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?
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
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?
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?
Sunday, September 8, 2013
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?
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?
Friday, September 6, 2013
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!
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!
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
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!
"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!
Sunday, September 1, 2013
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.
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.
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