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BVC Year-End Sale

I’ve been remiss in advertising this, largely because I’ve had my head buried in the first draft of the next Memoir. (Current word count: 33,191, and Isabella’s brother is endearing himself to me for being the kind of guy who will say things other characters won’t.) BUT! Time has not yet run out, for me or for you!

Book View Cafe is having an ENORMOUS sale right now, continuing through January 1st. I will not attempt to list all the participating titles, because omgwtfbbq there are a lot of them — but Lies and Prophecy is one of them. Since one of the other things eating my head right now is revisions on Chains and Memory, this is a dandy time to pick up the first book, if you haven’t already. Or, y’know, one of the other splendid offerings. Or all of the above! (Now I’m wondering if any crazy person has actually bought every single sale title, just for the heck of it.)

You have a few days left to take advantage of this, though not as many as you might have had my brain not been snack food for my current obligations. Should still be enough time, though. Go forth and enjoy!

A belated Yuletide yay

I must have been a very good Swan this year, because I got two fics in Yuletide: my gift and a treat.

My gift is for the sort of fandom that makes even Yuletide participants say “wow, that’s tiny.” There’s a musical show called Songs for a New World, and the very first time I heard the piece titled “King of the World,” I wanted to know what that guy’s story was.

“the weight of living” is the answer I got, and it achieves that elegant trick of being something I hadn’t even considered before reading the story, that fit beautifully as soon as I saw it. My anonymous writer made the speaker a megapastor televangelist type, and my god does that make sense with the tone of the song. Thank you, Yulemouse, whoever you are!

Then there’s the treat, which is also for a fandom so tiny it essentially doesn’t exist. Sengoku Avengers is a fan-art set that reimagines the Marvel heroes as people in Sengoku-era Japan (think Oda Nobunaga, etc). As I said in my comment to the writer, they had me at the tag “onmyoujutsu.” “The Middle Way” is from the perspective of a young woman who encounters Kaibutsu (the Incredible Hulk: a yin-yang magician who has trapped a demon in his own body) — a woman who knew him before the demon changed him, and can see the man behind the monster.

I reeeeeeeeeeeeeally hope the writer does more in that fandom. This taste is awesome, and I want more. 😀

***

If anybody would like to play the traditional “guess what I wrote for Yuletide” game: I produced four full-length stories this year. All were in different genres; one was for a manga and three for movies. One of the four contains what I consider to be a dead giveaway that I wrote it, though admittedly it probably looks more subtle to people who aren’t me. 🙂 Any guesses?

Sometimes the weather is actually a thing to discuss

I am a solar-powered person, and as such, winter is often a difficult time for me. Not just the short days, but the dreariness: grey skies and — at least theoretically, since I’ve come to live in the Bay Area — frequent rain. It makes me grumpy, and I long for sunny weather.

Of course, this hasn’t been so true of late. Not just that we’re in a drought, and saw almost no rain last winter, but my response to it. A month or two ago my mother asked whether we were still having “beautiful weather” out here. I said that at this point, my notion of “beautiful weather” is a nice steady downpour. Rain is no longer a cause for complaint; I feel like I ought to be grateful for what we get, and (so far, anyway) I am.

We’ve just been through a spate where it feels like the dry spells are things that interrupt the rain, rather than the rainy spells interrupting the dryness. It is, in a word, a godsend, and I hope it continues — though as my husband pointed out, the real question is how much snowfall the Sierra Nevadas are getting. What falls on the Bay Area as a liquid right now is nice, but what falls on the mountains as a solid is what we’ll be using all next summer. I’ve glanced at some sites trying to answer that question, but they’re all geared toward skiers, and I care less about how many lifts are running than about where we stand vis-a-vis the averages for this time of year. I feel like this much rain here must translate to some amount of snow inland, but I don’t really know the weather patterns of the region well enough to be sure.

