Allison Hurd's Blog

Be Punk AF

In my first year of law school, one professor paced the front of class, waiting for news about whether there was a stay of execution for a man sentenced to death.

“Let this be a lesson,” he said as the tension left his body upon hearing that the stay had been granted, “that what we do here has very real consequences.”

That same term, in another course, we discussed a real event where people’s loved ones had been buried in the wrong grave plots, and how distressed the families were to find that the headstone they had been tending did not mark the resting place of their dearly departed. After identifying all of the things that had gone wrong, all of the possible responses the families could make, the professor said, “it’s illegal to disinter people in that state. What remedy could you, as the lawyer for the families, offer?”

She makes it look so easy!

And into the stunned silence of the classroom he said “always keep in mind the goal of your clients. What is fair and what is possible are not always the same.”

As you can tell, these lessons really stuck with me.

Though God forbid I ever find myself in a position where my words are what keep someone alive, or have to provide solace to dozens of distraught families, I think these two instances provide a lot of context for me–not just professionally, where I must remember always who I am seeking to protect and how I can achieve that, but personally.

What we say has consequences. And sometimes being right is not the same as getting what we want.

It can feel so obvious and important and perhaps even necessary to try to make someone see our point of view, to agree with us, to absolve us, to like us, even. Especially online, arguing is just so simple. But there are consequences. Communities fall apart, individual people have panic attacks because of the rage machine that turned on them, victims commit suicide…it’s all digital, but there are organic components involved, and we’re all linked to them.

And for what? When we argue, what are we looking to achieve?

If you want to change minds, that’s rarely if ever done via argument, particularly not online.

Oh, lawd, this looks familiar!

If you want to be absolved, that is never achieved via the double down. Unless you are a dictator with an army behind you, trying to smother someone into conceding you’re good does not work.

There are other tools for these things. They are harder than being angry. They do not look like victory. They don’t feel like victory. But they work much better at obtaining the goal. So what’s more important? Feeling vindicated? Or achieving the goal?

These are things I ask myself before I wade in. Oftentimes if I’m arguing it’s because I know that there is someone who feels hurt and jeopardized who needs a champion, and I can be that. But the goal then isn’t to be vindicated, it’s to get the hurtful person to leave, and to make it clear to those affected that we see the hurtful behavior and it’s not okay. That’s it. My entire goal is to get the harm to stop.

It SUCKS! It really sucks. I want to eviscerate the person who dares to hurt my loved ones. I want to dismantle bigotry and fear and learned trauma and fix it all my own self with a few cunning lines. I wish life were like videogames, where you can convince someone by asking questions in the correct order. Like Arthur in The Once and Future King I would pray that i could confront all evil myself to be conquered at once, or so that I alone suffered. But that is impossible, people are messy, and all of us are sure we know best. So what is the next best outcome? What is important here?

I wish I could tell you that I was always successful in keeping to my goals, but I’m a person, too. Even in my rage, I do try to remember that all of us are just people, with bad days and pain points and trauma responses, and that kindness for the most possible people is paramount.

It’s critical to me that I try to keep this in mind.

Because everything I do, even on a small scale, has consequences. And what is fair, and what is possible are almost never the same outcome. So all I can do is stick to my goals, and measure my success in the progress I see as the world changes.

Hey, thanks!

Quite tickled to say that my book club members have nominated Feeding Frenzy for the group poll. Thanks for your faith and friendship! While I don’t think I have the same amount of buzz built up to surpass Steven Brust in the poll, I am sweetening the pot by having a sale on the first book in the series from the 4th to the 8th of February, so come grab it for a buck! Or, you know, go vote. That’s a free way to support me and it’s very much appreciated.

Book three is in the final editing stages, and a cover is starting to come together! I can’t wait to announce more, stay tuned and book hugs to you all!

 

 

Little Reminders (And F*** Gendered Gifts)

Today I am tired and feeling like I wish a mother****** would, so we’ll keep this short.

