Rules for Anchorites

The Wedding, In Which We All Cry A Lot And Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:31:41 GMT

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

Andre Norton Award

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:20:40 GMT

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.

Quote of the Day

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:45:15 GMT

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?

So It Goes

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:46:15 GMT

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.

Everything and Nothing

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:04:45 GMT

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...

Nebula Eligible Stuff

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:38:00 GMT

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.

Rambling

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:47:31 GMT

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.

Two Things

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:25:30 GMT

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.

At Long Last

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:22:24 GMT

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*

Evacuations

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:33:29 GMT

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.

The Affair of Leningrad

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:06:02 GMT

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.

Go East, Young Man

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:17:16 GMT

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.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:54:54 GMT

Well, that's it. One night in St. Petersburg and I'm a little in love.

Trying to squeeze the most out of our reduced time here, we immediately set off walking through the city, stopping to eat pelmeni and my first borscht, as well as coffee and rum and hot wine as the cold got to us. It's only about 30 degrees here tonight, but it goes right through you.

The night was bookended by babushki--grandmas. At the pelmennaya, this amazing old woman sat at her table, right out of every Russian movie you ever saw, with her scarf and all, slurping borscht with almost violent gusto. She then wiped her mouth on both her sleeves and heaved a huge bag over her shoulder before stomping out of the place.

At the last place we went to, a club that has a "Back to the USSR" 80s night on Sunday that WE WILL SO BE GOING TO, another old woman got up and started bumping and grinding on the dancefloor to a techno remix of One Night In Bangkok. Just wow. (Also I note that about half the restaurants in our guide go something like "amazing shashlik, dumplings, fish, great atmosphere, and oh by the way topless waitresses, just saying.")

So we walked over to Gorokhovaya Street, which is where I put my heroine's house in Deathless. I chose the street more or less at random, because I liked the sound, but it turned out to be a fabulous choice, as it's an iconic St. Petersburg street, with beautiful residential buildings, in addition to meaning "pea," and thus connected to "the days of Tsar Gorokh," which is a way of saying "back in the day." So we walked along it, looking at houses that might have been Marya Morevna's, peering through the dark at long, silent, cold canals, and I spent a lot of time reading cyrillic at the approximate speed of a toddler.

The thing is, this city feels so familiar. Part Paris, part freezing version of Rome--and I've been trying to imagine it for so long for the book, that now that I'm here, it all looks so much like I thought it would, and I have such good associations with Russian food, Russian language, even Russian faces. Everyone here has their Very Severe Face on, which is what I normally look like, except that everyone thinks I'm angry if I'm not smiling. But here, I blend! Sort of. Once we were out of the airport, the immediate switch to English upon seeing my face wasn't so bad. And justbeast gets that too, from time to time.

But I love it and we've only seen a slice of it, in the dark. The seaweed coming up out of the black canal, the color of sour cream floating in borscht, the occasional hammer and sickle still topping iron fences, this odd palimpsest of old and new city. I can't wait to see it in the light.

Back in the USSR

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:45:10 GMT

Who's in Saint Petersburg?

WE ARE, BABY!

Everything went smoothly, we got our luggage, are ensconced in our hotel, not even three blocks from the street where I put Marya Morevna's house in Deathless.

We are gonna make these next days count.

So many, many thanks to all of you. See icon like whoa.

Also, apparently it's something of a tourist activity to look for long lines akin to the Soviet days. The guidebook says where to find them. I find this bizarre and hilarious.

Just Wow

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:12:23 GMT

The events of the past two days have been embarrassing and heartbreaking--but also humbling and heart-lifting.

You guys are amazing. The power of the internet for good is astonishing. I had no idea I knew so many people in Germany.

A hundred times thank you for all your support, for rozk 's Facebook group, for charyvna 's superpowered ability to get us a night in this hotel for free, for the Fairyland donations and calls to Expedia. Apparently at some point Expedia stopped needing to be told what the situation was as practically the entire company has heard about it from all of you.

Can you even imagine that? That as a group, in the middle of the night, you can make such a difference.

The update is this: with a little luck, we will be on a plane this afternoon. We have visas and unless something goes really wrong, we'll still have a few days in Russia. (Communal activity for the somewhat ironic win.)