There’s a storm coming in soon, though, and apparently we’re at risk of flooding because the ground is already saturated. This actually sounds like a good thing to me. (Much better than the kinds of floods Dallas is prone to, where everything runs off because the ground is so dry and hard, and the storm so brief and fierce, that nothing has time to sink in.) It’s a price to pay, of course, but if I have to choose between saturated ground and the winter we had last year, I choose the rain, every time.

Even if the weather does get me down sometimes.

Ten Years Ago Today…

On December 8th, 2004, I sold my first book.

I tend to think of myself as having sold it on November 2nd, which is when I came home to find a message on my answering machine (we still had answering machines back then; it was the Stone Age) from the editor I’d submitted Doppelganger to, asking me to call her back. In reality, that was the moment at which I moved from “maybe someday I’ll sell a book” to “I am going to sell this book, and soon.” But I didn’t have an agent, and Warner Books didn’t buy unagented manuscripts — I’d kind of sneaked Doppelganger in the back door — so the phone call was basically to tell me I should go find an agent, pronto. Which I did: I officially signed on with one November 16th. But the deal wasn’t official until December 8th, ten years ago today.

In the interim, things have gone pretty damn well. I have nine novels out there, and two more within the next year. My books have been translated into several foreign languages. I’ve gotten a World Fantasy Award nomination. I’ve experienced my share of the vagaries in this line of work, but on the whole, I feel confident in calling my career a success. Heck, Doppelganger and its sequel are still in print! That isn’t likely to still be true ten years from their publication — it took about a year and a half to see the first one on the shelf, so the anniversary of that would be April 2016 — but they’ve trucked along in a manner that I will, channeling my Scandosotan ancestors, call “quite respectable.” Everybody tells you to expect your first book to sink like a rock; having mine still out there eight and a half years on is pretty darn pleasing.

In celebration of this day, please tell me what your favorite book is (or favorite author, if picking a single title is impossible), and why!

There is no war in Ba Sing Se

Earlier today on Twitter, Chuck Wendig posted:

Every week, every month, every year, another story, the same story told over again. White police killing unarmed black men. White men on the street killing unarmed black men. Because they thought the black men were armed. Because they felt threatened. Because they were afraid for their lives. Because the black man didn’t obey fast enough, was wearing a hoodie, was playing his music too loud. And time and time again, verdicts handed down that say, that makes sense. Of course you were afraid; of course you killed to protect yourself from the threat that wasn’t there.

I think about what I feel like, as a white woman of less than Amazonian build, walking down the street alone at night. Tensing up just that little bit when I see someone else approaching; tensing up that little bit more when I see that it’s a man. I imagine what it would be like to be a black man, and to tense up that little bit more when I see it’s a police officer. To see such a person as a hazard, rather than an ally if trouble occurs.

An op-ed in the New York Times today said,

Any police department that tolerates such conduct, and whose officers are unable or unwilling to defuse such confrontations without killing people, needs to be reformed.

This is fundamental. When we have riot police on the streets in military gear, SWAT teams burning infants with stun grenades, tanks rolling through suburbia because they’re army surplus and they might as well go somewhere — then something has gone so profoundly wrong I don’t have the words to describe it. When police turn their force against black men who have done nothing to deserve it, I can’t say “something has gone wrong,” because that implies it was ever right to begin with. But this is just a new verse in the same song. From its very founding, the relationship between the United States of America and its black citizens has been wrong. (The relationship between the United States of America and any of its minority citizens.) This country has used every tool at its disposal, from law to money to rhetoric to armed violence, to preserve the imbalance against them. Our steps in the other direction have been too few, too small, too often reversed with steps in the other direction. The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s right there today, tonight, all around us.

We need to reform a lot more than just the police. But the police are a place to start. If we cannot trust them, then we cannot trust anything that follows.

tonight’s writing lesson

Do not end your day’s work with a line like this:

Lord Rossmere was not speaking to inform us, though; all that was prelude to his next statement.

Because when you come back to the text, you will not remember what that next statement was supposed to be. (Possibly I never knew, and that was just me reminding myself to justify the “as you know, Bob” dialogue that precedes it. I haven’t worked on this bit since before my NY/DC trip, so I really don’t recall.)

