I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.
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“Dennis Hastert committed crimes against children and must be made responsible.”Following up on a story that came to a conclusion the same week I was dealing with a death in the family: Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Dennis Hastert, was caught paying millions in hush money to try to keep the public from learning that he had molested at least five teen-agers while he was a high school wrestling coach. Because of a statute of limitations on child sexual assault, he couldn’t be charged with those crimes, only with the crime of trying to circumvent certain tax and financial laws, and for lying to the FBI about what he was doing. He has since been sentenced to 15 months in prison: Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert ‘Deeply Ashamed’ as He Faces Accuser at Sentencing.
I’ve written before about his hypocritical conduct in Congress: being anti-gay, trying to shield another child molesting congressman from prosecution, promising the parents of a murdered gay teen he would fight to get a federal hate crimes bill passed and then doing everything he could to kill it (and succeeding), and so on. He’s since been showing up at his court appearances trying to look frailer and more pathetic—first with a cane, then a walker, now being wheeled to the court in a wheelchair. Maybe he is sick, but it is also a common ploy to try to play for sympathy. In any case, the judge certainly wasn’t swayed. Among his remarks during the sentencing, the judge noted, “Nothing is more disturbing than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘Speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”
While he was pleading for a more lenient sentence, Hastert contacted a lot of his former colleagues to write letters to the judge asking for leniency. I think it’s pretty horrible (but not that surprising) how many of his former Republican cohorts wrote such letters. On the other hand, he may have made things worse on himself with one of those requests. One of the people he asked was a former Illinois State Legislator… who happened to be the brother of one of the boys Hastert had molested. Not surprising, the legislator declined to write to ask for leniency, but the incident caused the brother who had been molested to go public about it. Including making a statement to the court about the abuse.
Fifteen months isn’t much punishment for the things that Hastert as done, but it’s a good start.
(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! And I’m on vacation! We’re running off to EverfreeNW where we will hang out with pony fans. I’m also running back to Seattle with friends midway through the weekend to see a teenager of our acquaintance perform in a production of the Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Meanwhile, here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week, sorted into various topic areas.
Raccoon causes 38,000 Seattle customers to lose power. Our house was one of the places that lost power in the wee small hours. Also my husband’s workplace, where he said he spent more than half the next day getting systems back up and running. The report claims that one of the raccoons survived.
I’ve been trying to avoid linking to Huffington Post because I think a multi-billion dollar company should pay its writers, but sometimes I can’t find the same post anywhere else: The Truth About Homophobia In The Black Community.
Cover of the paperback edition of the 1977 Annual World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald Wolheim (click to embiggen)When I was a junior in high school there was one comic book shop in the town I lived in. It was also a used book store, so I visited there a lot. I didn’t have much money, and I was still reading several comics regularly which took up most of my discretionary spending, so I spent a lot more time there browsing—trying to find the cheapest books—than actually buying.
One day at the store I happened upon a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim. I owned several of his earlier annual anthologies, having gotten several of them as part of my introductory new member shipment from the Science Fiction Book Club a few years previously. The paperback was in pretty good shape, having only been published about six months previous, so it was probably marked at half cover price, which meant it wasn’t in my usual price range, but I had enjoyed the earlier collections, and there was more than one author in the table of contents whose work I really loved, so I bought it.
One of the stories in this particular collection was a novella, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree, Jr. I didn’t know, at the time, that Tiptree was a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon (I think the year I read this was the year that her true identity was revealed, after ten years of being published under the name).
I believe I had read a few of Tiptree’s earlier short stories in the various SF magazines that I followed semi-regularly. I recognized the name, at least, but didn’t have a strong recollection of what kind of stories Tiptree had written before or whether I liked them. So I wasn’t prepared for just how good this story was.
The tale concerns the three-man crew of a NASA mission sent on a polar circuit of the sun. The ship is hit by an unexpectedly strong solar flare and is severely damaged. The crew survives and eventually gets their radio repaired, but are unable to reach Earth. At first it’s because Earth isn’t where they expect it to be in relationship to their position. They eventually figure out that they are further off course than they thought, and start transmitting their distress signal in the correct direction. No answer comes.
Eventually, as they scan more frequencies, they start picking up signals, many of them conversations in English with Australian accents. This is confusing, particularly since many of the signals are coming from various parts of the solar system, indicating a rather large number of space ships. Plus Australia, as far as they knew, didn’t have much of a space program. Also, almost all of the voices on the radio sound like women.
