Category: life

LA la la

So here we are in LA. Today (apart from a screenplay notes phone call) has felt closer to a vacation than anything I’ve done in years. Not just because of the vacation-like activities (breakfast in the room in a corner between two windows open to an absolutely gorgeous day, shaded by flowering trees, followed by lunch by the pool and a very satisfying hour in the shade of an umbrella reading The Lost Colony and thank you again Scalzi for a really excellent trilogy, I have enjoyed an SF series this much in dogs’ years) — but also because I feel, I dunno… I feel good. That’s not unusual, but it doesn’t always happen when I am away. There are times when the stress of managing the new can overwhelm the benefits of being away from the old. This, so far, is not one of those times.

You can tell I’m really relaxing because I’m not even going to fix that enormous run-on sentence up there. It can just putter on to itself.

We’ve already been made to feel wonderfully welcome by Jennifer (who left us a perfect welcoming gift of fruit, chocolate, water and armagnac) and Lisa (who just published her first book so go check it out, and gave us a lovely dinner and conversation last night, just the sort of thing I enjoy).

In a couple of hours we are off to the the Lambda Literary Awards. Win or lose, it’ll be a massive party of the queer nation, and I’m looking forward to it.

But really I hope she wins!

Because we should all be able to marry as we choose

Earlier this month, the California Supreme Court ruled that the “fundamental right to marry” extends to same-sex couples.

Nicola and I would marry in a hot second if it were a federally-recognized legal relationship, and this ruling in California is an important step towards that higher goal.

The Office of the Governor of California has set up a hotline for a public opinion vote on this decision. Please call in and support the ruling.

ANYONE can vote in the poll. You don’t have to live in California. You don’t have to speak to a human being — it’s a fully automated system. All you have to do is:

1. call 916-445-2841
2. press options 1 (english); 5 (to vote on a hot topic); 1 (LGBT issue); 1 (vote yes).

If you are lesbian or gay or bisexual; if you have family or friends who are; if you want to be an ally; if you think that we all have the right to marry the person of our choice — then please call in with your vote.

Thank you very much for any support you choose to give. I appreciate it.

You grow, girl

This is one of my favorite comics ever because it reminds me of myself. (Clicking on the image will bring it to full size.)

Calvin & Hobbes (click for full-size image)

The thing is, learning and growth are essential for me — mainstays of my identity, huge expenditures of my time and energy, driving factors in my most important decisions. I pursue learning and growth in ways that seem nearly random to people who don’t know me well (and sometimes to the ones who do, and sometimes even to me… although I can see the connective tissue much more clearly now than I could 20 years ago). I have left a lot of people blinking and bemused by the way that learning and growth drive me. (Nicola has taken to referring to them as the Evil Twins).

In order to justify myself, I have invested a lot in the assertion that Growth Is Good and Learning Is Fun.

And so they are. But that’s not all they are.

So these days, whenever I stop and ask myself any of these questions…

  • Why am I so tired?
  • Why am I so stressed?
  • Why am I feeling like a failure?
  • Why are my personal boundaries so fragile that I am crying over a story about an earthworm in Patagonia or feeling defensive because Nicola says there is too much milk in her tea?
  • Why am I scared?

… this comic pops into my head. Because sometimes learning is really really hard and scary and makes me just feel like shit for a while. Sometimes there is too much of it, too fast. I do think Growth Is Good, and I’m also starting to believe that sometimes it’s good to not do it all right this minute. It’s okay to do as much as I can handle and then just sit around like a string bean for a while.

Why is this a hard lesson? Because somewhere along the line, I began treating this part of me as if were the only thing that would save me from… from what, exactly? I dunno. From Bad Things. From making mistakes. From failing. From being thought stupid or weak or incompetent. From being left behind. From the limitations of the class I was born into. From people’s disapproval. From my own flaws. From fear itself.

But of course, it’s not that easy. And it turns out that learning and growing often make me fail, make me afraid, make people disapprove of me, reveal me as incompetent and weak and sometimes just damn stupid. Go figure. Or as we like to say at our house, another fucking learning experience.

The Evil Twins aren’t really evil. They are passionate and demanding and ultimately disinterested in my outcome. The universe doesn’t really care whether I grow or not. Caring about it is my choice. I do care about it, and I will keep doing it. But I’m going to try to remember that breaking myself in the process isn’t the greatest long-term strategy. That if I really want to keep growing, sometimes I have to stop, unless all I ever want to learn is how much damage I can take, how long I can go without sleep, and how weird I can truly get when I feel overwhelmed.

