Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 19

St. Patrick's Day? NOPE! Do-OVER Day!

This morning I was ready to take my car into Dave's Auto in order to get the blinker fixed. I packed up my charged-up laptop and gathered up everything else I might need in order to spend several hours at the library.

Mason came downstairs and announced he'd just been sick. We debated about keeping him home, but he said that he wanted to try to go. So we got ourselves ready and took him to school. Two steps from the car, Mason face planted like a pro. BAM! Straight down into the concrete. He says he wasn't dizzy, but it was a spectacular nose dive, nonetheless.

I pulled over, Shawn rushed out to give him a huge hug and I directed them both back into the car with a, "Nope, forget it, that's a sign. We should keep you home." I dropped Shawn back at work and stopped on the way home at my favorite Irish coffee shop to get a cup of coffee AND buy a green St. Patrick's day shirt. I figured maybe, just maybe the Good Neighbors had it in for us (we hadn't worn any green at all and Mason has plenty of Irish blood in him). So, as soon as we were home, I got Mason's huge shiner cleaned up, got him a new pair of glasses (his were completely wrecked) and tucked him into some GREEN (for protection, dammit.) Probably he'd have been fine to go to school, but screw it, that's the beginning of a No-Good Rotten Day if I ever saw one. We declared today "Fuhgeddaboudit Day" and "Nope Day."

When I called Dave's Auto, the guy on the other end of the phone was super-understanding. His whole family had gotten the flu and no one likes to face plant. So, I've got a new appointment for the car on Thursday. Our signal can keep being RANDOM until then. If nothing else, it's been nice enough out that I can hand signal my turns, if need be.

So today will be a day for doing other things. We may still end up at the library because some of the Terry Pratchett books I ordered for Mason have come in. Nothing soothes the soul like some Discworld books (or so I have been told.)

My first official, full-length review is up at Bitter Empire today: Let me know what you think!

My List Grows Exponentially

I don't know if I should include these or not, but the WINNERS (and nominees) of the Kitchies were announced. So, like a lot of the books on my list, they were published last year, but are this year's winner? I guess, if I wait, I'd have to wait until this time NEXT year, so maybe...?

Anyway here they are:

The Red Tentacle (Novel)

Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith (Egmont)
The Race, Nina Allen (NewCon)
The Peripheral, William Gibson (Viking)
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Way Inn, Will Wiles (4th Estate)


The Golden Tentacle (Debut)

Viper Wine, Hermione Eyre (Jonathan Cape)
The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne (Blackfriars)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (self-published)
Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta (HarperCollins)
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic)

I also missed an earlier announcement of the BSFA (British Science Fiction Association)'s nominees:

The Race, Nina Allan (Newcon)
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
Europe in Autumn, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Wolves, Simon Ings (Gollancz)
Ancillary Sword, Anne Leckie (Orbit)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North (Orbit)
Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder)
The Moon King, Neil Williamson (Newcon)

... I don't think I'm going to run out of things to read any time soon....

Taxes and Other Such Trauma

What better day to schedule an appointment with the Tax Guy, than a Monday, eh? Yeah, well, it shouldn't be too painful. I made some money writing this year thanks to Audible.com and trickling royalties, but I was also having the government pre-take-out taxes on all the work I did for the Library. Between that and the money Shawn paid quarterly, I suspect we overpaid and will be getting a refund, as usual.

The only reason we go to a Tax Guy (this should be a title, like Captain, so I am capitalizing it A. A. Milne style) is because I don't want the headache of figuring out all the things. We have a child, we have a house, I have, like, at least three jobs (if you include my teaching) so it just makes sense to pay a little money to avoid tears and possible arguments. I think of the money we pay Tax Guy as money that we DIDN'T have to spend on couples' therapy.