Let this be your semi-annual reminder that “sorry” is a great word to have in your vocabulary because without it we are all just bullies looking to beat the other person into submitting to the pain we inflict on them. Sorry recognizes the other person’s humanity and defers to it.

Let us also remember that there’s nothing fucking inherent in sex chromosomes that means someone likes cooking, cleaning, caretaking, camping, or craft beers as a factor of their genitalia, and nothing about genitalia that guarantees anything about gender. I’m looking at you, ads for Valentine’s Day gifts. Give yourself the gift of gender expression beyond what you see in a Macy’s catalog this year.

Just in case you forgot what your gender was and where it’s allowed to shop.

And finally,  remember that it’s okay not to be okay, but watch for when that turns into “never okay.” It’s okay to be sad, angry, or overwhelmed. It’s okay to feel happy when things are sad, enraging or overwhelming, too. To be human is to feel moments like these. But like with anything, please, please tell someone if you’re spending what feels like too much time being not okay, or distanced from the things you’re feeling. We are social, and social creatures need to lean on friends and loved ones sometimes. It’s okay. We’re all figuring it out together.

There’s A Place For Us

With Martin Luther King Jr. Day before us, and so many recent upsets wherein I’ve learned that people–creators, community members, media icons–have expressed publicly that they do not believe that all people should be granted dignity, I have been thinking about the nature of service and our identities.

While this is definitely a moment for people of color, I want to take a further moment to talk gender, especially as the intersection of race and gender is so fraught. The further we get from easy buckets, the harsher the punishment for that social transgression, it seems. So I hope while contemplating service, the increase of hate crimes, and how we as good people can fight oppression of people of color, you’ll also take a moment to apply Dr. King’s principles to protecting our trans and nonbinary folx, particularly those who don’t benefit from white or straight privilege.

I like hosting. I like making others feel welcome where I am, feel safe, unburdened, allowed to be who they are even if that person is silly, or sensitive or new. I find the joy of giving back to those who trust me with these selves, these precious individuals who satisfy every person’s paradox: unique, and exactly the same as the rest of us.

One of the acts of service I would like to perform today is to share my own personal journey with identity.

Don’t get it twisted, I am cis-het. I exist and have always existed in a space that society finds comfortable. I am identifiably feminine in appearance, a performance I enjoy, and am married to a cis-man. No, my story today isn’t one of embracing myself despite society, it is a declaration that we all claim these parts of us, even if the moments we affirm our identity are cumulative, or small and private, not needing to overcome presumptions people make for us.

Me, shortly before my first engagement.

I’ve known I’ve liked boys longer than I was sure I was a girl. Some of my earliest memories are of flirting ridiculously with the neighborhood boys when I was maybe two years old. Of course, I didn’t know what that all meant, but I knew that I wanted to be married, that I wanted it to be a boy I was with, and that I felt differently about boys than girls. Not in any sexual way, so early, but it was obvious to me that this is what I would one day want. Indeed, I think I was “married” twice before I started kindergarten, when cooties became something we feared. I wonder if teachers started that trend to keep children from marrying left and right in the classroom.

But girl I wasn’t sure about. Girls were princesses with long hair and delicate fingers. Girls cried all the time, couldn’t play with the boys–indeed it seemed all they could do was have tea parties and do chores. It’s not that I didn’t like tea parties or dolls or that I was really into sports or anything, but I didn’t like to have my choices taken, and dresses were not at all good for running around. Tights and dress shoes were torture, and this was what I was told through media and the strange social osmosis of school that girls had to be.

Obviously, this is not entirely true, but these are momentous things for children, to have to learn to swim in a rip tide of culture where what we see with our own eyes, what we feel in our own hearts and what we are told by adults and peers clash in epic ways. Not just for children who are not gender conforming, but for all of us. Boys who learn that crying and hugs and snuggling your friends is bad, brothers and sisters who had played together being told that sharing games is weird, girls who learn that “cute” and “helpful” and “quiet” are as important to social success as doing your homework. It’s cultural quicksand, and none of us entirely escape.

