shadesong:
Here, We Cross is orderable, and now I can tell you about it!

In rose_lemberg's words: ""Here, We Cross" collects twenty-two queer and genderfluid poems from the digital pages of Stone Telling magazine. This chapbook is a celebration of speculative poetry that is diverse and varied; here you will find poems with speakers or protagonists who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, genderqueer, trans*, asexual, and neutrois; speakers who struggle with the body and the society’s imposed readings of that body. It is a painful book, a triumphant book, full of works that soar and breathe and live. Just like us."

"The Changeling's Lament" is reprinted here, with 21 other poems by such luminaries as tithenai, sovay, cafenowhere, samhenderson, alankria, alexa_seidel, domparisien, ajodasso, snakey, and many more, and you should go forth and acquire it.

In other news, I'll be reading, signing, and Q&Aing at Annie's Book Stop in Worcester the evening of Thursday, August 16. This is the day before my Guest of Awesome stint at nearby PiCon. You should totally come to both! (Many thanks to p_m_cryan and novelfriend for having me!)

Okay! More coffee.

theferrett:

My Uncle Tommy’s blood didn’t clot very well, a disease known as hemophilia, so blood pooled up in his joints.  It ate away his cartilage.  Near the end of his life, when he moved his elbow, you could hear the bones rubbing against each other whisper-thin, like two dry crackers ground together.

So he walked slow.

So I walked slow.

To this day, Gini tells me I amble glacially – because I’m used to quietly keeping Tommy’s pace, not wanting to upset him.  Oh, I could have jogged on ahead; not that Tommy would have been devastated, as I was basically his son and he would have forgiven me the world.

But he had enough reminders that he was broken and frail.  He didn’t need another one from me.  So I crept at his pace, which only got slower as the years went by, and we passed the time as two humans.

This is what you do when you have a friend who’s disabled.

Let’s be blatantly honest and say that having disabled friends is often an inconvenience verging on annoyance.  They can’t get up stairs.  They cancel at the last minute because of unpredictable sicknesses.  There’s more planning to be find the right restaurant because of their diet.

If you think it’s an inconvenience to you, imagine how it feels to them.

Every day, the world wakes up and punches your pals in the fucking face, telling them “Hey, you know all those things you want to do?  You can’t.”

You can choose to be one of those blows.  Or you can be understanding and loving and help them to live a better life.

It’s that fucking simple.

They live in a smaller world because of something they don’t have control over.  I think a good friend will take that into account, and tread that fine line between “Yes, it’s an inconvenience and you may not always be able to come along” with a lot of love and understanding and bold attempts to make room for your friend because yes, they have a condition and it deserves to be accommodated whenever possible.

Because when you are that sick, you notice the way people cancel plans with you.  The way they quietly stop inviting you to parties.  The way you don’t defend them when other, healthier people, complain that they shouldn’t have to deal with your issues.

They’re sick, not stupid, and they feel their excision from your life as keenly as a cut.  One more cut in a life filled with them.

I’m not saying I was saccharine-sweet to Tommy.  I acknowledged the difficulty of his disabledness from time to time, because we were loving humans and that means being honest.  But I never made a big deal about the way we had to get to concerts half an hour early so he could get to his seat, or how we had to stay an hour late because the crowds might bump him too hard.

Instead, I used that extra time to talk to him, companionably walking at his cane-pace, as friends.  He must have noticed that his hyperactive teenaged nephew was walking slow.

But for a time, he had the ability to live his life as though nothing was wrong with him. And that was the greatest gift I could give him.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/212382.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

shadesong:
Adam had a doctor appointment this morning and ended up taking the day off. (His diabetes continues to be under control, and he lost a few more pounds! Yay Adam!) And the requires-signature package we were told to expect (by FedEx, not the sender) came early, so after I paid the bills, Adam and I were able to run to Target for three-shelf bookcases (I've given up on finding a two-shelf bookcase, and no one but me goes into the craft room anyway, so it doesn't have to match) and a few other necessities and Home Depot for more paint.

For those keeping track:
* Living room = Grassy Field
* Foyer, stairway, hallway, soon to be kitchen: Caribe
* Soon to be bedroom: Butterfly Garden
* Soon to be office: Sparrow

If I have leftover Butterfly Garden, I may use it in the craft room. Or I may go for something wacky in there, I dunno. It has lots of windows (it's a sunroom), so it'll still be bright.

