Tricia Sullivan's Blog, page 6

Double Vision

This is the second in a series of blogs exploring some aspects of my UK-published science fiction backlist, now available electronically through Orbit books.  (I have several other novels that are out of print, in case anyone reading thinks that Maul was my first novel. It was my fourth.) Today I'll write about Double Vision.



This book was originally titled Cookie Starfishes, after the behaviour of the protagonist (Cookie) who can stretch her consciousness across what she believes is interstellar space and also after the name of a fictional breakfast cereal.  Yeah, that’s what I said.

I was interested in ecosystems.  I’ve always been curious about mathematical modelling as a way of representing factors and forces we can’t directly apprehend, of tracking them and making them perceptible.  I kept wondering about the behaviour of ecosystems that aren’t biological, but ideational, informational.  When I thought about the world I had grown up in (and much of my youth was spent watching TV), I had the itchy feeling that an ideational  system was being built that wasn’t under the control of its creators; indeed, it didn’t even seem to be within the perception of its creators. I wanted to bring this itch into some kind of focus for myself.

I called the system The Grid in honour of Tron, because after all the book is set in 1984 and when I thought of SF of that time period the luminous graph-paper cyberspace of that movie came to mind (I've never seen it, oddly enough).  But my Grid was not cold.  It seethed with life, not to mention consciousness.  And we could only see it through the eyes of Cookie.

When I first began writing about Cookie, she was a white man in an abortive short story.  The only things the original character had in common with Cookie were his weight and his SF fan status, and those things were there because I wanted a dramatic disconnect between the protagonist's day-to-day life as a sedentary corporate drone and his ideational life as a flier in an alien war.  But he was soulless.  I soon realised this was because I’d conceived him straight out of a stereotype; he wasn’t a person.  So I decided to write about a black woman, because, hello, SF? Where were your black women? Few and far between. Once I made that decision I became nervous and uncomfortable about what I was doing, but this seemed like a better place to be. Suddenly I had a character who was talking back to me.

At the time I was writing Double Vision I was going through a hard phase with a baby son who demanded more energy than I had (I literally could not keep weight on), and our living situation was unstable. It was fraught, actually. There was enough money for food and minimal heat, full stop.  Our dial-up internet was rarely used and I often went weeks without talking to another human being apart from my partner.  I coped by bundling my son in a waterproof pushchair or backpack and walking for several miles a day. The physical discipline kept me from cracking up. 

I thought about survival: what it means, how we do it, where it diverges from what is called victory.

I made my soldiers female, and while I was writing I kept comparing my own experiences as a stressed-out mother with theirs. Until I’d had children I’d never really felt particularly womanly and there was a part of me that didn’t quite accept being female—maybe because I identified with strength and self-reliance, and women generally seemed to be short-changed in that department.  After going through pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding and all the usual I started to redefine my ideas about what strength can be, and I began to question the validity of self-reliance. Having a baby totally dependent on me restricted me, stretched me, changed me—and it made the me of me at times irrelevant. I began to see myself as part of a larger system whose inner workings were mysterious.  All of this fed into the way I wrote about the Grid.

Here’s an excerpt from the point of view of Serge, one of the soldiers who has inadvertently reproduced within the generative intelligence that is the Grid; she now has nine alien children.

            They took her to the place where the missile had fallen. It didn’t look the same to her now. She was still aware of all the misfit equipment arranged above the dust bowl, but the importance of the human artifacts seemed reduced in her new eyes. She noticed now that the Grid was woven into a spiderweb, a concentric series of irregular rings crosshatched with pulsing beams of something forever caught in a state halfway between solid matter and sheer light. And she knew what had happened because the Grid’s memory was a part of Serge: it lay in the bottom of her lungs, the coming of the MF missile with intent to destroy all life at the logic mines and being instead itself pulled down by the defensive system that these little girls had created.

            Oh, they had built it, for sure.  Six would have provided that aptitude in his ejaculate.

            They had sacrificed miles of the Grid’s sinew, wedded it to stolen stereo components and transistors, poached body parts thrown in for good measure; and now by the will of the Grid, whatever that was, the dead zone was coming alive in some sneaky and hard-to-fathom way.

