Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 83

Graphic Novels and Trolls.

My editor posted my review of an awesome collection of PANG: THE WANDERING SHAOLIN MONK over at my reviewing gig. If you like Jackie Chan monk movies, you'll love this -- and as a bonus, it's an on-going web comic you can read at Shi Long Pang.

And the troll referenced in the title of this post is not actually comic book related, more of the on-line community variety. When the news broke about the union busting bill getting pushed through committee via the "nuclear option" in Wisconsin, I was horrified and devestated. I posted a rather innocuous (though clearly political) status on my FB about how upset I was by this turn of events and how I intended to go hide in fiction where bad guys get vanquished and heroes are victorious. (Not terribly IN YOUR FACE, wouldn't you agree?)

Anyway. I normally live in a comfortable bubble that doesn't include Fox News or, really, any friends who espouse tea-baggish talkng points. However, I know they exist. I even know some of them are my friends on Facebook, because I see THEIR status updates and it's not hard to figure out.

I ignore them. Even when people are wrong on the Internet.

Thus, I have trouble understanding the mentality of someone who would read something akin to "I'm DEVESTATED by the loss of my dear pet fish" and feel the need to take the time out of his or her life to comment, "I'm a dog person myself. Fish suck." This might be a vaguely more acceptable response if you wrote "I love my pet fish. Here's a YouTube video of me making kissy faces at my fish through the tank!!" But when someone uses the word "devestated" I think you can safely assume that they're emotionally involved in whatever it is they're posting. So you think fish are the dumbest kind of pet ever, is the post in which your FB friend used the word "devestated" the time to point that out?

Yeah, see, this seems really simple to me. Some of my Rebulican/Independent/Tea Party FB friends were "devestated by the passing of 'Obamacare.'" Did I post "nana-nana-boo-boo!" on each and every one of their statuses? No, I didn't, and frankly I wasn't even tempted. What I tend to do is "like" the people who I agree with politically, and ignore (and even sometimes HIDE, though I find is just as easy not to responsd) the people with whom I don't. I can think of one recent execption and that was when someone posted a video of Ronald Reagan talking about how union's collective bargaining was a right. This person was clearly trying to show that Walker is way out of line since Reagan would disagree (and thus actually on "my side" of this debate), but I couldn't help but point out that Reagan busted the air traffic controllers' strike and, thus, those comments needed to be considered a bit ironic coming from him.

So, anyway, I let loose both cannons on my former college Game Master/Dungeon Master (now Tea Bag Dittohead), and I felt subconsciously guilty about it enough last night to dream about yelling at former high school friends about something completely unrelated.

As a professional author, I usually try to keep my FB/Twitter posts relatively innocuous. I don't hide my support of various causes and I say things like the example above which makes my political leanings really clear to the casual observer, but, you know, I'm not out there posting things like "Walker is a Kochwhore" even if I think it's true (and funny.)

All I have to say is: "Hey, Troll! Get off my lawn!!" (Imagine me in fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe...)

Thursday is usually busy, but...

Thursday is usually busy, but this is ridiculous. I'm just glad that we resisted the urge to curl up under the blankets last night and hauled our sorry butts to kuk sool wan, otherwise I'd be even crazier busy than I am right now.

Okay, truthfully, this VERY moment is a lull in the storm.

Let me tell you what's been happening. Apparently, the universe has decided that it was tired of hearing me belly-ache about how no one knows me and I'm not as popular as all the other SF/F cool kids. You've heard me whining, right? Well, the Powers that Be did too. And now I am so ridiculously popular I feel the need to complain about THAT now. ;-)

I got a "Big Idea" gig at Whatever for March 22. Holy f--k. Commencing freakage.

That alone is enough to keep me hopping around like an idiot for several days, however, within the past two days, I've also gotten three invitations to speak/present/do a workshop a various venues. The Minnesota chapter of MENSA is having a regional gathering on April 2, and has invited me to give a short presentation. Some folks in the library were looking for someone to give a talk on YA SF/F writing at their Forest Lake Branch, but I had to respectfully decline because the date they wanted was May 7, the same as my Tate signing at Uncle's. Out of the blue, the Loft sent me a solicitation for workshop ideas for their first annual Teen/YA writing event.

