Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 54

Accounting

There has been slow progress on piracy.  More today, I hope.

cucumberseed @ 2011-10-30T18:54:00

Hey, been away for a little while.  Bound to be hard to find for the rest of the week, thanks to the snow.  

All Sorts of Poetry and Stuff!

1) There is new Goblin Fruit!  Tastiest in the fall!  Okay, it wouldn't be Goblin Fruit if it wasn't tasty all year long.   aliseadae  and I (and a lot of cool people who I am not yet very familiar with and would like to change that situation) are in there!  And for the first time ever you can listen to the noseless splendor that is my voice recorded!  You will believe a man can read poetry without a single functioning sinus in his head!

1a) csecooney has really nice things to say about us at Black Gate.

1b) I'm not sure and I don't want to look as presumptuous as I really am, but I think that's a wolf and a peach in the banner over the table of contents.  I'm going to pretend it is, and be all insufferable about it.

2) Also!  Stone Telling now has the audio file (and many thanks to rose_lemberg and shweta_narayan graciously took the late submission of said audio file).  As much as I hate the sound of my own voice, I like being able to read for people. 

3) tithenai  leaked the TOC (authors in alphabetical order) for the next Mythic Delirium!  And it contains a very high percentage of my favorite people (and also me).

3a) Alphabetical order always makes me feel important.

4)   rose_lemberg  has a novelette up at  Beneath Ceaseless Skies  called "Held Close in Syllables of Light."  (I just stole that wholesale from tithenai 's post because I'm getting lazy with all the linking.  Sorry).  Normally I am not big on stories where the magic is at the front and the center.  Normally I am not big on clockpunk.  This is not a normal story.  This is a really excellent story, and I loved it.  

4a) I now ship Taemin with one of my characters.  I won't tell you who.

A New Challenger Arises

I feel odd about doing a metrics/accountability post, but there it is.  Both more and less writing got accomplished today than I thought (991 words), and I got to introduce the fourth member of the team: Bacon, whose name comes from the first thing that made her realize she was meant to be a human.

Dead Boys Like Me

Well, actually, dead boys like everyone, so I really shouldn't take this as a mark of distinction, but my mythsploitation poem "Under the Asphodel" has been picked up by time_shark for Mythic Delirium, which is a mark of distinction if ever there was. 

Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by gabrielleabelle </lj> at Mississippi Personhood AmendmentOkay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later - on a Sunday - thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

- Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

- If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

- You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

- Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

cucumberseed @ 2011-10-11T21:56:00

Today I want to put swords into bad guys.  For real.  

I bang on about monsters again.

Mom got me the last of the five I was looking for, the monsters I want to use for my project, thought experiment or whatever, with the crocodiles.  So now I have all five and I've got a good handle on what they are and what they do.

1) Goblins - I am stealing these right from Guillermo Del Toro, because even though Don't be Afraid of the Dark is supposed to be a stinker (and despite the fact that d|p and I both love Del Toro and one of us lusts after Guy Pearce [but only when he's all beat up], even we haven't seen).  And from Gremlins, because, why not?  They don't have the crazy reproductive cycle.  I don't think they reproduce themselves.  Momuè brings them into being himself or imports them from a place of limitless supply.  Momuè?  Sylfie tells me he is a very bad man and when she gets her hands on him, he won't be a bother to me or anybody else.  But first, she's got to get her hands on him.  Goblins are the things that serve him in greatest number and frequency.  Individually, they aren't up to much.  You can take one in a straight-up fight.  Even you, over there in the corner, never hurt a fly, never threw a punch before.  If you are wearing shoes, you could kick one down and trample it.  My nephews could probably take one, but I think they would not like the experience.  That's not the point, well, it kind of is, because goblins never have fair fights.  They set traps and swarm you and rattle you and make you run... into those traps, and then when you are down, they tie you up in ropes of hair and drag you down to goblin town.  Where they figure out whether you are worth more as a hostage or as noms.  Either way, you usually end up noms.  They can be very hard to find and figure when they aren't about, but, there is a trick to dealing with them, cause even the most modestly gifted magician can burn them down with a little will properly applied.