On the other hand, I am pleased with this line:

I did not say to him that I had kept the information secret precisely to avoid our current situation. First, because it was only true in part; and second, because Tom was stepping firmly on my foot.

Would you believe that Tom was originally a throwaway character invented solely because somebody like Lord Hilford wouldn’t travel alone? The stuff about his working-class origins came later, so that he and Isabella wouldn’t be nonentities to one another. And then I decided, almost on a whim, to have him become an actual colleague, at least to the extent of going to Bayembe with Isabella. Next thing I knew, he was a fixture of the story, and one of my favorite characters in the entire series.

It only looks like we plan this stuff. Half of it happens by accident.

Nerdiness at Kepler’s on Saturday

If you’re in the Bay Area and interested in SF/F, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park is doing an event on Saturday the 15th, with items ranging from a class in how to speak Dothraki to a panel on the topic of which is better: fantasy or SF?

Now, the panelists for this are myself, Ellen Klages, Pat Murphy, and Chaz Brenchley. Ellen and I were talking this past weekend at World Fantasy, and she points out that she knows herself, she knows Pat, and she knows me. And I know Chaz.

This panel is not likely to go according to the description. 😛

I’m not sure whether the plan is for me to brandish a plastic sword at Ellen proclaiming that fantasy is better, while she brandishes a plastic raygun at me proclaiming the supremacy of SF, or whether I’m going to be waving the sword and championing SF while she waves the raygun and champions fantasy. Quite possibly we will do both. Either way, there are likely to be Shenanigans. And plastic weaponry. And a good deal of silliness. We will certainly do our best to be entertaining, regardless. 4 p.m., Menlo Park, be there or never learn the truth of which genre is supreme.

Say Yes to Telekinetic Squirrels!

A while back there was a furor over a YA novel with gay characters, whose authors faced pressure from a potential agent to make him straight (or at least not reveal his orientation until later in the series).

Now, at long last, Stranger (by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith) is out in the world. Since this is fixed in everybody’s mind as the “Yes to Gay YA” book, I feel I should quote from Rachel’s post announcing the book’s release:

But you could just as easily call it “The one with the telekinetic squirrels,” or “The X-Men in the post-apocalyptic Wild West,” or “The one where the sheriff is super-strong, the doctor can speed up time, and the plant life is out to get you.”

{…}

Other points of possible interest: Psychic powers. Luscious food descriptions. Detailed world-building. Hurt-comfort- lots of hurt-comfort. Thrilling battle sequences. Cute animals. Killer crystal trees. Romance in every configuration: gay, straight, lesbian, and poly. Illusion-casting rabbits. Flying cats. And, of course, telekinetic squirrels.

If one or more of those things appeals to you, various buy links are here, and Sherwood discusses their writing process here. I’m going to be ordering it from my local B&N, to help keep it on the shelves — because quite apart from the aforementioned furor, things like this don’t get enough attention in book publishing.

And, y’know: who can pass up telekinetic squirrels?

I have a newfound respect for laundresses

Our washing machine has been on the fritz for a while, and tonight it gave up the ghost — because of course we forgot to turn in a maintenance request before leaving for World Fantasy.

And, of course, it gave up the ghost when it was very full of water and clothes.

So we just spent a chunk of time taking items out, wringing them, and hanging them off every available bar and hook in every single bathroom. This? Turns out to be hard work. Like, seriously hard. I am reminded of the descriptions I’ve seen in history books and historical fiction, where they talk about the laundresses being beefy-armed women. Dude, they would have to be. This was one pretty small load, and all I had to do was wring it, not even shove it around a tub with a stick or anything. It makes you understand why we invented devices like the mangle.

Now I’m going to flop around like a very tired thing. (And I still have to do my PT. Argh.)

Thoughts on Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate

As promised, a follow-up post on the public revelation that Requires Hate and Benjanun Sriduangkaew are the same person, and the material collated by Laura J. Mixon on that topic. This is entirely about my own feelings and opinions on the matter; they’re not statements of fact, though I’ve done my best to be clear what facts I’m basing my feelings and opinions on.

