my tattoos

Brand new and still healing.



This is the labyrinth pattern I build with stones each year at Fort Rodd Hill. I wanted a human figure in the centre, like the female figure in the Sibbo wall-painting, but it wouldn't have been legible without making the labyrinth huge. So a dot, standing for me being midway (a labyrinth is a two-way journey, there and back)
Also, if I forget the pattern next year at Fort Rodd Hill, I can just ask someone to look at the back of my neck.



A jellyfish, on my right shoulder, for the phosphorescent ctenophora at Martha's Vineyard during Viable Paradise (yes I know this isn't a ctenophore, it's a moon jelly) and for my first pro-rate sale, which features flying jellyfish.
And VPX, for Viable Paradise Ten, my year and my tribe.

photosensitive me

Back from May Crown, a terrific weekend at the Daisy May Campground near Fort Macleod. I visited with my kick-butt apprentice Alis and her lady Asha; former but still kick-butt apprentice Sina and her cute-beyond-bearing children; amazingly talented friend Nan (with detour to see her new yarn shop); about-to-be-married Meg; stunningly gorgeous Kate, and others that I'm too silly to adjectivise just now: Klaus, Nessa, Elaine and Malcolm, Freydis, ....
So yes, I was very social. And dutiful. I did about an hour of folding event handouts, two hours of gate, attended the (mercifully brief) Laurels meeting, the 'Show & Shine' (all of one person displaying work, possibly because the name is not indicative of anything specific), and the Laurel Q&A (where I ended up being Mistress Bossy-Boots because no one was in charge).

The site is a former or occasional swamp off the Oldman River. Once off the flattened campground, you can clearly see the channels and humpy islands, even without water to delineate. Doing a bit of a wander, I found two half-sunk squashed cars, with scrubby trees growing through the windows and hood in approved post-disaster movie fashion.
The full-grown trees were mostly leafless, making for a somewhat artificial, stage-setting look. Trinity thought it looked like the set for a Harry Potter film.
Where the swamp wasn't, the ground was strewn with river stones, some remarkably large. We found an impressive lump of quartz, black basalt, granite, lots of blobby sedimentary and others that Freydis identified for us (yay Freydis!). I found a little square striated stone that turned out to be petrified (?) bone - a bit of buffalo rib, maybe.
Yes, I brought back rocks. Because rocks are cool.

The first day was clear and still, the stars that night thick and swarming, the night bloody cold. I didn't properly warm up (having done the 10-midnight shift) until near light. The next two days were windy, gusting erratically and continually, and my canvas tent luffed all night. Every time I dozed off, I dreamt of sailing and woke trying to duck under the boom as we swung about to catch the breeze. Since I haven't sailed for, oh, thirty-five years, this seemed unfair.
I'm a bit wonky from lack of sleep, although I did sleep until 11 Monday morning.

After take-down, I discovered that the methotrexate warnings aren't kidding about photosensitivity. I'd managed to keep my head covered almost the whole time, but apparently not enough, and not my nose. Not only did about 15-20 minutes of sun toast the back of my neck, but my nose was blistered.
The backs of my hands burnt! The most weather-exposed, toughened parts of my body burnt, from being out in full sun for part of a day. You can see where my cuffs fell partway across the knuckles.
It makes me want to do leaf-prints on myself. If I stuck some ivy leaves on my bare pallid arms, it would probably only take about 10 minutes to establish a temporary sun-tattoo. Sure, it might hurt some, but so do tattoos.