They establish contact with one ship which detected them and has diverted from its course to rescue them. During the radio exchanges before the rescue ship reaches them, they learn that it has been hundreds of years since their mission went up. The world is anxious to meet them, they are told, because they had long been assumed to be dead.
They also learn that there has been some sort of catastrophe on Earth in the intervening years which greatly reduced the population. When the rescue ship finally arrives, the men are surprised that there is only one man in the crew of the ship. Lots of other things surprise them, too. Two of the crewmembers seem to be twins, and both named Judy, but one seems to be several years older than the other. There are several other anomalies and slips of the tongue during the weeks that the ship is returning them to Earth that make the astronauts more suspicious.
Eventually they learn that the catastrophe was even worse than they imagined: it was a plague which only 11,000 women survived; not one single man survived it. The remaining people have been reproducing for several generations by cloning. Children are raised in a communal setting. Some are chosen to receive hormone treatments to give them the musculature and size of men. The story seems to imply that the only reason this is done is for the physical benefits of the muscles and such, and it is unclear if these children choose to became essentially transmen, or if it is imposed by some sort of societal system.
The three astronauts react in very different ways to the discovery. One becomes convinced that god threw them through a wormhole so that they can “rescue” this society and bring men back in charge. Another assumes that since there’s a whole planet of women who have never had sex with a “real man” that he will become sort of a sex god to them all. The last simply hopes that they will be allowed to rejoin society and help repopulate the species (since there are some health problems due to the of lack of genetic diversity).
It turns out, of course, that none of that is to be. The actions of the three men have been being recorded and sent back home. The men were slipped drugs which supposedly made them act out their true natures. The leaders of the world agree that men are simply too dangerous to introduce back into the species. There’s a particularly moving conversation between the captain of the rescue ship and the one man who has remained rational where she points out that most of the heroic behavior the man has tried to cite as proof that men can be good was simply men protecting their own women and children from other men.
The men’s genes are going to be used. Before the three are euthanized, sperm is collected, to diversify the gene pool, but only female babies will be taken to term. Since the entire story is told from the point of view of the one man, the reader never finds out what happens after he and his companions are put to sleep.
I wasn’t the only one who thought the story was good. It won both the Nebula and Hugo award for best novella the year it was published. The story did not kick off much in the way of controversy at the time, in part because people believed Tiptree was simply a feminist-minded man. A man could write a science fiction story decrying generations of misogyny and patriarchal violence and be thought of as open-minded, and a forward thinker. A woman, on the other hand, would (and still often is) branded as a radical man-hater.
I simply thought it was an intriguing story. I was still struggling to accept my own sexual orientation at the time, and I was intimately familiar with how the cruelty of boys toward boys who weren’t manly enough was overlooked, approved, and often encouraged by a sexist society. So the notion that culture might be a better place without all that hypermasculinity was appealing, even if I felt sorry for the reasonable male viewpoint character who was going to be exterminated along with his more brutish companions.
I want to emphasize that Tiptree made the male character sympathetic. She laid out the case for both sides convincingly, and seemed to be inviting the reader to consider (and maybe fight for) solutions to the problems of toxic chauvinism other than simply wiping the men out.
It was another mind-blowing story. Another time that sci fi helped me (as a very closeted queer teen living in a small town among Christian fundamentalists) imagine a better life, particularly the notion of romantic relationships other than opposite-sex pairings. After that story, whenever I saw Tiptree’s name on an anthology or magazine cover, I knew I wanted to read it.
(Click to embiggen)I want to be very clear that I love ebooks and audiobooks. Being able to carry around a whole shelf full of books in my pocket is one of my favorite parts of living in the future. Not having to decide (quite so often) which old books to relegate to a back shelf, or get rid of altogether just because we’ve brought a bunch of new books home is a good thing, too. We both still buy hardcopy books, and there are currently a few piles of them in the bedroom that haven’t found a home on the shelves somewhere in the house, but it’s a slower process since both of us buy a lot of books digitally, now.
