Month: June 2010

Eye to eye with germs

Okay, can I just say ewww?

I am not the Howard Hughes of my neighborhood: I shake hands and no one has to wear scrubs and latex to step through my door. But I am becoming less patient with other people’s ick. We were in a doctor’s waiting room the other day with a woman who proudly announced to the receptionist that she was pretty sure she had pneumonia (and she had the cough to back it up), but she had come anyway because it was so hard to get an appointment these days. Everyone else in the room spent the next 15 minutes trying to hold their breath. Why didn’t the receptionist send her home? I have no idea.

I am turning into a curmudgeon. I think things like Turn down your music! and Cover your mouth!, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I have my very own You kids get off my lawn! Clint-Eastwood-movie-moment. Is it possible to be more generally accepting of the fact that we’re all human at the same time as being less tolerant of the particulars? Because that’s where I think I am…

All work and no play…

… is never going to be my plan again.

It’s been great to have a break, and re-entry is going pretty well, partly because I’m finally understanding that work/rest is not a zero-sum game. I know, I know (*shakes head*). But I’ve always been the kind of person who hunkers down, gets stubborn and just works harder, just works more, just gets it done. That turns out to be a great strategy for maintaining straight A’s in the midst of family crisis, or driving 800 miles in a stickshift car with one’s injured and bandaged left foot propped on a box, or nerving oneself up for yet another revision of the screenplay…. but it’s not such a great strategy for long-term everyday life.

And so although re-entry requires that I once again embrace concepts like schedule and priority and portion control (sigh), I’m making damn sure that it holds tight as well to go to the park and watch a movie and drink tea in the sun with a book for 20 minutes. In service of this, I have scheduled my workload — wait for it — one project at a time ( I know! Is that an amazing idea, or what?).

I keep trying to learn this lesson. Let’s see how it plays out this time around.

In Seattle? Get your photo on…

Our fabulous photographer friend Jennifer Durham is currently running a special for individual or family portraits. If you or someone you know is in Seattle, considering giving yourself/them the gift of good pictures of themselves. It’s a great Father’s Day gift as well as a lovely idea for family portraits or special occasions.

Seriously, making people look great in photos is a talent. Jennifer has the ability to make us all look our best: call me vain, but, well, I like looking my best. It’s not that I want the map of my life airbrushed out of my face — I earned those lines and I have mostly liked the journey. But I do want to look like what I think of as myself — I want to see on the outside what I feel myself to be on the inside. Jennifer’s great at that. She took the photo that Nicola uses on Ask Nicola, and I think it looks just like her, outside and inside (and you can see it in the banner over at Jennifer’s special offer.

So. If you’re in town, go get you some of that. It’ll only take 15 minutes, and it will make you feel great.

I’ll be back next week with, you know, conversation (I know, it’s been ages). Enjoy your weekend.

Write-a-thon

The Clarion West Write-a-thon approaches!

The Write-a-thon raises money for CW. It runs in concert with the six weeks of the workshop, and is one of our most important fundraising events. As the chair of CW, a former CW instructor, a Clarion graduate, a writer whose work I hope you enjoy, and the sweetie of a writer whose work I hope you enjoy who is also a Clarion graduate…. well, I really hope that you and every single person you know will choose to support me in this year’s Write-a-thon.

    Here’s how it works:

  • I have promised to write 12,000 words of a YA novel in six weeks. I have been thinking about this for a couple of years: now it’s time!
  • I’ll make progress updates at the CW website and here on my blog.
  • You sponsor me in this goal by visiting my Write-a-thon page and clicking on the PayPal button to make your donation.
  • Spread the link to your friends and ask them to help.
  • Are you a writer? Join us in the Write-a-thon and work for six weeks with an incredibly supportive and cheerful group of folks.

Any amount — any amount — is wonderful. I will be grateful for every single dollar that anyone chooses to give Clarion West. Every dollar helps us make this workshop a supportive, challenging, transformational and potentially life-changing experience for emerging writers of speculative fiction.

And besides — being a Write-a-thon supporter or writer brings you good karma, extra sunshine, and automatically makes you the coolest person in the room. I promise.

Thank you all for your support.

I can haz kindlebook!

The Kindle version of Dangerous Space is now available.

For those who may be new here, Dangerous Space is my short fiction collection that includes a winner of the Astraea Award, two Nebula finalists, three Tiptree Honor List stories, a story adapted for television, and story collected in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. You can read three of the stories here: “Dangerous Space,” “Strings,” and “And Salome Danced.”

I’m very proud of my short work. I hope you enjoy it.

Staycation

— George, look! That nice Kelley Eskridge is back! You know, the one we thought was dead in the desert somewhere and eaten by vultures!
— That’s super, Martha. Pass me the TV guide, will ya?

Nicola and I are entering the third (and final, SIGH) week of our staycation, in which we have gone at most, I think, 10 miles from our own front door at any point. She is completely unplugged from the world, and I am maintaining a very limited online presence for making social arrangements and doing research for my own writing. But no email/work for Sterling Editing or Clarion West or Lambda Literary Foundation or any of the other-things-for-other-people we are involved in.

And it’s great. I like it very much. I’m just stopping by here today because there are a couple of things I want to announce (posts forthcoming) and it didn’t seem right to re-appear with a bang and a flash and then smile mysteriously and zoom away again.

I enjoy my blog. It is for me both a personal pleasure and an artist-obligation. Long unexplained absence from it is almost always a sign of overload, fatigue, a certain head-down-in-the-bunker just-worked-harder coping strategy. These are not good things and I am fucking tired of them. This next week is for reading, writing, thinking, eating, drinking, talking with my sweetie, and coming up with some better strategies.

And I’m closing comments on this post because A) I’m not really here and I don’t actually want to chat (smile), and B) because I don’t want any advice on this. I want this lovely, lovely time to breathe and to find my own path. So watch this space for some news bits, and then look for me in conversation sometime soon. I was going to add I hope, but fuck that. I don’t need hope. I need to make good choices.

But I really am feeling better! And I hope you are well and happy and making good choices too.