Idea Garage Sale: The Right Foot of Light, or Something Like That

Hi, y'all, there was computer crap and it was Game with People Day and I'm tired, so just real fast here's a high concept garage sale idea that came up at WorldCon.

You've read Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, right? (If the answer is "no," go read it as soon as you get off the net.) Personally I prefer Lathe of Heaven, but I'm the only one who does and that's okay. The point is -

Tell yourself the same story. With a human in the POV slot who isn't straight cis male. Any of the alphabet soup of alternate sexualities (and remember the A stands for Asexual, not "allies," don't be silly), or straight female, will do.

How does that kemmer scene on the ice work with the change?

Where does that take you?

I Know, It Looks Like I'm Goofing Off...

See, here's the thing. My brain keeps on working, making stories, regardless.

But it doesn't always work on stories I know how to sell, or that the market will treat kindly if I do sell them; and sometimes I find myself returning constantly, obsessing over, a story I know I can tell, but which I also know would be read wrong by half the people who read it and 90% of the people who didn't if it ever actually sold and somehow picked up buzz and folks did in fact read it.

Like the story dealing with how women are socialized into not recognizing that all the sexual power naturally belongs to us, with an extra layer of misleading us into believing (when we discover that fact) that it's the only power we have (and that it's wrong to use it); which is spinning itself out of the Widespot backstory for me -

It'd be a risk to write that, but hey, I can't sell the stuff I know how to sell right now, either, so what am I risking, really? I could tell that story and maybe somebody'd get it and that would be all to the good so who cares if I have to go to new places in the writing to do it, right?

Except that the way it's shaped now almost everyone would think of it as "that story where the girls are dating a father and son." Which, ick, who'd pick that up? Nobody who'd enjoy, understand, and benefit from the story I'd actually write, for sure.

So I'd have to back it right out of the Widespottian origins (which I'd have to do anyway because not only the names holey cheese the names but Penny Weiss, as is, is firmly embedded in the Sims2 alien offspring concept, with mpreg and green skin and the whole nine yards), which leaves me with themes and no characters, which is not a place I can start from. (Diagram that sentence. I dare you.)

And I'm too much a child of the 20th century to feel comfortable writing a book that is front and center about sexual mentorship, which is what the Mary/Valentine story turned into as I played my own version of the hood, and which deeply impacts even what I'm doing with Penny, because Penny and Mary tell each other everything and Rhett (whose bio I'd write differently if I did it now; instead of Rhett believes in male privilege so thoroughly he doesn't even know he believes in it, it'd just read Mommy Issues) is at the beginning of a road Valentine's already been down. So it'd have to be about something else.

And you know, there could be worse B plots than the sexual mentorship one for a story about an alien/human hybrid who regards herself as an anthropologist among the humans, if I could come up with some alternative to Penny's origins which would still leave her with the asexual hermit father and the BFF down the road. And if Penny's actually bi and in love with Mary while experimenting with Rhett (only it can't be Rhett because the father/son angle is too distracting for the audience)...Changeling, fairy child, alien, isolation, the isolation is essential as is Mary's biracial status - hey, that actually ties in with Penny's anomalous birth, too, at a metaphorical level...

So, it's a jungle in here, rampant undisciplined growth threatened by the napalm of self-censorship, the occasional tiger roaming around, beautiful and dangerous and threatening to eat me alive. I'll work it out or I won't. And it's less than a month to the Paleoamerican conference anyway, which could send me spinning in a completely different direction.

Excuse me, I probably need to clean something. Isn't it wonderful how the brain keeps chewing away at this stuff while you're cleaning?

Random Thought

This is not directed at anyone in particular who I have any reason to think might be listening. It's just a thought.

You know how many wrong people have changed their minds because someone who was right yelled at them?

None. In the history of the world.

It's important to keep up the good fight. But even shutting your mouth and walking away, leaving Them feeling like they've won, is a more effective tactic, in the long run, than shouting. Because if you shut your mouth and walk away and they feel like they've won, their guard comes down and you can sneak your point into their brains after you've calmed down. But shouting just keeps their adrenaline strong.

And it may take a long time for your point to work, and you may never see the result. So don't assume you've lost and things are hopeless. Even when your blood sugar's low and it really seems that way.

