I don’t often link to short story reviews. For one thing, they’re a lot less common than novel reviews, and probably play a much smaller role in convincing people to go find the story in question.
But every so often, one pops up that says, yeah, you know that thing you were trying to do with your story? Bullseye.
At least for this reader. (Warning: spoilers for “Kingspeaker.”)
It’s nice to feel, every once in a while, that you’ve hit your target.
Warning: graphic metaphor ahead.
***
I currently have the vivisected body of Part IV lying in front of me. (Figuratively speaking; I’m working with an electronic file, not one of my cover-the-floor-with-paper stunts.) I’ve sliced it open and gone to work moving things around: transplants for a few organs, repairs to others, a bit of experimental reconnection that I’m hoping will work. Generally, I feel good about the changes. Having it lying there all bloody is making me nervous, though, because this revision is due on the 17th, and I’d feel a lot better if I could stitch this part up and get it on its feet again, so it can walk around a bit and tell me if anything isn’t functioning the way it needs to.
I can’t, though, because it doesn’t have a liver. There was one before, but it never worked all that well — just well enough to pass — and I’m pretty sure it can’t handle the load the new transplants will place on it. And while a liver isn’t so vital of an organ that you’ll keel over on the spot if yours is kind of gimpy, it isn’t an appendix, either; we really want one that works. So I need a new liver, and I need it in the next week. And I can’t go stitching up the body until I have one, because I’d just have to cut it apart again to put the thing in, and besides, there’s stuff that needs the liver to run right. Which means I’m increasingly fretting about how much work it’ll take to stitch the body up again, and how frantically I’ll have to work to get that done once I have the damn liver.
Fretting, in case you were wondering, is not good for productivity.
There are other things I can work on, and I’m going to do those, so I don’t have to do them post-liver transplant. But it’s harder than usual to trust my usual work pattern — namely, that the idea will show up by the time I need it. Generally it does, and I know from experience that I’ll get better results if I relax and let the hindbrain do what it has to. Unfortunately, that doesn’t silence the little voice whispering but what will you do if it doesn’t . . . .
I’d feel a lot better if I just had the goddamned liver already.
Dear Brain: I’ve had a stressful year. Please don’t add to it any more than you have to. (And consider very carefully what goes on the “have to” list.)
Off to work, while I wait for the liver to arrive.
This journal will not be all politics, all the time for much longer, I promise you. But when one uncovers a motherlode of good reading, one naturally wishes to share.
Since I only just this cycle started paying any real attention to the details of presidential campaigns, this is the first time I’ve heard of Newsweek‘s “How He Did It” series, which is apparently a long-standing practice. They embed reporters with the various campaigns, but put them under a strict embargo, only releasing their articles after the election is over. The result is an abso-frickin’-lutely fascinating and human look at the road to the White House — not only for the victor, but for his opponents along the way.
Now, I’m sure there’s a certain similarity to VH1’s “Behind the Music” shows — you know, the desire to search out the dramatic “but behind the scenes, everything was falling apart!” moments. Having said that, what I’ve read of the series so far highlights something I find very telling, about the temperaments of Clinton, McCain, and Obama.
I had reasons to like Clinton; I think she could have won the election, though probably not with Obama’s margin of victory, and I don’t think she would have sucked as a president. But my confidence in her ability, I must admit, is much weakened by this account of her campaign: she appears to have had no gift for managing her team. She failed to balance conflicting personalities and bring her fractious underlings into line, and the result, at least for a while, is that nothing effective got done. Ads against Obama were made and then shelved, because nobody could agree on what line they should take. It says elsewhere in the series that candidates are not supposed to micro-manage their campaigns, but I do imagine they’re supposed to provide leadership, and Clinton seems to have failed at that. Which does not inspire confidence in her hypothetical presidency: if she can’t forge consensus out of her campaign team, would she fare any better with her administration?
And then there’s McCain. I’m glad they had fun with their wacky pirate bus road trip, and I’m sure he’s a great guy to hang out with when he’s in the mood, but nothing I read about his temperament makes me think he belongs in the White House. He, too, had trouble getting his people to pull together, and has a really passive-aggressive streak to boot, never firing anybody, but making them so miserable they leave on their own — and then calling them up for advice long after they’re gone. He doesn’t like to listen to advice, and while he may be happy as the scrappy underdog gritting his way to the top, that’s a bad mentality for leading a country that has not been a scrappy underdog for at least a hundred years. I could also say a lot about his selection of Palin — and maybe I will, once I get to the part in the series that discusses it — but even before he made that monumental error in judgment, I just don’t think he was the right guy for the job.