Wow, I feel smarter already! (grin). Or maybe I’m starting to grow up a little.

DBAA, round 2

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about why it’s important not to be an asshole. And because sometimes the Universe provides its own object lessons, here’s another really good reason not to be an asshole, especially if you’re a writer: because the Writing Pond is really really small, and if you swim like an asshole, the Internet Will Ridicule You.

You can bet dollars to donuts that this person’s name is spreading among agents and editors faster than grease on a griddle (golly, I seem to find myself in a Southern mood today). If this person ever gets published, it’ll be a miracle. It really does matter how you behave, you know? People talk about it.

There is absolutely no percentage in behaving like this person did. Professional rejection happens all the time. Agents say no. Fiction editors and Hollywood script readers dismiss your months or years of work with no more than It’s not really right for us (if they’re having a polite day). If you do get published, critics and amazon reviewers and random bloggers say mean stuff about your writing and sometimes about you. It’s no fucking fun, precious, and we doesn’t like it, no. But if we’re smart, we never never never presses the send key on those special emails….

Kindness feels good

Earlier this week I saw Lars and the Real Girl and if I can convince even one person to see it, I’ll feel like I’ve added a glimmer to the general light in the universe. It’s a beautiful, fine movie. I laughed out loud, I cried, I loved every single character, and when it was done I felt terrific.

And you know why? Because it was 106 minutes of people being kind to each other. A community of folks confronting difference in one of their own and responding with compassion and kindness. And that is all that happened. Someone was frightened; people were kind; and it helped. I kept waiting for the cruelty that I knew was coming because that’s what happens when wacky people make themselves vulnerable, right? But it never happened.

Isn’t that extraordinary? A movie so confident in the power and wonder of human kindness that the kindness is all we need to see. Without a trace of anything sentimental or silly. It wasn’t a fairy tale — it was a simple story of the extraordinary kindness that people are capable of in the smallest acts. It was about how we really all do make a difference to each other. And for my money, there’s more power and human truth in this movie than in all the hip ironic let’s-plumb-the-depths bullshit I’ve seen or read in the last ten years.

I’m not linking to the trailer because it spoils some of the nicest moments. Just rent the movie and watch it.

And here’s a more immediate kindness fix in the meantime (gakked from my friend Dave — you rock for making me aware of this, bro.)

I hope this story makes you feel as good as it did me. Because it’s true that the simplest kindness can change a mind or a life. And all we have to do is see past what’s awkward or scary or inconvenient or icky about someone else, to put being human above being different from me. And that matters so much.

It’s a human thing to use our differences to demonize — dehumanize — each other. It’s a human thing to let our fear make us indifferent or cruel. But it is also a human thing to be kind, to be joyful, to find love and beauty and hope where we can…. and so I find joy and beauty and hope in the kindness — fictional and real — that I have seen in the last couple of days. I believe that such kindness could save us all.

Not this year(3) – Grand Canyon

A series of posts about things I thought or hoped or feared I would do in 2008.

Of all the things I know I’m not doing this year, not going back to the Grand Canyon disappoints me the most.

When I was 24 and living in Chicago, I read a long article in the Sunday paper about a river rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It just… seized me. I cut the article out of the paper and put it in my bedroom. Then I wrote to the rafting company and asked for a brochure… it couldn’t hurt to ask, right? The brochure came, along with the pricing list for that year’s trips and next year’s. And I just about cried. I was making extremely little money, and the trip plus airfare plus supplies and expenses was probably in the neighborhood of 10% of my net income for a year. And the thing about living lean is that there’s just not 10% left over, you know?

But I read the article again. And again. And I got stubborn (I do that, sometimes). I instituted the Grand Canyon Invisible Savings program. Every time I got a paycheck, I would deposit it into the bank and then deduct $10 or $20 or whatever I could manage and write it down on a little piece of paper in the back of my checkbook register. Because if I couldn’t see it, I wouldn’t spend it…

But of course, sometimes I needed the money, and then it had to come out of Invisible Savings and back into the Real World. But I just kept reading the article in my wallet, so many times that the paper became soft like an old t-shirt.

About a year later, I had about 70% of the money saved. So I called the company and booked a trip for June. I sent in the deposit. I bought hiking boots and a rain poncho and worked like a demon to scrape together the rest of the trip money before I got on the the plane. I think that when the flight lifted off, I had something like $47 left in my checking account, or some equivalent no-responsible-adult-would-do-this amount.

