Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 33
September 17, 2012
20000
September 14, 2012
Like Riding a Bicycle
September 12, 2012
Poetry Planet No. 7 - 2012 Rhysling Award Showcase
divadiane1
at Poetry Planet No. 7 - 2012 Rhysling Award ShowcaseAfter much delay, the next installment of Poetry Planet has hit the ether! The annual Rhysling Award Showcase features the poetry of the award winners in both the Long and the short categories plus the 2nd and 3rd placing poems as well. I must apologize profusely at this stage because the 2nd place long poem failed to make it into the final audio file and by the time I noticed it was too late to fix it. Sorry! But as a bonus, you get it here (see below)
You'll hear:
maryturzillo, Mary A. Turzillo's, novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl and Nebula Award- winning novelette "Mars Is no Place for Children" are recommended reading on the International Space Station. She has been nominated for the Rhysling, the British Science Fiction Association Award ("Eat or Be Eaten, a Love Story"), and the Pushcart (Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, vanZeno). Her latest book is Lovers & Killers, Dark Regions 2012.
Lyn C. A. Gardner grew up beside Keuka Lake in upstate New York, but her family has since gathered in coastal Virginia. With master's degrees in English literature and library science, she’s been the editor for a private maritime museum and currently serves as catalog librarian for a public library. She also loved her work as projectionist for AMC Theatres. In addition to writing, art, and photography, She enjoys fencing, swimming in lakes, biking around the neighborhood, skating (ice & sidewalk skates). She loves owls, cats, trees, snow, the stars, the color blue, and playing folk guitar and harpsichord. Most of all, She loves spending time with her family. Her first book, a poetry collection called Dreaming of Days in Astophel, is available from Sam's Dot Publishing.
2nd Place Long: G. O. Clark and Kendall Evans, “The 25-Cent Rocket: One-Quarter of the Way to the Stars” This poem failed to make it onto the final audio file. My apologies to Gary and Kendall! I've posted it to my MySpace space for now, until the next Poetry Planet runs. To listen go here.Kendall Evans is the author of more than 250 poems and about 50 short stories published in various sf, fantasy and horror publications. He recently completed a book length sf dramatic poem, a ring cycle in four parts, The Rings of Ganymede.
G.O Clark’s poetry has appeared on Poetry Planet previously. G. O. Clark's writing has been published in Asimov's Science Fiction, StrangeHorizons, A Sea Of Alone: Poems For Alfred Hitchcock, Tales Of The Talisman, among others. He's the author of nine poetry collections, most recent, "White Shift" in 2012, and a fiction collection, "The Saucer Under My Bed and Other Stories", 2011. He’s retired and lives in Davis, CA.
2nd Place Short: Erik Amundsen, "The Lend"Erik Amundsen, cucumberseed, was removed from display, as he was considered zoologically improbable and/or terrifying to small children. He has been sighted in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us and Jabberwocky but his natural habitat is central Connecticut. Taken broadly, Erik Amundsen has had an interesting life; he's been a baker, an itinerant schoolteacher, worked for two governments and gotten in bar fights overseas. He now lives at the foot of a cemetery in central Connecticut where he writes nasty little stories and poems that shuffle around in the night when he's not looking. Or at least he hopes it's them; something's got to be making those noises and it's not the furnace. He maintains a blog on LiveJournal under the code-name cucumberseed.
Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. This was her first Rhysling nomination and her first award for speculative poetry. In addition to poetry, she writes short fiction; her work has recently appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed. She procrastinates by editing the online magazines Mirror Dance, which focuses on the fantasy genre and Lacuna, for historical fiction.
1st Place Short: Shira Lipkin, "The Library, After"Shira Lipkin, shadesong, is a writer, activist, mother, and nexus. She has managed to convince Interfictions 2, Stone Telling, ChiZine, Apex Magazine, Steam-Powered, Mythic Delirium, and other otherwise-sensible magazines and anthologies to publish her short fiction and poetry, and she has just won the 2012 Rhysling Award for short poem. She lives in Boston with her family and the requisite cats, fights crime with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, does six impossible things before breakfast, and would like a nap now. You can track her movements at shiralipkin.com and shadesong.livejournal.com. Please do. She likes the company.
Please click on the links to the poets' websites, blogs and the like. They appreciate the support.
September 11, 2012
oeei33aeo838o8oiia
It's hard to keep secrets. After the funeral, I still had the house to keep, and no mom's disability to help keep it. I had a brother to keep, who can't earn his keep.
oeei33aeo838o8oiia is imperative. We play for keeps. When I was nine, I got this cross-stitch kit for Christmas. When I was ten, I got a whole mess of art supplies. I think we've (see me grin at this) kept them, somewhere, in a closet or a crawlspace. I never touched them, except to open a couple of things, poke at threads and paints and then the water got deep and I couldn't touch. They were swimming in the middle of the ocean, far from shore - you can swim in any direction you want, so which one do you pick? I'm not a strong swimmer, and with my skin, I've got no business near a beach.
aaaa3e3i88i83ao, and you won't be able to walk on water, nothing can do that for a person, except being Jesus, but it does make step ladders less scary; same with walking the line when the red and blues are flashing and there's a two hour margarita that might show up in the breathalizer if the officer makes you blow.
