Lyda Morehouse's Blog, page 91

lyda222 @ 2010-11-03T12:17:00

I'm with this from Angry Black Bitch: Break it off, dust off and refocus.

'Nuff said.

Tonight... karate!

Also, I have allergies like heck this morning. Blurgh.

Okay, Okay, I VOTED!

I'm an early morning voter, so I'm already done. No need to remind me. No more calls, okay? I want it noted for the record that I have NEVER missed an election, even when the only seats up were Soil and Water and a couple of judges.

As I told my mother in an e-mail this morning, I'm planning to stay optimistic until proven otherwise. The only thing I know for absolute certainity about this mid-term election is that the Republicans own the message and the media. So, if the news tells me it's going to be a Republican blow-out, all I know is that that's what the Republicans would like me to believe.

I promised to post a few pictures, so here they are:

This is Mason in his karate (kuk sool wan) outfit, kicking Medusa's butt in the section of the Dragon Quest called Medusa's Garden (really, a game of red light/green light.)



Here is his Halloween costume. Sorry about the blurriness. Our camera has been goofy. I think I accidentally messed with one of the settings and now it has trouble auto-focusing. (It may be time to break out the manual and let Shawn fool with it until everything is right in the universe again.)



And here is my cat, Ms. All Ball, being beautiful, because the internet needs MORE cat pictures:

The Weekend Report

We actually got a lot done this weekend. On Saturday, we headed off to Mason's swimming class, which he continues to excel at -- even though we were almost late thanks to my addiction to coffee. Note: next time get up before everyone else and fetch coffee, or, in a crazy option, make some AT HOME.

We weren't the last ones to class, though, so that was a relief. At any rate, Mason enjoyed splashing around I think he's poised to make more break throughs -- possibly figure out the front stroke (knocking on wood.)

Then we spent the rest of the day finishing up the garden work. I put Mason's veggie garden to bed and cleared out a couple other spots. It's not perfect, but considering how much we should do, we made a good dent in the to-do list. We also raked up the ginormous pile of leaves in/next to which we take our annual fall family picture. My hair is quite long and wonky this year, but I think the picture(s) look pretty good. They'll stack up nicely with all the other, at least.

Sunday was, of course, Halloween. I think though, for Mason, the Dragon Quest at Kuk Sool Wan was a close second in terms of things he was excited about. Our karate (actually kuk sool wan) studio do a kind of maze/challenge thing for the junior members for the school. Mason got to wear his new uniform (gi) and, even though we haven't attended any real classes yet, it seemed to me as an objective observer he wasn't particularly less coordinated, etc., than the others. They set it up as a game, so it's not required that you know much about the martial art, just that you live up to the princples of the thing: respect, teamwork, etc. In fact, I thought Mason was particularly good with teamwork. At one point the kids get "cursed" -- some are without arms (tied to their sides), some are without eyes (blindfolded), and some are melded (tied together) and they have to negotiate a simple obsticle course. The only way to do it successfullly is to work together. Mason had no arms and he was teamed up with a blinded student, and so he had talk the other student through the course. He did really well up to the blocking part. It was hard for him to remember how to describe where the blows would be coming from, but he eventually got it. It was really satisfying to watch, actually. And, compared with some of the others who had been at the school much longer, I thought he did extremely well.

He dressed up as the Grim Reaper/zombie/monster this year. His costume was actually very good. He had a mask, a scythe, and chains that he picked out at Menards. We found a good hoodie to help cover the mask (and keep him warm, an important part of any Halloween adventure in Minnesota), and claws and gloves and a long black robe that was originally meant as a witch dress-up dress given to us at some point by our friends the Jacksons.

I'll post pictures tomorrow.

Islamic feminism

Islamic feminism exists. Here is its symbol:



The Holy Qu'ran does have some antiquated things to say about women and their status, (but then so does the Holy Bible.) Here's a lovely article about what the Qu'ran says about women from the Kuwait Times.

Time to Get to Work

I'm not really sure what's been up with me lately, but I haven't been writing much. I finished a re-draft of a synopsis for the third Ana book, but I need to have Shawn look over it before I send it in to my editor. I hope to do that this week. If for no other reason than that that book is due at the publisher in April.

Once, many (and I mean MANY) years ago, I was at a Minicon where Alan Steele was on a panel about "Books as Bricks." The general theme was supposed to be: why are books getting bigger and bigger and is that a good thing or not? People talked about the price of books and how consumers want more bang for their buck, and I think Alan talked about how he was working on trying to work against the trend by writing as tightly as he could. At some point in the panel the conversation wandered (what? On an SF/F convention panel? Never!) into process. And I was struck by something he said about how he has two modes: input and output. And, how, for him both were equally important. If you don't put some words in, in his opinion, you can't expect to keep getting words out reliably.