One thing I miss, now that smart phones are ubiquitous, is seeing what other people are reading on the bus. Seattle is a city of bibliophiles and other literary people, and for most of the 30+ years I’ve been riding public transports in Seattle, I could always count on seeing interesting books on my commute. Sometimes I might see someone reading a book I love, and I’d find myself grinning—hoping they were having as much fun with the book as I did. Other times I would see a title I had never heard of, and find it intriguing enough to look up more information on the book when I had a chance. Other times I would see someone reading a book that I despised, and I would wonder what sort of person would read that.
There are still people reading hard copy books on the bus, of course, just nowhere near as many as there used to be. Now instead of seeing a dozen books or so on my morning commute, there are a dozen or so people staring at their phones or iPads or Kindles.
Which still warms the cockles of my heart, because I love reading, no matter what form it takes.
And I’m certainly not going to give up reading (and some mornings writing) on my iPhone. Among the downsides of reading a hardcopy book on the bus is the time spent digging it out of my backpack, and then later needing to stop reading far enough before my stop to put the book away and get my pack zipped up and situated. There was also the need to decide whether to pull out my book or my notebook and a writing implement. And the frustration after I chose when I discovered I didn’t seem to be in the right headspace to concentrate on that book, or to write.
With the phone, I can slip it out, fire up a book, and start reading. If I want to make a note, or get another idea I want to write down, it’s just a couple of swipes and taps with my thumb to switch to a writing app, write it down, then get back to the book.
Of course, there is a bit of the paradox of choice that the phone amplifies. Occasionally I just can’t decide which of the many choices that are on the phone to read. Which of the several books (because I’m always in the middle of more than one) to pick up, or should I open one of my news apps and catch up on the world?
Having all those choices doesn’t usually paralyze me, but I do often dither for at least a few minutes. So maybe I’m only kidding myself when I say I get a bit more reading time in now that I’m not fumbling with getting the book out and putting it away again.
But I don’t think so. For one thing, with the phone, I can become obliviously lost in the book right up to my stop, then jump up, slip the phone into my pocket as I’m moving to the exit, and get off the bus.
In 1968, Fr. Daniel Berrigan traveled to Hanoi with historian Howard Zinn to bring back three American prisoners of war. Then he and eight other Catholic priests concocted a batch of napalm and used it to burn 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Cantonsville, Maryland draft board as a protest of the war. (Click to embiggen)There were a number of items that I had queued up for Friday Links that I didn’t include yesterday because I was trying to post a few less outrage-inducing things. I didn’t intend to also leave Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s death out of the links. His obituary link happened to get lost in a cluster of political stories:
Berrigan was a Catholic priest who was also a peace activist who wound up on the FBI’s most wanted list and spent some time in prison because of his anti-war activities during the Vietnam War. He continued his anti-war efforts throughout his lifetime, but he also won some notoriety for ministering non-judgmentally to AIDS victims in Greenwich Village in the 80s, when most of the Catholic hierarchy was busy condemning gay men.
If only more the of the church’s leaders were like Berrigan. The world is a slightly darker place without him.
Now I need to segue from talking about a peace activist who clearly loved his neighbor, to talking about a hate monger who clearly doesn’t.
I think it’s important to know just how long and how determinedly Moore has been defying the law he has sworn to uphold: Way back in 1993 Judge Moore drew criticism for displaying a wooden Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom, and insisting that each session begin with a prayer. This eventually led the ACLU to file a lawsuit in 1995. This led to a series of rulings and counter-suits, sometimes with appeals being thrown out on technicalities. At each stage Moore vowed to never stop the prayers and never remove the plaque. The state supreme court allowed the appeal that reached them to languish without ruling, effectively allowing Moore to have his way and preventing any appeal. Ethics complaints were filed against Moore, but eventually came to nothing.
Trading on his high profile in the media because of the case, in 2001 Moore campaigned for Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court runnng on the idea that the law must come from god in order to be legitimate, and this being Alabama, he won. And immediately began construction of a massive granite Ten Commandments monument to install in the rotunda of the state courthouse. The Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and other organizations filed suit.
Before that case was resolved, Moore incited protests and controversy by writing in a 2002 ruling about a child custody suit that it was better for a child to be put in the care of a heterosexual father despite that father having a history of child abuse, than to allow the mother (who had come out as lesbian) to have the child. Again, ethics complaints were filed which came to nothing. The other justices had simply relied on Alabama’s anti-sodomy laws in the ruling. When the U.S. Supreme Court threw out all anti-sodomy laws in 2003, the child custody ruling became moot.