I have no idea what to do about the dining room; right now it's peach above the wooden chair rail and hospital-ick green (the original color of the living room, foyer, and stairway) below. It'll have to be something that works well with the Grassy Field and Caribe, as it borders the living room and kitchen. We'll see.

But yes, this is a DO ALL THE THINGS day. Adam's finishing up bookcase #1, and then I can get started shelving. The only six boxes that remain packed are books. This can get done today.

EDIT: This can't get done today, because three book boxes = two bookcases, so the remaining three book boxes > the remaining one bookcase. *sigh* BUT PROGRESS.

theferrett:

Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I will be attending the Nebula Awards this weekend, where I will be the happiest loser in the world.  When they say it’s an honor just to be nominated… boy, they’re not kidding.

In any case, if you happen to be in Washington DC this weekend and would like to see a weasel, there are several places at which you can catch me:

I’ll be at the Mass Autograph Signing from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., signing copies of my latest book.  What’s that, Ferrett? you ask.  You don’t have a book yet, you exclaim.  Oh, but I do, thanks to fellow nominee Nancy Fulda, who has created the Awards Weekend Collector’s Edition, which features works by eleven authors who will be at the Nebula weekend.  I’ll have it, I can sign it, and if you’re quite lucky you can get a full run and have all eleven authors put their name on it.

(My story in there is “As Below, So Above,” my generational tale told from the perspective of the monsters in a mad scientist’s moat.  Read it in advance, and I’ll even draw a squid for you.)

(And while you’re at it, read Nancy’s Nebula- and Hugo-nominated story “Movement,” a tale of future autism that is a fascinating exercise in tone.  I nominated it, and am glad to see my tastes vindicated.)

(And while you’re extra at-it, note that I am currently in search of an agent for my book, so if you’re interested… call me!)

At 1:00 on Saturday, I’ll be on the “Watch That Step!” panel with Tom Crosshill, Nancy Fulda, Ellen Kushner, and Rachel Swirsky, where I’ll be discussing pacing in stories.  This oughtta be interesting, because my pacing is usually pretty reflexive – you kind of develop a sense of fast and slow after writing blog entries for, I dunno, a decade.  So discussions will be had.

And if you feel like hanging out and you’re a press type, I’ll be available for interviews at 3:00 on Friday.  I suspect strongly I’ll be hanging out in an empty room twiddling my thumbs, but should a reporter show up I will perk up nicely and answer all available questions on squids and space stations that I can.

Also, if we’ve met before, feel free to text me – or email me at theferrett@theferrett.com to get my phone number so we can coordinate drinks.  We shall see what happens.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/212100.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

yendi:
The Avengers started because of "the imagination of one man -- Stan Lee."

Thanks to CNN, I now know that all that stuff I thought I knew about Kirby was wrong. Yay, journalism!

shadesong:
Originally posted by samhenderson at How to Flirt in Fairyland and The Moment of Change

theferrett:

I have a weekly date with Kara, which is a little weird, because we’ve never met.  Or even talked. Yet every Sunday, we watch Game of Thrones together and text snarky observations to each other, and this time is inviolable as my weekly date with Bec.  (It helps that I’m curled up on Gini’s lap, sharing the greatest hits.)

The weird thing about Game of Thrones is how some people stand out because of the actors.  Honestly, I never paid attention to Littlefinger in the book – which is a trick, because we see all of his plots and discussions, know who he talks to, and yet somehow I keep forgetting that he’s pulling most of the strings in Westeros.

Yet in the series, Baelish is such a screen force that they give him extra time to masturbate on-camera.  Thus are the delights of HBO.

That said, Jon Snow was one of the big guns in the book series, yet on screen he comes off as petulant and ignorant.  Part of that’s the age shift, where Jon Snow’s four years older and as such he’s having an on-schedule adolescent rebellion during his sophomore year in college.  But part of it is that the actor who plays him has a confused face and this unfortunate pube mustache, and so much of the inner dialogue that highlight’s Jon Snow’s maturity is lost.

Baelish: Win.  Jon Snow: Loss.

Likewise, Tywin Lannister is a strangely likeable figure in the series, not quite fatherly but rewarding intelligence and cunning… Which few do.  I could just watch “The Tywin and Arya show” all week, because I love the subtle interplay between the two of them.  And so what if Tywin should have recognized Arya by now?  Who’s to say he hasn’t, and is just playing it far better than his idiot grandson?

