Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 173

In Which I Try To Take A Shower Without The House Erupting

Me: *just stepped out of shower and into towel* Get off my bed.

Odd Trundles: BUT I MISSED YOU!

Me: I was in the shower. The bathroom door was wide open. Get off my bed.

Odd: I MISSED YOU, I NEEDED COMFORT.

Me: Get off my–oh my God.

Odd: I DON’T FEEL GOOD.

Me: You ate my shoe!

Odd: WHAT? I DON’T FEEL GOOD. I THINK I MIGHT BARF.

Me: GET OFF MY BED.

Odd: WHY’RE YOU YELLING? *urps* *tries to swallow shoelace again* WHAT’S IN MY MOUTH?

Me: *grabs shoelace* GET OFF MY BED!

Odd: DON’T YELL AT ME, IT HURTS MY FEELINGS. HEY, WHAT’S THAT?

Me: *holding dripping shoelace* OFF. NOW.

Odd: WILL WE PLAY TUG? IT’S MY FAVOURITE GAME. ONLY I DON’T FEEL GOOD. BUT I’LL TRY.

Miss B: IS THAT VOMIT? DO I SMELL VOMIT? HAS VOMITING OCCURRED WITHOUT MY PERMISSION? I MUST INVESTIGATE!

Me: Shut up–

Miss B: HE’S ON THE BED! HOW COME I’M NOT ON THE BED?

Me: Because you tried to kill me by tripping me when I got out of the shower.

Miss B: THAT WAS YOU? HE DOESN’T LOOK SO GOOD…

Odd Trundles: *barfs* *all over bed* *and carpet* *and my feet*

Me: Oh, for God’s sake!

Miss B: LOOK! I’M QUEEN OF THE BED!

Odd Trundles: *evidently feeling lighter and MUCH relieved* MY FAVOURITE GAME! *piles onto bed*

Me: GET OFF THE MOTHERFUCKING BED, BOTH OF YOU!

Both dogs: EEEEK! MOM’S PLAYING TOO! *tear down hallway* *tear back* *leap back on bed* *wrestle and produce ear-scrubbing noise*

Me: …

I came back (after washing my feet and getting dressed) to clean the sludge up, only to find that someone had eaten the bits of half-digested kibble. Whoever it was had, though, kindly left the other shoelace and some of the liquid.

I might have been grateful, but they were both on my bed, worn out after wrestling and growling, and half asleep.

So I sent them outside, where they pressed their noses against the French door on the deck and silently beamed YOU ARE SO CROOOOOL AND UNJUST at me while I stripped the bed. Guess I have to scrub the carpet too. Again.

*headdesk*

Concerning SquirrelTerror

It appears that if I want to resurrect the SquirrelTerror chronicles, I’m going to have to go on the Wayback Machine or something. *sigh* I’m not sure I can, or will, do all that. I don’t have the time to go combing through and copy-pasting them, though I would like to put them together in an ebook or even a slim paper volume.

Ugh.

It’s sad because I lost sooooo much when my site was hacked. It’s upsetting. I thought I could resurrect some things–like the Pyrrhic Victory of Pelennor Sunroom–from a SQL dump, but no dice. This is me banging my head on a keyboard and cursing the fact that some people are jackasses whose only joy is destruction.

Truth be told I’m thinking of retiring Squirrel!Terror stories for good. Napoleon is a hysterical little beast, and I like chronicling his ongoing adventures–and his, ahem, passion for his Josephine. I dislike having lost previous tales, though–and the pressure to write them more, harder, faster just makes me want to dig in my heels, despite being pleased at the obvious enjoyment of said adventures. I chronicle the Kingdom of Backyard for fun and to share, but to have people pressuring me or acting as if they’re entitled to have me produce the stories on their schedule is…well, it makes me contrary.

Still, I may eventually have to use the Wayback or something, and resurrect Neo’s adventures. If only for my own amusement. If I manage to get all the books I have on my docket done by the end of the year, that might be my Yule present to myself. My reward for working=more work! Hooray!

