Well hello, dear Reader. I had a busy weekend–between working, a haircut, grocery shopping, some body mod, my sister’s stalker (in a minute, hang on), getting some decent bread pans (joy!) and Being Judged.

I had a lovely long leisurely lunch/dinner on Saturday after I left work, got haircut and modded, and wended my weary way home. Waited until it was dark and watched The Blair Witch Project, which was creepifying in some places but obeyed horror tropes with a fine well-trained obedience so far that the shiny new way of obeying said tropes didn’t have the punch, for me, that I’ve heard the movie had for other people. I have to say, the more interesting thing about this film is knowing how it was made, and the psychological terrorizing (lack of sleep, pursuit, strictly controlled food) of the cast that made for such a ring of verisimilitude.

Read On, If You Dare »

First, the new Watcher book–Mindhealer–is available for preorder at ImaJinn. (It’s also available as an ebook.) If you prefer to wait for Amazon etc., I’ll let you know when that goes live.

I’ve also done my weekly post on writing. It’s at Fangs, Fur, & Fey or The Midnight Hour, depending on which you prefer. This week I’m thinking about sensitivity–both its benefits and its drawbacks.

This week was a busy one. I’m averaging a lot of work per day on the YA, which is good–but it’s not as fast as I want to be going. Life keeps interfering.

Anyway, I’m ready for the weekend. On that note, here are two bits of hilarity from Cracked.com–the Ten Most Insane Crash Diets in History, and the Ten Weirdest Historical Contraceptives. I don’t think they’re particularly safe for work, as I almost fell out of my papasan with hysterical laughter while reading either. *giggle* Enjoy!

The trouble with sensitivity is that it is as much curse as cure or help. Any kind of sensitivity has trouble as its obverse.

Today has been a day of Things Going Wrong, or at least Worse Than They Could. Not for me, though, for everyone around me. I like to joke that I’m the den mother, and some days the title is incredibly apropos. Fortunately I will soon turn everything off but the writing I need to get done today, and a quick trip to the store for celery and cream (for different dishes, natch.) That will be my signal to the Universe not to drop any more problems in my lap.

Yeah. Like the Universe will listen.

I had really odd dreams last night, about someone teaching me to “blink” in and out of reality. I didn’t know how I was doing it, and someone was trying to teach me how. It always came through in a pinch (I suppose I should mention I was at kind of a Hogwarts) but I needed control. And then my parents showed up, or younger versions of them, and I started hyperventilating in my dream and hiding. From there it was straight to nightmare.

Hm. Someone will analyze that and find, no doubt, something dark and deep, especially in the figure of the faceless boy who was telling me where to hide and how to control the “blinking”. Now isn’t THAT strange. And I’ve been feeling kind of like I’m standing right next to myself all day. The local crows are making that ratcheting-throat-sound that means they’ve seen something weird/strange coming, it’s kind of their sentry call. This is interspersed with eerie quiet from all the fauna except the Little Prince, which surprises me not a bit.

Hm. A good day to you all, dear Readers. Be careful out there.

G’morning, all. I’m barely conscious but have managed to make it into work–driving without coffee is an adventure. And turning on the espresso machine once one walks in the door and waiting twenty minutes for the damn thing to wake up was even MORE of an adventure. But I’m not complaining.

I didn’t make the Seattle author-a-thon last night; there was an accident on the I5 bridge that held up the Muffin getting home. It was very sad–I couldn’t just throw the kids in the car and go, since they were going to kendo. I REALLY REALLY WANTED to get my ms. copy of Happy Hour of the Damned signed, and to buy a copy too, since it was one of the funniest books I’d read in a long time. *sad face* I ALSO wanted to kibbitz with Richelle about some Fabulous News. Instead, I got the kids and the Muffin out the door and collapsed on my bed to read some of Kipling’s Kim, which is a slow start but starts rollicking at around Chapter Six. After a while there was a plot bunny, and I wandered back to the YA and wrote down one of my high-school fantasies, which involved me having the power to telekinetically choke people without touching them.

Hey, you can’t say you didn’t feel the same way at least ONCE in high school.

I’m knocking off between 3 and 4K a day on the YA, which is good but a little unsatisfying; I can’t type fast enough and I’m in that stage of creative endeavor where any interruption, no matter how minor, is galling. But I’d rather have THAT problem than a dry well.

So today it’s a half-day of work, heading home (where my sisters will be down for the day to coddle and cuddle the Little Prince, who will of course bask in the attention) and a trip out to cat-sit this evening; in between that, I want to get another few thousand words out of the way and set up a love triangle.

