K. Eason's Blog, page 9

blue (balls) and fiber therapy

My summer awaits. The amazing M, she who has so much fiber her husband does this little cheer when she gives it away to me (she's an indie-dyer, among her many talents, and she's always trying stuff out), has given me blue balls merino, so it'll felt, which is good because I'm going to ply it with some BFL which doesn't like felting and make carpets. Anyway. Each of those balls is about 8 oz, or half a pound, and Arachne knows how much it'll spin out, but I bet it'll be enough to get me through season 3 Poldark for sure.  And then there's the 4-5 pairs of socks to be done by Christmas. I will be busy! I will be productive! I will be able to let my brain (and spirit) rest!

Which is good, because oh, my various gods, this everything-since-January has sucked for so many reasons.

I wanted to be done with the draft of the WIP by now, but HA. No. Even making wordcount on the days I scheduled for writing, no. I am at the stage where I am convinced it's totally awful, which, haha, is incidentally the place where I did trash a whole manuscript a couple years ago because it was total shit, so... this feeling is not without precedent or merit, though I don't think it will apply to WIP. I just have a much harder time dismissing feelings of failure with the writing than I do with the teaching.

Speaking of.  Spring is also universally the worst for student engagement and general give-a-shit, and I have watched students implode this semester/quarter (the spring quarter. Winter was fine) like...things that implode a lot. I'm out of similes.

I have felt a little like imploding myself. A friend of mine, former officemate for years, died unexpectedly at the end of March. That was total toadshit. She'd just retired last year and while I missed her like hell at work, I knew she was out there being nona to her grandkids and adopting dogs and just, like, having fun and stuff.

Then, fuck you, April, we had two parental surgeries. First: Nous's dad, unexpected brain surgery (he fell. There was bleeding. They figured it out when he kept falling and having trouble walking). Second and third: My mom, knee surgery, the first for the actual fixing the joint, and second because it infected and they had to go back in and scrape things out. We didn't go back because, well, we're adjuncts and however good the benefits (we have them. That's something) and the union (until something crap comes from Janus, it's strong), we don't get actual sick time or vacation, so... anyway.  Nous's dad recovered nicely. He liked his time in rehab; he had a new audience for his jokes (he's the only extrovert in the family, poor guy). My mom is recovering, but her attitude is far wobblier.

The HS students give teacher awards. But I was provoked.So...  I didn't have much left for students at the HS who were dealing with murdered friends and school shootings all over and general teenageriness. I had even less left for the ostensible adults in uni who sit in my office and explain that they just can't write this boring essay, they just don't do well on things they don't like, it's who they are. (While assuring me it's the class, not me, that they hate. I assured them back: I don't hate you either, okay? But your grade is sinking like a sinking thing, kid, so you better find it in yourself to adult and write the fucking essay. I didn't say fucking. That time.) There are moments when I feel like a crap teacher, which I know is, well, crap, because I'm good at this job and they have to meet me partway or it doesn't work. And there have been amazing students, too, just stellar. They are the reason I keep doing this job, right there.

The Hummingbird Chronicles

Or: What happened in the Eason household last week/end.

Karma, the Anna's hummingbirdWe begin on the previous Sunday with Murdercat catching and eating a hummingbird, midflight. OK, fine. Let me be more precise: he caught it midflight. He ate it after everyone was on the ground again, and after he'd played with the sad little feathery corpse for a good half an hour. It's gross, y'all, but it's also him being a cat, and he's so damned happy and proud of himself it's hard to be mad or grossed out for too long.

For those keeping score: hummingbirds caught: 4. Hummingbirds killed: 3. Hummingbirds eaten: 2.

