“The Poison Gardener”

New story out today, in The Sunday Morning Transport! This one is for subscribers only, but subscribing gets you a story in your inbox every Sunday morning. My contribution this week is “The Poison Gardener”, a vicious little science fantasy piece entirely born out of me thinking poison gardens are cool . . .

In which I take on the old saws of writing advice

Two things make a series, right?

Continuing what I began with The Writer’s Little Book of Naming — in other words, mini ebooks on writing-related topics that I don’t feel are big enough to support a full-size book — today marks the publication of The Writer’s Little Book of Platitudes! This one was sparked by the rants that periodically circulate among writers about how thus-and-such piece of advice is stupid and wrong. Which is true . . . sometimes. This book is me taking on some of the most common soundbites of advice — not the detailed principles, but the short, pithy stuff like “murder your darlings” or “write every day” — to see where it came from, how it can go horribly wrong, what problem it sets out to address, and how to decide whether it’s good advice for you or not.

And, for bonus points, the end of the book has the One True Universal Writing Rule! Guaranteed good for all writers in all situations!

So check it out, and stay tuned for more Writer’s Little Books in the future!

Book read: La Valencia del XVII, Pablo Cisneros

Last year I stopped posting about what I’d been reading because it abruptly became All Research, All the Time for The Sea Beyond, and I couldn’t talk yet about what Alyc and I were working on. Then I could talk about it, but it didn’t make good fodder for the usual “here’s what I’ve been reading” posts, and I didn’t have the time or energy to work through the backlog to do the kinds of individualized book reports I did back in my Onyx Court days.

But this book gets a report, because this is the first time I’ve read an entire book in a language other than English.

Mind you, I wouldn’t give myself full, unadulterated credit. I did rely on Google Lens to check my comprehension of each paragraph after I’d read it, or to assist with sentences I couldn’t quite make sense of. (Some of which I did in fact read correctly the first time, but what they said was so unexpected, I needed verification.) Machine translation also helped a great deal with the quotations of undiluted seventeenth-century Spanish — though after a while I got better at coping with “hazer” and “dexar” and “avía” and “buelta” — and I flat-out needed it for the untranslated Catalan, from which I can pluck out at most fifty percent of the words via cognates.

Still and all, I read this book. On the basis of three years of Spanish classes from ages thirteen to fifteen, a reading comprehension test in graduate school that I passed with an assist from four years of Latin + watching a bunch of familiar movies with their Spanish subtitles running, and a headfirst dive into a Spanish practice app when this series got officially greenlit. I am stupidly proud of myself for doing as well as I did.

And I’m glad I attempted it! In the grand scheme of things, Cisneros is no Liza Picard; he quotes abundantly from the writings of period travelers and Valencian observers, but he doesn’t seem to have gone digging deeply into other kinds of sources or context that might have fleshed out his description in greater detail. It’s all fine and well to tell me what kinds of development was done around the Palacio Real, but I had to look elsewhere to verify my guess that, in the usual absence of the monarch, that was the residence of the viceroy instead. Cisneros is very obviously writing to an audience of fellow Valencians — there’s a constant evocation of “our city” and “our ancestors” — and his goal is mostly to glorify things about the city that date back to the seventeenth century and to describe things that are no longer there. He does acknowledge some of the less-attractive parts, like the rather dingy houses occupied by non-elites or the truly massive amount of interpersonal violence, but he’s not trying to fully explore daily life back then.

Beggars can’t be choosers, though. There’s an astonishing paucity of books in English about daily life in Golden Age Spain — as in, I’ve found a grand total of two, plus one about sailing with the New World treasure fleets — and even in Spanish, it’s hard to find works that focus on Valencia, which is where a significant part of the story will be set. But for every bit where Cisneros goes into stultifying detail on the Baroque renovations of individual churches (almost all of them late enough to be irrelevant to our series), there’s another bit where he tells me exactly which parts of the river embankment will be under construction when our protagonist arrives there, or how Valencians were required to water the streets in the summer to cool off the city and reduce disease, or what now-vanished traditions represent what they did for fun. (At Carneval, they pelted each other with orange skins filled with such delightful stuffings as bran, fat, and the must left over from wine-making. Apparently injuries were not uncommon: he quotes a poem whose title more or less translates to “From a gentleman to the lady who put his eye out with an orange.”)