Hey, BTW, does anyone on my f-list know someone who knows Bulgarian? Just checking…

Tonight I’m hoping to make the Seattle Urban Fantasy Author-A-Thon, 7pm-9pm at the Beaverton Powells. Mark Henry and Mario Acevedo will be there, and the audience will hold such luminaries as Richelle Mead and (I think) Caitlin Kittredge. I am certain there will be heckling and much fun. My own attendance is based upon the car not making that knocking noise and the Muffin getting home from work before 6:30. Wish me luck.

Yesterday I (are you ready for this?): knocked off 4K on the young adult book, made bagels from scratch, made homemade pizza, started Mixed-Starter Bread, and cleaned. Of all those things, it was the work on the YA that made my brain feel like it was ironed out flat and squeezed dry.

I’ve been thinking lately of books I feel are sorely neglected, so I decided to list five of them. Your mileage may vary, but I love these little books I’m about to list–and should you try them, I hope you like them too.

* A New England Girlhood, Nancy Hale. I read this when I was about nine, and I loved it. It’s a slice-of-life, a woman who grew up as a New England debutante thinking about her childhood and telling what it was like to live in that world. Some childhood experiences are universal–like losing something precious, or being cruel to a tag-along and only realizing later how bad that is, or wanting to go with your parents so badly you throw a tantrum. Interspersed with this are little stories about living as an adult, and how childhood memories can be misleading or illuminating, sometimes on the same day.

* Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, Various. This is an anthology I bought once at a library sale that has some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read in it, like The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman, Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, Stephen Vincent Benet’s King of the Cats, and more–like Henry Martindale, Great Dane, or The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. It’s just one of the finest compilations I’ve ever read, and I’ve read three copies of it to pieces now.

* Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson. I read this, again, when I was about nine. (That was a good year for formative books.) Sara Louise is born first, and her twin Caroline almost dies at birth. Everyone cossets and pets Caroline, who is a musical prodigy, and Sara is left feeling ignored and unloved (at one point, her bitch of a grandmama quotes the Old Testament to her, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated). So Sara turns to making her own way. The great thing about this book is the setting, an island in Chesapeake Bay fast losing land every time there’s a storm, crab pots, the stultifying suffocation of small-town life when everyone has already decided what you are. The ending leaves a little to be desired–even when I was nine I thought that Sara Louise deserved much more than nursing and marriage–but it has the virtue of being the ending Sara chose for herself and worked toward, so it made sense.

* Psion and Catspaw , Joan Vinge. Every once in a while I get the great urge to reread these two books; nothing else will do. Xenophobia, telepathy, poverty, outsiders, the longing to belong–it’s all in here, and Cat is a hero the way Sam Spade is a hero. He’s trying to do the best he can, measuring himself by a fierce internal standard, at the mercy of forces and people he can’t control, taken advantage of, and just generally mistreated. I think Cat was the first hero I ever really wanted to marry and “take away from all this.” Ironic, no?

* Passion Play, Sean Stewart. I think Stewart’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. In particular, Passion Play, which was one of the major influences for Dante Valentine’s world, is a dystopian work that kind of mixes a less-repressive Handmaid’s Tale with Psion, structured like a medieval morality/passion play, and with a tough female protagonist that could probably arm-wrestle most male protags under the table without breaking a sweat. I like a lot of Stewart’s other work, but Passion Play is a book I wish I’d written. And that, for me, is the sincerest form of flattery. The codification and government use of psionic talents in Dante’s world gets a lot from the structure Stewart built in this one slim little volume.

There you go, five books I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years and hope other people will discover.

And now I’m off to knock off more of the YA. I am SO SO hoping I get out to Beaverton tonight! If only to squee with Richelle about some neat stuff that I can’t share with everyone just yet, and to possibly see Scockercrew. *wink*

*crosses fingers*

So yesterday was Easter and William Shatner’s 77th birthday. In honor of Easter (more precisely, in honor of chocolate) the kids got an amazing sugar high yesterday. I suppose childhood isn’t childhood without the Easter and Halloween jolts.

In honor of Shatner, however, here’s a Salute to the Women of Classic Trek, and it’s hilarious. The polls have three choices: yes, you’d hit it; no, you wouldn’t hit it; maybe, for various reasons. I remember at Orycon this last year I was on the mock trial of James T. Kirk, me and the other woman on the panel were representing a lot of angry green girls who had been loved and left. It was awesomely funny. It was marvelously tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking of something not so tongue-in-cheek, last night I went and saw 10,000 B.C. Now, going to see a horrid movie can be fun, if one realizes one is going to see a horrid movie and doesn’t expect too much. I liked the CGI, though I wish the sabertooth had shown more interest in eating someone. What an awesome plot device and CGI device, just wasted.