Because naming gets complicated in a discussion of someone with multiple names, my approach has been as follows: I use Winterfox or WF when referring to that specific persona, ditto Requires Hate or RH, ditto Benjanun Sriduangkaew or just Sriduangkaew. (I would like to abbreviate that name as well, but since the initials there are BS, it would have a very unfortunate effect.) When I’m talking about the individual behind all of those personas, I follow Mixon’s lead in calling her RHB, for lack of any better referent.

Some brief prefatory comments follow, before I get to the main points.

(more…)

What a difference an empty seat makes

On the way home from World Fantasy tonight, I had the entire row to myself, all three seats, with my husband in the aisle seat across from me. I took advantage of this space not only to sprawl out and read a sizable chunk of Wolf Hall, but also to get some work done: 1500 words on a proposal for a Sekrit Projekt, and another 2300 on “The Unquiet Grave,” whose title has been hacked down to “Unquiet” for the time being. The only reason I didn’t finish was because my computer was almost out of battery and we were about to land anyway; after I got home and ate dinner, I parked my jet-lagged butt in the chair and knocked out the last 200 words.

So that’s a draft! Not necessarily a good one, but it’s easier to fix a story that exists than one that doesn’t. And it’s nice to write something for which I don’t have to do any research whatsoever: things like that are pretty rare for me these days. I’ll let it sit for a bit and then have some friends pull it to pieces, and then — wonder of wonders — I’ll have something new to send out!

Probably couldn’t have done it without those empty seats, though. It’s amazing, what a difference some elbow room makes.

The Head of H.P. Lovecraft

No, I didn’t win Best Novel. That went to Sofia Samatar, who is richly deserving.

There’s a part of me that had mixed feelings about the prospect of winning the award — not because of anything against the World Fantasy Award in and of itself, but because of the thing that signifies the award: a Gahan Wilson sculpture of the head of H.P. Lovecraft. For starters, he isn’t who I think of when you say “fantasy;” I associate him much more with horror. For another — with all due respect to Mr. Wilson — I find the visual aesthetic of the thing seriously unappealing. But most of all, it’s really kind of offensive.

H.P. Lovecraft was an influential writer: no doubt about that. But he was also a deeply unpleasant person in exactly the ways that we as a genre are trying to get past.

I know there are people who want to keep the award’s design as it is. All the arguments I’ve heard from that side have amounted to “tradition” or “fondness” or something else in that vein. I’ve yet to hear anyone say that people will be hurt by changing the design. But right now, people are being hurt by not changing it. To the point where Sofia Samatar felt obliged to mention this problem in her acceptance speech.

I have a hard time seeing why tradition or fondness should outweigh that.

Had I gotten the award, I would have crossed my fingers that I could say I had received the very last head of H.P. Lovecraft ever handed out as a World Fantasy Award. Honestly, that might be too ambitious of a time-scale; I don’t know whether the WFS could get through the design and production process quickly enough to have it be different for next year. But one of my friends pointed out that they could unveil the new design at next year’s con, and that would make me very happy.

What should it be instead? People have floated lots of suggestions, ranging from the heads of other writers to various symbolic objects. Me, I say throw the doors open: let the community submit designs. We have a wealth of excellent artists among us; let them exercise their collective creativity, let the membership vote to select a shortlist, and then the board can choose the final design. Or make a board shortlist, and the membership votes on the final design. Or whatever. Something that makes the an exciting opportunity for the community, a positive to counteract the negative of the current controversy.

There was a poll at this year’s con, completely informal, to see whether it should be changed. I’m glad to see the WFS taking notice of the issue; I hope we see them take action soon.

links, without commentary

Many of you have probably already seen these elsewhere, but it’s possible I have blog readers not covered by other sources, in which case I do want to do my part in spreading the word.