I flew to Las Vegas. I stayed overnight in a cheap casino/hotel. One of the luxuries I’d budgeted for myself was $50 in betting money, and that evening I gathered my courage, went to the $1-ante blackjack tables, and asked the dealer to teach me how to play. I lost my $50, but I got 4 hours of entertainment and a couple of free drinks out of it. And it made me feel brave. It was the start of my adventure.

They picked us up the next morning and took us in a van to the river, about 25 customers plus three guides. They put us on two ginormous pontoon rafts. And away we went, into the canyon.

It was so beautiful and powerful there. It felt like being home. It was like letting out a long breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding. It was the most enormous quiet I have ever felt in my usually noisy mind. People on the boat thought I was odd because I didn’t want to chat — I didn’t want to compare stories about our jobs and our kids and talk about my favorite TV show. I did want to shriek at the guy who spent the whole first day looking at his watch (his watch!) and saying, Well, back in the office they’re having the marketing meeting about now, ha ha! I get it now — it was his way of letting out his breath — but at the time I just wanted to drown him.

We rode the river for 6 days. We slept on the river bank in the darkest darkness I have ever experienced. The guides cooked incredible meals. Every day there was at least one stop where we could choose to hang out at the river, or follow one of the guides on a side trip — to a spring or down a side canyon or up to a vantage point. We went over some E-ticket rapids.

And at one point deep in the canyon, the walls going so far up above us that the sky was a narrow strip overhead, the boatman pulled our boat over against the canyon wall.

He told us all to touch the wall. And when we did, he told us that the rock under our hands was two billion years old.

So I want to feel that rock again. I want to be on that green river under that blue sky. I want to fill myself up with the place again.

And when I go, I’m going with Arizona River Runners — the same company that took me there 22 years ago. And I hope, I hope that when I am in the boat, when I ride the rapids, when I wake up under the stars, when I touch the rock, that it will still feel like coming home to something about myself that I’ve never found anywhere else.

Grand Canyon, 1986

Not this year(2) – 30th reunion

A series of posts about things I thought or hoped or feared I would do in 2008.

At the end of May, when Nicola and I are in LA reading, drinking, meeting folks and taking the sun (at least I hope so — it just started snowing again here, clearly the weather is broken), my 30th high school reunion will happen on the campus of the boarding school in New Hampshire that I attended for four years. Since we don’t have transporters yet, I’ll miss it. (Note to Scientists: where is all the Star Trek technology that was supposed to make my life so convenient?)

I had a blast at my 25th reunion. I hope the 30th will be as great for the folks who are there.

Things I will miss about this reunion:

Seeing old friends — Nora, Holly, Els, John and Beret, Carolyn, Edie, Hobson.

Here are some pictures of some of us at the 25th reunion in 2003.

Seeing the school — So much beauty. But it’s a different place now, too, and that is both right and a bit hard. It’s not “my school” anymore. (Hmm. I seem to be doing a lot of thinking right now about things that are no longer mine… see previous post about Wiscon.) But my school is alive in me in the way of the best memory — so vibrant and integral that even the changed reality doesn’t dislodge it. I don’t know… it’s funny how being there for the 25th and seeing the graduating students made me so conscious of my age and at the same time feel like 17 again.

Being in the boat — I have to preface this by saying that I am the least athletic person I know. So it’s very funny that I have a JV and a Varsity letter in anything, especially crew. It’s even more funny when you know that I was the tallest cox in the world and therefore weighed more (even at 110 pounds I was at least 20 pounds heavier than a cox was supposed to be). But the women who rowed in my boats were amazing, strong, focused, and so gutsy… (no pun intended, since rowing is the kind of sport where people throw up over the side of the boat when the race is over, especially if they’ve been rowing hard enough to win).

We were a great crew, and at these reunions we gather whoever is there from the original crew, round up other willing folk to fill the open slots, and go out on the water together again. The faculty person in charge of the boats that day always looks nervous as hell in the repressed But we can’t piss off the alumni way. Nora, who was the stroke of our boat, always has to remind me of at least one vocabulary term. And every time, the women of the crew are so beautiful on the water. We had so many powerful moments in that boat, training and winning and learning to pull together. My experience with crew is still one of the Great Happy Anomalies of my life.

