yuki_onna

I'm starting in on the first volume of the Prester John series today. Does that mean the deadline makes me want to cry and huddle in a corner? Yes. But I had to take time off to avoid spontaneous combustion.

Of course, here, today, in the beginning of it, I feel like I'm not big enough for this story, for the vastness of it, that I'll inevitably fuck up how beautiful it is in my head right now. I got so used to the idea that no one would ever publish this book, and now it's suddenly a real live creature. And I have no justbeast to brainstorm with. So I'm fairly miserable and feeling small and overwhelmed. But I'll get through it. It'll somehow happen. I have to have faith that it will--and that faith lasts only so long, which is why I do these marathons. Because I can only believe in myself for so long, like the King of All Cosmos.

Way back when I took 50 pages of this beast to Rio Hondo, Maureen McHugh, one of my personal heroes, said in her critique, discussing how to proceed with the rest of the book: use every trick. Meaning, every clever literary trick, anything, to get this story out, to make it understood to an audience who has never heard of Prester John. That idea was tremendously exciting to me. So now I'm thinking...what are my favorite tricks?

What are yours? What in the postmodern toolbox thrills and tweaks you? What are your least favorite?

So I want to say that my agent, Howard Morhaim, has been nothing short of a godsend to me over the 18 months I've been with him, and done wonders for my working life this year. He's massively competent and smart and I'm honored to be working with him--he's just the kind of agent you dream about having when an agent seems like a far-off grail.

While discussing Care Bears and Disney animation and their awesomeness today, I had the occasion to slide something out of my wallet to show babymonkey , something I haven't til now had a camera good enough to record for LJ. My dear friend seanan_mcguire made it for me on the BART last spring, because she is that freaking talented. Getting to know Seanan has been one of the great fairy gifts of the tour, and I carry this small thing with me, and take it out when I'm blue, and smile, thinking of her and how good my life really is.



That is, in fact, a portrait of me as a Maine Coon Care Bear Cousin. With a Palimpsest map on my chest. And a Very Fine Tail.

From everyone:

If I came with a warning label, what would it say?

It's Thursday, the storm has passed and the sun is out (and presumably the nefarious Cthuloid ocean foam which crept over the island roads last night has gone back to its foul undersea lair) and my soul quakes in anticipation of going to Augusta tomorrow. babymonkey and I attended our first island knitting group (I taught babymonkey to knit! Am not teachingfail! And I take part in the grand circle, teaching as I was taught, and feel fuzzy and connected) in a gorgeous mansion by the sea, and happily knit by her side while re-watching the first Harry Potter flick, which always puts me in mind of Christmas.

mishamish has winterized our windows with plastic sheeting--something I clearly did not have anything like the patience to do last year. I aimed the hair dryer at the plastic for two minutes and then yelled: THIS IS NOT WORKING and we had blousy plastic on one window all winter. You see, while I was born in Seattle and lived there til I was 13, my main upgrowing and expectation-building were done in California. I am, as I never wanted to be, inescapably, inevitably, a California girl. Therefore, I do not understand this Preparing for Winter, this Must Wear Socks At All Times, this Huddling for Warmth. I have learned to survive it, even embrace it, and I love the snow and ice, but part of my brain will never understand why we have to put plastic sheeting on the windows and draft blockers by the doors.

But mishamish is better than that, and the whole downstairs is done and much warmer. We might actually make it through the winter--if my decision to not drop $400 on a generator yesterday does not prove to be ill-founded and hilarious.

We ventured into town in search of non-wool yarn for her and gift-making yarn for me, and are now ensconced at Bard Coffee, waiting for justbeast to get in from Augusta. I am doing very well with Christmas shopping, and will finish up tonight, most likely. I am wearing my Ashland, Oregon shirt got on the Palimpsest tour (which, by way of update, I finally have the art auction items back from Seattle and will be getting them out to buyers soon, also am about 3/4 done with the Palimpsest Blanket of Endless Tiny Bits of Love and Yarn.)

Christmas, despite my not being Christian, is a dreaming time for me. The close of the year and all the hopes and wants and dreams of childhood in one sweet, cold month. Peppermint and chocolate and pine. I love giving gifts. I love the tree. I love Julie Andrews singing carols. I love cider and laughing and curling up.

What are you dreaming of?

I think we can all agree that the only good thing to come out of authors responding to reviews is hilarity on the interwebs. I try never to do it, because, well, it's bad etiquette and worse karma. I'd like to think I'm not actually doing that now, just musing on the relationship, and the feelings involved.

Palimpsest, of everything I've written, has probably gotten more bad reviews by volume than anything else. It's gotten great reviews, too, been listed on top ten list--but when people don't like this book, by god, they don't like it a lot. Of course, this sucks from my end. No one likes to read that something you loved and worked hard on was terrible in anyone's eye. And most of us check our Amazon page on the regular, so we hear about it, when those one-stars pop up.

And yeah, it makes me sad. Because what it ultimately means is that the gulf between what I wanted to write and what the book eventually looked like was fairly wide. And that's discouraging. Everyone has discouraging moments. I've always wanted to do a panel at a con on how to fail well, how to fail with grace and how to keep going afterward, because the fact is we all of us fail much more than we succeed. But since we're all terrified that failure might be communicative, or summoned, like the devil, by mentioning it, no one ever takes me up on that panel.

My instinct, reading those reviews, and even short story reviews like Torque Control's short story club discussion of The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, wherein several people say they didn't get it or like it, is never to get angry, though, as some authors do.

I always want to apologize. I want to say: I'm sorry. I'll do better next time. I'll work harder. I know it was allusive and mysterious, I'm writing a whole novel where all will be clear. I know it was a difficult book. I know it was upsetting and strange. I know the imagery is dense. I'm sorry it wasn't worth the difficulty to you. I will know better, in the future. I will be better, in the future.

Of course, I stifle my instinct to do that. It sounds pathetic, rather than genuine, and it is by far not my place to barge in on other people's discussions of my work. It makes everyone uncomfortable, and as someone who rags on books fairly often, I surely don't want Alice Sebold or Donna Tartt popping up in my comments.

But still, it casts a shadow in my heart. Even though I know I choose, and continue to choose, a kind of story and style that is bound to get me a lot of resistance. I make that choice knowing everything that comes with it, intimately. But I still hate seeing that choice bang against the reader wall and fall slack to the floor. Because I want to be good. I want to be better. I want to be able to transfer a book whole and unbroken from my heart onto a page. Of course, there are always people who don't like it, even your heart on a page. I don't like lots of things. It's only fair. But I still sigh, and pull a Rockbiter sad face and resolve to learn more, be more, write more, grow more, be...just better than I am right now. It's not exactly optimism, so much as grim determination.

PS. I'm not fishing for compliments, and please don't go running over to anyone's conversation with defenses of anything. EDIT: coalescent encourages folks to go over and discuss Radiant Car, though.

I have all these essays I want to write, and yet, while sitting in a warm bed waiting for the hot water to come back so I can have a shower, I find the energy for any of them is just not there. So I say fragmented things instead, by way of Day in the Lifeing.

The first snow of the season came on Saturday. I firmly believe that it came--so very late--because we were down by the sea singing carols and lighting the tree with the rest of the island, and singing about snow. We then went home and queued up the Hogfather audiobook on the stereo system, and the first snowflakes immediately appeared. The sun rises; snow falls. Sympathetic magic. Behave as though it's winter, and winter comes.

On Christmas Eve, I'm making pork pies and sherry.

So by midnight or so we had several inches of perfect building snow--that kind that so rarely falls in the northern parts of the country, where cold and dry makes for crumbly, squeaky snow. I grabbed babymonkey and we dashed out in furry hats (mine a Soviet ushanka--what can I say?) and gloves and built ourselves a snowman. the first I'd made in years. It all went up fine, though we didn't rally have traditional materials for face and buttons. I found some marzipan balls in the house, and used them for eyes and clothes, blackcurrants for a mouth, and a big mandarin orange for the nose.

He needed a hat, obviously. So I brought out my grey fedora that I bought in St. Louis (my formal gypsy family will know its significance) and set it on his head. He was clearly Don Draper the snowman.

We made snow angels and threw snowballs for Grimm to catch--they exploded when she snapped her jaws down on them and she licked up all the snow on her muzzle. All in the dark, with snow gently falling still.

On Sunday, thanks to an unexpected rush of income, contract being up, and growing resentment and hatred of my old phone, I broke down and got an iPhone, which means I am officially One of Those, as my computer is also a mac--though I gave justbeast my ipod, so I don't have the full trifecta. Oh my god, the iPhone is magical. It's the first time in a long while that I've held a piece of tech in my hand and thought: wow, this changes everything, and also this technology is magic, and is way better than Star Trek.