            The girls went down into the dust, proud of their creation.

            She looked at them, jerky little Sergettes with music around them like a smell.

            She was no longer wanting to have them exterminated.

            She was well and truly screwed.  What good was she, Captain Bonny Serge, with the Grid leading her around by the nose, literally? Information hung in the air.  It thrummed in the branches. It simmered in the well. She was just another storehouse, a mobile one, but a member of the club now all the same.

            ‘Holy Poobah,’ said Serge. ‘I’ll never be just me again. I’ll never be an individual. From here on out, I’m always part of something else, something alive.’

            She paused, chewing her lip.

            ‘I don’t like that.’

            My next blog in this series will be about some of the racial and cultural issues that I messed up in these novels, and what I’m learning from the mistakes I made.

Thunder and Lightning

A couple of weeks ago I got hold of Natalie Goldberg’s Thunder and Lightning.  Natalie, of course, is a Zen Buddhist who uses writing as a spiritual practice.  I have been wanting to share this bit with you guys for some time, and I finally had a few minutes so here it is.  I don’t think I need to explain.  Just read it:

‘I never gained control of my mind—how do you dominate an ocean?—but I began to form a real relationship with it.  Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, “I can’t do this, I’m bored, I hate myself, I’m no good, I can’t sit still, who do I think I am?” I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of life—“Natalie, you can’t write shit”—when, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain.  Yes, even people with terrific, supportive parents are inhabited by this blabbing, resistant mouthpiece.  But as I wrote longer, went deeper, I realized its true purpose: monkey mind is the guardian at the gate.  We have to prove our mettle, our determination, stand up to its nagging, shrewish cry, before it surrenders the hidden jewels.  And what are those jewels?  Our own human core and heart, of course.’

Natalie Goldberg, for me right now this is gold! Thank you.

She goes on, ‘I’ve seen it over and over.  The nearer I get to expressing my essence, the louder, more zealous that belittling voice becomes. It has been helpful to understand it not as a diminishing parent but as something universal, impersonal, a kind of spiritual test. Then I don’t have to wither or sneak away from censoring dad, carping mom, or severe schoolteacher with sunken chest when I hear that onerous yell.  Instead, it is my signal to perservere and plow through. Charge! I scream with pen unlanced.’

I hope this can be of use to some of my writer friends.  Unlance your pens!

Announcement & a sample from MAUL

Today I'm over on the Orbit books blog talking about the release of Lightborn, Sound Mind, Double Vision and Maul in electronic format.  None of these books have been available for e-readers until now, so I'm very happy. I'm doubly happy and grateful that so many people have signal-boosted already. 

Over the next few weeks I will be putting up some samples and talking a little more about the books--especially about the older ones, because when they came out I was not in a position to blog about them.

For now, I give you the opening of Maul , because I can.