Expedia, to their absolute credit, emailed us this morning and admitted whole heartedly that their agent was at fault. They'll be refunding our trip and offered us a credit toward future travel. That's more than we ever expected, and they really did go out of their way to make it right. I want to especially thank the employee (who asked to remain anonymous) who due to her own honeymoon experiences took a personal interest and made this happen.

Seriously, you should all be proud of yourselves--your collective power is amazing. And your collective kindness towards us. Let this, certainly, be a lesson to all, especially us, not to believe someone just because they are a human being and work for travel specialists. We've had an object lesson and won't forget it--I hope this helps others not to make the same mistake.

Hopefully, all benevolent gods of travel willing, we'll be gawking at cupolas come evening. And holding all of you close in our hearts, our tribe, who never lets us stay in the dark for long.

Fairyland

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:49:51 GMT

Having some free time on our hands, the penultimate Fairyland chapter is up.

Chapter XXI: Did You See Her?

Donations are, as always, appreciated, and especially so right now. I don't feel comfortable putting up a tip jar, but Fairyland has always run on the donation model, so if you feel moved, it is there as it has always been.

There is a Facebook group that's started a phone campaign to Expedia--it's here.

Thank you all for your support. I'll keep you updated.

National Day of Unity??

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:32:47 GMT

This is getting to levels of awful I can't even describe.

We got a visa invitation. All we need is to take it to the Consulate.

Which is closed tomorrow for a holiday. Meaning the earliest we could get to Russia would be Thursday night. Giving us at most three days.

And we're out of money. This has cost more than half of what the whole trip cost, and we've been penalized severely for changing our flight, on top of it all.

Both of us are just sitting here with our heads in our hands. We don't know what to do. We just wanted a honeymoon and now we're stranded, with no money, in a strange country, and fucking Expedia refuses to help us. Do we just turn around and go home? This hotel is so expensive, and we can't afford another night. I just don't know how to Pollyanna this.

Fuck. Everything seems pretty fucking dark right now.

Nothing But Net, Expedia

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:18:32 GMT

I guess you can't have a wedding go as amazingly well as ours did and not pay some kind of cosmic price.

We are currently stranded in Frankfurt, Germany.

When we booked the honeymoon to Russia with Expedia, we were told that we did not need visas.

Did this seem odd to us? Yes. So we called and talked to Expedia in person and were assured that we did not need visas. We had no reason not to believe this information.

Only to arrive in Germany, attempt to board a plane to Russia, and be informed that boy howdy do we need visas.

We have been here for almost six hours, dumping euros into the phone to try to fix this somehow. Because justbeast is fluent and was born in the Ukraine, he managed to talk the Russian consulate into some kind of exception, if we could get a visa letter of support from Expedia.

Who refused.

We found another company to provide one. Theoretically, we spent the night in Frankfurt and pick up our visas at the consulate in the morning (as they are busting their asses over there, with 10 am to 1 pm business hours). Theoretically. Any number of things could still go wrong.

We are both beyond exhausted. We have been traveling for more than 24 hours. We need showers. My legs and feet got all swollen on the plane from not moving. I've cried a little. If I never see the inside of Frankfurt airport again it'll be too soon. And on top of that, we have to pay a truly obscene amount of money for a hotel room tonight, of which Expedia grudgingly agreed to cover less than a third, as they have no documentation of someone telling us we didn't need visas when we did. Funny how you might not write something like that down.

I hope we'll be laughing about this tomorrow. Right now, I ache and just want this Brazil bullshit to end.

But the wedding was so wonderful. I'll post about it, when I'm no longer marooned.

Fairyland will update when and if we get to our hotel. I am sorry--the situation was out of my control.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:00:55 GMT

09:04 Wedding folk: hashtag for the wedding is #beastlybride, upload photos to the pool at: bit.ly/2gCeWl #
09:07 I feel we should have made con tags for this wedding. #
10:53 Hey twitter, how come the flags are at half mast? #
01:04 Oh my god, so much awesome in one night, so many people, so much crazed beauty. Bachelor/ette party for the record books. #beastlybride #
01:17 @justbeast's niece Nika wins Halloween. Came out in Little Mermaid costume, looked at me very solemnly, then took out pair of vampire teeth. #
01:25 #beastlybride The wedding weekend feels like it's going so fast. #