Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 9

Random Acts of Violence

 Last night I had a reading at Magers & Quinn in Uptown.  I kind of wanted to bail on the whole thing, of course.  Like a lot of people I know, I spent much of yesterday breaking out into uncontrolled sobbing.  But, we were talking about Women in Science Fiction and I'd made a promise.  Moreover, the bookstore had made a concerted effort to have my books available and so I didn't want to let anyone down.

I didn't think anyone would come. Most of us are so shattered and the topic seemed so... I mean, as I was telling friends of mine earlier, I was feeling so beaten down that I was afraid that all I would manage was to burst into tears an say, "Why bother!? Misogyny won!"  But, again, I thought, no, this is important.  I need to do this.  Besides, it's just a reading.  If no one comes we can go to the bar and cry.

But people came.

I was supposed to meet my fellow panelists early at a nearby restaurant, but with traffic, my mood, and everything else, I didn't manage it.  So I ended up at Magers & Quinn early and watched people come in.  One of the first was a friend of mine from fandom, Sybil, who was still leaking tears as she talked about friends of hers who were seriously considering suicide.  I had no words.  We all feel so hopeless.  But, I offered a hug and my sympathy.

By the time we started, the house was actually packed.  It was standing room only as we started to tentatively talk about what it's like being a woman writing in a predominantly male dominated field.  I talked about my added issues as a queer writer.  We were sharing "war stories."

Out of the blue, in the back of the audience sharp words were exchanged. A chair went sliding.  Someone got shoved into the stacks. I heard a sickening, wet-crunch of a punch being thrown.  Everyone was so shocked it took a minute to even understand what was happening, but then people dialed 9-1-1, some guys rushed back to break up the violence. The aggressors stalked out with threats of "we'll see you outside." To which we responded, with, "No, we're calling the cops." No one knows what started it.  Maybe a fight over a chair offered?  Maybe thugs looking for PoC to beat up on?  But the aggressors didn't seem particularly white (I would have said they were Hispanic, but they did not read as white, regardless), and they punched a white guy....? Were they looking for a white guy to hit (weird place given that everyone there were allies and the room was very much dominated by women and several other PoCs, including the victim's wife and children)? What hell happened?  It was crazy.  Beyond crazy to surreal.

I have never attended a reading/panel discussion that broke out into violence before in my life. I can only assume that this random violence was the angry version of my random tears.  Something uncontrollable, volatile, hopeless.  It might have been an attack on PoCs/queers/women, but what weird place to go looking for us!  Why chose a bookstore when Uptown is full of taverns and clubs?

But what is even more astounding to me is that the reading went on.

After the aggressors stalked out, the cops called, the victim tended to... we went on.  People stayed. No only did they stay, but we managed to talk about why what we're doing is important. People listened, people spoke, people asked questions... I cried randomly once, but we also managed--AFTER ALL THAT--to laugh, all of us, together.  

I can't even begin to really process or understand what happened, but, despite how awful it was, we went on, you know?  One step at time.  One moment at a time.  And we found a way to survive.  More than that, we survived and thrived, together.

Reading, Nov. 9...!

 On Wednesday, Nov. 9, at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis at 7:00 PM I'll be doing a "Writers in Conversation" with a number of other Twin Cities authors !  

It'll be the day after the election and I'm sure you need an excuse to dig yourself up out of your blanket fort and be social with some really cool people!

From their events page:


Wednesday, November 9, 7:00pm - Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)  

 

Writers in Conversation: Local authors Victorya Chase, Kelly Barnhill, Abra Staffin-Wiebe, and Lyda Morehouse discuss women in science fiction and writing female protagonists, along with a brief reading

Victorya Chase is a writer and educator living in the the Midwest where she works in medical education teaching the importance of narrative competency and understanding the various cultural and personal stories at play in the exam room. Her writing has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Lamplight, and The Unlikely Journal of Entomology. She is the author of Marta Martinez Saves the World.

Kelly Barnhill writes novels for children and short stories for adults and poetry that she whispers in the dark when no one is listening. Her first novel, The Mostly True Story of Jack, received four-starred reviews, and her second, Iron Hearted Violet, received a Parents’ Choice Gold Award. Her most recent novel is The Witch’s Boy. Kelly lives on a city street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a field and a creek behind her house. A coyote runs by every morning at six a.m. and a heron flies over her yard just before the sun sets on slow summer evenings. Kelly is a fast runner and a steady hiker and a good camper. She also makes delicious pie. She has received grants and awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, and the Loft. She has three very smart kids and one very smart husband and a dog who she believes might be one thousand years old. No one can say for sure. (The dog, incidentally, is very smart too.)