*********

      It feels smooth and heavy and warm when I stroke it because I've been sleeping with it between my legs. I like to inhale its grey infinite smell for a while before I pass my lips down its length, courting it with the tip of my tongue, until my mouth has come to the wider part near the tip. This I suck, and blow gently into the hole. It becomes wet in my mouth but doesn't soften. It remains achingly solid and I put it between my legs. Its tip snuggles around my clit. On the day I bought it, I had to test out several models before I found one that fitted, and Suk Hee's gangster cousin Woo kept trying to look around the side of the van to see what I was doing. Woo was afraid someone would come and he'd get caught with the van and everything. I came. It was the only way to be sure I had the right one. 
      It's narrow enough that I can slide it into my cunt without breaking the hymen. I grope around for a while trying to find my G-spot but the urge to pee is too great when I press there and anyway I think the whole thing's gotta be a myth so I go back to where I started.
      Astronomy.
      Bodies of light fence and entwine on a mantle of blue. Leo and the Hydra.
      The fine hairs on my arms are electric and there's a tingling down my legs and up the back of my head.  It's a tropical kind of feeling. The Lynx and Ursa Major, which looks like a reindeer not a bear. My nipples are standing up and rubbing against the sheet. My clit gets more sensitive first in one spot, then in another; but it can't elude the round metal that encircles the glans and works every aspect at once.
     Orion, Orion, Cassiopeia and Auriga buried deep in the milky way. 
      It's good if I twirl the cylinder, a spinning circle around my flesh sinking also into, and. Come in. Its muzzle seeks me out: Factory made in New Mexico, it noses toward its original home. Deep deep.  Into the danger; the curves, the trigger. Its steel pin has butterflied me; I'm spread out on a card. The metal wraps me and I wrap the earth in starpaper. I can see myself now in the third person. She is splayed across the planet: a contortionist, her hands and feet meet behind her head, she is whirling fast and the stars become lines become a ribbon of light becomes a curtain. Her body. MY. Appearing, the taut, her legs. 
      SEE HER a torn place, there's a dark SHE'S darkness beginning to split open now tears the curtain THE GOLDEN a wet rending sound the consequences if seen IAM
      a deep place of no light. NOW yeah yeah yeah
      the missile, it's--YEAH
      A deep PLACE. Something's THERE. It's really BIG and it's going to, deep in the earth where it's hot there's a core of IRON it's coming towards sliding metal on metal black black fire
      LYRA! SCORPIUS!
      Iron FE chemical number 26 which is made of the original matter of the SUN a great gob that split away in the primordial moments of deep in the consequences if seen a rending Plieades like a doll's veil
      YOU ARE MADE OF STARS
      and here comes the big missile past the point of recall it's it's it's it's it's
TOO LATE now oh it's much too late you CAN'T stop YEAH
YEAH
yeah!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
don't end
!!!!!!!! !!!!!!
PLEASE stay
!!!!!! !!!!
no. oh. no. don't go.
!!!
      Hmm. Not bad.
!
      Not bad.
      Pretty good.
      What time is it? Late. Better quit here. Stay hungry.
      I lie back in bed and grope for a cigarette.
      I smile.
      I used to wish I had a boyfriend but now I know better.
      Even a hypothetical boyfriend wouldn't understand
      How I feel.
      About my gun.


****************************

So drained I forgot to title this post

I have a lot of processing to do after the math exam so I’m putting this very long post behind a cut.

I’ve been studying for this exam to the exclusion of all else for over three weeks. I found the course really difficult, and although I went into the exam with a 96 average, as soon as I began revising (that’s ‘reviewing’ in USian) I realised that a lot of what we’d studied hadn’t sunk in. I had to go back and relearn a lot of the material from scratch. Then it was a case of busting my butt working on past exam papers, two of which I did under mock test conditions.  The first time I scored in the 40s, which was a rude shock, and the second time a few days ago I came in at about 70%.

This all made me quite tearful. My first instinct was to blame the curriculum. You spend nine months teaching yourself maths from books that are often less than crystal clear.  (I had to resort to online tutorials and other books on several occasions, and there were only four tutorials for the whole course.) The assignments are graded, but these grades don’t actually count toward your final result in a real sense; for example, I was aiming for a distinction (equivalent of an A in US) but the only way to achieve this is through a high score in the exam. There are no interim tests to give you an idea of what an exam will feel like or how well you are performing, and assignment marks can apparently be misleading. So I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling very low about myself and frustrated because if I’d known I wasn’t doing enough over that nine month period I might have been able to do more.

My second reaction was to blame myself.  I’ve somehow failed to learn as I should have learned.

I studied hard in the limited time I had left.  The day before the exam I picked up a tummy bug off one of the kids, who was home with the same thing, and the last 24 hours before the test were a bit of a misery compounded by lack of sleep. I was worried at one point that I wasn’t going to be able to physically get through the exam, but luckily the tummy was mostly cleared up in the morning.

*

The exam was held in a hotel in Telford.  There were other courses having their tests in the same room at the same time, but no one seemed to know each other. We were herded into this anteroom to wait to be admitted to the exam. I got chatting to one guy on my course. After we were talking for about a minute he admitted he already had a degree in Mechanical Engineering. WTF? Then, this twenty-something guy overheard the phrase ‘Taylor series’ and came over to say hi.  Guess what? He had a Physics degree from a bricks and mortar uni!

WTF WTF WTF?????

I’m like, yo, I have a Music Program Zero degree from 22 years ago and I’m supposed to compete against you math people?!?!  Fucking save me.

I then went to the toilet but didn’t puke! Miraculously.