So I wasn’t sure I was keen on this girl thing. There were a lot of rules, and I was very into playing in the woods which surrounded me, which was not one of the pre-arranged things I was allowed by my peers. I didn’t want rules, I wanted to be a princess or a kangaroo or a pioneer or one of the cool Power Rangers, forget the pink one. I resented the feeling that I had to choose one facet, which of course leads to so many “tomboy” or “I’ve always been better friends with boys” type outlooks that plague middle and high school ideologies.

Me, age 7 or 8 I think, after a disastrous hair curling experiment that seemed to confirm my ineligibility for girlhood.

Again, I’m not saying I escaped all of that in some way. But in third grade, I had a small epiphany. We sat in worktables, four of us in a square to make it easier to do team projects and hand in work. The teacher tried to make it two girls and two boys to a table, as best he could, so that there was no delineation in the class based on apparent gender. And the boy sitting next to me stopped someone from taking a paper away, saying “hold on, she needs one.”

What a stupid thing to remember! But I do, so clearly, the surge of pride that I was “she” with all that entailed. I remember a sort of vertigo as I connected that to other symbols. I was like my mother and my aunts. I was like their mothers. I could be seen as a mother figure myself, to nurture and protect, whose legends were tied in so many mythologies to the moon and the ocean and mystery. Someone who could also be protected, deferred to and respected. I was she, and would be woman, lady, mademoiselle.

It was just a moment. A nothing moment where my gender was acknowledged and I saw it on me for the first time fully, realizing that I had grown into it, and it fit me like a glove. Nothing had to change in how I played or who I had crushes on or what I did with my schoolwork. I accepted the weight and privilege of something offered to me by society, and knew it was mine to tailor and explore.

A powerful moment for one so young. I was still years from puberty and anything like romance. I would still have years grappling with the expectations of others and my place in the world, but I knew then, like a piece of the puzzle finally locking in place, something true about myself.

If a cis-girl can have that thunderbolt moment approximately 7 years after she begins to understand what gender is and how it works, I am sure there are other cis-girls who had it much later, and trans-girls who had it way sooner and everything in between. I won’t say that gender is entirely cultural, because I’m not sure I believe that, but I do believe that it is intensely personal and at least as much a decision we make as it is an accident of birth. No one has the right to come to that decision for someone else or deprive them of that moment of clarity. We are who we are. No amount of condemnation changes our truths, only our ability to express it healthfully.

Image by Úrsula Madariaga

So, wherever you are in your personal journey, however it manifests, let me say I see and love you. I hope all of us find places in this world that fit and grow with us, and that one day soon, this struggle is only personal. That is enough of a battle. It is enough. We are enough.

Reflecting on 2019 with 2020 Hindsight

In many ways, 2019 was a year of treading water for me. There were accomplishments, milestones, victories and losses but the revolution of the sun and of myself was mostly in an ability to stand my ground.

In the personal, we lost my grandfather-in-law, the adopted grandparent who loved and guided us, who united my spouse and me in marriage, and who made sure his wife never wanted or worried. We still have her, and through the vagaries of fate, are now attempting to give her what he did in terms of peace. But I’ve also strengthened friendships, reunited with far flung family, and made sure that my boundaries are intact. I’ve prioritized the things that make me feel whole, like exercise, creativity, and music.

In the political that becomes personal, I watched as a third of my country debated whether or not I was person enough to get the rights my foremothers had secured. I watched people attempt to revoke the personhood of my friends and loved ones. I held my friends’ hands as they whispered their fears, as they sat stunned after someone in their life was attacked, lost, or embroiled, and promised them over and over my support, my voice, and whatever power I had to keep the tide from ripping them out to sea. Once we spoke of building ships and bridges so that the sea was not an obstacle but a thing to be marveled in. Now we congratulate each other for staying on solid ground. It is a hard thing, to have turned the entire army towards a new battle, only to find that all the wars you thought you’d settled have rekindled. Bigotry is a form of necromancy, I am convinced.