I'm bad with secrets. And I'm bad at ethics. I hit and I miss, but mostly, it's irrelevant. I show things to my patients and things change, or they don't, and eventually they die. No one stays in my place of employment, we are all passing through. 83iio338ioo begins the sequence for stealth if you're a spider made for hunting, but it doesn't help you hide the things you've done. They are there in the people who meet my spiders, there in the home gone all vegetarian in the space of six months (that was early on, before the first lesson addressed to me came through the medium of my mom).
Dr. Bronner's soap tells me the MORAL A-B-Cs, but taking advantage has its own progression. 8i3o8aoie833ioe, take one, take a little, don't get caught. 3i88oooeiaa8i, someone remembers their name, recognizes where they are and why, depression sets in, respiratory failure follows. No one knows what to look for or how to look, but the state thinks there is something to find. There's something to find. And so far, there aren't any sequences I've found for money spiders to win me the lottery.
Instead, I made myself better at math, six, hell, twelve years after it would have done any good, and now it's ruined scratch tickets for me. So that's for magic powers. State investigations and no Lucky for Life.
September 7, 2012
Saaaaailing Takes Me Awaaaaaaay
heksenhaus
.Someone is clearly taking the piss. I'm just not sure if it's only one or both articles.
Here's the pull quote from sjb's link.
Instead of the rationalized production of “cool” and novel lifestyle tropes that the late 1960s unleashed, yacht rock turned to aggressively uncool and retrograde signifiers of achievement: yachts, sailor caps, tropical getaways, tans, state-of-the-art audiophilia — exhausted symbols that could be recuperated only as carnivalesque parody. By de-emphasizing identity, innovation, and novelty, yacht rock re-imagines luxury’s abundance as inclusiveness rather than scarcity, a mode of enjoyment by rights open to all and offensive only to those snobs who predicate their pleasure on feelings of superiority. It unequivocally rejects the productivity of connoisseurship in favor of a taken-for-granted democratic lexicon of public-domain cliches of the good life.
And here's one from the article it rebuts:
The ulcerating chancre known as “yacht rock” was the sign of a greater, gathering plague: that of the reactionaries and their most potent poison, the redistributive, soak-the-poor tenets of neoliberal economics. Six months after those Grammys, American air traffic controllers went on strike for better working conditions, and the tertiary phase had begun.
Taking the piss.
September 5, 2012
Rights, choices and exceptions
pecunium
at Rights, choices and exceptionsI am sick of hearing about exceptions. If you actually think choice is a right, that people are allowed to do what they want to do with their bodies (and that women are people) then being upset that Romney, or Ryan, or Akin, or any other person doesn’t want to allow some people to have abortions while denying them to everyone else is not only inconsistent, it’s foolish.
I think it has been making the entire debate harder to have, because it cedes a vast piece of moral ground to the anti-choice side. It says that some abortions are more acceptable than others, which implies that all the rest are, in some way, not acceptable. That absent some extenuating circumstance the fetus, presumptively, has rights.
That’s not a good position to be in, if what one is arguing is the right isn’t one to life (on the part of the fetus) but the right to autonomy on the part of the woman. It makes it easier for those who are opposed to choice to get their foot in the door with those who are on the fence. It gives the waffling people a way to salve their consciences. Those people get to tell themselves they aren’t denying, “good women” the right to abortions. No, the people who are “deserving”, those who aren’t, “trying to run away from their responsibilities” will still be able to get an abortion if they, “need” one.
Well it’s not about need. It’s about freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to not be the slave of the state the moment one gets pregnant. Freedom to have children when one wants them, and to not have them when one doesn’t. An unwanted pregnancy is an unwanted pregnancy, no matter how loving, or hateful, the circumstances which led to it.
I have some of the same problems with people who defend non-heterosexuals having rights because, “they were born that way”. I don’t give a damn if it’s nature, nurture, a question of politics, or pure hedonistic choice. People are people. They have rights. If those rights can be stripped, because it’s a choice, then they aren’t rights.
One can argue the moral values of when legal personhood begins, that’s fine. But saying some types of abortion are legitimate, because the cause of them is squicky is an act of moral cowardice (on both sides). Choice is legit, or it isn’t. I know why the strategists chose incest and rape as the poster child for making the anti-choice people look monstrous, it’s because those are things we react to with horror, and it allows a certain type of logical fallacy to play out in the id. It allows for some guilt by association. If the anti-choicers won’t allow exceptions for rape and incest victims, then they are supporting rape and incest.