Or he never said anything like this.

However, I remember someone whose writing I respect once, maybe, saying something like this and it's always stuck with me because I used to fight these "fallow" writing periods, because I mistook them for just that. Now I trust that I'm doing some kind of input or percolating or some other much more nebulous, zen part of the writing process.

I know one thing for sure. I've been reading like a fiend, and not just fiction -- everything. I'm clearly in some kind of absorbing mode. But I may have to artificially end this input time because on last count April is only six months away, or five depending on how many days into April the book is actually due (I think 15. I'll have to consult my master schedule.)

But, just to distract me from achieving my get-back-to-work mode, my editor over at ODDyssey sent along two graphic novels: THE MARTIAN CONFEDERACY (Volume 1) McNamara/Braddock and ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE: LIVE FROM THE MOON Young/Smith. I finished the first and am halfway through the second. I think that one of my favorite things about graphic novels is that I can often read them in one sitting. For someone who is mildly dyslexic like me, this is hugely satisfying. I know there are people out there who can read an average sized novel in one day, but I couldn't do that if my life depended on it. I just can't absorb/sort words that quickly.

Mason says he averages 100 pages a day. At school. Which must mean he reads at a phenomenal rate. He comprehends it too. He just passed an AR (advanced reading) test for TREASURE ISLAND a book, frankly, I find confusing at times (he and mama are re-reading it out loud at night and I've been listening in.)

I've been trying to get Mason interested in reviewing books on the blog I set up for him, but he resists pretty much everything that interferes with his reading. I'd love him to find a community out there of other readers, because, for me, talking about books is at least as fun as reading them. (Well, for me, it's more fun, but that's only because of the dyslexia.)

Ah well.

Okay, back to work.

Weekend Report

Shawn arrived home safely on Friday night. The only thing that went awry while she was away was that I totally forgot to go pick up our very last CSA box. I blame MEA or whatever reason it was that we didn't have school. I managed to remember that it was Thursday in terms of recycling, but we were picking up Donte for the sleepover right about when I should have been collecting the box.

And it had spinach in it too. sigh.

We spent much of Saturday recovering/decompressing from the sleepover/business trip. I had a gig at the Roseville Public Library at 3:00 pm, which was a dud. They were having me speak in the middle of their "Harvest Festival" which included things that were a lot more awesome than me, like henna tattooing, storytime, etc. Plus, they put me in a very forbidding white room. Two people came. I talked to them anyway, and somewhere near the end of the hour four other people trickled in. We'd already devolved into talking about famous people we'd met, and I was telling my story of crashing Neil Gaiman's Guy Fawkes party (and how I peed in the same stall as Ursula K. LeGuin at WisCON.) If we were at a science fiction convention, we would have retired to the bar almost right away. :-)

But, the library was beautiful and the librarians were awesome. I so don't blame them -- or even the patrons for their disinterst. There was just too much other cool stuff going on at the same time. I mean, for God(dess)'s sake, they had a Wii in the teen scene room on a widescreen. If it were me, that's where I'd have been hanging out too!

Sunday, we celebrated full moon (which was actually Friday night) and then I spent the day cooking a chicken for my nephew Jonathan. I made some very odd, but ultimately sort of tasty coleslaw of the rutabega and turnip that were left over from the previous CSA box. It was strange, but it had a nice tang that I ended up enjoying. My mashed potatoes were so creamy they almost seemed fake, you know? My bread was perfect too, so, all round it was excellent food and even better company -- though I wasn't terribly focused for some reason. I think it might have been the rainy weather and the slowness of the weekend. Also, I spent a lot of my day reading and that can turn me rather introspectively quiet.

I finished up GRACLING by Katlin Cashore. Normally, I'm not a fan of BFFWMs (Big, Fat Fantasies with Maps,) but this YA was extremely compelling. Our heroine, Katsa, lives in a world where people like my mother (born with two different colored eyes) are graced -- they have some kind of superpower. Katsa has one blue, one green eye and her grace is killing. She's being used as a tool by her uncle, the king, and meets her match one day when she runs into Po, a foreign prince graced with fighting.

Or so it seems.

This book is new enough that I don't want to spoil it, so I won't tell you much more other than things are wonderfully complicated -- in a way that made me depressed that I hadn't thought of this idea first, you know?