When I came back everyone was sitting quietly like lambs to the slaughter, except for one white-haired man with a booming voice who was chatting away to his neighbour as if we were all on a coach to bingo night. I found an empty corner from which to watch people. The women were well-groomed and exchanged the odd friendly smile. The men didn’t look at one another. Nobody moved. I thought, I’m going to be sitting at a desk for three hours.  I’m standing up while I can.  So I started stretching out just a little, unobtrusively I hope, in the corner. If everyone else hadn’t been so uptight and silent I’d probably have started bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet to get rid of some energy.  There was a coat rack in the corner and I had the urge to shadow-fight with it.

I found those waiting minutes very emotional.  I was wearing Rochita’s necklace for luck, and I had a good-luck card from Chris and Pat in my bag, and I had convinced myself that this test was The Most Important Thing Ever.  I found myself blotting my eyes, thinking of everyone who has encouraged me in this venture. In all truth I think I was calmer going into childbirth.

The Chief Invigilator came out and hooted some instructions at us all in a manner that suggested we were idiots and also, possibly, anarchists.  I couldn’t help but laugh quietly at her.  People turned and looked at me.  My goodness. What a serious lot.

Luckily the other two invigilators were lovely, quiet, helpful people. The Chief Invigilator bullied them, though.

*

Then we had the test.  I read through it and was pleasantly surprised that most of it looked fine.  I circled the bits that looked troublesome, including one heinous piece of integration by backward substitution that I never did crack.  Then I set off. I was so nervous I was questioning every single move I made.  I looked up and half an hour had gone by, and I was behind where I knew I should be by that time. Whenever I got to a point where I had to stop and think for more than ten seconds or so, I’d skip and move on to something I could do. I got to the end of the first section and went back and took another shot at the problem problems, and some of them made more sense the second time round.

I had a lot of false starts, messy calculations, and stuff that was scribbled out.  On one slightly lateral matrix question I got myself confused and ended up with pages of crossed-out workings. In the end I just wrote ‘oh sod it’ because there was no time to think.

The second part of the exam is the more difficult part.  I knew how to approach all of it but I messed up various things and was now working so quickly that I have no way of knowing how successful I was or wasn’t—there was no time to check anything. 

The material was all within my reach except for maybe a couple of points here and there where they asked for something weird and I didn’t know what they were talking about. But under the pressure I just could not think and even the simple problems gave me grief. I worked right to the end of the three hours but it was not enough time.  That’s what really threw me.  I am generally pretty quick. I’m not some sort of super-intelligent person, but whatever I do I do it fast. I think fast, I read fast, I write fast, I eat fast, I walk fast. Even in the home trials of the test, I never ran out of time. But on the day I was not fast enough.

*

My original hope for a distinction is gone. I have revised that downwards to hoping for a Grade 2 pass, but sadly this is by no means assured. If I get a Grade 3 I will re-sit the course.

The course forum is full of people complaining about lack of time and feeling hard-done-by and depressed and disappointed by their performance. People are stunned. One of the OU tutors came up and said ‘that’s the whole point of the exam.’  Well, I don’t know.  If the point of taking a course is to learn something, then the exam seems a very crude assessment tool. But that’s just my Columbia University Teachers College progressive educational ideals talking, I guess.  This is Britain. It’s all about the exams.

So in the end I have decided to treat the whole experience as learning. What have I learned? Not to trust the OU process. For my next course (Physics) I will begin revising and consolidating much earlier in the year.  I will start doing past papers earlier because I already know from my past experience with OU science that the phrasing of questions is often cryptic and you have to almost mindread the teachers to figure out what specifically they want you to give them in an answer. I will read and study more outside the course so that I have a deeper understanding than the course materials alone can give me. I will become unassailable in my mastery of the materials, and then maybe when I come to the exam I can scrape a higher mark.

Maybe.

Meanwhile, I gratefully thank everyone who has encouraged me and listened to my whinging and who has said, ‘You can do it.’ I have needed and used every speck of that help and I appreciate it so very much.

Now I have to get on with everything I’ve been neglecting, including e-mails. I feel a bit floppy. I may need to be a comatose rabbit for a day or two.