Plus, an editor I respect asked me to consider submitting some SF to his magazine in what SEEMS to be a personal letter. (Is form letter-y enough that it may have gone out to other SFWA members, but it was also personalized enough to make me say, "hmmmmm....")

AND, in a somewhat related/somewhat not note, one of the two authors I "represent" as a short story agent just got some serious interest from one of the places we submitted a story to. I put represent in quotes, because I'm not really anyone's agent. I'm just a friend who kind of likes the secretarial aspects of tracking and submitting short stories, so I volunteered to lick a few stamps and stuff a few envelopes for them, as it were.

But that's been exciting, too, you know?

Oh, yeah, and that would all be much more managable if I were actually just focusing on those things, but today Shawn had to go in for her stress echo. We've been slowly uncovering some information that various doctors neglected to tell us along the way. One, is that the reason Shawn was admitted on Saturday night for observation was that her R waves (something the EKG tracks) failed to progress. This is sometimes a sign that a heart attack has happened, despite the fact that none of the blood tests showed chemical evidence for a heart attack. Shawn found this bit of information out yesterday, when she and her nurse practicioner went over the on-call doctor's notes that got sent to her clinic.

The second, perhaps more startling/concerning bit of information we uncovered today is that one of the things this stress echo was supposed to look for was a HOLE in Shawn's heart. Her attending cardiologist at United suspected that a hole in her heart might be the cause of the numbness and other stroke-like symptoms.

No one has explained how serious any of these issues are/were, and that's a bit frustrating to be learning now -- now that we're out and blithely going along with our lives, you know? But, the nurses have been a font of information, and it sounds as though they think that if the stress echo doesn't show evidence of a hole (which I guess it's not terribly good at doing anyway), the cardiologist may request what's called a "bubble test."

And so my day has been a lot of taxi driving. We're a one car family, which is rarely an issue, and, even if we were, I certainly would not want Shawn driving herself to the hospital. But, today I really felt like I was just getting one place before having to turn around and go to another. All the while thinking about all the things I needed to be doing once I settled down in a coffee shop somewhere, you know?

So, now my big question for the day: should I try to actually write on my novel, panic about Whatever, or read my assignments for Wyrdsmiths before heading out to volunteer at Mason's school in about a half hour?? I may have to flip a three-sided die.

Mouse Tuesday!

At the sound of the sigh, I tense. It's the just the wind through a crack in the window, I tell myself.


I refuse to check the back seat. No one in their right minds would sleep in an abandoned car under the blazingly hot midday sun. You'd dehydrate in a minute, wouldn't you? Of course, I abandoned my own water bottle in my mad dash for the "safety" of this car. My throat sticks and sweat beads my brow at the thought.

I glance up at the overpass. The Gorgons are following my trail of dust down the slope, in simian leaps and jumps. I duck back down.

"They're coming, little brother," says a crackly male voice in Arabic, and then, adds, "Alhamdulillah."

'Thank God?' Does the crazy voice from the back of the car want the Gorgons to find us? I tell myself I've misunderstood him. I've spent my formative years with a bunch of British ex-pats' kids, after all. I know crap about street idiom. Maybe he's being sarcastic or ironic.

Which prompts me to check, honestly – if he'd just stuck with the creepy pronouncement of imminent doom, I could have contained my curiosity. Sarcastic use of Allah's name, however, deserves a peek. I maneuver across the seats on my elbows until I can see between them.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting. Someone's abandoned grandparent? A leper? A bug-eyed mental institution escapee?

What I see is a naked torso, covered in bluish-black, old-school ink tattoos. No representative pictures, of course, that would be haraam. Instead, there are spirals of Arabic script that run into lines and clusters, like someone's doodles on a notebook for a particularly boring subject. I can read Arabic, but nothing I see makes much sense. From what I can tell, he's covered in gibberish.

Shifting, I strain to see his face. One naked, bony arm covers his eyes. Tattoos circle that too, though I can almost make out a phrase or two at his wrist – a line from the Holy Qu'ran? Or someone's phone number? Or some screwed up combination of both?