Also, it hit me how much I live in the future. It's better than a jet pack, really.

I'm still playing with it and discovering the many ways in which it makes my life easier--if anyone has apps suggestions, preferably the free kind, leave them in the comments. That thesaurus.com shows beautifully on it makes me so happy--it was unusable on my old Centro. This means that I can work in a cafe and still have research and materiel on hand. I can photograph book pages in resolution good enough to actually read. Not to mention Shazam and Simplify Media and all the other really amazing leaps in tech this device provides. Not to mention Minority Report-esque gesture commands. And it's a nice phone, too. Wow. I haven't been so pleased with a purchase in ages. (I always try to buy something for myself with a novel advance check, and then the rest goes into savings. So that I can look at it and remember the work that earned it, and feel like I'm a bit patted on the back for all the long hours.)

We also got our Christmas tree--we drove to a tree farm out in the country and rode the horse-drawn sleigh and everything...and then couldn't find a tree of the right size or type in their forest, so ended up getting it at Lowe's. Sort of MaineFail, there. But the horses were huge and gorgeous. Someday, I really want to have a horse. My ex-husband's family had Appaloosas, and I loved them, and miss them. Someday, with enough time and land. Like everything else.

This morning I have mainly been tending to poor Grimm, upon whom justbeast stepped the other day, so she is poor and still limping some. Though she still chases the mailman along the fence just fine, so I suspect she just wants up on the bed. And I've been thinking about Rosie the Riveter, after whom I named my iPhone, because I name all my tech and because seriously, we can do it.

She's a personal icon for me. Hard work and that gorgeous image of her with her big, strong arms. But I had no idea until today that she was originally a song, that the woman she was modeled after eventually went on to be a pilot. I love her even more. I wish I were better with GarageBand, because there needs to be an industrial/techno remix of that song. And I still want a Byzantine-esque icon of her, parrish_relics -style. I put this wishes out into the ether, like playing Hogfather to a snowless December. To me she's a Kami, one of the many million gods, a female Hephaestus, and she makes me want to work harder, to be better, stronger, more awesome.

To that end, I have a story to finish today, and another to start. And a shower in my very near future. Here's hoping your winter is crisp and icy and pale and bright, like ours, out here on the edge of the world.

John Scalzi, Duke of the Internet (I think the hierarchy behaves much like a court where the monarch is perpetually away), posted an entry about what he gets paid for short fiction, and his thoughts on same.

Now, I'm not on Scalzi's level as an author--I don't make his sales or his money. But I'm fairly safely mid-career these days (average career length being five years I'm actually in the mature career category, but I look at it more as: I've progressed, I'm growing up, but I'm not living up to my potential yet, report card wise). Anyway, I find his post interesting because it's the opposite of how I think of short fiction.

See, I write a lot of short fiction. At any given time I'm committed to 3-5 pieces for a number of publications. Only once since I started writing short stories have I ever had a clean slate--that is, no requests for material, and free to write for any market I liked. This is why I haven't been published in the Big Three, or Strange Horizons, or Tor.com, or a number of other places. I never get to write anything that isn't immediately promised to someone else. It's a crazy world I live in, and Not Normal, I know, in the world where many bemoan the idea that one can't make a living on short fiction, but that's the situation.

The other part of the situation is that novel advances are few and far between. Especially given that I couldn't sell a book in 2008. I have to wait months for any major check. So short fiction is actually how I make a goodly chunk of my income--especially when you figure in the Omikuji Project, which is a short story per month as long as people keep wanting them. Short fiction, for me, pays the bills.

So it's funny--Scalzi talks about how little one gets paid for fiction per word and posted his per word rates, which are almost all higher than I've ever been paid for anything.

I've made 25 cents a word a couple of times. Once I got paid $1 a word for a textbook contribution (still fiction, a retelling of a Greek myth). But for the most part, I work for page-mine rates. 5 cents a word. I'm thrilled if I get 7 cents, ecstatic if it's 10. And occasionally, if I'm friends with the editor or it's for charity, I work for less than 5 cents a word. But for a long time, my policy has been: if it pays pro rate, I'll do it.

Because I couldn't afford not to. Still can't, really. I'm fighting to hollow out recovery time in between the 5 stories I owe various markets right now.

But look--5 cents a word, with my average short story being 5000 words or so, comes out to about $250 for a short story. Is that a ton of money? No. Is it a couple of bills paid, or a half tank of heating oil, or a third of my rent? Yes, it is. And it adds up. I write fast. It rarely takes me more than a day or two to write a short story, once I have it in my head (it's the getting of it in my head that takes time, grasping the idea, smoothing it out in my brain, coaxing it, but mainly getting the idea at all) and if the story's good enough it might make a Year's Best anthology for another $100, or maybe another $30, depending on the anthology. But all those small numbers add up, and if I write two short stories a month, which I usually do, plus Omikuji and whatever other freelancing things I'm up to at the moment...well, that's how you live from day to day.

Without short fiction, I'd have had to quit this gig a long time ago.

I can't even imagine getting 50 cents a word for anything I'd write. I've had two short fiction gigs lately that paid about 25 cents a word and I was over the moon about it. When it comes to short fiction, I almost always say yes, as long as it comes with a deadline and isn't a vague "send us a story sometime." It's a massive part of my working life--even though I never set out to be a short fiction writer and had to learn the hard way how to do it--just by doing it, over and over, until I didn't hate everything I wrote.

I do agree, absolutely, that as writers we must be paid for what we do unless we choose to forgo payment for reasons that seem right to the individual author. And as someone progresses in their career, what they can afford to write changes. It's only in the last year that I've even started to limit myself to pro rates--though I would never have accepted the fifth of a cent rate that started this whole debate. But for me, pro rate is a good, solid rate, nothing great, nothing spectacular, but solid enough to count on, and I work for it regularly. It's the bedrock of my ability to write full-time. Not as exciting as a novel sale, but without it, I'd be in freefall.

I post this without comment, because no comment could equal the awesome I am about to report:

Peaks Island is not famed in history or song. The poet has not sung of its beauties and the historian has passed it by, but it has its history and its beauties are acknowledged by all.

The earliest voyagers found Casco Bay adapted for a playground and a summer resort. Christopher Levitt, in 1623, said that there was good fishing and much fowl. He found plenty of salmon and other good fish in Fore River.

Michael Mitton told Josselyn of seeing a merman who came and laid his hands on the side of his canoe and that he chopped off one of his hands and that he then sank, dyeing the water with his purple blood.

--A History of Peaks Island and Its People

Yesterday, babymonkey and I went walking down to the other cemetery on the island. The first cemetery is right near our house, and bears the awesome signage: Ye Olde Towne Burial Ground. Pass At Ye Own Risk.

But that cemetery is mostly small graves worn down by time into indistinguishable grey. The one we went to, on the oceans's edge, is small but lovely, full of white stones and long green grass and bittersweet. The graves have astonishing engravings and poetry on them--I'll be taking my camera next time, no fear. Beautiful suns and moons and weeping willows, and dates going back to the mid-1700s. Since shipping a body to shore is prohibitively expensive, most everyone who dies here gets buried here. (Especially if your name is Brackett--they're like the Borgias of Peaks Island. Or, em. I mean, I'm sure without any poisonings.)

One of the things I love about old graveyards is the names. I always notice them, and sometimes they're Sarah and Anna. But sometimes they're amazing.

There was Thankful A. Griffin, a young woman who died in her thirties, and I cannot express how fanastic that name is--first for being named Thankful, and second for the image of a thankful griffin. There was also Paryntha Salter, which I will definitely be using in one book or another.

Even more than usual it strikes me that these were people who lived on this island--who must have loved it, because it could never have been easy to live here, it's not even easy now, and we have a ferry, and stores and restaurants. (Though an odd fact of this place is that in the late 1800s and early 1900s this was actually a more bustling and populous place than it is now, as it was a summer theater resort where the Barrymores played. John Ford was once the honorary mayor of Peaks Island. And in fact there used to be many stores, one for each neighborhood. In a lot of ways island life has shrunk.)

But they lived here, named their children Thankful and Paryntha, and walked all the same paths I do. They thought and loved and weathered the winter--all cities are palimpsests, but it feels like little really dies here.

