Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 41

Signed personalised books for the holidays

Image description: White background, blue lettering spelling “Phinney Books,” i all caps. And, in gold, an image of a Big Wheel lower left and “Seattle,” again all caps, lower right.

I’m teaming up again with Phinney Books, on Greenwood Avenue, Seattle, to bring you signed, personalised books for the holidays. Why Phinney Books? Well, because it’s my idea of a perfectly-sized bookshop with just the right stock. Also, it’s level-entry with a light front door so very easy for me to get in and out of. And of course before and after pandemic restrictions it’s wonderfully convenient because it’s right next door to the 74th St Alehouse, which sells an excellent pint of Guinness.

Here’s how it works.

Go to Phinney Books’ online ordering page to buy any of my books, no muss no fuss, and get them shipped to any address in US. Everyone else, see the next step.
Email info@phinneybooks.com (phone is okay: 206 297 2665) with billing info: all major credit cards accepted. They use Square, so they’ll also need the 3-digit code on the back and your billing postal code.
Tell them what you’d like, e.g.  Hild  (paperback or hardcover) or So Lucky or Ammonite or Slow River .* Or, hey, another book by somebody else—lots of books, any books! It’s the holidays. You (and your friends, your family, everyone you’ve ever met) deserve something nice. Splurge! Remember, too, that you can order ebooks via the store, and—woo hoo!—audio books (I narrated So Lucky). Sadly I can’t personalise those, though—unless you pay for a card and shipping from Tom and I sign that.
Tell them whether you want the books by me personalised (to you, or to someone else; if so, who; and what short thing you’d like me to add). If you give this order by phone, please spell out even the most common names.
Give them your mailing address and payment info.
Beam, sit back and relax: you’ve done your holiday shopping!

Tom, the owner, tells me he is happy to ship multiple copies, to ship internationally, and to ship express/priority, but then there will be extra charges you will have to work out with him.

Deadlines: We’re late sorting this out this year, so my advice: order as fast as possible, and consider paying for Priority Mail. Good luck!

*There are no more of the limited edition memoir boxes, and it takes time for Tom to order copies of With Her Body. Also the Aud novels are no longer available. I reverted the rights two years ago and sold everything I had lying about in an earlier promotion. But, woo-hoo!, they will be back on sale at some point soonish in spiffy matching editions from Picador—and I’ll be doing the audio narration. either late next year or early the year after, so next time I do this, who knows. And the time after, well, get ready for an announcement next week.

Manatee mind

[image error] Photo by Maegan Luckiesh on Unsplash

In “The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow” Samuel Johnson wrote that although most human needs have a theoretical solution—the miser could perhaps gain more money, the glutton more food—for the sorrow of grief:

there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

Nerve pain is like that. There is no remedy. It can be dulled with drugs like alcohol and opiates—which don’t actually reduce nerve pain much, though they certainly make the sufferer care about it less—or treated with an anticonvulsant like pregabalin that reduces pain signals. The problem is, pregabalin also reduces other nerve signals. Some people seem to have a reasonable tolerance to it; I do not. Pregabalin, even in small doses, makes me feel like a manatee: grey, blimp-like, and drifting through a dreamy liquid world. Everything requires an enormous effort.

In September I had a pseudo-relapse of my MS. Pseudo-relapse is helpfully explained by International Multiple Sclerosis Management Practice:

Another way MS patients can experience worsening is called a pseudo-relapse. When physicians use this term, we are also referring to worsened neurologic symptoms; however the underlying cause of the worsening is not from new immune system activity or inflammation, but rather from the damage that has occurred from previous inflammation. […] There are a number of stressors that can affect the body and MS in this manner.

My pseudo-relapse was caused by physical inflammation—the truly awful wildfires and smoke that, for 10 days, turned Seattle’s air quality, along with Portland’s, into the worst in the world; plus writing every single day without a break for months—and emotional stress: politics, protest, and pandemic. Also overwork—writing every day, flat out, seven days a week for months. My symptoms were a recurrence of the terrible nerve pain I had six years ago—only, thankfully, instead of the entire left half of my body, it was part of the upper left quadrant: neck, shoulder, a bit of my chest, arm, and hand. And instead of constant, sheeting pain, it was only when I moved. Basically, my pain-gating held—so it wasn’t as bad.

But it was still, y’know, a lot. Bad enough that I needed biggish doses of pregabalin; I turned into a manatee.

Manatees are not known for much more than drifting about looking grey; they’re certainly not known for their writing talents. It could be their lack of thumbs, but also it turns out it’s very difficult to focus on words when drifting about in a hazy world; being in pain; and watching the world burn, literally and figuratively. So while on pregabalin I watched hours of TV, and fell asleep a lot. I did still manage to work, just very…slowly. (Without the pseudo-relapse I would have been done with Menewood long before Halloween.) But then the rain came, the wildfires died down, and gradually my inflammation eased. My pain began to lessen. I could reduce the dosage; I began to wake up. Then one day I realised I had had no pain at all for 24 hours; it was over. I swore I would be grateful for the rest of my life for every single day without pain.

The funny thing about pain, though, is that we forget. As the days pass our minds close seamlessly over the horror and it fades. We can remember that it happened but we don’t feel the memory. I’m guessing this is a necessary evolutionary adaptation. After all, what woman in her right mind would ever go through childbirth twice if the pain wasn’t swaddled in gauze and sprinkled with glitter then safely tucked away somewhere inaccessible? And so it was with me. I wake up in the morning and forget to be grateful for lack of pain. I’m grateful for many other things of course—delighted and grateful every day for sunshine, kitties, Kelley, a roof over my head, hot tea, tasty coffee, cold beer, fabulous cocktails, and a thousand and one other things.

So while sorrow and pain might have no immediate remedy, if we’re lucky they both eventually fade. I am glad. May this be true for you, too.

MENEWOOD!!

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A monster is born…

Late on the night before the election I finished the first draft of Menewood. It is a monster!