Whereas I barely remembered Theon Greyjoy from the book aside from him as a plot device, but the actor who’s portrayed him has made him wonderfully craven and snivelling.  Which is a wonderful talent, because you’d think Joffrey would have sewn up that particular avenue, but there’s something about Theon’s insecurity that just trumps Joffrey’s boiling arrogance.

Daenarys, however, is dropping for me.  She used to be strong, and now she’s just sort of whiny.  “Give me what I want, or I’ll…. pout!  And be poutier.  Say, did I mention I’m the Mother of Dragons?”  She had a nice moment of dry realization with whats-his-butt, but then was back to “Give me because I said!”

(This is a rare case of the books and the TV series intersecting, because I got fed up with her antics around [book X] and decided, dragons or no, I’d be happy if she got axed.)

It’s kind of fascinating.  I mean, Tyrion’s always been the star, but I suspect the fan base is different among the books-only fans and the series-only fans just because of the magnetic pull of the actors.  Some do better in translation, others do worse.

Meanwhile, I’m rooting for Stannis.  He’s a dry, humorless fuck, but he’s at least vaguely competent.  He might not fuck up the kingdom too badly if he wins.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/211738.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

shadesong:
Still low-energy and recovering, but still alive. My accomplishments today: my first walk since coming down sick on May 1, and a shower. Livin' large. My body is uncertain about the walk being a good idea, but I'm sure it'll come around eventually.

Elayna yesterday: "Happy Mother's Day even though I'm sick and you didn't get any gifts." Aw kid. Yes, she's down with it now. Judah had it last week, and Adam's done with it, so at least this'll be the end of this particular ick in the household - and at least she wasn't sick on SAT day!

Mother's Day shopping was apparently a comedy of errors. She tried to get me the "Shut Up, Shinji" t-shirt that Topato must've only been offering for like a month. So no gift from her, as she has to choose something currently available. But I love that she wanted to get me that. Adam ordered me a book, but then got the inter-library loan pickup notice on that selfsame book (he mostly picks up my library books, because the library is on his way home). I also use my wishlist as a remember-to-request-this-from-the-library list. I read fast and don't have money. So.

Judah made me GF s'mores pancakes and the breakfast potatoes I love; the guys suggested brunch out, but Judah's food is better than any restaurant food, plus my house is less crowded than a restaurant and I don't have to wear shoes. Also, on Saturday, Judah painted the rest of the stairwell and upstairs hallway. So I regard this as a pretty good Mother's Day weekend regardless.

Right. Enough internet procrastination. I should (hopefully, brain permitting) get to writing.

yendi:
Okay, after three episodes, I've given up all hope on the wretched Ultimate Spider-Man series. It's appallingly awful, manages to be ludicrously untrue to the characters, and has no idea how to pull off good fantasy sequences. Literally, the only thing good about the show is the occasional remix of the old Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends at the end (in fact, both DC and Marvel are doing a great job with shorts, but that's a topic for another post).

Between this and Krypto the Super-Dog, can we agree that anointing Paul Dini with a "genius" tag for creating one awesome update of an Infinity Inc villain and a few (admittedly awesome) Tiny Toons and Freakazoid scripts was a little premature?

And no, that doesn't mean Dini's a hack or untalented. Just that we seem to have a habit of deciding that one great work (or a handful) puts someone on a pedestal (it's a cult of personality thing not dissimilar from the genre/geek fetishization discussed here). Very few artists (in any field) never release a mediocre work. There's nothing wrong with that, but too often, folks seem to either assume a creator must be perfect (and how dare you criticize that later work, because that first one makes them bulletproof), or a sense of stunned shock that such a genius could have fallen.

It's not just Dini, of course; Neil Gaiman could have stopped writing comics last millennium, and no one would lump Sandman and Miracleman in with 1602 and The Eternals. Alan Moore's been ludicrously inconstant for his entire career, but works like Necronomicon are so masturbatorily awful that I want to walk into the store and paste "Alan Smithee" over his name.

And it happens in every medium -- witness Joseph Heller's final six novels, none of which were even in the same league as Catch-22. None of them, of course, make Catch-22 any less of a great novel. Hell, Orson Scott Card's willingness to keep going back to the Enderverse (assuming he's not just letting his "co-authors" do all the work these days) to the point of literary strip-mining doesn't make Ender's Game any less of a novel than his ludicrously reactionary columns do.

