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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(Click to embiggen)So, three years ago today I got to stand with the man I love in front of a bunch of people we both love and say, among other things, those traditional words, “I do.” It was wonderful and happy and I couldn’t stop crying or grinning.
Part of the reason I kept tearing up was because it was a historic moment. A nice majority of voters in our state has agreed that gay and lesbian couples should be able to legally marry just weeks before, and so we were officially tying the knot on the very first day that it was allowed in our home state. This was over a year before the U.S. Supreme Court extended that same legal right all across the country. So we’d been fighting for the right to marry for a long time, including a previous attempt by the religious right to repeal the state law granting domestic partnerships all the legal rights the state could. So part of the celebration was for the thousands of other couples around the state who were finally able to access such legal rights as hospital visitation and community property and renting, leasing, or buying property jointly (without having to pay extra taxes if one of you predeceased the other), and so on. Much of which doesn’t sound very romantic until you read heart-wrenching stories of people who are kicked out of their own homes or barred from the deathbed of a dying lifelong partner because of homophobic relatives.
Another part of the reason my eyes kept brimming over with tears was because he had already been together for 15 years at that point, and while we had called each other husband and many of our friends saw us that way, we weren’t husbands before the law.
Another part was that so many of our friends had gone to great lengths to make the ceremony I kept referring to as “the elopement” into something a lot more fabulous than I had expected. From the surprise string duo to the incredible number of flowers, to the custom chocolates, and so much more, it was a magical day.
And then there are the friends themselves. Contrary to what some people say (including a lot of the anti-gay folks who try to pretend they aren’t anti-gay), a marriage is not just a private agreement between two people. Legally a marriage isn’t just a piece of paper, nor is it only a contract between two adults, nor even merely the list of over 1000 federal legal rights that were often talked about in the court cases dealing with marriage equality. Legally it is a binding agreement between those two people and the state. The state (and by extension local and federal governments) promise to provide certain rights to the people being wed, and to hold them to certain responsibilities. That’s where all that assurance of property rights and survivor benefits and hospital visitation rights come from, the fact that the government is agreeing to recognize your mutual decision to name each other next of kin.
Likewise, a wedding isn’t just a formality or a ceremony you do for attention. It’s an affirmation and a covenant—not just between the brides and/or grooms, but between the loved ones who attend and those who can’t but offer their support and love. When we attend a wedding, we’re making a promise to support the resulting union.
So our loved ones who attended the wedding, and those who were unable to, but had sent their love and well wishes, were also on my mind that day. And their love and their belief in our love had my heart so full, it nearly burst.
But of course, the biggest reason I kept crying and could barely make my voice work to say the important “I do” when needed, was because Michael is the sweetest, smartest, kindest man I’ve ever known, and for reasons I still can’t quite fathom, he loves me.
Michael is the handsome devil on the right.It may only be officially our third anniversary, but I’ve been privileged to love and live with this man for over seventeen years. Every year with him thus far has been better than the one before. Which means I must be the luckiest guy in the world.
A steampunk Santa… (wonderhowto.com)For the longest time I wanted to be the kind of person who got a bunch of my Christmas shopping done in advance. It shouldn’t have been difficult. There are certain people I know I’m going to want to give a present to every year. And I come across things all the time that make me think, “Oh, that would be good for so-and-so!” But for various reasons I wouldn’t.
They weren’t bad reasons. Sometimes I’d look at the potential gift, think about how many months it was until Christmas, and worry that the person would buy it for themselves before Christmas arrived. Or that someone else would give it to them at some other gift-giving opportunity. Or I myself, while looking at the gift, would realize the person’s birthday was only a mont or two away, and I’d buy the gift, but as a birthday present, instead.
Then one year, at a science fiction convention in March, I kept happening on things that would be perfect presents for certain friends, and they were unusual enough that I was relatively confident none of our mutual friends would purchase it. And I picked up presents for about seven of the people on our usual list of a couple dozen people. And once I had a box in the bedroom that already had presents for several people, it was really easy of the course of the next few months to take the plunge and pick up presents as I found them.