I’ve been working on this for a while. I wrote the first chapter in 2014 but then got distracted by many things: my health, three tours and consequent rounds of publicity for Hild (US, UK, US again) other projects like gender bias in literary prizes, and #CripLit, doing a PhD, writing another novel, doing my first audio narration, grief for my father, writing another other novel (more on that soon), politics, adopting kitties, more politics, more health stuff (more on that another time), and other interesting things I’m not ready to talk about yet. It’s been…busy.

Busyness aside, though, the real problem I was having with Menewood was its length. Hild, the first novel, spanned 14 years of Hild’s life, from her first conscious memory—at age 3, of her father’s death—to her marriage. Menewood, I thought, would pick up immediately after her marriage and cover the 15 years to joining the church at age 33. But as soon as I got about 100 pages in I ran into trouble because given the sheer amount of story I had to cover the novel would end up being about a million words. But that story was what I was contracted for, so I kept trying to shoehorn the story into a smaller container—and kept running into the walls of that container. I kept trying, though, because a) I hate those endless, meandering series, and b) I had a contract. I was determined. 

But every time I reached the 150,000-word mark, I despaired. I kept second-guessing myself: maybe it wasn’t working because I’d made some misstep with Hild’s character; maybe it was the story, or the pacing; maybe I’d got the history wrong, or the mood. So I’d stop and throw away the most recent 10,000 words and try again. And hit a wall. Over and over. Every time I did that I’d turn to another project. Or write another book. Or fly to the UK to deal with my father’s death. Or adopt cats, or whatever. I knew Menewood was a good book, I knew the story I’d told so far was exactly what I wanted to tell, but at the same time I couldn’t see how I could make it work, how I could fit a gallon of story into a pint pot.  

But then at the beginning of this year an interesting thing happened—I’d been working well on Menewood (again) but then had to stop to start work on something that was meant to be a piece of short fiction. For various reasons (I’ll tell that story soon! It’s exciting! I promise!) it broke my constraints, just smashed them to little shiny bits. So when I got back to Menewood I let go of all preconceptions, worries, and constraints—including where the story was supposed to end—and just fucking wrote. I wrote like a beast. Between March and November I wrote 130,00 words, saw the perfect stopping place, and wrote -END-

The book covers four years. Those years are eventful: birth, death, marriage, grief, famine, joy, destruction, contentment, belief, betrayal, two full-fledged wars (or maybe three, depending how you’re counting), love, sex, resentment, surprise, wandering, homecoming, and three—count them, 3—sets of regime change. Trust me when I tell you: a lot happens. And I had the best—the fucking best—time writing it! Right now those events take 39 chapters, 1342 pages, and 285,531 words. In the rewrite the manuscript might grow, it might shrink, but either way it’s going to be a big book.

I’ll start the rewrite in a couple of weeks. As I rewrite I’ll share thoughts, and research, and maps—oh, lots and lots of maps; maps are key—both here and on Gemæcce, my research blog. Until then: time off, and lots and lots of rounds of Brandy Brambles in honour of Hild’s Feast Day—which in the Catholic calendar is today (17 November), in some parts of the Anglican Communion tomorrow (18 November), and in the Church of England the day after that (19 November). Hey, more drinks for me.

Meanwhile, I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU TO READ THIS!!

Kitten report #16: 18 months old

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What are you looking at? Charlie and George at 18 months old

Today the kitties are exactly a year and half old. They’ve changed quite a bit since we got them last August—bigger, obviously (compare this photo of them on their kitty condo to an earlier one), but also beginning to become grown cats, by which I mean they sleep a lot more and spend more time on their own pursuits (often literally). They spend a lot of time together. Outside they hunt together sometimes. Indoors after dark they often play, and sleep, and fight together—Charlie usually starts it—but during the day they prefer to move around the house separately. George will sit near me but not on me; Charlie wants to be on me, though when I’m working he’ll mostly settle for being put in his bed on my desk. They still both love playing Feather, and Foil Ball, so I keep a stack of crumpled gold chocolate wrappers next to my desk and just toss one when they get irritating. But mostly they are wholly involved in each other, and in their individual presences out in the world.

And they are out in the world a lot. You will remember the trials and tribulations we went through with the cat door, and lock, and portcullis. Well, we’ve been through another couple of rounds. George began to stay out later and later, getting really good at sneaking in quietly for food, then sneaking out again before we could lock the kitty door. So we decided it was time swap to a four-way lock mechanism—where you can set it to open both ways; closed both way; open only for going out, and open only for coming in.

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Four-way cat door locking mechanism

That way we could set the lock to 3 (inwards only) mid-afternoon and any time George sneaked in for a snack, whap, he would not get out again. Then when they were both in we’d switch it to 4 (fully locked). One problem—the mechanism is bulky, which meant the portcullis had to be dismantled. We didn’t worry, though, because we thought even our Einstein Houdini Ferociraptors wouldn’t be able to figure out how to turn the lock anticlockwise, to 1 (fully open) and escape.

Oh ha! Ha ha ha!

It took Charlie about three minutes to figure it out—he worked out that if I set it 4 (all-closed) then he could just lean on it and push it round clockwise to all-open. So we had to build a new portcullis. But that wasn’t hard. So now we’ve managed to establish an indoor-outdoor rhythm: we unlock their door at 9:00 am, and we set the lock to enter-only around 4:00 pm. They are now always both home well before 5:00 pm. They are throughly adjusted to this—to the degree that George doesn’t even try to go out anymore past mid-afternoon. He’ll give one pro forma yowl, then go eat his bodyweight in cat food, then curl up (on something green) and go to sleep. Charlie, though, well, not always. Every now and again he’ll just get mad at the restrictions and just run from window to window to door to kitty door, chirring and meeping and desperate to get out. If neither Kelley nor I know where Charlie is at any given moment, nine times out of ten he’s on a windowsill somewhere, yearning, threatening local wildlife, and plotting revenge.

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Charlie prepares to knock every single file folder off my desk

They sincerely disliked us for ten days in early September when wildfire smoke turned the outdoor air quality here in Seattle to unhealthy then very unhealthy then flashing-red hazardous. We let them out the first morning when the air was merely moderately bad—and even so you can see how yellow the light is.

