Known Forms

It will only end in tears. Since I upgraded, I’ve spent the last several hours trying to figure out why the Pages (My Fiction) aren’t linking to anything but the front page. The only help I’ve found isn’t helpful at all (who the hell knows what an .htaccess file is? my ftp software certainly doesn’t recognize it!@$#@!!). I give up. Maybe someday the wordpress gods/assholes will simply fix it and it will all magically reappear. Until then, I’m sick of trying.

edited to add that I now know what an .htaccess file is and it doesn’t matter. Permalinks still don’t work. Wordpress, fix your frickin software!!!

It has come to my attention that this blog has been discovered by some of the academics I work with and report to and there may be some questions about how/why I’m able to spend so much time on fiction when I’m supposed to be spending ALL of my time on the reading and writing necessary to a PhD. Here’s the thing or things. I don’t do the normal time-wasting stuff that others in my cohort and the rest of the world seem to rely on for relaxation. I don’t watch TV, I don’t go out drinking and I can’t do a lot of the social things that take up a LOT of people’s time (I have celiac disease so I can’t and alcohol makes it very clear to me that it is, in fact, a poison). One of the main things I do for fun and to relax (I know, you wouldn’t imagine I find writing relaxing by reading this blog, but I do) is write fiction. So don’t judge my academic work based on some subtractive math about my fiction-writing (in other words, I must not be spending enough time on the academic stuff ’cause I’m wasting time on the writing thing). Part of the reason my papers are so very often publishable (by your standards, profs, not mine) is the fact that I write so much regardless of what kind of writing it is. Also, having an imagination and exercising it often? Priceless.

So I’m finally writing the end of this book and beginning to understand that as long as it has taken, it had to take this long. If I’d written this months (or years!) earlier, it would have been completely different. And probably fine, but that’s not the point. I know things now that I didn’t then. And more to the point, I’m not so scared anymore.

When I began writing this thing years ago, it was the distraction, the pressure valve for the more serious book I was writing (and finished, but stopped sending out too soon because it was too painful because it was too personal or something). This was the book I let myself write as a reward. It isn’t litfic or Serious Enough. It’s scifi/fantasy with a teenage girl protagonist even though it isn’t totally scifi/fantasy and doesn’t fit into YA. It is not the kind of thing a Real Writer writes or takes seriously and it isn’t the kind of book YA editors will take seriously. Yes, I know that’s all total crap now, but that’s not really the point. The point is that at some point, this book became Serious Bizness. It wasn’t the fun book anymore, it was the book that had to say very important things or be very important or something and it stopped a release and started being the problem. I had originally planned on a lesbian protag or at least some fairly queer storyline somewhere, but that got tossed out with the fun. I sucked all of the joy out of my own book, which is as gross as it sounds.

It’s taken me years to get back to where I started and I’m suddenly having fun again and they’re getting to be as gay as they want again and I keep reminding myself that it doesn’t have to be perfect or Terribly Important with a Terribly Important Message. Even though there are so many things different now about the way that things work in this world, it’s strange to watch the big things, the big ending points I had originally imagined yet carefully navigated away from, somehow move themselves (and the entire world of the book) into position to be the place where the book ends up anyway. WTF book? Maybe books have their own destiny.

I’ve started another book that’s a bit more like my short fiction — adult characters, totally batshit crazy, somewhere between this world and another, road movie/on the run from something. Maybe that’s why this book is suddenly so easy or so much fun? Because the new one is suddenly the problem?

This story about the lonely whale kills me.

I’m pretty sure there will be 20 children’s books pitched in the next month about The Loneliest Whale. They’ll probably have happy endings. Bastards!! While the real lonely whale is still out there singing in the North Sea to no one. Well, to a bunch of humans who don’t know how to sing back and who’d want a creepy 4-legged land-walking mammal who can’t really sing to show up anyway? Kind of a WTF moment for that whale. ‘Dude, thanks and everything, but that’s not what I ordered.’

My Dad sent me a link to an amazing review of Patti Smith’s Just Kids that makes me want to buy Just Kids and pretty much everything Elizabeth Hand (the reviewer) has ever written.