In other health-related musings, you'd think that a test involving the words 'occult' and 'blood' would be creepy and cool, possibly admitting one to membership in an order of mystic assassins.
But this is not the case.

general news & books

Mark left for Arizona this morning, to attend the Estrella War. The house is in various sorts of disarray, since he's been using most of the downstairs as a staging area for packing, and in the time just before he leaves I blinker myself and just think 'there is no point tidying, because much of it will be going away with him'. Thus, dust falls gently over the disarray.
Then the urge to tidy and dust and sweep will fall upon me randomly through the next several days, depending where in the house I am and what I happen to be looking at. These fits will increase in frequency and intensity, then taper off as the house reaches a level that I'm comfortable with.
Which is not to say that it would meet any particularly stringent white glove test, only that the horizontal surfaces will be accessible and the piles of stuff-in-progress will be neat orthogonal piles. They will also consist for the most part of my stuff-in-progress, Mark's being tucked away on shelves and exiled to the garage workshop while he's not there to protect them.

Virtuous things: I updated my website.
-finished "Gods'-Meat" and sent it off to the Potlatch workshop, realising with some shock just how long it had been since I'd finished a short story. Plotwise it may be an inchoate mess--a grammatical, correctly-spelled, nicely-paragraphed inchoate mess. I go with my strengths.
-sent three e-queries to agents. This I found oddly exhausting, traipsing back through blogs and LJs to discover their particular quirks and preferences, and tweaking the query to match. This one wants to know where you think your story fits in the market, that one thinks anyone who compares their work to an established writer is just showing off. This one hates Ms, that one hates being addressed by his first name. This one wants you to show your research in picking them, that one doesn't want to hear any of that fake personal stuff. I know it's because they're individuals, and I was prepared to do the research. I was just surprised how tired I felt at the end of a mere three queries.
I'm going to try to get 2 or 3 queries out each weekend, until I run out of e-queryable agents who handle fantasy, which shouldn't take long. Then start on the snail-mail queries. Oh yeah, and write another, better book.


Dubious things: A dental app't this Thursday to--if I'm lucky--put in a permanent crown, or--if I'm unlucky--root canal work. I'm very much hoping that the tooth isn't cracked. I've already got one cracked tooth that, when it decides to go, will require extensive repair work. I'd just as soon not have another.
The UVic Medieval Seminar on Saturday. I know I'll enjoy it once set-up is done, and there Will Be Less Set-up this year, because the new venue has much less display space, being a lobby entrance. I will dress warmly, in linen and wool, with woolen hose, I think. Also I will bring books. Books from my tbr pile, which needs to be dealt with.
Perhaps I'll dedicate this coming weekend to reading other people's published writing? And try to spend fewer evenings browsing the web, and more evenings tucked up with a hot drink and a paperback.
Then I could post reviews of what I've read. Oh, heck, why don't I do that anyways?


World Fantasy Freebies: People who regularly attend the big cons may take this for granted, but I was surprised and excited at the World Fantasy Convention 2008 to be given a very nice tote bag, with side pockets and net pockets and zipper pockets, and it was stuffed full of books! (My previous experience with a big con would be, umm, Worldcon in Brighton in 1979.)
Certain books were in every bag, the rest of the space was given to random books.
Mark and I went through and removed anything duplicated between us, or that we already owned, and cleverly there was a table where books could be left, swapped and picked up, beside the flyers and bookmarks table (which probably has a name). I browsed that table regularly throughout the con, and all I can say is that it was very clever of Mark the Wonder Husband to bring a mostly-empty suitcase.
So far I've only dented the freeby pile (I think it was described as 12 pounds of books, even though we're supposed to be metric.) Here's the first few:

Journey Between Worlds, by Sylvia Engdahl, originally published 1970, updated 2006. I quite liked the cover illustration, by Craig Phillips, which had a sort of Nausicaa/Moebius feel to it, very suitable. The book was an easy read, reminiscent of those 1960s career guides for girls that were disguised as novels. Only instead of becoming a tour guide at the UN or a fashion illustrator while finding love and possibly solving a mystery, Melinda emigrates to Mars. References are made between the American pioneers and the colonising of Mars, and the frontier spirit of ancestors and descendants. Mars has no aboriginal inhabitants, so that less comfortable parallel isn't much examined.