Presenting the Cultural Imperialim Bingo Card

If you think colonialism is dead... think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller--furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

It's time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here's a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism--and we wish we could say we've made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.



Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of volunteer signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

Any signal boosting on this much appreciated!

http://aliettedebodard.com/pics/2012/CulturalImperialismBingoCard.png

meme of sevens

I've seen this lots of places on LJ and you probably have, too. Post your work in progress, page 77 or page 7, lines 7-14, no cheating.

This is a weak bit and will probably get cut as I go along.  Shroedinger's Raincoat p. 77 lines 7-14:

  At the end of my second set of dead lifts I looked up and Chima Chima was standing on the other side of the glass that separated the gym from the hallway. A translucent white logo partially obscured his body, but I could see his face clearly.The saccades of his eyes made invisible tracks that ran all over my body like a swarm of ants. It was like he could take me to pieces with his gaze.
  I dropped the bar on the mat with a resounding clang.

  'Thanks,' I gasped to the bodybuilder as I charged

------------

This morning I attempted a practice math test under exam conditions and got 43%! It's so bad it's good! My assignment scores were in the 90s, so god help the people who were struggling in their assignments. Less than a week to go. Has anybody got a spare rock for me to crawl under?

Eaten by roving energy toad?

Tired. Not sure what the reason for this is, but nevermind. I probably won't get half of the half-term stuff done. Math exam in just over a week and SO NOT READY.

I hope to get to some of my e-mails and stuff next week, but if anyone expects to hear from me and doesn't, you know my fate. Please don't blame the toad. Everyone's gotta eat.

any excuse for stationery supplies

Random and dull because, because.

I embarrassed myself when I decided to crank out a few sets of press-ups the other day and then nearly couldn't move for 72 hours afterward for lactic acid. I dragged out the scale and found I'd gained nearly half a stone in the last six months, so I'm now running an extra two miles every day on top of whatever training I'd normally do.  Hoping this will have some effect. I suppose sitting on my ass eating chocolate all day had to catch up with me eventually.

Still working on the SF novel.  If I say 'very slowly' will anyone be surprised? I doubt it. I might as well not even bother to say it; it's as though somewhere in my mind there is this other, swifter & easier default setting for writing.  Like a memory of one's former flat stomach...whoops, let's not go there!  I need to accept that maybe those 5000 word days will never come again. Or maybe they will!  No, let's be real.

So yeah.  Mainly I'm now studying for my maths exam on 15th June. That is flaying my poor brain. What can I say that will be positive and fun?  Oh, I know.  I get to use random stationery supplies like post-its, pencil sharpeners, different coloured pens. So, that's good, right?

I'm keeping my twitter usage right down.  I have been ruminating lately on the internet and toxicity and my mental health, and the ruminations are not good.  But I'm not ready to quite explain where I'm coming from. I'm really grateful to have the social internet for lots of reasons, but there are times when the price seems too high and this is one of them. For now I'll be swooping in when I feel strong enough, and otherwise staying away.

Oh, and I'm really enjoying Lisa Randalls' Warped Passages which I'd started a while back but put down. It includes the clearest non-mathematical explanation of quantum physics I've yet seen, and I've read a few and come away none the wiser.

Boosting the Signal - Project Save Annabelle (otherwise known as I need help)

Originally posted by intothenyght at Boosting the Signal - Project Save Annabelle (otherwise known as I need help) Originally posted by java_fiend at Boosting the Signal - Project Save Annabelle (otherwise known as I need help) *** Please, even if you can't donate (let's face it, times are tight all over), can you please just re-boost the signal? Hopefully, we can all throw in together and help save this beautiful, wonderful dog. Anything and everything is absolutely appreciated. Thanks so much, guys!!!

Originally posted by pixie117 at Project Save Annabelle (otherwise known as I need help) The Story

On Sunday May 20th, I woke up and realized that my Great Dane, Annabelle, hadn't come in for her morning kisses like usual. As soon as my boyfriend and I start talking, we're usually joined by my giant dog with tail wagging and kisses to the face as she climbs in bed with us to snuggle for a few hours.

