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The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis. If formula romances are analogous to ditties, Connie Willis books are symphonies. (Formula books are fine -- ditties are fine. It's just an analogy.) I just finished Doomsday for the nth time, and it is more rewarding on every reread. I mean, it really does hit a lot of hot spots for me -- plagues and british humor and medievality and time travel and competence...

P.S. I will never understand why people don't read books or watch movies over again. If the point were to find out what happens, a synopsis would do.

P.P.S. Plagues! Come on! You can't go wrong!

Mannequins are creepy. They're like clowns and puppets, and they are used to sell things.

Many of them are headless.

My brain busies itself in the night. I wake up in the morning and am confronted with absolute nonsense on the bedside table -- half words penciled on envelope backs that mean nothing. But I'm getting higher tech about it.

Last night I sent myself three messages, using my cell phone, to my instant messenger:

Lexemic (11:47:12 PM): dmz
Lexemic (12:33:11 AM): write about parliamentary procedures
Lexemic (7:53:42 AM): this wont hurt a bit

Saturday thinking in the rain

Four more critiques of One-Two, and I might be beginning to see the issues that I need to address... important, because addressing these issues will be vital to addressing the entire Manassas universe. The comments and suggestions and criticisms have all been spot-on and so very appreciated.

(Pause to discuss how many insects we should order. "We could handle 500 in that aquarium." Yeah, we are buying bugs again.)

Here are some of the hurdles I have with Manassas. 1. I love the universe. I think this makes me particularly blind to issues. 2. The time line is shifty. It could not be described as linear. 3. Neither could the plot. (Although, it is true that a line on a mobius strip is a real line, and so if this plot is an inside-out ouroboros, which is really interesting mathematically, the line itself exists. It's just bendy.)

4. The magic of Manassas really does represent the dark reality shifts in families. You can leave your house and get a clear head for a little while about toxic behavior patterns; you can even convince yourself that it doesn't exist, but when you step back over the threshold, the old patterns take hold yet again. There is no escaping the darkness of family dysfunction, and yet if you give it up, you give up the family. You give up life and everything important. This is a good and important subject, but it takes wrestling and great concentration to get "right". I'm nowhere near perfection yet. Believe me.

5. There are a lot of Manassas stories to tell.

A whopping 46 words yesterday, the first day of my work year. Okay, so I did a little organization and a little research and a little existential musing, which does take time.

I swear, one needs to look no further than the mirror to find all the character development needed to write any kind of fiction. Yesterday, I grumped around because -- and don't laugh, you know you all have these idiocies yourselves, or at least I comfort myself with thinking that you do -- because my dishtowel basket in the kitchen keeps getting things put in it that are not dishtowels.

"Ah, maybe she's a neatnik."

No. I'm a convenience-nik. I want to grab a dishtowel entirely unimpeded by chocolate bars or avocados or someone's 7-11 receipt. If something spills, I want there to be NO barrier to my hand grabbing a clean towel to mop up. All this is very boring. But when I'm stalking around fuming, and no one has any idea why, and I'm refusing to say why, because that would sound silly, well, the dialogue that ensues INSTEAD is very interesting.

And good kind Marsh turns into snarly incomprehensible Marsh, which is probably where Stevenson got the idea in the first place.

(P.S. I got better.)

Rut chronicles

On the way to critique this morning, we were talking about my favorite working assumption: No narrator is reliable. For a while, I was afraid that I was getting into a rut with some of my stories because so many of them had unreliable narrators. So I came up with a good rationalization for this, and I'm happy to pontificate about it any time.

But it's true. People don't know themselves perfectly, and that's a fascinating thing to explore in a fictional character. People don't understand what is going on around them, not expertly, even when they are experts. They miss nuances and they have biases. So fictional characters are not supposed to be "real" and we are not writing about them as though they were, but if humanity does one thing worth capturing, it's that amazing ability they have to think that what they are doing is right when everyone around them is shouting, "no, stop, that's the house where all those teenagers were murdered!" Monumental self-blindness, it's what we do best.

Well, I'm not that way, of course. I'm just a chronicler.

I signed up for the very next critique slot, deadline 2 weeks from this moment. I'm trying hard to keep the enthusiasm and momentum going.

We have a friend who is doing some commuting and has asked me for science fiction and fantasy recommendations -- specifically for someone who has not read a lot of speculative fiction.

Here are some of mine. They are not a top ten list or a best of or anything like that. They are just ones I have loved or found interesting or even ones that I think are "important" to the genres. In no particular order:

1. Dune (Herbert)
2. The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
3. Stranger in a Strange Land (my hero, Heinlein)
4. Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead (Card)
5. The Gate to Women's Country (Tepper)
6. Cryptonomicon (Neil Stephenson)
7. A Spell for Chameleon (Anthony) (yeah, yeah, but you don't have to read the OTHER 57)
8. Foundation (Asimov) is probably important enough to give a read -- I have not read it in forever, but it is part of my brain DNA.
9. Harry Potter (Rowling)
10. The Hobbit, LOTR, Tolkien. Egad, I temporarily forgot Tolkien.
11. The Liveship trilogy (Hobb)
12. A Wrinkle in Time
13. Doomsday Book (Willis) is always in my top 20 or so. I have read it many times.

