A Modest Proposal

Many, many things are wrong in my life right now.

But today is a good day.

We should have a Marriage Day holiday, with parades and picnics and love story movie marathons (focusing on forbidden love stories of all sorts, with happy endings), commemorating June 12, 1967, the day of the Loving vs. Virginia decision that struck down anti-miscegenation laws, and June 26, 2015, the day "same-sex marriage" became just "marriage."

Hmm, a series of historical romances about the human cost of nonsensical laws, there's an idea...

Synaptic Miracle; or, Thank You, Melissa Etheridge

So my brain has not been behaving in the way I'm accustomed to think of as "normal," lately, and I'm more worried about stuff than I normally am about Health Crap because if the brain doesn't work, nothing works. But -

All my life I have been unable to listen to instrumental music. Without associated lyrics, a bar of music slides right off my ears unless I have, thanks to recording technology, heard that identical bar of music several hundred times. I'm always about half a beat off the music when dancing if I'm trying to follow the music instead of matching my partner (which makes me an annoying partner), and one reason I have never gone out of my way to go to many concerts is, that they always lose me when they play those long instrumental riffs that musicians love so much and which are designed to work the audience up into an orgasmic state.

One artist I always go see, though, is Melissa Etheridge. Not only does she do an amazing live show, of which her albums - good as they are - are the merest shadows; but listening to the albums was a major emotional support for me during the Year From Hell, especially during the months when I had no choice but to process a lot of Stuff on my own, because the entire support network was hit simultaneously and no one had any energy to spare for more than mere survival. I was sitting at the soul-sucking day job day after day, typing up real estate appraisal reports and using lunch hours to run (literally; it's about 10 minutes on foot from the office to the hospital Damon was in) to visit my nearly-dead husband, and then at the end of the day visiting him again and going home alone. I couldn't have done it without Melissa on heavy rotation on my computer playlists. (Fortunately I was mostly in a room by myself and I don't think I made anyone else in the office hate her.) Going to every public appearance of hers within driving distance is the least I can do in return, and I always enjoy the show and emerge feeling stronger. But even Melissa loses me on the long instrumental riffs - even in "I'm the Only One;" even in "Like the Way I Do." I just - I can technically hear them, but I can't listen to them. They can't do to me what they're doing to the band and to everybody else in the audience. I'm not technically tone deaf, but my brain doesn't do music, as music. It can only do music as language.

Until her recent concert in Austin, when suddenly, starting with a "I'm the Only One" coming surprisingly early in the program, and continuing through a relentlessly hard-rocking set with almost no downtime, none of the softer numbers except "Come to My Window" (which isn't that soft), I got it. I don't know how, and I can't reproduce it in memory, and I would be surprised if I could get it again at a concert by a band I'm less emotionally connected to, but my brain definitely did do something at that concert that I had every reason to think it didn't possess the correct synaptical connections to do. And it wasn't just familiarity, because Melissa mixed things up from what I'd grown accustomed to - new band, backup singers (which she's never had before), a completely different concert structure, and instead of saving one of her familiar hard rockers for the encore she went with "Monster," which is from the new album and I'd only heard it a half dozen times, not having had the new album very long before the concert. And of course the point of those long riffs is that they're improvisations (or apparent improvisations) and expansions, novelty inserted into the predictable course of the piece.

At my age, new synaptic connections are rare. Brain activity after about 25 is less about learning new things than about refining old connections and extrapolating from experience - I have never seen this particular problem before, but it has elements in common with this, that, and the other situation that I have encountered, and those, these, and the other skills that I've already mastered will enable me to deal with it.

But I must have formed some new connections in order to experience the concert in the unprecedented way I did.

So there I have proof that my brain has undergone some changes recently - and that this doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Maybe I could even manage some math? Naw, let's be realistic here. I cannibalized those synapses to expand my sense of narrative structure decades ago. Besides, I have a husband who can do math for me; nobody but me can mediate music for me.

And once again, I owe Melissa Etheridge some hearty thanks.

House Rules

For the first time in a long time this Memorial Day weekend, everyone in my gaming group had the same three days free. Three days! Gamingpalooza!

We had a couple of pretty intense roleplaying sessions. Without going into details that would make the eyes of non-gamers glaze over, we were experimenting with pushing back against the tendency of the Pathfinder Adventure Path system to force players into a min/maxing style of play which is alien to us. We ran an underpowered three-person party a couple of levels higher than the module writers recommended, with the addition of an unfamiliar optional set of "mythic powers." The mythic powers could easily have overwhelmed the scenario if handled poorly, and they appear to have been designed merely as a new way to increase "power creep" (the ongoing arms race between players and game masters, requiring constant escalation of increasingly complicated and burdensome game elements), of which we are heartily sick. However, the game master gave them to us in such a way that, though we got to control which ones we got, we felt obliged to play them as complete surprises which our characters did not know how to use and didn't feel they could rely on. So while we as players knew that we had a safety net, our characters were making plans and devising strategies that did not take these safety nets into account, and pulling mythic powers out only when we felt cornered by the introduction of unknown factors or pressed by the inevitable disruptions of our plans. Only toward the end, when the Big Bad was defeated, did we feel entitled to start experimenting with them.

