Adam Rakunas's Blog, page 4

Happy Celloversary to Me

As far as I can tell, I’ve now been playing cello for three years.

That’s not completely accurate, though.

I really started some time in 2009. I had wanted to start playing an instrument after a fifteen year hiatus from drums. My brother had played cello when he was a kid, which meant his old cello was at our parents’ house. If I was really into it, I could buy a new instrument for myself.

It wasn’t the free cello that made me want to start. I’d always enjoyed the sound of it. Who doesn’t hear the Prélude to Bach’s First Cello Suite and think of life and joy and light?

Monsters. Dead-hearted, unfeeling monsters. That’s who.

Where was I? Right. Cello.

So, I picked up my brother’s old Kay, took lessons for a bit, and it was hard. I could read rhythms just fine, thanks to all those years of playing drums. But learning bow control and fingering and melody and trying to write and work at the same time? It was a lot. I got frustrated. I got callused fingers.

When Grace was born, I had to put cello aside. I was bummed, because I felt like I was making progress. However, I knew that, in order to get good and stay good, I’d have to practice consistently. And those first couple of years of stay-at-home parenting, the only thing I could do with any consistency was be tired all the time. Cello was out.

Except it wasn’t. I wanted Grace to grow up in a house filled with music, especially music that Anne and I made, even if it was just us singing nonsense songs. The cello (whom I named Norman, because why not?) sat in the corner, reminding me of the little bits of progress I had made. Couldn’t I play a couple of scales every now and then, at least? I could, and I staying in this stasis. I didn’t have enough technique to try anything harder, and I didn’t have anyone around to teach me technique.

Jump to February of 2012. Grace had turned two. I was getting a grip on parenting. I was starting to write in earnest again. And I decided that, yes, it was time to start lessons again. My teacher was a touring musician, so she was on the road. I did my Googles, found the Santa Monica Conservatory of Music, and set up a trial lesson John Redfield, the cellist who founded the Conservatory.

It was embarrassing. Oy, was it embarrassing. I ground my way through scales, I played what had been my trickiest étude, and I could tell from the look on John’s face that I had long, long way to go.

Well, it’s been three years, and now John’s getting me ready for a spring recital where I’m going to play the first three movements of Bach’s First Suite. My brain itches when I don’t practice, the same way it itches when I don’t write. Both crafts fuel each other, though I can tell when I playing well a lot easier than when I’m writing well. Of course, I can edit what I write. If I screw up a note, everyone knows it. I love getting that instant feedback, but it’s still maddening when I flub a passage and wonder: how the hell do I make it sound better?

Of course, I do the same thing with writing, so what the hell.

Anyway. Happy Celloversary to me. And to you, if you play or write or draw or make carved wooden figurines of minor historical figures. Life’s too short not to find one’s voice. I’m glad I found mine through a keyboard and a big wooden box.

I have no idea how I survived past five years old.

When I was three, my parents moved us to Costa Mesa, an Orange County suburb, back when the word suburb still had some meaning. We lived on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision whose streets were named after Pacific islands. There were two other families in our end of the street, and some of the kids were around my age.

We played. We fought. Our parents intervened. We played. We fought. Our parents intervened again. Repeat ad nauseam.

And then came the Star Wars action figures.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: all of us kids had the same action figures. We all played with all our figures together. And we would all fight about whose figures were whose when it was time to go home.

Our moms, sick of this bullshit, came up with a novel solution: applying a heated nail to the feet of our toys. One dot for this family, two dots for this family, three for another. This system worked, even though it meant the toys were now ruined for future toy hoarders (but it has made it easier to justify breaking them out for my kid).

And then we fought about something else

I have no idea how much of this I can chalk up to being human, how much to environment, how much to living in the United States during the late stages of the Anthropocene. What I do know is that I’m seeing the same bullshit with my kid, and it makes me want to apologize to my mom for whatever I must have done when I was her age.