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Everything’s yellow

But then it got really bad. There were a couple of days when day seemed like night in our living room.

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Charlie on the back of a chair in the living room at 10:58 am

The cats did not understand, and were very, very unhappy. There again, so were we. The whole family spent a lot of time watching TV. It turns out they’re both fans of speculative TV—and dislike realism quite a bit, unless it’s about big cats killing big game. Here they are watching The Old Guard, and Charlie is quite taken with this notion of being killed, then just getting up again. It’s hard to say whether here he’s having visions of having to catch only one shrew that he can kill over and over again, or if he’s figuring out that, hey, he’s a cat: he can live forever, like NINE TIMES!

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Hey, George, wake up George! I’m gonna live forever—like NINE TIMES!

George likes Firefly, particularly Wash—whereas Charlie is more of a Jane fan.

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George is a fan of Wash

They are both mystified by Lucifer, particularly when he sprouts wings, but George likes him; Charlie prefers Maze.

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Is he a bird or a boy? No idea; let’s eat him and see.

By the time we could let them out again, summer was over, and fall was well on the way to winter—Seattle’s five-month rainy season—so now it’s cold and wet outside all the time. As a result, they’ve really changed their habits. We haven’t had a dismembered vole or shrew to deal with for nearly a month—an abrupt change to finding three livers and a tail in a single day. Perhaps it’s just that they’re eating them outside but I suspect not because they are eating a truly astounding amount of food.

They are both still growing—that kitty condo is now ridiculously too small for them; they love it anyway—but much more slowly. I suspect they’re within a whisker of their final size. George is bigger; he always will be. Here’s a photo taken a few months ago, with a Kindle for scale. He’s bigger now.

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Kitten with Kindle (for scale) on a green blanket

They’ve developed habits. George, for example, will never come snuggle up during the day. If it’s daytime he’ll find a place to sit near me—usually his favourite ratty green blanket that we’ve had to make an almost permanent feature of the family room sofa (sigh).

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George likes green

In the evening, he’ll settle in front of the fire—

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George by the fire—on a green carpet (he really likes green)

—while Kelley and I have our wine or cocktails and Charlie plunks himself onto Kelley’s lap. Or steals her chair when she gets up to get us a refill.

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Charlie likes red

But at night, George will climb onto my lap in bed while I read—again, onto a green blanket—and head bump, then knead and purr luxuriously, then slowly fall asleep. I not a fan of the blanket, so as soon as he wakes up, yawns, and wanders off for his second supper I take the blanket off. When he comes back he does a double-take (every time) at being faced with a (to him) unfriendly duvet (even though it’s green) then huffs his way to join Charlie bracketing Kelley’s legs on the blue blanket.

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Guarding the legs

While George is still very cautious of people who aren’t me or Kelley, Charlie is utterly promiscuous—he will settle on anyone, anytime. As Seattle enters its rainy season he’s been helping me a lot with my work.

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Charlie helps with MENEWOOD*

Both of them have had their first wounds. George got bitten on the base of his tail a few months ago—by something small, judging by the spacing of the bite marks and how shallow they were—but there was no infection. He cleaned the bite so assiduously that half the hair on the base of his tail fell out, and it’s still growing back in. Charlie wasn’t so lucky. Three weeks ago he got chomped by something just above the dew claw on his right foreleg. We knew something had happened, but we couldn’t find a break or anything, and he seemed to get better, but then he started to limp and the paw swelled: the wound had abscessed. Off to the vet. Shaving draining, antibiotics, and a kitty who felt very sorry for himself for a couple of days and wanted cuddles every minute of every day, and never missed an opporunity to show his shaved patch.

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Wounded warrior wants a cuddle

They have been an immeasurable comfort to me during a recent MS relapse and the horrors of the American political landscape. Here’s George beaming love and comfort.

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George sends love and comfort to all those who need it

And they both offered a moment of silence for Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

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Respect for RBG

And a few days after the election they seemed thankful for new possibilities.

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A new hope

But mostly they’re just learning to be cats, and trying to learn to make space for others, one mum at a time.

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Waiting for Mommo

Mostly, though, like all of us I think they’re just biding time until spring. Instead of vaccines and new administration, though, they looking forward to pulling up flowers, chasing butterflies, and pulling the heads off anything they can catch—perhaps a few slow-moving White House escapees. Meanwhile, you can enjoy many, many earlier adventures—including photos and video—in previous Kitten Reports.

*News about that next week

Election Day Cocktail: Brandy Bramble

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We invented this so it doesn’t have a name, but let’s call it a Brandy Bramble. Except I prefer to make it with Armagnac. Except Armagnac is more expensive than brandy—especially when you drink it in the kind of quantities I’ve felt the need to since spring, what with the global pandemic, health crap (family with COVID, friends with COVID, family with cancer, friends with cancer, and, of course, a perfectly timed pseudo-relapse of my own MS), apocalyptic wildfires, civil unrest and curfews, emergency vet visits*, and—O Joy of Joys!—the election. So sometimes, yes, it’s a Brandy Bramble.

What’s in it? Well, lots of fucking alcohol. The best taste comes from brown, rich-and-fumey stuff—Armagnac, Cognac, or—if you’re a fan of grain alcohol—bourbon. Things like gin and vodka are okay, but lack that autumnal warmth I’m after. So I go with grapey goodness and use Armagnac when I’m feeling flush and Cognac when less so. Part of the delicious autumnalness comes from the berry liquers: St Germain, which is elderberry (yeah, okay, it’s elderflower, not berry, but it’s what we first used and it turns out the flowers add a delicate aroma that berries don’t) and crême de cassis, made from blackcurrants. (At some point I’d like to experiment with blackberry liqueur.) These liqueurs are sweet, so you don’t need much, but they add a lovely colour and, as I say, a kind of sit-by-the-fire-while-the-leaves-fall taste that is very comforting. But you need something to cut the sweetness a bit, and put a bit of wake-up on your tongue, so a squeeze of citrus is good. I don’t like lemon very much, so I use lime—but I’m guessing most people would find lemon more convenient, not to mention cheaper, and a sharper contrast.