“Requires Hate” apologizes

Benjanun Sridungkaew apologizes

Laura J. Mixon’s report on Requires Hate/Winterfox/Benjanun Sridungkaew/etc, with documentation of her lengthy history of abusive behavior under the guise of of social justice

I will have more to say about this later. Right now, though, I’m at World Fantasy, without the time and energy to spare that this topic deserves. And even if I weren’t, I’d want to put my thoughts in a separate post, because I think it’s important to make a distinction between what is public knowledge and what is my personal feeling on the matter. Look for that next week.

my #WFC2014 schedule

I have a surprisingly busy weekend ahead of me. My official obligations are as follows:

  • Thursday, 8-8:30 p.m., Regency E&F, Opening Ceremonies. In which I go play the role of World Fantasy Award nominee!
  • Thursday, 8:30 p.m. onward, Ice Cream Social. Okay, this isn’t official as such, but it’s basically the Opening Ceremonies afterparty.
  • Friday, 11-12 p.m., Independence B, Geography and Fantasy. A panel on the ways in which fantasy gets tied in with the landscape (especially cities). I’m on this with Robert Redick, Joshua Palmatier, Max Gladstone, and Siobhan Carroll; that last is a) a friend of mine and b) armed with Actual Scholarly Knowledge on this subject, so it promises to be a pretty awesome panel.
  • Saturday, 8-9 p.m., Washington, The Myriad Faces of Dragons. Naomi Novik is on this panel. How could I pass up the chance to be on it with her?
  • Saturday, 9-10 p.m., Arlington, Book View Cafe group reading. There’s a bunch of us, so it’s going to be a rapid fusillade of storybits!
  • Sunday, 1 p.m. onward, Regency E&F, Awards Banquet. In which I go play the role of extremely nervous World Fantasy Award nominee!

And that’s not counting the various lunches, dinners, meet-up-for-coffees, launch parties, and friends’ readings I have penciled in. The good news is that my mornings are more or less free; the bad news is that, uh, pretty much nothing else is. O_O

But I can’t complain. Every bit of this is something I’m looking forward to!

Here and there (but not everywhere)

Made a haphazard stab at sightseeing in D.C. today. I had only about five hours to spend on it; getting myself to the hotel and then out to the National Mall ate the morning, and at this time of year both the museums and the sun close up shop pretty early. The Mall itself wasn’t putting its best foot forward anyway: this being the off-season, they’re doing returfing projects, there were temporary fences everywhere along with some tents (related to Election Day yesterday? or something else entirely?), the Capitol dome is wrapped in scaffolding, etc. Plus the weather was rather grey. From a photography standpoint, it wasn’t ideal, though I did get some pretty good shots of the Korean War memorial — the trees there had turned red, which harmonized nicely with the metal statues and the dark green ground cover.

But photography was one of only several things I’d come there to do. My top priority was actually research for Chains and Memory. There’s a scene that takes place at the western end of the Mall, so I wandered around Constitution Gardens and the Lincoln Memorial and the bank of the Potomac to fix in my head just how far apart everything is. (Answer: quite.) Then I needed food, and somebody had told me the cafe in the Museum of the American Indian was really good, so I walked more or less the entire bloody length of the Mall just to get a very late lunch — which, to be fair, was worth it. Bison skirt steak with huckleberry reduction, cucumber and some other things I forget in fireweed honey, a truly excellent salad of wild rice with pine nuts and watercress and cranberries and other stuff I couldn’t identify in a apple cider vinaigrette, and then some fry bread to top it off, because how can you not have fry bread?

Wound up spending the rest of my afternoon in that museum, because a) I was there and b) I like anthropological stuff. It’s not at all the kind of museum I expected it to be: I subconsciously assumed there would be galleries devoted to the various geo-cultural areas, i.e. Great Plains and Southwest and so forth, but it’s organized much more around themes. One gallery had to do with the cosmologies of seven different tribes; another was about treaties between the nations and the U.S.; a third discussed how contemporary Native Americans express their identity in the modern world. I don’t think I did the museum justice, but my feet were hurting and I was a little brain-dead; I will have to settle for the value I did get out of it.