At first I had a hard time relating to Katsa, but I eventually got used to Cashore's storytelling style, which reminded me of what I've read of Eleanor Arason's unfinished YA (the bonus of being in Wyrdsmiths.) Also, having just read HUNGER GAMES triology, I kept expecting something REALLY AWFUL to happen, and I was estaticlly relieved when it didn't. That might make it sound like nothing happens in this story, but that's not true. The story isn't typical hanging-on-the-edge-of-my-seat kind of exciting, but I was entirely engaged in the characters and what was happening in a way I haven't been in a long time. So I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone who hasn't picked it up yet.

Also, and this is perhaps a weird comment, but I think I liked GRACLING because Katsa might be a courtly lady in a fantasy world, but all the things that bug me about fantasies bugged Katsa too. The court politics (while there and part of the story) were uninteresting to her. She found women's place in society wrong and unjust (and she eventually does something about it.) She's determined to remain unmarried and childless in a way you don't usually find in such an incredibly romantic story in a pastoral fantasy, you know? I found that utterly awesome. Plus, she's very obviously straight, but she cuts her hair like a boy and ocassionally passes as a boy in society. She extraordinarily butch, and I like that because as a teen I would have adored having this role model to consider among all the other character's lives I was "trying on" as part of my coming out process.

In fact, she's kind of who I was in high school before I realized that I didn't thrill to men quite the way I did to women. (For those who don't know, I like boys. I dated boys all though high school and into my first few months of college.) Anyway, Katsa is very admirable throughout. She's the kind of heroine that I often complain about not seeing enough of -- a tough woman who is still complicatedly human in her relationships, etc. She ends up having a child to protect (one of my bugaboos particularly of strong women in film) but their relationship ends up being richly complicated as well.

Anyway, I'm afraid I'll give the whole thing away if I talk too much about it. Maybe if we meet at a science fiction convention -- and you've read it too -- we can put our heads together and really discuss the book.

That'd be fun. See you there.

Successful Sleepover

No broken lamps, broken bones or broken hearts. I'd say the sleepover was a success, wouldn't you?

In about ten minutes I'm going to rustle the boys out the door and deliver Donte to his mom, and then my big plan is to go get a gigantic, steaming cup of coffee. The only thing I neglected to prepare for this time was the fact that, with Shawn out of town, I really needed to have coffee at home I could make. I've been herding these cats undercaffinated, if you can believe that! (I did, at least have some tea, otherwise I'd be a complete zombie.)

I also don't think I meantioned my other great success while Shawn was away: I decorated the porch for Halloween. Halloween is a huge deal at our house.

----

Later: I am finally at the coffee shop, sipping a guru brew. Hooray. Shawn will be home tonight around 10 pm (if all goes well with the plane, of course, knocking on wood.)

I just followed a twitter link to a very simple (but very well done) "It Gets Better" video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3J9ge_vyFk and, just as I suspected, I can't watch any of these without crying. This one, in particular, resonates because the place I found healthy, happy gay people was in the future -- in science fiction and fantasy, specifically. But the last line did me in. This is such a great project. I hope it works for the next generation of GLBT people, and that everyone else can live long enough to find it does get better.

General Stuff

At first I thought I must be mad to have agreed to host a sleepover while Shawn was out of town on a business trip. Now, I'm sitting in the computer room wondering what the heck I'm going to do with myself all night.

To be fair, this isn't a huge sleepover with countless screaming argonauts. It's just one other boy, someone we've had over before, no less. I've fed them... a lot, actually -- a dinner of corned beef and fixings, desert of fresh raspberry pie and icecream, and now they're munching on popcorn in front of "Ice Age." They're other big plan is to have a pillow fight. Last time, a lamp actually got broken (I know! It was like something out of a sitcom!) but we moved all the breakables into the hallway this time, and everything seems to be going well so far, knock on wood.

Like I said, I think the hardest part so far has been knowing what to do with myself. I was reading for a while downstairs while they were having the first of many pillow fights, and now I'm surfing the interwebs and talking to you.