The other trauma in my life is that our blinker on our car has become utterly RANDOM. It's not just blinking fast or suddenly quitting in the way that would make me think "Ah, I must replace a fuse" but RANDOM. Like, works some times/doesn't work at all/blinks twice and then quits. As Mason points out that makes our car one giant moving violation, so I'll be taking it into our friend Dave's Auto in Roseville tomorrow morning. Honestly, I suspect they'll find a whole bundle of wires that have been damaged by water or squirrels or something because I also have a very RANDOM (which I think should just be all-caps because it's deeply frustrating and random seems like a thing one should respect by shouting) engine light that pops on and off, as well as other dashboard Gremlins.

Otherwise, life continues apace. Shawn is fully recovered. She says she still gets weird twinges just after eating, as though the phantom gallbladder is trying to do its thing, but otherwise she's as good as new. I'm especially happy to report that she's taken back over laundry duty which is a huge relief to me personally.

Mason and I also recorded our MangaKast podcast: The Ywach Puppet Show

Having given up 200+ pages into THREE BODY PROBLEM, I'm currently reading a book that's up for a Lambda called AFTERPARTY which I absolutely adore.... except for one weird problem. The main character's name is... Lyda. For real, Lyda. Lyda Rose, no less. And, I know that most people have to deal with this all the time, but I NEVER come across a book with my name in it. NEVER. Add on top of this that the Lyda of AFTERPARTY is also a lesbian and is hallucinating angels. It's like someone wrote an alternate universe, real-person fic about me.

Honestly, in my head, I've just been switching to Lydia. That makes it all better.

I will say that I ended up having to reach out to the author, Daryl Gregory to tell him just how eerie it was to be reading about a Lyda who has so many similarities to myself and I got a Tweet back from him:



Which was just perfect. I am now rooting for him to win the Lammy (sorry Alyx!)

Teaching!

I just got confirmation from the Loft that I'll be teaching my "Mars Needs Writer's" class, which starts in a couple of weeks (03/25/15–05/20/15 | Wednesday | 6:00-8:00 p.m.) If this suddenly looks like something you'd like to sign-up for, the class is by no means at full capacity.

This also means I should probably look at my syllabus and figure out what the heck I'm doing! But, hey, I have a little time to figure it out, which is good.

I'm at the hospital clinic right now hanging out while Shawn does her follow-up with her surgeon. She's feeling 100% better now that she's off all the drugs. Honestly, I think the worst part of all this was how SICK the medicines that were supposed to be helping with pain and nausea made her (which included the unmentionable gastrointestinal problem, which is, of course, a well known side-effect of narcotics.)

So, hooray for that.

Now that the weather is turning nice, my friend Naomi and are going for walks, ostensibly to exercise, but really we tend to walk to a coffee shop or otherwise hang out at a place like that afterwards. So, I won't be losing weight. However, Naomi took me out to Fort Snelling to walk around near the abandoned barracks and officers' housing. That place is amazing. As I was just telling a friend, it's easy to believe in fairies because you have to wonder how it is people don't really know about this place, despite the fact that it's a ghost town that's almost in the middle of the city. While we were wandering around imagining being billionaires who could turn this into an upscale boutique town, two deer came bounding out of the underbrush--a mama and her spotted baby.

Seriously, people: Fairy land.

I wish I'd brought my camera.

Oh God More Award Nominees....!

I've started following Locus Magazine on Twitter, so I can keep up with the award news as it rolls in. So now I have even more books to add:

According to Locus, "there are several titles of genre interest on the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize long list":

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (Picado)
The Country of Ice Cream Star, Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus)
The Bees, Laline Paull (Fourth Estate)
The Table of Less Valued Knights, Marie Phillips (Jonathan Cape)

This is good news, because Shawn has been bugging me to add Station Eleven to my reading list because she thinks it would make an interesting compare and contrast to "actual" SF (as opposed to what mundanes THINK SF is.) Now I have an excuse. Honestly, I've never heard of the Baileys Women's Prize before, but apparently it comes with a cash prize.

In other news, I started working on a novella today. A friend of mine has been organizing a group of people to write a paranormal project together and listening to them talk about it has made me realize that if I have the energy to do something like that, I should really try seeing if I can write a few Tate one-offs as well.