And then I got laid off on the last day of June.
I wasn’t unemployed for very long, but my jobs for the rest of the year were contract gigs through agencies. Some of them only lasted a couple of weeks. My take-home pay for each was considerably less (particularly since I was paying our medical insurance all out of pocket) than it had been.
Already having half the usual presents acquired helped in a couple of ways. First, there was simply a smaller number of gifts that I wanted to acquire than usual during that last half of the year. But also, because there were already gifts for a bunch of people, I had an incentive to no just throw up my hands and say, “no one’s getting anything from me this year” or whatever. I didn’t want to hand one friend this really nice thing I’d picked up in March, and then hand their spouse or significant other whom I usually picked up nice things for an obvious token gift, right?
What that did was keep me on the look-out for thoughtful gifts constantly. And that helped my attitude. Maybe it’s just me, but thinking out things I’d like to give to people I care about makes me feel good. I can’t be depressed while imagining how much a friend is going to enjoy this cool thing I found for them.
Yes, there are lots of things we spent less money on that year. But we still had a really fun Christmas.
Then the last week of the year I started work as a regular employee at a new job, at a salary and with benefits that put us back in the kind of shape we’d been in before I got laid off. And because I’d gotten into the habit of keeping my eye out all year for presents, the next year by the time December rolled around, I already had presents for a bit more than half the usual list. We still had to do a bunch of shopping in December, but it was a lot less than in most previous years—less stressful and more fun.
I don’t know what happened this year.
It didn’t even occur to me until midway through November that I had picked up nothing: not one single gift for any of our friends or family. Why? I have no clue. Even when, last summer, announcements were made at work which indicated upper management at work was looking to sell the company (which might mean a big change in my employment situation), it didn’t make me think, “I should start working on Christmas, now, while I’ve got time.”
So, here we are, it’s December already. We’re way behind on our usual decorating. I hadn’t done any shopping or even any real thinking about what to get for people until just this weekend. So we’re in a scramble at the end of the year. And there have been more announcements at work, another company has tendered an offer. In a few months I’m either going to be an employee of the new owner or looking for a new job altogether.
I’m trying not to let any of this get me stressed out. I’m 99% certain that I was feeling down last week and very cranky much of the weekend because I’ve been fighting off a cold, and the remodeling at work filled the office with fumes that irritated my sinuses and eyes, and noise and disruption that just make things a teensy bit of a hassle throughout the day.
The truth is, decorating and wrapping and all of that makes me happy. As my husband noted on Sunday evening, when I was up to my eyeballs in boxes of decorations I’d hauled up from the basement, after putting lights on the bushes in front of the house and so forth, that it was the first time he’d seen me smiling in a few days.
(Click to embiggen)Thank goodness it’s Friday. Wait… is it really the first Friday in December? The year is nearly over? Oh, wow!
Anyway, Decorating Season is in full swing, and we’re counting down days until Christmas and I spent a gazillion hours working on two novels last month, and no time working on my annual Christmas Ghost Story, so I’m just in another world of panic, here. But, meanwhile here are links to some of the interesting things I read on the web this week.
Christmas at my Grandma’s, age 4. There are a surprising number of pictures of me with that Tonka steam shovel in later years. (Click to embiggen)“Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go…” as the song says. My paternal Grandmother lived for most of my life in a five-bedroom house that Grandpa built when I was 2 years old. And for as long as my parents were still married to each other, nearly every Christmas and Thanksgiving (a lot of the Easters) was spent at that house. When I was very young, my maternal Grandmother lived in the same small Colorado town as my paternal Grandparents, so I got to see her (and my Great-grandparents) at least briefly for each of those holidays as well.
Write drunk; edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway (Click to embiggen)Now that National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has come to an end for another year, a lot of people are looking at large piles of words which they have assembled and are contemplating the task of editing. At least I sincerely hope they are1! Editing can be a daunting task. And let’s be honest, it is hard work.