Anyway, queries for me. And it really is past time I started thinking about what the next book should be. Because I can make myself write stories when I can't make myself write queries.

Idea Garage Sale: Spies?

So in the middle of the week I had a dream with a plot. Not the illusion of a plot, which is common in dreams. You wake up thinking you have a whole novel, but on reflection, when you try to lay it out for yourself, it's full of gaps and logic lapses and transitions that don't work, so all you're left with is a handful of images that haunt you, or don't. (That bit with the frog, the river, the library, and the pageboy, from college - it's still there and I still can't do anything with it.) But this one kept its shape when I reviewed it, consistent characters and situations and the whole nine yards.

This was probably, however, because it was a cliche. Its beats were set in a familiar rhythm; the shape of the story matched up exactly to thousands of short stories in hundreds of anthologies. Yes, the details were distinctive, as far as they went, but I knew I would never write it because the most it would ever be would be a well-crafted, workmanlike piece and though that's worth doing as a small part of an overarching career that requires steady output, I wouldn't enjoy writing it and I couldn't sell it in this market, not without putting a lot more charisma into it than I ever have. I don't suck but I don't dazzle and I don't have the energy necessary to sell a pedestrian short story. But I figured I'd use it for the garage sale, as that's part of what the garage sale is for.

But now I can't remember it. At all.

It was a mystery, but not a murder mystery and I don't think a theft. Maybe a spy story? Does anybody write spy short stories? (You know, I don't think they do. I don't think that's a genre at all. I wonder why not.) It was suspense of some kind, anyway. Was there a ghost? I don't think there was a ghost...

And the moral of that story is, write stuff down even when it's simple and clear and plain and cliched and you know you'll remember it.

Maybe it wasn't even suspense. Maybe I'm influenced by the misreading I also did during the week, when I was skimming movie descriptions and saw one in which the character finds work as an assassin in a department store and has an affair with her manager, which made me sit up and take notice. But of course it was "assistant," which is boring. An assassin in a department store is absurd, but at least it isn't boring. Maybe trained assassins are the next level of escalation in corporate espionage.

So the garage sale idea for today would be a short story about an assassin/spy in a department store, playing a high-stakes game among the escalators, between Lingerie and Housewares. There's a ringer in the Catalog Department, and the proof sheets in the photo studio's secret file drawer are too dangerous to see the light of day...

Creativity as a Civic Duty

So yesterday I was at jury duty. I did not get picked, although I was well up in the numbers (#10), which means I was specifically un-chosen. This did not surprise me, and does not hurt my feelings, because I probably shouldn't be on a jury. It's just way too easy for me to identify imaginatively with everybody in a case. And of course there's the whole issue of my two modes, Silent and Can't Shut Up.

But it boggled my mind, the number of people who said they couldn't think why, if you were innocent and accused, you wouldn't testify. That's just a failure of the imagination. I wouldn't do it - I talk too much and I annoy people and I bewilder them because my honest emotional reactions fall at the extremes of the bell curve and if I happened to be cross-examined when hungry - holey cheese, no! Just, no. And what if you have a stutter, or English is your second language, or you're self-conscious about your voice, or think poorly on your feet, or the opposing counsel reminds you of your abusive dad, or - I could come up with innocent reasons for silence all day long. (And I think everybody in that courtroom knows that now.)

Why is it so hard to bend their minds around the idea that the presumption of innocence includes the presumption that if the defendant doesn't testify there's an innocent reason for it?

Why do people assume that everything they're mildly curious about is their business?

I hear this sort of thing all the time, directed at me and at people around me. Why are you in a wheelchair? How did your spouse get HIV? If you're still friends with your ex why did you divorce? Why don't you have any children?

The answer to all these questions, and others like them, is: None of your business. Yet if you give this reply, the questioner is likely to treat you as the rude one.

When you're tempted to ask a question like that, stop and think a minute. Imagine a few scenarios that might result in the condition about which you are curious (or feel genuinely sympathetic and concerned) and ask yourself: "If that happens to be the reason, and it were me, how would I feel on being asked about it? And even if it's not - how often does she get asked about this? How annoying will this question be?" And then you won't ask.