We (as fans, readers, critics, whatever) love to hail artists as geniuses, but we forget that A) even geniuses make mistakes, B) a great work can come from someone who is merely "talented," and C) and, of course, many such works come from more than one person: editors, cinematographers, musicians, and others affect works, too.

tl;dr Ultimate Spider-Man continues the Marvel streak of less-than-stellar cartoons.

theferrett:

The book was published in 2010, and purported to be about the distant future.  And yet its opening chapter was based on a premise that wouldn’t have flown in 1995.

The book was about an antiques dealer, sitting at his desk, when a customer came in with some effects from a dead celebrity.  The antiques dealer had not heard of said celebrity, and as such told the woman that these items weren’t worth much.  As it turns out, the dealer “doesn’t get out much,” and the celebrity was in fact very big news in certain circles, and was later called upon the carpet by his boss.

Note what did not happen in this crazy future-world: not one fucking Google search.

Back when I was editing for StarCityGames, I’d get articles by people I’d never heard of.  And even as scattershot as SCG’s editorial focus was back then, I Yahoo-searched every name to make sure they hadn’t won a Pro Tour or something.  Sometimes they had, and that saved me much embarrassment.

So what we have is someone presented as a competent employee, who doesn’t think to type a name into a goddamned computer.  Which is a social failure on the part of the author, who also references a lot of old-school printouts and books hanging around in a future rife with AIs that can talk and evolve.  Won’t e-books and bookmarks have consumed those wholesale by then?

I don’t think that it’s that she’s bad at writing (the book’s quite fun otherwise!), but that she’s so busy envisioning a future where black holes and time travel matter that she’s accidentally skimming over the very changes to society that technology has wrought right now.

As a science fiction author, that vexes me.  I think it’s our job to look at how technology changes people, and part of that has to be looking at the society that we’re becoming.  Facebook is causing all sorts of havoc in the college field, because you have some sleazy hookup with someone, and wham!  Tomorrow, an embarrassing friends’ request.  That person’s now connected with you, a part of your life in a way you didn’t necessarily want but would now be a dick to refuse.

Things teenagers say are now amplified in weird ways.  Drama spirals out of control so much quicker when it’s all in the public arena, dogpiles of crazy waiting to happen.  Dumb photographs you took when you were fifteen now lurks in your Facebook archives, waiting to be revealed by employers at the worst possible moments.  And always, always there’s the possibility of your idiocy going viral, where in the blink of an eye your fun weekend project becomes the next Rebecca Black.

As people who are looking at the future, we need to examine that, and extrapolate, and figure out where all of this enmeshing of society goes.  Maybe that’s a part of my history, because at the age of 25 I started writing crazy sex stories that opened up my personal life, and twenty years later that’s such a part of my identity I can’t imagine what it would be like to not be a blogger.  But the choices I made when I was young, dumb, and full of cum are still influencing my life years later in massive ways I could not have anticipated…

…and that’s the future.  This having every word on the record.  This me, changing the details of the book so I’m not calling out another author in public, because I don’t want to start a flame war with someone whose book I think is otherwise quite good.

This is the new society we live in, where all information is just a touch away, and I think as authors we need to examine that warp and weft of our fabric more closely.  To figure out how our culture will either adjust to this craziness, or to figure out how we’ll start to bend the rules so that it becomes healthier for everyone.

Either’s okay.  My first pro-published story, Camera Obscured, is all about a boy trapped in the web of social media.  Sauerkraut Station is about a lonely girl who’s too far from the social networks, but note that there’s at least a nod to the expense of sending emails.  I’m not saying they’re works of genius, but they’re at least making concessions to the future that’s spinning off of today’s headlines.

I think the singularity is coming, but it’s not what you think.  I think it’s going to be a hideous snarl of concentration-shattering advertising and reptile-brain attention grabs and selfishness ego-shouting, and when it comes it’s going to shred us apart because the corporations will have learned how to pander to our worst desires out to three significant digits.

That’s my vision.  Yours will be different.  But please.  Apply a little thought to what’s going on now, and don’t just have the next generation of people be just like us.  They will have a lot of similarities.  But they’re growing up in science fiction now, so honor that by viewing it through a lens that is flexing and distorting as you read these words.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/211539.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.