Escaping the Trunk

You can read my story, “Milk+” at The Orphan. Snip:

Braxtin had no need for the milk bar until a week after starting Milk+. By then, her breasts already felt stretched and sore, and a hot little knot of pain had tightened between her shoulders. But according to the pamphlet inside her free box of Milk +, her new breast milk contained a more even distribution of fats and sugars, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys created by conventional insulin release. Lev fed steadily, cried less, and napped more. Braxtin could have wept with relief.

Steadying Lev’s stroller with one hand with baby bag and her canvas grocery tote hanging from her other elbow, Braxtin swung the keychain before a card-sized black panel and stepped through the softly chiming doors. Like deer troubled by a passing car, the heads of three nursing mothers rose to watch her from their curved, ultra-modern sofas. Despite their differences in height and race, their breasts seemed disproportionately distended and heavy, as though a bad comic book artist’s Oedipal fantasy had come bizarrely and painfully true. Stretch marks like root systems began at their necks and climbed ever downward.

I’ve been wrestling with this story for a long time. Thankfully, Brendan Byrne was willing to adopt my li’l orphan and give it a home. You should check it out, if only just to see Molly Crabapple’s excellent illustrations. They’re creepy and juicy and gorgeous, and the illustration to the right of my story is a better companion for it than I could ever have wished for. Go take a look.

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I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Cory Doctorow wrote about my story:

This week’s Escape Pod podcast story is Madeline Ashby’s βoyfriend, a marvellous, sweetly romantic science fiction story about teenagers who use clever artificial intelligences as “training wheels” on the way to their first real love, but who quickly find themselves substituting the warm companionship of their imaginary friends for the confusing and fraught people around them. It’s got Ashby’s sly humor, heart and it’s got clever to spare. I bought Madeline’s first published story for Tesseracts 11 and it’s wonderful to see where she’s gone since.

Note: I thought about snipping his entry, but fuck it: I’m pleased as punch at what Cory had to say, and I want to keep it forever in my own archives. Seriously, I’m wiggling in my chair, right now. I’m also blogging from my foresight class. (That’s a no-no, kids. Do as I say, not as I do.) Ironically, we spent the day talking about future uses of mobile phones.

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Good news! One of my stories has made it to Escape Pod! That means that someone, somewhere will get to read aloud about romantically-inclined mobile phone apps, and post-prom chicken fights in hot tubs. Good news all ’round, I say. Special thanks to Dave for encouraging me to submit the story.

I was so pleased about this news that I spent extra time in the kitchen, today:

From Food

From Food

Above, you’ll find the bento I’m taking with me tomorrow when I head out for an appointment. I don’t prepare bento often, and as you can see they’re rarely very attractive. (Were I a character in shoujo anime, my bento skills would never win my intended’s heart.) But they are useful when you don’t want to waste the money or calories on fast food. And there is something very calming about making something like inari zushi; it is a repetitive process whose end product you actually get to enjoy after all the hard work. I feel this way about gyoza, too. From mixing and marinating the meat to pinching together the dumplings to frying them, dipping them, and eating them, I’m mostly on my feet avoiding hissing hot oil or manning my tongs. But at the end there’s this crispy, juicy explosion of garlic and ginger and scallions on my tongue, and it’s all worth it.

You know, sort of like writing.

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One chilly morning in January, I phoned Squid for his birthday. As I padded barefoot between the living room window and the kitchen talking about how far up the simulated brainstem one might nestle robot :: human affective bonding, I casually made reference to a story idea I had.

“Oh, wow,” he said. “You have to write that story.”

“It’s a one-liner,” I said. “It’s trite.”

“But it’s great! You can do it in a thousand words. Come on, you have to.”

...At lesser provocation have wars been waged and empires built. Be careful what you wish for, people, especially when what you wish for is a story about a very clever piece of furniture who loves, really loves, a brilliant physicist.* (Also there are origami cars and a household “Internet of Things” and talking toilets that can do pregnancy tests. But those are just icing.) Otherwise I might just demand your help revising the story, relying on your superior prose skills for assistance, only to call you halfway through the editing process just to say “WE SHOULD MAKE FICTION BABIES POST-HASTE.”

Speaking of which, you know what’s good for that? The Missionary Position.

*Note: The story should also be available in the print edition of Nature, on the back page in the “Futures” section. Granted, you will have to find a newsstand or bookstore which carries it, or hit your local library.

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…OTB is, according to one blogger, one of the best new stories of 2009. (Thanks again, Dave. You’re the best pal ever.)

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Courtesy of my pal Dave, I learned that Lois Tilton at the Internet Review of Science Fiction had some pretty nice things to say about my story “Off-Track Betting” from Flurb #7.

One of the things I like best about this review — aside from the fact that Ms. Tilton recommends my story — is how well she summarizes its content:

When Xian was young, her family sold her to the People’s Colonial Circus. Now she is living on the ice miner Tian Hou and has sold her body to the Motes, nano-sized aliens that attempt to communicate to humans by contorting the bodies of human Dancers into messages. Like everyone else, she bets on the outcome of the messages, but the government has been tracking her bets and now it is suspicious about how much she knows.

