Escaping the Trunk

From Toronto

Photographing tall ships, getting sunburned, and coming home for our annual re-watch of JAWS.

Oh yeah, and finishing the re-writes of my novel. The latest iteration now rests comfortably in my agent’s inbox, and I would have done a celebratory dance of some sort once I clicked “send,” had it not been a quarter to five in the morning. I took a four-hour nap before we headed out to look at the tall ships, I’m exhausted, and my skin is far too pink, and I’m sure I’ll have some sort of sender’s remorse later. For now though, I have an air-conditioned bedroom.

The Bebop re-caps will re-commence very soon.

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From Food

I’ve been on break from school for a while. I wish I could say that I did something truly amazing with my time, but I mostly focused on watching Twin Peaks, doing yoga, and finally figuring out how to make brown rice properly on a stovetop. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I seem to finally have discovered the method that works for me. The secret is washing the rice. Over and over. Three times, at least. You drop the rice in a bowl, run cold water over it, then polish it between your fingers like Ebenezer Scrooge counting the last of the day’s shillings on a cold December afternoon. When the water becomes cloudy, use your hand like a sieve and tip the bowl over, draining out the water between your fingers without losing too many grains. Lather, rinse, repeat. You are finished when the water runs clear. It’s slow, but it works. For one cup of rice, I use 1 1/4 cup water. I bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to the lowest possible setting, and do my best to wait patiently. It’s hard not to open up the pot and meddle with the process. But nothing destroys rice faster than over-attention; too much stirring and you have risotto instead of sushi.

This break I’ve also finally learned how to sear a perfectly moist chicken breast, and how to make the right macaroni and cheese. (I love macaroni and cheese. Without those crucial bits of butter and milk during my growing years, I’d have wound up even shorter. But now I make mine with broccoli, Worcestershire sauce, and my all-important Calphalon saucepan.) Nothing fancy, just techniques that make things easier later. It feels good, getting these small things right.

I also received Peter and Caitlin’s notes on the novel. I suspect that they had several “spare the rod, spoil the child” discussions before giving me those notes. For two people who approach their craft from such different points, they wound up agreeing on a number of issues. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a plan. I’m thinking of the story as a story again, and not a checklist, and remembering what made me want to write it in the first place. All the decisions I was loath to make earlier on are much easier and clearer, now, and it feels good to have it under my hands, polishing it, clarifying it.

It’s there when I go to sleep and it’s still there when I wake up. I missed it.

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In case anyone’s curious, I’ve gotten feedback on my manuscript from both my agent and (most of) my workshop. I’m still waiting on a couple of opinions which really matter to me, and for this reason I’ve been reticent to attempt any re-writing. I’m waiting until all the science is in, to use a climate-denier phrase.

That said, I’m slowly growing more excited about the process. Everyone has a slightly different take on the book, but the good news is that they all enjoyed it (if for different reasons). It’s tough to reconcile all those opinions and desires and nagging questions, and I feel like I’m cooking vegan, kosher, and hypo-allergenic all in the same dish. But I know that the flavour is in there, waiting to be sweated out, and eventually everything will approach some semblance of cohesion. I think the first step might be re-reading it and making notes for myself, but not touching anything. It’s very hard for me not to fix and tweak as I go, but in this case I think I’ll have to sit on my hands. I’m not even sure I’ve read the whole thing in one go, before. I wrote it in isolated chapters, and at one point I went back and edited and re-wrote from the very beginning. I think the manuscript benefited from that, so in theory doing the same thing all over again with a more focused and informed mindset should help.

Still. I could screw it up.

In the meantime, there’s an absurd amount of homework to do. Seriously.

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From Food

This is the dinner I prepared after finishing the first draft of a novel called The von Neumann Sisters. My agent is reading it, my workshop is reading it, my husband is reading it. The title is taken from a comment Peter made in a Starship Sofa podcast, when talking about it. He mistook the title I had in mind, but when I thought about it, I realized it was a better fit. But that final moment reflects the beginning of the process: Peter’s the one who told me to write this one. I already had five chapters and a ton of research done on another novel, but that novel was fighting me every step of the way. In the middle of one of our afternoon anime and beer binges (did I mention that my life is great?), while we were talking about another short story I had written about robots, Peter squinted at me and said: “Why don’t you just write about them, instead?” When I told my husband about this conversation, he said: “You have something really special, here. I think you should do it.”