I moved the feeding station again, back to its formerly Very High Point on the wall, behind a hedge of angry agave (agave are always angry) and a tomato cage (with a tomato plant in it, not just a random tomato cage). I had moved it off the wall because management, may they choke on their own stupidity, had directed me to "get all the plants off the wall" in contravention of their own policies because there were Muckity Mucks coming to visit the complex and since our apartment backs on to the pool area, Muckities would be able to see...us in compliance with the rules about plants on the walls? I don't know. (This is the same site manager who tried to tell me they did not need to reassemble the bedroom closet after the HVAC work because workmen were returning the next day, and that we could store all our clothes in the main office overnight. I lost my shit, folks. Utterly. Anyway. Not an individual one looks to for consistent or logical policy decisions.)

ANYWAY.



He waited. No parents. He moved her off the parking lot and kept watching. No parents. The sun began setting, the shadows got long, the temperature dropped. The bird remained huddled and scared. No parents.

You see where this is going, right?

I came home and we had a very tiny guest in a shoebox, nestled among crumpled paper and perched on Nous's softest hand-knit green sock (she looked cold, he said). He had taken the eyedropper from his beer making supplies (I have no idea what he uses it for) and successfully fed her some of the nectar I make for the feeding station. She was in the hard-sided cat carrier, which is a dark, solid place, coming out every hour or so for meals. She seemed to have all her feathers, but we are not hummingbird experts and honestly, the birds I have handled most extensively have been dead and denuded by Murdercat. Most of my experience of feathers is on the carpet or all over the patio. So.

We figured she would die overnight. Birds always die overnight, but at least she would do so warm and safe. I worried the entire time that Murdercat would get up on the counter and knock the carrier down. He did not, but when I got up on Friday, it was turned a good 90 degrees on the counter. He'd tried.

And somehow, the bird was not dead. She greeted me on Friday morning with a piercing chirp and an expectantly open mouth. Oh. That's how it is, then.

And thus began the Hummingbird Chronicles, aka The Weekend. We read the interwebz. Call a rescuer, they said, for babies, which she clearly was not But they also said, 72 hours for sugar water only is okay, if the bird seems just stunned, and try fruit flies all mashed up. Also, the time between trying to fly and actual flight is, like 1-3 days. So okay. She'd clearly tried flying. Maybe she could...try again. Soon. And leave. Except... when she flapped, one wing would not quite extend laterally, although when she folded them, they sat symmetrically on her body. Not a dislocation, not a break, but something wasn't right.

We moved her into the soft-sided cat carrier, with its mesh sides and top that cat paws cannot penetrate. Murdercat began working on the zippers. Right. We put the carrier into the puppy crate. Murdercat began working on the latch, but since he's not a Border collie, he had no joy. Bird inside, cat outside. During the day, she went out, in her shoebox only, in the hopes she'd fly. She did not, but she flapped alot, and Big Daddy, the dominant adult male Anna's hummingbird, came down and menaced her a few times. She was unimpressed. She flapped. She fell off her perch (a knitting needle). She climbed back on. I fed her. Nous fed her. She flapped and flapped. And she spent another night in the kitchen in her double-walled cat-proof cell.

Louhi was indifferent. Murdercat was Very Concerned About The Flapping Thing and assigned himself as sentinel. He didn't get a lot of sleep. We named her Karma; Murdercat's Bane seemed too big for a bird that tiny.

By Sunday afternoon, it was clear she was not going to fly, and we called the wildlife rescue. It took, like, 5 minutes to get us in touch with the local rescuer and 5 minutes after that to arrange to drop her off. If any other bureaucracy was that efficient, we would rule the world. (There's an idea. Wildlife Rescue for World Domination! I'm on it.)

So somewhat anticlimactically, the Hummingbird Chronicles ended with Karma going to a volunteer with wildlife rescuer with the proper licensing to rehab hummers, this tiny little older woman with a living room full of birds. A flight cage for the wounded, just full of these little feathered jewels. A shelf of intake containers, fleece-lined and soft-mesh topped and equipped with a feeding tube. Several tanks of babies. A tank full of partly fledged babies. It was kind of amazing. The rehabber pronounced Karma a fully fledged Anna's hummingbird female, just on the cusp of juvenile, who should be capable of flight but might be not very good at it yet. Apparently there's a week or so between parental ejection and learning to self-feed where they can get into a lot of trouble. She was glad we rescued her. So were we.