Destiny Kills, by Keri Arthur, Spectra 2008. Cover firmly in the urban fantasy mainstream, bare female back with tattoo; though this one is old-style, credited to Getty Images, the swirly vinery around the title brings it back to standard.
I enjoyed the first half of this. It starts pretty bang! with our amnesiac heroine sitting naked on a beach beside a dead guy, remembering only that she has to perform a final ceremony for him when the sun rises. But the amnesia only lasts long enough to allow info-dumps in the guise of awakening memories, not to be a real difficulty, and the chasing about and outwitting of pursuers became samey. I love chase stories--see my extensive collection of John Buchan and Geoffrey Household for proof--but when the romantic leads decided to trust each other and have sex, the tension dissipated. Then the two villains, one human and one nonhuman, just to be even-handed, are so sketchy that their defeat(s) were anticlimatic for me. The final confrontation, which should be intense, since the building is flooding, was pretty well meh. I think this was because there was no tactile detail. I mean, even if you're a sea dragon, doesn't water lapping around your feet feel like something? But it was all perfunctory visuals. The ending verged on bathos:

SPOILER!!!

The wizened dragon-king in his cold stone castle, with water lapping up to the carven feet of his ornate throne, in exchange for the gold ring that holds his ancestral power ... gives them a cell phone and tells them to call an Econolodge in Nevada.

END SPOILER

Scavenger, by David Morrell, 2007. Cover has author's name in huge, and book title as bas-relief on stone incorporated into the artwork, mostly a small scene of entering a cave on the page underneath, revealed by a die-cut 'broken' corner. I don't by preference buy books where the author's name is the largest feature on the cover. I want a picture!
The writing is smooth, the plot races along, characters are in jeopardy, things get worse for our heroes, and I failed to be engaged, even though there's a tough-but-vulnerable heroine and a wounded-but-determined hero. I had a recurring itchy feeling that we were hitting all the major stops on the Hero's Journey (underground ordeal with symbolic rebirth? check). Still, it would be dandy reading for the airport or Greyhound, except that the ending felt like a cheat. If I'd been really wrapped up in the book, the ending would have been a wallbanger, but since I was dipping into it non-sequentially, I only groaned.

Paraworld Zero, by Matthew Peterson, on cd. I admit, I hung onto this because I'd seen the ads on the back cover of F&SF, and I was curious about someone who would pay for that sort of promotion (I don't know what it costs, but it can't be pocket change) but not for a designer to make his cover less amateurish. It was published by Windstorm Creative (discussed here) so he was probably responsible for his own cover as well as his own promotion.
I didn't get very far with listening to this, because the narrator has the sort of earnest, slightly nasally voice that I find off-putting. Also, the intro/prologue is an emergency birth by a woman covered with pus and lesions, fully described (yeah, now I'm complaining when writers put details in, there's no pleasing me). When I skipped ahead to the first chapter, with our young orphaned hero daydreaming in class and dealing with bullies, it was considerably more engaging, and I could see why kids might enjoy it.

Huh, that sounds pretty negative so far. Maybe I'll be better pleased with the next few.

Viable Paradise, day three

Note: the diary is of events that occurred in October, but is being entered here now with minimal editing. Just because.

Tuesday night
You'll excuse me if I'm a touch incoherent today. blubwublubulubwu. I haven't done anything on my story assignment, but this diary may be approaching the desired word-count of the story.