In the professional, I had more progress, though even that was stilted. My day job is satisfying, interesting, intellectually stimulating, and safe. In writing, I finished book three, sent it out for beta reading, and started a new book project. It took me a year longer to finish the book than intended, but in a year where gains seem to slip away from me, bulling through the last chapters and typing THE END with firm intention still felt like a win. I’m really eager to share this book with you, as I think it might resonate with us, if your year felt at all like mine.

What I did measure as progress this year was in my literary world. Book done: check! Book club flourishing: check! Prioritizing reading: check! Achieving parity in the gender of authors whose books I read: check! Engaging more in the fandom: check!

The GoodReads book club I co-moderate, the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club, saw a huge increase in participation and membership. I am so grateful for the kindness, intelligence, enthusiasm, and humor of my friends there. I’ve found such support and kind help, along with so many wonderful books and worlds to escape to. I went to a convention for readers and joined the organization that runs it in the hope that we can continue the same spirit I’ve come to love online in the physical space as well. And while on average since leaving school, I’ve read about 50 books a year, this year I read 105 books.

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Our new logo, thanks to Jessica Woodard!

Here are the books that I loved last year:

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange — a few years ago I asked a friend what authors she found to be pivotal to her, and Ms. Shange’s name came up. This was available from my library, so I went in blind and could not have been more enraptured. A sweet story of hope, familial love, an era of change and finding yourself with confident, beautiful writing that feels like a friendly hand on your shoulder.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake

Shange — I needed more by this author and was not disappointed. This is actually a theatrical script, part ballet, part spoken word epic poem, part play, it’s wholly unique and cuts deep.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke — This is a chonkster of a book. Slow, dreamy, and blending things I enjoy very much like Regency slice of life novels and dark fairy tales. If you like Jane Austen and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, maybe give this a try. I listened to it while spending all day cooking and it was simply perfect to lose yourself in.

The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley — A searing retelling of Beowulf, this book mixes the classic epic poem style of oral history with the modern and weaves between the two a story as old as time that is at once familiar, vital, and so, so troubling. This is a work of art, and while I did have a few quibbles with it, the vision and mastery it shows over the concepts it invokes is just a marvel.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik — another book that mixed together the eternal story of privilege meets limitation, the strength of sisterhood, and dark fairy tales. I really enjoyed that this book witnessed women very different from our normal heroines, including people of Jewish faith.

Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey — In a world where the media keeps telling us how disparate and vile we are, this book was an oasis. The plot is small, the heroes plain, and the story is mostly in the goodness of the characters. A perfect thing to escape into and find threads of hope.

Becoming by Michelle Obama — I think this book is a must-read for women. I loved her pride in her identity, her tenacity, the love that was evident for her family, her partner, her mission and her values. I loved how relatable she was despite the heights she’s explored. I thought it would be too hard to read this now, but aside from the opening and the ending, I was engaged rather than misty-eyed.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker– I was late to this, both in reading it and in learning about the author’s strange allegiances, but credit where credit’s due, this book is sublime. I loved how personal it made the political, how it boldly stated that women, people of color, and queer people (separately and all at once) have always been here, and can enjoy love, freedom, and pain, just like everyone else.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers —

Riffing off ofthe first book in the loosely-affiliated Wayfarer series, this book explores what it means to be human, and is a gorgeous exploration of homecoming, intricately woven to compare and contrast different ideas in a way that merely explores without offering unwanted advice.

No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin — A collection of blog posts and essays by the late great Le Guin, these all capture small yet profound moments in our shared human experience, expressed as always with the clarity, grace, humor and rage of this beloved author.

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett — I ration the Discworld books as treats to myself when I know I need a boost. Replete with his signature wit and sarcasm, this is an exploration of belief, power, and the extreme peaks and valleys of humanity.