Spikes of bleached-blond hair stick up from his head, like fuzzy knobs. He lifts his arm long enough to catch me staring. His face is gaunt, shrunken. His eyes glitter out of deep hollows.

He looks nearly dead.

A Gorgon slaps at the window, making me flinch.

"Don't worry, little brother, we're not halal," he rasps, covering his face with the crook of his elbow again. "They won't eat us, though I wish they would."

I'm about to ask him why he hasn't run, when I see the gleam of something metal on his legs. Braces? "How long have you been here?"

"In this particular car? A couple of hours," he says. "But in hell? Forever."

MarsCON report

First of all, I should say that I woke up this morning in the mood for Irish rebel music, and I've been given into it. Currently on the CD is the Fighting Men from Crossmaglen's "50 Irish Rebel Songs," including a song that sometimes even makes me cringe a bit -- "Fennian Record Player." (Which I should say is quite a feat, because I'm perfectly okay with belting out lyrics such "A curse on you, England, you cruel-hearted monsters; your deeds they would shame all the devils in hell" and "the only craic [pronounced "crack"] in South Armagh comes from an Armalite")

But, I thought I should try to quickly sum up my experience at MarsCON, which I attended this weekend. Probably my biggest take-away from the weekend is that I am a FAR bigger Harry Potter fan than I ever realized and that I could TOTALLY cosplay in that universe. However, Shawn is less than excited about the idea of me dying my hair bright blonde in order to cross-dress cosplay Draco Malfoy. There was a very awesome Harry, Voldemort/He Who Must Not Be Named, Dumbeldore, Sirius Black, and Professor Lupin (among others.) The only problem of course is that I feel that I need to be a lot more weasel-skinny to really pull of Malfoy.

Also, I need to go to more cons generally, because I get a lot of joy from hanging out with like-minded folks and screaming about Star Wars and Brian Michael Bendis and things that mundanes tend to not know about or tell you not to get so worked up about because, you know, they're *only* fiction.

On the flipside, I was beginning to worry that MarsCON was turning into one of those cons where you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to fake your own death in order to escape the panel from Hell. My very first panel of the con I was about 45 minutes late to, but I decided to embrace my inner diva and show up anyway. I wish I hadn't. One of the panelists dropped the n-word. A word, I should say, that I haven't heard out loud from a white person since about 1973. He was making a reference to certain characters representing the "reviled underclass," but instead of saying that, he totally casually used the n-word. And this flew out without any reproach. By the time I found my voice to say, "Uh, you're really not supposed to say that word, dude," someone else had used the term "pussification" which shocked me right back into silence.

I fled that panel to read at the BroadUniverse Rapid-Fire Reading. I hate readings. There's never a packed house, and my current book has a lot of plot twists/character revelations that make it hard to pick an action packed chapter that is spoiler free. Also, my first chapters in Ressurection Code have a bit of sex that makes for awkward afternoon readings when kids might be in the room... but I love hearing other people's stuff. Plus they had chocolate. So that one was a win.

The next panel was comics, so that was a blast. I worry that a lot of SF fans don't cross over into comic fandom, but I so RARELY get to talk to actual people about the stuff I'm reading that I totally geeked out on this panel. I was also happy to discover that the "Heroic Age" is already over in the Marvelverse. I'm a big fan of the darker storylines.

Right before dinner, I had a panel about self-promotion, which I left feeling even more like I have no idea how to find the audience for my work and that EVERYONE ESLE has the secret handshake. :-)

I had an awesome dinner out in which I busted out my deep fandom and started telling people about my unwritten STAR WAR fanfic (it's unwritten because I *know* this could easily become my life's work/ruin, as I would obsessively write it and not get paid, thus destroying my actual writing career.) The food was really good and the company was even better, so it was probably the real highlight of Saturday.

The final panel of Saturday was a bust, as it was one of those where two people have to try to carry the idea -- and one of us had a lot more to say on the subject. We did, however, have an interesting pre-panel discussion about early fandom, and a fan project called "Midwest Side Story." I kind of wish the panel had been about that, though I would have to have sat in the audience for that.