I am not dead. Srsly. I have been in the hospital. long story short, don’t get a lumbar puncture. Only if you’re dying. Really. No complications they tell you, not a big deal…yeah, right. Whatever. Never trust an asshole in a lab coat. The lab coat takes off at least 40 IQ points. There’s a reason they feel the need to wear it. Because no one would listen to them otherwise.

Anyway, while I was out, my story was published by Hot Metal Bridge. I don’t know how to describe my joy here without reverting to internet stupidisms, so please read the drunken and possibly naked dance of ‘I rock’ between the lines.

Also, the great and awesome Gwenda Bond posted about it on her masterful blog so more than three people may actually end up reading it! Gwenda also just penned a masterful smackdown of the anti-book yahoos on some site I can’t remember at the moment. Nervous Breakdown? Oh yeah, here it is. She. Rocks. The best part is that she, unlike so many who venture into these treacherous waters, doesn’t fall for the trap of arguing on their turf — the nutball religious turf. Instead she takes them to task for their stodgy, outdated, white guy canonfingering. Wait, that sounds dirty. Because it IS, people!

Today, I woke up to a rejection email that wasn’t, in fact, the rejection I was expecting. I had to read it twice and have my partner read it before I believed that it was actually an acceptance letter.

This was a story I had given up trying to place (although, obviously, I hadn’t quite given up on it or it would have never been submitted – take note struggling writers!). I wrote it five years ago and despite some really lovely and encouraging rejection letters from places as diverse as The Paris Review and Asimov’s, I’d begun to think that it was, like many of my stories, too scifi for litfic and too litfic for scifi. Doomed to wander the no-man’s land between for all eternity.

However, just like the best kind of fairy tale, the wonderful, heroic, and beautiful Hot Metal Bridge decided my little story was just right. So keep your eyes open for “Falling Bodies to Light” by yours truly in an upcoming edition.

The major stumbling block? The bio. Oh how we hates the bio. I think it may take me longer to write than the story itself. *sigh*

Ash, by Malinda Lo, is a fairy tale…I want to say ‘with a twist’, but that makes it sound like too many of the current titles out there that are ‘vampires with a twist’ or ‘Jane Austen with a zombie twist’ and it most certainly doesn’t fall into that category. Although it has elements that will remind you of other fairy tales, it departs from it/them in a way that is wonderfully satisfying. In fact, one of the really beautiful things about this book is the ‘fairy tales’ the characters tell each other and themselves that add to the larger narrative and overall worldbuilding.

I have to admit that I was prejudiced against this book and hadn’t even considered it because the author was an editor/writer for AfterEllen and although this is a site I check pretty much daily, I find it frustrating and downright infuriating at times. But that’s on me and it’s not at all fair because, hello! we all have to make a living. And Lo’s writing in Ash couldn’t be more different than her writing for AfterEllen. Actually, it was Nicola Griffith’s rec that got me to take another look at and ultimately buy it and I’m glad I did. It’s not without its faults — I found the pacing to be the most frustrating thing (the book takes a great deal of time setting up Ash’s story and her involvement with the fairy, Sidhaen, leaving not much time/room for Hunress’s story and the book’s ultimate resolution — I seriously kept checking the jacket with twenty pages to go thinking that the book could never resolve itself in the remaining pages and must have a sequel) — but I can say that I loved it (and seriously, I can find fault with anything I read — I’m a a grad student, that’s my job!). It was beautifully written and imagined and I can’t stop thinking about it. And even though I found it very enjoyable as an adult reader, I, like Nicola, wish that someone had given me a copy of this book when I was a teen or tween. It would have changed my life. And that’s no small thing.

I’m beginning to think the book isn’t broken. I think maybe it’s me that is broken.

I’m thinking about posting several older stories of mine that haven’t (and probably won’t) find a home. Stories that are too weird. Or not weird enough. Stories that are about teen girls having sex (nobody wants that!), young girls getting caught in a war between witches and rabbits, stories that just don’t fit.

No one reads this blog anyway, so it’s pretty much the same thing as printing it out and pasting it on my office wall. Or sending it to friends.

Also, even if I found a home for them, I wouldn’t make a dime anyway so what’s the difference. *G*