Category: blog

Beyond Binary

I’m delighted to announce that my novella “Eye of the Storm” will be included in the anthology Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, from Lethe Press in May 2012. Many thanks to editor Brit Mandelo for including “Storm”: it’s one of my favorite stories and I will be happy to see it swing-dance with other genderqueer fiction. It’s in extremely good company, and I’m very pleased indeed.

Edited to add: Just to be clear, this is a reprint anthology, so those who have read Dangerous Space will have read this story. But in that case, buy the antho for all the other great stories!

Table of Contents:

“Sea of Cortez” by Sandra McDonald
“Eye of the Storm” by Kelley Eskridge
“Fisherman” by Nalo Hopkinson
“Pirate Solutions” by Katie Sparrow
“A Wild and Wicked Youth” by Ellen Kushner
“Prosperine When it Sizzles” by Tansy Roberts
“The Fairy Cony-Catcher” by Delia Sherman
“Palimpsest” by Catherynne M. Valente
“Another Coming” by Sonya Taaffe
“Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot” by Claire Humphrey
“The Ghost Party” by Richard Larson
“Bonehouse” by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
“Sex with Ghosts” by Sarah Kanning
“Spoiling Veena” by Keyan Bowes
“The Metamorphosis Bud” by Liu Wen Zhuang
“Schrodinger’s Pussy” by Terra LeMay

Thanks every day

We were talking last night over a celebratory bottle of Spanish wine about our urge to live more of a city life, to have more urban energy around us. As we drove to the restaurant last night, the city spread out in the night all lit up for the holidays, full of people, and we thought how lovely it would be to have known places nearby once again, the way we used to when our favorite restaurant was just down the street, when the dry cleaner and the wine shop and the market and the bakery and the pub were all right there, full of familiar strangers. It can be very good to belong in a place like that.

And it’s also good to belong where we do, and to be who we are right now. Last night we celebrated 22 years of living together. The nice people at the restaurant gave us a dessert (gooey chocolate cake, espresso flan, profiterole!). We talked about small moments and big ideas. We remembered, and we looked ahead… It was a lovely evening. And it reminded me that I am both a creature of yearning and big dreams, and one who prizes the beauty and joy of the small daily moments. I’m grateful for those things, and although there is much about me I would change, I am grateful to be what I am.

And since I am currently in a mood to eschew the authority of the calendar (Hah! to your structure I say, hah!), today is my thanksgiving day; and because I am so goddamn busy, I’ll let other people talk about the yearning and the big dreams and the everyday beauty and joy. They say it so well.

Here’s John Scalzi talking about right here, right now.

And here are many of your sister and brother humans talking about their lives at The Rumpus.

Whoever we are, whatever may have come to us in life, we have this day. I’m thankful to spend part of mine with you. I hope you enjoy yours.

Flash mob Mumbai

If you’ve stopped by my corner of the internet over the years, you know I love flash mobs. This one is particularly great. I love the song, I love the dance, and I love that a group of people in Mumbai chose this way to honor those who died November 26, 2008 in terror attacks in the city.

The best way to celebrate the lives of others is to remember them in our moments of joy.


 
Enjoy your day. Dance if you have the chance.

Thankful

I am so very thankful for my life. And yours too, all of you who join me in these conversations. Today I am so full of joy and wonder that I simply cannot find the words. But I hope you have these moments too, when everything you are, all your experience, all the people who have ever touched you for better or worse, all the beauty of the world and the creatures in it, all of us living our lives — when it all rushes into you for an instant and there you go, the joy and the wonder of it all.

Thankful, me, for all of it.

Look up

I grew up in Florida, where the land is flat and the water is wide, and the sky is a great bowl of possibility arching overhead.

The possibility of weather passing through on its way to somewhere else; the possibility of going with it.

The possibility of lightning, how it speaks of power and passion and lets us see spontaneity writ large.

The hurricane that so easily persuades the stupid that death won’t spoil their party.

The blue of summer so hard it stings the eye, that makes us want to put our hands in it up to the wrists because it’s summer, summer!

The blue of winter that feels too high to touch, that teaches us in the most literal way why cold is a metaphor for distant. And that distance is what moves us to reach higher.

They say that everything we’ve ever seen stays with us. Stays in us. I hope that’s true. I enjoy thinking that I am full of sky.

Hdr skies from Tanguy Louvigny on Vimeo.

Enjoy your day. Look up!

Shame on them

On Friday, a campus police officer at UC Davis decided that the only rational way to respond to a group of students sitting in silence on the sidewalk with arms linked was to pepper-spray them directly in their faces. You can find updates on the story here.

It’s fucking horrible to watch. But please do. Because after the officer dehumanizes himself by inflicting unnecessary pain, and by appearing to enjoy it just a leetle too much, the protesters rehumanize the event by ultimately forcing the police to leave.

The beginning of this video terrified me. The ending astonished me: the protesters giving the police permission to go. Watch it happen. Watch the consequences, and the power, of speaking your mind.

 
May no one harm you today, and may you do no harm.

A girl is the hero

I know it seems to be all about the movies here in my little corner of the internet right now. So mote it be. I’m writing movies, and that means paying attention to all kinds of visual storytelling.

Brave has been on my radar for a while, and now there’s a full trailer available. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons. A girl is the hero! She has adventures. She’s good at riding and shooting. And she is brave. Oh my goodness, the power of that alone to make me want to see this.

But there’s also the power behind that power: Pixar, who are some of the best visual storytellers around — and both of those components are important. Movies are visual, which may seem like a d’oh statement until you’ve seen a film where everyone tells everyone everything, unless it’s My Dinner with Andre in which case it’s good. But for the most part, storytelling through dialogue is boring; and there is so much in good movie storytelling that happens between the words, in the silences, in the perspective of the camera and the small behaviors of the actors, in the fast cuts or the long slow moves. Remember the single shot in Hitchcock’s Frenzy that tracks out of the flat as the murder begins and backs away down the hall, down the stairs, out the door onto the street where people are going on about their daily lives… We could imagine it all in that single deliberate move, the fear and the pain and the lonely death. That’s the power of movies.

But there has to be a damn good story to tell, and that’s the other place where Pixar shines. They work hard to make the story right. I admire their process and philosophy enormously.

So I have high hopes for Brave. And high expectations. It’s Pixar’s first movie about a girl: we’ll see if they know how to tell a story about a brave human being with astonishing red hair.
 

 
Enjoy your day. Be brave.