Over Thanksgiving we brought flashlights and explored the rooms in Battery Steele, the WWII fort here that most of those buried would never have seen. It is a truly bizarre and wonderful place, a maze of dark corridors and hidden rooms, abandoned, lightless, half-flooded. It is so very much like the Barrens in It, you could believe something awful lives there--but you could believe the Turtle lives there, too. We shone our lights, our flashlights, our headlamps, our cell phones--and there was a room covered in paintings of the same elfin face, drawn over and over, at different distances, small and large and close and far. Another one with wasps stenciled in neat lines over the walls, as though crawling in a line. In one giant antechamber, flooded and dripping, there was a hold gouged in the wall. Someone had painted the word destiny below it, and an arrow pointing into the hole. Of course, there were plenty of Van Halen sigils and Nick Was Here! June '83! and high school team booster slogans, but there was also, in a small stone room, a square of red paint with neat white letters written on it, reading: He Will Strike Your Head and You Will Strike His Heel. On the opposite wall, in the same white on red print, it said: Perelandra. Malacandra. Earth. Elwin Ransom, Philologist. (A reference to Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis--which just floors me, that such a thing can be written in the dark on this island.)

Of course, generations of kids have gone to the fort to light fires and drink and have sex and do drugs, and all those things are there too--a bench, a chair, a tin of potted meat in the corner. Relics of old and new childhoods, of life after the war, of paradise lost and gained, the terrible innocence of Perelandra, all there in the shadows, the inky black. Shine a light on them, how they glow.

There are so many secret lives here, so many secrets. Buried, hidden, drowned.

Robert Holdstock died a few days ago. I have never read his books, but I rather think I should, having read about them all over the internet after his death. They sound like something I'd love. But we do share an agent, and thus I received an email talking about his life and death, which contained the chilling note that he was bursting with unwritten books, and how often he spoke of the books he had yet to write. That is heartbreaking, beyond any love I have read of his books, that there was so much left in him and he will never get to write those books.

It's what I fear, what I imagine many of us fear. Once, I was asked one of those silly questions: if you knew you only had a year to live, what would you do?

I said: write faster.

The idea of my agent sending out an email full of kindness about the books I never got to write fills me with horror. I can't even imagine how awful this author's family must feel, and I've seen the grief of his readers. But for me, who never knew him, that email sticks hard against my ribs.

Then, last night, I found out that Milorad Pavic died.

I haven't seen anyone talk about it. Pavic was one of my favorite writers. I passionately adore his books. I hoped against hope that I might meet him someday, and in my broken Russian (he's Serbian but his website makes it clear that he spoke at least some Russian, and he spoke no English) how much his novels have meant to me. I was heartbroken. Pavic wrote a lot of books, and died at 80--that's a long life by any account. But still, to have him not in the world--part of me is sad that the world can just go on without him in it.

Of course I am selfish. I wanted to read more Pavic books. I didn't know him. Part of me feels like I should have tried harder to make that happen, since being an author means being part of a network whereby most other authors can be contacted.

But it's harrowing and hollowing, to lose these people, to keep living in the world when they are gone.

I'll miss you, Milorad. Though we never met, I loved your books like parents.

Every once in awhile I end up reading a bunch of "literary fiction" books in a row, whether to see what's going on outside of genre or by some fluke of omnivorous shelf-grazing. Almost always, it causes a rash of contemplation about literary fiction as a genre--because boy howdy is it a genre. And this time is no different. Due to what was staring me in the face in zoethe and theferrett 's guest room, what was on offer in the Frankfurt airport bookstore, and what I happened to pick up when I got home, I read, in quick succession: A Brief History of the Dead, The Lovely Bones, Kafka on the Shore, and A Trip to the Stars. Add to that the not really literary fiction but certainly mainstream YA Feed and out of my own perversity a re-read of The Secret History and it's a feast of angst and high sales and quotes from the LA Times.

To be fair, I didn't even finish Kafka on the Shore. I love Murakami, but this was so boring and uninteresting and meandering that I just had to give up, less than a hundred pages from the end, which I never do, because the tedium of it made me want to die. I seriously cannot believe this won the World Fantasy Award. Also, authors should deeply reconsider whether annoying 15 year olds (who talk like 30 year olds) and their bizarre sexual habits are fascinating enough on their face to justify hundreds of pages of examination. It sounds trite to say nothing happened in this whole book, but it's a buddy flick where the buddies don't meet and their endgame is some murky WWII event (it is Murakami after all) of which only one (who is mentally disabled) is aware and then all of the sudden there are crystals and bizarrely helpful truck drivers and some kid is having sex with his mother and thinks it's awesome. But it's all so banal and flatly written that I don't even care--even less than I care about some of these other books, and that's saying a lot, so let's just leave it with a "not living up to his potential" comment on Murakami's report card. Guh.

Feed, on the other hand, was really and truly decent--though it thrives on the reader being young and thus never having read Stand on Zanzibar or any of the other SF novels that feature a constant stream of advertisement as a literary technique. Again, though, I have a problem with the bored, passive protagonist and his sexual fantasies being more or less all I'm given to hang on to as a persona. And the dying wrong side of the tracks girlfriend having actual serious thoughts about anything while the privileged boy goes on to...not have any. It's just kind of a tired trope. And the lesions were never explained, no matter how awesome the truffle line is. In general, I think that The Great Gatsby is great despite its excerable protagonists, not because of them, and I don't actually want to spend any time with mini-Nick or mini-Daisy, even on the moon. But back to this one in a second. Those would be the outliers, the best and worst of the lot.

I found none of the others to be bad books per se. Obviously, they're bestsellers of varying degrees and somebody loves them, they speak to someone. But I feel like, with every one, they were doing it wrong. Clearly doing it right for someone, but doing it wrong for me, personally, as a reader. And with every one I felt like I got a clearer idea of the actual difference between "literary fiction" and "genre."

The difference, I think, is rules.

I've commented before on litfic's obsession with suburbia, which Alice Sebold hilariously claims in the interview in the back pages of The Lovely Bones is somehow a neglected corner of Americana where all the real stories are and she had to learn as a writer to recognize it as a legitimate source of stories. To which, with all the class I can muster, I wave my brandy snifter and say: LOLWHUT. Look, I get that urban stories are legion--as long as that urban means New York and the protagonists are privileged white people, but suburbia is where it's at for literary fiction. The story of the repressed housewife being dissatisfied while her husband works miserably and her kids act out is getting to be nigh-on universal, no matter whether it's the 50s or the 00s. Hell, it's the plot of Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, Little Children, American Beauty...I could go on, but it's pointless. The siren call of the easy symoblism of an outwardly perfect row of houses and inwardly borked lives is resisted by precisely no one. The Lovely Bones is merely another entry in that restrictive genre of storytelling, and other than its otherworldly protagonist, alters the traditional narrative not even a little. But besides having to sit through yet another reel of how much being a wealthy white family in the suburbs sucks, what I really notices was a total lack of worldbuilding or rules of the game. And more, a total lack of interest in the same.

To be honest, Sebold seems to have no real interest in the afterlife she sets up at all. It's just a vantage point for the family drama, and half-baked serial killer thing (worst serial killer ever, by the way. There is no WAY this guy doesn't get caught in five seconds in the real world). And yet, what few rules she sets up (the dead can't affect anything, mainly) she breaks without any stated reason or justification. Those of you who have read the book will probably know the big Rule Breaking Moment I mean, when not only does our little Susie body-swap for no reason, without intent to do so or any possible sense of why she could, but she takes her last living moment not to talk to her tortured family about who killed her, but to bang a dude she liked in middle school, despite her only other sexual experience being brutal rape. Yay! Love is awesome!

But I just kept saying: why? Why can this happen? And what happened to the other girl's soul?

But Sebold isn't after that fish. She cares about a. the broken suburban family story and b. writing a scene she wanted to write without caring whether it fits with the universe of the book. Because she's not a genre writer, despite the genre window dressing, she doesn't recognize that the book has a universe, or care about rules, or worldbuilding--because it's ostensibly our world and doesn't have to be built. But for me as a reader this is just insane, because it's ghost time in the house, and the book just throws up its hands and says: weird things happen! We don't have to DWELL ON IT! Let's get back to a suburban dad smashing things.

Two final and beside the point points: one, the death of the serial killer was bullshit and I call shenanigans. There is an implication that Susie made it happen but it's fairly clear she didn't, at least to me, since it's all from her POV and she doesn't say she did it. But the refusal to decide whether the dead can or cannot affect things reaches its most ridiculous toward the end. This is not satisfying, for crying out loud. And by the way, a heaven where no matter what happens you cannot grow or heal or change, where you cannot grow up, ever, where you can meet other people but cannot be an adult, or sexual, or progress beyond the age and mentality of your death is not heaven. That's hell.

Ahem.

Same thing with A Brief History of the Dead. I got the gist of everything in literally the first 30 pages, which are easily the most interesting. I walked out and asked theferrett : "Is anything going to happen in this book besides everyone else figuring out that someone has to remember you on earth for you to live in the purgatory city and that one chick is the last one on earth so everyone she doesn't remember is gone? Because I got that, and there's a lot of book left."