The court rulings on the massive monument went against Moore, but he refused to obey the orders. Ethics complaints were files against Moore, and this time he was found in violation and removed from office. Moore sued the ethics commission, but lost.
For a while Moore made overtures to try to seek the Republican nomination for President, but instead wound up running for election as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court yet again. And yet again, he was elected. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made marriage equality the law of the land, Moore has fought it: issuing an order declaring that the ruling only applied to the specific states who were sued in the lawsuits the Supreme Court had consolidated for their ruling. Trying to get the rest of his State Supreme Court to issue a similar ruling. And sending messages directly to probate judges telling them that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling is not legal.
And so various people, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have filed ethics complaints against Moore, and Moore has been temporarily suspended while the commission investigates the case. Moore is, like every other anti-gay so-called Christian out there, claiming to be the victim in all of this. He insists that the charges aren’t real ethics complaints, but are politically motivated. He has accused the Judicial Inquiry Commission of falling under the sway of “a professed transvestite, and other gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals, as well as organizations which support [the homosexual] agenda.”
Right. And Moore doesn’t have an agenda at all, despite saying: “God gives rights and the government’s role is to secure those rights. When governments [sic] dismisses god out of the equation and pretends to get rights, we suffer accordingly.”
The charges against him, by the way, aren’t merely that he is defying the U.S. Supreme Court order and issuing improper orders to try to enforce his defiance. The complaint also cites his endorsement and other support (using the resources of his judicial office to promote and fundraise for) a non-profit corporation founded by his wife for the explicit purpose of promoting and enforcing acknowledgement of god in law and government.
We can all hope he gets removed from office soon. I suspect it is far too optimistic to hope that if so, he stops causing trouble for queer folks and anyone else who doesn’t share his religion.
(click to embiggen)I am happy that it is Friday. I mean, really, really happy that it’s Friday. I almost didn’t do this post this week. I have been tired and stressed out all week. And I felt things had turned so negative the last half of last month, that I scrapped most of my blogging plans for this week, and found more uplifting things to post about. Instead of skipping this week’s links altogether, I decided to leave a couple of the usual topic areas out. Let’s see if you can guess which!
Meanwhile, here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week, sorted into various topic areas.
A silver rocket from the classic Flash Gordon serials.It’s that time of year, again, where I’m waiting for the Hugo Packet to arrive so I can start reading things that have been nominated for the award. And while several categories have again been piddled by the Rabid Puppies, I am still looking forward to the experience. Particularly since I learned an important lesson last time: the point of the awards is to recognize excellence. I’m not obligated to read stories to the end—as I always have as a small-press editor, where part of my mission is to help the writer improve the story if necessary. These stories have been nominated because, allegedly, they are great stories. So, this year I’ll give each story three pages to hook me. If by that point I’m not feeling interested enough to keep reading—regardless of whether the story was on anyone’s slate—then it goes under No Award on my ballot.
If I am enjoying it, I’ll keep reading. The only stories that will go above No Award will be the ones that kept me hooked until the end. Then I’ll rank those and move on to the next category.
It may be a very busy few months, since only one of the novels that were nominated is one I’ve already read. It’s easy enough to read five each of short stories, novellas, and novelletes in the time frame, and graphic novels usually go relatively quickly, but the novels take a bit more time!
With this new rule, I suspect that I’m going to enjoy the process this year a bit more than last year. Because the reason I care about any of the awards is because I love science fiction and fantasy. I don’t just love it, I frikkin’ love it. I have written before about how I can’t remember a time when sf/f was part of my life, because even when I was a small baby my mom read aloud to me from whatever book she was reading at the time, and she is one of the world’s geekiest Agatha Christie and Robert Heinlein fans.
Thanks to her, my childhood was full of a lot of science fiction. For a few years we faithfully watched episodes of Flash Gordon on channel two every morning, for instance. And our regular trips to the library (and used book store, when we lived in towns big enough to have one) usually resulted in several fantasy or science fiction books coming home with us.
It was one of those used bookstore runs when Mom found a copy of Dune in paperback. That book always sticks out in my memory because it was the first time that Mom was reluctant to tell me details about the book while she was reading it. It was also the first book that Mom told me I would have to wait until I was older. I know she really liked it, because it never once went into the pile of books she was thinking of trading in when we were preparing to visit a used book store. The fact that it was forbidden but also apparently really good instilled more than a bit of longing.