I am nothing if not highly suggestible.

That other novel is still in me, and I think about it every day. But it’s a big, rough book. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to tackle it, yet. There were moments writing vNS that stymied me completely. At one point, I had to turn right around and start over, editing from the first sentence on down until I could get my momentum back. This really hurt, because writing is the thing I do all the time, and if I don’t have a story with me I feel not just naked, but empty and alone. Since finishing this draft, I’ve got the DT’s: I’m alternating between the sense of my head clearing enough to get some damn homework done, finally, and the gnawing absence of what was once a regular, if not always productive, activity.

With that sentiment in mind, please enjoy this video:

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Recently, two separate posts have gotten under my skin and forced me to re-examine the book I’m trying to write. (I’m trying, I promise. Really. It’s just that everything I do looks wrong, and this is part of the reason why.)

The first is Jetse de Vries Christmas present to the genre: Should SF Die? Jetse distills his point here:

My viewpoint is that SF is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and that lack of relevance can be attributed to developments and trends already mentioned in the points above [SF is morally and ethically bankrupt; SF is monolithically angophilic; SF is commercially dead; SF has ditched science and become fantasy] and SF’s unwillingness to really engage with the here-and-now. That doesn’t mean that SF needs to die (actually, a slow marginalisation into an increasingly neglected and despised niche-cum-ghetto is probably a fate worse than death), but it does mean that SF needs to change, and that it needs to become much more inclusive of the alien (and I mean alien in ‘humans-can-be-aliens-to-each-other’ sense) and proactive, meaning it should not just shout ‘FIRE! FIRE!’ (and do almost nothing but), but both man the fire trucks *and* think of ways to prevent more fires.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m going away to finish this book. I have a lot of work to do. Luckily, as of this morning I feel energized to do it. For too long I had been languishing, fretting, freaking. Then I spent yesterday with a rather large cephalopod watching Fullmetal Alchemist. (Because that’s our life: we write and read all day and then break for eight-hour marathon viewings of good anime. It’s a good life. A great life. I suspect what people want when they want to write is not the signings and promotions and cons, but this kind of life.) As I was describing the series as a whole (we got through a quarter, yesterday) I said: “Really, this story is about two kids who make a really bad mistake and find out that they can’t rectify it. They can’t fix it. They can’t get back to normal. And every movement the story makes is about proving that, and proving how powerful our mistakes can make us.”

And then I realized I was describing my novel.

Sometime this afternoon, I’m going to get into a car with my best friend and head up toward lake country. With any luck, we’ll get horribly lost — those times make the best stories. But eventually we’ll find our way, and there will be food waiting for us, and friends, and a hell of a lot of work. And then we’ll come home to the city, and there will be people who love us and support us and whose breathing puts us to sleep every night. This is our life (and it’s ending one minute at a time) and it’s the best goddamn life anyone could ask for. I’m grateful every day. I know how lucky I am. I know how little, in some ways, that I deserve it.

It just gives me all the more reason to rock my shit.

So here’s to long trips, wherever they may take us. Fuck normal. Get lost. Make mistakes. Whistle past the graveyard. Just get started.

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If you read the revamped BoingBoing today, you’ve already seen this. Personally, it reminds me of both Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece and that old Paxil commercial with the sad little onigiri/lump thing that rolled along until it found a SSRI that did good spam filtering on its serotonin.

Funktionide Part II from eltopo on Vimeo.

I’ve been exceptionally busy, lately. Well, busy for me, which means working on finishing my novel, doing my homework, going to class, and editing my thesis. My thesis is edited and turned in, now, and I’m graduated ABD. I spent the weekend writing and churned out 5700 words. Not bad, but today I’ve only written 1100 and I need to do more.