I went to check on her and she was on the floor, which is odd since she's a comfort creature who usually prefers the couch. I went up to her and barely got a response. I called Kevin in and normally she can't contain herself with excitement when he enters the room.

Nothing. Her eyes could barely even stay open and she looked uninterested in everything.

We got her to stand up and realized she was not putting her right foot down at all. We tried walking her; she couldn't walk. So we ran her to the emergency vet (since it was a Sunday). My boyfriend had to carry her because she couldn't walk.

The day before she was her normal goofy self. Playing ball at the dog park, and even rough housing with a new Great Dane puppy. She came home and was fine that night. It all happened between when we went to bed and when we woke up.

At the emergency vet, her fever was 104.7. She was a very sick dog. They kept her all day on Sunday until her fever went down. He said her paw looked to be injured but that it likely caused an infection (she had elevated red blood cells). He sent her home with an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory medicine for the injured paw. Original bill was $900 which I didn't have. I burst into tears because she is my baby and the wonderful vet lowered it to $600.

Sunday night my boyfriend and I slept in the living room because she couldn't move and I didn't want her being too far from me. He slept on the floor and neither of us got much sleep.

I took Monday off and luckily I did because her paw did not stop gushing blood. I had never seen so much blood just gushing without stopping. Obviously, I couldn't let it continue so I took her to my regular vet. She thought it was foxtail that had weaved it's way into the paw, we scheduled Annabelle for surgery the next day and all should have been well.

This was how swollen her paw was before the bleeding even started. It has only gotten worse from here.



However, things turned ugly the next day. When they opened the bandage up, they found that the whole on her paw had grown to twice the original size and her flesh was rotting around it. The vet called and said she felt it was either a brown recluse bite or flesh-eating bacteria (such as MRSA).

I took her in for a second opinion with the emergency vet who saw her on Sunday and he said her tissue was liquefying. It was one of the worst cases he'd seen in a very long time. He was leaning more toward flesh-eating bacteria, but said a brown recluse bite could still be possible. He did say that with aggressive veterinary treatment, she would survive. She might lose part of her foot, but that she would be fine if we did everything the vet is asking of us.

Sadly, we still don't know what we are dealing with.

We just know that her skin and tissue is rotting at an alarming rate. She went from playing catch with us on Saturday to us looking at her dying within the week if we couldn't get this under control.

Today is Wednesday and from the massive amounts of a variety of antibiotics, she's doing better. The wound hadn't grown any larger for the first time since this whole ordeal. It's not reversed yet, no healing is present, but the fact that it stopped spreading the way it had is a good sign.

Her clotting tests came back normal showing that her body is healing the wound.

Everything is pointing to good signs if we keep up treatment.

The issue is cost. I have spent $2,000 since Sunday. That's over half my monthly salary. I pulled money from my IRA to pay for services and I am running low over there.

Today alone was $870. Tomorrow? Another $300. And until she shows healing, it could be $300 a day to hospitalize her. Then it will be regular vet visits with special bandage changes ($55 a day - I am hoping to negotiate or learn how to do this myself at home). Once she starts healing, she will need surgery to remove to dead tissue and to either stitch/graft or amputate as needed depending on the damage that is done. This could add up to a couple thousand more depending on the course of treatment.

She requires all of this to survive. Right now, it's looking more and more like a flesh-eating bacteria. A super bacteria of sorts that got into her injured paw and is killing the tissue. It's crazy how she can go from being fine on Saturday to having her foot rotting away on Tuesday. It's mind-blowing and terrifying.

How she is today (Wednesday)

For a dog with flesh-eating bacteria on her foot, she's almost back to normal personality wise. The antibiotics seem to be working on the internal infection, it's just the wound that needs to heal up. While at the vet this morning, she climbed up in the chair next to me like normal. When I came to pick her up this afternoon, she pulled the vet tech down the hall to get to me. She's now putting a little weight on the paw which means the pain is subsiding. She's happy to greet my roommate once again, and she even begged for food last night (which I spoiled her with two hot dogs because she's been through a lot).

She's on the mend, the treatments may be working. Though without knowing what the bacteria is immune to, it's going to mean a lot of trial and error to get this under control for good.