Group crit was led by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow. PNH is short, slightly stocky, dark hair and trim beard, glasses. He projects intensity, an interesting trick since he doesn't often look at the person he's speaking to, but keeps his eyes on the pages or screen while speaking. He reminds me in a way of a couple of my friends, Ken and Larry, guys who aren't physically big but seem physically dense, as if they could just tuck their heads down and barrel through a shieldwall. Cory has his hair very short (buzz-cut? crew-cut?), wears black-framed glasses, was stretched out in the armchair with what could be relaxed calm or jetlagged fatigue. A big guy, sort of former-jock physique overlaid with geek enthusiasm, if that makes any sense?
The other students were Scott, who has the room next to ours (I'll have all this down by the time I leave), has a well-scrubbed, good-natured look, like the guy you really really want as your supervisor because he'll actually listen to you; Greg, whose posts I've read on Making Light, a dark-haired, dark-complected guy with a straw cowboy hat, whom you could imagine meeting in a desert town where he would miraculously fix your broken-down car; Terri-Lynn and Diane who took the heat yesterday; John, long black hair and bemused air, from England--I could imagine him as a roadie or musician. Laura was the other victim. She's probably one of the younger people here, slender, long brown hair, and an alert, almost birdlike way of holding her head. She always looks as if she's about to smile.
Laura's manuscript had some very cool concepts, of big animal spirit totems (mangan) each tied to a particular country, and cultures sufficiently urbanised to have bureaucracy administering the beasties and their human shamans. Some issues about modern language and not thinking through how the level of material culture would be affected by a metals embargo, but apparently she wrote this originally in highschool. (I couldn't write that well in highschool--my faith in educational standards is bolstered). It had a prologue, which everyone liked, but which may be extraneous to the story, giving an impression of the mangan that was a bit misleading. A fair bit of discussion about how much backstory was needed, where was the conflict, where did the story begin.

My crit session was...what do I say? For my author's rebuttal the only thing I felt I could say was 'it's not that good, really, there are some issues that need to be dealt with.' It verged on a love-fest. Terri and Scott want to read it when it's done. PNH said 'a cast-iron grip on non-anachronistic detail'
omgomgomg (that last bit was me, not a quote)
Issues identified: There needs to be more at stake. Tyl's mistreatment needs to be front-loaded so that the impetus for them leaving is more apparent to the reader, something bad enough to drive them into the unknown. Perhaps expanding the scene in the kitchen to show Myl being slapped or pinched surreptitiously, and include the information that Midame overlooks or even encourages that sort of treatment. Also possibly plant here the idea that it's considered unwise to cross Midame, even the hint of witch-fear. Cory suggested that the three springs might be reduced to two, that keeping the story moving might be more useful than keeping to the fairy-tale pattern of threes (which led to a short discussion of triunes and the pleasure of pattern-finding between him and Patrick). Greg felt the witch/deer aspect wasn't laid enough beforehand, which might be helped too by the expansion of the scene in the kitchen. Funny that in OWW that scene was suggested for expansion, and that I did it, but didn't follow why--it needs to show more of the inner life of the house and thus of its mistress. About half the readers felt the dialogue needed to be more differentiated from the narrative, which almost seems like an invitation to raise the archaism of the dialogue--but probably isn't. Nobody had problems with the style, which flat-out astonished me, after OWW (which has run about 50/50 people having trouble with the style and vocab). In fact, it seemed to be the strongest point for everyone, that the style was poetic, and evocative, and lyrical and stuff. Nobody said purple or overwritten or too writerly, which is my great fear. PNH said he wanted to disagree with the poetic etc. and say that it was a good clear style and a grim style, to go with the fairytale grimness, and I shouldn't try to be pastoral and lyrical at the expense of the grimness. He said it read not as if I was drawing from Tolkein but as if I was drinking from the well that Tolkein drank from and that the Brothers Grimm drank from. He said
(I pause for emphasis)
that it was the sort of story he wanted to see. Got that? PNH wants to see my story.
I better finish it. No more messing around with the short stories until the Willow Knot is finished. I didn't get a marked copy back from Patrick (as far as I can tell) but Cory marked his copy mostly with check-marks of spots he thought were good.