I rolled my eyes when I realized all the Passive Helper/Magic Dingus or Passive Evil characters were Brown People, and all the Active characters–hero, love interest, comic relief, and Big Bad Guy, were more recognizably Caucasian. And a further eye-rolling was had when it was the Great White Hunter who brought home “the seeds” so his people could start agriculture. *sigh* But the movie is okay if one overlooks glaring inaccuracy and embedded modern attitudes. There was certainly some pretty mantitty and nice spectacle in it, and let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to this movie for verisimilitude OR plot. I just wanted to see the big cat. Although the huge carnivorous emus were a great touch.

In between all that was some housecleaning (a motivated teenager is a great help to have around the house) and 2K on the young-adult book. I have a character who is wanting to make an early entrance, and making him wait is just killing him. He keeps trying to intrude on the narrative. Damn uppity characters.

So today it’s knocking off a serious chunk of the YA and getting to the character who wants to step onstage. It feels good to be creating again. Forward! Mush!

My weekly post at The Midnight Hour is up. It’s Five Things About Writing, including Jungian shadows and whips and spurs. Enjoy.

Last night the Teen and I watched Into the Wild. I’d read the book, of course, and knew the ending, so it was heart-in-my-mouth time. The film succeeded for me, I think, because I understood the parents, the protagonist, the incidental characters, and the desire to get out and away, to flee.

The movie affected the Teen very strongly, because of how he feels “about nature”, he said. And because when he was younger, he had dreams of striking off into the world just like Chris McCandless did. It has always seemed ironic to me that the youth who wants to flee the most is often the most ill-equipped for the harshness of the world. There is beauty and kindness out there, sure, and most people are decent. But there is also very real and very present danger, from people and elements AND everything else. Surviving a few hard knocks should make one a little more cautious–but sometimes, the false sense of young invincibility from surviving a few hard knocks can be oh-so-dangerous.

So the Teen and I talked about that urge to get out and go away, and I said something that apparently shook him. “Those types–the explorers–God, they’re selfish. I mean, they have the best intentions in the world, but they’re always heading off into the blue and leaving people behind them to wait and worry. And they’re so self-centred, even though they don’t mean to be.”

He was still thinking about that, and we were still discussing it, when the movie showed what eventually happened to McCandless. I knew, but the Teen didn’t, and he was very taken aback. Afterward the Teen leaned over and wanted a hug.

They get so big, but never so big they don’t need a hug every now and again.

I think both Krakauer’s book about McCandless and the movie succeed as pieces of art, one more documentary than the other. They both provoked strong feelings in me, and both helped me to understand a very human tragedy. More and more, the older I get, I think there are very few cases of true “evil.” (I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that it’s rarer than we think.) When you understand both sides of a story, of an issue, of a bloody dispute, it breaks the heart to see people blindly battering away at each other, physically or emotionally.

I also think that to be an artist is to search for understanding as a means to communicate. You cannot communicate clearly without understanding, and (again, Johnny, you’re rising in my thoughts) such understanding breeds compassion.

Ah, I’m getting maudlin. Here’s a few links I’ve enjoyed in the past few days: first, SPATS! and next, golly, they just figured out young humpback whales communicate with their mums. (Gee, go figure.) And Mark Morford’s note to China, where he points out that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out there’s bloody totalitarian repression going on in Tibet, and maybe the Olympics will blow the lid off it. (Hey, we optimists can dream, can’t we?)

Last but not least, watching Into the Wild last night made me figure out something: I want to look like Catherine Keener when I grow up. Talk about aging with grace and beauty. Damn.

But more about that later. Have a good weekend, dear Reader. Hug someone you love–and if you can’t, then hug yourself. Please.

The subject line is stolen from my f-list. I have been thinking a lot about what’s “wrong” with me. Of course, as a writer concerned with characterization, I sometimes make the mistake of thinking humans out here in the real world can fall into the neatly-analyzable characterizations one finds inside books. One doesn’t often find real people on the page because, well, real people are messy and it’s impossible to know everything about them. Understanding breeds compassion, as Johnny always used to say (usually followed up by, and compassion’s a real bitch that stops you from getting the job done…) and understanding Real Flesh And Blood People is hard.

I suppose every spring, when the plum tree in the back yard blooms, I get a little introspective. The year starts in the dead of winter for me, at Halloween, but spring is when I start thinking about how to make myself a Better Person. It’s a slow process, and each step needs to be built on the step before it. Having a clear vision of what and who one wants to be is not encouraged by our society–the television is supposed to tell you who to be, what to want.

The best couple years of my life for self-growth were the two years we lived in an apartment in Edmonds and had no television. None. At all. For two years.

Some guy called trying to sell us cable. The Muffin, in all his Japanese sangfroid, said, “We don’t even have a television. Haven’t for years.”

To which the cable salesman replied, shocked, “That’s just…that’s UN-AMERICAN!”

You can imagine the hysterical McCarthy jokes roaming around the house for weeks afterward. Have you a television, sir? Why no, and I have no sense of decency either! Heh.