But first, a bath. And some more homework. Then making dinner. This workflow feels like home.

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He steered them past expensive kitchen shops and the dark, hollow spaces where bookstores used to be, and nearly lost him in front of a brightly lit yoga studio pumping trance out its open door. In the window, human women dipped toward the floor, lifted themselves up on trembling forearms, and balanced there as they offered their wet faces and shaking chests to the night.

“Wow,” Junior said.

“Easy.” Javier winked at the blonde in the front. She ducked her head and ruined her balance. He grinned. Humans were so damn adorable. Shaking his head, he tugged Junior down the sidewalk. “Give it some time. You’re only a day old.”

Back to work.

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I’ve gotten a big chunk of The Von Neumann Wives finished. Enough to show it to some (very patient) people, namely Dave and Caitlin. Here’s a clip:

“Leave me alone!” Amy pressed herself up against the wall. Her fingers, for some reason, were still in her ears. She was crying. They were staring. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to. Just please let me go home. Please, I just want to go home.”

One smiled faintly. “You are home.” And she reached out-

-and then her hand vanished, gone in a hot puff of wind that smelled vaguely of bile. For a moment, the other Von Neumann woman watched her flailing stump of a wrist. Then the wrist disappeared, oozing away into gray fluid that dripped like hot wax down her disintegrating arm. She didn’t scream. She didn’t howl with pain or fear – she just watched as a large figure in a green jumpsuit loped down the hall carrying the officer’s rifle.

“You know what this is?” Amy’s fellow prisoner asked, shouting over the alarm. He primed the rifle again. He was hugely fat, and wore badly scorched prison slippers on his hands. Amy smelled burning cloth. The other Von Neumann women were backing away, now, abandoning their sister who cradled her disintegrating arm close to her chest. Now he stood at the ruined door to Amy’s cage. “This is a wasabi cannon. It’s full of horseradish peroxidase. It eats carbon tubes faster than your repair mods can handle it. You’re gonna die.”

He pointed the weapon straight at Amy’s head. “And now you’re gonna let me leave.”

I also just finished a story I’m calling “Ishin.” It’s about unmanned aerial systems, signal-relaying body armour, and life in Afghanistan after the war(s).

Brandon accesses Tink’s command line and inputs his own hack: ⇑⇑⇓⇓⇐==>⇐==>573. Now she belongs to him entirely, priorities momentarily forgotten, processes un-logged, movements off the grid. He directs her with his finger. She swerves, hovers, waits as Brandon plots safe Euler paths between the school and the nearest teashop – a safe location. When he sends it to her she pounces on the girl’s mobile, planting herself inside the phone, streaming the maps there. The girl nods as the first image pops up. Brandon watches through Tink’s eye, sees the slightly worried faces of the other girls as they look back at the labour pool on the corner, watches their lips move with a mixture of frustration and fear. When Tink withdraws they move forward.

The people here are already so used to the bots, Brandon realizes, that they barely recognize them as surveillance. They are part of the landscape. As in a fairy tale, they have come alive through prolonged use: real dragonflies, real camels, real birds of prey.

For the first time, he thinks that this might have been the plan all along.

Next up is a story I’m working on with Peter and Karl, which we intend on submitting to The Shine Anthology. I’m excited about it, and a little nervous. I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, much less two people, much less two people of such calibre. Lucky for me they’re quite experienced at this, and they always inspire me, and they’ve always taken my work seriously — even when it was in its most embarrassing infancy. I feel a bit like the squishy, melty middle of an otherwise cohesive ice cream sandwich. I asked Peter what he intended me to bring to this trio, and he said: “The twenty-first century.” 

I really can’t believe that this is my life, sometimes. Wish me luck.

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I’m about to write about robots entering a Costco. The nice thing about writing my robots is that they can actually move like this:

Also, I have things to do today. So “Now Get Busy” is my new theme song for a bit.

And yes I got a plan I’m a carry out it
Yes I’m pro-choice I’m a scream and shout it
Yes I love life and I try not to doubt it
Yes I’m gonna party ’cause I’m ’bout it ’bout it

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