I think what I learned from all these books, if I distill it, is that we are stronger together, that hope and hardship are constant companions, and that contentment and security are valid ambitions. It can take as much energy to remain in place in a stormy sea as it does to set a record for an Olympic 800-meter gold. So I hope no matter what your year brought or what 2020 has in store, you take time to be kind to yourself, to make a harbor for someone to rest in, and that you end stronger and wiser than you were before.

Happy 2020 my friends, I keep you all in my heart.

Image by Dominika Roseclay

Us, You, Me

Hi all!

I try to do these weekly, but I’m finishing up book three, starting a new project, it’s the holidays and frankly life is quite busy. So expect updates to be a bit more sparse for awhile. You can always find me on various social media, like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter (and Goodreads, of course!) if you want to see what’s going on in my worlds. (Links on the right!)

For now let me say, try to be kind. Please. There are so many ways things can take sharp left turns and you just never know when those will be, or who just had one. You don’t have to like everyone, you don’t have to be friends with everyone, but there’s no cause for being cruel.

For me, I abide by a simple hierarchy that I learned in third grade from The Music Man, of all places. In it, Marian is a sharp-eyed music teacher waiting for love. And she says this great line:

“I would like him to be more interested in me

Than he’s in himself and more interested in us than in me.”

She’s talking romantic love, of course, but I think this works well for all relationships you want to foster. Treat the other person like the most interesting thing in your life. Listen actively, engage, encourage, support. But remember that relationships are always a compromise, so set boundaries, know when to apologize, to demand apology, to take space for yourself, to state your needs.

If we do this whenever confronted with conflict, the resolution becomes quite obvious. I have to do what is necessary to preserve the relationship, to show care for the other person, and last of all is my ego. That’s it. That’s the heart of it for me.

I hope you all have a support system that recognizes you and your relationships. I hope you feel safe in asking for kindness and confident that you will receive it. And I hope you recall that kindness and niceness are separate. You do not need to avoid conflict to be kind, but neither should conflict be ongoing.

I think that’s enough of a sermon for now. I’m off to mentally unplug for a bit. Have a great week and let me know how you like to be supported or what relationships have shown the most commitment to you!

 

 

Grateful That You’re Great!

It’s my most favorite holiday of the year! Happy Thanksgiving!

There’s always a bit of a conversation in the United States about Thanksgiving because on the one hand, it is a reminder of some very imperialist, negative things that our ancestors did.

But on the other hand, it’s a time to get together with loved ones and have no commitment except to feel grateful. Unlike Christmas and Valentine’s Days with their gifts, or Labor and Memorial Day with their connotations of war, Thanksgiving is a time to sit back, focus on food, drink and being near loved ones.

For me, it’s also my partner and my anniversary. This is sixteen years with my person, who is always high on my list of blessings.

This year I am grateful for work that challenges and fulfills me, for creative efforts that continue to enrich me, for community that lifts me up, and an environment that brings me peace.

As part of the community I mention, thank you all for sharing your thoughts and laughs with me over the past year. I count myself fortunate indeed to have such wonderful people in my life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

What are you thankful for?

YA Is A Useless Genre

I bet you came here ready to have a fight. But please, let me assure you that I have no beef with “YA” books. I just think it’s a rating, not a genre.

YA stands for “Young Adult” and was initially used by bookstores and libraries to provide a space for readers who were no longer children looking for picture books or reading levels for single digit age groups, but who might not be ready to read just everything the bookstore might have to offer. The idea is that 10-14 year olds don’t have to go to the children’s section and embarrass themselves among their peers, but their parents can be more or less certain that graphic sex or violence will not be shoved under their kids’ noses.

All well and good. This is a huge portion of the market, not just because so many people in this age group are spending their pocket money on books, but also because so many adults, too, through nostalgia and a similar yearning for books that are just fun and engrossing without being gross, really like to peruse books aimed at this group.

The issue is that through a series of events including mimicry, prolific authors, and reader expectations, people have started to identify this rating system with a genre. There are tropes that are quite common for this age group: coming of age stories, teens conquering the establishment, love triangles, and also writing styles we associate–like flowery or “purple” prose, more “surface level” or simplistic writing styles that are very easily consumed etc.