In any case, today I’m closing the castle, raising the drawbridge, and settling in to brush up and lay out Jeremy Gallow–that’s the trailer-park fae novel. He needs some attention if he’s going to go anywhere, and the work will stop him eating a hole in my head and complaining that his story has waited quite long enough, thank you.

Over and out.

photo by:


PhillipC

Considering Gatsby

It’s a nice cloudy morning, thank the gods. I was getting tired of that sunshine crap so early. It’s the Pacific Northwest, we pale mushrooms can’t take that sort of thing.

I’m ambivalent about the upcoming Gatsby film. The costumes and the party scenes are probably going to be divine, but I’ll most likely spend the entire thing annoyed at diCaprio and Maguire. Even going to Cinetopia and drinking my way through the thing doesn’t seem like a good idea. I might as well just Netflix the damn thing so I can sit at home, get my wine on, and throw popcorn at the screen every time diCaprio looks constipated or I wish Driver would come in and rescue Carey Mulligan. On the other hand it’s Baz Luhrmann, the man who did the Like A Virgin thing in Moulin Rouge. Which pretty much earned him my undying affection, even if he did get the massively uninteresting Jay-Z somehow deeply involved with the soundtrack.

I find myself longing for pre-Titanic diCaprio. Gilbert Grape. This Boy’s Life. Still, in the trailers he looks less…bloated…than he has in some other films. And Maguire, of course, is a type of Shia laBoeuf upgrade. Still annoying, but at least capable of acting sometimes when the right director tears it out of him. And even if Mulligan is incandescent the storyline leaves very little for her to work with, especially against such dragging weight.

In any case, costumes and parties. Luhrmann does spectacle very well, and maybe the man who made John Leguizamo into the Toulouse-Lautrec will coax something out of his leading men and a hot mess of a novel adaptation. Who knows?

It’s probably time for me to reread Gatsby again, come to think of it. I remember being bored and annoyed with Nick and Jordan the entire way through, wishing I could just hear from Daisy. Even at that tender age–I think I was 10 the first time I attempted it, and have read it three or four times since then–I had the idea that women in “literature” were often canvas screens for male authors to project a sort of fantasy upon.

Not much has changed, even with more novelists who happen to have innies instead of outies, so to speak. (Those women who do get published are often saddled with froufrou covers…) I think I’ve read maybe two male novelists in the past 15 years who manage to have female characters that aren’t at bottom a passive reflection of some male fantasy. Maybe Zelda Fitzgerald could have written marvelous things from Daisy’s point of view, but if she had, would it have received any attention at all? Let alone careful editing and posthumous veneration? (No, I’m not hoping someone else will tell the story from her viewpoint. Wide Sargasso Sea and Scarlett cured me forever of wishing such things.)

Anyway, I read lots of “classics” not for themselves, but to see the product of the times the author lived in, and furthermore to see allusions to them elsewhere. My own private Easter-egg hunts, as it were, through literature. I suppose the movie Gatsby will be somewhat the same–it’s not really about the movie, it’s more about what the movie says about our current state and preoccupations. Another play upon a screen, I guess; but it certainly helps to be conscious one is watching instead of taking it for truth.

Still, I wish someone would keep Jay-Z away from soundtracks. Sigh.

photo by:


Cia de Foto

In Which I Fail At Facebook

For a long time I had an “accept any fan who wanted to friend” policy over at FB. Sadly, I no longer can handle some of the inappropriate (and stalker-y) behaviour I was getting. It got to where I was dreading using social media at all, and the problem was compounded by the, ahem, shall we say, sort of cavalier attitude toward personal privacy FB displayed.

Things reached a head this past week, so I acted. I pruned my personal FB page pretty drastically, restricting it to people I actually know to some degree. Readers, fans, detractors and the like, can hang out on my sooper-official Author Page, and of course, you can still follow my personal page, but I have it under a variety of lockdown. I just can’t have the sort of stuff that was going on before. Marketing and fan service, as integral as they are to a long-term career, can’t be allowed to give one an ulcer or take over one’s writing time. The fence needs to go back up.