I will add others as I think of them. Recommendations/reminders are welcome.

Edited to add: Anything after number 9.

Everything on this list has been read at least twice by me; several have been read many more times than that.

The same ideas come up in my stories over and over again:

1. Things are never as they seem, or Nothing is as it seems.

2. You can't replace a person/child. (This one comes up more recently, and it was one of the hearts of the story I just turned in. Yes, my stories are many-hearted creatures.)

3. Good people do bad things. Evil people do good things.

I don't want to get stuck in a rut, but it seems like two and three could give me enough material for a lifetime. Number one is fun.

Eighteen hours after deadline is approximately the time that I decide that all the work I have ever done in my life is utter crap and that I hope it got lost in the mail/internet so that no one will ever see it and that I should take up another career, preferably hard physical labor.

Manna

John, from his computer across the room: Marsh, you have to get back to getting your stuff out there.

For a moment I thought he was looking at a budget sheet or something. I considered reminding him that most of the stuff I'm writing will pay for a happy meal and a toy, and that won't change for a while.

But actually he was reading a critters (online critique group) story. "A line edit wouldn't really turn up much, but..." There are a whole lot of folks out there writing perfectly grammatical sentences, but they have no spark, no soul, no... reason to read them. (And how on earth do you say THAT in a critique, by the way? No grammatical errors, man, but I really don't care about the characters or what happens to them or really anything about this story.) This is why he wants me sending more work out. John thinks the world needs MY stories.

Obligatory aw-shucks aside, having one's partner get one's work -- GET it, really get it -- and think it is what the world needs... I can't imagine being richer than this.

Pick your heroes carefully

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

How science is not like literature

You won't hear neurologists say (often): "well, you have to learn how to do brain surgery correctly before you are allowed to break the rules."

Why do I write science fiction?

This is the important question for me this week. I worry that what I'm creating is nonsense, is just flat genre crap, paper dolls with lightsabers. The second TNEO deadline looming ominously might have something to do with this. My insomnia, also, although the TNEO deadline did not have anything to do with me imitating a banshee at three in the morning when I discovered that my very wonderful daughter was giggling loudly on the phone with her male friend from out of state. That was just my maternal madness. Maternal madness explains many things, including most ridiculous threats, i.e., if you don't hang up this second I will throw that phone AWAY. In the light of day, this is not much of a threat, since, a., the phone belongs to me, b., there are many more phones in the house, and c., I don't throw things away. At worst, I would have freecycled it.

Anyway, if I have a point, it is this: I am still after all these many years struggling to find my way. I want to laugh hollowly when my 20-year-olds say they don't know what they are doing with their lives. "Wait until you are 40!" I do say. But who does know their way? Stock brokers? Physicists? (I think physicists know that none of us actually know anything.)

Which brings me back to science fiction or, as I like to call it, odd little stories. The stories of people who seem to be monsters, who turn out to be misunderstood, or people who seem to be monsters who really are monsters, albeit misunderstood. The stories of the ends of the worlds, all of them. My own childhood, as tragic and hilarious as every other person's (except for stockbrokers), dressed up in scary masks and hats. But this is part of all fiction, right? So why science fiction? Maybe because I adore it so very much. I adore the great what-ifs. It is fun for me, and if I enjoy what I'm doing, it is better. It approaches art. Once in a great while, it IS art.

All the people in my life are out doing important things: working, errands, whatever Emmy does when she is out, thinking of traveling home from college "sometime soon", and so forth. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

I stayed home from errands to work on TNEO stuff. My work style is chaotic and baffling to people outside my brain, I'm sure. I have to do things in a certain way: that certain way is to follow my brain where it leads, even if it leads to running upstairs to look up a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Muses aren't will o' wisps, I guess, but usually they feel like that. I jump around the internet and go for agitated walks. Eventually, my brain says, "aha, found it!" and then it comes. It ALWAYS works this way.

But when I say to my adoring family-fans, "don't interrupt me, I'm working", what are they to think? Oh, working. That's what she calls it.

Whew. "One-Two", my second round story for TNEO, is very much under way now. It's been a little nerve-wracking waiting for the ideas to mature and the characters to come out from under the wet leaves and such.

It's an odd little story. I think this describes almost everything I write.

I may be looking for volunteers for this story, depending on my panic level.

The other writing-related news is that TNEO has high speed internet in the apartments this time. I am going to try to chronicle my adventures. I've been asked to assist with some of the socializing in the evening (!) and have inexplicably agreed to this. So I'm not really sure how much energy will be left over for chronicling. I will have all my critiques done beforehand, though. So I shrug and say maybe. How exciting!