Abra Staffin-Wiebe has sold stories to publications including Jim Baen's Universe and Tor.com. She specializes in optimistic dystopian SF, modern fairy tales, cheerful horror, liquid state steampunk, dark humor, and heartwarming grotesqueries. She spent several years living abroad in India and Africa before marrying a mad scientist and settling down to live and write in Minneapolis. Discover more of her fiction at her website, http://www.aswiebe.com, or find her on the social media site of your choice.

Lyda Morehouse writes about what gets most people in trouble: religion and politics. Her first novel Archangel Protocol, a cyberpunk hard-boiled detective novel with a romantic twist, won the 2001 Shamus for best paperback original (a mystery award given by the Private Eye Writers of America), the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award for best debut science fiction, and was nominated for the Romantic Times Critic's Choice Award. She followed up Archangel Protocol with three more books in the AngeLINK universe: Fallen Host (Roc, 2002), Messiah Node (Roc, 2003), and Apocalypse Array(Roc, 2004). Apocalypse Array made the short list for the Philip K. Dick award. She lives in Saint Paul with her partner of twenty years and their amazingly adorable son, Mason.

New Anthology

 My short story "Everything in Its Place" (which first appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated, but which I significantly revised.... like, there's a new ENDING) appears in a new anthology from Calumet Editions: Boundaries Without.  Go check it out!

No Mirror....

For some reason Dreamwidth stopped mirroring my posts here.  I'm going to try posting something over there and see if it will show up over here....

Of course, I could probably, like many of you, abandon LJ for good, but I felt I'd had a pretty good compromise, alas.

CONvergence Schedule

I totally forgot to post this anywhere. But if you're at CONvergence this weekend, here's where you can find me:

SATURDAY, JULY 2

11 am - DoubleTree Atrium 2 - "Remembering the Phantom Tollbooth": Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth" is full of word play you may not have caught when you read it as a child. Let's discuss the book through an adult's eyes. Panelists: Lis Morton, David Schwartz, Joel Arnold, Paul Weimer, Lyda Morehouse (mod).

2 pm - DoubleTree Atrium 2 - "Non-Network Original Content" : Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are all releasing original content, some of it taking us in interesting directions in sci-fi and fantasy. Will online original content soon make networks obsolete? Panelists: Alex Musial, Matt Gamble, Lyda Morehouse, Grace Ulak.

8:30 pm - DoubleTree Bloomington - "Jessica Jones" : The Netflix original series presents arguably the most complex, nuanced Marvel character to date in the antihero Jessica Jones. Join us to discuss season 1 of Jessica Jones and what we expect and hope for from season 2. Panelists: Keane Amdahl (mod), David Schwartz, Olivia James, Grace Ulak, Lyda Morehouse.


11:30 pm - DoubleTree Atrium 6 - "Animation Blue" : The air might turn blue as you listen to these miscreants talk smut about some of our favorite animated characters. Panelists: Greg Weisman, Khary Payton, Christopher Jones, Lyda Morehouse, Jenna Powers.


SUNDAY, JULY 3

11 am - DoubleTree Atrium 2 - "Filled with Determination" : Want to squeal/sob about your favorite Undertale characters, plotlines, and secrets? Want to talk about how queerness and nonbinary gender is represented in the game? Have cool theories to share? Bring all your determination to this panel! Panelists: Allyson Cygan, Lyda Morehouse, Jason Thibeault (mod), Luxander Pond, Anna Besmann.

2 pm - Crowne Plaza U - "Starblazers" : Space Battleship Yamato/Argo is one of the iconic vehicles of science fiction anime. We will be looking at the classic series, the dub, the movies, and the remakes. We might even have a singalong of the American theme song!

