This can be "fun with first lines" if you want it to.

My house smells like wet possum and I went to bed at 6:30 this morning. These facts are not unrelated.

(No wonder I'm always tired.)

Happy Memorial Day.

Idea Garage Sale: Down with Love

So, on the day after Valentine's Day, let us stop and reflect on just how annoying the emphasis on romance is in our culture.

Did you know that some people are asexual and/or aromantic? Asexuals aren't sexually attracted to anybody. Aromantics love their families, their friends, and their puppies, but the whole gazing-into-the-eyes-lets-feed-eachother-chocolates thing to which Valentine's Day and 99% of pop music is devoted is as interesting to them as a football game is to me: Yeah, I see that a lot of people are into that but I don't get it and furthermore, I don't want to.

Me, I like romantic subtext as much as the next person; I'm very much in love with my husband; and I can ship Destiel with the best of them. But it bugs me when I see friendship sexualized. Holmes and Watson, Kirk and Spock, Jeeves and Wooster, Scully and Mulder - why can't they be best friends without a sexual or romantic element? Why can't we have a male/female team in a movie who are clearly close and supportive without having a trajectory heading toward bed or the altar by the closing credits? Love and sex are independent variables and there's more than one kind of love - even between adults.

And if those things bug me, what kind of media hell are asexuals and aromantics living in? It must be like living in a world in which sports infiltrates every single story; in which the climax of each movie involves a Big Game; in which, if a work contains no overt sports content, everyone and his dog rushes to headcanon sports subtext into it.

Worse, if a character is introduced who appears to be asexual or aromantic, they will almost certainly be treated as if something is wrong with them, and they will either become a running joke or get an arc in which they discover that they really needed a (probably heterosexual) romantic relationship to be happy, after all. It's obnoxious enough to see disabilities treated in this way; for a non-disabling characteristic to be shoehorned into the disability category in order for it to be subjected to an obnoxious trope is a real excess of obnoxiousness.

I know this, and for the most part I have managed to avoid it, chiefly by writing for middle grade audiences. The middle grades are as subject to romantic pressures as older people, but the fact that the adults acting as gatekeepers equate romance with sex and judge sex to be inappropriate for kids younger than a certain age to be thinking about - though problematic in its own way - does at least provide room to tell stories with no romantic content at all.

But how does one do it for older audiences?

A single-sex cast won't do. The hordes of queer readers out there, who aren't as starved for representation as aromantics but are still really hungry and accustomed to surviving on crumbs, latch onto single-sex casts in a frenzy of queershipping so powerful it will probably affect the creator, too; and it's hard to blame them. But if the heteroromantics get the banquets, and the homoromantics get the crumbs, what is left for the aromantics to keep them alive?

The all-pervasive romantic/sexual cultural script is so strong, so all-pervasive, we write into it whether we mean to or not. Bucking this is a major technical challenge. I would like to see it done.

Specifically, I would like to see it done in a Valentine's Day story. Why not confront the monster head on? Why not have a plot centered on the pressures applied to aromantics and asexuals to be what they're not, to fake feelings that are supposed by the culture to be sacred? It's Valentine's Day, and the heroine has had it up to here with the matchmaking, the prude-shaming, the condescension, the judgement, and the pity. She's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore!

But what does she do about it? Answer that, and you've got the story.

Idea Garage Sale: General Thoughts for Spring

So, zombies are a thing lately (I don't know why; it never has made sense to me, but trends don't have to). Where's the zombie Easter story? It's a natural, isn't it - the dead rising and all that?

And why is Easter not more of a story holiday, anyhow? Easter stories don't have nearly the cultural footprint that Christmas ones do; and yet they're similar in a lot of ways. Both are about renewal - the return of the sun at solstice, the coming of spring. Both support huge commercial industries and amazingly tacky, color-coordinated decor, though Easter isn't quite as relentlessly consumerist. (Yet.) Both are Christian holy days onto which are grafted semi-pagan pop cultural icons. Both are huge days for church attendance by people who don't normally go. Both have parallels in other religions. Both are part of the one big overarching holy story, about the cycle of life and death.

The plot has a lot of relevance even when you strip out the Christian symbolism, and it's all very dramatic. Christmas is the beginning, Good Friday is the climax, and Easter is the happy ending.

Beginnings are easy. We all have dozens of beginnings in our file cabinets. Beginnings don't take you anywhere if you don't press on. We need the climax. We want our happy endings.