And he wouldn't meet my eye.

What I wanted, with these afterlife porn books--the genre element of choice in American fiction--was some exploration of the world put forward, of what it means to be dead, of why people keep their general economic status, still working in restaurants, etc. Why do dead people need to eat? Does anyone, ever, do anything but stare into the distance and act depressed? But the authors didn't want to write those books. They wanted to write about Antarctica or the standard "the connections that bind us all" or, you know, "emotions."

As a genre writer, it's funny how I put emotions in quotes. We don't like emotions or characters, right? It's all about the world. And the worst genre fiction does get mired in that, the fetishizing of rules and worldbuilding. But, you know, some attention to the fact that you've invented this fascinating premise and are going literally nowhere with it and exploring nothing in it would be nice. And I use quotes because the emotional arcs presented by these books are just not intense or interesting enough to justify flying in the face of logic so often. I can't listen to parents mourning their kid because she hasn't died yet because they're EATING in a DINER and people are WORKING SHIFTS there and they're all dead and WHY? But it's the emotional content of the scene the author cares about, not making it work in an invented world. (Don't even get me started about the fuzzy fade to white handwaving ending of that book, either.) Really? Parents miss their kids? Stop the presses. We have got to get someone on this.

A Trip to the Stars...probably the best written of any of them, but the best example of why genre fiction can't have nice things. Every five pages the author picks up a genre trope, shakes it in confusion, and then throws it away. There's vampires, but they're gone within a few pages and no one cares. The whole thing is an embarrassing Mary Sue (Gary Stu, really) adopted kid's fantasy about how the protag's REAL family is RICH and AWESOME and will take him away to a palace in the desert where he'll get a perfect education from genius tutors and speak Greek and Latin and be awesome at drawing and get all the toys he wants and ALSO be awesome at sports and anyone who doesn't like him is inherently evil and despite all this he has tons of free time to wander in the desert where a spider will give him superpowers (that won't matter and will be forgotten) and his tutor will give him a BABY WOLF and also they're all TRUE DESCENDANTS OF ATLANTIS WTF. (Actually, the Atlantis thing is especially awesome, because supposedly it's their sooper special "double O positive" blood type that makes them Atlanteans. I thought that sounded weird, so I looked it up. Turns out that "double O" just means O, as it's a recessive gene. That means, fare from being the "rarest blood type on earth" it is in fact the single most common blood type on earth and it just so happens to be mine. So now, when justbeast asks me to do things I yell: NO, FOR I AM A TRUE DESCEDANT OF ATLANTIS AND I DO NOT DO DISHES.)

The point is that Nicholas Christopher doesn't give a shit about making all this magical stuff jive with the plot, nor, clearly, does he even recognize the painful Gary Stuness of his story. He cares about the relationship between his two main characters (sort of) and the rest exists so that the back cover copy girl can list a bunch of cool things separated by commas that make the book sound epic. Don't you want to read about vampires in the Old West, alien spiders, Captain Cook, Basque separatists, astronauts, Atlantis, and BABY WOLVES? I know I do! But none of those things matter to the book at all, and the minute one starts to matter, the author crushes them brutally and glares around daring you to remember that there were real fucking vampires like five pages ago and everything that's happening are coincidences that beggar the end of Jane Eyre. It's the real world, right? Shit just happens, and you don't have to explain it.

The Secret History is really a bit of a cheat on this list, because the doin it rong is completely different--though related. Once again I question why I want to hang out with the cast that got rejected from The Great Gatsby for being too assholish. These guys, all of them, are literally the worst people ever. And there's no reason that the worst one, Bunny, who gets killed on the first page, should have been let into the sooper special circle of classics students that the protagonist has to shit angel feathers to get into, where you have to be charming and smart and attractive and be approved by the perfect amazing teacher, given that Bunny is a colossal shit. Who can't do Latin or Greek. What the hell.

But my main issue is that only one thing of any interest occurs in this entire book. It happens to be the only genre element--the kids do a ritual to summon Dionysus and homes shows up. That is awesome, my friends. It's tossed off in three pages of dialogue. I suspect if you asked Tartt, she'd say it's a nod to Greek plays where all the action happens offscreen and is reported by a messenger. Yeah, whatever. It's the only interesting part of the book and it's what the book should have been about. We should have seen all those aborted attempts, and the group growing close and then fracturing over failures, not just be told about it by a bored 21 year old who talks like he's 90. Good grief.

But then, that would have been a genre book, right? If you center stage the weird shit, rather than using it as a fetching window treatment, then it's not Serious Literature. But what we're left with is a bunch of Literature that makes no sense because the authors are essentially operating a forklift they're not rated to handle. It's awesome! It goes up and down! It crushes things! Wheee! But if you don't read the manual, you end up with a messy factory, and everything is out of order and nothing makes sense. A novel should have its own internal system, its own logic, that coheres, that connects with itself. It should not be full of random incidents of magic that connect with nothing just because watching people grieve for three hundred pages is much harder to make interesting without ghosts or vampires. It feels lazy to me, intellectually lazy, to throw out scenes and leave them hanging, breaking all the rules of the world, with no explanation. And yet I see it again and again in these books.

I'm reminded of a speech from Six Feet Under, a show that for awhile managed to pull all off this afterlife/family drama stuff pretty well:

It may seem weird to you but there is a reason behing everything that we do here...

Noodling up a big post for today, but in the meantime everyone's doing their general end of year holiday wishlists, so I thought I'd put mine up, for family and friends and anyone else who might wonder what to get me.

Firstly, anything still on our wedding registry is what we really need and want. We took forever making up that list and there's not much that's not on it, except for--

Books and media, which are on my Amazon wishlist

But if you want to buy me a book or an album...I'd love a copy of your favorite book or album, so that I can think of you when I read it or listen to it, and there can be connection, which is what gifts are all about.

I also always love yarn and especially love things you make. So many of you are amazing artists and if you want to give me something, something from your own hands is always exactly what I want. See above, connection.

And, in an obligatory fashion, if you're looking for gifts for others, I write books, and they make great gifts, as does an Omikuji Project subscription. (November Omikuji, unforgiveably late, is going out today. December will go out this week. After this, normalization will commence.)

In other news, not having justbeast here in the mornings is brutal. Mornings used to be coffee and kisses and hugs, and now there's none of those, only a cold empty house and housemates gone or not awake yet and unlikely to kiss me or hold me til I wake up anyway.

And why won't it snow already?

I have to say it. I didn't get weddings before now.

I mean, I love weddings, and they're wonderful, and I love being around friends and family. But I fundamentally didn't get what weddings are for until I had one.

See, I've been married before, but I'd never had a wedding. I had a divorce before I had a wedding. And you know, when Cher says in Moonstruck that she didn't have a real wedding, so she had bad luck, I kind of believed her, knowing what came after. So this time I wanted the real thing--bridesmaids and a dress and dancing and all of it.

I had no idea what was going to happen. All those months of planning and thinking and choosing and it all finally happened and I was just not prepared for it to be perfect. For it to just tear me to pieces and build me up again with its beauty, with all that love.

This is almost impossible to post about, really. There was just so much. Friday night, at the Velvet Tango Room, where I was vibrating with nervousness because so many people were meeting for the first time and I felt like I had to take care of everyone but it all went smoothly anyway. The bachelor/ette party with my mad ululating bridesmaids abducting me from a Starbucks, and the rest of the wedding folk chasing clues all over town only to burst into theferrett and zoethe 's house whooping triumph. All those quiet moments with zoethe , my fairy godmother, planning and crafting and plotting. Listening to tithenai and stealthcello practicing in the basement. Showing all my friends the amazing photo of justbeast's father at age 18, with a cigar stump in his mouth, looking handsomer and manlier and more hardcore than a dozen Clint Eastwoods. All these impressions, like autumn leaves, drifting by in my memory--pretendpeterpan's laugh, roomette's teary smiles, all my cousins sharing Starbursts outside, all the guys with their clothes muddy from pulling car after car out of the muck at the shower. My aunt and grandmother and my mother sitting on a white couch, laughing. Janice, who made my wedding dress, creating glory in wine red in zoethe's basement, out of miles of silk and satin. How do you chronicle all that? tithenai is doing a lovely detaily post, but I just can't--it flows together like wine and paint, to me.