But it was rare for her to restrict my access to books. She never seemed to worry that I might not understand most books. If I asked to read one of her books, she’d let me, and she was always willing to discuss the story. There were times when I would try one of her books and I’d call it boring, though sometimes it was probably more because I actually was a bit too young to be tackling that particular book.
I loved browsing in the science fiction sections of the library or bookstores. Looking at the cover art, which was sometimes a bit weird and confusing, but always otherworldly. Each one seemed to beckon, promising strange and wondrous adventures if I would brave those pages.
Science fiction was always about possibilities, to me. I never felt that some sci fi wasn’t for me. I always felt welcome. Science fiction, particularly the way Mom enthused about it, was about making the world a better place. About going to new worlds, or creating new inventions, or learning what it would be like to live with aliens—or elves, or dragons. Do I wish more of the sf/f available in the 60s and early 70s had been more inclusive? Yes. Just as I wish more of present day sf/f was inclusive of people of color, queer people, et cetera. We’re getting better, but still have a ways to go before the representation matches the real world.
Whenever I pick up a new science fiction book, especially if it’s one that’s been recommended by a friend, I get a flash of that feeling of wonder and anticipation; the sense of strange adventures beckoning. For a moment, I’m that little boy in the bookstore, clutching a story, and about to plunge into something wondrous!
The previous two places we had lived had not had any sort of yard. They were like the archetypical city apartment, in that regard. So when we’d found a place with a small lawn and a couple of flower beds that would be ours, Ray had been ecstatic. Particularly since there was already a rose bush in one of the beds.
The rose had clearly been there a for many years, with the thickest canes being nearly three inches thick. When we moved in in February, the rose was just leafing out, with no sign of buds, yet. But it wasn’t long before enormous red roses were appearing on it. We took some pictures and shared with friends who knew a bit more about roses. More than one person guessed it was a Mr. Lincoln, a fairly well-known red rose. Later that summer, when I was digging down deep around the roots of the red rose (we were trying to excise wild deadly nightshade, which grows as a weed up here), that I found the original stamped metal tag that had come with the rose whenever it had been planted, which identified it as a Patrician. It’s a red rose that was specifically bred to emulate a Mr. Lincoln, though it is supposed to be a bit hardier.
That same spring Ray came home from a shopping trip one day with a new rose to plant at the other end of the same bed. It was labeled a Maid of Honor, which was not a rose I had heard of. I learned much later that the name Maid of Honor does not represent a recognized cultivar of a rose, but is rather a name that sounds like it ought to be a real rose breed which gets slapped on various pink or yellow roses sold by, shall we say, less than scrupulous distributors.
We didn’t know that, at the time. We planted it, took care of it, and we were both a little shocked at just how quickly it sent canes shooting up for the sky. We would get these enormous pink blooms, often in clusters above the eaves. The next spring I remember quite clearly one Friday finding a new cane that had grown to about 8 inches in length. By the next Friday, that same cane was more than 6 feet tall.
To say that it was an aggressive climbing rose might be an understatement.
So I have learned that I have to be a bit aggressive in trimming our pink rose. Not just in the fall, but throughout the growing season, as side branches soon block off the walkway, and the tall branches hang down into the driveway.
Ray died before our Maid of Honor reached its third spring. Another rose that we found that same year, a pale lavender rose whose labeled breed I have forgotten, lived only a couple more years after Ray did. But the Maid of Honor, and the original Patrician, continued to go strong.
A couple of years ago, I apparently got too aggressive at trimming the Maid of Honor, because the root stock started sending even more rapidly growing canes up. Roses don’t breed true via seed, so when you buy one at a nursery, what you get are several canes grafted off of an original (or more likely, a graft of a graft of a graft… et cetera… of an original) and onto a hardier breed of rose. Usually a wild rose or tea rose. So if you get new shoots from the root ball, they are a different kind of rose, altogether.
The root’s flowers on mine are very tiny white blossoms that almost don’t look like roses once they open all the way. It’s branches grow even fast than the pink ones, but they never get quite as thick as a pencil, so while they are very long, they droop and wind around the thicker, stronger pink branches (and anything else they can reach).