Sure, the person might need to talk about it - but there's a thousand different ways to let someone know you're there to listen without asking personal questions that might have painful answers. And the people who demand information in this way aren't going to be good listeners. They're mildly curious, and a lot thoughtless, and that's all. Far from helping, they are part of the problem of coping - irritation on a wound.

Writing stories and drawing pictures and making music are refinements and developments of our basic creativity. We are all creative because we are part of a social species, and dealing productively with other members of our species requires that we be able to imaginatively identify with them.

Probably the lawyers wrote me off as being too easy with this facility. We all know people who become too enamored of the stories they tell themselves about the world to deal with the world itself when it differs from that story; and though I don't routinely do that, this is a reasonable reservation to have about me as a juror. I am professionally primed to read between the lines and fill in the gaps between the facts in the way that makes the best story, which is not necessarily the most just way to render a verdict. But other people in the same courtroom were undoubtedly written off for their professed inability to extrapolate at all - because that's not conducive to justice, either.

I hope they found the happy medium of that ability in the twelve people chosen.

Feedback

Pleasantest dream I’ve had in a long time.

Someone had approached me to write a Widespot-like book, and made a movie at the same time, to premiere the same day the book came out. It wasn’t exactly Widespot, because it was setting up a murder plot, but I used similar characters. I had to work to parameters but the packager and filmmaker both understood the point of Widespot and the openness so it had been a great experience making these things.

The day the movie came out my husband and I were in some sort of resort right after a big con of some kind, but the resort had a small movie theater and was showing it, so we went. The movie was well received, but the projector broke, so we went walking around and my husband was telling me his theories about how the story should work out. He thought Chester was the obvious person for the lovers to frame for the upcoming murder, and I had to explain that Chester wasn’t in the book. I wasn’t sure how the director had gotten permission to use him or why he wanted to.

Somehow word got out (I hadn’t been going around telling anybody) that the author of the book of the unfinished movie was there and I was approached by some people with a mutual acquaintance from the con, who had “some questions,” which were really their theories about what would happen. And then somebody overheard and joined us and started in with their own “questions,” then another person, until finally I’m in the theater listening to theory after theory and it’s wonderful! They had all these creative plot developments based on what had gone before and what they knew but didn’t know they knew about how story works, each one different and perfectly logical - I wish I could remember any of them, but you know how it is with dreams.

Until finally everyone had their say and clamored for me to get up and tell them the “real” story, and I got up to explain that there isn’t a “real” story, that they had each made the real story themselves because that was the whole point -

And woke up, which was good, because they'd have lynched me.

Artistic vision and public requirements don't necessarily synch perfectly. Games can be open-ended. Books and movies require closure.

This, I think, is why fandom thrives on series. You get the satisfactions of closure episode-by-episode, but the ongoing nature of the work invites the sort of active imaginative engagement that breeds fanfic, fanart, and ongoing water cooler discussion of issues. Unfortunately, the creative team can't afford to listen to this sort of thing too much - it's likely to make them self-conscious, tempt them into profitless discussion, distract them, or even potentially open them up to nuisance lawsuits if a fan proposes a storyline similar to one the creators come up with on their own.

It's a shame, because creators so seldom get the satisfaction of hearing their work discussed, or the extreme pleasure of seeing it in action, interacting with the audience. We're a social species. We like feedback. I don't think it's even ego-gratification - well, not all the way down - so much as it is creative satisfaction, and the wonder and surprise of seeing a work you know intimately in a completely different light.

On the other hand, if you're paying too much attention to feedback, you're not moving forward with the next work. So there's that.

Everything's a trade-off.

If you really crave audience reaction, volunteer to do storytime at the library. Just don't overload your schedule with your own work.

Idea Garage Sale: Riding Alone into Indian Country

The trouble with Westerns is, that they are too in love with misconceptions about their aesthetic to come to grips with history.

The genre is long overdue for a renaissance. It's probably true that the vein of macho white male stories is pretty much mined out, but that leaves huge numbers of characters, equally macho, but less white and/or less male, with dumbfounding stories to tell.

Consider the story of the man known to his neighbors as (I'm sorry) "Nigger Britt" Johnson.