I suppose a little tighter control initially would have been a good idea, but I liked the thought that readers could interact with me there. It might have been better to start with everything locked down and not have to go through and prune my “friends” list one. by. one. But when have I ever done anything the easy way?

I can file this under Lesson Learned: you do not have to put up with bullshit, crazymaking, and scary on the Internet; blocking, moderating, and walking away are your friends. Of course this will only put a temporary divot in the plans of the truly cray-cray nutters who must register their dislike of me or my work with me personally, but I’ll enjoy the brief peace.

And now that I’ve finished that disagreeable duty, time for some lunch and to wader back into the space opera I’m playing with in lieu of working on Ruby’s story. I’m not ready for Ruby just yet, though the bits of her tale are bubbling and percolating in my fetid little subconscious swamp. Yummy!

photo by:


mamnaimie

Running, Vulnerable

Yesterday was my long run for the week. I didn’t take Miss B, because it was over 10K and I worry for her paws. Also, I knew I would need most if not all of my resources to keep going, with little left over to deal with her being interested in other dogs or chasing buses or whatnot. Plus, at about 8K she sort of gets the idea that we’re not going to catch anything, so she slows waaaaay dooooooown. Which is fine, normally I’m running for endurance, not speed. Still, anything near or over 10K is not for my running partner.

It struck me, while running through a park near the Little Prince’s burned-down school, that I was feeling odd. Not breathless, it was just a steady run, not a tempo or anything. It took me about a kilometer to figure it out.

Without Miss B, I felt…vulnerable.

I don’t just run with her to take the edge off her working drive so she can rest. I run with her because she’s good protection for a lone woman. Odd Trundles is so sweet-natured he’d probably be useless in a tussle, but not so my Aussie. Besides, Odd’s a sprinter. Dangerous over short distances…if you’re a bit of kibble. Miss B is fully capable of chasing someone down, and keeping them on the ground until I can get there.

Miss B alerts me to people walking ahead on our route, or odd things in bushes. She once flushed a guy hiding in some blackberries by lunging. (To this day I don’t know what the hell he was doing in there, since there were no berries. *shrug*) When I run alone, my “space” is invaded far more frequently. Males get a lot closer. Some of that is just the social training men receive to “own” a bigger chunk of sidewalk real estate. Other female joggers instinctively give me a wide berth, as I do in return. A woman with a stroller and a small kid will try to get off the pavement when she sees me coming, before I swing off into the grass or the bike lane. A lone man will sashay down the middle of the sidewalk, taking it all up as a matter of course, ninety-five percent of the time.

In a perfect world I’d be able to run without thinking about my chances of being assaulted. Since I don’t currently live with a man I’m emotionally involved with, I realize I’m statistically safer than a lot of other women. While I run, though, there’s the yelling out car windows. The inappropriate comments when I jog by guys doing yardwork or unloading their cars or even just walking by. About the only guys that don’t make some sort of comment when I pass–usually rating my attractiveness or getting pissy with me when I don’t respond to their greeting, because of course I exist to make nice at your sallies even while I’m doing a tempo run, right?–are themselves jogging or cycling and apparently saving their breath for other things. Even when I used to run at 5am there would be, at least once a week, a car horn or a scream out a car window, usually a comment of a sexual or suggestive nature.

You’d think, at 5am, everyone would be too tired to be assholes. Apparently not.

In a perfect world I wouldn’t feel vulnerable while running (except when I’m crossing the street because some people just don’t look where they’re piloting their tons of moving metal, OMG) or have to give my daughter the “if you set your drink down and take your eyes off it, GET A FRESH ONE, get into the habit of doing this now” when she attended her first school dance. In a perfect world I’d run with Miss B because she loves it and it gives her a job to do, because she’s happiest right next to me. In a perfect world I wouldn’t have to feel that tightness all through me when I’m in my own neighborhood enjoying the sunshine and I see a male human approaching from whatever direction.