Thus endeth the Chronicle: happily, and not in death and feathers.

Pub Day! (or: Things About Finishing A Trilogy)

ALLY is here! This one was tough, for a lot of reasons.

Things that I learned, finishing a trilogy...

First and most obvious, the publisher dropped the series before the book got into the wild.  Thanks to the best agent (and agency) in the history of ever, we took this book the independent pub-route, and here it is. You can get it from Amazon in paper or e-book. I recommend, well, both! I am the author! But the paper version has this gorgeous cover that benefits from being held in one's hands. Just sayin'.

Second, and less obvious: this book was tough to write. I have heard tell that it's the second book in a series that's the worst, and as I am writing one of those now, okay, yeah. I get it. But for On the Bones of Gods, that honor went to ALLY. I wrote it like I had until that point written everything: total pantser, no idea what's coming, whee! (I swear, Lisa, if you are reading this: I can plan plots. Plot plots? --That. I can. I do it with RPGs all the time.) That led to a lot of omgwtf moments in the prose, digressions, me trying to figure out what the hell to do, what payoff would possibly suffice for what had come before, how I could knot off all the threads (while trying to remember what those threads were) and resolve character arcs. I knew what the climax would look like. It was all the rest of it.

See, here's the ass-pain about world-building. You find cracks and unfinished bits all over the place, even in book three, even when you think you've figured it all out. I worked out backstory that ended up getting cut out. I wrote plot twists that turned into plot-tangles of the Gordian knot variety, and had to be similarly solved. And because I know where every seam is, every knot, every mistake... I see those first, every time. I hear from people whose opinion I trust that ALLY is good, really good. Which--well, good. I'm pretty proud of it.

Third (it's a post about trilogies. It needs three learning points): I've changed my writing habits a lot since On the Bones of Gods.

I wrote all three books in the evenings, and with ALLY, I wrote while drinking (not like Hemingway, but enough to get past the inner voice who was screaming that I was doing it all wrong, all of it, what was wrong with me). This made for steady progress through the first draft and an awful lot of revising before it was even fit to send to my first reader, much less to my agent. I stopped writing at night after ALLY partly because Nous finished his damn dissertation and suddenly I had a husband again, and also because I have finally achieved that imperial stout level of Oh fuck it, just write without needing the imperial stout. I've finally internalized what I tell my students all the time: just fucking write it. Revise later. It can be awful. Write the awful to get to the good.

I've also shifted to morning writing. I think this is because On the Bones of Gods was "hobby" writing, which is to say--I wasn't sure it'd ever become anything. I wrote with no agent, no prospect of sales. It was... I don't want to say fun, because writing rarely is for me, but it was definitely that thing I was doing for me, so I had to fit in after the teaching and grading and cooking and cleaning and all that because I am just that way. Sometimes there's not much brain or energy left at the end of the day, so... the beer helped. I also had a soundtrack for On the Bones of Gods, one for each book; the music also helped punch past the anxiety of figuring out wtf I was doing.

Now--after getting an agent and two book contracts*, knowing that this writing thing can be a thing--producing wordcount is a job, and one that competes with the teaching and grading for my daylight attention. That means with coffee, cold sober, all my attention, no soundtrack.*** 

 I wrote Rory mostly over a summer. TCFF (not a sequel to RORY, but in the same world, a sort of proof-of-concept for space fantasy) I wrote during a school year, in fits and ferocious starts, in the mornings when I had neither class nor grading. I rearranged my syllabi to guarantee me 2-4 mornings a week for writing, not teaching or teaching related stuff. Now, with RORY 2, I am repeating that process: scheduled time to write, which goddammit, I adhere to. (I have tried to fix that sentence. It's ugly. I think we're stuck with it.)