The result was that we felt challenged, engaged, and endangered constantly, but did not lose a character. One random encounter almost did us in; one programmed encounter was subverted and turned into a cakewalk due to our proactive data-gathering and sensible use of resources (and we were entitled to the cakewalk because we were proactive); the climax was climactic (which is not always the case); and my character developed what might be called learned pyrophobia, which is the sort of thing that I love best about role-playing games; i.e., the chance to temporarily be another individual with a distinct life experience. We did not get any of those jawdroppingly great moments when everyone is surprised, but we had a lot of fun.

None of us is under the illusion that this particular experiment is a panacea for our problems with Pathfinder. It's obvious to even the most system-mechanically-challenged of us (i.e., me) that the particular combination of solutions implemented here would not work with every adventure path, or every set of characters. But I think we are on the right track. The rigidity of Pathfinder compared to other systems we've used, and the adherence of their Adventure Paths to formulaic structures, has hypnotized us into experimenting and enjoying ourselves less with them. I think we need more house rules. I think we need to use some of the Paths as sourcebooks instead of as modules, make more choices that thumb their noses at the power gamer expectations of the system, alter the structures given to us. We need to do this as players and as GMs, in cooperation and adjusting our approach to our circumstances. As a gaming group we have always been pretty good at this in play. I think we need to go "old school" in prep, too. Stress less, improvise more.

I often see people lock themselves in like that. A writer reads The Hero's Journey and mutilates her story to fit it, as if the structure of the Journey were a universal ideal toward which all stories must strive. An artist learns some useful techniques, and keeps using them even when they are less useful. A player gets bored with his playstyle and assumes he's bored with his game. A person leads a meaningless life, continually striving to hold on to a job she doesn't like to pay for a car she doesn't enjoy driving and buy her kids toys they don't play with. A citizen declares loyalty to a country and clings to that loyalty long after the country has proven itself disloyal to him.

Why do we do this to ourselves? It's depressing.

So cut it out. When you need a house rule, make one. When you don't, don't.

You can be happy and do good work, if you let yourself.

November 29: A Great Day for Literature

Today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott.

And C.S. Lewis.

And Madeleine L'Engle.

It is a good day to read!

Thankful as an Intransitive Adjective

For various reasons, we won't be having the Big Meal till Sunday with the gaming group, but that's fine. Damon has today and Friday off and we're going to hunker down (by local standards it's very cold) and stay off the road, except I have to go deal with some cats whose people are out of town, poor things.

My reverend Mom once asked me who or what, as an agnostic, I feel grateful to when I take time to be thankful; but I'm not feeling thanks as a transitive verb in these cases. I'm looking at my life, and taking note of the ways in which it is in fact pretty decent. When an individual is responsible for some good thing I wish to give credit where it's due; but I can also feel glad about circumstances. And by the way, some of the things I'm glad about, I did for myself. So there's that. Nothing wrong with being thankful to yourself for making the right call.

I'm thankful I have freedom to make choices and live with the consequences.

I'm thankful I live in Texas, where we all feel cold when it gets into the 50s. (Despite the political craziness; no place is perfect and it's my responsibility to provide as much political sanity as I can.)

I'm thankful that my biggest immediate complaint is that my videocard died and I can't play my favorite computer game till the new one arrives. On the scale of crosses to bear, that's a highly desirable level of discontent!

Damon is congested and didn't sleep well, but he's fully mobile, has fat reserves, and hasn't had acute anything in months. By his standards, he's healthy. And after the year from hell, when none of that was true, I am grateful every year that he's alive.

I'm thankful that I have control of my own time.

I'm thankful for the local independent bookstore, the only place I would ever consider shopping on Black Friday if I had a reason to shop, which I don't.

I'm thankful that my health crap is controllable with fairly simple lifestyle limitations and medications. If I have to miss out on stuff, well, then, I have to. It beats being too dizzy to walk.

I'm thankful for pharmacies that are open on holidays.

I'm thankful for my cats. Because cats.

I'm thankful for my friends. Because friends.

I'm thankful for books, both the ones I write and the ones I read. Because books!

And I'm thankful that I am once again the person certain people call when in need; because being that person means not being in need myself.

Don't Worry About It

Incidentally, don't let posts like the last one worry you unduly. People are out there committing great deeds with worse Health Crap than I've got. People with diabetes, HIV, and cancer envy me, because my incurable disease is a nuisance, while theirs is busy shortening their lives. Only mine is - you know - mine, and the times it prevents me from doing what I want to naturally loom larger to me than the times it doesn't. If nothing else, this fuels my escapism, which is a large motivator for literature.

Escapism needn't be a lazy, unthinking quality. It has, in fact, fueled a lot of hard work through the centuries. As Edmond Dantes's desire to escape the Chateau d'If prompted hours of steady work scraping rock with a spoon, the desire to escape disappointment, discomfort, and particularly that great scourge of mankind, boredom, prompts us to obey our divine natures and create despite the sucking quagmire of daily survival. Sometimes we create things others can share and sometimes we horde it to ourselves, and often the people around us will criticize our escape activities. But they have their escapes, too, which aren't any less, or more, silly than our own. The desire to escape gravity prompts great myths of flight, soaring poetry, practical designs for load-bearing balloons and heavier-than-air vehicles - and plunges off of cliffs to grisly death.