Aging Fen

 There's a big debate going on in the science fiction community going on about who feels welcome where and what that means. The sense of unwelcomeness originated with some older fen / pros talking about WisCON.  Pretty much the most articulate summation that I've read so far on that subject comes from Sigrid Ellis: https://sigridellis.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/a-few-post-wiscon-thoughts-on-being-an-ally/

I've been thinking about the subject of aging and fandom on a more personal level.  Nate Bucklin is someone I've known somewhat tangentially since I first started trying to write professionally.  In fact, Nate was at least partly, if not wholly, responsible for connecting me to my then agent (and now rather notorious, speaking of WisCON,) Jim Frenkel.  So, when Nate called several weeks back and asked if I'd be willing to help him with a writing project he's been trying to finish for years, I said yes.

Nate is currently living in a nursing home, the Augustana Health Care Center in Minneapolis (http://augustanacare.org).  Because Nate has no internet access, I've been going to see him once a week to talk about this project, etc.  It's pretty much as abysmal as you might imagine, but no worse than many of these places go.  Nate has a small bed in a shared room, but there are lots of common spaces.  It reminds me of the place my father stayed when he was in recovery for so long, though I daresay my dad's was a touch nicer, but probably due to being in a smaller town, if nothing else. 

At any rate, I asked Nate today if he was getting a lot of visitors. He said 'No, not really.'  So, if you know Nate or know people who know him, please spread the word that he'd like more visitors.

These places are rough, even when you know your time there is limited.  I think a lot about Gardner Dozois and his wife Susan Casper who are in a similar situation in another city.  Gardner, at least, is able to post updates and such on Facebook, and that was something my father was able to keep up with too.  I actually gave Nate a computer (it was given to me as a gift, so I passed it on and, if he's interested, I'll see if I can get him set up to use Facebook and Gmail too. I know how much having outside contact kept my dad feeling at least somewhat more connected.)

I have to run pick up Shawn and Mason, but I just wanted to be sure to get this out there.  Friends of Nate Bucklin!  Go see him if/when you can! (if you need more specific info as to how to contact Nate, please feel free to drop me a line at my gmail address: lyda.morehouse@gmail.com.)  

Tiny Cuts

It's Tuesday and there's a joke/not joke/tradition in my family that Tuesday are actually worse than Mondays, because with Monday's you're EXPECTING things to suck. Tuesdays always blindside you.

Today is not much of an exception.

I woke up this morning sometime around 3 am and I probably lie awake for a half-hour, which doesn't seem that bad, except it was punctuated by two cat fights and Shawn having several wake-up gasping nightmares.  (Apparently, one of them involved wrestling someone to death on a highway. "Mason, too" she said, in that sleepy way that meant she was falling back to dreamland, and I wanted to say, "Wait, what? Were you wrestling Mason to death or was it that Mason also had to wrestle someone to death?  And... why was it on the highway???" But, you know, nightmares aren't nightmares because they make sense.  They're often the most terrifying because they DON'T.)

Because we are aware that Tuesdays have sneaking-suckage, we've written it into the fabric of our family life that we try to lighten the load by going to Bruegger's for bagels on Tuesday mornings.  EVEN THOUGH we know that the Breugger's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is chronically understaffed and has fairly poor customer service.  I think we do this partly to ENSURE Tuesday will kind of suck, but also because even though it's a kind of a hassle the bagels are REALLY good.... so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but with bonus tastiness.

But, before we even left for Bruegger's I opened up my email and checked in on social media and discovered that on a my Facebook feed there was a couple of guys who decided they needed to jump in and comment on something I'd re-blogged.  It was just a funny little poke at the Sad Puppies that said, "Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron."  Which, admittedly is a very HARD poke at certain people, but yet, somehow, I didn't expect that what these guys were going to argue and get in a snit about was whether or not Mary Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.

As I said in response to their malarky, this is not a debate I usually see.  Mary Shelley is fairly well recognized as the first science fiction novelist and thus its "inventor."  (In fact, when I linked to the Wikipedia article entitled "the history of science fiction" her picture showed up!  I didn't even know it would!)  

There may be, as I said, other people who dabbled in writing science into their fiction, but who the f*ck has heard of them?  Frankenstein is a book that EVERYONE knows, to the point that they think that's the name of the monster.  Therefore, Shelley is the default inventor.  I mean, if we want to quibble then people need to stop saying that Eddison invented... well, pretty much anything people think he did, because what he did was PATENT things. To the victor go the spoils. This is, after all the argument women have to put up with all the time when there were women in the shadows or as support.