2) Mermaids - Okay, so, waifish, sweet-faced creatures with fishy nethers.  You would think the best way to save yourself from them is to sit underneath a tree, and you would be a little bit right.  The ocean they swim in is liminal, and you are almost always near it.  Usually, you are very near it.  And you don't know it until it's too late, most of the time, as you smell the sea, you hear the singing, and the wall unfolds to the surface of a great, dark sea, and there they all are, beautiful things (appearing to be whatever is most attractive to you sexually - they don't have a sex, but they do, oddly, have gender - about 1/3 male when at rest to 2/3 female [it's posited that Momuè is male himself and likes women better than men, possibly in that proportion.  How useful that knowledge is to you is your affair]) with beautiful voices and knowledge of the things you long for.  They are charming and they will charm you and yeah, they make drowning in their arms sound really, really nice.  Something that you'd want to work for, to risk for, to possibly kill for?  Or, you know, just let them take you to the Dark Sea Between the Walls.  Magic doesn't put them off as well as you want it to, but if you can bear to do it, take up something heavy and swing away.  Or just your fists.  They are as delicate as they look, and not brave.  They are only used to fighting those whose lungs are already filled with water, and then they can be eight pairs of hands on one. 

3) Skin Stealing Foxes - Pretty big for a fox, and pretty strong.  Lithe, sinewy.  The foxes are a little smaller than you, or, at least, the ones you might see are, and there is a reason for that.  They will take you by surprise if they can, but they aren't all that tricky in the hunting.  Most of the time, if you see one, it will come right up to you.  A fair fight is no fight at all against these bastards.  They are strong, and they are wise, and they will take you down, grab hold of your tongue and eat your skin hollow.  Then they'll wear you and wreck everything.  They will enact full-scale John Carpenter's The Thing on everyone they can get your hands on, and in the end, the only way anyone will ever know what happened is finding your discarded skin when the fires go out.  If that weren't bad enough, understand that everything I tell you about them is probably wrong.  Anything you may have heard about weaknesses or allergies or a trick on how to find them out is something they made up themselves.  Some lie to get you all to distrust one another or trust in some test or method for detection that is plain wrong.  I guess one thing that might help, which is pretty reliable (don't believe it) is that they are rather unfoxy in their singlemindedness and their senses are not very keen.  They also hate climbing.  If you throw lentils at them (red or green, I am not sure which anymore) they have to count them.  You can also see their yellow eyes in the mirror.  No, wait, I know that last one is false.  Someone told me that recently, though.  I wonder who it was...

4) Perytons - It's a black eagle big enough to take down a horse with the head of a buck and the tusks of a boar (sometimes a crest of bristly fur down the back).  This is not a subtle creature.  The Momuè didn't want subtle and Lords, did he not get it.  Perytons will fuck your shit up.  They have claws, they have horns, they have tusks.  They will dive straight into the ground with only you to break their 400 pound fall, and not give a good God's damn about it (your bones, however, will have other opinions, if not their original shapes).  Then they'll scream so loud, that, if you're not dead already (and no reflection on your character if you are, I don't blame you), you'll be deaf; and then they'll tear the heart out of your chest, since it's actually hard to get Perytons into the world, and Momuè needs that kind of snack when he's through calling one up (or he needs it to do the deed in the first place, but Sylfie tells me that it's probably for a snack, because that is the way he rolls.  Also, she says that she wouldn't want to tangle with a Peryton, at least not before a good breakfast).  Now if you survive a tangle with a Peryton, and stranger things do happen, you might find yourself in a bit of a predicament  because you might have the Peryton's shadow on you (which, incidentally means the Peryton can cast your shadow, and you can't cast one at all, because you are already in shadow), and the only way to get it off is to kill it or die trying (well, a magician can scrub it off with a wire brush, but you get the idea).  They can talk, too, and they are terrible bullies.  The kind that back up all their threats.  They are, however, not hard to track or find.  Yay.