We all have the right to our own particular form of escapism. How much good that right does us is partly up to us, and partly chance.

Whatever it is - go for it when you can. That way, when you can't, you won't have those lost chances to brood over.

I'll be more cheerful when it warms up. Probably.

Revision Month

Nothing much in the way of new projects this month, but lots and lots of revision. I'm awaiting an editorial letter on Sullivan, always a fraught moment - especially with a new editor. Most of the editors I've worked with have been very good at their jobs, but one hears horror stories - editors who think they "get it" but don't, or who want you to rewrite it in a way that would make it theirs instead of yours, or who put you on improbably tight deadlines and then leave you hanging in the wind for weeks. But there's no point borrowing trouble, and while it stands to reason my luck'll run out sometime, it doesn't have to be this time and in any case worrying about it won't help. But I wish that e-mail'd get here!

Meanwhile, Andrew May sent me the story he wrote riffing off a couple of my garage sale ideas, and I got to read a novella with chapter headings like "Idol of the Apemen" during a period of severe Health Crap, which was a great help, because you always feel better when you laugh unless your ribs are broken. So I gave him some comments which I hope will be helpful.

Our gaming group is also taking a break from role-playing to assist in a playtest of a tradeable card version of a module set we recently played in its RPG incarnation. It's not the first playtest I've participated in, but it is the first one we've done as a group and the first one in which we made a major commitment. Playtesting is like playing, except instead of settling in to strategic thinking and focusing on the game experience, you're poking and testing the rules, uncovering ambiguities in the wording, and constantly responding to rules changes that get made during playtest. This is more fun for the game mechanics in the group than for me, but I don't think I'm cut out for tradeable card games anyway. My major contribution has been to be always slightly confused about the rules, highlighting shortcomings in the way they're written.

Widespot, the shareable Sims2 neighborhood I made as a project, reached the point where I felt I could ask interested parties to playtest for me. Most of the revisions I've done based on that feedback have related to the buildings - so far no one has a problem with how the characters play. Which is not too surprising, given that character and story are the elements I have lots of experience with, while as far as architecture goes I know it when I see it. However, I have noticed that people are tending to play the Hart and Mann families preferentially to the Weisses, Beeches, and Lands, which makes me wonder if I didn't give those families sufficient story interest. And I realize that the Hart family has a lot of internal conflict and intricate conflicting connections to every other household, and the Mann family has a strong conflict-creating connection to the Harts and Lands, but the connections among the Lands, Weisses, and Beeches are mostly harmonious. So I probably have some character and story revision to do there, after all.

Having a game property in playtest is unexpectedly different from having a manuscript in critique, because whereas critique partners are all business, playtesters are (if you've done your job at all) having fun, so you get a foretaste of the pleasure of publication. Otherwise, it uses the same mental muscles and requires the same degree of flexibility and willingness to set your ego aside, to learn new techniques and how to better use existing tools from the people who understand them better, and to alter your original vision when necessary. And, just like in revision, you have to be able to coolly assess conflicting opinions, like the scene/building that one person finds charming and the other person thinks looks "like you were tired when you did it."

Finally, we're in the final stage of the year, a time when lots of people assess their lives and think about how they want to change them. When we go into revision mode on our lives. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in changing your life if you're not happy with it. Sure, you may have to back up a bit and unravel something that exists in order to do that, but - happiness is hard work. And happiness is worth it.

Too bad it's so hard to find playtesters, editors, and critique partners for that one!

Get Out of Your Way

I started noticing this with writers, or people who intended to be writers, or artists, or whatever. "I'd like to..." they'd say, and when I said, "Why don't you?" the answer was: "Well, first I'd have to..."

And it's never anything they actually have to do first. I totally agree that if you want to write about the sinking of the Bismark you have to do a big chunk of research before you do much in the way of real writing; though personally I'd count that as part of the writing process. No, it's first I have to get some sort of tool (artists are really bad about this) or take some class or get better at this other thing, or go and do something completely irrelevant. Granted, somebody has to pay the rent; but you're not at the soul-sucking day job 24 hours a day and you'll never get a break from it if you don't give yourself one.

But here lately I've noticed people doing the same thing with their play. Someone wants to run a certain kind of role-playing game, but doesn't have a finished map, or the entire society set up ahead of time, or all his NPCs detailed. Newsflash: the players can only be on one part of the map at a time, you won't have time to refer to your NPC notes in the heat of play anyway, and you can improvise better than you think you can.

Someone else wants to play a Sims game; but they don't have all the custom content they want for it and the thought of tracking it all down, or making their own, is exhausting. So? It's a solo game. You're the only one playing. No one's going to be judging what you do, except you. Yeah, it'd be cool if your Test of Time Challenge sims had complete immersion sets that really looked like Neolithic huts, Egyptian palaces, etc.; but you know what? No matter how much custom content you put in there, the sims are still going to roll inappropriate wants to buy electronic entertainment. And you could easily spend a year making stuff and still find, in play, that you want something you didn't think of, but never actually use the sabertooth tiger teddy bear that you sweated blood over. So why not relax about it, get what you can as you can, and make the custom content you feel a real need for when the need for it makes the process of doing so fun and engaging?