And this is where things start to go haywire.

Coming of age stories, like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie? Is that YA?

Teens conquering the establishment, like Red Sister by Mark Lawrence?

Love triangles, like Deathless by Cat Valente?

Purple prose like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser by Fritz Leiber?

Simple writing like Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey?

It is utter tomfoolery to say that things that are remotely similar to those tropes are YA simply because they include those elements. We can think of a name for a subgenre for writing in this style, but boy howdy would it be a mistake to give a lot of books that could qualify to tweens. Even books that check off all the boxes, like RF Kuang’s award nominated Poppy War and Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” are not the sort of thing I’d give to a 12 year old unsupervised, though they are things I think make use of the emotive genre’s writing style.

Simple writing isn’t necessarily bad writing. People drool on themselves looking at Picassos even though I think we all know a few motivated kindergartners who can employ similar use of color and lines. Coming of age stories can be extremely relevant to full adults and not really suitable at all for people who are still in the midst of their transformation. The movie Closer has some of the most notable love triangles I’ve ever seen, but I think I’d have a heart attack if that was enough reason for it to be in the “Teen Drama” section of Netflix that my baby cousin might peruse, alongside My Hero Academia.

So what is it that makes these books feel like they belong to a genre other than some version of adult fantasy?

Like I mentioned earlier, there is a sort of genre-esque element in combinations of attributes, and I’d love for someone to name it. Purple prose fantasy or Emotive fantasy or something might capture it well enough without accidentally shocking the hell out of some 11 year olds (and let’s be honest, more so their parents.) There is a sort of style to this, like there’s a style including graphic body horror in grimdark books. There are rhythms, like we have with the rise and fall of the story in a quest fantasy. And it makes sense that we’d see those similarities and label a box for them.

I think a lot of this is perception, not just of the style of writing, but about the people who read stories like this, and I think a lot of that has to do with sexism, racism, and homophobia. We think of twitterpated girls reading Twilight, and the unsophisticated reader (who in our imagination might again be a woman) who just “doesn’t know better” who might prefer Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings. But liking a certain type of story, or having a certain type of identity certainly isn’t indicative of actual quality (or lack thereof), right? It would be asinine to say that things women and girls like are bad just because they’re liked by women and girls, right? It would make no sense to condemn someone for liking 1980s cult classic movies more than JJ Abrams works, would it?

But that sure is the sentiment. That is the perception of people who can find enjoyment in things that are less literary, or books which might indulge a bit in more emotive descriptions. Unless, of course, the work is by a man for men and boys. And then it’s just your run of the mill superhero or quest fantasy. Then the prose is beautiful, the love interests romantic, and any failings in quality hearken back to an earlier time which we apparently must just allow because “things were different.” There seems to be a rather obvious gap between what is a classic, and what is for a child.

This might feel like a hard pill to swallow. But name me a man whose works are definitely considered YA who did not actively say that he was writing for children or teens. The magical realism and mythical based works from African and South American authors, how many of them are considered “serious” or “adult” fiction?

This is not to say that people who don’t like these books, or who would give anything like this to their tween family and friends are bad people. And possibly it’s just because we don’t have a good subgenre name available for this sort of book, so we lump it with things that are similar. But there’s a lot of bias against “YA” for adults, which makes it difficult for those books to win awards, become selected for book clubs, and generally to find audiences perhaps better suited to them than 10-14 year olds, which then condemns the author to needing a pen name, needing to actually write for that age group, thereby fulfilling the prophecy, or content themselves with mediocre careers lacking a solid audience.

And that’s a bullshit choice.

I urge you all to help me think of an appropriate subgenre name that allows us to move away from shelving books about war atrocity or baser aspects of human interactions as “YA”, and to think through what it is that you would actually feel confident giving to teens for their reading pleasure, versus a writing style you just don’t personally enjoy. How does that change a book’s classifications, if at all?