In addition to the alcohol, you’ll need a shot glass for measuring, a lime/lemon squeezer, lots of big ice cubes, a cocktail shaker, and two glasses. We use 8 oz lowball glasses which end up being about the right size, especially if, like Kelley, you prefer more ice.

To serve 2

Fill cocktail shaker with ice.

Add:

– 5 shots Armagnac (or brandy—or, if you really must, bourbon)

– 2/3 shot elderflower liqueur

– 3/4 shot creme de cassis

– juice of one lime (more if you prefer)

Shake. For a long time.

Take four ice cubes from the shaker and drop two in each glass.

Strain cocktail over the ice cubes, dividing evenly between the two glass.

Sip slowly. Unless you’re watching election returns, in which case gulp the fucking thing and immediately make another.

These are deceptively strong drinks, though, so take care. We usually drink just one. But the election is a special case. All bets are off tonight.

See you on the other side.

* I’m fine, the cats are fine, and I’ll write about all that in a few days.

Handheld Book Club—Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting, Tues. 6 Oct 11:30 -12:30 PST

Are you a fan of Vonda McIntyre’s science fiction? Or want to know why so many people are? Then please join me, Una McCormack, and Kate Macdonald on Tuesday to talk about Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting.

The Exile Waiting was the first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, published in 1975. It introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake: a post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet’s resources, and are strangling the city’s economy by their decadence.

Mischa is a thirteen-year old sneak thief, struggling to support her drug-addict elder brother Chris, and their predatory uncle who uses their telepathic link with their captive younger sister Gemmi to control them. The alien pseudosibs Subone and Subtwo have come to Earth to take over Center’s resources. Subone is attracted by the decadent living on offer and begins to unlink from his sibling’s conditioning. Subtwo has fallen unexpectedly in love with a slave.

When Mischa defends Chris from Subone’s malice, Subtwo hunts her beneath Center’s foundations, and discovers how terrible Center’s cruelty has been to its inhabitants with genetically distorted bodies and minds. They have to rescue them and leave, but how?

This is the new edition of Vonda’s first novel, and includes a wonderful Afterword by Una, and the first reprint of the original story, “Cages,” originally published in Quark 4, in which she first created the pseudosibs and their origins.

Vonda’s best-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. But The Exile Waiting was her first, and you can see so many of her themes and motifs emerge here. It’s going to be a wonderful hour of conversation—and a great opportunity to ask questions, whether about the publication process (Kate is the publisher), the novel (Una is an academic, a fan, and—like Vonda—a writer of Star Trek novels) or Vonda herself and her other work (I was her friend and colleague, and both Una and Kate are very well-versed in her work).

All three of us admire Vonda as a person, member of the SF community, and writer. We would dearly love to share that admiration with you. So please join us on Zoom on Tuesday (11:30 – 12:30 Pacific/14:30 – 15:30 Eastern/19:30 – 20:30 UK). Book your Eventbrite ticket (£3 + VAT) here.

Date And Time

Tues, 6 October 2020

11:30 – 12:30 PDT

Tickets

About this Event

Una McCormack and Nicola Griffith talk about Vonda N McIntyre’s great science fiction novel The Exile Waiting from 1975, republished by Handheld Press in 2019. Una wrote the introduction for this new edition, and Nicola wrote a heartfelt endorsement. Una’s new Star Trek novel will be published in November, The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway, so they’ll be talking about writing for Star Trek too. Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press will moderate the conversation. All attendees will receive a special code giving a discount on The Exile Waiting from the Handheld shop.

About Vonda

Vonda N McIntyre’s most well-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. She was a biologist by training, and the author of several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and many short stories. Her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun was filmed in 2013 as The King’s Daughter. She died in 2019. More at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, or Wikipedia, or her website.

Flowers, cats, birds and bees [photos, video]

I usually do a blog post at the beginning of summer talking about the herbs and flowers I’ve put in the containers on the two decks. This year I didn’t because the choice at local nurseries and big box stores was abysmal, even downright weird, and to start with my pots and boxes looked pretty pitiful. Then I forgot about posting. Then I got busy. But, hey, I finally got around to taking some pictures—though sadly I’ve now forgotten the names of everything we ended up sticking in pots so it won’t be a very dense-with-detail post.

We looked at so many different flowers, and so many of them were in a poor state, that in the end our selection was more of an assortment than a deliberate plan, so I just experimented. And by ‘we’ here I mean me and our handywoman, Sue (who helped fix our Einstein Houdini Ferociraptor problem). i made lists and pointed and said, I want something big and red there, and some small blue things with yellow and pink there, and some trailing stuff here, and she planted them and hefted the pots about because I can’t do that. So when I say I’m not a gardener, I really mean it. Kelley’s input was: Put all the herbs on the kitchen deck this time, please. And this year we could do that, because this year we finally got around to trimming the trees overhanging the deck at the side and so finally had enough sunshine for herbs to thrive.

So, anyway, here are an assortment of pictures, some with cats, and two videos of hummingbirds, one for each deck. One is of a hummer dogfight—if you turn the sound up you’d swear they’re unsing light sabres. In the other, the hummingbird is working itself half to death on the Flaming Lips salvia, even destroying one of the blooms in frustration while a bee works her way around the furious bird.

We’ll start with the kitchen deck because that’s where I spend most of my time. Here’s what it looked like in early June just as we’d got started.

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Charlie guarding me from the jasmine, or maybe the jasmine from me

That big blue pot contains the jasmine we’ve had for four years now, and some fuchsia and a vine thing that all overwintered. Next to that is a pot of sage and marjoram, and above that the coir basket with the saliva that overwintered, plus new marigolds and some tiny blue flowers whose name I always forget, or perhaps never knew in the first place.

Here’s what that looks like now.

