Bathroom Monologue: Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore (Redux)

As soon as the last Grail meeting ended, Merlin slipped out the door and lit a cigarette. One of the squires came over.

“Good boy. Is my horse ready?”

“Yes, sir. But are you certain you should go now? Their crusade could begin any month.”

“Listen, that hobbit isn’t going to pull this off by himself and Arthur knows what he’s doing. I’ve got two weeks vacation from Camelot and if anyone gets suspicious I’ll blame it on Morgana. You can blame anything on the old bitch. Two weeks is all I need to ride to Rivendell, from there around the cliffs and I make the necessary cameo to inspire and point him in the right direction again. I swear, if I didn’t show up regularly they’d wander into Las Vegas before they hit the Misty Mountains.”

He combed his beard with his fingers, changed his pointy blue hat for one with a rim and swapped his staff for that sword the elves dropped. Then he turned back to the squire.

“How do I look?”

“Exactly the same, sir.”

“Good, good. If Hogwartz calls again tell them I’m not playing phone tag anymore. If they want me to be head wizard, I want time and a half plus a pension that doesn’t rely on disgusting jellybeans. Playing two roles is hard enough.”

Then the wizard hustled to the stables, mumbling something about how having to make so many dramatic appearances had turned his hair white.

Bathroom Monologue: Tripping Brachiosaurs

You can rob a person, you can rob a party, you can even rob the military up north – and if you can get away with it, go ahead. But if you wanted to score a decent haul this age, you hit convoys. It’s been the way since the first time some farmer bought up enough hadrosaurs to drag his stuff across the desert and sell at an indecent mark-up.

Their investment invented my economic class, vis-a-vie, the entrepreneur. Us. They buy hadrosaurs, and I buy a bunch of sleeker sauropods that can outrun them, get my people onto the wagons, and overtake them. Presto: I’ve got enough food to last the frost and can sell the rest at whatever mark-up I deem appropriate.

We inspired a third economic class: the security guard. That’s our natural enemy, or some would say predator, though one hasn’t eaten me yet. These were triclopes and satyrs the farmers hired to ride with their convoys so that I could sneak up behind them, knock them unconscious, and toss them overboard. That is, to my experience, their only function. I always considered them overpaid.

The farmers eventually agreed with me, and put their pay to buying bigger sauropods. The brachiosaur was the worst invention I ever met. They carry so many goods that there are few to a fleet, and thus no stragglers for us to pick off, and they’re so big that it’s very difficult to sneak up to one and climb aboard. They also absolutely always crush you if you slip when you’re climbing. I muchly prefer the security guard to the brachiosaur.

Still, brachiosaurs were a depression in our economy, not an apocalypse. Deluxe-class sauropods are superstitious and spook easy. First time I ever successfully robbed one, a monsoon did all the prep. No sooner did lightning strike the coast, then that big lizard dumped its load and stampeded off. After that, my fellow entrepreneurs and I took to setting off explosives, unleashing deluxe-class carnivores in the area, or one time, climbing all the way up to the brachiosaur’s peanut of a head and banging a gong in its ear. Scared the sin out of it, and we picked up what they dropped.

But farmers are hard people. After a year of what I deemed a spirited enterprise, they began loading their brachiosaurs with fake cargo. We’d spook the critters, they’d drop their loads, and we’d rush in to crack open containers full of zombies. Half of my associates were devoured in the first of these practical jokes.

The farmers began sending two fleets a week, and we had no idea which had goods and which had biters in them. It was supposed to scare us off. We’re entrepreneurs, though, and refused to submit to temporary market forces. We jumped as many as we could regardless, and you know how the farmers responded?

They sold tickets. We struck in a few regular zones, you see, and the farmers had them scouted such that they put in seats and made twice as much as they would off of their crops from all the well-to-dos who thought’d be funny to see my fellow businessfolk devoured. Last week, as I sprinted from a fresh crate of zombies, I spied a woman in a flowing white dress on the ridge above. She was applauding the zombie team.

So tomorrow we’re taking the next step. We’ll ignore the brachiosaurs, and the cargo. We’ll still show up on time, though, because we’re going to rob the damned audience.

Bathroom Monologue: Conjugations of Blaze

Have you ever considered what happens to a word when it’s let loose in the wild? The weird relationships people force it to have? The way its meanings slosh around? If you haven’t, please take a moment and consider “blaze.”

Blaze (noun): a particularly bright fire. Duh.

Blaze (verb): to burn with particular intensity. Sure.

Blazing (verb): to burn with particular intensity, in the present tense. Feel like you’re on safe ground? But there’s another present tense verb form.