Our building is getting painted right now, and I’ve been having to trim both the white and pink branches multiple times because the rose keeps getting up around the eaves or into the porch railing. Late last week I trimmed a new tall branch, and it had a single bud near the end. So I trimmed it some more and stuck in in the vase where I had some flowers (some that I had bought myself, and some that friends brought over when they heard the news about my dad).
Sometime while I was sleeping last night, the bud began to open. So I took a picture.
Every time I stop and look at any of the buds from the Maid of Honor, I think about of Ray. Who loved to smell those pink blooms, give me a goofy grin, and ask me if I agreed that it was pretty.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month – National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org)May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so you can find a lot of blog posts recounting various experiences trying to get diagnosed, find a treatment or method of coping that works for that person, and so on. I read a couple of those posts on Sunday and thought, “I should write a post linking to the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s awareness page.”
But you know me, I have to give it some personal context. So I started a blog post that was supposed to be a brief overview of some of my experiences watching a few loved ones try to get diagnosis and treatment, and the varying levels of support they found. The next thing I knew, I had nearly a thousand words ranting about some of my own bad experiences with the inappropriate application of therapy, beginning with the time in middle school I was threatened with expulsion unless I went to therapy because I was continually the victim of bullying.
Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to write about, since this is Mental Health Awareness Month, not Gripe About Homophobic School Administrators Month, right?
Believe in yourself (click to embiggen)I made a disparaging remark about myself the other day, and my friend, Jeri Lynn declared, “Stop making fun of my friend Gene!” Which turned into a brief discussion of the differences between the way we treat other people, the things we will put up with other people saying about our friends and loved ones, and the ways we treat ourselves.
It also made me think of a conversation I had a week or so earlier where one of my friends made a comment about people who never seem to like anything. It’s a phenomenon I see all the time: someone claims to be a Doctor Who fan, let’s say, but they never, ever seem to have anything good to say about any episode of the show we discuss. Never. It makes one wonder why they keep watching, right?
I know I criticize all sorts of things. Particularly real world things, such as the current spate of laws trying to ban trans people from public bathrooms. And I can go on a bit of a rant about the poor storytelling choices that certain studios seem to be making because they completely misunderstand why some of their rivals are making money hand-over-fist with a similar type of movie.
It’s easy, sometimes, to rant about things that aren’t working or to raise awareness on things that are causing problems for people we care about. In the course of all that advocacy against various injustices and heartaches, it can be hard to remember that there’s a lot of good in our lives. And sometimes that good is entangled in the bad.
This is the whole reason I set myself a goal a while back about decreasing my outrage. And then gave myself the specific task of setting myself a minimum number of posts each month that will just be about things I like. Most months I made that goal. I missed it last month. I will place some of the blame on Camp NaNoWriMo and some of the blame on the unexpected death in the family (and the fallout therefrom) and let it go. Just as it isn’t good to rant about bad things all the time, it isn’t good to berate myself for missing an arbitrary goal every now and then.
There are a lot of really cool people in my life. I’ve had the joy of reading and watching a lot of good storytelling during the last year or so. I’m looking forward to quite a bit more. This Friday we’re going to see the new Captain America movie with some friends. The week after that we’re attending EverfreeNW, where I expect to see a lot of wonderful and happy people enthusing about a kids’ cartoon series. The same weekend I’m attending a musical (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) with a couple of friends, and watching a very talented and awesome teen-ager of my acquaintance playing one of the roles. Next month we’re attending the Locus Awards weekend (my first time) which I expect will be fun (it includes a banquet where one of my favorite authors will be MC-ing, a bunch of books and stories will receive awards, and there’s an Aloha Shirt competition! What could be sillier and cooler than that?).
Flowers are blooming all over my neighborhood. People are writing interesting stories, drawing cute and wonderful art—and we get to read and look at a bunch of it!
I’ve been trying to remind myself, whenever I look at a web comic, or a posted story, or even just a cute observation on someone’s tumblr, to click the “Like” or “♡” (heart) or “✩” (star) or whatever option the particular web service gives us for telling the person who posted it that we appreciated it. Because posting things takes time and effort. And if it made us chuckle, or nod in agreement, or smile, or just feel a little less worried about things even for a moment, we should let the person know.
Because it isn’t easy for some people to believe in themselves. And they don’t always have a friend sitting nearby to come to their defense when they feel discouraged.
Font Folly 