But, getting the rough draft together is no mean feat. And it’s whole lot easier to revise something once you’ve got a rough draft than it is to create the first draft to begin with6.
Now, some people operate under the mistaken notion that by editing we mean going through the story line by line to correct spelling and get the punctuation right. No, that’s copy editing. And you do that at the very end. Which isn’t to say that you oughtn’t fix any spelling errors, typos, and so forth that you notice during the first editing pass, but that isn’t what editing is. It’s not even the most important part of editing.
Storytelling isn’t about creating perfectly structured sentences with perfectly spelled words and having every comma at just the right spot. One reason why that isn’t nearly as important as many people think is because there are a lot fewer rules of grammar than most people believe. There are wrong ways to use a comma, yes, but there are an infinite number of completely different but still right ways to use (or omit) one as well. A lot of the “rules” that people have learned aren’t rules at all. They aren’t even, often, good guidelines. They are preferences in some case—and outright myths in others.
Writing isn’t a simple algorithmic function. A story needs to live and breathe. A story has a mood, sometimes that mood changes as the tale moves along. Some parts of a story move more quickly than others. You may have a rapid fight scene with a lot of angry posturing and taunting between the opponents, followed by a more leisurely description of the aftermath, when the conquering heroine comforts the person she rescued. And you control pacing by varying things like length of sentence, length of paragraphs, choices of punctuation, and so on.
No style guide, no matter how good, can tell you how to structure a sentence to be brassy and defiant. You have to let the context be your guide.
But before you get to copy editing, you need to revise, restructure, and clean up your story. In my day job as a technical writer we have several terms for different types of editing. And the one you need to concern yourself with first is what we call a developmental edit. This is where you look at things such as the structure of the story, the plotting, the pacing, the characterization, the tone, and the overall reading experience. This is something that is very hard to do to your own work if you haven’t been writing for a long time, but it’s something you can learn, and just like writing, you learn it primarily by doing. But you also have to study.
Pick up some good books about structure and narrative7, and read at least one all the way through before you pick up your manuscript at start the edit pass. I admit, at least half of the reason I give this particular piece of advice is to give you some time away from your story. You need some emotional distance in order to look at your work objectively8.
Then you need to look at the story first as a whole. What is your central conflict that drives your main character’s actions? Does this conflict run like a thread from the beginning to the end of the story, or does it get tangled and cut off midway through, and another conflict entirely take over?
What about the emotional arc of each of your characters? This is another way of looking at the theme of the story. Why should the reader care about the things that happen to your leads and supporting characters? What is at stake and how do they feel about it? In what way do they change? Or what prevents them from changing?
Does the order of events make sense? Are you missing connecting scenes? Do you need to have a few characters spell out their motives a bit more?
Is the pacing of the story overall consistent with the plot? Does the pacing of individual scenes match the mood, purpose, and context of that scene?
Do your sub-plots compliment the main plot, or are they distractions? Does each sub-plot line up with the emotional arc of at least one character?
There’s a lot to work on. And at some point you’re going to have to let someone you trust (and by trust, I mean, they will give you their honest opinion) read what you’ve got to see how they react to it. So long as you remember Neil Gaiman’s advice: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
Before you do that, you should try the trick of reading it aloud in an empty room. You will be amazed when you read a scene aloud to yourself at all of the things that are wrong with it which you never noticed while reading it silently.
Editing is work, but it has rewards. There will be moments during the editing process when you’re just sloughing through, and start wondering if it’s worth it. And there will be other moments that inspiration will strike and you’ll find yourself writing new bits or revising existing bits that feel as exciting as the best moments of the first draft.
Just remember: the goal is to tell the story the best that you can. Never forget that.
“Write drunk; edit sober.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Footnotes:
1. A writer I follow on Twitter re-tweeted another writer who said, “An agent recently told me that every December 1 she receives hundreds of unsolicited, awful, unedited manuscripts. Don’t be that person.” So, obviously, there are people who don’t realize that a rough draft needs edit and re-write passes2.