The book I'm currently reading is GRACLING. It's a fantasy YA about a girl who has been "graced" with the ability to be an a$$-kicking assassin. I'm not wickedly impressed so far, but I can see why it was recommended to me as a follow-up to HUNGER GAMES. Kat is very similar to Katniss, and not just in name, but also in tone. She's very non-emotional, distant, and cold. I suspect that's going to change now that the love interest has made his appearance. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for some graphic novels to show up so I can review them for my new gig. Seems my whole life is about waiting for something to come in the mail... rejection letters, royality checks, books to review... :-)

Speaking of all that I was saddened to hear about Realms of Fantasy and Dreams of Decadence folding (again.) My very first short story sale was to Dreams of Decadence, and I never managed to crack Realms. (I'm such and AWFUL short story writer, really. It's sad.) Still, like a lot of people I entertained the idea of buying them from Warren Lapine for a buck. Seems like kind of a deal, unless you consider there's probably accumulated debt, etc. Oh, yeah, and the fact that I know absolutely NOTHING about running a magazine.

And WisCON actually disinvited Elizabeth Moon, eh? Wow. I know there's talk out on the interwebs about WHAT IT ALL MEANS in terms of setting a precident, but I don't see how they could do otherwise. I guess the SF3 membership voted to disinvite her, and, frankly, I'm not sure she's a good WisCON fit because the thing that's struck me about all this is that she's offered no apology, explanation, or any kind of attempt to engage people in a discussion about her post. In fact, she deleted other people's comments. I'm sure that was an attempt/hope to make it all go away, but that REALLY doesn't jibe with WisCON's sense of discourse, you know what I mean? (And it's not really very realistic about the way fandom works in the Internet age, either.)

Looking back on this (but more its predecessors), I hope that if I ever find myself in the center of any kind of fail storm that I have the sense to shut up, listen, learn, and apologize. I don't think that it's wise for us, as writers, to walk on eggshells on matters of race, class, religion, politics, or any other hot button issue. Science fiction is one of the few genres where we push boundries -- sometimes into uncomfortable maybe even sharp edges, and I think that one of the fallouts is that we f*ck up sometimes, even when we have the best intentions.

Of course, if you say stupid things and stick by them, there are consequences. I'm not sure I can avoid the stupid, so my best bet is to try not to be hateful, and, for god(dess's) sake if I come off that way, apologize.

E-Book Sampler Review

OTHER SIDE: 12 Webfiction Tales
Ergofiction Magazine E-Book (October 2010)
http://www.ergofiction.com/ebooks/


This e-book bills itself as a webfiction sampler. The idea is that the vignettes and stories presented here may lead you to follow the link embedded at the end of each piece out to the larger work/community of the twelve authors featured. I have to admit that, at first, I didn't understand this basic premise, as the introduction by Jan Oda, the book's publisher and Ergofiction Magazine's editor-in-chief, doesn't entirely make that clear. Or, perhaps, I'm too old and too mired in my own traditional print world biases, because Oda begins the introduction with one of my big bug-a-boos about how there's this digital revolution underway and the mighty traditional presses may fall in its wake, yada, yada, so I was probably grumbling to myself and not really paying attention.

Once I grasped that rather critical design concept, however, I found a lot to enjoy in this sampler. The collection is pretty evenly divided between science fiction and fantasy, with one horror story, "Junk Drawers" by M. Jones.

My two absolute favorites were a science fiction story, "Dalston Junction" by Meilin Miranda, and an urban fantasy, "Mittlin County Coke Blues" by Isa K.

Miranda's story follows two women living in London in the early 19th century who are up to something seemingly sinister with unwanted babies. It takes a while in "Dalston Junction" for the speculative fiction aspect to reveal itself -- though when it does, it's a doozy. The ending, though clearly not "THE" end, was satisfying enough for this to feel mostly complete.

K.'s "Mittlin County Coke Blues" is a unique take on a Pennsylvanian Mennonite youth going through rumspringa. I felt the lack of a complete story more keenly with this one, as I found myself easily identifying with Jake and wanting to know what happened with both his relationship with his buddy Danny and with his mysterious, shunned grandma.

Unfortunately, it's not clear when you follow the links at the end of either, whether or not you can continue following these specific stories. In fact, it seems you may need to register at Miranda's site to read *any* of her other fiction.

I also enjoyed the laugh-out-loud space opera/adventure story "The Little Problem" by MCM that involved drug smuggling and… garden gnomes. T.L. Whiteman's "The Spaces in Between" was also a fun little jaunt into demon hunting through the streets of Paris. Other stand outs included "New Stories" by M.C.A Hogarth, which had very complex, gender changing aliens that reminded me positively of Eleanor Arnason's Hwarhath. Both G.L. Drummond and Nancy Brauer took on the problems of being psychic in a hostile, mundane world to good effect.

