Category: blog

Cityscapes

Meduzarts Subaru Ep3 By INetGrafx

Here are 45 beautiful cities of the future from a variety of artists. I could get lost in them: so much world-building, so many stories implied, so much evocative detail. The imagination, the focus, the discipline to create such specificity…. wow. So much that I admire in people has to do with this combination of imagination and willingness to do the work necessary to realize the vision well.

Dreams and work, friends. We need both.

Enjoy your day.

That Kelley, he’s so excited

If you use Chrome browser, have I got a thing for you. If you don’t use Chrome, do yourself a favor and install it even temporarily for the pure pleasure of Jailbreak the Patriarchy, a fabulous extension by Danielle Sucher.

Go, go, go. Go read the examples and see if/when your head turns inside out. Then install Jailbreak and go play. The Internet is full of words and those words are full of gender assumptions, precious, yes they are. Go see for yourself.

Danielle Sucher, my brother, if you are ever in Seattle, I would love to provide you the beverage of your choice.

Enjoy your genderfuck day.

Good and evil

Wednesday night, Nicola and I joined our friend Colleen Lindsay of BookCountry to speak to members of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association about social media for writers. A lovely and lively crowd, and a very well-organized event (which makes me so grateful every time, because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to make everything run smoothly for folks).

It’s nice to pay forward in this way, and to offer help to other writers as I can. And it’s good to get out into the world after a long stretch of immersion in editing and writing, although I do sometimes feel like a bear emerging from a cave, squinting into the unfamiliar sunshine. Hopefully I do not behave like a bear, since that would probably scare the audience, which is certainly not the point… At any rate, it was good to reconnect with my own notions of “the community of writers,” and to realize that although I sometimes find it draining to maintain an online presence, I also find that it sustains me in a particular way. And so the search for balance continues.

And because every story needs a reversal (smile), now I will show you the EVIL that the PNWA did.

They gave us a present.

Each.

A goodie bag with a book and a lovely mug.

FULL OF EVIL.

Here’s the thing: Nicola cannot resist this stuff. She is like a two-year-old with the chocolatey-sugar-enormously-bad-fat combination. And we all know what happens when kids meet candy….

There is blood sugar whackness in my house today, friends, and I blame the PNWA.

Enjoy your day.

Timelessness

I’ve just seen a time-lapse video made by photographer Dustin Farrell so beautiful that I cannot bear to embed it here and make it small. So instead I will send you to Vimeo where you can see it in HD and full screen, which I highly recommend.

It will take Far Too Long to load in Vimeo. Please embrace the delay. Go out for coffee, or something. It’ll be worth it.


 
Just magnificent. All the things I love about the west, how it makes me feel so big inside… and the time-lapse gives it a sense of timelessness that I can’t articulate but really respond to. Must think about this.

Enjoy your day.

The writing days of summer

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my experience of 41 Days of Story.

The background for those of you scratching your heads: I’m the Board Chair of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. This past summer, to raise money for CW, I accepted donations and wrote a new piece of fiction to a prompt supplied by the donor. I did this every day for 41 days in a row.

Thank you to all of you who donated, and read the pieces, and left encouraging comments. You made a difference to Clarion West, and to me. I will always be grateful.

    For those who like the numbers:

  • I raised more than $2,500 for Clarion West.
  • I wrote 32,000 words of fiction, plus another 8,000-10,000 of editorial commentary at Sterling Editing.
  • At least 6 of these pieces are conscious opening or early scenes of a novel (meaning that I saw a much longer work when I was writing them).
  • 34 of them are stories. Of those 33, at least 12 could conceivably be the genesis of a longer work (novella or novel) if I wanted to develop them along those lines.
  • There’s one piece that is not a story: a prose poem, maybe?
  • I would classify 9 to 12 of the pieces as speculative fiction.
  • 7 of the pieces are YA fiction.

And then there were the days themselves. Getting up every morning and sitting down to a sentence or two of prompt, and a big blank screen, and then…writing.

It was brutal. It was absolutely fucking terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was deeply surprising. And it was occasionally ecstatic. But I keep trying to talk about it beyond hanging these tags on it, and I just…can’t. I don’t really know how to make anyone understand what it means to me that I did this thing. Because, you know, people write new fiction all the time. Lots of people write 32,000 words in six weeks. It’s not particularly impressive to the outside world, and it feels pretentious to process about it in public as if it were important to anyone but me. But I just wanted you to know that it mattered to me, and that it has changed me deeply and forever in ways that are exciting, and not entirely comfortable.

However, I would really appreciate your input about what the hell I should do with this stuff. Because my head is overfull of ideas. I could e-publish them as unedited flash fiction (explaining in the introduction the Clarion West/prompt context — I could even give the prompts). I could publish them with the Sterling Editing commentary appended. I could dig in and write one of those novels. I could polish/expand some of the better stories and publish them individually or in a small collection. I could put a nail gun to my forehead and end my indecision that way, although that seems counterproductive…

Your ideas? What would you do with too many options and not enough time? I would also love to know from those of you who read the pieces what your favorites were, and perhaps why?

I am not accustomed to crowd-sourcing my career (and, to be fair, I’m not leaving the decision up to the crowd), but any feedback is a gift right now, and I would appreciate any input you care to offer.

Enjoy your day, and thanks.

Albert Nobbs

A poverty-stricken woman in 1860s Ireland disguises herself as a man to gain employment as a waiter in a Dublin hotel. As she settles into her new role in society, she gets increasingly confused about her identity, courting a maid while pretending to be a man and revealing her secret to a hotel guest.

 
Glenn Close is awesome at a molecular level, and I very much hope this film is too.

Enjoy your day.

To all the invincible women

Last week, my mother’s sister Gaylia and her husband Al came to Seattle for a visit. It’s been a while since we all saw each other. The wine and conversation flowed. And my Aunt Gay brought me an unexpected present that surprised me so much, and touched me so deeply, that I began to cry at the restaurant table. Drip drip drip into my salmon…

Gaylia brought me a locket that belonged to my great-grandmother Margie, our Nana.

Nana was an amazing woman. Amazing. A little woman with small bones and a high, light voice like a bird. A fierce and questing soul. Guts by the barrelful. When Nana was 15, she walked from her home in the Midwest (Oklahoma?) all the way to New Orleans to avoid an arranged marriage to a much older man. When she was forced to marry him anyway, she made the best life for him and his kids that she could, and she held him in her arms when he died. And then she lived alone for the rest of her life. She painted small oil and watercolor pictures on scraps of paper and the backs of greeting cards, and gave them away. She loved cats, and her garden, and her independence, and she loved my mother and Gaylia and me. She knew a lot about pain and a lot about joy. I hope there’s a lot of her in me.

So this was Nana’s locket. I would treasure it for that alone, but then Gaylia opened it and showed me what was inside.
 

On the bottom (left, below) is my mother Sharon at about 17-18. On the top (right, below) is Gaylia, about 13-14. These were taken at the beach somewhere in Southern California.


 
Aren’t they beautiful?

Here’s the thing: I know they were both having hard lives at that point, for a variety of reasons. But here they are, on a summer’s day, together, smiling… well, I admire them both extremely, and I am struck again (and again, and again!) by the power of the human spirit to find joy wherever it can, no matter what.

Albert Camus said, In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer. My Nana was invincible. Sharon and Gaylia are too. And me, well, I’m trying.

Enjoy your day. Go invince.