So where are the stories in which Easter/spring are explicitly tied to, say recovery from grief or catastrophe? Ordinary poor couples with ordinary babies are routinely made to stand in for the holy family in Christmas stories (especially on TV). If we re-enact the birth constantly, why do we not re-enact the death and resurrection? People don't literally come back from the dead, but - people come back from the brink of death, and from symbolic deaths; people work through the stages of grief and come out of mourning; relationships and careers and nations die and are reborn, transformed, every day.

Where's the divorce Easter story?

Where's the attempted suicide returning to the land of the living, slow agonizing step by slow agonizing step, into a hard-won happiness as fragile as an egg or a flower?

Where's the transplant patient coming to terms with the fact that if someone else, someone at least as worthy and loved, had not died, he would not be living to be wheeled into church on Easter morning?

What happens to all those poor TV babies born when their parents get stranded in December - are they well-fed and cared-for in April? Do they grow up groaning under and rebelling against the symbolic weight of their births?

What about the arc of poor Judas, who chose the villain's path, repented, despaired, and didn't stick things out till the happy ending? It has always seemed to me that if we don't parse out Judas's arc, we miss the part most relevant to most people's daily lives.

Christmas is meaningless without Good Friday. Good Friday, without Easter, is too bitter to bear. And the only way to get to Easter is to grit your teeth and get through Good Friday.

Idea Garage Sale: Free-Range Normal

So every Thanksgiving, I see the same things.

Christmas decorations.

Turkeys.

Pilgrims and Indians.

Complaints about the historical inaccuracy and insensitivity of popular portrayals of pilgrims and Indians.

You know what I don't see?

Historically accurate portrayals of pilgrims and Indians. By which I do not mean jokes about what a bad idea it was for Native Americans to feed invading white people, which are - face it - a further reinforcement of the traditional imagery that puts nothing constructive or interesting on the table. Names like Wampanoag and Massasoit are too unfamiliar to the general public to joke with.

So isn't it time to address that?

Isn't it time for a Wampanoag-eye fictional treatment of the prototypical "first Thanksgiving?"

For that matter, isn't it way past time for the great Iroquois domestic novel? The historical romance which isn't half-European? If we must have clash-of-cultures, mixed-race romance, what on earth is wrong with a hero or heroine who is an escaping slave making a new life with the Seminole? (Hmm...the Cherokee kept slaves...) The war novel about the clashes between different tribes, with Europeans at most an annoying and trivial side presence? The story of epic technological change and cultural upheaval following the reintroduction of the horse? The pre-Columbian murder mystery? Or political novel?

The pre-Columbian anything that doesn't read like an epic fantasy, for that matter.

I told one of the other attendees at the Paleoamerican Odyssey Conference that it was my ambition to write Pleistocene domestic novels. No culture is exotic or romantic to its own members. One of the great advantages of fiction is that it allows us to get out of our own points of view and experience someone else's normal. This applies at the writing end as well as the reading end. It is not true - and I have never met an author of color who thinks that it is - that white people can't write about the experience of non-white people. That's only a poor-mouthed backasswards way of saying that authors of color can't write about mainstream experience independent of race issues, which is obviously and completely wrong. My books with non-white protagonists (Margo's House, The Music Thief, and 11,000 Years Lost) have received nothing but positive support from the black and Hispanic people who have remarked on them to me. But the danger of crossing the line between inspiration and appropriation (a line that falls, I believe, exactly on the line between recognition of and assumption of privilege; if you write cross-culturally, do so with a humble heart!) is real; and it is, miserably, statistically true that it's easier for a white author to sell a cross-cultural book than for an American Indian to sell a book of any sort.


We need more writers from American Indian backgrounds, and we need them to be better known. Sherman Alexie, Joseph Bruchac, and Cyn Smith can hardly be expected to do the job of spreading normality all themselves; especially since "American Indian" and "Native American" are umbrella terms covering many different normalities which are treated as a single entity by mainstream culture. So the experience of being Indian is not the same as the experience of being Muskogee, or Navajo, or Cherokee, or -

Apart from pushing books at people, and despite writing protagonists who aren't like me, I'm limited in my ability to contribute here. And it bugs me to realize that it's not at all unlikely that someone out there will read these words and say snappishly: "I'm trying! But the damn lily-white publishing industry keeps rejecting them!" Because, yeah, even this far into the digital revolution, the publishing industry is still depressingly white. And straight. And all the rest of it.

I'm kind of hoping to be inundated with links to indies and e-publications that do everything that I suggest here isn't being done, or not done enough. That would be nice.

Happy Turkey Week, anyhow. And try to believe it's not about imperialism, but about getting a day off in the middle of the week to get together with your family, bake pies together in a nice warm kitchen, and eat yourself into a stupor.