And then Sunday morning, which dawned as gorgeous and golden a day as you could possibly ask for--we had been so worried about rain, because Patterson's Apple Farm is very much outside, and we'd had this moment with zoethe and I went to see the space, and were facing having the ceremony in the parking lot, due to heels not playing well with mud, and Betty, the coordinator, rushing in to show us this secret, radiant grove in a stone ravine where no one had ever gotten married before--we wanted that place so much, but if it rained...but it didn't. My weather witches rule. The light was autumnal and rich and slanted, the trees all full of golden leaves, and all my most loved ones laughing and lovely. I was calm that morning--everyone kept expecting me to freak out and have a stress attack, but I didn't. Not even close. I was just so happy. And my family was there, my family, my uncle and aunt and cousins like siblings, my father and my mother, who hadn't seen each other in twenty years, all these generations, and my chosen family too. How could I be stressed?

We did have a few minor issues, but each of them turned out more awesome for having fallen through. The cake topper looked like a lost cause. Both the vendors I had ordered one from failed me one after the other (the first one an especial nightmare) and I had decided I just didn't care, no cake topper was fine. But sheryl67 and rbradakis weren't going to let that happen. In one night, they built us a steampunk robot cake topper that rivals any I've seen, and brought it in triumph to the wedding. My unicorn heeled shoes that I loved so much sank into the earth to the hilt when I set foot on the ground--roomette went and got me adorable new ones, but they sank too. So I ended up, in that fabulous red Victorian dress, wearing my black cowboy boots underneath it. Which, I think, pretty much rules. And there was the music--but I'll get to that in a minute.

Everyone was so kind and helpful, I was just floating--the only tragedy being the classic one--you can never spend as much time with people as you want to at your own wedding. I tried so hard, but it's just impossible. And all through the morning, kylecassidy ...just took the most amazing wedding photos ever, ever in the history of the world. (I don't even have them all uploaded yet, but some are here.)

xhollydayx did my make up--and let me tell you, it was superpowered. When we first talked, she asked about waterproof mascara, I said: "Nah, I'm not going to cry. I'll be fine."

Well, I started crying walking down the aisle, and I never stopped. Just...hearing that song, the song Ivar Tryti wrote for The Orphan's Tales reinterpreted by my dear, darling tithenai and stealthcello, in that magical glade, with all my beautiful friends arrayed up there and waiting for us--and oh my god did the girls look amazing in their tuxedos!--and justbeast , all warm beside me, I couldn't not cry. I couldn't not cry as s00j sang for us, a song just for us, so full of references to our shared life and work and love. I couldn't not cry as passionandsoul spoke, as we first spoke Mike Ford's declaration, and then our own, sillier vows, as scathedobsidian passed fire over our joined hands. I couldn't help but laugh that justbeast had forgotten to take off his engagement ring, and had to pocket it before I put on his wedding ring. I just cried the entire time.

We had phenomenal Russian feasting at the reception--and if you want to have an event in Cleveland, Patterson's is your place. They were amazing to us, and the place looked warm and bright, all red and leaves and candles floating in water. We ate and drank and then the toasts began. We opened up the toasts to everyone, after the wedding party finished, and as we have an extraordinarily well-spoken social circle, this turned out to be a great idea--except that we were toasting with vodka, so there was a lot of drinking. That we all met on the internet became a running joke (mishamish : Unlike most of you, I didn't meet Cat on the internet. I met Dmitri on the internet.) yagathai had a great line in: may you both roll nothing but 20s from here on out. scathedobsidian quoted Star Trek. mtolan toasted us in Russian. My mother had asked ahead of time if she could read from The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider as part of her toast, to represent the maternal line of our family, and though that made me nervous I said yes.

Well, damn. Her Cherokee pronunciation is a lot better than mine. She read it, and cried while reading it, and my great-aunt and grandmother, the daughters of that Grandmother Spider, her only children left living, just wept and covered their hands with their mouths. And then my father got up beside my mother to toast us, and I saw my parents stand together for the first time in my life, and smile at each other. And Reader, I lost all composure, and just sobbed openly at the table. But I'm reasonably sure half the room was crying by then. And the shocking thing is--xhollydayx 's make up didn't even smudge.

I listened and remembered how long I had known some of them, like caudelac and roomette, how much I had shared with them, how much I loved them, how much I had gone through with some of them in just a few years. This was it--my tribe, my beautiful, madcap tribe, together and stunning and so alive. So, you know, I cried some more. And I got it. I understood. What a wedding is. All those worlds colliding, all those disparate people getting to touch each other and meet, all that tribal whooping and joy. It's not the end of anything, but a nexus, where the threads of life tangle up for a moment, and there is this unutterable grace, where there can be healing, even between people truly severed, and you point at the earth and say: this is where I begin, with everyone I choose and love.

And then there was dancing. Our first dance was to As the World Falls Down from Labyrinth--and shut up. We wore glittery demon masks made by ioianthe, and it was marvelous. s00j insisted on playing Manticore's Lullaby live for the parents's dance, which was again, just perfect. And then we got down, man, with our very bad selves. I worked very hard on the playlist--though as gieves pointed out, the problem with a playlist full of awesome songs is you get really tired. But a curious thing happened.

Right in the middle of Start Wearing Purple, when we were all hollering along and dancing like crazed Russian fools, the stereo broke. That's right, we blew out the sound system. And the music died. And it stayed dead--the audible click of no chance, mister, echoing from the speakers. And people started to leave. It was 8 o'clock and it looked like the wedding might be over. My heart broke a little--I so wanted to dance at my wedding.

And then I mentioned to mishamish and babymonkey that I had missed the slow dance to The Rainbow Connection because I was outside talking to my father. So they went over and picked up my laptop, turned up the volume, though it was still very soft, and held it next to our ears as justbeast and I danced to it, eventually joined by others--they all sang the Rainbow Connections to us in a circle as we swayed. I cannot even express to you that moment, how it was the moment of the wedding, when my tribe made music where there was none, and closed around us, singing one of my favorite songs, which has always been so much about love and hope and dreaming to me. The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

"It's amazing how this is becoming our song right now," I said to Dmitri, and we laughed. Then the minstrels moved on to Skullcrusher Mountain and Bohemian Rhapsody and we were doing fairly well making our own music (our own music! In this day and age, with no instruments, we were making music and merry) when Betty the coordinator appeared with a boom box. She turned it on. The volume was great! And it only got a mariachi station on the radio. No CD player, only cassette. We danced a bit to the mariachi, half-heartedly. And then rbradakis appeared, as if he were a wizard from on high, and in his hands?

A cassette stereo CD adapter.

Which we plugged into my laptop.

And the music was saved! Again with the Bradaki superhero day-saving!

And so we danced, into the night. We sang along, we Time Warped. justbeast and I agreed ahead of time that we wanted to be able to dance with other people--we had our whole lives to dance together, but some of these people we'd be lucky to see again in five years. I danced with roomette to The Origin of Love, with puckathon to I Will Follow You Into the Dark, singing it into each others' ears. We Baby Got Backed and Vanilla Iced. I danced with my little cousin Alec, the ringbearer, and crouched down to let him turn me like my brother taught him. My brother danced with everyone. The Thomases toasted in a big circle with vodka. At some point, Nika, Dmitri's niece, and katspaw156's daughter Carolyn ran up to us hand in hand and intoned in unison: WE LOVE YOU BIGGER THAN SPACE! Which I will now incorporate into my vocabulary of affection. Boys danced with boys. Girls danced with girls. No one batted an eye. I watched everyone dancing--all those parts of my life that had never connected til now, laughing and jumping and busting a move together and my god, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

At some point, justbeast 's aunt took him aside and told him how flabbergasted she was by the beauty of it all. She could hardly speak. She said it was just like every movie she'd seen as a child about 18th century St. Petersburg. In the end, I am very grateful to our families for not feeling that urge to interefere with the plans, so that we could have exactly the wedding we wanted, and no one said a word about me not wearing white or my cross-dressing bridesmaids or our bear shaman officiant or anything that we chose. Nothing but love, and that's a huge gift, considering how stressful wedding planning can get.

It was a profound experience. justbeast and I have been married in our hearts for a long time. Saying the words was enormous, but it didn't change where we were as a couple. What changed was having this night to remember, all our people, all our worlds together in one place--and of course there were people who couldn't come that I wished could have been there, but so many were there. Having this fertile, happy ground to grow from, having the world we make together witnessed by so many extraordinary souls. We've already joked about a wedding reunion--because the thing is, we have awesome friends and I think awesome attracts awesome and some true connections were made that weekend. I don't know if we ever will, but I know I feel pretty damned tight with everyone who was there.

I'll post a few more times--I want to talk about all the people who made fantastic art for this wedding, and a little about the pre-wedding stuff, but it was way past time to get my impressions of it all down, and how much it affected it me, how much I will never forget it, how healed and whole I felt, how loved we both felt and how much belonging and acceptance there was that day. Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen, who was there with us, who drank and danced and wished us well.

Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl...there was a boy...there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did...and what he did...and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did...and why one failed...and why another triumphed in the end. And I know that it's true, because I danced at their wedding and drank their very best wine.

--Terri Windling

So, it came to my attention through the wonderful maryrobinette last night that Fairyland is eligible for the Andre Norton Award.

For those of you who don't know, the Andre Norton award is associated with the Nebulas and announced and voted on at the same time, but honors YA work.

I had no idea. I assumed self-published e-editions were out of the running. That it would be eligible when the print edition comes out from Feiwel and Friends.

Turns out, it will not be eligible when that happens. It is only eligible this year, when it first appeared in English.

This is Fairyland's shot at this.

Now, obviously, I have a vested interest in this, as being nominated for and winning awards is awesome, and to even be nominated before a traditional print volume appears would be amazing.

But outside of my personal considerations, wouldn't it be cool for something this independent, this unique and tribal and viral, to be nominated for one of the big awards in the field? Wouldn't it be cool to shake things up, to show that this kind of thing, if the quality is good enough, can be considered alongside shiny hardback bestsellers?

Only SFWA members can vote. But I humbly ask that if you can vote, consider this one. Consider the book, which I am so proud of, and consider the impact. Spread the word to voters you know, if you can't vote yourself.

Of course, a lot of people think campaigning for an award is yucky and I kind of do, too, but for an online work that even I didn't know was eligible til last night, which will not be eligible when it comes out in print, I feel it's within my yuck parameters to post about it, and ask for--not votes, just consideration.

The book is complete and can be read in its entirety on my website for free.

Exchange reported to us over the phone on this fine sunny autumn day:

Nika (justbeast 's 6-year-old niece): Do Cat and Dima have any children?
Her mother: No, they're not planning to have any soon.
Nika: ...so did they just get married for sex?

I was going to friends-lock this, but decided against it. So here it is for all to read.

The thing is, I don't really believe in friends-locking. The whole point of a blog, for me, is to live openly, declaratively. I find that a tremendously valuable thing for my personal development, to try hard not to be ashamed of anything I experience or feel or do. Filtering is great for some people--everyone chooses how to run their online space--but for me it is an admission of not being able to talk about something, which means not having the kind of online life I want, where I can talk about anything, and I don't like that, on a visceral level.

This is obviously a more fraught issue since I started writing books and being on Twitter celebrity lists (what). There are endless debates on what level of self to share. But I want to share. Most of my relationships started and/or are continued online. I don't draw a distinction, socially, between the worlds. So I started to post this under a heavy filter and then decided I was only doing that because I don't want to hear (again) what a degenerate I am for one reason or another. And because LJ is so essay-geared, and sometimes I just don't have the answers, even at the end of the post.

But I refuse to let my life as a writer determine a level of secrecy I don't want. So here I go. There's a lot of self-outing in here, so run now if you don't want to know.

Reading passionandsoul 's post about his kink history brought up a lot of issues for me, about sex, partly, but mainly about identity.

I emphatically do not have that history. My early upbringing, as I've mentioned, was Christian Scientist, and though my adolescence was much more secular, and I understood about sex early on, my childhood was pretty damn sheltered and I just didn't develop that sexual muscle til much late. Add to that that I have this terrible habit of being attracted to severely repressed people and even when I wanted to lose my virginity as a teenager, my boyfriend felt it was wrong (he wasn't Christian or anything like it, pagan, in fact. Just deeply self-loathing and full of body-hate) and we should wait until we were 18 and legal. I couldn't give my virginity away, let alone lose it, like, just tripping over a guy and whoops. The first man I ended up marrying was slightly less repressed, but just body-hating and horrified by any steps I might have wanted to take outside the standard. So for me, sex could never be a journey--I never had anyone to take it with me, and for awhile, in my early twenties, I just decided I was frigid and cut sex out of my life entirely.

Obviously, things are different now. I got out of that mess. Though I still feel those old ghosts of denying anything but the activity of my mind and assuming by default that I am defective. But I look at that history and though there is horror there, there is also such tremendous self-knowledge, surety. And where there is not, there is a quest for it.

And this is a strange thing to realize about myself. Which is hard to put into words, and has to be approached in circles.

See, I like Leather. I like power play. I like bondage. I like boys and I like girls. I've been monogamous and I've been poly. I like all kinds of things. But nothing, not even kink as a whole or even sex itself, has ever driven me to the point where it became a massive portion of my identity. Or even a fair portion. The only thing I can point to that does is being a writer (and a reader)--but calling yourself a writer is still and forever fraught, and discussing it as an identity sounds arrogant. And who claims Reader as an identity? The point is, I could never even take those What Animal Are You? tests because to choose one image for myself, the way so many pagans seem to be able to do, is impossible for me. I float. I don't fix.

And while there's power in that, I envy knowing, with all your being, that something defines you. That you are part of a Leather Family and that fulfills something deep in you, that couldn't be fulfilled by anything else. That you are a shaman bound to a Bear God. That...anything, that anything definite. For someone who has spent the majority of their 30 years on earth being ambivalent about sex, even calling myself bisexual feels like a sticker slapped on something much more complicated. But, you know, stickers make everything easier, and having become involved in the kink and alternative sexuality communities, everyone seems to have a sticker. Seems driven. I want to be driven. But even in the journeys I've taken in my late twenties, nothing has seized me so hard that it became part of me. I, that which is I, always stands apart and intact.

Tangential, but related to all this is how passionandsoul talks about earning a Cap and Leather Jacket. I understand what these things mean in the Leather Community, why they're capitalized. And that's even harder to talk about. I have no particular attachment to Leather as a substance, as fabric, but the idea of earning clothing, earning vestments, that's attractive.

The path I've chosen in life is weirdly twofold. On the one hand, much of my progression and development is determined by publishers--what books get written, when. Much of the acknowledgment available for goals achieved and peaks surmounted is also determined by others--award committees, reviewers. But on the other hand, in the community my books create, in the chosen family of my world, I have a lot of personal authority. I has a shiny, so to speak. And I create, for others, fantastic landscapes and wonderful circumstances in which they, if I have done well, can find themselves. But I made them. I can find myself, a little, in the arc of them, in the larger orbit of my books as a whole--but man, I couldn't even write one book and let that stand. Everything is fractal with me, kaleidoscopic.

And who is out there who would ever turn to me and say: here, you've earned this cap, this coat, this jewel? You've leveled up, you've done something big enough to earn, not a plaque, not a statue, but this terribly personal emblem to mark your Self and your Striving?

Who would know me well enough to know when I had earned it?

I suppose that in part, when people bring me gifts to readings and shows, I am so intensely grateful, because I feel like in part that's what they're doing. Like when arianhwyvar gave me an amber lock and key necklace in Boston last week. But I still, like a child, crave approval from elders, from tribal leaders, from people who might know exactly what it means to confer such a thing. This is, of course, all satisfied by the traditional Leather Family structure, and that's a powerful thing, but not wholly, I think, for me. I don't know what is for me. I've never found an answer. There's no parade I could go to without feeling like a fraud.

Sometimes I feel like I'm all want, and no object. I envy those who found their objects early, who found them at all. In many ways, I am still so lost. I fear that books are all I'm good at and that's not enough. I fear that because no single identity, sexual or spiritual or otherwise has ever leapt up to claim me, I don't have an identity at all. I wish I'd been pre-loaded with all this software, but I just wasn't. And I don't know where you download patches now. And I'm done with this metaphor.

I don't really find the whole it's a journey thing to be a comfort. Of course it's a journey. I just wish I'd had a few more signposts. Way stations. Maps.

I'm doing that thing where I feel like I can't post about anything until I post about the wedding, and the rest of the honeymoon.

But I am also physically pretty messed up right now. I understand that my body needs recovery, which is possibly why I'm sleeping way more than usual, but I'm also waking up with a splitting headache that lasts for hours. And this morning, it's worse, since I'm getting hateful comments after AOL did an article about ExpediaFail.

And then there's my foot.

I suspect what happened is that I walked on it in heeled boots in St. Petersburg (I swear, all the women do, even the older ones. I have never seen so many amazing shoes--both beautiful and oh my god how can you walk on that needle? At least mine were chunky stack heels) and because the streets go on forever and ever into the sunset, I strained something in the ball of my foot badly.

My usual response to pain is to ignore it and behave as usual. This is a standard Child Raised as Christian Scientist response, even when the pain hits intolerable levels. You grin and bear it because someone once told you that doing otherwise meant you were not God's perfect child. So obviously, when I went to the Interfictions 2 reading on Friday in Boston (which went beautifully and I got to meet Brian Francis Slattery) I wore the super cute teensy heels roomette got me. And walked around Cambridge. And then Portland.