2. This shouldn’t surprise me. As the editor of a non-profit amateur publishing project for more than 20 years I frequently received unsolicited manuscripts from people who were absolutely aghast when we asked for re-writes. “Can’t you do that?”3.
3. And I’ve written before about people who have never written a thing in their lives and are convinced that their life experiences would make a great book—and then find out that I’m a writer. They are always shocked that I’m not willing let them tell me their anecdotes so that I will write it up for them for a promise of a small percentage of the proceeds?4
4. Though my favorite was still the woman who, after listening to my explanation of the project at our table in a Dealer’s Den of a sci fi convention, asked if we she could dictate her stories to us and we just write it down. I referred her to services that will do that and she was appalled that someone would actually charge to type her stories for her. “I’m doing the hard part! I thought it up!”5
5. See, it isn’t just artists who have to contend with this!
6. Even though there are times while working on the rough draft that you probably despaired of ever finishing, there were also times when the words just seemed to fly from your fingers. You didn’t always know what was coming next, but right that moment, inspiration was driving you, and it was fun.
Today is World AIDS Day. Each year, I spend part of the day remembering people I have known who left this world too soon because of that disease.
So: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack. Some of you I didn’t know for very long. One of you was a relative. One of you was one of my best friends in high school.
I miss you all. It was a privilege to know you.
Rex Huppke has a post on why fighting AIDS is still important: On World AIDS Day, pass this on. ‘Only a third of gay and bisexual men “realize that new infections are on the rise among gay men” and 22 percent think rates are decreasing. The survey also found: “Most gay and bisexual men are not aware of current treatment recommendations for those who are HIV-positive, or of the latest developments in reducing new infections.”‘
Pastor Manning’s church sign last August after a judge found the church guilty of five zoning citations. Note the church didn’t win, they lost, lost, lost, lost, and lost. But Manning has never been known for speaking truth of any kind. (Click to embiggen)I’ve written more than once about Pastor David Manning and his frequently homophobic, hateful, lying, and violence-advocating church sign in Harlem. He’s in the news this week for a couple of reasons. There was a Love Not Hate protest outside his church, and he and some of his supporters came out and kept yelling incoherently about faggots. Seriously, it’s like he has a form of Tourette’s Syndrome that forces him to say “faggot” and other anti-gay slurs multiple times in every sentence. He and his church are also in the news because of zoning violations that have now added up to more than $11,000 in fines. And yes, the church sign is part of the issue, but it is only one of five violations.
The pastor’s church building is covered by a Historic Landmark Preservation Ordinance. As such, any renovations, remodels, or alterations have to be approved by the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. The church has never, ever applied for such permission, and in the last several years has erected the sign upon which they keep posting hateful messages, they removed ornamental ironwork from another part of the building, they removed a second floor balcony, they added an exterior door, and they added a marble fence. Not only did they fail to apply to the Landmark Preservation Commission, they didn’t attempt to get ordinary building permits for any of these alterations.
Way back in May of 2013, the Landmark Preservation Commission issues a warning letter about the violations. The church ignored it. Last March, after many attempts for nearly two years to get the church to respond, the city issued a citation. The church ignored that. The church continued to ignored numerous notices until finally last August when the pastor presented his defense to a judge. Said defense consisted of the claim that other churches have broken the same law, but no one cites them because they don’t put homophobic messages on their sign. He’s being persecuted for his beliefs, you see. The judge didn’t care, found them guilty of five violations, ordered the church to pay $1,850 in fines, and ordered them to work with the appropriate agencies to bring the building into compliance.
The church then changed their sign (as pictured above) to read: “We won, we won! Have a nice day you damned homos.” They didn’t win. Not one of their arguments was accepted. The judge ruled against them on every count. I guess that because he didn’t order a wrecking ball to destroy the whole building that very day, they decided that meant they won. I don’t know.