There's active fandoms out there documenting various games and commenting on those of others; but months can go by when bloggers appear only to say that they're so far behind with the documentation that they can't play until they organize their pictures, write up the story, and make a post. Nonsense. Of course they can! No one's obliged to document everything that happens, or anything that happens. Your audience will not cease to love you if you document three months of silence with three lines of summary text and plunge back into current events; and if they do, screw them. You're not playing for them. You owe them nothing.

You don't need to have the new glove in order to play baseball. Someone will loan you a glove. You don't need the perfect shoes to hike in; choose trails that your existing shoes can cope with while you're saving up for the good boots you want.

You don't need a new dress to go to a party - just change up your accessories. Anyone who judges you for wearing a dress twice is someone you don't need to associate with anyway. The people who matter most either won't notice, or will admire you just as much as they did the first time you wore the dress.

You don't need anybody's permission, and no one is setting these requirements except you. Set different requirements and get out of your way.

If you need somebody's permission - here's mine. Enjoy yourself.

If you won't, who will?

The Bird in my Hand

Yesterday Health Crap descended and it would have been a waste of a day except...

...Bruce stood in the hallway penetrating my misery with deep-throated yowls, quite unlike his normal crying, until I got up to see what was the matter and why he didn't just come in and harass me.

And found him with a hummingbird in his mouth.

Yes, you read that right. Bruce, who hasn't a clue how to hunt anything more intelligent than a jingle ball, had caught the fastest bird on two wings. And he had no idea whatsoever what to do with it, so he'd brought it to me, presumably to make me feel better. (He is our resident doctor, after all, though his usual treatments are bedrest,purring, and acupuncture.) So I told him he was a bad cat and carefully took it away from him.

It was a juvenile, judging by the downy bits and the lack of any distinctive throat bar. Except for the rapid pulsing of the powerful little heart, I would have thought it was dead, with its wings held out stiff and fragile as a dragonfly's, it's feet curled up in a bed of downy feathers, and its eyes squeezed shut. I carried it out the back door and set it on the porch rail, where it balanced on its stomach, still frozen. I was afraid it might be too terrified, or have taken too much damage to those stiff little wings, to take off, so I turned away, wondering what I had that might make a nectar container suitable for an incapacitated hummingbird.

And when I turned back again, it was gone as if it had never been.

A real blogger would've taken a picture, but hey, a real blogger would have a digital camera by now.

Hurray!

Asking questions didn't help, and googling didn't help directly, but googling and following a link and then following another link and then following another link, did.

The problem: I do not now, nor have I ever had, a Word document for the books to which I hold the reverted rights. Every single piece of advice I've been able to get has assumed the Word document, as if there aren't any other word processing programs out there, and as if Word weren't the worst word processing program ever invented (this from someone whose first word processor was built into a typewriter). So I knew I had to scan the books, but the question was, What's the easiest format to scan them to for all the subsequent conversions they'll have to go through as I try to make them as painless for people to buy as possible?

The search led me down many fruitless by-ways until I landed on the blog of someone I never heard of, who talks about a lot of things irrelevant to me, but who also has dug down to the source code and told me where I need to start and how to get from there to the starting line.

And, not to keep you in suspense any longer, the answer is "Scan it as a .txt file" and then there's a tutorial on how to turn that into a .doc file. Just .doc, not .docx, which I believe is now the devil program's default format, so if you've been using that program and still couldn't get to the starting line, maybe that's the deal.

It's way too late to start on a project that tedious right now, so I'll do a quick whip round on the housework (and by quick I mean cursory, because it's triple digits again today, folks, and I still only have air in the study and the bedroom, which can't both be run at once) and tomorrow I'll get into that temp-job state of mind - put a dress on, have breakfast, and settle down to a tedious task that at least I won't have to do tomorrow, trouble-shooting further problems as I go. I'm good at that, though I haven't temped in over ten years now and my skills are rusty. But if I can get properly into the mindset, the study will be much tidier at the end of the day tomorrow than it is right now.

A Good Day

Yesterday I did not blog.

I did, however, submit a manuscript to a publisher, dust, sweep, start a blouse, do some much-needed file organization for my game, and make my cats purr.

I call that a win.

That's Better

This afternoon I learned that Elaine Marie Alphin went home. She's a long way from well, but she is better than I ever imagined she could be again when I first heard the news about her stroke.

A lot of stuff is wrong with this week. I'd have one twice as bad, if it would help Elaine get better.

If only we could take all the minor miserable stuff, the rejections and the vermin in the attic and the badly-timed bills and the interpersonal friction and just stuff that gets us down, and trade it in for an improvement in somebody else's major miserable stuff - wouldn't that be grand? You've got to deal with this little crap anyway; it'd be nice to get some good out of it.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cave Art Kids

For those of you who missed it, individual children making art can be tracked in Dordogne Cave, especially a particular 5-year-old girl.

This makes me very happy.