So basically, the situation is that now when I put pressure on the ball of my left foot it feels like I'm walking on bone and someone is simultaneously ripping my toes off. I've been couchbound for yesterday and it's looking like today, too. Except for hobbling on my heel.

I meant to film a trailer for Under In The Mere this week, but lack of walking killed it. Tomorrow, I hope. I am going to try to make it out to my izbushka-office today to work on Omikuji--so sorry it's late, guys, it'll go out asap, but everything is in chaos. After this month it'll be back to normal.

And starting Monday I'm just going to post about everything until it's done and I can get back to blogging proper. (I am twittering regularly at @catvalente, btw.)

Ugh. Body, this is not cool.

It is broken. We look for things to make it go...

It's that time of year, when red velvet and white fluff are in season, when pine and mistletoe scent the air, when sleighbells jangle in the distance...and Nebula nominations open.

Now, I've never been nominated for a Nebula. I've rarely even been suggested for one. But I thought I'd list the things I've written this year that are eligible, just in case any of you are SFWA members and want to vote for them. (Plus some little announcements toward the end!

Palimpsest
Obviously, this would mean the most to me--Palimpsest was in many ways an orphaned novel, surrounded by lay-offs and championed not by its publisher but by its readers. I still can't believe Amazon ranked it #1 on its SFF of 2009 list.

Under In the Mere
Sadly, I think this is a hair too long to qualify in the novella category, and is a long shot given how weird it is--but hey.

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
I love this story with a great love, and I think some of you did too. If you haven't read it yet, please do! I think I am probably turning this into a novel.

Golubash, or Wine-War-Blood-Elegy
Yay, first SF story ever!

The Anachronist's Cookbook
This got zero attention, mostly because it was only available on an app for the iPhone for a long time. But finally, I have gotten permission to post the story for free on my website! All my issues with steampunk in fiction form!

Proverbs of Hell
This story about love between a monk and a demon just came out in The Stories Between, an anthology to benefit and celebrate the awesome indie bookstore Between Books. It's basically filled with storied by authors who have read at the store over the years, and is GORGEOUS besides. Check it out!

A Delicate Architecture
This was the first YA piece I ever wrote--a Hansel and Gretel story, following the witch's childhood and the root of her obsession with candy.

Thank you to everyone who votes! If you are a voting member of SFWA, I will provide free e-copies of any of these that are not available online on request. Just email me.

Here I am, with a hundred things to post about, the rest of St. Petersburg and the wedding and a new book...and I'm playing Mortal Kombat vs. DC and staying up while everyone else is in bed.

I guess I'm having a bit of wedding withdrawal. For awhile there was so much to do that it could never get done, and then it was done and there were so many loved ones to spend time with that I could never spend time with them all, and then there was the honeymoon and it was all SO MUCH. And justbeast was there all day every day for two weeks, and now he's gone again, from very early to very late, working in Augusta, and I miss him. I'm taking a month off before starting on the next book that's due (Prester John Book I, due oh-my-god January 30th) and I want to do awesome things, I want to do everything I've been putting off, but I'm so enervated and tired and just want to be cuddled and relaxified. But it is not to be, just now.

I'm going to get up early tomorrow, I think. I have the Interfictions reading in Boston at 7:30, but I can do things before then. I'm going to try out my new ice cream maker (flavor suggestions welcome). Maybe take a stab at unpacking. Definitely hit the post office. Pretty myself a bit and maybe get my nails done in town before I go. (I am HOPELESS with doing my own nails. It always looks like a monkey went at them.) I don't know. I want to feel awesome. I feel like butter scraped over too much bread, to quote another small, hapless thing.

At least I made yummy dinners for my house full of people. (I feel that it should have a name, like House Cerulia has, now that we are so many.) Beef stroganoff last night and pelmeni lightly fried with curry paste along with green beans sauteed in a bit of bacon fat tonight. And we valiantly work on ingesting the alcohol leftover from both our weddings.

Thanksgiving is coming up, and along with justbeast , babymonkey , and mishamish , we have blazepoet , yakavenger , ioianthe , and her husband Bill-I-can't-find-his-username. Full house! Right now the menu is looking like: plum-molasses glazed goose with cherry-sage stuffing (I make this every year, it kickes the shit out of turkey), lamb shashlik, borscht, butternut squash-apple soup with bacon and goat cheese, homemade bread, spinach salad with warm bacon dressing, cranberry compote, sweet potatoes ala babymonkey, pumpkin chiffon pie with cranberry whipped cream, apple toffee pie with a white chocolate glaze, and gluhwein. What? My inner Sicilian grandmother kicks in when there are more than two people in the house. ALL WILL BE FED.

For future holidays, we can accommodate two other couples. First come, first seated--let us know early if you want to come and we'll hold a seat at the table. This goes for all food-related holidays, not just Thanksgiving.

So yeah. I'm trying to take it easy but taking it easy is weird and a little unnerving. I need to start knitting again.

Yesterday we went walking to Battery Steele, the WWII fort here. It is so very The Barrens and I mourn that no one in this house has read IT but me. There are even fucking terrifying dark corridors and graffiti and abandoned rooms and I so have to get greygirlbeast up here someday, it reminds me so of The Red Tree, too. I love my island so much. I'm so viscerally grateful to be home, to not have missed autumn, to smell the sea and get mud on my boots climbing around the woods with the bittersweet and the sumac. I just...am feeling disconnected, afloat, dreamy and strange.

One, I'm reading at the IAF Interfictions 2 reading tomorrow, 7:30 pm at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. You all are coming, right? Because there's musical accompaniment and possibly an accordion. And Brian Francis Slattery (ZOMG.) Also my last trip to Boston for awhile as I burrow, sick of travel and with a novel due at the end of January (I don't even want to talk about it.)

Two, I'm working on a trailer for Under in the Mere, and searching for music. I want something appropriate to Arthuriana without going full McKennitt, melancholic, probably, but not necessarily un-modern. Any musicians out there want to get some exposure by letting me use one of their tracks? The Palimpsest trailer got over 20,000 views...

Any suggestions of other musicians must be people who are contactable and at all likely to give me permission. Bands I have to contact through MySpace and are on tour, probably not.

Lastly, I am NOT getting sick. I swear.

The final chapter of Fairyland is up.

Chapter XXII: Ravished Means You Cannot Stay

A mother cannot see every little thing, and glad we may be that she could not, as it would have caused a great deal of trouble September would never have been able to explain.

In the following weeks, we will be updating the Museum, filling out the missing audio chapters, and I will be deep in thought planning the sequel. I don't have a release date from Feiwel & Friends yet, but I'm led to believe it will be sooner rather than later.

Thank you to everyone who read and supported this project, who retweeted, posted, boosted the signal. Every member of onaleopard . Who made icons and art. Who loved September and feared for her. Who gave me advice and encouragement. (Particularly alexandraerin , corvaxgirl , and talkstowolves , as well as justbeast , who faithfully created and updated the website all this time.) Who made this particular magic with me. I count us all as Fairyland Family, and make no mistake--what happened between us, in and around Fairyland, was a miracle of no small measure. My gratitude cannot be summed up in a text box. I'll be working on some special treats for you "early adopters" as the print edition nears its birthday.

If you have any questions at this point, any final copyediting notes (I know geek love when I see it), or comments, please feel free to email me. The donation button will stay up and active, as will all chapters, as long as I have a thing to say about it. I'll be posting when we get home (flying out today) about this whole process--many stories to tell.

I would love, now that the story is told, to see some reviews pop up, some discussion of the novel while it still lives only online. It is very hard to get cyberfunded projects reviewed professionally or even by their readers. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them.

Check out crowdfunding for your next serial addiction. I will continue to post fiction online whenever I can.

Thank you so much. You are all my heroes.

*shrugs on a green smoking jacket, straightens hair, and takes a very small bow*

Was awakened at 2 and cannot get back to sleep. Everything is very silent in our room, and my stomach is empty. How I wish the streetside blini stands were 24 hours. Oh my god, streetside blini.

One of the thoughts I kept turning around in my head today was about fantasy literature and the war. WWII is a favorite garden patch for anchoring Western fantasy in historical and moral authority, from Narnia all the way down to Hellboy. It's irritated me in the past, because it seems like a way to infantilize fantasy, to say: look! It's connected to the American idea of the easiest moral choice ever, to go to war against the skull and crossbones brigade! That means it's real, complex literature! And inevitably, those stories that do choose WWII as their adoptive parent show a monochromatic worldview of depressing simplicity. (I'm sure there are exceptions. It's 4 am, this is not a critical piece.)

Now, one of the big set pieces for American and especially British fantasy is the children's evacuation from London. That flight from the horrors of the real world into the pastoral countryside is pretty much the street map for portal fantasy. And yet.