I'm still anxious about wtf I am doing, of course. But I've shifted how I deal with that. I work through plot-knots the same way I work through game-planning: by hand, in a journal, with an actual pen. (Neil Gaiman likes fountain pens. I like these super fine-point felt-tips. Ballpoints are for teaching.) I give myself permission to sit and think, instead of fretting that I might not make wordcount and writing crap to make that magic number. I think my writing craft has leveled up, but I think my process has too.

So anyway. ALLY is loose in the world. My first trilogy is finished. I'm both elated and a little sad. I'm gonna miss those people.

Now I'm going to make some more coffee and get back to work. RORY is coming.



*Yes! I have three books forthcoming from DAW**, staring in 2019 with How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse.
** DAW!!
***There is a future project that I'm already planning which will get a soundtrack again, but because most of it will be in languages I don't speak (at least fluently), it'll be fine and not distracting. I just can't write the Rory stories to Scandinavian progressive folk metal.

but why not dragons?

So over on Facebook I see a post by a former MFA grad-student-turned-HS-teacher, asking how to help a student of hers "transition" from epic fantasy to "more serious" literature, and I am back to being 19 again, in the TA offices, listening to the MFA grad students going on about genre in tones of great scorn, and feeling defensive and defiant. Be proud of me, readers: I did not storm in there and punk-post about judging books by their cover (the student reads books with "dragons on the cover," which is obviously proof of the contents' quality), or get high-handed about how fantasy can be, and often is, serious literature with challenging writing, jesus H, have you read N. K. Jemisin or Le Guin or goddamned Beowulf, the fuck is wrong with you?

Instead, I spent a morning on this post instead of the WIP, but hey, blog posts are still writing, and the WIP needs to percolate a little more, and goddammit.

Once, long ago, I was an undergraduate student who wanted to be a writer. I was persuaded to pursue the literature degree, rather than the creative writing degree, for reasons of practicality, which, had I interrogated them closely, were really based on fears that you can't make a living as a writer rather than any certainty that an English degree would prove more employable. (I should have gone for the astronomy degree, or the chemistry degree, or anything else in STEM. I was dissuaded by Calculus 2, for which I had an abysmal teacher, and a desire to spend my weekends playing D&D instead of in a laboratory.)

I spent much of that undergraduate literature degree reading things I did not like and trying to find ways to read and research things I did like for credit, like the forty-source annotated bibliography on J.R.R. Tolkien scholarship instead of Hawthorne or Dickens or [insert canon author here]. That, in turn, led me to his inspirations and influences, and I discovered Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and All The Medieval Romances(tm) and mythology, which mean going over to Classics for some of my electives (and reading the Welsh and Irish stuff on my own), but whatever. I had imagined that literature was full of dry realism, women seeking husbands and red badges of courage and scarlet As, and instead I found all this magic stuff that looked like D&D. After years of resisting the parental dictates to "read more widely" (which meant: read Dickens and Bronte and put down the Tolkien or Cherryh or the Le Guin) I saw that I could read legit literature and still get my fantasy vibe on.

But I couldn't write it, not in that MFA program, so I kept going with lit in grad school, and after a series of science-grant administrative jobs I ended up adjunct professoring in composition at a big public university. The staff is composed of people like me, lecturers with graduate degrees, and English graduate students in both the PhD and MFA programs. My office shares a hallway with several professors, some in Creative Writing, some in Literature. As one might imagine, I come into contact with a lot of academics. A lot of us like Tolkien. A lot of us are gamers. But for most of us, it's still unserious. Leisure stuff. "Real" literature is something else, something mysterious, that could be universal themes or beautiful prose and universal themes or so much cultural cache we can't get rid of it? (And okay, but why is a goddamned hairy-handed vampire more legit than a dragon, as a book's subject? Dracula, not Twilight.)

Well. In my cynical mood, I'd say what they mean by serious is Not Fun (for me, this applies also to Dracula).