I'm pleased to report I have about 2,000 words of a new Garnet Lacey novella. One that I intend to self-publish on Amazon. Fingers crossed that I can keep this project going.

Unjust Cause, speaking of other Tate projects, is currently languishing. I'm planning to, at some point this week, pull down copies of all my entries to-date to see if I can wrestle them into something resembling an actual novel. Then I need to read it and figure out where the heck it's going. So I can finish it.

That was an experiment that seems to have floundered. I still think it was important to do, and may very well be salvageable, but... yeah.

Still, it got me started writing on a new original project. Not all is lost! And I'm sure I can fix up what I do have.

At any rate, that's me. I'm also about 124 pages into THE THREE BODY PROBLEM and... well, things are finally starting to interest me. The book starts in a time and place I don't know very much about: The Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean, I know some basics, and the stuff we see here is very dark. But, the narrative skips forward a bunch and I think we're finally in a thread that I can sink my teeth into. We'll see.

Con Wrap-Up and a Plug

Since I have a lot to report about the con, I thought I should start with a quick plug for my new gig. I'm going to be doing a weekly book review for Bitter Empire. The introduction to the concept is up now: My Year of Speculative Fiction: An Introduction.

Check it out!

This does not mean, gentle readers, that I won't still be posting my thoughts about the books I'm reading over here. You're just going to get the un-edited, first impression, messy thinky-thoughts.

So, first drafts, really. :-)

Okay, so the con. Saturday, frankly, was a bit of a blur. It started early, because I had to get up and get home in order to take Mason to his swimming class. Then I picked up Mason's GF at her house and we all went to the con. If you saw my schedule, I was booked pretty solid. So, the idea was that with Rosemary there, Mason could enjoy wandering around the dealers' room, gaming, or panels with a friend. It worked out perfectly. She and he hung out together until 6 PM.

Mason stayed with me for the rest of the evening. It was meant to be a treat to get to stay overnight, but my schedule didn't quite allow for us to enjoy room service or any of the other fun bits of staying at a hotel (like cable!) But, that was okay.

Probably the only panel that day that was a true flop was the Wyrdsmiths: 20 Years. They'd scheduled us opposite the masquerade, so we had two audience members and one of those was Will Alexander who is a colleague and dear friend. So I ended up fetching Mason from the hotel room and we took Eleanor home.

Of the other panels, I don't remember much--not because I didn't enjoy them, but because they were LEGION. I will say, though, that probably the interview that Naomi ran with me when FAR BETTER than it had any right to. I'm not normally so Minnesotan that I'm uncomfortable talking about myself, BUT it's certainly easier when I have more confidence about my career, you know? I mean, I could point to the book that Rachel and I have out, but I hate disappointing anyone who might ask, "So when I can I see another science fiction novel, etc." However, the reaction I got when I suggested that I'm finally getting serious about writing some short novellas in the Garnet Lacey universe for Amazon self-publishing was... deeply gratifying (and humbling), let's just say.

Sunday was another sort of blur, because we had to get Mason home early. Parking at the hotel was AWFUL so I wanted to get him there and get back again before the spots were all taken. Turns out, I needn't to have rushed too much because I had another audience no-show for the "Otaku Dilemma" panel, but that was okay, because Adam Stemple and his daughter hung out with me and, if you don't know Adam from... well, Adam, you really should consider going to this year's Minicon just to see what a fantastically fun, bombastic personality he has (Adam is the musical guest of honor).

Then at the very, very end of the con I had an amazing conversation with Christopher Jones. You may recall that Christopher is the friend of mine who is an artist who has worked for both DC and Marvel. I visited his studio a couple of years ago after we had a fantastic panel at the CONvergence. Anyway, he asked me what happened: why I hadn't done anything with the comic book scripts he'd given me as models. And I was like, "Huh? I wrote a script! I gave it to another artist friend because I figured you were way too busy!" And, he gave me the stink eye and basically told me that he thought I'd just gone cold on him, as he'd been planning to help me (in whatever way he could) break in into comic book writing.

I was... yeah, totally blown away.

AS YOU CAN IMAGINE.