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Everything’s loving the sun

Everything’s flowering—the jasmine, fuchsia, marigolds, petunia, cosmos (I think but could be wildly wrong) and even, sadly, the marjoram—which I neglected to tell Kelley was there, so she hasn’t been picking it for cooking, so it just kept growing. And I just liked the tiny little pale mauve flowers so wasn’t much concerned. We have some geranium in there too somewhere. I think. And maybe a few nasturtiums.

There a clay pot balanced behind the salvia basket, with rosemary and more marigolds. Herbs in the coir baskets include more sage, parsley (lots of parsley—we use it it to make soup and salad dressing), oregano, thyme, basil (which Kelley enjoys on cheesy tomatoey things that I can’t eat; I prefer it in the tofu dressing we’ve been making for 25 years but sometimes forget exists until we rediscover it), chives (not doing well this year, I don’t know why), and mint (very handy for cocktails).

And here’s a photo of a bit further back on the deck.

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Lavender and yellow flowers in a hanging basket

The crows love to come perch on that hanging basket support every morning—before we let the cats out—to wait for their food, which we put on a white plate on that railing. When the cats are out Charlie often sits near the (empty) plate hoping for a crow to have a brain cramp and come back just one more time. George, meanwhile, is in the ravine hunting.

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Waiting for Crowzo

And further back from that you can see a pot of fuchsia, the latest parsley we haven’t yet potted (seriously, we eat a lot of parsley), and past that another coir basket of fuchsia—Kelley loves that stuff—and lovely forget-me-not-like-things plus more of that brighter blue flower I can never remember the name of.

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More parsley, more fuchsia, forget-me-nots (?) and a watering can

The kitchen deck is where all the wildlife action is: hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, crows (the towhees and chickadees and tits stay away now, sigh—the robins do too, but I’m happy about that). The hummingbirds are addicted to the Flaming Lips salvia.

Hummingbirds also really enjoy the back deck salvia, but even more they like those gigantic purple salvia spears and what might be veronica. If you turn the sound up you’ll hear this pair engaging in a dogfight over the flowers armed with invisible light sabres.

The back deck is where I have no clue what we’ve got planted, except for the stuff that overwintered from last year. You can see those humble beginnings here, with some of the new stuff—two sets of petunia, one pink, one red, and a set of marigold—still in their little seed-start six-packs waiting to be potted.

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The overwinters (in big-girl pots) the new arrivals (in little plastic containers)

The things that overwintered include, starting in that corner pot and moving clockwise, the humble-looking pile of pale green leaves, that will soon turn into the huge purple hummingbird attractors, and those little shocking pink flowers look like a cross between miniature petunias and tidy impatiens but are neither. The only thing I know about them, or thought I know about them, is that they’re annuals, not meant to overwinter. So—not a gardener, remember. To the right of that is that sword-like palm thing and the little white flowers, both nameless. To the right of that, on the deck, is more of that delicious-to-hummers Flaming Lips salvia. And below that, again on the deck, the sweet bay that only just survived plus more of that vine thing that grows in the big blue jasmine pot on the kitchen deck.

Not shown are the motley collection of stuff that might include bee balm, cone flowers, cosmos and geranium.  Here’s what the pots look like a month later.

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How it looks a month later

Here’s a close-up of the big pot with sweetbay now being overpowered by flowers.

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Red and orange for the win—and there’s sweet bay in their somewhere

We also have a few other pots on the other side with things like lavender, veronica, marigolds, petunias, big red salvia and more. The petunias in one pot are the loveliest soft and dusty mauve.

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Purple petunias pale to mauve

But they seem to be temperamental things, also prone to being munched on. So here’s a photo of the kitties one early morning in the first half of August that gives you a pretty good idea of how things look now (all those petunias are gone).

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Morning with cats—this is the most  you’ll see of George outside because he prefers to be hidden under things just waiting to pounce

The weather this year has been wonderful for flowers: bright, sunny, not too dry, not too hot. These two decks with their flowers are what have made this pandemic isolation bearable for me. I spend an hour on the kitchen deck after lunch with a cup of tea, some chocolate, and a book. In the evening, Kelley and I sit in the slanting light with wine, and sometimes something on the grill, talking about our day, smelling the flowers, listening to the birds. It’s all made more precious by the knowledge that in two months all the glorious colour will be gone and we’ll be heading into the grey cold of winter. All the more reason to enjoy it now.

 

 

Slow River is 25

“Slow River now demonstrates that Griffith is the major new voice in the field… In her depiction of a woman struggling for control of her life, Griffith has fashioned a paean to the human spirit, engaging both the mind and heart. It’s fashionable to say such books transcend the genre, as if quality had no place in science fiction. Rather, I think Slow River elevates the genre, joining a select few books that shine as beacons of excellence.” — Seattle Times 

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Covers of English language editions of Slow River. Left to right: current US cover, current UK ebook, original US cover, current UK print edition, original UK edition

Slow River is 25 years old! Actually, the anniversary was earlier this summer, but a 25-year old novel has learnt to be patient and so won’t mind that I’m a little late.

SR was my second novel, but it could have been my first. I wrote the first couple of pages in 1991 when Malcolm Edwards, then editorial director of HarperCollins, asked me if I was working on a novel. I said Why yes I am! (I lied—you can read the whole story here) and quickly wrote a couple of pages of two different novels I’d been thinking about, one set in the far future and one in the near future. He wanted to read both. After pondering for a day or two I started the far-future other-planet one, which became Ammonite. So I didn’t get to the idea that became Slow River until 1993. In fact, I’d just started it when I was at the Lambda literary Awards banquet, sitting next to the Ballantine/Del Rey VP of Sales, Owen (whose last name I’m sorry to report I have forgotten). I won the award for Ammonite, and Owen asked me when Del Rey could have the sequel. I said, ‘Oh, I’m not writing a sequel.’ He said, with a smile, ‘You misunderstand me. I didn’t ask if, I asked when: we have the option on your next novel. And I want a sequel.’ And I smiled back and said, ‘Perhaps you misunderstood me: I’m not writing one.’ He was not happy but I didn’t particularly care.