We don’t live in a perfect world. We can work like hell for a better one, but we can’t afford to overlook how the world actually is at present.

Do I feel ridiculous sometimes, because I have to make this mental calculation whenever I go anywhere alone, or even when the doorbell rings? Yes. Do I wish it wasn’t necessary? Yes. Am I going to stop making these calculations? No. I realize I am relatively privileged, that I do not live in a war zone, so on, so forth. Does it mean I feel less vulnerable while doing something so simple as jogging alone, during daylight, wearing long pants and long sleeves (and how ridiculous that I have to note what I’m wearing, really?) and not doing a blessed thing to anyone?

No. It does not.

I run anyway, but the consideration of my vulnerability, trained into me by the society we live in and bolstered by the fact that I am a survivor of abuse, does not ever go away. How much faster and further could I run if I wasn’t forced to spend energy on that? I suspect I’ll never know, and that it will only get better slowly and incrementally over my lifetime, my children’s lifetimes, their children’s. (If they choose to have any, that is. OH MY GOD, SO NOT READY FOR THAT THOUGHT.) Still, I do the work for change that I can, investing in a better and safer world for my daughter, for everyone’s daughters. Taking what steps I can to have a full life and reasonably protect myself at the same time.

But I still feel vulnerable when I run.

photo by:


foxypar4

EAT YOUR SOUL

WE WILL EAT YOUR SOOOOOOOOUL.

I often take pictures of owls and send them to a friend. This one got a full 10 minutes of silence before my phone buzzed. “Is it just me or are they kind of creepy?”

To which I replied, “It’s not just you. They’re creepy as fuck.”

“Oh. Good. I wasn’t sure.”

*snort*

Six Months And Flinching

Happy Walpurgis. Tomorrow, of course, is Beltane, and that means sunlike sugar cookies, feasting, and blessing my new garden into growing, growing, growing.

Incidentally, now THIS is a cookbook. And a love story. Wow.

Work proceeds apace on Ruby’s book; also, Jeremy Gallow. It’s a funny thing, going back to bits one wrote more than six months ago and flinching. If one doesn’t sort-of-cringe when reading old work, seeing how it can be improved, one is most probably not improving as a writer. I don’t often reread my published works, except to get back into the flow of a series, because I am mightily tempted to get out the red pen. By the time a book is set in type, a bundle of time has flowed under the bridge, and I’ve acquired both more distance and a slightly clearer understanding of craft.

In other words, I never arrive, I just keep finding new destinations. Such is life.

The weather report says no rain for the next little while, and I dislike that intensely. It’s spring, we should be soggamous. I do a lot of my best work in the rain, I find it comforting. I’m always faintly amused by people who move to the Pacific Northwest and then complain about the lack of sunshine. What did you think you were going to get here? Seriously.

Anyway, today is for more speedwork while running–I am growing to hate speedwork and tempo runs almost as much as I hate interval training, but the results are good. I’m reliably turning in 10K without dying, and I might reach my goal of 10K in under 65min. If not, I’ll do the training program again, and again, until I get there. Smartphones, with GPS and the ability to have a playlist, have no doubt induced me to stick with running a lot longer than I would have otherwise. I haven’t been on the treadmill in ages, though I’m sure that during winters when Miss B gets older and no longer can handle trotting on concrete I’ll return to treadmill running with a vengeance.

Also, I should see what the next few turns of Gallow will bring. Thinking about the shape of the story while running is some of the best and most satisfying time I can spend. Even during speedwork…

photo by:


Kakakrokodil

Considerations

Finished the third (and maybe last) Bannon & Clare book, turned it into a reasonable first draft, and sent it to agent and editor last week. A difficult book, one of the first I finished in the new office and…well, I knew where it ended and I didn’t want it to end there. Fighting your own resistance is often the hardest battle.

Now there’s Ruby’s book (from Tales of Beauty & Madness) to think about, and I’ve set a personal goal of getting the first Jeremy Gallow (the trailer-park fey book) zero-drafted by the end of the year as well. *eyes calendar* *weeps a little* The latter is burning a hole in my head and actively wants to get out, so I guess it’s time. It will probably never sell, but I like the world and want to throttle the hero, so at least I’ll have fun.