The kid and her best friend love Frozen. They have bonded over ice powers and “Let It Go,” and they run around and chase each other and act like two rambunctious, happy kids should. This also means they’ll fight over the dumbest, territorial stuff, and, man, I’m about at my limit. Fighting over what game to play. Fighting over what toy to play with. Fighting over fighting.

And all I can do is separate them when it gets physical and try to explain to my kid that, no, her toys are not her friends. They are things, and things cannot love you back, no matter how much you insist to the contrary. People can love you back, so it would be a good idea to be nice to the people in your lives.

Mom, when you eventually read this: thank you for not selling me off for scientific experiments. However I was when I was five, I apologize.

2015: Opus fac

Last night, Midnight’s Twitter Game Tag was #2014InFiveWords. My entry? “That could have gone better.”

Which is a dumb thing for me to write because, on the whole, 2014 was a hell of a good year, albeit one punctuated by horrible moments of great magnitude. My family went to England and Scotland, I got to race some cyclocross, we got three new cousins added to the family (including my new niece. Hi, kid! I have no idea on what kind of device you’ll be reading this, but I hope you’re doing okay), and my daughter grew like bamboo. My agent sent my little book out the door, I learned all of Bach’s First Cello Suite, and I leveled up in Political Campaigns, Parenting, and Adulting In General. Yay!

Still, I fell into a pretty dark mood in November. Part of it was coming down from working so much during Richard McKinnon’s campaign and getting crushed at the polls. That was followed by the high and immediate crash of World Fantasy (yay, I get to hang out with my friends and eat good food and ride a bikeshare rig around Washington DC! Boo, it all ended way too fast). Toss in a little bout of existential dread (I only have forty more years to do stuff before I’m dead, and then the sun will go supernova in a few billion years, and then the Heat Death of the Universe will render all of this moot, so what’s the point anyway?!?!), the kind I haven’t had since my early twenties, and stuff got just weird. I’m okay now, but I know if I get into that kind of tailspin again, it’s straight to my friendly neighborhood mental health professional to figure out what the hell is going on.

Which brings me to this post. This post, on this site, and everything that’s going to follow. 2015 is the year of The Work. This is the year of getting back to 1,500 words of fiction a day. It is the year of taking on only two pieces of volunteer work (the Wilmont Board and Safe Streets Santa Monica…more on that later). It is the year of studying, of organizing, of doing The goddamn Work, because, if there’s anything I learned in 2014 it’s that not doing The Work is the equivalent of sitting in front of looped reruns of infomericals: it is murdering time, and I am not going to murder time in 2015. I am going to use it. I am going to invest it. I am going to spend my time, and that means not wasting it on petty time-killing bullshit.

So. I a kid to teach and raise. I have a marriage to enjoy and nurture. I have books to write and sell. I have clear political goals. I don’t know how much of it I’m going to pull off, but I am sure as hell not going to look back on this post twelve months from now and say, “Well, that could have gone better, too.”

Opus Fac. Do The Work.

P.S. Cello, too! Man, there’s going to be so much cello in 2015.

OH MY GOD I’M GOING TO LONDON

Almost two years ago, I was in a very crowded room in Chicago, watching a looping video of aliens and monsters destroying various London landmarks. The committee bidding to host Worldcon in London had won, and what better way to celebrate their hard work by showing us how easily their city could be smashed to pieces by unfeeling terrors from beyond?

I was stoked because it meant an excuse to go to London for longer than twenty-four hours. In 2001, my dad, my brother, and I had a day’s layover on the way home from Lithuania, and Dad insisted we see as much of the city as we could. It was, as you can imagine, a very exhausting day, but it sure as hell beat sitting around Heathrow. This time, we won’t be in as much of a rush.

Also, I get to babble with a bunch of people about comics and movies, so that’s going to be a hoot.