Idea Garage Sale: Calendar's End

Now that I think of it, I'm surprised nobody (to my knowledge; please point me in that direction if you know better) has written anything connecting the supposed Mayan prophecy of doom (which was no such thing)with the winter holidays.

The fundamental connection between any given winter holiday tradition and the Mayan calendar is the winter solstice. The days have been getting shorter, the nights longer; if this trend continues, we're all up a creek without a paddle, so it behooves us to huddle together in our warm personal units, keep lights burning, sing a few songs, and remember we love each other. All the great Christmas stories are about this, after all; probably all the great Hannukah, Kwanzaa, and Midwinter Night stories, too, though being embedded in the culture I am, I'm not familiar with them. If, someday, the sun doesn't come back after all, we will at least all be with the people who matter most.

But wait, people are celebrating Christmas as a summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. If the sun deserts the northern hemisphere, will it be because it takes up permanent residence in Australia? Hmmmm...That would mean that the earth stopped wobbling on its axis.

What would be the knock-on effects of that?

Yeah, suddenly I know why this story wasn't written. I was envisioning a short story; for which I now see you'd have to do an awful lot of scientific research, and then distill that research down to its essentials, and develop the single character, situation, and incident that would convey the idea to its maximum potential - a lot of work to create a single gem-like story that could only become a Christmas classic if it found a publisher in today's straitened short-story market.

A parody would have been nice, too; could have skipped some of the research; and gotten bonus points (at least for American audiences) by encompassing the notion of the looming "Fiscal Cliff."

Oh, well, I didn't think of it in time, either.

Happy Solstice Celebrations, y'all.

Idea Garage Sale: The Year in Ghosts

First of all - Merry New Year, y'all.

Second of all: Why aren't there more New Year stories? Is it just that most of us experience it as an extension of the big solstice celebrations? The only New Year story I can think of is Dickens's The Chimes, which is considered one of his "Christmas Books." There's a New Year's chapter in one of the Mary Poppins books in which book characters come out of their books in "the crack" between the first and last strokes of midnight at New Year's. That's it as far as I can think off the top of my had.

Yet there's lots of potential in the New Year. First, as expressed in the Mary Poppins incident, it's a liminal time - a time of transition when the barriers between worlds are thin. Ghosts, UFOs, monsters, fey, angels, demons - they should all be out in force. Second, it's a time we have invested with an arbitrary meaning, a time to start over, make new resolutions (which we don't expect to keep), tackle our lives anew, as if we mean it this time, instead of dealing with it in the half-baked way we've been doing; a time for looking back and forward, self-assessment, and self-improvement. In other words, of interior conflict.

But mostly - New Year's is a dangerous holiday. Drinking, illegal fireworks, celebratory firing of shotguns into the air (but the bullets have to come down) - this is a night when lives are likely to be changed in a literal, and unwelcome, way. Need a character dead, paralyzed, blinded, riddled with guilt? Here's your big chance to have somebody say "Hold my champagne and watch this," or a bullet fall out of the blackness from no apparent source, or a car come careening out of nowhere, and your audience will buy it.

I have a little idea about this. A story cycle - I tried to do this as twelve flash fictions, as an exercise in forcing myself to be brief (you can see how well that worked, huh?) or a novel in 12 chapters. The wife/mother is killed in an accident on New Year's Eve, and she is the viewpoint character. The opening sequence would be her bustling around her house trying to get things in shape after the New Year's celebration, and gradually realizing that she's dead. Each subsequent sequence would show her, and her family's, adjustment to this gross disruption of the natural order. Her husband gets depressed; one kid takes on too much responsibility; one acts out; she tries to intervene, with mixed success. One kid goes to college. One kid becomes obsessed with proving that Mom is (or isn't) still around. The cat can always see her, but doesn't always care.

The trickiest part (apart from my complete failure to write short) is how to give the viewpoint character agency and still let the family go through its stages of grief and finally, on the anniversary of her death on New Year's Eve, reach the point where she can let go of them and they can let go of her. We can't deal with anybody else's grief for them, much as we sometimes want to; and dead people can no longer solve problems.

But that's why the POV character is the mother. Mothers, more than any other class of people, have to perfect the art of influencing their loved ones for their good without dominating or controlling them. Which is pretty much all the ghost can be allowed to do. For this story's purposes, the mother is the ideal protagonist.

I'm not a mother and feel this disqualifies me from doing this sequence as more than an exercise.

Or maybe that's an excuse because I don't want to go through the emotional arc of a mother's death until the world forces it upon me.

Anyway, it's outside my genre. Writing YA and juvenile literature from the POV of a middle-aged woman is problematic at best, pointless at worst.