Lately I’ve been running up against my own introversion. I’ve never liked marketing or anything that smacks of it. I always feel faintly dirty when considering questions of advertising or publicity. Also, conventions are problematic–childcare and travel costs are a huge bar to my attending, and the draining of being “on” and extroverted during them makes me tired just to contemplate. Not to mention the, ahem, fending off of unwanted advances and constantly worrying about questions of safety, since con culture has become (or maybe it always was) really problematic in that area. Now that the kids are older and I can sometimes bring them with me, I worry about the Princess’s safety in that environment, too, and it’s a heavy weight on the side of not going. It’s exhausting, and to top it off, all that sort of stuff cuts into writing time as well as raising-the-kids time.

Of course I worry that by avoiding marketing and conventions (and other travel/signing stuff) so much, I’m shooting myself in the foot. Can a midlist author afford not to do those things? Would I have an easier time with mortgage payments if I did them? Am I going to have to eventually pack in the writing and find a more, well, steady job that doesn’t involve waiting long periods of time for any payment at all? Questions, nagging questions, and right now I have no answer.

The Internet’s been a boon to single-parent writers, and to midlist authors as well. I can be here in my office and talk to readers daily, through the blog and social media. It raises visibility and makes it easier to have a core of readers to speak to, without having to travel, leave the kids, so on, so forth. The drawbacks are there, of course–trolls, stalkers, personal information being spread about if not jealously guarded, making for a certain amount of daily danger, lack of productivity through mistaking social media for actual work, you get the idea. All in all, though, I think a career like mine would definitely not be possible without it, and I’m grateful. It’s been a wonderful ride.

I’m not sure if it will continue for another decade, that ride, but I’ll certainly hold on for as long as I can. And this concludes my nattering on for a Monday.

Back to work, listening to the Divinyls and deciding what sort of trouble Ruby can get into…

photo by:


Musée McCord Museum

Now In Paper!

Guess what? Oh, come on, guess.

Many of you have often asked me if my ebook-only offerings from Orbit are going to show up in paper. And now…they have! They’re now available in trade paper, through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and indie bookstores. (You can even get signed copies through Cover to Cover.)

The cover price is a little higher than other trade paperbacks for a variety of reasons. But, in response to your asking, dear Readers, the publisher decided to go to paper.

I’m pretty thrilled–I don’t mind ebooks, of course, but we all know my thoughts on paper. And this bodes well for me being able to offer other books in this fashion in the future.

My lovely editor sent me copies for my collection this past week, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. There’s just something so nice about seeing them on the shelf with the others.

*dances with glee*

White Rabbit

Follow the white rabbit.

Am I the only one who sees the beginning of the first Matrix movie now and smiles fondly, thinking that the Wachowskis telegraphed everything in the first ten minutes? I can’t be. Still, it makes me happy to see that now, it’s a storyteller’s ruse.

Happy St. George’s Eve, everyone. (St. George’s Day.) Tonight’s the night vampires are most traditionally active. Look for blue glows over caches of buried treasure, but beware of wolves. And, you know, razor-licking Wallachian noblemen. Of course, if they’re Gary Oldman, that’s all right, right?

Today I sink back into the Ripper book, making it pretty for first-draft round. If I can get that done and sent off this week (bit early, but that’s good) I can turn my focus to Ruby’s book. I’m going to have to trust that she knows what she’s doing, that her story will come along as it needs to. Trusting the work is an ongoing process, and one I don’t know I’ll ever fully catch the hang of.

So, yeah. I am nervous about following that particular rabbit down the hole. I have a very foggy idea of what the story entails, but it doesn’t feel like enough. What would feel like enough, I wonder? The books never end up where you think they will, they never grow quite as they appear ready to, and by the end one has grown or shrunk with little control over the process.

No wonder we’re all mad here.

photo by:


AlicePopkorn