I certainly did not do justice to the Mall itself, because I lacked the time and the energy, and the weather was on the dreary side. In tracking how long it took me to get from the north end of the pond in Constitution Gardens to the Lincoln Memorial, I managed to miss the Vietnam Memorial entirely. And I meant to stop at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on my way to food, but thanks to my calorie-deprived state I went right past the place where I should have turned to find it, and by the time I realized that it was much too late to backtrack. But given how many other things I missed in the area — e.g. every museum save the one — it isn’t like I can check “see the National Mall” off my bucket list anyway. I’ll be back some day, and then I’ll see at least a portion of the things I missed this time.

And now, World Fantasy!

why I hate the dress shoe industry

A while ago I posted about needing new dress shoes. A lot of you gave helpful feedback, whether on LJ, on DW, or by email, and I was optimistic for the future.

Then I actually tried to get some shoes.

Really, I should have started this hunt way sooner — and with that in mind, I’m going to continue the hunt, because the shoes I bought for my immediate purpose meet basically none of my initial criteria. The heels are too high, they have no padding, they have no arch support. They’re just the best I was able to obtain on short notice. The shoes I found that might have worked weren’t available in my size, or couldn’t be obtained in time (one site has no shipping option faster than 10 business days — wtf). But this rant is about something bigger.

This rant is about the dress shoe industry basically telling me to go to hell.

ME: I would like a pair of heels that are not an ergonomic disaster.
INDUSTRY: I suppose I can help you. Here, have a small selection of shoes with padding and arch support and heels of less than two inches. They are very suitable to wear to work.
ME: No, I need something dressy. Evening wear shoes, not business shoes.
INDUSTRY: Oooh! We have those! You can enjoy a wide selection of beautifully designed platforms and wedges and stilettos, with heels ranging from three inches up.
ME: Did you forget my first criteria? I want dressy shoes without insanely high heels.
INDUSTRY: Three inches isn’t insane.
ME: Yes, it is. Look, I don’t want to argue; just give me the kind of shoe I’m looking for.
INDUSTRY: They don’t exist.
ME: What? Why not?
INDUSTRY: Because fuck you, that’s why. If you want to look fancy, then you have to pay the price. You have to be unstable, incapable of walking quickly, and in pain by the end of the evening. Those are the rules.

There are exceptions — a very, very, very small number of them, in the grand scheme of things. But on the whole, the dress shoe industry is flat-out uninterested in letting women look nice and take care of their feet. The shoes that are comfortable are also sensible, in the aesthetic meaning of that word. Even though there’s no reason you can’t design an attractively strappy shoe with a heel of, say, an inch and a half. Even though there’s no reason you can’t build a small amount of padding into the sole of something other than a sedate pump. We live in a world where anything less than two and a half inches is a “low heel,” and the three-inch mark is treated as the median. Never mind the detrimental health effects of wearing shoes like that on a regular basis: as a woman, you can wear good shoes, or you can look nice, but you can’t do both at once. (And god help you if you decide to flip the bird to the notion of “looking nice.”)

Ten minutes at DSW and I wanted to light the entire dress shoe section on fire. I ended up walking out with a pair of not-too-expensive heels that have no padding or arch support, but do unexpectedly offer ankle support — not by intent, I imagine, but simply because they have a decorative bit that laces up. These are not the shoes I want; they are not the dressy black heels I can wear with many outfits for the next ten years. I’m going to have to keep searching for those. But I can’t say I’m very enthusiastic about the hunt, because the industry has zero interest in providing me with what I want.

links for the fighty types

These have been piling up for a while, so I might as well put them all in one post:

In the line of fire

On Friday I hit a tipping point and posted about #GamerGate.