So where did Slow River comes from? The intersection of two different experiences, both of which changed my perceptions of myself and my place in the world. I wrote a whole essay about it, Writing Slow River. In that essay I also describe why at first I had such a hard time writing the novel and how I came up with the narrative structure that solved my problems.

I wrote the first ten thousand words twice and threw them away. Then wrote the first thirty-five thousand and stared at it, and despaired. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t working at all. The narrative had become hopelessly muddled with flashbacks piggybacking on flashbacks, and dizzily escalating dream and nightmare sequences. Emotionally it was a mess. Each time I sat down to work I felt queasy. The more I tried to consciously wrestle the book into shape, the worse everything got. It wasn’t until I’d given up—or thought I’d given up—that I found the solution.

Kelley came home from work one night and found me sitting in a heap on the living room floor.

“How did your work go today?” she asked.

“It’s crap. I’m crap. I can’t write. I’ve given up. I’ll have to find a job.”

I meant every word; my life, as I understood it, was over. Once Kelley saw that I was utterly serious, that I could not be consoled, she disappeared into the kitchen and after a long moment re-emerged with two frosty Dos Equis.[1]

“Okay,” she said. I looked up. She held out a beer. “This is a magic beer. When you reach the bottom of the bottle everything will be better. You’ll find out how tomorrow.”

I stared.

“Trust me,” she said. “Just drink the beer. It’s magic.”

I drank the beer. About one swallow from the end, I felt a stray thought break my brain surface and arrow back into my subconscious. I trusted the magic, though, and didn’t pursue it. In the middle of the night I woke up thinking, “Brazzaville Beach!” (Brazzaville Beach is William Boyd’s 1990 novel set in the Congo and written from two different points-of-view—both from the same character, one in first and one in third person.) And the solution lay there, whole and perfect, in my mind. The next day I deleted those thirty-five thousand words and began again.

Instead of two points-of-view I used three, though all were Lore’s. I used first person past tense for the narrative present (A); third person past tense for the immediate narrative past (B); and third person present tense for her childhood (C).

Present tense is the language of dreams, of dissociation and dislocation. It is malleable, the tense of events to be reviewed and interpreted later. It seemed suitable for a childhood that, in comparison to Lore’s present situation, was almost a fairytale—at least on the surface. Let’s call it layer C. Past tense, on the other hand, is much more concrete: this happened. The events described are not open to interpretation—just right for layer B, Lore’s immediate past. I wrote this section in third person because she is looking at it from a little distance; not the same distance as her childhood but no longer quite who she is in the narrative present. The main layer of the novel, though, A—the one with which we begin and end—is in first person. This is the mature Lore, the one who is working out how her childhood, her immediate past, and her present, fit together. This is the voice that decides, the one who chooses, the one with agency.

Slow River is a very deliberately layered book because that is how I have come to view the world. Details of Lore’s character are lacquered one on top of the other, each revelation seeping through to stain the next, each informing the whole. Layering forms not only the narrative structure, but also the predominant image of the novel. Lore knows the different strata of a bioremediation plant because she has, literally, been different people. Lore has been rich and spoiled. She has been a thief and a prostitute. She has been a kidnap victim. She has been a lowly grunt in sewage processing plant. Lore learns the city from a range of perspectives and finds out that the city is like a jungle, each layer having its own predators and prey. She understands where the power in each milieu lies, and how those milieux interact.

The greatest challenge for me, technically, was to layer these narratives in such a way that they reinforced each other emotionally, while also situating the reader, making sure they always knew what part of Lore’s life they were in, emotionally, timeline-wise, and geographically. To help with that I built a formal pattern that I knew a reader’s subconscious would recognise: a recurring ABA C ABA C ABA… The readers’ brain, I reasoned, would learn to expect various time and perspective shifts, and relax.

I wrote each viewpoint in chronological order. I don’t remember how long it took me to actually write. Not long, I suspect. I was moving through an ecstatic dream. Then I printed it and chopped everything up (literally—when it comes to think kind of work physical paper works better for me than screens), spreading it out all over the living room, dining room and hall floors, then splicing it all back together. Undoing. Redoing. That took two solid weeks of twelve hour days accompanied by curses at playful cats and petulant glares at Kelley when she told me it was time to eat. (And one particularly horrible day when she flung open the front door, announced, “Honey, I’m home!” and set a whirlwind loose on my carefully arranged piles of paper, destroying all the work I’d done so far.) But eventually I had it all arranged to my satisfaction: emotional chords and plot lines harmonised, character development and reader movement through the book followed pleasing peaks and troughs.

I printed the final draft. Gave it to Kelley. She read it, burst into tears, and told me it was brilliant. I beamed and told her she gave good beer. “Oh, god,” she said, “I was so scared that day, I didn’t know what to do, I’d never seen you like that before. The magic beer thing was sheer desperation.”

Many critics of course did not recognise the structural schema (see, for example, the New York Times review) which surprised me because I’d worked so hard to make it clear. But I shrugged because, eh, you can’t win them all.

One problem I did anticipate and wrote a pre-emptive Author’s Note to address:

There is a disturbing tendency among readers—particularly critics—to assume that any woman who writes about abuse, no matter how peripherally, must be speaking from her own experience. This is, in Joanna Russ’s terms a denial of the writer’s imagination.

Should anyone be tempted to assume otherwise, let me be explicit: Slow River is fiction, not autobiography. I made it up.

Predictably, it made little difference—lots of people still assumed I was writing about my life. (Just as they made that assumption about So Lucky.) Again, I shrugged: you can’t please everyone and if you try you’ll drive yourself to despair. Also, it just didn’t matter: enough people liked the book that it won awards (Lambda Literary, Nebula, Spectrum) and was nominated for others (Seiun). It’s been translated into many languages, two editions, and many reprints. I still get royalty cheques twice a year.

Right after I finished the draft of Slow River I wrote a fantasy novella, ‘Yaguara,’ which might at first seem to bear no resemblance to the novel—but in reality was another perspective on the whole notion of layers, which can apply to cities, to ecosystems, to meaning, to class and privilege… So many things.