In 1864, Mr. Johnson was technically a slave, but had a large degree of autonomy, working freight, and was away from home when the Elm Creek Raid (a story that wants telling in itself) blew through, killed his son, and took his wife and two daughters off with him.

The usual pattern of Indian raiding on the Texas frontier at this time was that the Indians would strike, the local home guard unit or other miscellaneous available adult men would try to follow them, the Indians would vanish (often dispersing into terrain that's as difficult and confusing as any on earth), and the pursuers would either come home in a day or two, bitter and frustrated, or find another set of Indians with no connection to the raiders and massacre them to make themselves feel better. In 1864, the home guard units were understaffed, underfunded, and continually being raided for conscription into an increasingly desperate Confederate Army.

So Johnson came back, looked the situation over, and rode off into the west, by himself, armed with a gun whose percussion caps were as likely to misfire as not, because the local manufacturing facilities (i.e. kitchens) couldn't get the right materials, to look for his surviving family.

He got them back, too, as well as some of his white neighbors. There are people who'll tell you he didn't, that that's just a story, but excuse me, when did Reconstruction-era Texas ever go out of its way to invent a story to glorify black people? Never, that's when! And if he didn't personally ransom anybody, nobody can deny that he went out there, when other people with motivation just as great did not, and gave it his best shot.

It's a little hard for a modern reader to comprehend exactly how gutsy this was, because we're no longer raised on Indian atrocity stories. Which in a way is a shame, because although only hearing Indian atrocity stories is bad, alternating the Indian atrocity stories with the white ones is immensely productive. For one thing, many atrocity stories about one side are also, properly told, stories of extreme courage and resourcefulness about the other. A good solid dose of true stories about the savage guerrilla conflicts, no holds barred on either side, called collectively The Indian Wars, is the best corrective I know of to the myth of White Hats vs. Black Hats. If you read what Europeans did to Indians, and Indians did to Europeans, and what subsets of both groups did to other subsets within the same overall group, and how they overlapped and absorbed and spat each other out, you find yourself on a sympathy rollercoaster and eventually wash up on the shores of reality feeling shaky and staring down the evil in your species and realizing, once and for all, that everybody's history is guilty and all we can do is deal with that, admit it, and proceed to do better.


Anyway, from Johnson's point of view he was riding into country teeming with well-equipped, well-organized enemies with no motive not to shoot him on sight, except that they might feel like testing his courage by torturing him first. On the other hand, the tribes of west Texas did also have trading relationships with certain businessmen, known as comancheros, and mostly resident in New Mexico, through which unassimilable hostages were sometimes ransomed. Perhaps he thought he had some potential as a roving comanchero. Perhaps, being from an underclass, he was more willing to think about the motives of the raiders and believed that by bringing strategic thinking (as opposed to relying on brute force and the Natural Rights of White Men, which has continued to plague U.S. military policy into the present day)to bear he could keep his life and regain his family.

Or perhaps he just kept imagining his wife and daughters being gang-raped and couldn't sit still.

The point is, he did this thing, and it was epic, and then once he had everyone back and the war was over he started a freight business, and in 1871 a party of Kiowas out of the reservation in Oklahoma attacked it and killed him and his employees. The teamsters who found him said he had evidently taken up position behind his dead horse and fought to his last bullet. Which is pretty traditionally epic, too.

Especially when you also know the history of Kiowa-Comanche raiding out of Indian country, and how it was premised on the fact that, though these tribes had agreed to peace with the U.S., they had never ever said Word One about peace with Texas, which they weren't up for and considered unreasonable.

And no, The Searchers does not count! Though almost certainly inspired by Johnson's story, nothing starring John Wayne will fill the bill. Black leading man, or no soap. peace with Texas and considered such a thing completely unreasonable. Look into that and you open up another whole box of epic stories.

So where is this guy's blockbuster movie? Seriously?

Hard is not Impossible

Some days I think I exhausted all my discipline during the Year from Hell.

And some days I think I'm just lazy.

Then there's days like today when I realize that the problem is a war between my creative mind making a good-faith effort to create things and my disciplined brain protesting that it's trying to create the wrong things and anyway we need to do this other stuff first, and I wind up doing neither; or doing stealth creativity in ways my disciplined brain completely disapproves of because I can't even theoretically get paid for it, and not even the housework gets done

And then a front comes through and knocks me flat on my back. Well, not so far, but autumn is on its way, for sure.