Which brings us, of course, to Obama. It’s been said before, but the things I’m reading in the article reinforce it: the guy is smart, thoughtful, and disciplined. His campaign made its share of errors, but the instructive thing is how they reacted to them. They learned. They adapted. And they worked together. Before the Wright thing started blowing up, they decided they needed to look over all the guy’s sermons for potential sources of trouble, but it never happened. And when it came back to bite them? Axelrod blamed himself for not following up on it. Contrast that with the backbiting in Clinton’s and McCain’s campaigns, where everybody was more than happy to blame somebody else. The difference lies in the individuals, but also in the people in charge, who both chose those individuals, and created the dynamic of their interactions. Obama’s advisers didn’t always agree with each other, and he didn’t always agree with them, but they listened to each other, and examined their own judgment. When discussing VP picks, Obama didn’t want Clinton; the two of them did not get along. But when his advisers gave him a list of reasons why she would be the wrong choice, he kept questioning them on it. Were they sure? It wasn’t him second-guessing; it was him making sure their reasons (and his own) were practical, not personal.
That’s a temperament I want in the White House.
Anyway, I’m not done reading the series yet (and two chapters have yet to be posted), but those thoughts were rattling around in my head and preventing much else from getting done, so I figured I’d get them out. I highly recommend the series; it’s a lot of reading, but very, very good.
Many of you are no doubt making one of two transitions: either you’re cautiously venturing back onto the Internet, having temporarily exiled yourself to avoid all the political talk, or you’re trying to fill the empty hours now that you no longer need to obsessively check all your favorite political websites. Either way, I have something for you!
The new online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies has just put up my short story “Kingspeaker.” This is a Nine Lands piece, and the brainchild of something I read about in one of my folklore classes — surprise!
BCS is publishing two pieces every two weeks; my companion this week is the first part of Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay’s “The Crystal Stair,” which will continue in the next issue. You can also read David Levine’s “Sun Magic, Earth Magic,” Yoon Ha Lee’s “Architectural Constants,” and Chris Willrich’s amusing “The Sword of Loving Kindness,” likewise delivered in two parts. But wait, there’s more! “Architectural Constants” is also being podcasted, and “Kingspeaker” is slated for a later episode. So if you don’t have much time to read, but you do have time to listen, check those out on the website.
[EDIT: At the advice of my commenters, I’m putting in a notice that this is a post about revision, not politics. I’ve apparently given a few people minor heart attacks already, before they got far enough in to figure out what I was talking about.]
I said it all the way back in July: “When in doubt, throw in an assassination attempt.”
Now, the attempt in question ended up being canceled, but I think putting one in elsewhere may in fact be the solution to one of my problems.
Send in a man with a gun. I don’t think I’ll have an actual gun, but the advice still holds. Funny how this whole “learning your craft” thing involves coming around to the basic lessons over and over and over again.
I’m going to get to work on this book, and stop reading political news. Really I am.
Eventually.
In the meantime, check out this map, by way of The Daily Kos:
Red is counties shifting more Republican than in 2004; blue is more Democratic.
Check out how dark Indiana is. That doesn’t mean the state has suddenly become a Democratic stronghold; it just means the vote swung strongly leftward from where it had been (which resulted in it landing almost perfectly balanced in the middle). Virtually the only part of the nation where Republican sentiment gained in strength was Arkansas, stretching into Oklahoma and up through Appalachia. Even chunks of Alaska went more Democratic this time around, some of them quite sharply.
Even Wyoming, which last night had one of the strongest McCain margins of victory, is mostly blue on that map.
The information I’m waiting on, incidentally, for the substantive post I mentioned before, is electorate stats. I’ve seen exit poll data on electorate share for young voters, African-Americans, etc, but a) exit polls are not great data and b) electorate share isn’t that useful metric, since it’s a zero-sum game, where gains in one area must be matched by losses in another. What I want to know is how much the total number of votes cast by each group changed, and what the turnout rate was for each demographic. That’s where the interesting meat is.
Just as a heads-up to interested folks. (No, I haven’t gotten to work yet. Surprise!)
First of all, they’re still counting provisional/absentee/early/etc. votes, so the result is not official. However, it’s highly likely that the measure will pass.
But, its passage in the election isn’t the end. Lawsuits have already been filed. Short form, as I understand it, is that same-sex marriages were recognized in California because the CA Supreme Court ruled that opposing them was unconstitutional. Amending the constitution, according to more educated opinions than mine, doesn’t remove the conflict with Article I. So on legal grounds, the amendment itself may be struck down as unconstitutional. Getting around that would require revising the original text of the constitution, which is much harder to do.