The Facebook poster seems to think that her student's dubious literary analysis skills will be bolstered by Not Reading Fantasy. I think--just based on the kid I was, reading shit I did not like one bit in high school lit classes--that if the student has something to say about the work, her literary analysis will suddenly improve; but if she's bored or disengaged, well. Shitty writing. I learned to fake it, but I had good teachers who let me play with form. My essays were half the time fantastic arguments made in character's voices, weird and recursive and, because I gave a damn, good analysis.

Which is not to say broadening of literary horizons is not a good and necessary thing for cultural literacy and just knowing shit and hey, sometimes we find something we like--I would not have read Virginia Woolf on my own, or any of the modernists, without that graduate seminar--and sometimes we encounter concepts we wouldn't, if we stayed in our comfort zones (Like modernism. Like post-modernism. OH MY GOD, JAMES JOYCE, WHY?) But if we're talking about learning to read critically, then... why not something with dragons on the damn cover? Just because dragons aren't "real"? (Well you know what? Neither is Mrs. Dalloway, or Lord D'arcy, or Jane-bloody-Eyre. Neither is Kurtz or the Artful Dodger. Characters and settings aren't real. They just exist on a scale of scientific-materialist plausibility.)

Here's a thought: if you want someone to be a better writer, let them write about something they care about. Dragons. Or vampires. Or women seeking husbands. Or whatever.  Then make them think critically about why they like it, why the prose is working (or not), what the author's saying. Some writing is just crap, okay! But the way to have someone realize that is not to tell them it's shit and hand them a different book. Teach them to like the thinking, and they'll start looking for writing that makes them think. With or without dragons.

the odyssey of ALLY

So hey! Ally is up for pre-order. That's the third and last book of On the Bones of Gods, the follow-up to Enemy and Outlaw, and the end of the trilogy, in which, well, things happen to Snow and Veiko and Dekklis.

Preorder is only for the e-book edition. Paperback will be available to order on March 20.

Some of you may think...hm. That's odd. Why only the e-version on preorder?

Well. See.

Ally had a long, strange journey. I sold Enemy and Outlaw in a 2-book deal, with an option for the third. So the first two came out, I wrote the third, we sent it off...and for reasons unbeknownst to me (but which I suspect have to do purely with numbers and business, because that is what publishing is), the publisher declined that option.

So there I was, with the third book finished, and no publisher, and a rejection I had not expected.

So that sucked. I despaired. I thought my career was over before it had really gotten started. And mostly I was seriously heartbroken, because, well, these characters are near and dear, you know? They live in your head for years, you get them out into the world, and then...their story isn't done but it suddenly is. Even when you know the decision not to publish isn't personal, it feels like it is.

But, you know. This is writing. Rejection(shit) happen(s).

I started the next project (and ended up throwing it out, 93K words into it, and starting over).

I polished up the manuscript I'd worked on after Ally, and unrelated and totally different project, and sent it to my agent, Lisa Rodgers.

She was sad about Ally, too, and we commiserated. She said, These things happen, yeah, and they suck, but there are options.

Yeah, I said. I can put Ally up on my blog in installments.

Or, she said, You can self-publish.

Oh no, I said. I cannot. I do not know the first thing about it.

Pshaw, she said. (Well, she might not have said pshaw, exactly, but you get the idea). The agency publishes its authors sometimes. We've got resources. We can help.

And here's where Ally's odyssey finally turned around. Lisa, like, knows people, man. She coordinated the cover art and found a copyeditor and dealt with distribution and epub formatting and all that stuff that looks like magic but is really hard work. I hired an editor and worked on revisions. All the pieces came together, and now...

Ally is here.

light is the left hand of darkness

There will be big news coming soon, but Ursula K. Le Guin just died and I am sad.