Lectures were Debra Doyle and TNH, and I list them together because they were playing tag-team to an extent. DD said she sometimes spoke on 'sentences that go clunk' but we were pretty good that way, so instead it was Style and Story. TNH spoke on Exposition. I made a lot of notes. Random quotes:
Style is what you can't help doing. Strange events should be set in straightforward prose. The Law of Conservation of Wierdness. The main action should be in the main verbs, not in subordinate clauses: Shooting him in the head, I turned and opened the fridge. Words have a budget; some can be used once in a lifetime (formication, phantasmagoria), while others once per book, once per short story. Words have buried history in them, and buried technology. SF/F must worldbuild while telling the story--the Ginger Rogers of fiction. Stephen King's 'the gotta' is a trance state while reading, to achieve it, don't slow the reader down with decoding (adjectives and exposition). A word is the negative space of all the words it doesn't mean. A novel is a transactional space; the reader wants to trust you. Get the economics right--things have price and weight, goods must be paid for and shipped, characters must have jobs.

Lunch break (peanut-butter sandwich, muffins)
Evelyn pleased with her crit session, and some great quotes from the instructors (woo!). From the sounds of it, Evelyn has done the most original world-building of anyone in the workshop. I'm so pleased for her. Hope Mur's session goes well tomorrow.

My second one-on-one was Steve Gould. I really don't know what to make of this, and I'm going to find some others who had sessions with him and compare notes. I feel kind of as if I've had a session with a Zen master but didn't attain enlightenment. I went to the Gould-Mixon room, and Laura Mixon gave me a glass of juice while I waited. When he got in, he asked if I wanted to stay there, and I said whatever was convenient for him, so he drove me into Oak Bluff(s?) and showed me 'Methodist Munchkin Land', the middle of the town. Apparently in the mid-1800s this was a major tent-revival centre, and people came so regularly that they took the same tent-plots each time, rented from the church, and eventually the church built a giant pavilion, like an inflated bandstand or gazebo where the revival tent usually went, and people built summer-houses on their tent plots. The summer houses are like miniature San Francisco painted ladies, Queen Anne houses with front parlour, back kitchen, upstairs bedroom, little front porch or verandah, all within the tent's footprint. Mr. Gould pointed out decorative features like the shape of windows and door arches that mimicked the tent swags. There's no insulation, because they were meant only for the summer. And yes, one does expect Munchkin people to be sunning themselves on the verandahs, or bustling about the streets. "If you're going to write way-out fantasy, you have to be able to describe things more way-out than this reality."
I'd expected him to be tougher than Debra Doyle, because he writes modern sf, and wouldn't be so easily swayed by the tropes of the past. It turns out that he's a Georgette Heyer fan, and we compared notes about favourite Heyers. I asked 'how do I make my book better' and he said 'Zeppelins. Everything is better with Zeppelins.' Then we discussed whether the technology of the world allowed for dirigibles, and decided that hot-air balloons were allowable. Digression on which Heyer has a hot-air balloon ascent (Frederica). Driving back, he did get into the questions of religion and magic in the world, and how the magic works, so I had to put into words more on the knot-magic that Myl learns and remembers. I've been slacking on that rather, because it seems to put itself together as I go, so I haven't worked it out in advance.
Going down for dinner, I saw Mac on the stairs and got up my nerve to ask what the turnaround time was for Coyote Wild. Didn't want to be pestery about the story, but I figured that was a legit low-pressure question. And she said she wants it and would have made up the contract except for being busy prepping for VP, and I said completely understand, no hurry, and did the happy dance because it would be my first sale. Which surprised her (ego-boo all over the place).
Then, walking into dinner, Cory asked me if I did short fiction at all, because he's co-editing the new Tesseracts anthology. So I said yep, I did, and what lengths were they looking for (the usual 7.5k or less) and where should I send it, while being kind of boggled. Mac told Cory he couldn't have my long story anyways, because she was taking it.
My bogglement was tempered by the realisation that I'm the only other Canadian attending, and Tesseracts is Canadian, so it may be more a factor of my having made it to VP and being Canadian than his being overwhelmed by my work. Still, 'at VP Cory Doctorow suggested I submit a story' is better than a cover letter with no creds.
Then during dinner I asked Patrick about submitting to Tor when the Willow Knot was revised and finished, and what I should say in the cover letter. He said to mention VP and that he'd suggested sending it, and also to email him when I did, so he could let his assistant know that there was a legit sub coming and not just someone taking his name in vain. Which apparently happens. Big surprise, hm? I would never have the nerve, because it's so easily checked, but I suppose people are counting on their writing being so wonderful that no one bothers to check their veracity. I said something fumbly about understanding that this didn't mean a sale necessarily, and that the market and the commercial side needed to be right, and he said it wasn't a commercial novel, or not only a commercial novel, it was one with a strong voice and a strong story, like Gene Wolfe or Howard Waldrop.
I wonder if I should start keeping a list of writers I've been compared to? (Kelly Link compared the voice in 'Fluke' to Jennifer Crusie and Connie Willis.) But I don't think anything can beat Evelyn's story being compared to Thomas Wolfe or a Henry James Bildungsroman among the amphibians, by TNH. That purely rocks.