Simple, straight, and to the point. I really wish I could summarize my own stories with such economy. That’s something I’ll have to work on.

In other news, I know that I’m long overdue for a meaty blog post. After all, so much has happened: I’ve moved to a new neighbourhood, attended Ad Astra (where I was a triple panelist, and my friends showed up, and it was awesome), done a colloquium, registered for more Japanese lessons, started a new story…the fun just never stops, and apparently, neither do I.

Except for now, of course, when I catch up on Dollhouse and try to decompress. Later, there might be analysis of the con (what of it that I can remember, aside from Doug Smith calling me a “fucking great writer” or Liana K. scratching my scalp) or a list of the things I enjoy most about being here (quite possibly, it’s the way the baristas at my coffee shop sample their perfume for me when I walk in, proudly thrusting their wrists under my nose just so I can be included in their conversation). But that will be later. Not now, later. Now is for television, and experiments with red beans and rice.

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A story of mine called “Off-Track Betting” has finally found a home, and you can read it here, compliments of Rudy Rucker, who was kind enough to give it a home. As I told my workshop (who might not remember the title, as I wrote the story some time ago), “it’s about alien nanites who communicate through interpretive dance, and the illegal gambling communities that spring up around them.”

I swear it’s a serious story. Even with the interpretive dance. No, really. It’s about, uh, interrogating the myth of a unified nation, and, er…critiquing depictions of the female cyborg body at labour. And stuff. Yeah.

Snip:

The Motes let Xian go, and she tucked herself, twitching and sweating, into a loose ball until the crane plucked her like fruit from her sector of the performance space. The Motes really had a lot to say, this session, and her body had contorted in ways it hadn’t since her People’s Colonial Circus days: her toes near her eyes, her spine a half-circle. A nurse pulled Xian’s collar down and slapped on a pain patch. Xian’s body, so light in this space, took on a false heaviness as the drug worked at softening the impact of what the Motes’ molecular machines had done to it. Someone gave her a drink – potassium and sodium chloride and all the chemicals the Motes liked to mimic when their machines broadcast signals through a Dancer’s nervous system, bypassing the brain’s own signals. She needed to replenish. She needed to sleep. She needed to place her bets.

Also there’s a funny picture of me at the end of it all. I had initially intended for an edited, prettier version to be sent, but somehow it didn’t get through. Clearly the internet is punishing me for my vanity. I’ll just leave it as is.

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I’m very happy and proud to announce that you can read my story Fitting A New Suit at Godfather-Of-Cyberpunk Rudy Rucker’s ‘zine, FLURB, which my friends assure me is a “HOMG!”-worthy offence. Here’s an excerpt:

“There, isn’t that better?”

Dai shifted inside his new suit. Unlike his previous one, this felt like a piece of clothing and not a second skin. He didn’t like it. “Loose.”

Kyon rolled her eyes. “You’ll get used to it.” Stepping around the treadpad in the floor, Kyon found his refrigerator. She opened it without asking. “You need anything? More protein? More carbs?”

Dai took a deep breath. “There’s a chip.”

Kyon frowned. “You want chips?”

He shook his head. “There’s a chip inside the fridge.” Kyon looked from the fridge full of protein drinks and noodle cartons to him. “It calculates what I need, and tells Support Services.”

Kyon peeked inside again. “So you can’t choose?”

“They choose what’s best.”

“Interesting.” From her tone, Dai guessed that Kyon’s image of him now involved words like “trapped” and “Kafkaesque.”

“It’s very healthy.”

“So you don’t ever want something from outside?”

Dai thought briefly of fried pork cutlet smothered in curry gravy. “No.”

Kyon shrugged. The boxy shoulders of her coverall rose and fell. “Suit yourself.” Her hand rose to cover her mouth. “That was a bad pun,” she said through her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

Dai sat on the floor. “I’d like to work out now.”

Kyon nodded. “Right. Sure thing. Let me know if there are any kinks.” She crossed to the door. She opened it before pulling on her building slippers. “And hey, wash that new suit, huh? The other one was, like, stiff.”

Dai pretended not to hear. Instead, he began the first of three thousand crunches.

Read the rest of this entry »

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My story, “In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock n’ Roll,” originally published in Tesseracts Eleven, has just been granted an honourable mention in Gardner Dozois Twenty-fifth Annual Year’s Best Science Fiction. Before I got my hands on a copy of the book, I had Dave take pictures for me:

Honourable Mention

Also I made that dinner you see in those photos, to celebrate. “In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock n’ Roll” was my first national sale, so it was pretty lucky to get mentioned in Year’s Best right out of the gate. (My friends’ reactions made it real: Karl called it a “big, big deal,” Watts said I was making enemies already, and Cory, who published the story, used capslock.)

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