Saturday night I hung out briefly at the Harry Potter party, but I will confess that my brain is so fannish that I was a little freaked out to be hanging out with He Who Must Not Be Named. (That's just not very relaxing, you know??) That was the other take-away for the weekend, actually. I really, REALLY love fans who come in costume. Because right before the Masquerade on Saturday, I was hanging out chatting with a bunch of friends and got to see everyone come by in full regalia, and there's just something mind blowing about seeing a fairly-perfect Lord Voldemort standing next to a Prediator. For a moment, too, we thought there might be a face-off with Lord Voldemort and Glenda the Good Witch. And, you know what? I love that! Some of my favorite moment at cons are those in which I speak to people in costume as if I'm talking to the real thing.

Sunday were my best panels by far. I got to talk/gush about the new Sherlock (the BBC miniseries) and about the current dystopic trend in young adult lit.

A good time, and, in the end, an experience I wouldn't mind repeating after all.

March Forth!

It's been the week for books arriving in the mail. Yesterday there was another huge box on my porch. This time it contained contributor's copies of WHEDONISTAS! A CELEBRATION OF THE WORLDS OF JOSS WHEDON BY THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM (edited by Lynne Thomas and Deborah Standish). rarelylynne talked me into writing an article for her, despite the fact that my non-fiction sucks even worse than my short stories. The result was "Romancing the Vampire and Other Shiny Bits" in which I try to make the case that Joss Whedon is responsible for the explosion of urban fantasy/paranormal romance in publishing in the last decade.

I'm not sure I do a very good job of it, but that shouldn't stop you from picking up the book if you have any interest in Joss Whedon, his various projects, or Whedon fandom in general. Because the other contributors are very good and include people like Emma Bull ( coffeeem ), Elizabeth Bear ( matociquala ), Catherynne M. Valente ( yuki_onna , and many, many more such luminaries.

WHEDONISTAS! shares a publishing date and a publisher with RESURRECTION CODE (March 15), so, you know, you could order both at once! ;-)

Speaking of books, I am venturing out of my comfort zone of SF/F to read Michael Muhammad Knight's THE TAQWACORES. THE TAQWACORES a fiction book about the Muslim punk rock scene (a real movement,) which a friend and former Immigration History Research Center collegue Todd Michney recommended to me. I'm not much for "literary" books -- and this one is touted as "The Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims," which doesn't help as CATCHER IN THE RYE is a book I bounced off HARD, despite having to read in high school and college. Actually, I would go so far as to say I *hate* CATCHER IN THE RYE. This book, however, seems pretty fascinating so far.

It is a very strange follow-up to THE LAST HAWK, though the back cover copy does promise sex....

In other news, it's Friday. We have a busy weekend coming up, though hopefully not nearly as intense as the last. I've got panels at MarsCON both Saturday and Sunday, and Mason has his swimming class, and we'd really like to hit Uncle Hugo's this weekend for a bit of light book shopping. Shawn is actually supposed to be heading off for a business trip in the next few weeks, and she's out of mystery novels. I want to see if I can find Asaro's follow-up book to LAST HAWK, if for no other reason that to satisfy my curiosity that it's just as cheesy and sexed-up as the previous one.

I also totally forgot about my fish yesterday, so the tanks needs a cleanin'. Stuff to do!

Hopefully, I'll see some of y'all at MarsCON. The rest, I'll check in with you on Monday.

MarsCON schedule

In all the excitement with Shawn, I forgot to look through my e-mail for my MarsCON schedule. I _do_ plan to be there, though I'm going to be late for my first panel (which I'm supposed to moderate), because we'll be coming back from Mason's swimming class -- which finishes at 11:00.