IT'S ONLY BEEN MY DREAM SINCE I WAS TWELVE TO WRITE FOR COMIC BOOKS!!!!

So... one of the many tasks I've given myself over the next week or so is to see what other scripts I can come up with.

BECAUSE O.M.G.

So... yeah, most of the con was a blur. Because the last ten minutes were AMAZING. And you know, nothing may come of it, but it really, really moves me that someone is willing to help me... and has confidence in my ability to do something like this, that I normally would feel was so far out of my league as to be unattainable.

Con Report

My first panel was by far the best of the bunch yesterday. That one was, "Why Has No One Heard of Me, Dammit!?" and it was a good group--Michael Mirriam, Naomi Kritzer, Rachel Gold, and myself. (I provided links, in case YOU haven't heard of them.) Interestingly, we're all doing *something* right because just putting my fellow panelists names into Google, they all popped up right away. The joke answer we came up with, I wrote down, which is "complain and cats." The idea being that we're attractive when we're passionate and cats are always popular on the internet.

Other than that I mostly tried to argue against the sort of typical marketing advice, which is to "decide your brand and promote the [bleep] out of it." My feeling is that readers are smarter than marketers, and can see through the writer desperately writing about some subject and trying to slide in a non-advertising advertisement of their book and then the potential readers are very, very TURNED OFF. I mean, all we have those people on our feed, don't we? The ones always harping 'on message' or showing pictures of their book or slipping it into casual conversation in a way too obvious way? That's an instant turn off to me, anyway. Desperation is so not sexy.

But, it's the only thing people know to do.

So, we decided cats. Cats were a good option. The internet needs more cats

My other panel was my reading and I super-duper HATE doing readings (see above and why I am not more famous). I'd been hoping no one would show, but a bunch of people did.I am very self-conscious of my dyslexia when I read and I hate that no matter how much I practice, words ALWAYS trip me up. Plus, there are always words I use in my head that I never pronounce out loud and I always f*ck up words I know people know I'm mispronouncing. But, because I was reading from the book Rachel and I wrote, I had her come up and help me. We did some tag team scene reading, which was fun.

The last panel was the least structured. It was my FanFic 101 panel and... well, it was late at night, after parties had started, and we had one panelist whom I adored, but who was so fannish as to need a translator. We could have gone down the squee rabbit hole, but I resisted that in a foolish attempt to actually provide some "101" information, but... yeah, I probably should have let go and let goddess. :-)

----

Today's schedule is:

Marvel Phase 2, on to Phase 3
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) — Saturday 12:00 pm
Catch up on all of Marvel films from phase 2: Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and X-man Days of Future Past. Marvel One-Shots: Agent Carter, All Hail the King, on TV with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter. (There will be spoilers for all listed above.) The end of phase 2 with Avengers: Age of Ultron and the start of phase 3: Ant-Man, Captain America 3, Doctor Strange, and the rest of phase 3.

With: Lyda Morehouse, Tony Artym, mod.; Aaron Grono, Bill Rod, Ruth Tjornhom

The Rise of Women Superheroes
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) — Saturday 01:00 pm
Let’s talk about some awesome female superheroes who have become breakout sensations in recent years! Why do we love them so much, and how can we get more?
With: Lyda Morehouse, Christopher Jones, mod.; Cynthia Booth, Catherine Lundoff, Chandra Reyer

What is Anime?
IV Hawk’s Ridge (Anime/YA) — Saturday 02:00 pm
What really is Anime? What’s the real difference between Anime and cartoons, and why do we classify them like that? Hear all the facts and argue it out yourself!
With: Lyda Morehouse, Bailey Humphries-Graff, Hojo Moriarty

Lyda Morehouse Interview
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) — Saturday 04:00 pm
Learn about the mind and works of our Author Guest of Honor.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, Interviewer

Mass Autographing
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) — Saturday 05:00 pm
The Author Guest of Honor and other interested authors sign their work.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Sammi Kat, Rachel Gold, Michael Merriam, Kathryn Sullivan, et al.