5) Necrodiles - I think I already told you about these guys, magicians in their own right.  Maybe a little small as crocs go (skinny, too; I've heard of ones the size of the great salt-water crocs that are strong as perytons, but I don't want to think about that being true).  They are sorcerers and they paint eyes on themselves, human style eyes, so that when they come around, and they slink, because, my dears, fuckers can slink, like their serpenty cousins, they can slink right to being upright on hind legs and look at you.  You can't stare down all those eyes at once, can you?  Of course not, so when it whips out the powers of darkness to season and cook body and soul, you're stuck without so much as a good word in your defense.  So when they've had their wicked way with you, they can paint a few more.  You would think that one or two would do, for your one life or your two eyes (not nec. in that order, sorry to say), but the damned things cheat, and they can get five or six eyes painted on their scales just for you and you alone (some can go as high as a dozen, but I suspect that they view that as gauche).  But, of course their eye-eyes are human eyes, too.  I mean, what do you think they do with those things, after they've had them out their victims but wear them around in their blind, empty sockets?  Their sorcerous powers include putting the nightmare run on your legs (you know that one too well, already, I expect), which makes them very hard to escape.  Your one hope with the necrodiles is that they love stories, and, well, magic and brains are supposed to be related, but if they are, not so closely as you might think before you meet these things.  You can trick them fairly easily, if you know what you're doing, and they haven't already cooked your ghost out of your poor crackly skin.

Where it Comes From

So my mom was thinking, and what she thought about was a crocodile or alligator, or some fuck-off big lizard, only it had human eyes.  So she tells me, and I'm thinking: what if it paints eyes on itself, human style eyes, so that when it comes around, and it slinks, because, my dears, fuckers can slink, like their serpenty cousins, it can slink right to being upright on hind legs and look at you.  You can't stare down all those eyes at once, can you?  So when it's had its wicked way with you, it can paint a few more.  You would think that one or two would do, for your one life or your two eyes (not nec. in that order, sorry to say), but the damned thing (or things) cheat, and they can get five or six eyes painted on their scales just for you and you alone (some can go as high as a dozen, but I suspect that they view that as gauche).  But, of course their eye-eyes are human eyes, too.  I mean, what do you think they do with those things, after they've had them out their victims but wear them around in their blind, empty sockets.  This is what we talk about.

Breakthroughs!

I am like a mogwai, apparently, when I shower for bed after midnight, I get story brain like whoa.  These are the things that I got, which I need to write down now in the time that I have (very little) so I don't forget.  Mental progress on three fronts.

1) The protagonist from rapey vampire story I decided never to write because it is rapey, and no is escaping.  Eevie S, goodbye.  You are now Esther Finch, still with the dark spiky hair and the doe-like movements and stillness, but upgraded, 10th grade English teacher (2 year veteran) and adjunct Freshman Comp professor at SCSU.  The man's shirt I originally saw you wearing might belong to an ex, still, but you have a closet full of your own, and sharp khakis, because you are genderqueer, and that's how you dress.  You have a thing for Hermes, your ankles are tattooed with wings and your back with a stylized herm.  Of course you were a runner.  Your apartment is decorated with robots and with mostly turn of the century paintings.  You know who Charles Fort and Dion Fortune are.  Your grandfather dated a tattooed lady before your grandmother made a respectable man out of him.  And you will be hunting carbon-fiber cryptids for benlehman .

2) Something I never thought of, a method of putting human beings on a planet thousands of light years away: upload consciousness, bring all the information you need to create human bodies and make them in the place where you show up.  Gob-smackingly fucking obvious.  Human bodies aren't made out of anything that hard to find, it stands to reason if you're going to find a place habitable to humans, it's going to have all the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and trace shit just lying around in great profusion HOLY SHIT I CAN WRITE SF!  And all I need to say is that, as it turns out, our consciousnesses are kind of fixated on the human form.  I can now to dudes-in-space without pushing Sisyphus' boulder of cognitive dissonance up that hill.
And now I know how Sooney-Crow came back when Sooney died. Now I know how Murr Potter is the fifth life of the narrator.  I know where they are and where Arkansas in the Land of Demons actually is.  Most of all, I know who Arkansas Crow is, and what Sooney saw when she saw the golden doors open and the charnel wind blew out.  And why the preacher in the Hill Canton likes to sermonize about how there ain't no natural man.

WOOO, I AM FLUSH WITH THE GIDDY RUSH OF FIGURING SHIT OUT!

Now all I need is to figure out how to get Ruibe's man into SSS&S.