 

Impostor Syndrome Is A Con

This weekend I went to a local convention called Philcon, where I had the pleasure of attending several interesting panels, laughing at a lot of fandom humor, and getting my picture taken with Samuel R. Delany.

I went for a few reasons, namely it being a good excuse to go on an adventure with my parents, who are also creative, and to meet local folks who love this thing that I also love. On this score, it was exactly what I wanted, and I had a good time.

But what I kept noticing as I listened is that honestly, no one knows how any of this works. The subjectivity of it all is the only consistency, from querying authors or editors, to what makes a good hook or a believable story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a grandmaster of Science Fiction or a short story writer in your own imprint, we’re all just trying to share stories and our love for this art.

Which, even if it is frustrating, is sort of comforting, isn’t it? There are no impostors because everyone is someone’s version of “the perfect fit,” and all we can do is hope that we find each other at the right time. It’s frustrating that there isn’t a map to being a bestseller or even a one-time seller, but hey, we’re all here, we all love this passion of ours, and aside from being a jerk, there’s really no wrong way to participate in it. That’s quite uplifting, that sense that success is always one email away. Unsatisfying, maybe, but also a good reminder that success is more or less a matter of persistence than anything else.

When I got home, I returned to two things: a message from my co-moderator at the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club that we’d just hit 25,000 members, and a new one star review on my first book. How fitting a conclusion to my story, that you can do so much right, and still not be good enough. Or, and I like this version better, that you are doing enough and are good enough now, because someone’s preference is no real indication of your value at large, or your chance at excelling where you persist.

So, thank you to my incredible book club members for helping me find and become the community I was seeking, and panelists and Chip Delany and one star reviewers for reminding me that this hobby of mine is legitimate, that I am exactly where I ought to be, and that time spent is all that is missing between where I am and where I’d like to be.

Keep making art, keep learning and practicing and trying, because unlike Yoda said, there is so much try out there, and it is by trying that we “do.”

Chuck Wendig, author AND motivational speaker.

Cars Are For SINGING

Pleased to report that so far most of the beta reader notes I’ve gotten so far are threats of loss of friendship if anything bad happens to the side characters, which is really the ultimate goal of anyone writing side characters.

I’m preparing to start book four and Secret Other Manuscript (SOM) but mostly I’ve been traveling around for weddings and family gatherings this month, which has given me plenty of time to contemplate what music I never need to hear again.

When you’re driving around, and your car has decided that your phone is “an accessory” that it just will not recognize, you try to make friends with the local radio stations. So, first, a tip of the hat to Boston, which not only seems to have the greatest quantity of stations, but also the greatest assortment!

And a big, stern frown to New York City, where I guess everyone has cars that don’t think they’re too snooty for their phones and no one listens to the radio.

Okay, here are the songs I never need to hear again:

Pour Some Sugar On Me – Only if it’s molten, and you won’t take a hint, Def Leppard.

Rock and Roll All Night – I mean, it’s hokey, isn’t it? KISS isn’t doing anything all night anymore are they? Maybe getting up to pee.

Old Time Rock and Roll – I say this as a Seger fan, but no one, and I mean no one, misses “old time rock and roll” SO MUCH that they’d rather listen to a song talking about how old it is rather than, you know, the rock and roll we miss.

All songs by Sublime – I don’t practice Santeria, but if Love Is All I’ve Got, it’s really The Wrong Way, I think.

Dude Looks Like A Lady – They have so many songs, and have done some great things, do we really need to play the transphobic one?

Forever Young – No thanks! Is there a “forever pain free” song though? Young is a lot of effort, I just don’t like injuring myself sneezing.

Come On Feel the Noize – Feel it? I don’t even want to hear it!

Newer songs than this, please!

And honorable mention, I’d like to hear different songs by Sting & the Police and Bon Jovi. I can’t be sure, since I’ve never heard them, but I have a strong suspicion that they each have more than 4 songs they play? I’m guessing?

What music do you never need to hear again?