And as a result of recognising those similarities I wrote another essay, ‘Layered Cities,’ which I’ll revise (I cannibalised some of it for ‘Writing Slow River’) and post here some day. But today is not that day.

And as a result of that, and of the critical takes on Slow River, I also wrote a very short polemical piece about the gendered nature of Hard vs Soft Science Fiction, Hard Takes Soft, Still.

So you can see, Slow River forms a large part of my personal and professional career in SF. I’m very fond of the book. It was a tough one to write but I just reread some of it for this post and I think it holds up, so I’m happy. If you’d like to read a bit for free, here are the first two chapters. My one as-yet-unfulfilled hope for the novel is to turn it into an audiobook. Some day I’ll get to that. Meanwhile, I’ve found this old recording of me reading a bit from near the beginning.[2]

Enjoy!

https://nicolagriffith.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/slowriver.mp3

[1] Now I know that this despair is just part of my writing process for about half my novels: Slow River and Stay and Always. Not for Ammonite or The Blue Place or Hild or So Lucky. It doesn’t seem to happen with stories, and it didn’t with my memoir. Why? No idea.

[2] It sounds weirdly high-pitched and fast for me. I can’t remember when I recorded it, or what hardware or software I used, so it could be that in some conversion or other it got pitch-shifted, or perhaps it just that I was just much younger and more energetic when I read it.

Kitten Report #15: Einstein Houdini Ferociraptors

The cats have learnt to team up for hunting and escaper cats have been going outside. I have many photos of Charlie out there—he does love to pose. This is his resting demon face.

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Resting Demon Face

George I tend to only see when he comes in and goes to sleep.

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What the shrews never see…

Our cats are too smart for their own good—well, certainly too smart for our good. Individually they’re very different and can manage different things. Lately, though, they’re learnt to team up, and together they are unstoppable. If you’ve seen the original Jurassic Park you will no doubt remember the pair of ferocious, wicked smart velociraptors that hunted the children as a coordinated pair. Charlie and George have started to do that team-hunting. They’ve been practising on the crows, which fortunately are older and wiser than they are; also, they can fly. But watching our wee ferociraptors, I am very, very grateful that I outweigh them by a factor of 10. Bear this in mind as I tell you the story of the cat door.

As you recall from the last Kitten Report, Charlie and George had their first venture outdoors. We kept them in for a while so we could all recover—we could do that with no worries because we’d blocked off the old cat door years ago when our last cat, Zack, died. But they had a taste for the outdoors now and they were determined to get out there again. and when Charlie fixes his will on something, it happens. So we bought a new cat door: the usual kind with a magnetic seal and a sliding lock.

The problem was, it was an extremely strong magnet, and Charlie (who is small) couldn’t quite manage it. We disassembled the door, took a look, and thought, Well, it should be easy enough to pop that top magnet out. Wrong. It was glued in, so in the end we had to break a chunk off the door. This meant a) there was now a hole in it, b) without the magnet it flapped crazily in the wind, and c) we could no longer lock it. But, Hey, we thought. That’s okay. Until the new door arrives we’ll just prop something in front of it when it’s time to close up shop.

So when it was time for them to be in for the night, we blocked the door with the heavy black mat covered in nonslip rubbery stuff that I usually carry in my wheelchair backpack as a portable tray. It’s heavy duty and difficult to slide aside. Then we drew the heavy velvet curtain over that.

Five minutes later we heard the plap of the mat going down and the creak-flap of a kitty busting out.

Fortunately he (Charlie) hadn’t gone far so we got him back in and propped a big heavy painting in front of it, with the heavy threshold mat up against that. Ha! I thought. Figure that out!

Thump. Crash. Creak-flap. Out.

So then we propped the big painting, slid the threshold mat, and put a big dining chair in front of that.

They tried a few times but couldn’t manage it, so we went to bed and were just settling down when Skreeeek. Thump. Crash. Creak-flap. Out.

Now we were getting thoroughly pissed off. So next we propped the big painting, slid the threshold mat, and then wheeled my heavy wheelchair hard against the painting and put the brakes on. We went to bed. THEY DID NOT FIGURE IT OUT! Yodel of triumph!!

A week of happiness followed: cats allowed out after breakfast, in-and-out until 5 pm, then locked up safe for the night; bliss. Bliss for us, anyway. the small mammal population began to suffer: George likes shrews; Charlie prefers voles: he brought home three on Monday afternoon. Weirdly, neither seem that interested in the birds, or perhaps they’re just working their way up to that. They’ve been eying the bunnies that keep our lawns cropped (and the north garden very well fertilised, sigh) but so far haven’t caught one—or maybe they just couldn’t get it through the kitty door.

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George wuz here

However, during the day the broken door with the hole it that flapped with every breath of wind was driving us crazy.

So we bought a new door. I figured out how to degauss the magnet—I weakened it enough that Charlie could push through it okay—and more to the point, it left the lock intact. So one night, instead of the picture, mat, wheelchair routine we simply…locked the door! And went to bed.

At three o’clock we woke up to find no cats on the bed and the house eerily quiet. We staggered into the living area and found they were outside taunting the coyotes (which, thank god, can’t climb onto the roof). We got them inside—eventually—locked the door, then sat and watched. George strolled over and pushed the lock open with his paw. We scooped him up and stuffed him in the bedroom before he could get through the door. Then we watched Charlie—who trotted over and opened the lock with his teeth. So now we were back to the painting and the wheelchair.

This was getting seriously old, because when the cats were safely locked in the house, I was too: I couldn’t use the wheelchair.

So I worked out how to build a physical block: a frame around the kitty door, with a door-sized piece of plywood that slides in, acting as a portcullis—a physical barrier. We couldn’t even need a lock. Then our handywoman, Sue—appropriately masked, gloved, and social-distanced, of course—built and installed it for us.

We slid the thing down: yay! High fives. Settle down with a beer, grinning, because we would not have to worry about the cats for the rest of the night. 5 mins later? George figured out how to push the portcullis up an inch with his nose, enough to get is head under it, and then flick it all the way up and zip out before the portcullis fell. Well, I thought. That’s an easy fix: lock the door, then drop the portcullis. Ha! I thought. Figure *that* out!

