.]

And this handful of novels, one of which should probably be my next book:

34. [untitled]
The Emperor's head hit the floor with a wet thud. The body stayed upright a moment longer, and then simply collapsed; the blood jetting out of its neck soaked Moth through before he could think to move.

[This is the walking-back-from-Mordor story.]

35. The House at the End of the World
When Sebastian Marlin became a man, there was no one to celebrate with.

[FtM transsexual becomes his father's seventh son. All hell breaks loose.]

36. The White Devil
Since I was a little girl, I've always told my father my dreams. Except for one.

[The White Devil crossed with Tam Lin (both pameladean 's novel and the ballad) and Donna Tartt's The Secret History and done as Southern Gothic]

37. Dark Sister
Nephael cannot remember Heaven.

[Insanely ambitious project about an AU America in which, when the Puritans reach America, they discover angels (and devils) are real.]

38. Schrödinger's Parable of the Cat
Denise Blumenthal died on a beautiful spring morning in the polity of Greater Manhattan.

[Alternate universes; Lovecraftian science fiction; god knows what all]

---
*That's an Eddie Izzard quote, for those of you who don't recognize it.


And now I'm going to walk to the pharmacy for the first time since I broke my ankle. Viva l'independence!

Tony Harrison, "Long Distance II"

"Long Distance II"

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

--Tony Harrison
Continuous, London: Rex Collings, 1981

Day 73

I am CRUTCH-FREE! w00t!



Really, what else is there to say?

Day 69

Tried going down to one oxycodone last night, vis-à-vis the RLS. It did not work. I am disheartened. Also draggy and exhausted and probably a Very Slow Loris Indeed.

On the plus side, PT is going well. My physical therapist is very encouraging. I'm down to one crutch, and we have hopes that I will be able to dispense with crutches entirely sometime next week. This would be a TREMENDOUS boon.

I'm doing better on other fronts: more energy, less nausea. The writing is kind of rocky, but not dramatically outside normal parameters. "Thirdhop Scarp," the Booth story I've been working on since approximately the dawn of time, is now 16,000 words long, and it's not what you could even call close to being finished. It is obviously a novella, which explains why it would not work when I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette.*

I did not want to write a novella (which would be why I kept stubbornly trying to make it a novelette), as there is practically no market for them, but the story does not care. And I would much rather it be a good, even if unsaleable, novella, than a bad (and therefore even more unsaleable and also embarrassing) novelette.

Actually, at the moment, what I want is for it to be a finished novella. We can work on "good" later.

Writing. Still, blessedly, not performance art.

---
*Definitions by word lengths here, courtesy of SFWA. Personally, I hate the word "novelette," but if we're going to make artificial distinctions by word length (which, obviously, we are), we have to call them something. I have a tendency to write novelettes, particularly, though not exclusively, with Booth, and I admit, I do not think of, for instance, "The Wall of Clouds," as a short story.

Also please note, while I'm being cantankerous, that "novelette" is another English word, like "cigarette," "kitchenette," "Rockette," etc., that provides a useful clue as to the pronunciation of my surname. You don't say it "novel-ay," do you?

Storytellers Unplugged for October

"The Wonderfulness of ...," about I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is up. We shall celebrate with my favorite MfU icon.