I’ve written about the 25th reunion and my experience at school at length over the years, and have imported those posts from the Virtual Pint section of my old website for anyone who’s interested.

In chronological and conversational order:

Enjoy. And if you’d like to start a conversation, please do so — it’s easy. Or come back later and use the link on the sidebar, and let’s talk. Some of the stories and realizations that have been most important to me over the years have come directly out of these online conversations, and I’m always grateful for them.

Not this year(1) – Wiscon

A series of posts about things I thought or hoped or feared I would do in 2008.

This year, I am not going to Wiscon.

Wiscon is a thing that some people still scratch their heads over — a feminist science fiction convention. Why this still puzzles folks is a bit beyond me, but there you go. Maybe it’s because so many people’s notions of sf are formed these days primarily through movies, and Hollywood has some distance yet to go on the “feminist” side of the equation in pretty much every way. (I have tried to make my movie as feminist as possible, and at least it stands up to The Rule, but I do feel a bit like a lone voice in the wilderness…)

Nicola and I first went to Wiscon in 1995, when she was a Guest of Honor. I’ve been once on my own in the late 90’s. And we’ve attended the last two years.

I see a lot of difference between the 90’s and the now. The convention is bigger (attendance cap of 1,000 as opposed to the olden days of about 750 or so, I think). In other words, about a third bigger, and it’s interesting how much bigger that feels to me, and how much less better. I think it’s great for all the folks who otherwise wouldn’t get in the door, but it’s starting to feel a little too big to me. Fragmented. Like every other large con, it’s become many different cons in the same building, and the divisions between people are more apparent. There are the people (like us) who can afford to stay on the Governor’s Level of the hotel, which includes a free bar for GL guests only, and where those on the GL congregate constantly, thereby becoming much less available to the people who can’t afford much beyond sharing a room and eating in the Con Suite every night. There are the more-established writers (like us) who hang with other writers whom they haven’t seen in ages, or with editors and critics, and thereby become much less available to the readers at the heart of the convention. There are the less-established writers who attend in groups and support each other by organizing midnight readings of their work. There are the East Coast writers who organize private parties, and the West Coast writers who organize private dinners. There are the academics. And so on.

Wiscon is based on feminist and humanist principles in every way that the organizers can imagine, and they do an excellent job. Wiscon has flat-out the best access policies and practices of any event of any kind I have ever attended. And they work hard to give everyone a chance to participate in programming. I think this is great — and it’s exactly the kind of event I find less personally welcoming, because there are too many choices. I’d rather have a choice of two panels with hundreds of people in the room for each, than fifteen panels with fifteen audience members. More fragmentation.

And I hate the fact that readings are now group events where everyone gets maybe 10 minutes to read from their work. Two years ago, Nicola and I shared an hour-plus reading slot with the fabulous Pat Cadigan, which was Very Cool. Last year, Nicola and I shared a 50-minute reading slot with Nisi Shawl and Eleanor Arnason, both terrific women whom I was honored to be with — but it was rushed, stressy, and seemed like a whiplash experience for the audience. Again, this is designed to make opportunities available to everyone who wants to read, and I think that is All Good for the principles of the con — but it’s not good for me. I’m a fucking snob, I guess, but I remember reading And Salome Danced — the entire story — to a packed room of attentive people, with time left over for an interesting and extended conversation. And I think that’s better — for writers and readers — than getting 10 minutes in an assembly-line situation just because there are jillions of people who want to read at Wiscon.

Change is. I’m fine with that. I’m not disrespecting Wiscon — it’s one of the most exciting, enduring and important events in speculative fiction. But I think that Wiscon and I may be changing in different directions. It doesn’t mean I’ll never go again — I especially love the chance to meet readers and reconnect with writers, and some of the best people in the world are there. It’s a rocking convention, smart and fun and full of opportunity.

But it doesn’t feel like my place anymore. And maybe it never really was. I’ve always been mostly an outsider, and it’s easy for me to feel that a space is too small. That’s my problem, not theirs. But I do find it ironic that this space feels too small for me because it is trying so hard to be big enough for everyone.

A story of Dublin

I’ve just posted my favorite story of Dublin over at the @U2 blog. Enjoy.

For those who don’t know, I’m a staff writer for @U2, the world’s #1 independent U2 website. I’m wicked proud of the work done by the entire @U2 staff, and I count my personal essays, articles, interviews and reviews for the site as some of my best work. If you’re interested, you can find links at the bottom of my essays page, or search the @U2 site.