Dinner was shepherd's pie. Nostalgia of a sort, for me, it being the end-of-the-month meal in my family. The first time I saw it on a restaurant (pub?) menu, I laughed. I suppose the equivalent would be seeing sloppy Joe on a menu. Perhaps that too can be ordered now? After meatloaf, all is possible.

After dinner I went over to the NH hotel room to see if Teresa was up for a one-on-one. Met Elise at the door, just leaving. Teresa was just about to eat dinner, Jim Macdonald was just leaving, and she looked exhausted. She asked for a raincheck and I said of course, because I knew this was a bonus, and since getting a line-edit from TNH was like getting beaten up by Emma Peel, I'd want her to be on form for it.
I didn't get a Teresa point, but she did laugh. She said 'So you'd like to see my party trick?" and came around to the table and sat down. And thus did I get a line-crit from TNH. She reads with intense concentration, you can see her gaze tracking down the page; occasionally she smiles or pushes her bottom lip out (which oddly is the trait Tyl has when concentrating). She mutters short comments, and from time to time her pencil darts down, rather the way I'd imagine Duerer or Giotto adding a line to an unfinished sketch. (Yes, I am a fangirl, but I'm a pretentious fangirl, give me credit) She fixed one of my not-quite-parallel constructions, added 'she' to a couple of long sentences for clarity, and pointed out one sentence where the referent may be unclear but didn't fix it because it isn't a straightforward fix (and I must learn to do these things myself). And asked me if Myl used the subjunctive, which I didn't know, off the top of my head. She said that I have good clear prose, and that the mock-archaic is a difficult style, but it looks as if I can handle it. I asked her about my commas, and whether there was a good text for comma usage. She said my commas are pretty good (now I want to tattoo that on myself somewhere) and that a 1st or 2d edition of Fowler's Usage was good for commas, but that commas were variable, and many places had house usages that were just strange. She changed one of my commas to a colon, so I asked her about colons, which frighten me the way semicolons used to. The colon is 'the stage magician conjuring up the rest of the sentence' (PNH added that the semicolon is the maitre-d' showing the rest of the sentence to its table.)
She read both chapters and the outline, though I'd rather expected her to stop after the first chapter, since I'd said I didn't want to impose when she was tired.
Partway through, Patrick showed up and was pleased. He said that when he'd asked her about scheduling a session with me, she'd gotten that hunted look in her eyes (which I can understand) and he'd said: 'No, you want to look at Barbara Gordon's manuscript'.
We had a brief chat afterwards, with sugar cookies, and I explained about being myself the best line-editor I had access to, and needing to know whether I was good enough to trust for my own work, or just wannabe-writer-level-good. Who shaves the barber?
I thanked her again, and asked her if she'd sign my copy of Making Book. She asked if it was a first edition and made a correction in the text of the Bret Easton Ellis article (the compulsion never fades, I see), then inscribed it 'to Barbara Gordon, who knows what she's doing.'
I went back to my room in a state of both exaltation and exultation. I think the only place it can go from here is direct translation into heaven. Where I suspect it would be hard to find an agent.