I spent a while thinking about it before I wrote that post: not so much what I was going to say (I’d had that taking shape in my head for a while), but whether I should say it. The internal conversation went something like this:

OUTRAGED BRAIN: Aaaaaaaugh must rant.
NERVOUS BRAIN: . . . do we really want to jump into that pit?
OUTRAGED BRAIN: But if we don’t, we’re part of the problem!
NERVOUS BRAIN: Yeah, but we might get trolls coming after us.
OUTRAGED BRAIN: Honey, our microphone ain’t that big. Nobody will notice.
NERVOUS BRAIN: They will if we use the hashtag.
OUTRAGED BRAIN: So? We’re still nobodies in the grand scheme of things. How bad could it get?
NERVOUS BRAIN: The answer to that question is exactly what I’m afraid of.
OUTRAGED BRAIN: What, you think somebody’s going to bother doxxing us?
NERVOUS BRAIN: No. But what if they do.
OUTRAGED BRAIN: You realize this is exactly what they want — to frighten us into silence.
NERVOUS BRAIN: . . . .

And lo, I posed, and lo, I attracted some Twitter trolls. I responded to a few of them, not because I thought it would do any good with that specific person — at least a couple were almost certainly sockpuppets — but because it might do some good with people reading the conversation. Even then, though, I set some ground rules for myself: I’d give people maybe three or five chances to say anything of use, and if they didn’t (or if they set me off faster than that), I’d mute them.

Some of them didn’t even really merit that much consideration. But like I said, having the conversation in public might do some good, and since I haven’t been involved in this (or any major internet altercation) very much, I have the emotional resources to engage, at least for now. I can see, though, how that would change very fast: even dealing with the limited response I got ate most of my morning, and had things gotten scarier than they did, it would have drained me in no time flat.

Which is to say: the tactics work. Unfortunately. Even while I’m laughing at their transparency, they’re still eating away at me. And this is when I’m wandering around in the shallow end. I don’t know how people do it, the Anita Sarkeesians of the world, the ones who are on the front lines of this crap for an extended period of time. I hope I never find out firsthand — and yet, it’s possible that someday I will, because see the conversation above. I do not want to let fear for what might happen stop me from saying what I need to.

in honor of the season, I give you: Monstrous Beauty

Some years ago, my brain got stuck in a certain gear and cranked out seven rather dark fairy-tale retellings. In this brave new world of ebooks, it is quite easy for me to put them together for your Halloween delectation:

Brennan-MonstrousBeauty200x300

It may be purchased from one (or more!) of the following fine retailers:

(I do hope to get it up in iTunes before long, but the roadblocks they put in the way make that difficult.)

Edited to add: Sorry, this was meant to go up at 1 p.m. rather than 1 a.m., which would have given Barnes and Noble time to fix whatever is currently borked about their system — they’re not listing Monstrous Beauty for sale yet, and their back end is down so I can’t attempt to figure out why (which possibly is why). The Amazon links were broken just because of a c&p error; sorry about that. They should be okay now.

a quaint twentieth-century concept

My husband and I reached a point a while ago where we ought to start thinking about doing something more useful with our savings than letting them sit in a savings account. After much procrastination, we finally went to see an investment advisor to talk about our options.

During that meeting, one of the things he asked us was when we expected to retire. I forget what my husband said; my reply was basically that so long as I am healthy enough to write, and continuing to earn money by doing so, I see no reason to stop.

What I did not say to him: I don’t think I believe in retirement anymore.

I have a dreadful suspicion that fifty years from now, “retirement” is going to be seen as a quaint twentieth-century concept, an unusual social construct that existed for a little while and then went away again. There will be no retirement; there will only be dying or reaching a point where you are no longer able to work. If you’re lucky, you’ll have enough money to more or less support yourself when that latter point comes. If you aren’t . . . and a lot of people won’t be. I have far too many friends with no savings and too much debt — college- and even grad-school-educated friends who can’t find jobs worthy of their qualifications, who work at what they can get to make ends meet but god help them if one thing goes wrong. There’s no “retirement” when you can barely afford a nest, let alone put together a nest egg.

I’d like to be wrong. I’d like to see this country, and a lot of others around the world, reverse the current trend toward wealth stratification that leaves 1% with obscene amounts of money and 99% with a life plan straight out of the nineteenth century. I don’t really plan to retire, but I’d like it to be a thing people can still do when I get to that age.

In the meanwhile, I will save money, invest it wisely, and count my lucky stars that I’m in a position to try.