The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, two of my...favorites? I don't think that's the right word. Two very important books for me. I didn't come to Le Guin through Earthsea; I came by accident, browsing shelves as an adolescent, and The Left Hand of Darkness sounded cool. (It was cool. It was hard. It made me think about things I hadn't before.) I don't think I understood it entirely--I mean, I was like 12--but it lingered. When I reread it, and found The Dispossessed on the library shelf beside it, and read it, I began to understand why Le Guin's name kept popping up with all the other famous SFF authors.

I was at an SFRA conference in Las Vegas in 2005 and Le Guin was a guest. I had to date published one short story. I was working on a novel, and feeling entirely inadequate to the task. I didn't actually meet her, although it was a tiny conference and I totally could have walked up and done so. I didn't even bring my books. I mean...it seemed disrespectful, somehow, to attend a conference on SFF scholarship and research and then fangirl. But I remember she told us the rejection letter story about Left Hand of Darkness  and I remember thinking, "but that's why it was awesome!" and also, "okay, if that book can be rejected, oh god."

I don't really remember Earthsea. I need to remedy that.

my murdercats are broken

Skugga started 2018 off by catching a hummingbird. He did this in the dark pre-dawn (cue early-bird jokes), when I am practicing yoga in the dark (lights, feh) and Skugga's doing his early patrol of the patio. The regular hummingbird at that hour is an asshole. It's buzzed me before. Evidently it buzzed him, too. I didn't see the deed. I heard this strangled chirp! and then Skugga came scuttling inside.

He saw me, I saw him, and he dashed into the bedroom and under the dresser. Hooray.

Got the bird back, somehow still alive and intact, and delivered it back outside. Did it survive? I don't know. It wasn't there an hour later, once the sun actually came up and we could see anything, but it was mad and intact enough to flutter out of my hands and hide in the bushes, so maybe. Point is: Skugga didn't kill it.

the murdercat fails at murderSame day, later: Skugga caught a mouse. That time I got to the door in time to keep him outside. He sulked on the patio, occasionally tossing the mouse and pouncing. Eventually he watched it crawl under the laundry room door. I yelled. Skugga seemed confused.

Next morning, another mouse. The same? Maybe. It was trying to hide in a pair of empty, nested flower pots. Skugga patiently peeled the pots apart and pounced (alliteration, for the win). That mouse also escaped eventually, this time off the patio and into the bushes.

And then the third mouse, same day. This one, Skugga brought inside. This is a small apartment, and he was not about to take his treasure into a place I'd already pursued him, so he went into the bathroom. Aha! A door. Which we promptly shut.

But did Skugga kill the mouse? No, he did not. He tossed it. He chased it. And when it went catatonic from terror, he... sat down. Looked at it. Poked it with a paw ("Will you move? No?") and then tried a bite and got a mouthful of fur, ew! and let go.

Terrified mouse. Puzzled cat. I was feeling sorry for both of them.

But there is a second cat in this house, Louhi the Toothless, and I thought--well maybe she'll have a clue about mouse-killing. I did not hold out too much hope, fortunately. Louhi saw that mouse and started growling, stalking, creeeeeeping up on it. She made one of those long, loud, nostril-exhales that means "Oh what the actual fuck", and then repeated it, longer and more loudly, the closer she got to the mouse. She growled. It cowered. She tapped it with a paw. It cowered. She looked at me with utter disgust and stalked about of the bathroom.

I think she thought we'd gotten another pet.

"It's cute," said Nous.

Oh no. Oh no no.

The mouse continued to pray to the mouse gods, face in the corner, shivering. Skugga continued to look confused. I finally got a flower pot and piece of cardboard and scooped the mouse up, and Nous took it outside, far, far away, and let it go. It was entirely undamaged. No cuts. No blood. Just wet fur, from hanging out in Skugga's mouth for so long.