For one thing, it illustrates my main thesis, that creativity is a normal human activity, not something special set aside only for the elite.

For another, the individuals who can be identified and glimpsed at Dordogne - and other ancient sites - are natural solid reference points around which we - and by we I mean all of us storytellers, whether we're scientific archeological storytellers or artistic fiction-writing storytellers - can build a story. First we collect the traces of the individual; then we interpret them according to what we know in our selves about people and what we know from the evidence about their environment, and extrapolate a reasonable story about who this person was, why she was there, who was there with her, and what challenges she faced.

Obviously, a cave art picturebook is long overdue.

A novel would require more conflict than is implied by the harmonious and happy picture created by this research; but one can always start with that harmonious, happy picture and work either away from it - happy art-making in caves has to come to an end, the youthful artists have to grow up and face adult challenges - or toward it, with the families of the youthful artists overcoming various hardships to arrive at the happy art-making.

And for the scientist, the image of the happy art-making makes an excellent centerpiece for the reconstruction of Pleistocene culture, a cohesive, relateable context that enables the scientist to put all the disparate and fragmentary bits of evidence together in a meaningful way.

I don't see any way to go about any of these project that don't involve researching till blood comes out your ears; but I can tell you from experience, the reward is worth the work.

Okay, maybe not the monetary reward. 11,000 Years Lost hasn't made that much money. TheEarth's Children series has. This sort of thing is always a crapshoot and there's nothing to be done about that. But the emotional and intellectual rewards of doing the research and writing the story - those are hard to overstate.

Plus, research for any of these projects would involve visiting Pleistocene art sites. Which would be a good in itself.

We cannot have too many books about the Pleistocene. We just can't.

The Happy Media

In one way, I am a fortunate individual. I always knew, and so did everyone around me, that I was going to write stories. And by always I mean, always. I was a writer before I could write things other people could read. This was so plain and obvious that everyone around me conceded it as a given, too. This or that individual person may not have thought I'd be any good, or that I'd make any money, or that it was a worthwhile endeavor - but nobody ever disputed that I would do it.

Not all writers know their destiny so well, or manifest it so clearly, from the git-go like that. They flounder in search of their purpose, or they are actively discouraged from it by those around them, or they mistake their calling and do something else for half their lifetime until the day they wake up and start writing, or realize they've been writing all along and it's time to take that somewhere.

I didn't, however, always know that I would write for young people. For a long time I thought I'd be one of those novelists who's also an academic (that was before I experienced academia and how little I am suited to it), or I'd write science fiction and fantasy, or - something. I had a leg up on my period of experimentation because I knew my medium and my skill, but I still had to find my subject and my audience. My niche only became clear after I had - first of all - realized that I prefer books written for young people to books written for adults, for the most part (and once I realized that most genre fiction is "really" YA, in that the qualities I enjoy in it are the same as the ones I enjoy in YA literature); and - second - that I did in fact write well enough to produce them.

This is another way in which I am fortunate. These two discoveries were easy enough to make, since I already knew what form my artistic expression would take and I could focus my experimentation on finding my niche within that form. A lot of people have to experiment on their form, their subject, their audience, and their genre all at the same time. Even more people are raised with the idea that they aren't creative, or that there's some qualitative difference between messing about with creativity, and actually being an artist, a writer, a musician, a dancer, or whatever.

Some people even have to muddle along without access to their form and audience. The world has more essayists now than at any time in the past, if we concede that bloggers are essentially essayists, freed from the limitation of needing someone to pay them to write essays for a periodical. The first people with a talent for programming computer games were born before computer games were invented. The modern world contains far more talented actors, scripters, costumers, prop builders, and effects artists than the related drama industries could ever support; hence the existence of historical recreation societies, cosplayers, and gamers. I've known many people for whom their game of choice is their creative outlet - on tabletop, playing field, or computer, they flower.

This is why fandoms proliferate. People who for one reason or another cannot use their native talent professionally can find it avocationally, in the company of a sympathetic audience, in the context of a fandom. Some of them pass through their fandom and come out the other side as a professional, and good for them (Cassandra Clare being a prominent current example, but hardly the only one). But many, many people do professional-quality work in the context of a fandom and never get paid; either because they never think of going pro, because they try and fail, because they're afraid they'll fail, or because they decide that the effort of going pro would spoil the activity for them. Sometimes it's because their talent lies in a niche so narrow that professionalism is unlikely, or unlucrative, or unacceptable - many gamers reject the restrictions that would be placed upon them, were they to enter the corporate structure of the gaming industry.

I happened to think about this in the context of poking around simblogs in an idle moment. (Okay, idle afternoon. Look, the floor's going to get clean; I was just a little giddy and needed a break. Of several hours.) People document their games online, with pictures, dialog, and snarky asides; make their favorite sims available for others to play; create new clothes, objects, even modifications to game code, investing hours not even playing their game, but playing with it. Their only audience is other players, but that's all right. They like it that way.