The Wyrdsmiths: Twenty Years
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) — Saturday 08:00 pm
GoH Lyda Morehouse is in a writers’ group that was founded in 1994. How does a critique group sustain itself for two decades?
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, mod.; Eleanor Arnason

Hero Support: Sidekicks and Minions
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) — Saturday 09:00 pm
How does your hero go about getting a really good sidekick or a really good minion? Who are some of your favorites in literature and other kinds of storytelling? Who is the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings?
With: Lyda Morehouse, Rick Gellman, mod.; P M F Johnson, Ozgur K. Sahin, Tyler Tork

---

Today, too, I will have Mason with me at the con, and we've invited along his friend Rosemary. That's going to make this morning's logistics interesting. But, we've made it to swimming and then it's just a matter of picking her up (reassuring her mundane parents that everything will BE OKAY), and then getting to the con. The kids are all old enough that they'll have their cell phones and free range. MarsCON is big enough, but not CONvergence out-of-control huge, so I'm very confident they'll have things to do and yet be very safe. If not, Mason has me (and, possibly more importantly, Anton) on speed-dial, so he'll be fine.

Should be a full, fun day. I'm looking forward to letting Mason really have his first true con experience. Though it would be nicer if Shawn felt well enough to hang out at the hotel with us. Because Mason and I are going to overnight and live the hotel highlife. There are very few perks to being a science fiction writer, but the occasional free hotel room is one of them that I think my whole family should get to enjoy. :-)

It's been a fun con so far. Fingers crossed!

MarsCON Tonight!

Today is the first day of MarsCON.

Looks like registration opens at noon, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to figure out when Opening Ceremonies is... I do have a panel at 4 PM, which I planned to arrive in time for. Hopefully, they won't need me too much before that since I have to pick Mason up after school, and he's not usually out until after 3 PM.

It's going to be a bit of a mad dash.

I've got a reading tonight and, of course, it finally hit me that what I should read from is the book that will be available there: SONG OF SECRETS, which I co-wrote with Rachel Calish. Depending on how much of that I want to read, I could also read part of my short story "God Box" which appeared in KING DAVID AND THE SPIDERS OF MARS as I'm thinking about bringing copies of that book along as well.

My schedule tonight is:

How Come Nobody’s Heard Of Me, Dammit!!
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) -- Friday 04:00 pm
Let’s figure out all the things we did wrong!
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, mod.; Rachel Gold, Michael Merriam

Fiction Reading: Lyda Morehouse
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) —Friday 08:00 pm
Come hear our Author Guest of Honor read her work.
With: Lyda Morehouse

FanFiction - Who, What, and Huh?
IV Hawk’s Ridge (Anime/YA) — Friday 09:00 pm
From the basics for the beginners to your favorite websites to share your own stories.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Rakhi Rajpal mod, Bailey Humphries-Graff, Susan Woehrle

In other news, Shawn is doing a lot better. She's still sleeping a lot, but I suspect that's what comes from removing an organ. But, she's otherwise back to doing most of the things she does. She's still restricted on lifting and OMG I can't wait until that's over, because I HATE DOING LAUNDRY SO MUCH.

I do a lot of other things around the house, including nearly all of the cooking and dish washing, but laundry has always been Shawn's thing and I can't wait for her to take it back. Also, I'm ready for her to go back to work, if only because the longer she stays home the more likely she is to notice how little ELSE I do around the house.

*wink*

I just got the notice that THREE-BODY PROBLEM is ready for me to pick up at the Roseville library. I'm headed there in about a half hour to also return ANCILLARY SWORD, which *cough*I didn't finish.*cough* This will now be two out of the six books up for the Nebula that I just couldn't finish for one reason or another. As I was saying to Shawn last night, there's nothing _wrong_ with ANCILLARY SWORD, per se. I gave it a fair chance: nearly 200 pages. I just never got really engaged in the story. I found the world.. too stiff and formal and unemotional (which is weird because I think it's loosely based on Japan or China--there is a lot of bowing and tea and begging of pardons), and so I never connected. For me, it suffered from a whole lot of 'so what?' I finally found a character I sort of enjoyed, the alien translator, and, well, not to spoil anything, but let's just say my attachment to that person was short-lived.