Because they haven’t made any effort to even discuss how the building would be brought into compliance, the city has issued new citations. But since the church wouldn’t pay the $1,850, I don’t think they’re going to cough up the $11,500 any time soon. The pastor claims that the church simply doesn’t have the money for the fines. Now, given how easy it was for a pizza parlor that wasn’t even facing a boycott or fines to get anti-gay people to crowdfun hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone the money that bakeries, wedding venues, and other businesses run by homophones have been able to raise), I find it very difficult to believe Atlah World Missions couldn’t get donors to kick in for these amounts that are quite small by comparison. I think it’s fair to conclude that they have no intention to pay, and clearly no intention to fix the building.
And: Bomb hoax and molotov cocktails thrown at Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia. “It’s enough that it would lead a reasonable person to believe, given the location of where he was, given the time, he was there at three in the morning … what he said … It would lead you to believe that this guy is doing this because we are of this religious denomination or ethnicity or combination of both.”
So, pardon me if I have trouble feeling much sympathy for some members of the religious rightwing who claim that we are using violent tragedies to confirm a “narrative.” No, we’re too busy being victims of all this violence you’re encouraging to be worried about a narrative.
(Click to embiggen)Thank goodness it’s Friday. It is the final Friday in November. That means, at least here in the states, that yesterday was Thanksgiving. Which means that here at our house, we are finally officially into Christmas season. I can list to Christmas music! I can start decorating! Yay!
The last few weeks the links list has been a bit shorter than usual because of how much time I’m spending on NaNoWriMo. Then this week with the holiday, traveling, and family time, my news reading time was even more restricted. Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
CDC: Marriage Rates Up in 2014, Divorce Rates Down. “Remember how religious conservatives insisted that allowing same-sex couples to marry would destroy the institution of marriage? Yeah, no: The CDC says more Americans married in last year and fewer married couples divorced. The numbers are small—tiny uptick in the marriage rate (reversing a 15 year trend), tiny downtick in the divorce rate—and this CDC report covers 2014, the year before the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land. But same-sex couples were already marrying in a majority of states in 2014.”
Things to be grateful for (Click to embiggen).It’s easy to spend all of our time worrying about bad things happening in the world, ranting about stupid things people do, complaining about problems that plague us, and so forth. I feel especially bad doing that because a lot of things in my life are not just good, they’re wonderful. And it’s worthwhile to remember that. And not just remember it, but share it.
So, among the things I’m thankful for this year:
My husband — sweet, kind, loving, smart, sexy, and way too awesome for the likes of me
My friends — talented, entertaining, amazing, supportive, and inexplicably willing to put up with me
purple, anything purple
people who help other people
books
coffee
people who sweat the details
flowers
people who make good art
electricity
people who love
soy nog
people who clean up after natural disasters
rockets and satellites and space probes and all the cool things humans build to learn more about everything
tigers
people who make other people laugh
otters
my family, yes even the most crazy, because they’re part of what made me who I am, and I’m sure that I drive them just as crazy as they drive me
people who make music
my job
people who don’t sweat the small stuff
my wonderful, talented, hard-working, long-suffering, handsome husband (who absolutely deserves to be on this list more than once!)
people who dance
raspberries
people who do science
kittens, puppies, adorable pictures, and all the sweet goofy things in the world
people who build things
music
technology that lets me carry my entire music library in my pocket, access the world’s libraries from the palm of my hand, read silly things people say halfway around the world, and complain about the most petty first world problems while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store
people who care
my extended chosen family, which yes overlaps with several other times on this list (not just the second)
the crazy world of entertainment that gives us everything from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to Ashe vs Evil Dead and everything in between
readers
sexy people (yes, including the cast of Magic Mike)
my clever, patient husband who happens to be both an amazing computer resurrectionist and a damn good cook
Thank you, everyone who reads this. Where ever you are, whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today or not, I hope your life has more blessings than tribulations. May you be surrounded by love and filled with joy—because you deserve it!