Something's in there. Hiding. It's hard to prepare for when I don't know what it is, though.

Losing Track

Yesterday I went looking for the paperwork on my trip to the PaleoAmerican Odyssey Conference in Santa Fe next month, and couldn't find any. Since I'm not as organized about filing as I ought to be (I used to be great at it in soul-sucking dayjobs where I was desperate to fill my time) this didn't prove anything, but as far as Damon and I could reconstruct it, about the time I meant to register we had a sudden influx of demands on our money, and I put it off till a new payday, at which time the intention to register had transformed into a memory of having registered.

Property tax season is an unfortunate time to plop an extra $225 + airfare + hotel into the budget, and I was thinking I should probably not go (looking at my dismal money-making record for the year), but Damon, who will have to do all the money juggling, said if I didn't go I'd regret it, and he'd figure it out. So I'm registered, and have a hotel booked, but have not bought the plane ticket yet. (This is why creative people should marry supportive practical people.)

And digging in my paperwork reminds me that quarterly income tax is coming up in five days, too, so better to not let that get away from me, either. I actually have income to report and may even make a small profit on the year, hurray! But my, uh, ledger isn't up-to-date, so I'm not sure.

Even market research is more fun than filing and accounting, but you can't do the big fun stuff like this without them, so take a minute and look around. What have you lost track of lately?

Idea Garage Sale: Borderline

So I was on the Future of the Border panel and there as so much we couldn't get to because one of us (and there were no brown faces on the panel, which is another thing I should have just mentioned that I was aware of) insisted on talking about sovereignity, which is - as I said and maintained and demonstrated - the least important issue on the U.S. Mexican border, at least - I can't speak for Canada, but the Canadian/American citizen on the panel agreed with me. It's a damn shame, because there's all kinds of stories you can tell about borders.

And I think it's important to do so, because science fiction stories of this sort are thought experiments and, carried out intelligently and logically (as opposed to being written to support a premise) they can cause people to think along lines that make real changes for the better. But you do have to be logical about it.

Examples of real border problems, as opposed to the manufactured ones that get all the news time, include the depletion of the shared Juarez/El Paso aquifer (which could be empty by 2025 - that's 12 years, y'all, this is urgent!), the Juarez/El Paso femicide, criminal cartels and corruption operating on both sides, depression of wages, educational poverty, and good old-fashioned racism and classism, and that's even before we get to the fragility of the desert environment. These are all problems that people who don't live on the border could not understand thoroughly even if they didn't completely ignore them.

For these purposes I must count as a person living on the border of the border, insofar as South Texas and Northern Mexico are the same place. Which they are, sort of - geographically and culturally they form a distinctive space. Countries are merely categories and categories overlap and may safely be rearranged for different purposes. I am sufficiently of the border to recognize this, and see for myself the irrelevance and counterproductivity of policies emanating from Washington DC and Mexico City; but I'm not nearly as qualified to speak on them as almost anyone from Nuevo Laredo/Laredo would be. If I can get people to look in the right direction and speak to the right people, I'll will at least not be useless; if anyone mistakes me for an expert I will, alas, be counterproductive.

So anyway, if we take the position (and I do) that only border people will be able to find viable solutions to border problems, one logical approach would be to give border towns a greater degree of autonomy and self-determination than they have now. I have seen the proposition seriously broached, of the numerous sister-cities (San Diego/Tijuana, El Paso/Juarez, Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, and on down the line) forming into independent or quasi-independent entities in order to focus on matters of moment like water management. The model has weaknesses (violence incident to the drug trade, corruption in law enforcement, and the depressed economy are all intimately intertwined and affected by national-level policies) but all models have weaknesses; and a porous string of city-states in a self-regulating buffer zone between two nations is a pretty close analogy to how the Texas/Mexico border has operated, in practice, during its most functional periods. Formalized and placed into a near-future setting, this would make an excellent background for any amount of genre fiction.

I brought this up at the panel, and Madeline Ashby, our Candaian moderator, said she'd actually written a story like that. Which pleased me immensely and I'd link to it, if it were published yet, which I understand it's not. And in the meantime, ideas being what they are, her story will not be the last word on the possibilities of the setting. Far too many of them exist to be exhausted in a single story.