So! If you’re going to Loncon3 and want to say hi, here’s where I will be:

THURSDAY: 18:00 – 19:00, Capital Suite 4

Extrapolation on Screen

SF on screen, even or perhaps especially at its most political, seems reluctant to extrapolate directly from our present time. Instead, politcal works such as The Hunger Games or Defiance are often set after a radical change; or avoid extrapolating at all by dealing in secrets and conspiracies, like Orphan Black and Person of Interest. Possible contemporary exceptions include Continuum and Almost Human, but why are they so uncommon? Are important questions being dodged, or can the absence of extrapolation be a strength (and if so, how)?

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (M), Juliana Goulart, Michael Morelli, Adam Rakunas, Jacey Bedford

FRIDAY: 13.30-15:00, Capital Suite 13

Best 21st Century Comics: Predicting the New Classics

Which comics published in the 21st century will be quoted as the ‘classics’ in the decades to come? Will Y: The Last Man, Saga, Attack on Titan, Lazarus, Ms. Marvel, Grandville, Snowpiercer, or The Wake be remembered by future readers? What are your bets for the titles 22nd century comic book aficionados will consider comic book canon?

(I just got invited to this one, so I don’t know who else is on the panel. Still, getting to burble about Saga for ninety minutes is going to be grand.)

A Brief Notice About Disclosure

First, as of Saturday, June 21, 2014, I am now a member of the board of the Wilshire Montana Neighborhood Association. I look forward to getting sued over this.

Second, I am volunteering for two different city council campaigns in two different cities. In Costa Mesa, where I grew up, I’m helping Jay Humphrey get re-elected. In Santa Monica, where I live now, I’m helping Richard McKinnon get elected. Both have the experience and temperament to help their respective cities thrive in the upcoming weirdness that is the Mid-Twenty-First Century, and I hope you’ll check out their campaigns and give them your time, money, and votes.

Third, I have yet to find a taqueria that will support me in my endeavors, but I’m totally open to talks, people.

That is all.

Writing: Oy

In November of 1996 (oh my God, that feels so long ago), I made a website on Geocities. I felt like I had things to say, and the web, in all its HTML 1.0 glory, made it possible for me to say them to the entire world. Or, rather, to that chunk of the world that bothered to read that tiny piece of the web that I occupied.

A lot of that stuff I wrote is still sitting around, maybe even on this server. I don’t want to look at it now because it’s probably terrible and embarrassing and could be summed up thusly: I was lonely, and I wanted not to feel alone. My dream job had turned into a crap job, I hated where I lived, and my friends had all graduated and scattered to the four winds. Writing on the web helped me to connect to a whole bunch of other people, and it eased that crushing loneliness.

Jump eighteen years to now (oh my God, was it that long ago?), and I’m writing full time. Yes, I take care of the kid when she’s not at school, but my job is writing fiction. I have gotten paid to make up stuff. I hope to get paid to make up even more stuff. I’ve got one book out on submission to publishers, one waiting for edits, and one that I really should have finished last month (hey, entropy happens). I have all these words, man, but they’re not ready for you to read. That kills me, ’cause I think they’re some pretty good words. I want to share them with you. I want to connect with you. Yes, you.

And, yes, I also want that instant gratification that comes with hitting Publish and getting comments and notes and little smiley faces (note: we had to make our own smiley faces back in 1996). So, inspired by Jeff Noon‘s occasional tweets (which you should totally read), for the past two weeks, I’ve written tiny, tiny stories on Twitter right before I shut my brain off for the night. I’ll let an idea pop into my head, and then I run with it. I haven’t mastered getting a whole story into one hundred forty characters, but I am getting a handle on wrapping things up with enough punch to satisfy. Plus, I know people are reading them.

I’ve told myself I’m going to write fifty of these bedtime stories and figure out what to do from there. In the meantime, I’m going to start cross-posting them to a separate Twitter account, along with the dozen or so I’ve already written. I hope you like them. You should probably ask your parents before reading, though. Yes, even you.

Drugs! Plus bison. But mostly lots and lots of drugs.

The best part about being a writer is that you get to be a reader before everyone else.