Of the Chaldees

The language NEVER stops shifting. I don't mean English or any other so-called official language. I mean the ways we communicate a thing, one to another. I mean the special words we only use between pairs of people or in hobby groups. I have "tomatoes" and "The War" and "wamefousian", the last of which means a very creative and open-minded approach to rack, board, and the game of scrabble as a whole. I have "mull", which means refuse to decide.

I allow acronyms in my online speech, but not "u" or "2". Say "you" or "to" or "two". 2 is a number! But 2 is stretching, isn't it? It's a speedy solution in a world where speed matters -- like every other language situation. It is faster to say "leisure" than "ledger", and the dg softens as much as possible already. Contractions drop their apostrophes online and on cell phones -- and why not? Contractions are already legitimate evidence of the lazy factor that plays into every aspect of speech. It seems unfortunately appropriate that they should be streamlined. Don't becomes dont. Dont forget ur shoes, dude. Or dood or d00d.

We're swimming in it, we who live in the internet, the shining stream of language that is always heading -- richly -- downstream.

The internet is a hugely positive thing in my life. I can find information on anything -- ANYTHING -- any time. I can see up to the second pictures of my nieces and nephews, or pictures drawn by them, or things they thought were neat. John and I used the internet to stay in touch while we lived apart. All of our "big" discussions were typed. My kids far away can find me on messenger -- and so can the one sitting in the same room. I go first to the internet to find out things like news, weather (in case I can't see the window, I guess), and entertainment. It's a good thing.

It is also really distracting lately. I am going to make a few changes. In the work day (self-defined), I am going to leave yahoo messenger logged out. (This is partly to stop the constant email notifications.) I am going to only respond to offspring (including step and in-law) aim messages. Any others I will respond to after hours. Whatever after hours means.

If I choose to do something that could be considered time-wasting, that's one thing. I choose to do so. It's the stuff that comes in interruptingly that I have to cut down on. At least that is my theory!

(A recent article by Cory Doctorow about interruptive media helped shape some of my thinking on this... decision.)

Every week of Odyssey, there was a special guest writer or editor. Our year was lucky enough to get George R.R. Martin as the weeklong guest, and apparently there were MANY applications for our year just because George would be there. He was very funny and I learned a lot from him.

But one of my own heroes was there another week, an editor of a very successful genre magazine. I really really like his work. A lot. Everyone was to have one piece of writing critiqued by one of the guests, and I signed up for this editor and put my story in the envelope to be mailed to him prior to his visit.

Well. He loved it. It is not a genre story. It's still in my pile of stories to try to place, actually. He said something along the lines of "I would not change a thing in this story; send it out." He told me to come to such-and-such a conference and he would introduce me to some of the other editors. I actually found myself wondering in the moment if this was what he told all the kids. But no, several people told me later that he had talked about my work to them when I wasn't even around! One of my heroes. I still find it hard to believe.

So. Did I go to the conference? Have I followed up at ALL?

No. I think I missed that chance. You know, it was such a turbulent time. It was only a few months before separation and divorce. Em was beginning to get sick, although we still didn't realize what the signs meant. I was picking up pieces of life everywhere.

I hope I get another chance with this editor, with the editors he would have introduced me to. My writing hasn't gone to hell in the intervening years, I don't think. I can't use turbulence as an excuse forever, although it's a pretty good REASON. But I can't keep missing these chances, I can't, I can't, I can't. Missing isn't even the right word. I can't keep throwing chances away.

Other people's opinions

Some weeks I do transcription instead of attempting to write. (Transcription pays much better than attempting to write, I assure you.) This current job is a transcription of a meeting involving free trade agreements. I have some pretty strong opinions about free trade agreements, which are not the point.

What I find happens when I transcribe another person's words, verbatim, with stammers and mannerisms and all that, is that I am very sensitive to the channeling effect. I feel myself taking on their opinions -- only slightly, like they are inhabiting my fingers and eyes and ears just long enough to get their words on paper. But it is a real effect. So when I think about free trade agreements, and I do think about them frequently enough to matter, I feel like I for very brief moments can see all sides of the argument. It's kind of cool, but disturbing.

Reminding myself

Everyone is real. That's the main driving idea in my life. I know it sounds obvious and probably lame, but I think it's easily forgotten. (Or maybe it is just me who can forget it and the reason I have this main idea is to keep me from forgetting it!) The guy cutting me off in traffic, he's real; he has goals and a life. The kid in school who drops his tray in the lunchroom -- real. That embarrasses him. The laughter embarrasses him. He thinks about his clumsiness for a long time, remembers it when he leasts expects it. The losing team last night, did they sleep? Did they weep? Some of the fans did, I know.

This driving idea affects the way I parent, the way I write, the way I worry about people I have never met -- which keeps me from sleeping sometimes.

I wrote a dreadful poem in college. Really, who hasn't? The main point of this atrocious piece of work was the idea that when I ride along in the car there are people everywhere, going along, doing things, going places, and they don't even know I'm wondering about them and I wonder if they are thinking thoughts like mine. (Really atrocious, seriously bad.) But I still think those THOUGHTS when I'm driving along. I try not to think about the poem.