There's a person writing an extended fanfic about how a particular iconic neighborhood, with which everyone who plays Sims2 is familiar, got itself into the starting situation for that neighborhood. She writes it in chapters, formatted as screenshots from her game accompanied by blocks of text; and setting up the screenshots is obviously not a matter of playing the game at all, but of performing elaborate maneuvers with custom clothing, objects, modifications, and something called poseboxes to take a number of different pictures of the characters and then discarding most of them. Not too different from the process by which Dare Wright wrote The Lonely Doll and its sequels, in fact, except that this person has nothing tangible to work with, just a game designed for an entirely different purpose.

I can, just about, see how Dare Wright got pleasure out of her process. I can't see how "Skelljay" does; but I don't have to, either. Apparently, this is her medium and she likes working in it. It seems to me she could have finished the story by now if she hadn't mucked about with all those pictures but maybe she couldn't have. And maybe - who knows? How would we tell? - she's building skills in this medium that will enable her to be more profitably creative in another one. But if she's not, and she's satisfied, that should be enough for anybody.

But it raises the question: If you think you're not creative, is it because you haven't experimented enough and found your medium? Is it because, though you've found a medium, it seems silly to you?

I know that voice. Filking isn't really songwriting. Blogging about your hamster isn't really writing. Your elaborate macaroni sculpture isn't really art. You should do something more worthwhile with your time.

Don't listen to that voice. If something makes you happy, it is not a waste of time.

And if it brings pleasure to others, even just a small handful of others, it is a positive boon to society.

(While I'm doing this, let's have a couple of links to my two favorite simblogs, in one of which we get the story of Barkertown, the other of Ste. Margo. Warning: This game is rated T for Teen for a reason! Don't worry, you'll get most of the jokes and follow the story just fine without knowing the game.)

Cliff Jumped!

I wrote it yesterday. I read through it for a basic first proof this morning (I don't always do that, but with this book I need to) and it's bad. It's really bad. But that doesn't matter right now. Only the writing is bad; the logic and sequence and the choreography and the character actions are all fine. Writing I can fix.

So after reading through that I went on to the next bit, which is Di telling her secret, and I wrote up a storm. Which isn't surprising, since I've been writing that scene in my head for a couple of years now. Len started fishing during the conversation, which should have slowed me down because I know nothing about fishing, but all that was "business" to keep the reader anchored in time and place and situation. Alas, the escape from the bushwhackers left them without provisions. They have two canteens, a bag of beef jerky, some guns, and Len's fishing tackle minus any pole, and those creeks in the hill country don't grow a lot of cane for fishing poles. I can sort all that out later.

Sometimes I seem inconsistent to myself. Many and many a time a story has come to a grinding halt over details far more trivial than the fishing, and I can't proceed until I've winkled out exactly how such-and-such a thing is done, or would look, or would be achieved. Other times, however, I blast through like this. That's not a function of the details themselves, but of the context in which they're used. When I grind to a halt fretting about details in, say, a chase scene that has to end in a jump off a cliff, odds are good that the detail is not the thing that's stopping me. The detail is the thing I give my conscious mind to play with while my backbrain is working out the important stuff.

My conscious and subconscious were on the same page with Di's secret, as they'd been thinking about it every time she acted or spoke throughout the book. She's revealing the key to all her actions, here. If I didn't know that stuff, I wouldn't have gotten this far.

This'll be drafted by the end of the year, for sure.

Insomnia

You only have to do a little research to realize that modern medical science does not understand and is not properly investigating insomnia. All the advice we are given is bad. It does not work. It is given to us by people who never have trouble sleeping unless there's a direct, specific cause, and think that means they know how to sleep and they can teach us those of us who are awake at one in the morning and two in the morning and three in the morning against our will when we are too freaking tired to accomplish anything, and can't catch up the sleep in the daytime, and know this could go on arbitrarily for days on end.

This is like people who can see the normal visible spectrum assuming they can teach someone who's red and green colorblind to tell the difference between sage and rose.

No crisis yet, but the only thing that ever works for me is, I must work harder. I must write and I must do housework and I must assemble everything I need for the camel workshop, even though I'm dizzy and I know I'll have to caffeinate just to do the camel workshop at all, which means I can't expect to sleep this weekend.

(And anybody who wants to tell me that's a self-fulfilling prophecy can go boil his head. I bet you think people decide to be poor and dyslexia is just laziness, too.)

Fortunately, since I've been doing this my whole life, the same experience that leads me to know what to expect leads me to be pretty sure that I can alleviate the problem somewhat with work and that I have the necessary personal resources to do so if I don't rush myself.

Getting older has its advantages.

Love, not Romance

So I sat down to rewrite the Helotes scene in the lesbian western, in accordance with my new information, and instead I spent the entire morning staring at maps and thinking about Love. This made for a disappointing word count, but since the love story - or rather, the story of how Len and Di get to the point of being able to have a love story - is an integral part of the book, and I've neglected it in my quest for historical accuracy, I can't accuse myself of wasting the time.

I am not a romance reader, except in the strict critical sense in which "romance" is used to indicate a story in which incident is emphasized over character. In this sense, "Jack the Giant Killer" is a romance because Jack undergoes lots of interesting adventures, but no character growth to speak of. I can read critical-sense romance all day, but I was once left alone in a parking lot for half an hour on a rainy day with a grocery sack full of Harlequins, and I couldn't get past the first paragraph on any of them. I like books, like the Vorkosigan saga, in which love relationships are an integral and important part of the protagonist's life, but one reason I prefer young adult to adult literature is that adult literature tends to be much less subtle and realistic about those relationships.