Enjoy yourself a nice food coma… (Click to embiggen)I learned a lot of incredible recipes from my grandmothers and great-grandmothers as a kid. There are a few favorite old dishes that, for one reason or another, I never learned how to make before the only person in the family that knew it passed away. One of my great-grandmothers cooked sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving in heavy cream and molasses. They were incredibly delicious, but it was apparently a rather involved process. If she wasn’t attending the big Thanksgiving dinner, we didn’t get the creamy sweet potatoes. Her daughter, my Grandma B, didn’t like the creamy recipe. She preferred to just pour a bit of molasses and a bunch of mini-marshmallows on top and bake the sweet potatoes. Lots of people eat them that way, but they just don’t compare to the way Great-grandma made them.
My Grandma P. had all sorts of favorite old recipes, but most of them weren’t Thanksgiving fare (her chili was to die for!). But about ten years before she died, after she had let my Aunt Silly take over hosting the annual Thanksgiving dinner, Grandma brought this frozen cranberry salad which everyone loved. Really, really loved. And they begged her to make it again for Christmas. It became the dish she brought to all the holiday get-togethers from then on. For some reason, I never asked her to explain the recipe to me. I was a bit surprised, after Grandma died, when I found out none of my cousins, nor my aunt, nor Mom, had ever asked for the recipe. We had some discussions and realized that none of us agreed on all the ingredients we recalled being in it. It was frozen, it had cranberries, and orange slices, and Cool Whip mixed together, but also had layers. But some of us remember it having nuts, while some said it never did, and others remember coconut, while others thought it was marshmallows, and so on. I suspect it’s because Grandma had alway been an improvisational cook, so I bet she never made it exactly the same way, twice.
Over the years since, I experimented in an attempt to re-create it, and have come up with a process that gets something most of the family members agree is darn close. I know that Grandma probably made hers with canned cranberry sauce, but I always start with raw cranberries and mandarin oranges, cooking them down to make homemade cranberry sauce. In the tradition of none of us remembering it the same way, every year I intentionally do at least one different ingredient than the previous year. My sister keeps insisting Grandma’s had mini marshmallows (at least two cousins agree with her), while Mom and I are pretty sure it didn’t. But this year, for my sister, I’ve added mini marshmallows.
For the last fifteen years or so, Mom has made this thing she calls Mistake Salad. Originally she meant to follow a recipe she got from a magazine, but she skipped a major ingredient. But everyone liked what she made, so she’s kept doing it “wrong.” If you’ve ever heard the novelty song “Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise,” this thing Mom makes is from a similar tradition. Except if there were a song about Mom’s, it would be called “Pistachio Pudding Pineapple Cottage Cheese Surprise.” And while that may not sound good, I assure you it is sinfully delicious.
Family holiday traditions are weird like that. Several years back my sister had Thanksgiving dinner plans go badly awry, and she wound up making spaghetti and meatballs, because that was what she had left that was fit to eat. Her oldest daughter (my niece) loved that Thanksgiving, and now spaghetti and meatballs is her favorite food to make for the holidays.
When I was young, the gravy served at big family meals was always so thick, it could have been served with a fork. After you spooned some onto your mashed potatoes and stuffing, he had to sort of mash it into the potatoes and the stuffing with your fork to get the flavor blended. A friend once explained that her family’s gravy was always thin and runny, so when you poured some on any part of your dinner, it flowed all over the plate, and everything got some gravy on it. For her, that’s the flavor of Thanksgiving: a bit of gravy on everything.
For me, it isn’t a holiday dinner if there isn’t a relish tray (at least two kinds of olives, pickles, other pickled vegetables). For my husband, the dinner needs a green bean casserole—specifically the kind made with cream of mushroom soup and French’s fried onions. And afterward there has to be pie. Unless I’m feeling up to make cherries jubilee (the kind with flaming brandy! Fruit, sugar, ice cream, and fire! How can you top that for a dessert?), then I can live without pie.
This year it’s just going to be the three of us at my Mom’s. So we’re only going to have part of a turkey, and only a couple of side dishes. Though I can tell from the messages I’ve been exchanging with her that both of us have picked up a few extra things besides what we discussed when divvy-ing up the menu. So we’ll probably wind up with enough food to feed a dozen. It may be more than filling, but it will also be fun.
Font Folly 