Unfortunately, I found much of the rest of the collection suffered from being partials of much larger, on-going or community stories. For instance, from the first line, "Poaching" by Lyn Thorne-Alder and Chris Childs came off as very fannish. In the others, I simply felt that I was missing some critical bit of world-building or characterization that likely came with reading the webfiction from its beginning, rather than jumping in and jumping out, sampler-style.

If you're actively searching for online community fiction, this book would serve as advertised. If not, it's still an interesting read to expose you to what sorts of stories you can find on the web.

Life and All That

I'm going to have another review to post here tomorrow. I tried to "sell" it upstream to my new ODDyssey gig, but my editor didn't bite, alas. It's for an e-book that a Facebook friend of mine has a story in. Mason and I also spent some time at the Border's in Roseville yesterday, and I picked up a fantasy YA book (on purpose!) It's called GRACLING. It was recommended to me by the woman who owns/manages Sixth Chamber Books as a good follow-up to HUNGER GAMES. I've been having a really hard time with anything other than urban fantasy, and this book actually starts with a MAP.... so we'll have to see if I finish it.

Over the weekend, Shawn and I picked away at all the various around-the-house/fall garden clean-up that needs to be done. We're trying to clean out that room in the house that accidentally became the "junk room." It was orginally meant to be my office, back when people had to sit in one place with a big, honking computer. But, I do most of my writing on the couch these days, so the room became that place we stored STUFF until we knew what to do with it... except we never ended up doing anything with it. Until this weekend -- we hauled some stuff out and brought up a new table and a metal cabinet, which the hope/idea that we could transform this room into a craft room for Shawn. She's got lots of fabric for quilts, beads for necklaces/earrings, and scrap booking material. All of it needs to get out of banker's boxes and onto shelves for easier access.

Needless to say, this is kind of a BIG project. I suspect it may take us until Thanksgiving, at least. I say Thanksgiving because it's our hope to have the room back in order before our friends, the Jacksons, make their now traditional sojourn to the Twin Cities to have turkey and bits with us.

Meanwhile, the neighbors on the OTHER side are now having some major work done on their house. The paint on their house has always been kind of shoddy (even when they attempted to get it painted a couple of years ago) because everyone who has ever attempted it, scrapped a little, realized how rotten bits of the house were, gave up, and just slapped cheap paint over the top. The new crew is actually replacing rotting boards and doing REALLY nice, careful work. I've been eyeing them up because we're in pretty desperate straits ourselves in terms of boards needing replacing, etc. I chatted with the foreman/owner yesterday and we're going to get an estimate for our house. Luckily, we have stucco that's in fine shape. The only things that need work are the trim and the cedar shakes. It would be nice to hire someone professional, because, IMHO, there's nothing worse than a paint job you just have to redo in a couple of years.

So my yard is pretty much packed dirt this year. Between our roof, the other neighbor's roof, and now this.... every single patch of grass has been stomped to dust. It's quite sad. I'm going to have to seriously re-seed next year.

Mason's swimming class on Saturday continues to be great fun for him. Having spontaneously learned to back float this summer, he's got this amazing new confidence, which has been working to propel his skill level forward by leaps and bounds. They had the kids in life jackets in the deep end of the pool on Saturday, and Mason was just buzzing around completely unaided. He also was really getting the whole swimming front-facing too. He was the first to make it across the length of the pool at the end of class. I couldn't have been more proud.

On Sunday our big event was a playdate with some of Mason's friends from Crossroads. Actually, it was with a friend who USED to go to Mason's school, but transferred to some Roseville school. So I found myself out in the suburbs feeling very... urban, you know? First of all, the parent's house was so clean it almost seemed as if no one REALLY lived there. If I may be brutally honest, I find that sort of creepy and off-putting. I suddenly feel like Pig Pen (from Charlie Brown), carrying with me a cloud of dust, and it's hard to be comfortable thinking that you might be smudging something with your very breath.

Plus, these people aren't SF/F fans. They're my kid's friend's parents.

The end result was that, while I had a fine time, I came home and told Shawn (who had to sit out thanks to yet-another migraine -- it's been a really bad season for her) that I found myself feeling very DIFFERENT. Several things contributed -- I don't drink beer or wine (and, actually, I'm such a lightweight that I can't drink anything, not even a sip, if I'm driving,) and so I don't have a lot of "we were SO drunk stories." Plus, at one point we were talking about wills and other legal stuff, and I realized that straight people are clueless about married privledge....

But, that's not to disparage any of them, honestly. I think that I probably wouldn't even have been aware of all this, had I not had a very similar experience on Thursday night when I was asked to be a guest at a book club meeting (also in Roseville.)

Maybe it's just Roseville.