What, for example, is the economic driver of such a system? Energy springs to mind (I think Ashby had a line of photovoltaic cells along the border, supplying energy to both sides, which is a much more sensible way to get energy to sell than pumping crude oil). Could a coherent buffer zone pull the teeth of the drug cartels by decriminalizing illegal drugs and driving the price down? What other issues could be redefined to present different faces? Could the vital artistic and social life of the border, recently depressed by the threat of violence and strenuous governmental efforts to keep grandmothers from receiving casual visits from their grandchildren en el otro lado, be revived in a buffer zone, importing tourist dollars and exporting entertainment? What happens to agriculture? How are birding checklists rewritten and the birding event called The Big Year redefined, when the nature of the border changes?

That last bit may sound trivial, but it's precisely in the minutiae of everyday life and specialist enthusiasms that change becomes real and meaningful. If you want an outside narrator, a birdwatcher engaging in ecotourism in a border newly reopened after years of being unreasonably restricted would make an excellent one. But I'd rather see a ground's eye view - the kid who discovers a new painted cave, the guide leading the ecotourists through a landscape both battered and bettered by decisions made elsewhere, the mother negotiating the changing face of her city, the ex-narcotraficante finding work as a solar energy technician or on the freshwater pipeline, the team of cross-border detectives charged with cleaning out the cold case files from The Bad Old Days.

And of course, in every borderland, spies and opportunists, smugglers and tax-collectors, law enforcement and outlaw - corporate and political, good bad and ugly all in the same person. What happens to all that drone technology that's being deployed against the cartels, if the economic basis of the cartels evaporates? What's the hot new smuggling item? How does corruption work in the new milieu? Could the border cities scoop the entertainment giants of the east and west coasts with vital new talent taking advantage of changing technology?

Whose story is the most interesting one to tell?

I have two queries to get out...

...and I am still tired.

The trouble with cons is, they throw my schedule all out of whack. And it was pretty whacked-out to start with.

But I'll never publish again if I don't query so onward and upward!

What I Should've Said...

"Yeah, you take a car full of brown people and a car full of white people through the same checkpoint with the same border guard, then tell me who's generalizing."

"The Texas myth is a large and valuable one, but it grew up around straight white men and therefore it's got a lot of racism and sexism and so on associated with it. And I think a lot of people who cling to it are afraid, and a lot of people who are rejecting it assume, that you can't keep the myth without the racism and sexism. But if you look at the facts of history, and the less-publicized but equally likely versions, and the stories that haven't been told as much, and you see it isn't true. We have always been a diverse culture, and our mythic heroes can be found in any part of that diversity. We just have to shine the light on different places than we have in the past."

"You know what? I think I will stay for the masquerade."

"Texas blue dogs. The Donkey Lady. Skunk apes. Puss caterpillars. Puss caterpillars are easily the scariest of them."

"Oh, c'mon, no one part of a steer is any grosser than any other part of a steer. If you enjoy barbeque and can get over your ingrained prejudices, you might very well like barbacoa."

"Hang on just a second, Wendy, let me get a picture." Seriously, y'all, I need a picture of Wendy's half-horse costume to put here and on tumbler. It's amazing. The rear legs move. I'm so proud to call her my friend!

Idea Garage Sale: Fen Love

I have three panels I want to see tomorrow, all at the same time. Not cool, Worldcon; not cool!

However, I also need to finish going through the dealers' room and it'd be nice to say hi to Marianne and Dan-and-Wendy and various people I kept running into at panels again. Damon's not going back because he is too wiped. I'm pretty wiped myself.

But I can in fact sit up and type, so I may as well dump a Garage Sale Idea on you. A bare-bones one, anyway.

I've read fiction set at cons. I hate Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb, and need hardly say I love Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones. Probably others exist.

But has anybody written the romance novel about the Fanboy and the Gamer Girl who Find Eachother there?

Because somebody should.

That's plenty. If you've ever been to a large con, you know why this is a good idea. And if you haven't, you couldn't write it.

So I'm going to go read Helen & Troy's Epic Road Quest and put my aching feet up now.