Moreover, as that link points out, the CA justices said back when they made their decision that there were two ways to solve this problem. The easier one was to legalize same-sex marriage. The much, much harder one was to say, “to hell with this; civil unions for everybody, gay or straight.” Which in some ways I’m in favor of: I don’t think what the government says about a relationship and what a given religion says about it should have anything to do with one another. If we could actually push through a terminology change that would recognize the difference, I’d be in favor of it. But (as noted in the comments to that post) this creates a massive inter-state problem, since civil unions are not simply marriage by another name, not under the variety of state laws the U.S. has. So this may be more of a nuclear option than anything else: do all the people who voted for Prop 8 really want to go down that road?
Let’s be pessimistic, though, and say the amendment stands, and the legal fight continues. This analysis lays out the basics of how it would fare in the U.S. Supreme Court. Short form of that one is, this could be the queen sacrifice (no pun intended <g>) that wins the chess game. There’s a strong body of federal law and precedent and so on that can be mobilized to support gay marriage rights, and a Supreme Court decision in that direction would address this question in all fifty states at once. And while we may be worried about conservative justices, conservative or not, they have to respect the implications of the law. kittenrae suggests those implications would, in the end, be in favor of acceptance.
So: while the proposition will likely pass, the results may not be as bad as you fear. And the fallout from here will be interesting to watch.
(Links by way of zellandyne.)
And now I have to disengage my brain from thoughts about modern America and participatory democracy and post-racism and the disintegration of the conservative movement and all that stuff, and go back to thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of seventeenth-century monarchy.
Brain. Hurty.
There are a lot of things to say about last night. Some of them I’ll have to wait on, since I want actual statistics to discuss, rather than exit polls (which are a statistical mess).
But a few scattered thoughts:
I’m glad Jon Stewart was the one to tell me. ^_^ (We were watching Comedy Central’s hour-long coverage special at the time.)
McCain supporters at the concession speech: not cool. Speech good, but I wish he had been a little more energetic in quieting the boos.
Part of me wishes I were still in Indiana, not only so I could be part of flipping that state blue — seriously, the results aren’t finalized, but it looks like it happened! — but so I would have had a real possibility of hopping in the car and driving to Chicago. Because a part of me really wishes I could have been there in Grant Park.
Sadly, my being in California does not appear to have made a difference in Prop 8. But there are already legal battles being prepared; we’ll get rid of that thing, and I hope sooner rather than later.
As moving as the headlines from around the country are, what get me more are the international reactions. Very nearly the entire world was rooting for Obama. And while he’s going to have a four-year uphill battle, trying to fix the many things that have gone wrong, the simple fact of his election is enough to make many nations look more kindly upon us. That alone is worth the weight of the White House in gold.
Now? The real work begins.
I am perversely disappointed that I did not have to wait in line to vote. ^_^
(It’s the advantage of being free to wander in at 10 a.m. Sadly, it is also the advantage of living in an affluent area. That latter point is one that really needs fixing; being poor has enough problems, without also meaning you have to stand in line for six hours due to insufficient voting equipment.)
In a few hours, the polls on the East Coast will open for the 2008 United States election.
You may be tempted to stay home because you believe your candidate’s victory is a foregone conclusion, or because you believe his defeat is. Or because you look at the scale of a presidential election and conclude your vote does not matter. And the further west you live — as I’m realizing, now that I’m in California — the stronger that temptation becomes.
Get out there and vote anyway.
Vote because this is your first chance to elect someone other than a white man into the White House. Or if that isn’t your cup of tea, try one of these.
Vote because you can keep a good representative or senator in office, or dump a bad one.
Vote because you can do the same for governors, state legislators, mayors, judges, town councilmen, and dozens of other local officials.
Vote because you can change the laws of your state, county, or city.
Vote because you can.
One vote alone will probably not decide the next President of the United States. But we’re more than just our head; all the rest of the body matters, too. And you can always make a difference there.
Vote even if they call the race when the East Coast polls close. Even if you have to stand in line. Be a part of this.
I tried kicking in sparring today. Nobody’s really taught me how to kick yet; I just monkey-see-monkey-do my way through it in movement exercises, based on a small amount of education in front and side kicks when I was twelve, and constant reminders to myself not to turn out and/or point my toes.
I am learning to kiai. But I’m still getting chastised for not kiai-ing sometimes, and I’m not sure how to explain those are the times when the rapid-fire neurons in my brain have already figured out I’m not going to connect. (Which is not a reason to swallow it, I suppose. But try telling that to my brain, which so far has only internalized “the punch doesn’t count if you don’t yell while it lands.”)