The children of Leningrad were evacuated, too, at least a large number of them (the London evacuation wasn't complete either. Kids are hard to keep track of and for some reason parents are sort of attached.) They were sent out of a urban horror story far worse than the Blitz--and yes, the Blitz sucked, and rationing was hard, but it doesn't even compare to Leningrad and their daily 125 grams of sawdust and turpentine bread, or total lack of power in -38F winter winds, or 60% of the city population dying. No jolly Doctor Who episodes about plucky Leningraders and Captain Jack, you know?

Anyway, they were sent out into...well, it's not pastoral England. But I listened all afternoon to a woman talk about where she went, and it was like a fairy tale. A Russian fairy tale. You know, the kind where you still starve. How the orphans climbed behind the stove and giggled and shared secrets and tried to guess what was cooking by the smell. How they allotted her size 33 boots, and she cried trying to put them on because they were so big, she would never grow big enough to fill them. How she was obsessed with her teacher, who she thought might be a witch, because whenever she woke up in the morning, the teacher already had her clothes on. Whenever she went to bed at night, the teacher still had her clothes on. When did she sleep? Could she take off her clothes? And then how all the children of Leningrad were so determined to stay together, to never loose each other, but now she never talks to the others anymore. (Oddly enough, her orphanage was in Komarova, where Ahkmatova is buried, and which used to be a writers' dacha.)

For me, part of what fantasy does, part of what makes it valuable, is how it can tell a story about the real world in such a way that it jars you out of the endlessly repeated sadnesses of human life and makes you consider it all in another way. How it, mythology and folklore and fantasy, provides a set of narratives through which to see one's own experience, and understand it as part of a much bigger story of the world. Because the world likes to tell stories, the same ones, over and over. The world has fetishes. The world has kinks.

And now, in my heart of hearts, I want to write the book that starts with this other evacuation of children, this shadow-sister to the famous London one. It's a different story, a different starting point that goes to places Narnia doesn't begin to imagine. Again, I struggle with whether I am the person to write it, if it would not be better if my surname were Valentinova. If I maybe don't have the right to put that to paper. But then, I listened to Galina Sergeyevna today, I heard her story and I came to this city and I married into this family with so many war stories. Do I have any more right to write Italian war stories, because I am Italian, though I know no stories of my family during the war? I don't know. All I know is that this someone is sitting at the bottom of me right now, being very quiet and still, little Galina in her size 33 boots, and I look around this city and know I cannot be done writing about it, it is not even possible that I am ready to walk away from it.

Today was intense on many levels.

We walked over what seems like it must be the entire city but in reality was only about 1/5 of it. St. Petersburg is not like other European cities. It has enormous, wide streets that put California to shame, blocks that go on forever, with oddly repeating buildings so that one feels like one is on a loop, and the distances are just vast. I guess there was room enough in Russia not to skimp on the mileage here, but ye gods, my feet are killing me. Not!Leningrad combines the walkability of suburban Ohio with indifferent subway coverage. We have not tried the trolleys yet, as the scale involved only became clear to us today. The maps make it all look so close, but truly, they cajole and lie and make a fool of human hearts. Once you start walking, the city telescopes and all of the sudden you're staring down three miles of long, icy thoroughfare. Oh, look, it's only a block away! MWA HA HA. BLOCK IS INFINITE. CITY MOCKS WESTERNER.

It also started snowing today. Which was beautiful, and soft, and lovely.

We started out at the Anna Ahkmatova museum--now, normally, I hate museums. I am skirting the idea of skipping the Hermitage. I know this makes me a bad person and fit for reviling, but the thing is, museums are dead, enshrined culture, and I would so much rather make my way among the living, tasting and breathing the real and alive city, trying to scry out its heart. I see images online all day. The difference between that and a long white antispetic hall with more images hung on it, often the same images I've seen in other media, is less than you might think. With so little time in any one place, I'm always loathe to spend it in a closed space where I cannot touch anything, or smell anything, or even hear anything, usually. I live enough of my life in a purely visual realm.

But for my darling poetesses I make exceptions. Because it's her house. Where she lived, when she lived here, before the war, before she was evacuated in 1941. My passion for Ahkmatova's work has only grown over the last several years, and sitting in her room, looking out on the golden autumn garden with the first snowflakes drifting down past flitting crows to settle on glistening red rosehips--I had to go. I had to be there. It is an amazing place. I try to imagine it filled with people, with writers making inside jokes and getting drunk and being afraid and giving each other jokey awards and just being kids, the way I and my writerly friends are kids, only Anna and her friends were under a shadow, and most of them were killed, including her husband and son. Everything about Russia seems to start out as a story Americans would find familiar--raconteur writers, dashing, charismatic poetess at the center of it all, city on the verge of war--and then goes to a place so unimaginably awful that even telling the story of what happened here in those days is an act of bloodletting that most westerners avoid entirely.

So after that we went to the Siege of Leningrad museum. Now, there's almost no translation there, but I've seen all those photographs before in my research, and I knew what most of the exhibits were. We saw Tanya Savicheva's diary, and a preserved bread ration which made me feel ill--so tiny, and made with little more than sawdust. But that's what you expect in a museum dedicated to an atrocity committed in wartime.

I didn't know that the guides, the guard, even the coat check woman were all Blockade survivors. (Or as the guard kept calling it: the Affair of Leningrad.) We sat quietly by with Dmitri whispering translation as a PhD student (who turned out to be a fellow Edinburgh University grad) interviewed the guard. She laughed at some of the questions: didn't they teach you about the war in school? I was only a child. Ask the tour guide, she remembers more. Then we followed her to the coat check room, where the woman who remembers the most, having been a teenager, had the day off, and Galina, who was three, and evacuated with the children of Leningrad, told us the very little she remembers, and much more about her orphanage and life bouncing from one family to another after all but her much older sister were killed in the Blockade.

It is very, very hard to keep from crying when those stories are told. When Galina herself teared up talking about the first victory day celebration twenty years later. How she doesn't remember her parents' faces. She was so beautiful and serene, and yet this thing that happened when she was three dominates her entire life.

We walked in the cold after that, down into the impossibly deep subway, where underground, marble pillars and bronze stars shine, polished and bright. Through the streets on Vasilevsky Island, with their sherbet-colored cathedrals and apartments, everything ice-cream and custard colored, yellow and pink and pale green with white piping. We ate solyanka and cabbage and sausage and looked out at the Neva, which is close enough to freezing to have that extra sheen of water that wants to go to ice but can't quite manage it yet. I thought a lot about how much I hate American WWII movies and the whole narrative of that war for us, which ignores so much and rearranges everything else so that it all ends with a lantern-jawed GI hero stomping a cartoonish Hitler single-handedly. American cinema and politics love WWII because it was an easy war for us--the bad guys were nice enough to wear black and twirl their mustaches. It wasn't an easy war here, and people are still living in the same places, the same apartments where it happened. Galina told us that after the war she and her sister just came back and lived in the same apartment. Palimpsests on palimpsests, writing and rewriting a city.

We watched streetdogs all day, handsome black gentlemen, nosing carefully for bones. We watched the night fall suddenly, utterly, and talked about the old days, how they never really end, or begin, but just keep going, forever, like a dark street.

I've been sitting on this news for a really long time, and while I am recuperating from a day of walking all over Not!Leningrad, which is NOT LIKE EUROPE in that it is absurdly enormous, with gargantuan streets and map scales that mock mortal feet, I finally get to announce it. Plain old good news, instead of craziness.

Possible some of you remember the source of the icon in this post. Once upon a time, long ago, I was planning an epic fantasy trilogy based on the myth of Prester John, arising out of my Interfictions 1 story, A Dirge for Prester John. (Speaking of, the IAF Auction to support Interfictions 2 is on now, and there is a wonderful piece based on my PJ story over there. I'll also be reading from the story at the Boston IAF spectakular next Friday at 7:30 at the Lily Pad in Cambridge, accompanied by Brian Slattery's amazing musical troupe!)

I'm deliriously pleased (having nothing to do with the pleasure of being off one's feet) to announce that I've sold the trilogy to Night Shade Books. First book should come out sometime next year.

Which means it finally gets to exist! Yay!

On top of that, my new novella, the California-punk Arthuriana Under In the Mere, is finally in the world and ready for purchase. I need to do a big post on this but I just haven't had the time, hopefully understandably. I'll make my traditional OMGNEWBOOK post when I get back on Tuesday. In the meantime, if you haven't ordered it, hie ye hence, and if you have, the first (reasonably in-depth, not single line) review posted online will receive an Arthurian gift package from me, which will include some original jewelry and other gee gaws.