 Evidently Skugga is a catch-and-release mouser. At least the mice are staying off the patio and out of the laundry closet.

i am fire, i am death

This is becoming a regular thing, isn't it, I write about the weather? Like there's nothing else going on. But since my nation's currently a dumpster fire, well... I am not happy that my state is also burning, burning. Again. Especially since the new horror of a tax bill will not allow deductions for fire-disaster expenses because it's a mean-spirited partisan piece of malice.

Anyway, wind, ash, dust, wind, more ash, smoke. I'd rather have an actual dragon burning shit up, with actual gold in a hoard somewhere, so that we could at least pay for the rebuilding afterwards.

And we can't say "climate change" because... because... I guess we don't do science anymore? Man, I don't get that. I don't get the social conservatism, either (oh, let's just call it bigotry), but that's all amygdala. But science?

A process of trying to understand the world's materialist function, from observation and experimentation and extrapolation from principles. A search for the fucking rules, which would seem to be right up some people's alley, and yet--isn't. Rules for society! But not rules for the planet.

But also...facts, I guess. People imagine science is facts, and sometimes it is, but more often it's an evolution of understanding. (Here I fall back on my Kuhn, and The Structure of Scientific Revolution). New data emerges, new theories float, new tests, new knowledge. I think it's kinda awesome.

And yet.

I was flipping through a Signals catalog the other day (paper. I KNOW.) and there's a whole page of astronomy-themed stuff, and there's this solar system bracelet with, yes, Pluto on it. And the ad copy made a big deal of that, like including Pluto was something subversive, a strike against The Man who wants to take away our ninth planet. My first thought was "pretty bracelet" and my second was, FFS, Pluto? Come on.

When I was growing up, I learned that we had nine planets. Then, when I was an adult, I learned that the solar system was more complicated than that, and the ninth planet had been reclassified. And then the fight reignited about planetary classifications, and Pluto might be a planet again...along with 110 other bodies out there, This did not make me sad. Or upset. Or anything, except yay, science! A new thing has been learned about how solar systems form!

But people did get upset, as if Pluto's reclassification, as if this new knowledge, was some kind of personal assault on The Way Things Are.  No need to go relearning new things, why, we had nine planets when I was a kid, and nine planets are good enough now, too. And somehow the debate was evidence that those scientists are just silly, fighting over that stuff...all while insisting that Pluto was a planet because that was what they learned from a book when they were kids (which is, you know, pretty silly too).

I don't get it. I mean, I do--sometimes new data, new information, overturns something we found comforting or comfortable, and it sucks. But that's emotional reflex. Discomfort is part of growth and change, and change and growth are necessary and constant. Or they should be.

the ninth ring

I actually don't remember my Dante well enough to say  if there even is one that deals with weather in Inferno. If there isn't, there should be. I mean, it was 91 degrees at 6AM in late October, on its way to triple digits. (And in the time it took to write this post, yes, we hit 100).

I just finished the first draft (as opposed to the zero-th) of WIP,* which is not really IP anymore, but also is because it's not finished. But it's tacked together enough that I can send it to Nous, and send it back to The Rat, who read the subzero-th version already, and eventually, to The Mighty Agent. I have, like, 40K in scrap notes, which is what I had for Enemy, too. The detritus of world-building. The ways plot could've gone, and didn't. Still way better than the aborted 93K novel from last autumn. No, WIP is not book three of On the Bones of Gods. That manuscript has a name (Ally) and will be forthcoming in 2018, barring disaster. Except much fanfare as the details become more clear. Except the revisions on that to be eating my head soon enough.