I forgot ferociraptor mode. Charlie watched George nose up the portcullis, then zipped in and unlocked the door with his teeth, and voilá! Team Houdini! And we were back to the painting and wheelchair. Oh, now it was on!

If cats with brains the size of a walnut can figure out how to escape, surely a woman with a fucking PhD can figure how to lock them up without locking herself up. Sue suggested a weird combo of pegs and clips and carabiners that would have made the door look like a Heath Robinson bank vault but would stop George lifting it with his nose. I was convinced there had to be a simpler, more elegant way to do it. So I looked at Sue’s collection of shims and bits of wood and tape and screws, and pointed out we could use double-sided tape to build a bottom l/edge to the portcullis frame without having to dismantle everything. And with a bottom edge, George wouldn’t be able to get is nose under it. He would have to figure out how to stand on three legs, half turn upside down so he could hook a claw into and *under* the

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Not Alcatraz but…

It’s now been three days and they haven’t yet figured it out. I dance in victory! (With my fingers crossed…)

Meanwhile, they’ve decided on another approach. We’re still mostly managing to get them inside by 5pm because any later than that and they turn into totally feral beasts and vanish into the wilds of the ravine—and we don’t see them until the wee hours while they play chicken with coyotes and barred owls and mysterious pools of sticky stinking stuff. Yesterday, though, was a lovely hot day here in Seattle, so in the early evening Kelley and I went outside on the back deck to enjoy a bottle of rosé and conversation in the delicious scent of our flowers and vines. The cats, of course, stayed inside. They. Did. Not. Like. That.

Charlie’s forte is social engineering, so that’s what he turned to: the repeated whang! whang! whang! of throwing himself at the portcullised door with a relentlessness designed to weaken our will to live, admit we’re lesser beings, and obey: that is, open the fucking door. George, however, decided that engineering engineering was the way to go. First, he stood on his hind legs and moved parallel to the slider by inching his front paws along the middle ledge, probing for structural weakness. As he inched along he gave us the evil eye (his head was above the divider: he’s a very tall cat) and made it plain he did not appreciate us taking our ease in *his* garden while *he* was stuck inside. Then he sat down, wrapped his tail around his toes, and settled in to think. It’s fascinating—you can practically see the gears turning. He looked at the door. He looked at us on the other side of the door. He looked at the door handle. He thought some more. When we went out to the deck, we had mysteriously been able to make the wall slide to one side by moving something near the handle, that is, the lever that locks and unlocks the slider. In the open position, the top of that lever is 42″ above the floor; I was not worried—until he went back to the door, stood on his hind legs, and stretched up. And up. And up some more and tugged on the lever. Result? He pulled it down—and locked us out. Well, fuck.

It’s a slider; it doesn’t use a key; we were not getting back in that way. The cats sat there looking smug: Now you know how it feels! And I could tell George was also thinking: If I can work out how to lock it, I’ll figure out how to unlock it one day when you’re not around and then it won’t matter about your locking cat door and your portcullis. It’s a very heavy slider; I sometimes find it difficult to open. Even if they both grow a bit ore, and even if they go ferociraptor on it, I’m sure they won’t manage it. Or pretty sure. So I’m not worried. What does worry me, though, is being trapped on the back deck. The other day was fine, because kelley was there, and she could walk around to the side deck where, fortunately, we had left the slider unlocked, and get in that way, and open the back door for me. If I’d been on my own—even if I was again lucky enough to forget to lock the side door—I’d be totally screwed: I can’t do the steps down from the back deck, then the steps up to the side deck. (Charlie likes to guard me on the side deck.)

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Young deck owner

Now we’re going to have to figure out a failsafe mechanism for the locking lever, too. Probably we’ll have to replace the whole locking mechanism and get one with a key, and keep a spare in my pocket at all times.

But for today? I’m so very tired of having smart cats. They, however, are cats: they do not get tired.

 

32 Years: A Life

32 years ago today I met Kelley and fell stone in love. That love grows wider, deeper, and more richly textured every day. Along the way we have changed each other, and between us we have made a third thing into which we have put a large part of ourselves: we have made Us. There are things I will do for myself, things I will do for Kelley, and things I will do for Us. They are not always the same things.

What is Us? Us is indefinable; I will say, rather, what Us includes. It includes me, and Kelley, our families, our shared history, our shared joys and jokes and sorrows; it includes the home we have built and the disagreements we had over this painting or that carpet or those mugs. Us includes our kitties—not just Charlie and George, but all the kitties before, and all the tiny things they have killed and we’ve buried, or half-killed and we’ve dispatched for mercy’s sake. It includes our garden—the flowers we plant and tend (and neglect, and sigh over), the trees we must prune and the railings we must erect even though they are not beautiful. It includes the tidying up after every snack, so the other doesn’t walk into a messy and miserable kitchen when she needs a moment of peace; it includes remembering to put an extra beer in the fridge because we know our beloved is having an extra tough meeting this afternoon and will need it. Us includes our work—the long conversations over wine, the digging deep and bracing against disappointment when we can’t say, immediately, Brilliant, best book! but, for the sake of love, must say, Oh, it will be beautiful my beloved—only not yet, not quite yet. Us is care and kindness, but it is also ruthlessness and clarity: it is truth when necessary but not honesty as a weapon. Us includes—often—doing something inconvenient, or tedious, something we just don’t want to do. And always—yes, always—being open, being vulnerable, being willing to listen and improve. But, oh, Us is so much joy! It is glee and excitement and thrill; it is delight; it is contentment. Us is where we live. Us is the home we have built.

This is all I want to say about it today. But someone always has questions. So you can find out more starting with a brief excerpt from my memoir about the moment we met. Or read our very first collaboration, As We Mean To Go On, about how books built the bridge for us to meet on. Or just go look at 30 Years: A Love Story in Photos. I’m going to go spend the day with my sweetie, and revel in Us. May your day be as fine.