I feel very strange about my inability to connect to either this or ANCILLARY JUSTICE, since so many people recommended the first book to me and it was up for nearly all the awards last year. I feel like I failed this book. Like there's something wrong with me that I didn't 'get' it.

Certainly, there are nifty things going on in Leckie's universe. I love the idea of the ancillary's themselves, even with their gruesome past. I love (though found it somewhat off-putting and jarring at first) the whole use of the feminine pronoun for all the things. Leckie's writing is strong--for the most part.

Leckie is hobbled by the constraints of her main character, Berq, though. Because Berq used to be a ship (for real, she was a space ship), she's not exactly *in* her body. She's not sensual in any way. There's no physical description of other characters beyond basics like skin color and a bit about hair. Gender, of course, is never attached. Which is so much the opposite of the other books I've read by women this year--so much body: so much sex with the body, so much awareness of the body's gender, so much indulging of the body with food (glorious food!) and pissing and shitting and bleeding and f*cking.

And I miss it.

I feel "floaty" and unanchored without it.

Add to that the emotionlessness of Berq and her culture, and I'm lost. Berq often has to *tell* me what she's feeling, rather than showing it physically (also something to do with this emotionless culture Berq is from). "I'm angry all the time" I read, and I thought, "You are? Since when? and Why?" (which seems like a major misstep, if I'm supposed to have known, much less felt it, too.)

Because of all this, I end up just not feeling it. Any of it.

I really wanted to like this book too. And I just didn't.

At any rate, I intend to bring my laptop with me to MarsCON over this weekend, so hopefully, I can regale you all with daily con reports.

I Must Have Been Out of My Mind (So. Many. Books.)

Well, I certainly won't get all the award nominees read BEFORE the awards are announced, but I guess I never said that was my goal, per se. And, the year is long... which is good, because yet another award was announced yesterday. The Lambda Literary Award, which is for GLBT fiction in general, but which I include because it has a speculative fiction category. This year's finalists for the SF/F/Horror Lambda are:

LGBT SF/F/HORROR
Afterparty, Daryl Gregory, Tor Books
Bitter Waters, Chaz Brenchley, Lethe Press
Butcher’s Road, Lee Thomas, Lethe Press
Child of a Hidden Sea, A. M. Dellamonica, Tor Books
Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone, Tor Books
FutureDyke, Lea Daley, Bella Books
Skin Deep Magic, Craig Laurance Gidney, Rebel Satori Press

Tor Books (a major, traditional NY publisher) is well represented. More men* on this list, but I'm very excited that I have an excuse to hunt down my friend Alyx Dellamonica's book, Child of a Hidden Sea. Out of 7, only 2 are easily identified as women. But, of course, for Tempest's challenge they would have all qualified because they are (presumed) part of the queer community in one way or another.

Also, how could anybody not want to read a book called FutureDyke??

Last night, I got about 50 pages into Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie. Leckie is a writer that we argued about a little on my FB feed because, at one point, we were trying to list women who wrote "hard" science fiction. I suppose you could split a hair with a molecule slicer, and say, no, this is technically space opera, but there are AI/cyborgs and space ships. I don't know how much more skiffy you need your SF.

The book I'm reading is actually the sequel to Ancillary Justice, which I started last year and ... well, while I didn't exactly bounce out of it, I didn't precisely stick to it, either. I bet I read a little under a hundred pages before it was due back at the library and I returned it, mostly unread. Leckie's first book, for me, was a little too... "unanchored"? I'm not sure what word I want here, but the first fifty/eighty pages felt unfocused and not connected to the physical in a way in which I find I really need when being introduced to a completely strange and new world. Part of the strangeness of Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword is that the AI/cyborg POV character (as well of all of society), use one pronoun to describe every gender and that pronoun is "she."

As I said in an earlier post about this, dealing with the labeling of all as "she" really underscores the point that using the generalized 'he' as we do in our modern society doesn't work the way we think it does. It's not as universal as we've been led to believe.