I had started to post about the MeToo hashtag--

--which I participated in on Facebook (and not on Twitter), but--well. I didn't have anything to add, you know? There are so many of us, and so much overlap. I was struck by the number among my friends who hesitated to post (myself included) because we didn't think our experiences were serious enough. Catcalls and creepers and men from whom we could walk away without penalty didn't seem legit in the face of the assaults other women reported. That's toadshit, of course. I did not encounter any of the assholes some of the others did--the men whose comments made it about them, the women who said this is shaming, or not enough, or too much, or elevating victimhood, as if we are all asking for pity. And wait, what? I don't feel shame because some dude pulled up beside my twelve-year-old self and exposed his penis to me, or because some guy slapped my ass, or because a guy assessed me as fuckable (or not, depending on the encounter). I feel anger. I always have. And anyone who thinks I should feel something other than that can shut the fuck up--

--but decided I should work on this Tolkien class I just agreed to teach at the high school during the spring semester, which is a particularly long 17 class days of 2.5 hours each and no, we are not watching the LoTR and The Hobbit trilogies in their entirety. (Although that remains an option, I guess. But if I can't get the damned films done in one class, what's the point?) I had been intending to teach Zombie Lit, for which I have a syllabus already prepared, but the students I guess wanted Tolkien, and the boss asked who wanted to do that, so.... I am now researching, finding excerpts, coming up with (or borrowing) lesson plans. These are creative writers. We can do some cool shit. But it's also a lit class, so we don't do a lot of writing, which means I will need to PDF (it is too a verb. Shut up) all manner of things. Eventually. Not today. It's too hot to fight with the scanner today.

I have rediscovered Tolkien fans, though. Whew. Also too hot to get into that right now. But let's say I'm gonna have to watch the 3rd installment of The Hobbit and I intend to have beer and ice cream when I do it. Self-medication at its finest. (I'm going to hope Smaug wins, and write fanfic in my head where he does.)

black sand, dancing skies

The Lyft driver was horrified.

"You're going where?" she said. "To do...what?"

Iceland, we said. To climb a waterfall and walk the black beach at Reynisfjara and hike Thingvellir
Thingvellir, site of the Althingand ride horses. No tour buses, no sitting in hot springs, no fancy dinners. Rain gear, good boots, lots of layers, wool socks. Maybe the aurora borealis, if we were lucky. Probably not a lot of beer. Certainly not a lot of people. 340K on the whole island! Long stretches of nothing and no one. Lots of sheep and horses. Silence, I said wistfully. Maybe somewhere I can't hear any cars.

"Have fun," the Lyft driver wished us. But she sounded doubtful. (Her upcoming vacation, a weekend in Denver, was to be spent drinking and partying and otherwise not exerting herself one more iota than necessary. I do not judge this, but I also do not want it.)

Maybe it's that Nous and I are not good at vacations. We haven't been on one that lasted more than a day (visiting family does not count) for 15 years. Perhaps we could've offered that as excuse to the Lyft driver--we don't know how to relax in long stretches. And also, to us, hiking is relaxing. Seeing new landscapes is relaxing. Nous getting some quality time with his camera is relaxing.

We got our wishes. All of them.

I mean: we went to Iceland in September and did not need our rain pants. It rained exactly twice: the afternoon we arrived, and on the return from Reynisfjara.

Glymur, in HvalfjordurWhich meant, when we went up the Glymur waterfall trail, it was sunny, and our (very enthusiastic) guide decided to take the long way, which involved crossing a glacial river twice, barefoot. No tour buses. You can't see Glymur from the road. You have to earn it.

No lie: I felt pretty badass, afterwards. And I was also very glad of my wool socks (one of my earliest pairs) which prevented blisters from lingering damp and sandy bits that stuck to me after the river crossings.

We saw the aurora borealis that night, of which I have no pictures, because I was too busy watching them. They looked like  bands of silver and the faintest hints of green. Like ghosts moving on the vaults of the sky.

And then, finally, Reynisfjara, which was my Must See from the very first time I saw a photo. We drove out of Reykjavik, past farms of sheep and Icelandic horses, past Eyjafjallajökull (capped in clouds, quiet, brooding), past a parade of waterfalls fed by the glaciers.

There is something about this long stretch of black sand, studded with rocks, ringed with basalt columns on one side and crashing grey sea on the other. Just listen to it. I wish I could share the rest: the wind, the cold salty tang of the sea, the grit of the sand. But this will have to do.