My Situation

I won't go into my sob story great length since this is about Annabelle. But I left a really bad relationship about 2 years ago, moved out to California for a job opportunity to be in my field... and Dang, it's expensive out here. Rent takes up half my monthly salary and I wish I was exaggerating. It's tough. I have barely been able to save up anything and I live very frugally to make ends meet. My pets always come before me, their needs get met before mine and I make sure they eat better than I do. They are my world.

I had to get Annabelle spayed last August, and because she is a Dane, I also had her stomach tacked to help prevent bloat (You can Google it. It's a Great Dane issue). I used Care Credit to fund that. She had sickness associated with the surgery which required a lot of vet visits, and Care Credit came into play again. Then my cat got sick a few times... and my Care Credit is maxed out. They can possibly raise my limit, but I will know in 7-10 days.

I don't have 7-10 days. I am running out of money and the vets I have found don't take payment plans because they push you to Care Credit. They require money up front, which I don't have anymore of. I've dug into my IRA and will deal with penalties later. The $1000 I pulled out yesterday is already gone to the vet, I am broke once more.

My family is poor, I can't get it from them. My savings are burnt up from this. I really don't know where else to go. I am so ashamed to be asking for help, and hope no one thinks poorly of me for it.

Help Needed

I hate asking for any help, but this girl is my baby. Anyone who knows me knows that this dog is my world. I talk about her nonstop, I take her everywhere I go. I make sure she has the best possible life I can give her, and I go without in order to give it to her.

I have had a rough few years and she's been able to bring me so much joy. I seriously can't imagine life without my giant beast of a dog. She's a cuddle buddy who loves nothing more than being loved on by a human. She doesn't have a mean bone in her body and adores everyone she meets.



(This is a photo from a month or so ago. She's snuggling in bed with Kevin on a Sunday like we do every Sunday until this last one shook us all up.)

If you know of any charities that would donate to the vet on behalf of Annabelle to get her the services we need, please let me know. I am researching it a bit, and doing my best to find help that I can get right away. This all happened so fast and needs to be treated fast. If you know of a vet in the Orange County, CA area that would take payments or help me out, that would work great too. I just need it quick.

Knowing I can save her if I just had the money... I have to at least try. I have to at least ask.

Don't feel any obligation whatsoever, especially if you have helped me in the past with anything whatsoever. I don't want to be greedy or pushy. Several people have asked to help me with the vet bills and I am passing this along because I can't deny that I need help. If you can't help financially, but want to help out somehow, then feel free to pass this along. Pass it along anywhere you can think of, I don't mind.

Anything. Any little bit will help here. Even your thoughts and prayers mean the world to me since I believe in the power of positive energy. So keep those coming as well. Or just pass it on even. Maybe someone out there can help me in a way I never would have thought of on my own. You just never know.

Thanks everyone. I will try to make sure everyone gets at least a personalized "thank you" card if I get your address (so please consider leaving that. I may include a photo of Annabelle once she's healthy once more). I am more than willing to repay the favor in any way I possibly can. Never hesitate to ask.

For more about Annabelle, here's a video and a public post I wrote up about her. You can see that she really is a terrific dog and I love her so much.

http://pixie117.livejournal.com/61620...







If the link doesn't work, my paypal e-mail address is kristenrericha@gmail.com. Apparently people are having issues there. I apologize for that :/

Some thoughts on SFF and reality checks

I have to apologise for the naivete of this post.  I'm stumbling my way through thinking about these things.

I used to joke that I wrote SF because I didn’t know enough about reality to write in it.  It wasn’t wholly a joke.  Eighteen years into my professional writing life, I still don’t know much about the 'real' world.  My life experience is limited and my education is somewhat sketchy, so some writers have much wider life experience than I do, and many have studied more.  Still, I suspect that  writers glean a good percentage of our working material by recycling it to some extent or another out of stories—books and movies.  By ‘recycling’ I don’t mean literally nicking things and using them (although this happens) but rather, that we digest a mix of story and real life and then it emerges in a different form in our own work. 

So what is the reality of what we have digested? Especially, of what we have digested from second-hand sources?