My ideal of a literary romance is Muggles and Mingy in Carol Kendall's wonderful The Gammage Cup. If you haven't read this (not nearly enough people have), I cannot recommend it too strongly. The plot and its themes of rebellion, conformity, freedom, and heroism play out with domestic Muggles and grouchy Mingy providing the practical guidance their more conventionally heroic friends require. In the last chapter, Muggles - in the middle of hospital duty - says to him: "You haven't a thing to do. And you'd better come back here and let me dress your foot properly. And so as not to waste your cantankerous time, I'll tell you right out that if you want a wife, I'm it!" Only then did it dawn on me (the first time I read this, when I was 12) that from Mingy's first appearance in Muggles's house - complaining about frivolous public spending, letting Muggles feed him, warning her about impending social upheaval, engaging in surreptitious charity, and mending her rickety stool - Kendall was prepping us to accept this unromantic couple as a couple. The young, artistic, charismatic pair, Curley Green and Gummy, are taken for granted. Of course they get married. But Muggles and Mingy provide all the chemistry.

I reread that book five times the first time I had it checked out of the library, and I don't know how many times since. I think I see how she did it. But can I do it? Especially given that Di and Len are nothing like these two, or like me and Damon. (Hmmm...Damon and Mingy have a number of traits in common, come to think of it.) Plus, Len is telling the story in first person, so I can't do that back-and-forth scene thing like when Mingy is captured by the bad guys and Muggles is under siege. Too bad; I'm pretty good at the back-and-forth scene thing.

Perhaps Jane Eyre, which I have been reading and re-reading almost as long, is a better model. First person, and secrets, and lots of Victorian dancing around the sexual tension, which naturally produces more of it; also, more humor than most people acknowledge.

It discourages me, the number of people who read Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen's body of work, and other novels of character with strong love elements, as if they had no more depth or emotional realism than a shopping bag full of Harlequins. And I know that this is egocentric favoring of my own reading over those of others, but I'm am convinced in my heart that nobody who came out of Little Women wishing Jo had married Laurie has experienced the full potential of that crucial work.

One of the things literature, and media in general, does is give the inexperienced a script to follow when encountering a common situation for the first time. How well we succeed in the hard labor of happiness depends largely, I have found, on our ability to adapt when these scripts clash with experience. Literature is full of good scripts, but under Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud), bad scripts outnumber them; and it is possible for the prepared mind to take a good script and read it into a bad one.

Charlotte Bronte, writing from the heart of the patriarchy, wrote a script that subverted the dominance/submission model provided to her by her society, creating a sexually-charged equality between the governess and her "master;" but romantic emphasis on the "Alpha Male" has skewed many readings of this book over the years. And the Alpha Male script, face it, is not a practical one that will lead to happiness. The women I know who insist on using it in real life don't prosper, not least because it's an onerous role to foist on one's partner.

By definition, the lesbian western can have no Alpha Males; but the script in Di's hands assumes one, and she doesn't want him. Len has written herself out of society's script for her and doesn't know how to write herself into anybody else's, so she assumes she can't have what she wants. Once I get them to the point of exchanging secrets, the answer to their problems will be as obvious to them as to me; but how do I lead up to that exchange in a way that persuades the reader they'd do it? And how do I make the reader (most of whom will be straight) fall in love with Di as the reader of Jane Eyre inevitably does with Rochester?

And where do the Cave brothers fit into all this?

No wonder I haven't been thinking about this. Compared to the love story, the action plot will be a piece of cake.

Freedom Day, Pride Week

(Please note that I wrote this post yesterday, and in the middle of it my internet went belly-up. So pretend the date on it is October 12. It kind of matters.)

Columbus Day is a problematical holiday for anyone conversant in American history, but October 12 is a big day for me on the calendar of personal holidays, as October 12, 2007 was my last day at a soul-sucking day job, ever. Life since then has not gone the way I anticipated, primarily due to ubiquitous health crap, but at least I live my own life and my own choices every day. And isn't that what happiness is?

This week, as I learned Monday from my morning DJ (Hot Mustard at KSYM, the local college station), is Gay Pride Week at the local community college, though you can't tell from looking at their monthly calendar. It kicked off with events for National Coming Out Day. The LBGT group spokesman Mustard interviewed spoke about planned events, and also passed on to listeners "the best advice he ever got," which was, roughly, not to come out to anybody until you were secure enough to deal with the consequences. Start with those you can trust and move to those you aren't positive will reject you only when you're strong enough to take the rejection. You have to be out to yourself before you can be out to the world.

It bugs me that such a process as "coming out" is even necessary in our society. If there's one class of information that's personal and shouldn't matter to anyone not directly involved, it's how we define ourselves sexually! You shouldn't have to worry about the consequences of holding hands in public. But we live in an imperfect world, and until people stop beating up on folks on suspicion of having the "wrong" definition, until the consequences of honesty become less dire, I guess we're stuck with it.