Not so good: I think I am too dependent on the mirrors. When we do movement exercises, we advance across the floor toward the mirrored wall, but then we turn around and go the other way and unlike every dance studio I’ve been in, there are no mirrors back there. (Though there is a barre. Which convinces me there should be mirrors, dammit.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure my form is better going forward than back, and I don’t think it’s a side issue, since half the things we do alternate sides naturally to begin with. So: dear body, please pay attention to yourself, and don’t depend on the eyeballs to do it for you.
My hip joints hate me. I’m thinking Thanksgiving break will be a good thing: a whole eleven days between rounds of dislocating my legs out of my pelvis. Maybe that will be long enough to get them to stop creaking like this.
Maybe.
Madelyn Dunham just passed away. In all likelihood, she missed by one day the chance to see her grandson elected President of the United States.
I wish I had mailed her a postcard like I meant to, when various political sites posted an address for sending well-wishes to. Because that woman deserves recognition for her role in all of this.
Requiescas in pace, Mrs. Dunham. I wish you could have seen it come to pass.
John Scalzi joked the other day that among the verified miracles of St. Obama is the simple fact that he’s a black man named Barack Hussein Obama who may very well be our next President of the United States. (Also, he not only heals the sick but springs for their copay.)
With all due respect to Mr. Scalzi, that doesn’t quite cover the full extent of the miracle.
There are white supremacist leaders supporting Obama for President.
Esquire did a piece quoting several such leaders — warning, there’s a lot of racist talk on the other side of that link. And certainly not all of them are in favor of a President Obama. But when the Chairman of the American Nazi Pary says things like “White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro,” you really can’t help but feel you’ve entered the Twilight Zone.
That’s how weird of an election we’ve got here, folks. Guys who have made a lifelong hobby out of being racists are finding a way to reconcile that racism with the conviction that the black guy would be a better President. (And not by saying “he’ll screw it up and then everybody will see we were right all along,” either.)
There’s hope for this country yet.
Discussing a recent Podcastle episode over on their forums, and talking about how I end up not enjoying “realism with just a touch of the fantastic” stories as much if I go into them expecting more overt fantasy, I commented that I might appreciate a heads-up in the story intro, telling me what kind of tale I’m about to listen to. And then, because CYA and all that, I said I wasn’t looking for an actual metric or anything, just, y’know, a hint of what to expect.
But screw that. I want a metric! Should it be dragons? One millidragon for your average “is it fantasy or is this person just crazy?” story, one kilodragon for gonzo over-the-top magic everywhere you look. Or to hell with a metric metric; let’s embrace the irrational organization of imperial units and say there are twelve garcia-marquezes to a tolkien, and eight tolkiens to a gygax. Or whatever. Use the comment thread to suggest what our units of magical measurement should be. Show your work. Extra credit for plausible-looking equations.
The inestimable Rose Fox of Publishers Weekly’s Genreville blog is on vacation right now, and I’m one of the guest-bloggers covering for her. So I’m over on their site, being a NaNoWriMo grinch and discussing the pros and cons of various ways to get yourself to produce a novel.
I need to figure out what I’m posting for SF Novelists this month, though.
Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you’re in a heterosexual marriage/relationship (or if you think you might be someday), and you don’t want it “protected” by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.
I don’t think Internet memes change anybody’s mind, but it’s worth taking a moment to publicly announce that I think any consenting adults who love each other one enough to make that kind of commitment should be allowed to do so. I’m glad to live in a state that has granted them the right, and I devoutly hope they still have that right a week from today.
So I went to my ten-year high school reunion last week.
The short form is that there isn’t too much interesting to say; there weren’t any CIA spooks or hired assassins after me, and the whole event was hosted at a club rather than at the school, so Grosse Pointe Blank hijinks were not terribly likely. There were some people there I was glad to see, a bunch more I would have liked to see but didn’t come, and (thanks to the size of my graduating class) a giant crowd of people I wouldn’t have recognized ten years ago, either.
But it does encourage a bit of reflection. I don’t think I’ve changed very much in ten years, you see. Not so much because I’m still invested in who I was in high school — at least I don’t think that’s the case — but rather, I figured out quite a long time ago who I wanted to be after high school. What’s happened since then is, I’ve gotten better at being that person. I liked fantasy novels: my taste in them has improved. I liked certain kinds of art: I have the money to buy nicer examples of it now. I wanted to be a writer: I have three books in print. Music (in the performance sense) has sadly left my life, as has dance, but there’s no sense that I’ve “outgrown” them; the love is still there. I’ve gotten back into fencing. My hair is still long. <g> I’m just better at being me.
I can live with that.
Anybody have exciting high-school reunion stories? Did any of you rush off to reinvent yourselves after you escaped the madhouse?
