Science Fiction & Fantasy Author
And there’s no remedy for memory
Your face is like a melody
It won’t leave my head …
— Lana Del Rey, “Dark Paradise”
… which is to say, my story “A Remedy for Memory” is live on Empyreome. Thank you for reading, if you do!
P.S. While you’re at it, may I suggest you try the other stories in the issue? I am personally very fond of “Oscars on the Rue Jules Verne.”
Probably the biggest new happiness multiplier in recent memory: I (re)started taking ballet at local studio. Although I am a complete beginner, I grew up on a steady diet of ballet books at varying qualities. I don’t remember when I first saw the photos but I remember being completely entranced by the unparalleled beauty of the form. Lessons were not possible, so I read books, which is always the next best thing. I read all the Noel Streatfeild books, random teen serials where no book is complete without someone bursting into tears mid-dress rehearsal, and of course I read Jill Krementz’s “A Very Young Dancer” so many times that it’s burned into my mind. I also read all kinds of books about technique, and pored over photographs of classical ballets. Thanks, well-stocked childhood library!
One of the really flattering things that a teacher said at my very first lesson was “I can’t believe you’ve never taken ballet before.” And no matter how failhard I am at every lesson, I definitely laid up that comment to live by whenever I feel discouraged (the adagios in center practice, they slay me). And I do fail pretty hard, even for a beginner. My hips are stiff, I can barely follow simple choreography, and my placement is a mess. But I flatter myself that I have been mentally dancing for a very long time. So even when my feet are not right, I do know exactly what I am supposed to have done, and that sometimes–somehow–just a bit–shines through the mess of bad posture and worse turnout.
The other thing I love about ballet is that … I am a fairly competitive and perfectionist person in most areas of my life, but dancing shuts down that part of my brain. That makes it freeing and meditative–I suspect that ballet is to me as yoga is to a lot of people. If my steps are not perfect, that’s just my version of it and it’s as valid as anyone else’s, and I am shockingly content with that.
Which is the complete opposite of how I feel about writing! I submit my stories for publication, and I love it when people read and hopefully enjoy my stories. Part of me feels that a story is not real until it is shared–that it’s just a hallucination in my brain until someone else confirms that they heard those voices too.
In ballet, I do not feel that way. I am overjoyed just to be in the studio. I could do endless tendus alone save for the accompanying music on my phone. I feel absolutely no need to be on a stage.
I wonder if I would be a better writer, if I also felt that way about my writing?
Anyway, this was a rambling post. If you want to read a serious post about taking ballet as an adult, I wholeheartedly recommend the excellent essay “Swan, Late: The unexpected joys of adult beginner ballet.”
I am very happy to announce that “A Remedy for Memory”, a short SF story about love and memory and the perils of mixing them together, will be in the July 2017 issue of Empyreome Magazine.
I love all my children equally … said the parent of one child (and this is true, she said, in Peter Sagal’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” voice). But in all earnestness, “A Remedy for Memory” represents something special to me, not least that I don’t know when to quit. I wrote my first version of this story back in 2009, and since then I’ve lost count of the number of times I revised or completely rewrote the piece. I was going to rewrite it again–I still have the outline in my Google Docs–if there were no takers this year. But I am beyond happy that someone does want it.
As for the story sitting in my revised outline, I still plan to write it, or something like it, one day. Like I said, I don’t know when to quit.
I bought a membership to Worldcon 2017 when they first became available, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to actually go. This is not a blog about finances, but it would misleading not to acknowledge that it imposes choices. I went through a very sudden, very expensive move in October-November 2016, and wasn’t sure whether I felt Worldcon was still worth it after the dust (and the books) settled from that.
I was still waffling until last week when a close friend, who is not generally given to Acts of Carpe Diem, announced that he was going to climb freaking Kilimanjaro next month. I’ve never been one to give in to peer pressure, but that was a challenge I couldn’t entirely ignore. Also, I’ve been feeling a bit in a rut lately, and this was a kick that I needed.
So I made some spreadsheets and then decided to go for it. Aside from the excitement and opportunities of Worldcon, I just want to see Helsinki! I also have very probably unrealistic dreams of doing some light hiking with my DSLR in tow.
In a conversation about writing motivation, I disclosed that my best One Weird Trick is designing fake book covers for my stories. Even if the story in question is 200 words long. I love it because for me, 1) graphic design is low-stress creative fun, and 2) covers are creative affirmation.
Naturally, Spousal Unit chose that moment to wander by and complain that I wasn’t presenting evidence for my claim. Well, designing my own covers is somewhat narcissistic, so I’m not going to release them. Everyone keeps a secret garden; those are buried in mine.
But fear not, I will do you one better.
A few years ago a friend of both myself and Spousal Unit emailed us with, “Hey you read a lot of SF. I once read this book and I can’t remember the title. Maybe you guys can help me find it? Here’s the plot …”
And my friends, it was amazing. Far superior to anything I have ever conceived.
“it’s in the southern us, and people are searching for a great general robert lee (but it turns out to be a chinese robert lee) w/ a chicken against central planners controlling an entrepreneurial computer personality that founded a rebellious transport company.”