So this gave me a decent amount of very useful concrete detail that will help Valencia feel like Valencia, not Generic Early Modern European City. It may have taken me weeks to read its 228 pages, because I could only manage about ten pages a day before my brain shorted out and stopped processing any Spanish at all, but in the long run, it was worth it!

Building Cathedrals

I’ve long thought that the closest thing we have to medieval cathedrals is NASA projects (and those of other scientific space agencies). People work on those in the full awareness that they themselves will often be long gone by the time their mission reaches its destination, returns its data. And yet they do it anyway, devoting themselves to a cause that stretches beyond the everyday horizon of today, tomorrow. Just as the cathedral builders of past ages patiently hewed stone, raised walls, framed roofs, knowing they would not live to hear the psalms sung within the sanctuary they built.

The cathedral of a better United States has been under construction since 1776. Its original blueprint was badly flawed. Sometimes its fabric has crumbled, and what was built had to be built again. Very likely, none of us here today will live to see its true completion.

We must keep building it anyway.

We may hope for a victory in two years, in four — but a victory is not, will not be, the victory. We have to think in the longer term. The Republican Party didn’t get to where it is now overnight; it’s the fruit of decades spent working toward their goals, at every level from school boards and city councils on up. Pushing that back, making a truly progressive society, will be the work of more decades.

So we must celebrate the victories as they come, even when they are small. We may say “there is still more work to be done,” because it will be true, but that must not become a mantra of discouragement. We are building a cathedral, one stone at a time. We may not live to see it completed, but the work itself is still worth doing.

Fit for purpose

There is a simple but deep pleasure in finding the right object for your needs.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really ought to get rid of a bunch of my jewelry, because I almost never wear it except when out in Performing Author Mode, and then it tends to be a limited set of possibilities. But a few weeks ago I suddenly lost all patience with the assortment of boxes I was storing my jewelry in — especially my earrings, which were crammed eight to a compartment and I could barely pull a pair out without spilling others everywhere. I went online, discovered the stackable jewelry box layers I’d seen before were now all but impossible to get in the types I wanted and matching colors, got annoyed, browsed some more, found another possibility, ordered it.

Something like two days after it arrived, I ordered a second, because YES THANK YOU I had found the correct jewelry box for the purpose.

And guess what? I’m wearing my jewelry again, even when I’m not leaving the house. Because in transplanting everything from its crowded, insufficient quarters to its new home, I kept going “oh, I forgot about that!” and being delighted to see old friends. (Also getting rid of some stuff that I was deeply unexcited to see.) Now, with everything sorted into different layers so each pair of earrings has its own compartment and so do the pendants and the necklaces are no longer crammed onto three hooks and hey have I ever even worn that bracelet, I can actually see what I have. And get to it easily. Sure, I’ve got a spare lid because I had to order two stackable sets to get enough space for everything — you wouldn’t believe it to look at me in daily life, but I own a lot of jewelry — but it’s worth that slight overshot to make this big of an improvement.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make tea in the Best Mug and then take some more research notes with the Best Fountain Pen. I’ve had a few great instances lately of finding the right object for my needs, and I treasure every one.

website addition: Statement on AI

Since it’s good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I’ve added a statement on AI to my website.

Next task: updating the copyright page in all my BVC ebooks to state that I do not grant permission for them to be used in training AI models, and any such use is prohibited.

Our Toxic Friend

We’ve all got a friend like this.

They used to be great. Always there for you, super helpful whenever you needed a hand with something. They were the friendly gossipmonger, full of news about how friends were doing, and they even got you into some new hobbies and communities where you made a ton of new friends. And in turn, when they had a problem or two, you of course did what you could to help them past it, because they meant so much to you.