I am a she, and yet I find myself wondering who REALLY is, and who isn't. (Sometimes there are clues, "her beard was long and thick," but then, particularly in the first book where the ancillary was traveling from world to world--I think, or, this is an alien and their female aliens can grow beards... beards might be ceremonial or....?)

Then I usually stop to wonder, why does it even matter? Why does it throw me so much to not KNOW?

I think I'm fairing better in this book, because I've accepted she as the norm. Until a penis actually makes an appearance, I've decided that everyone in the book is a woman... or a man. It really has stopped mattering to me to some extent, though I still find myself looking for clues. Luckily, Leckie knows I am and has been sure to make it impossible. Okay, so the Fifth Seat is really concerned about the dishes and the appropriateness of protocol, but that's "her" job as aide/adjutant. That certainly doesn't make her default female any more than anyone else, does it?

It's fascinating.

Ancillary Sword, too, in my opinion, seems to be written with the confidence of a second novel, and so I feel more anchored for whatever reason (or, maybe, it's only in comparison to the very, VERY trippy books I read previous to this one.)

The other book I have but haven't started yet (I'm a monogamous reader: my mildly dyslexic brain can only deal with one book/story at a time) is This Shattered World which is the only book I've found so far that's up for an Aurealis (the Australian SF award) AND I found it in Roseville Library's YA section... the book jacket makes the plot sound eerily like one I proposed to my former editor when she asked me for some military SF. (Honestly? I will admit I checked the publisher, but, of course it's not the same. There's just nothing new under the sun.)

And.. now I have another whole list to start hunting for!!

Reading, More Reading, and a Tiny Bit of Writing

I finished MEMORY GARDEN by Mary Rickert a few hours ago, and I really came to enjoy it. I didn't think I would, since I've been reading so much science fiction and this book is a contemporary fantasy. The tone of it, though, was also very... quiet, yet suspenseful, not unlike my experience with MEMORY OF WATER by Emmi Itaranta.

Locus Magazine tells me I have a new crop of award nominees to attempt to find--the Aurealis Award (for best Australian SF):

Aurora: Meridian, Amanda Bridgeman (Momentum)
The White List, Nina D’Aleo (Momentum)
Peacemaker, Marianne de Pierres (Angry Robot)
This Shattered World, Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner (Allen & Unwin)
Nil By Mouth, LynC (Satalyte)
Foresight, Graham Storrs (Momentum)

Again, you will see that out of the 6 books up for best science fiction, 5 are written by women (one is written by TWO women!) So, I will be accidentally doing Tempest's challenge by only agreeing to read people up for awards. These might be more difficult for me to do, as NONE of them have shown up in my libraries' e-book collections yet. But I haven't checked the paper holdings. I would be surprised if Marianne de Pierres wouldn't be there, not only because she's published by Angry Robot, but also because I remember reading a book by her some time ago (like the 1990s? Anyway, she's very much established on this side of the world.)

In other news, Shawn continues do well. I'm forbidden from giving away too many details, but suffice to say that she's made real progress and I think that many things have shifted, including her sense of impending doom. She's actually sound asleep right now, sleeping well and deeply for the first time in days.

For myself, all this reading has produced only a small amount of writing from me. I've been working on something that I think will eventually be a long, short story, but, being the first attempt at something quite like this in a long time, it's meandering its way out of me very slowly. I'm hoping actually to have enough of it written to read at my MarsCON reading on Friday. I've got a fair amount--about 3,000 words, but with luck I'll get more out this evening. I'm having one of those moments in writing, though, where I suddenly wonder if this story should have been written in a different p.o.v. Currently it's first person, but it may have to shift to third. I think I'm going to finish a draft of it and see. I only worry because it seems, from all my reading, to be shifting into something that's kind of about gender to some extent and without the pronouns in early it might not be evident what the main character's gender is, and that's not the focus (not _his_ gender, anyway).... anyway, it's good to be wrestling with all of this stuff again.