So this was inevitable. I’m particularly proud of the gold bezel lettering.
We sent it off to him with a note indicating a helpful librarian had located a candidate book and scanned the cover, could he confirm or deny that this was the right story?
He took it well, although to this day I remain convinced that it was all a dream. But hey, you never know, so hit me up.
I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions for their own sake. But the convergence of history and religion, at least in the U.S. where I live, has resulted in a nice string of vacation days leading up to the otherwise arbitrary event. And so around every New Year I get a break from work, resulting in enough time to breathe and take stock of my life.
Usually this results in a few days of wallowing in all my failures of the year, followed by a few days of vowing to do better and scrambling to put systems in place to do so. This year was no exception, and my brain fixated on my fiction writing, which I didn’t work on as much as I would have liked in 2016.
The reasons aren’t all bad. Some of it was failure and procrastination and laziness. But I also burned the candle at both ends successfully developing my career in writing non-fiction. That job keeps my family fed and sheltered and warm, and I’m also pretty fond of it for its own sake. So I’m happy and proud of what I’ve accomplished in that arena.
Still, we all only have so many Action Points in a day. If nothing else, 2016 taught me to honor my limits. And I had to admit that I simply didn’t have the resources to spend as much time grinding at my fiction tech tree*. And that was okay. Everything builds on everything else, and what I did accomplish is not a waste. It’s only a waste if I forget what it’s all pointing towards.
So in 2017, my goal is to rekindle that love, commit to finishing more stories whether or not I submit them for publication, and in general rebuild the foundation (of love, and squee, and passions both dark and light) that drive me to tell stories.
*If it wasn’t already obvious, I view life as a mostly frustrating RPG.
I don’t get a lot of time to knit, so it’s always special when I finish something. This weekend I bound off / washed / blocked my Mother of Pearl sweater, which is pretty much the sweetest little thing. (I prefer simple shapes in clothing, and until Bean has the words to tell me what she likes, so does she by proxy. Haha.)
Knitting is by far the biggest competitor for my writing time (the relatively quick gratification is so nice as a writer!), and if good yarn weren’t so expensive it would win a lot more often. So you see, Madelinetosh et al’s price points are a good thing …
For any knitters who may be reading this: I made the 1 year old size with a lot of adjustments. The yarn was Dream In Color Classy (worsted) in the blue sulk colorway, which is obviously very different from my photo—I think they changed it though, because my yarn does not look like that at all, even allowing for lighting/monitor differences. Anyway, you can find the details on my Ravelry page.
I am not burying my head in the sand–I cannot afford to–but I am also in need of beautiful things that I love, to sustain me. So here are some recent delights:
A bike in my favorite color. Beautiful trails that make me feel like I’m in an endless golden wood. Finding my way to a new home from a new job. Early afternoons. Sunshine on my face. Tea to drink. Books to read. Beloved family to see tomorrow.
Spousal Unit was recently in Venice for work. When he came back he said that he couldn’t figure out how a place built like Venice could possibly exist. I said, it’s no wonder Italo Calvino wrote Invisible Cities; Venice almost seems to demand it, and he happened to be the person who could do the job.
(I had requested a copy of Le città invisibili as a souvenir of his trip, but alas, it was not doable. I hope that just means I’ll get to pick out my own copy on an Italy trip in the distant future: Rome, Florence, and Venice. Spousal Unit’s contribution to this discussion: “Yeah, you need to visit Northern Italy–it’s all the parts of the Frick you liked, only everywhere and all the time.”)
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I’m taking a break from SFF reading and scanning my bookshelves for something else. It will likely be “period” literature–perhaps something Italian or Japanese. Something that lovingly renders silken embroidery, gilt wood, etc.
Jeanne talked about books, mostly urban fantasy ones, having or lacking “sensaplace”, a favorite feature of mine in stories. An urban fantasy story, to me, is a love song to cities, and they must have foundations in solid bedrock as well as scrape the sky. That’s why I don’t seek out a lot of contemporary literature. They assume their default is the reader’s default and so the resulting book feels ungrounded. I am uncomfortable, physically, reading a book that I can’t visualize. One gets motion sickness when the inner and outer perceptions of movement clash; it’s the same feeling but with text on a page. This also applies to SFF. I had an incredibly hard time getting through Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand because it was impossible for me to envision.
There’s a trick to minimizing the amount of set-dressing for maximum sensaplace–the semiotics of ballet made me think of this the other day as I was dreamily perusing rehearsal pictures. A hairnet on the ballerina means Romeo and Juliet. Frenchiness means Sleeping Beauty. (Coppélia and Giselle can be hard to tell apart in the beginning! Peasant bodices everywhere. But of course they diverge wildly after Act I or so.) Mental macros, if you’ve got them installed.
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Then again, I’m writing a historical fantasy set in fake-Florence, so maybe I should be reading history books instead. Haha.
“A Study in Bronze”, my retelling of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle style) combined with a fairytale that I shall not name because spoilers, is now live on Mirror Dance!
If you read it, thank you ♥ and please do check out the other pieces in the Spring 2015 issue!