I constantly complain about fight scenes in books (and obviously movies too) on this basis.  Most of them are unselfconsciously ridiculous. My sister, a nursing professor, complains about medical scenes.  The phenomenon could extend in many directions depending on what it is that you know more-than-most about.  Certainly in reading the recent discussions on colonialism, globalisation, and the failure of world literature to include genuine non-Western viewpoints, I’ve been thinking a lot about the particulars of the SFF genre and my own work in this context. I’ve been thinking about a kind of self-perpetuating bullshit cycle that seems to turn up.

I’m not speaking specifically about colonialism here, which is deserving of its own space.  This more of a tangential thought about the genre: I wonder if fantasy literature, which by its definition allows us to bypass reality checks, is particularly vulnerable to allowing us to delude ourselves and therefore get away with stuff that is distortionary and prejudicial in whatever manner.  Because it’s not ‘real.’   And anything is fair game.  We wouldn’t expect to publish a political thriller without knowing the ins and outs of government and world affairs and lots of other fact-checkable nuts and bolts, but if we write that thriller in dressed-up fantasy terms, there’s a lot of fudge-space there.  I’ve used it myself. I think there could be something extra-pernicious about our genre in this department. Maybe that's not an insight to anybody but me?

Granted, it’s hard to get a reality-check on something that doesn’t exist—a theoretical projection or a proposed future, for example. But even when I’m going out there as far as I know how to do I must necessarily refer to what I do know.  I reach for some example of what I already know and try to bend or stretch it, or juxtapose it with another object so as to create an interaction that may generate something genuinely original.  I suppose in way that’s a definitional problem of writing SFF—no matter how I may try to set up a philosophical experiment, it always has to have some grounding in the concrete world.  I try to notice my real-life reference points.  I try to make some honest attempt to face up to the pitfalls of the way I’m using them, although the pitfalls aren’t always obvious to me at the time.

But what about the idea of inventing because actually learning the facts is too hard?  SFF writers are in a particularly privileged position in terms of being able to do this. What about saying, ‘I don’t know shit about how X works so I’ll just borrow a pinch of this and a dash of that and throw in some stuff that I saw this other writer do, and it’ll all be OK in the mix’?

That might not be actively harmful.  Or it might.  What if the stuff you borrow and (inevitably) distort is actually a portion of someone’s reality?  I mean, it seems obvious to say that’s uncool, but the uncoolness seems somehow unexamined, glossed-over, when in our genre it should probably be an area of mainstream writerly concern--there's no shortage of discussion on how to write an effective query letter, after all, but cultural appropriation doesn't get enough coverage at entry-level even though writers are effectively gods of our made-from-whole-cloth worlds.

The marketing machine demands fodder, of course, so it skews toward the derivative anyway.  Within the dominant culture, this skew can be very annoying.  But when you start to think about what is happening globally when Blockbuster X comes rolling into town, it seems what we can end up with is this big armoured tank of derivative untrue nonsense rolling in and crushing the original cultural ecosystem, wrecking it and replacing it with the machine’s own paradigm. Never mind what writers inside that culture produce; it's now irrelevant as far as the machine is concerned.

If it’s not my culture that’s being destroyed by globalisation, I can be upset about this overwriting and the losses it entails, on a theoretical level.  I can try to empathise with the people being silenced, and I can feel badly about it when I choose to think about it.  But I don’t have to think about it if I don’t want to.  And I can’t actually know or imagine how it feels to be in the path of that oncoming machine, how incredibly toxic the whole business is.  As a whitebread USian I’m riding more or less on top of a wave of destruction.

I need to really think about it and decide what my level of complicity with that armoured tank, or that wave, actually is.  To what extent am I OK with letting this destruction occur rather than stating up front that I prefer the complexities and disagreements and dangers of a world in which my culture might not end up in total absolute power over all things?  Because that is what it comes down to, right?  Actually giving others some space and not just coopting everything.  I don't know why that should be so hard, but apparently the capitalist model does what it does, and too bad if people don't like it on an individual level--I don't know how to stop it, personally. 

I want to say, oh nonono, this isn’t of my making, it’s not under my control, I don’t want it at all not even one tiny bit.  But I suspect that subconsciously some part of me must be a little relieved to be safely inside that tank.  I’m not proud of it, but I really need to look at that cowardice and make some changes in my head.

Fumbling, rambling.  Thinking.