Late last year, Daryl Gregory sent me a draft of his latest book, Afterparty. I had a cold and was high as a kite on sinus meds, which is a pretty good frame of mind for reading a book about designer drugs and God. Not that I would recommend you do that when you pick up the finished product. You’ll probably want to have as clear a head as possible, because Afterparty is going to kick the top off your skull.

What’s in the book? Well, I already talked about drugs and God. There’s also guilt, a discussion about the neuropsychology of the soul, hot sex, canoes, and bison. Tiny, tiny bison. I’m very happy to see them there.

Should you read this book? Hey, do you like sex, drugs, and tiny bison? The answer is yes. Yes, you should read it.

A letter to the Santa Monica City Council: Yes on MANGo

Dear City Council-

My name is Adam Rakunas, and I live in the Wilmont neighborhood. I ride all over the city with my daughter in our cargo bike, and I am excited about the possibilities that will come with the Michigan Avenue Greenway. Right now, the ride to Virginia Avenue Park is a little hairy; people use Michigan and Delaware as shortcuts to avoid Pico, which means watching out for speeding cars in a residential area. We also have to dodge cars when we’re heading anywhere east of the Civic Center, even though Olympic Drive should be a safe, easy way for us to connect to the bike lane on 11th Street. Right now, I wouldn’t think of having my daughter ride solo on any of these streets.

However, if the MANGo, with its diverters, raised crosswalks, and other traffic-slowing measures, is constructed, I think it will make an incredible and positive difference for my daughter and for every other kid in Santa Monica. By creating a safe cycling route to get to Edison Language Academy and SaMoHi, more parents will feel better letting their kids ride to school, thus putting fewer cars on the road, thus making it even safer. It’s a virtuous cycle, one that’s been repeated around the world as cities make the commitment to creating safer streets. And if the MANGo works, then that means other bikeways around the city will work, and that can only make for a safer, healthier city.

I realize it’s a bold and scary move to make a street that demands slower car traffic, and that there are editorialists and pockets of resistance who think that doing anything to impede auto circulation is a bad idea. We’ve had one hundred years of car culture, and it’s split the city in half, made the skies smoggy, and hurt and killed too many people. The MANGo is the first step toward changing the way we get around the city, and it’s going to set the tone for the next fifty years of how Santa Monica works. What kind of city do you want? One for cars, or one for people? I hope you will choose the latter and cement your legacy as the city council that said yes to the MANGo and everything that will follow.

Sincerely,

Adam Rakunas

(Note to everyone else: if you live in SM, please take a moment to email the city council and ask them to approve the MANGo. Feel free to cannibalize this email as you see fit. Thanks!)

I Am Now Forty

When I was a kid, forty was the age that the adults joked about. Forty was when you began the long decline to death. Forty was black arm bands, “Over the Hill” banners, and jokes about mid-life crises.

As of now, I am forty. And I am going to make my forties be the most righteous decade yet.

All I would like for my birthday today is for you to make a difference, not just in your own life, but in someone else’s. If you ride a bike, I’d like you to join your local bicycle coalition. If you’ve been putting off writing an angry (yet polite and well-written) letter to your elected representatives, write it and send it today. It would make me ridiculously happy to know that you donated to a charity you like. And, if you don’t have one yet, here are some I really like:

World Bicycle Relief

The Westside Children’s Center

Girls Inc of Orange County

I am forty. To hell with black arm bands, cheap gallows humor, and all of that crap. This is the decade to change the goddamn world.

For your Hugo Award consideration, 2014 edition

So, I got a story published last year, and I quite like it. I hope you read it and liked it, too. I hope you read it and liked it so much that you’d consider nominating “Oh Give Me A Home” for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette. I hope that you’d also consider nominating me for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer, ’cause my little tale of family, farming, and miniaturized bison now makes me eligible for the glory that is the Campbell Diadem (with matching cheese board). (Note: I’ve submitted “Oh Give Me A Home” to the 2014 Campbellian Anthology, so check back here on January 15th for a link. EDIT: here it is!)

And now back to work.