Personally, I've self-identified as bi for years, but it's mostly been irrelevant, as the only girl I could have been serious about was too busy experimenting with who she was to be serious back, and when I walked into love (there was no falling involved, believe me!) it happened to be with a man. Like Aral Vorkosigan, I used to be bi; now I'm monogamous; and who cares? What I write matters. Everything else is of limited interest.

Recent events in the lives of other people have caused me to review my choices this past week, and on the whole the only one I regret was ever taking a soul-sucking day job in the first place. Happiness is hard work, but nothing rewards the effort more.

Happy Freedom Day, y'all.

Fearless Fandom; or Weary Post-Concert Nattering On

I have legitimate bloggable thoughts engendered by the Melissa Etheridge concert I went to last night, but a concert in Austin on Monday on the heels of archeology at Gault on Saturday has left me mind-numbingly tired (we got home at one this morning and I normally turn into a pumpkin around ten) and - though I try to tone it down - I am a serious raving Etheridge fangirl, so bear with me.

We bought our tickets through the fan club, with the result that for astoundingly little money we wound up within 20 feet of the stage in direct line with the central microphone. So that feeling I always get sooner or later in a Melissa concert that she has just looked straight into my eyes and sung directly to me, may have not been an illusion at one point last night. The first time it happened was the first time we went to one of her concerts (not the first time we "saw" her live - that was in the Alamodome when she opened for the Eagles, and we were impressed enough despite the dreadful acoustics and the impossibility of seeing her from the nosebleed seats we were in to jump on the chance when she came to the Municipal Auditorium), while our friend J was dying. We'd been going to treat him, but he had his heart attack before we got the tickets and was still dying when the time came. So I was a little detached from events and didn't get on my feet, not even for "Bring Me Some Water," or "Similar Features," not even for "I'm the Only One," not even for "Like the Way I Do." But I did participate in the near-riot of footstamping that brought her back out for a third encore, and then she looked straight at me and threw out a lasso of notes that belonged on a mandolin and before she even started singing "Maggie May," without any idea how I got there, I was on my feet.

And I never have really sat down for her since. One of my major coping strategies for the Year from Hell was to have Melissa on heavy rotation on the media player at the soul-sucking dayjob and in the CD player in the car; and one of the thoughts in the back of my brain last night was that while we had our Year from Hell she was in chemo.

I think she would be proud of that if she knew, and justly so. But the connection I feel here, though real enough in one way, in another way is what another woman whose assistance I rely on in hard times, Louisa May Alcott, would call a castle in the air. Maybe Melissa became conscious of me as an individual in the third row for, oh, a note or two last night; but the connection between artist and audience is not between individuals, but between the originator of the art, on the one side, and those who continue it, on the other. The artist puts the art out there - music, lyric, story, dialog, light, shade, color - and the audience puts it to whatever use suits us.

When an artist and an audience are in synch - as we always seem to be at Melissa concerts - the result is art amplified, made greater than the artist can manage alone. When the audience is artist - and all artists are audiences - you get imitation, and influence, and sometimes an effect like the reflection of light from mirror to mirror to mirror till something entirely new becomes illumined, which is what happened when Melissa covered "Piece of My Heart" at the Grammies and turned the great anthem of love and loyalty gone toxic into a song of triumph over cancer. I love covers because of this potential for surprise and repurposing. (Listen to Dolly Parton's cover of "Stairway to Heaven" sometime.)

The transformative uses of audiences can be powerful; or they can be trivial; or they can be dangerous. That's how you get both Woodstock and Altamont. For that matter, it's how you get Freedom Rides and Nuremburg Rallies, for political leaders are tapping into the same vein. I am too tired to articulate this notion coherently, but at a behavioral level entertainers and politicians, fans and followers, are functionally the same.

Painters and writers, thank goodness, who don't have to be in touch with their followers as directly, are spared some of the side effects. There are reasons musicians, politicians, and actors are famous for substance abuse and unstable home lives. "You're the only relationship I have that makes sense," Melissa said to us last night; and I hate that this is probably true and is probably a direct result of the qualities that I value most in her. Who, after all, can long maintain a relationship with someone who routinely creates intense personal connections with a thousand screaming fans at a time?

The price of stardom is a high one, higher than I would be willing pay, so it is good that I will never owe it. The height of my own ambition is one I can never, by its nature, know I have achieved. I want someone to find something I wrote, and read it, and have a thought I could not have had, and which she could not have had without reading what I wrote. The thought doesn't have to be one I approve of, or comprehend. This can happen any number of times, but it only has to happen once to justify my existence. And it can happen any time. A year ago. Fifty, a hundred years after I die.

That's how art works. Many, many people have done this for me. Some people I can repay by paying for books and tracks and tickets, buying their merchandise, standing up at their concerts, waiting in line at their signings, commenting on their blogs. Others, I can only pay forward, as best I can.

I had a lot of other related thoughts as we drove home through the dark last night, but now that the caffeine and adrenaline have worn off, that'll do.

Research Walk

Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.

See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.

Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as

running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.

As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.

Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.

So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!

I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.

I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.

And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.

I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.

But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.

And again.

And again.