One of the commenters seemed to want to discount Shelley because he wasn't fond of Frankenstein.  That's not how it works.  

So, yeah, that rilled me up. Then I got stuck in about six different traffic jams due to construction I didn't know about, including one on Maryland Avenue where I swear to god the "go/stop" sign guys were just randomly assigning which lane of traffic got to go by some arbitrary means rather than looking at the HUGE LINE OF CARS in my direction and the fact that there WERE NO CARS COMING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION.  

It was, quite frankly maddening, the lot of it.  The people on my Facebook feed reminded me of climate change deniers.  They were denying something that every one else finds REALLY F*CKING OBVIOUS and not able to come up with an answer to "Okay, who then?  Who else wrote something this influential BEFORE Shelley?"  And, that's really the key.  I mean, it's a matter of influence as well.  

AARRRRRGGGGH.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. In preparation of our once-every-other-year (bi-annual?) trip to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail, I took my car into Dave's. So, I'm stuck hanging out at the Dunn Bros. coffee shop in Roseville.  Again, none of these things that happened this morning were THAT big of a deal, but I kind of feel like I'm suffering from a thousand pinpricks, you know?

And... screw you deniers, Mary Shelley invented SF. Full stop.

Oh, but I was going to say, I have a couple of things I should tell folks about.  1) I will be signing books at the Mall of America's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11 as part of their B-Fest Teen Book Festival.  (Here are a few more details: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780061787270-0) 2) I was gathering up things to DO while up in the land of no Internet and I discovered that I've nearly finished the PLOT part of UnJust Cause, the book I was posting as a work-in-progress on Wattpad. So, I cut and pasted all the chapters into a Google Doc and then printed it out.  My plan is to revise the book while we're up North so that I can have a really good start on finishing it and turning it into an e-book.  So, if you've been patiently waiting for the sequel to Precinct 13, it's coming very, very soon!  

lyda222 @ 2016-06-07T09:04:00

It's Tuesday and there's a joke/not joke/tradition in my family that Tuesday are actually worse than Mondays, because with Monday's you're EXPECTING things to suck. Tuesdays always blindside you.

Today is not much of an exception.

I woke up this morning sometime around 3 am and I probably lie awake for a half-hour, which doesn't seem that bad, except it was punctuated by two cat fights and Shawn having several wake-up gasping nightmares.  (Apparently, one of them involved wrestling someone to death on a highway. "Mason, too" she said, in that sleepy way that meant she was falling back to dreamland, and I wanted to say, "Wait, what? Were you wrestling Mason to death or was it that Mason also had to wrestle someone to death?  And... why was it on the highway???" But, you know, nightmares aren't nightmares because they make sense.  They're often the most terrifying because they DON'T.)

Because we are aware that Tuesdays have sneaking-suckage, we've written it into the fabric of our family life that we try to lighten the load by going to Bruegger's for bagels on Tuesday mornings.  EVEN THOUGH we know that the Breugger's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is chronically understaffed and has fairly poor customer service.  I think we do this partly to ENSURE Tuesday will kind of suck, but also because even though it's a kind of a hassle the bagels are REALLY good.... so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but with bonus tastiness.

But, before we even left for Bruegger's I opened up my email and checked in on social media and discovered that on a my Facebook feed there was a couple of guys who decided they needed to jump in and comment on something I'd re-blogged.  It was just a funny little poke at the Sad Puppies that said, "Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron."  Which, admittedly is a very HARD poke at certain people, but yet, somehow, I didn't expect that what these guys were going to argue and get in a snit about was whether or not Mary Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.

As I said in response to their malarky, this is not a debate I usually see.  Mary Shelley is fairly well recognized as the first science fiction novelist and thus its "inventor."  (In fact, when I linked to the Wikipedia article entitled "the history of science fiction" her picture showed up!  I didn't even know it would!)  

There may be, as I said, other people who dabbled in writing science into their fiction, but who the f*ck has heard of them?  Frankenstein is a book that EVERYONE knows, to the point that they think that's the name of the monster.  Therefore, Shelley is the default inventor.  I mean, if we want to quibble then people need to stop saying that Eddison invented... well, pretty much anything people think he did, because what he did was PATENT things. To the victor go the spoils. This is, after all the argument women have to put up with all the time when there were women in the shadows or as support.