But lately . . . that friend hasn’t been so great.

They started getting needier. Calling you at all hours of the day, to the point where you started using caller ID to screen them out, because you just couldn’t deal with it. Then they started emailing you all the time — five, ten, fifty times a day. You bin some of their messages, read others, and a bunch more languish in your inbox because one of these days, when you have some spare time, you’ll get around to them. Even though a lot of what’s in those emails is out of date now, and even more of it was never actually that important in the first place.

If that was all, it would be fine. But lately . . . okay, can we be honest? This is your friend, we don’t want to speak ill of them, and you remember all those good memories from years past. But lately, “not so great” is kind of an understatement. Your friend — our friend, because I have one, too — has gotten toxic.

They’re messaging us constantly, not just in email, not just in texts, but in Slack and Discord and every social media app we’re on. We block what we can, but we can’t stop it entirely, not without abandoning those apps entirely, which means losing touch with the people who aren’t so toxic. We go to text our mother on her birthday but there’s five pop-over notifications from our friend, and we can only see the first few words of each one, so we can’t really tell what they’re about (they might be important?); we have to click through and look at them. Of course they’re mostly trash, as usual, but oh, here’s a cute video they sent, and what was it we were doing? Right, texting our mother. But now our friend is pestering us to say what we think about the gift we got her, and hey, here are some other products we might also like to buy, and they keep doing it even when we tell them to stop. Fliers even show up on our doorstep — how did our friend get our home address? We specifically tried to keep it from them!

Some days our friend refuses to talk to us unless we download this new app they insist on using. We’re not sure why; they swear the app is more convenient for us, but it’s janky and loaded with ads and we have to pay money if we want to be able to scroll back and see the conversation we had last week. Plus now our friend’s messages are showing up out of order, for . . . reasons? Because of course we’d rather hear again about the car accident they got in two years ago, the one where a toddler died, than about the new energy drink that’s helping them lose weight — sorry, no, that was an ad, and now we’ve forgotten what message of theirs we were looking for in the first place. Probably one where they were having yet another problem, and if you stopped to count the hours, you’d realize you’ve spent far more time managing your friend’s issues than they have helping you with yours. Or hey, here’s one where they’re trying to interest us in a new hobby, a new community, but is it just me, or do those people look really sketchy? Every conversation goes slowly, every interaction with this friend is full of distractions and scams and we don’t like to admit it but we’re pretty sure they’re stealing from us when we’re not watching.

We’ve got only two choices, and both of them suck. We can spend seconds, minutes, hours of our one wild and precious life managing our friend’s bullshit, trying to reduce it to a minimum since we can’t get rid of it entirely. Or we can give up on managing it and just let the sea of chaos wash over us, drowning out everything else.

And all around us, people are moaning that they’re such bad friends these days, they have a hard time knowing how to keep up with or interact sensibly with Their Toxic Friend.

It’s not you. It’s your friend. And mine, and that of every other person who hasn’t sworn off all interaction with computer, smart phones, and digital technology.

The tech experience has gotten bad. It’s not you, it’s them.

But we can’t just break up with Our Toxic Friend. Because they’re everywhere in our life, and they’re constantly getting worse.

oops I lied

I thought I was done with publications for the year, but one more has slipped in under the wire! My flash story “Ten Minutes” is free to read online at The Cosmic Background. It’s born of my brain’s invincible impulse to narrate everything, including my own attempts at meditation — which led to me writing a story about meditation! And about something else, but you’ll have to read to find out what . . .

I’m particularly honored by this timing because The Cosmic Background is running a Kickstarter right now, and so the editor chose my piece as one to showcase what the magazine is doing. I’ll note that, very unusually for our field, TCB pays its slush readers — most markets rely on volunteers for that — so this is part of what your money will support if you pledge! Rewards include your very own eldritch horror in the mail, so check out the Kickstarter page and consider kicking a few bucks their way!