Stories and a sale!

Two stories of mine have come out recently, one while I was out of town, the other not long after I got back:

“In the Paradise of the Pure Land” is a little piece of folkloric flash, inspired by my yōkai research for L5R novels. But you won’t find well-known things like kitsune or tanuki here; instead it’s a tale about a very special karyōbinga . . .

And then at the opposite end of the short story length spectrum, we have the not-quite-novelette “Any Rose My Mother Raised, Any Lane My Father Knows.” I won’t say what exactly it’s based on, but I suspect some of you will tumble to it pretty darn fast.

As for the sale, I am delighted to say that I have sold a poem to Strange Horizons! It took many fewer attempts than with short fiction, even accounting for the fact that SH lets you submit up to six poems at a time. “A War of Words” is likely to be out fairly soon, September or maybe October; I can’t wait.

Let’s do this

I think I was somewhere over Hudson Bay, about thirty-five thousand feet in the air, when I heard the news that Biden had dropped out of the race. I’ve spent the last two weeks on vacation in Europe (more about that later), and I’d really been enjoying the extent to which that put me out of daily engagement with political news; when a flight attendant oh-so-helpfully shared that particular bombshell with me, the bottom dropped out of my stomach, because I thought, this is going to be fucking chaos.

But it’s . . . not, is it? I mean, yes, the racists and the sexists are going to lose their goddamned minds over Harris, and yes, there will be other people who are definitely not racist or sexist but nevertheless find ~other reasons~ to not support Harris. (Maybe she has some emails they can freak out about?) This will be chaos in the sense that the ugliest aspects of America are going to scream their bigotry to the skies. But she has the party establishment behind her, and she has an absolute FLOOD of support from grass-roots donors in the aftermath of the announcement. I think the whole “I’m not excited about this candidate” thing is sometimes overblown — my ideal president is honestly a boringly competent administrator who puts their head down and gets the job done — but it’s true that excitement can get people to the polls who wouldn’t have otherwise gone. And we’re gonna need that to make sure Team Bigotry doesn’t fuck this country over and enshrine the King of Orange to rule over us all, with a compliant Supreme Court behind him.

So, yeah. Let’s fucking DO THIS. Let’s get our first female president into office, not through the GOP trotting out some conservative mannequin to show how much they care about The Ladiez, not through Biden stepping down during his second term (which I honestly thought had a decent chance of happening), but through us actually electing her. Let’s put the female mixed-race prosecutor against the sexist, racist felon. And let’s elect a tidal wave of Democratic candidates into the House, the Senate, the governorships, the mayoralties, everything down to the local dog-catchers, because it’s that patient attention to down-ticket races that has let the GOP build the leverage they needed to screw us all over the way they’ve been doing lately.

And if you don’t have a lot of money to donate — to Harris or to those down-ticket races — or if you do, but in either case if you have free time, consider volunteering with Vote Forward. They work to encourage unregistered and low-propensity voters to engage with an election, and their success rate is pretty damn good. All you need is a printer, envelopes, stamps, and the will and ability to write a brief personal message on each letter. Said message has to be non-partisan, but since we’re at a point where saying “democracy good” is simultaneously non-partisan and anti-Republican, it’s not a tough needle to thread. Let’s get people to the polls.

Possibly of Use: Covixyl

Fifth in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

A friend recently clued me in to the existence of Covixyl, a nasal spray that — as the name suggests — was developed in response to the covid pandemic, but which actually has much broader use. Rather than being a vaccine, it physically binds to the cells in your nasal passages, making them inhospitable to respiratory viruses. Two sprays up each nostril give you up to six hours of protection.

Studies on its effectiveness are still few in number, but they are distinctly encouraging. Even if it’s only a 60% reduction in risk of respiratory infection (which is the number I saw somewhere; can’t find where now), that’s still a lot less risk. About the only downside I know of is that the first ten to twenty seconds after you use it are uhhhh kind of literally eye-watering — this stuff does sting a bit! But it’s fairly affordable: $19 for one bottle, which they estimate will last you a month, or you can get it cheaper if you buy three ($54) or six ($100) bottles at a time.

I’m about to go on vacation, and I’m absolutely bringing this stuff with me. I’ll still be masking in high-risk situations like crowds, but having this as a second line of defense will make me feel a lot more sanguine about being able to enjoy the trip.

Possibly of Use: Diaphragmatic Breathing

Fourth in a series of random posts on things that might be of use to others, with the usual disclaimers that nothing works for everybody.

A few months ago I got a smartwatch, and one of the things it measures is “stress.” Mine, uh. Thinks I’m basically about to explode at all times?

And this isn’t just “okay, yes, I’m under stress.” So is my husband — if anything, more stress than me — and he has the same brand of smartwatch, but it thinks he’s much more chill. So naturally, I wondered what the watch is using as the basis of its evaluation.

Turns out the answer is heart rate variability — which, yes, does appear to be robustly correlated with matters like anxiety and PTSD, along with physical fitness; more fit = better HRV. I do get exercise, and I am not that badly off with anxiety and such, so why is my stress rating so high?

I think I found the answer when I went looking for what can improve HRV. (It doesn’t just reflect your state of mind; there’s evidence that influencing HRV directly can in turn affect how you feel.) One of the most promising answers, where “promising” translates to “something I can try myself at home,” is diaphragmatic breathing, aka belly breathing. When we’re stressed, we tend to tighten our abdomens and breathe more in the upper chest; when we’re relaxed, we breath more from the stomach. Because our brains are gullible chemical sponges, it goes the other way, too: if you deliberately breathe from the diaphragm, you can reduce your feelings of stress, whereas if you breathe from your upper chest, you’ll increase feelings of tension and anxiety.

That much, I already knew. I’d never made a concerted attempt to use that knowledge, though, so I downloaded an app that’s designed for breathing exercises and set it to the timing mentioned in one HRV study, a ten-second in-out cycle, and tried doing that for five or ten minutes. Lo and behold, I can see the stress rating dropping in my smartwatch’s data. Okay, so, yes, this can improve my HRV and thereby reduce the stress metric.

But here’s the real kicker: doing that made me start to notice how I’m breathing throughout my day.

And the answer is, really, really astonishingly badly. It turns out that when I’m focused on something else, I tend to begin breathing very shallowly, and maybe even hold my breath? In small doses that’s fine — quite natural — but if I’m doing that on a regular basis, uh, I think I may know why my smartwatch thinks I’m about to explode. So now my project is to check in with myself periodically and notice if I’ve fallen into that pattern. Over time, I think I can retrain myself to breathe better as a matter of habit. If I’m right, I’ll probably see it reflected in my watch’s data.

But I may — should — also see it reflected in my life. I don’t think I’m super stressed on a psychological level . . . but that’s the kind of thing you quite possibly don’t notice until it’s gone.

more poetry!

You’d be forgiven for thinking I title half my poems in Latin, given “Damnatio Memoriae” and now “Draco Urbis,” which I have just sold to Julia Rios at Worlds of Possibility. I swear, it isn’t true! Okay, yes, I do have two other unsold poems with Latin titles, but I’ve also got more than two dozen that aren’t of that type.

Anyway, this one was a long time coming — at least eighteen years, maybe more, since I don’t remember when I first came up with the idea; that’s just when I created the file that was my abortive attempt to write the concept as a short story before running aground on my lack of plot. And then I also wrote a version of this in a different poetic form, a tanka instead of the mirror cinquain version that’s the one I’ve sold. But I’m very pleased with the result, and I’m looking forward to seeing it published!