I'm going to quick send off a note to Eric about that. In the meantime, this is where and when you can expect to see me:

Saturday, March 5:

11:00-11:45 AM--Krushenko's/Concierge (Room 1332)
Panel: Vampires: Why They Die in the Daylight and Don't Sparkle
DJ Vlad, mod.; Lyda Morehouse

Noon-12:45 PM--Re(a)d Mars/Taylor (2nd Floor)
Broad Universe Rapidfire Readings
Catherine Lundoff, host; Lyda Morehouse, Kathryn Sullivan, Anna Waltz

2:00-2:45 PM--Krushenko's
Panel: MARVELVERSE from the Civil War to the Heroic Age
Lyda Morehouse, mod.; Roy C. Booth, Eric M. Heideman

4:00-4:45 PM--Re(a)d Mars
Panel: Writing and Getting Read: Finding an Audience
Anna Waltz, mod.; Rob Balder, Lyda Morehouse

9:00-9:45 PM--Re(a)d Mars
Panel: Cops and Gumshoes in Fairyland
Rick Gellman, mod.; Lyda Morehouse

Sunday, March 6

10:0-10:45 AM--Krushenko's
Panel: Alternate Sherlocks
Eric M. Heideman, mod.; Cynthia Booth, Lyda Morehouse

11:00-11:45 AM--Krushenko's
Panel: The Future is Seriously Dark for 16 Year Olds
Lyda Morehouse, mod.; S.N. Arly, Naomi Kritzer

Sex Slave Fiction

Before Shawn ended up in the hospital, I'd started a book by Catherine Asaro called THE LAST HAWK. I'm normally a very slow reader thanks to my mild dyslexia and the fact that I'm usually easily distracted by Mason and/or my own writing and life. I brought the book along to the hospital and, because it was much easier to focus on than my own writing, I finished it.

And now I'm trying to decide how I feel about it.

I really loved Catherine Asaro's first couple of books. Though it's been a long time since I read them, I have a strong sense of having enjoyed PRIMARY INVERSION and CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

THE LAST HAWK, however, is from the period in which I remember a lot of my fellow SF fans complaining that Asaro had slid (as in downward - poo! poo!) into romance. I have no problem with romance obviously, but this book *isn't* romantic. (Spoilers under the cut...)


As I said in an earlier post, I kind of have a guilty pleasure for this sort of gender role reversal/boy-as-sex slave thing. I ended up both really enjoying and being driven crazy by Wen Spenser's A BROTHER'S PRICE (partly because I believe it made the Tiptree ballot).

I remember that one of the things that bothered me about Spencer's world-building was that you just had to buy into the idea that social conditioning had made men into the "weaker" sex. She had no explaination for how women controled men other than the fact that we outnumbered them by a much bigger percentage than we do now. There was a plague, but I didn't get as clear a sense that it had physically devistated the male population in terms of their size or strength.

Asaro, at least, just goes for it. The women on this planet were warriors from the beginning of their history. Most of the men are physically smaller (after, you know, thousands of years of being genetically selected for that trait). She has not only generations of social conditioning, but also this brutal past in which certain men of beauty (and great skill at playing "Quis" a game that defines a lot of their culture,) are seperated from the population and actually bound with permanent manacles that the estate manager can activate. Plus, even now in the more civilized present, the estate managers keep harems as a matter of social position (and might just happen to have some of those lovely manacles lying around). They have stun guns and armed guards to keep other managers from raiding their harems. And there's a sense that the brutal past isn't that far in the past...

At any rate, all that comes in rather handy, when our hottie hero crash lands on this planet. Even though he's a super soldier, they have the will and the means to control him -- especially since his juggernaut (think: cyborg) technology goes haywire and, in a nice science fictional moment, he's actually allergic to the planet's food and water/bacteria.

He spends a lot of the first chapters trying to escape his first "wife." But then, his cyborg tech goes crazy and he nearly kills a bunch of people that he's started to know and like. He sabotages his own mech, but they throw him into a prison and, quite clearly, break him.

This is where my enjoyment of the book takes a nose dive. I mean, I'm perfectly happy to admit that I kind of enjoy the S&M/B&D aspects of the set-up, and, honestly, I kept reading the book for those rather prurient moments. But, I think it's telling that the satisfying conclusion involves our hottie captive making his ESCAPE. I am NOT sad that he finally manages to break free from his sixth and final "wife" to finally make it off-world.
I think it's simply difficult to write this kind of thing well, unless one's tongue is firmly planted in cheek. Perhaps I'm supposed to have read this as the feminist twist on those horrible Gor novels. As I said, if I told you I didn't enjoy this book, I'd be lying. But, if you look at the situation with a critical eye, it's pretty dispicable.