One of the commenters seemed to want to discount Shelley because he wasn't fond of Frankenstein.  That's not how it works.  

So, yeah, that rilled me up. Then I got stuck in about six different traffic jams due to construction I didn't know about, including one on Maryland Avenue where I swear to god the "go/stop" sign guys were just randomly assigning which lane of traffic got to go by some arbitrary means rather than looking at the HUGE LINE OF CARS in my direction and the fact that there WERE NO CARS COMING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION.  

It was, quite frankly maddening, the lot of it.  The people on my Facebook feed reminded me of climate change deniers.  They were denying something that every one else finds REALLY F*CKING OBVIOUS and not able to come up with an answer to "Okay, who then?  Who else wrote something this influential BEFORE Shelley?"  And, that's really the key.  I mean, it's a matter of influence as well.  

AARRRRRGGGGH.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. In preparation of our once-every-other-year (bi-annual?) trip to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail, I took my car into Dave's. So, I'm stuck hanging out at the Dunn Bros. coffee shop in Roseville.  Again, none of these things that happened this morning were THAT big of a deal, but I kind of feel like I'm suffering from a thousand pinpricks, you know?

And... screw you deniers, Mary Shelley invented SF. Full stop.

Oh, but I was going to say, I have a couple of things I should tell folks about.  1) I will be signing books at the Mall of America's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11 as part of their B-Fest Teen Book Festival.  (Here are a few more details: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780061787270-0) 2) I was gathering up things to DO while up in the land of no Internet and I discovered that I've nearly finished the PLOT part of UnJust Cause, the book I was posting as a work-in-progress on Wattpad. So, I cut and pasted all the chapters into a Google Doc and then printed it out.  My plan is to revise the book while we're up North so that I can have a really good start on finishing it and turning it into an e-book.  So, if you've been patiently waiting for the sequel to Precinct 13, it's coming very, very soon!  

SFWA Nebula Conference

Again, I'm a bit behind, but I thought I should say a few words about the Nebula Conference that I went to last weekend.

I've never gone to a Nebula Award weekend before, but this year my friend Naomi Krizter's short story "Cat Pictures, Please" was nominated. (You can listen to the audio here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_01_15b/) So I went with the sole purpose of being Naomi's wingman, because these things are always better when you have someone to share them with, win or lose.

Naomi didn't win--which was a disappointment for her, I'm sure. On the other hand, there's a new tradition at the Nebulas that legitimately takes the sting out of losing. For the past few years Henry Lien has organized the "alternate universe acceptance speeches." The idea being that the people who didn't win get to still get applause and read their speeches. Maybe it sounds corny, but it wasn't... not a all. In fact, I'm not sure there was a dry eye in the house when Kelly Robson got up and talked about her first moment of stumbling across science fiction in Asimov's magazine and... experiencing 'intellectual curiosity' for the first time in her life. Then Charles E. Gannon just about killed me when he talked about how the cliche about it being an honor to be nominated should really be thought of like this: when you go to a museum you don't go into a room labeled "Renaissance" and see only one picture.  You see a gallery.  And, they all represent the best of their time, no single picture does that in isolation.

And then I cried some more because it's all true, and it makes me remember what is awesome about SF/F fandom and prodom.

The rest of the conference was a bit of a blur.  I got to see "Zootopia" with my friend Kyell Gold, which was awesome. I might have cried through some of that, too.  But, mostly what stood out to me about the Nebula Conference in comparison to other cons was that people knew who I was.  I never really had imposter syndrome because everyone seemed genuinely aware of my work. That happens a lot less at "regular" cons.  Thing is, I think writers are more aware that careers have fits and starts and fallow periods and very few people there think that writing is magical and without bumps and scraps.  What was amazing about that was how welcoming it felt.  It made me want to always go to the Nebula Weekend...

And maybe I will.

Audio Book Release!

Archangel Protocol is now available as an audio book: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Archangel-Protocol-Audiobook/B01FEI3EIM/   
This is actually a project I undertook myself with the help of a voice actor recommended to me by a friend, Jack Evans. Jack produced the book via ACX, which is audible's creative exchange program (and was a big subject of panels at this year's SFWA Nebula Conference, which I've just returned from.)
  At any rate, if audible books are your thing, you should be able to find it at all your favorite places to buy audible books including iTunes, Amazon.com, and, of course, Audible (as linked above.)