The nice thing about it, from that standpoint, is the claim doesn’t have to be overt. People’s revulsion to the concepts kicks in at a level below reason. But I think it backfires. It allows the people on the fence to think only “bad” pregnancies are deserving of choice. The better exception to be using, when the anti-choice crowd is going full-tilt, as they seem to be in this election, is the question of medical necessity.
Ryan, for example, is against it, when third-trimester abortions were being debated in the house, he said, “"The health exception would render this ban virtually meaningless.". Ryan doesn’t care if a woman will die, not if she’s pregnant. It’s a harsh thing to say; I know people will say I am exaggerating, but that’s what banning medically needed abortions means. It means that as soon as a woman becomes pregnant she is slave to the state. Her life is not her own, and it’s not her own until she is no longer legally responsible for the child.
That’s what choice is about. It’s about being your own person. The Republican Party, Romney and Ryan, don’t think women should be allowed to be their own persons, no exceptions.
September 3, 2012
Announcing <i>Not One of Us 48</i>
lesser_celery
at Announcing <i>Not One of Us 48</i>This issue is a veritable land of opportunity. We have a resistance movement rallying behind a singer with an unusual talent, a young woman moving from taxidermy to the opportunity of a lifetime, a stowaway to gold mountain, a couple finally getting the chance to marry long denied them both in life and in death. Plus a purple-eyed cat and cake. Everything is better with cake. Our poets speak of dead air and dead fingers, silver bullets and unexploded ordnance, gingerbread houses and red-capped wayfarers.Contents:
The Ash Singer, by Mat Joiner
Size 8 (poem), by Holly Day
Dead Air for the River Stones (poem), by Erik Amundsen
Heaven’s Lot, by J.R. Johnson
Siege Mentalist (poem), by F.J. Bergmann
Gold Mountain, by Anna Sykora
Danger UXO (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
More Fun with Cake, by Patricia Russo
Natural Phenomena (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
My Kitchen (poem), by John Grey
A Perfect Wedded Bliss, by Mark Rigney
Twitch the Witch (poem), by K.S. Hardy
Redcap (poem), by Gemma Files
Art: John Stanton
Not One of Us #48 will be available from Chris Drumm Books, or you can order a copy or subscription right now directly from me .
We’ll be mailing the contributors’ and subscribers’ copies this week.
September 1, 2012
August 30, 2012
SKEW: Whacked out Science Fiction
benlehman
at SKEW: Whacked out Science FictionI have just put up a pre-order kickstarter for SKEW: whacked out science fiction.SKEW is an anthology of unreal experiences. It contains fiction by:
Erik Amundsen
Dallas Taylor
Scotto Moore
Lisa Lindeman
Ian Creasey
Sara Amis
Greg Stolze
Caren Gussoff
and Brendan Adkins
as well as a game by me. It is edited by Isabel Cooper Kunkle.
Available rewards include library donations, games hosted by me, and bespoke microfiction.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1...
August 28, 2012
We've got a War to Fight
Partly, it is because I am doing something I have never done before. I am plotting. Not outlining, outlines are bloody useless for me, I never stick to them, and 2/3 of the way through a draft I look at them and where I am in the story (10 - 20K away from the last point on the outline at least) and flip my lid. No, I am plotting. Asking all the questions I need to know and answering them - how did Paris find the Seal Skinned Elder, why did he go looking for zir, what are all the differences between those who birthed swords like Paris and the quick recruits, what is going to lead my protag to retrace Paris' steps and find the SSE...
I think once that is done, instead of plotting, I am going to list beats I want to hit, and hit as many as I hit. It feels like a long time since I've done this, and I am terrified. I really do not want to fuck this story up AGAIN.
I went to the shrink today. Possibly the right one. Specialist in CBT and panic attacks, told me a lot of things that made me... kind of excited. Thanks to
snowshield
, I have a much better idea about how to be a good patient and advocate for myself. Turns out I was ignorant of some facts of cognitive therapy - like I get homework. I am excited for homework. It gives me something to do to get well that isn't wait two weeks to answer questions that dance around and around the root of the problem. It's brain training. I am down with that. It also plays to one of my intuitions about how to face my panic. Use it. Welcome it. Let it fucking come, and ride it. It's a notion that, well, I've flirted. It's a thing I've heard, that if you want the power, you've got to have a wound that never will heal. This never will heal, but it might be something I could harness. Fear of doing worse damage has kept me off, but now I learn that this is the most effective treatment, the best proven way to live with what I've got. This is a fucking gift.
This is the song I was listening to the first time a benign heart arrythmia set off 18 years of panic attacks. It's a good song.
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