And now I find out there's a sequel. Do I want to find out what happens next? Kind of... but, am I going to need a shower afterwards?

Does anyone out there know of a book that does this well??

In other news, Shawn bailed early from work yesterday, though she's back at it today. She's still suffering from these weird new headaches that involve stroke-like symptoms (numbness on one side of her body.) So, the medical mystery that is Shawn continues. She's going to contact her doctor today, though, so hopefully, we'll start down the path of figuring out how to manage her headaches more effectively.

Mason has been occupied by the thought that Pokemon's new Black & White game is coming out for the DS in a matter of days.

Review

I wrote a review of The Adversary for Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys. Feel free to check it out.

Worth a Thousand Words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, do you think I could send in a photo montage instead of the last several chapters of my novel to Penguin?

But seriously, I thought I could post a few pictures of the other stuff we did this last weekend BESIDES being in the hospital. Plus, I promised Grandpa a picture of Mason's gap tooth smile:



Also, I don't think that I was able to report this earlier, but Mason did really well in the kuk soOlympics. They divide by belt, of course, and, even though Mason was the only white belt junior competing, he placed FIRST in "techniques" (where you throw people to the ground.)

Here's Nikki Jo Kyo Nym listening carefully to Mason's introduction:


And the winner's block:



In the middle of all the trauma with Shawn and the hospital, I got a very nice surprise in the mail:



Shawn, BTW, is doing well enough that she headed off to work this morning around 9:00 am. Mason and I are still on intersession vacation for a couple more days, so we're planning to get together with our usual Women of Wyrdsmiths Wednesday crowd. It's nice to be back to old routines.

Mouse Tuesday

Three Gorgons scuttle up from the underpass on all four bone-thin limbs, skimming fast across the ground like ghost crabs. The girl with the broken holo pony shirt smiles beatifically at me where she sits, cross legged, on the dusty bridge. They've surrounded me before I can even react. I clutch the backpack to my chest as if it were a shield.


As we stare at each other, I try to determine its sex. My brain wants to default "male" because of how it's dressed – black trousers with dusty, torn cuffs and an oversized, navy button-down shirt. On the Gorgon's head rests a pointy, wide-brim straw hat, like the kind that the-farmer-who-turns-out-to-be-a-kung-fu-master might wear in a 3D. I think I detect the hint of slight curves at the hip and chest, but I wouldn't bet money either way. The Gorgon's face is completely androgynous. It is heart-shaped like a girl's, but has the thin, cruel lips of a boy. Eyes bore into mine with utter ruthlessness that defy any gender.

I can't really focus much on the other two, as they're rarely still. They circle around me, keeping low-to-the ground. The way they move reminds me of primates in the zoo. One dof them wears a loose robe, while the other a pair of plaid pajamas.

It seems fairly clear that "straw hat" is the leader. So I offer my bag. "Take it," I say, with a thrust of my shaking hand. "There's protein bars in there, about a half dozen."

One of the monkey-goons snatches it out of my hand and tosses it to straw hat. The languid grace with which straw hat nabs it out of air cements "female" in my mind, for some reason. Straw hat never takes her eyes off me, but hands the pack to the little girl. "Oh," the child squeals in delight, and pulls out fistfuls of the foil wrapped bars. "Candy!"

The two monkey-goons break their back-and-forth pattern to huddle around the goodies. The second they're in front of straw hat's line of sight, I bolt.

I leap for the nearest railing and haul myself over. The incline is steep. I struggle to keep my footing as I run. Dust kicks up behind me. When I instinctively check to see if there is pursuit, I trip. I tumble into a crazy roll. I stop when my face hits an abandoned car.

Using the side mirror, I pull myself to my feet. I try the door. Miraculously, it's open. I fling myself inside. The interior is oppressively hot, reminiscent of an oven, but I slam the door shut behind me and quickly press the locks down manually.

Safe!

Having scooched low in the seat, I peep carefully out the window. The Gorgons must be content with all my food and water, as they are nowhere in sight. My shoulders relax, despite the beads of sweat on my brow.

Then I hear a soft sigh behind me.