So I’ve been thinking lately, as the plum tree blooms, of what’s wrong with me. My health hasn’t been the best–personal stress and overwork causing breakdowns in the body, and my habit of taking care of everyone before myself doesn’t help. The nervousness attendant whenever a book goes live or a signing happens also crashes me out for weeks. I should probably learn how to deal with all that and take a little more time for myself. I can’t take care of everyone else when my engines are running on fumes.

Then there’s my nastiness, which I pretty much keep under control. I try to balance out profound personal cynicism with redemption in my art. This is married, in true Gemini fashion, with my absolute inability sometimes to set boundaries for those I love and trust. I will literally drain myself down to transparency for someone I love–and there have been those who would use all that and more, despite the cost.

Then there’s my temper. Most of my limited stock of patience goes for the people I love. I need to be careful who I unleash the sharp edge of my tongue on. I know better than most how verbal sparring draws blood, and I need to speak softly.

The question is, which thing do I work on next? Part of living and being an adult is realizing life is a constant process of change. It is the process that matters–the process of trying to be a good human being, of refining one’s idea of what a good human being is, constantly striving.

By the time the plum tree finishes blooming I should have some sort of answer. That’s usually how it works. I’ll be able to see the fallen blossoms before they vanish into the grass forever. And then it’ll be time to dye my hair again–I hate being a blonde; I’m going to keep dyeing it until it goes gray. That can’t happen soon enough.

It’s raining, and the sun is shining. I just got up and looked out the back window. There is a rainbow, and the tree is in full bloom. It looks like a pink cloud.

One can’t ask for a better omen.

Good morning, dear Reader. Since you’re here reading, I’m going to assume you want to know what I think, even about such a ticklish subject as politics. Of course, I have never hidden my political beliefs–it’s hard to do when one is such a dyed-in-the-wool anarcho-syndicalist liberal. *removes tongue from cheek* (I HAVE actually been called a godless pinko before, but that was during a family gathering.)

If you haven’t already heard or read Obama’s recent speech on his pastor Wright and on race in America, please go do so. It is such a f!cking relief to hear a political candidate who doesn’t speak in sound bites or poll-ese. And yeah, Obama doesn’t give much in the way of specific solutions in this speech–but he is engaged in something far more difficult: saying the unspeakable so we can frame the problem. Before we can have any specific solutions AT ALL we need the problem clearly spoken to the American people. He is speaking not for corporate interests or for an entrenched machine of privilege and position, he’s been listening when people like you and me–no matter how diverse you and I are–and he is speaking to us. Both of us.

It is bloody refreshing to hear a candidate who isn’t confined to “damage control” or trying to find the magic formula for a poll number. Jeez.

You can guess who I’m voting for. In any case, dear Reader, even if you don’t agree with me, please make sure your voter registration is up to date. This is no time for anyone to refuse to vote. We the People need to speak up. We’ve been supine for too long.

Nuff said, on to the next thing. Check out Mark Morford–he’s still thinking about the “new” sins the Vatican had the gall to “announce”. Imagine, they’re saying pedophilia is a sin–after how many lawsuits clearly showing that a black cassock has trouble staying away from little boys? After how many stories of abused trust and innocence lost? The amazing thing, as Morford notes, is that none of the assembled walked up and smacked the announcer of that little piece of sanctimoniousness right in the kisser. Though the one that I think clearly shows hypocrisy is the one against accretion of excessive wealth.

This, from the Vatican, the richest corporation on earth. *sigh*

And now for something completely different: a new take on Richard the Lionheart getting into bed with a French king. God, the Internet is awesome.

Even more Internet awesomeness: recycled images on book covers here and here. (Links gacked from Smart Bitches.)

Hrm. More revisions and a galley proof still on the docket, then a short-story revise and back to actual writing. It can’t happen soon enough. No, I’m not complaining–the more work I have, the happier I am–but I really, really want to get back into creating. I need a few solid months of letting the Muse turn the fire hose outside my head.

*rolls up sleeves* Well. Back to work. Revisions don’t do themselves.

Whatever happened to telegrams? Does anyone even use telegrams anymore?

So I’m in the home stretch for RA revisions. (”Home stretch” meaning “only another two or three days of work”.)

I’m surprised by writers who don’t get that even a very “clean” edit means a lot of work. There is no manuscript so clean that you won’t have to spend days or weeks making it better. Then there’s copyedits, and final proofs–no wonder some typos get through. And considering that one may have to go through two drafts, two revisions, one copyedit, and at least one proof pass, no wonder writers sometimes have a bit of trouble remember exactly what’s in the finished draft. *sigh*

I have really, really good news about a short story or two, but I’m waiting until I can share it. Dancing with impatience, actually. As soon as I can share, I will. Loudly. And happily.

Okay. Back to the salt mines. I will definitely come in under deadline for this one. Thank God.