Blazin' (verb): to smoke marijuana. Now you’ll say there’s a kind of burn involved, but then explain these next two to me.

Blazed (verb): to have burned with particular intensity. Add a ‘d’ and it conjugates to the past tense; but had an ‘r’ and…

Blazer (noun): a semi-formal jacket. This is never purposefully on fire. Never you mind mutations like…

Trailblazer (noun): a basketball player situated in Portland, Oregon.

Blaz (adjective): a particular shade of a color, such as blue.

Blaise (noun): a divine gambler.

Bathroom Monologue: The Restless Dead

“There’s a group of triclopes, The Restless Dead. I don’t know what you’d call them – a denomination? They used to be all over the north, during all the foot-wars. Miserable opponents. They’re a head taller than us, and half a head than a satyr, and quick as either of us. In the few times they were overrun and truly losing battles and with few members left to a regimen, The Restless Dead were trained to collapse in battlefields, near piles of fallen soldiers. They were trained to lie there, unflinching, breathing so slowly they were one with the deceased. Sometimes they catch a horseman, trip down his ride and all. Sometimes they waited until the whole battle was over, for the medics or scavengers from the victory’s army, and would slaughter them. It was last year that eleven-or-so Restless Dead got up the night after their army of two hundred were routed, waited for the camp to be drunk, and let them wake up to find all their captains with their eyes slit and a third hole driven into their skulls. Might be a tall tale, but it can stick with you.”

"The Last House in the Sky" Done at 92,000 Words

Five months of work.

Yesterday I completed the rough draft of The Last House in the Sky. The document weighs in at just under 92,000 words, a lighter fighter than The House That Nobody Built. The day was a tenuous fugue of a deep-lung cold and syndrome pains locking my joints, but there were only two chapters left, and the characters were already unfolding their story so well. This may mean I'll have the edit the heck out of the ending later, but it's done for now.

What is a rough draft? To me it's the beginning, the middle, and the end. There is no plot skeleton left; every scene is written. It's covered in notes and bold marks on things to change or look over later, but there is a complete text. It's what needs to be cleaned up into a presentable draft later.

Also, if I died and you published it, I'd come back and haunt you. Please don't do that.

I can't discuss the plot specifics yet, but in celebration for closing this draft, I wanted to tease three things:

1. We'll find out why the three most infamous thieves in the world
                  turned themselves in on the same morning.

2. We'll learn what killed off the gremlins.

3. One of our heroes will fulfill his dream of riding
             an ankylosaurus into battle against a giant robot.

Thanks for all the support while I've been writing it. This morning I'm sleeping in, but I'm already aching to edit.

Bathroom Monologue: Nine Pointers to My Younger Self About Love

1. Just be yourself. This is not because women will be attracted to who you actually are – it is that they will not be attracted to your fake selves either, and pretending will do long term mental damage to you. If you are just yourself, you will be slightly mentally healthier with no real variation in your chances at a relationship. Also, you could exercise more.

2. She has never “got it.” Go pick it up for her right now.

3. If you are waiting for her to ask, she is waiting for you to ask.

4. Never call her on her shit. Don’t expose the “got it” routine, or her waiting to be asked. Silently play along. You cannot win the fight that will ensue. There are only various flavors of losing.

5. Don’t worry so much about shared interests. Beyond the necessary few around which you’ll bond, she only has to be willing to give you the space you need to enjoy stuff alone. Meanwhile, you should engage in lots of her favorite passive activities, like holding yarn while she knits or watching Dr. Who. You will rapidly develop the life skill of being able to mentally tune out while sitting, enabling you to endure anything that pleases her. You’ll be able to sit outside a theatre during Winter for three hours for movie tickets and not really mind. Feel free to let her think you mind and she owes you, but do so in moderation.

6. You are expected to be single-minded. When she wants to fuck, this should be all you desire. When she wants to go to bed, you should be narcoleptic. When she wants to talk, you should be able to parse her tone to figure out subjects. She is the diverse unique butterfly. You are pollen. Harbor a complex internal life so that romance does not kill your soul, but recognize that at any given time she thinks all men are idiots and does not trust you with two motivations at the same time, nor does she like the idea of you having any other motivation than the one she wants you to have.

7. 1-6 are void if she feels like it.

8. Society scorns sexually inactive men. Single women are sad; single men are faggot assholes who are less than human. A female virgin is, at worst, annoying to the man who is failing to get into her panties. A male virgin can be pulling a bus load nuns out of a fire and people will still go, “Yeah, but...” If your experiences lead you to desire being single or celibate, then consider how much you like society. If your experiences lead you to feel society is full of people you’d rather never see again anyway, then feel free to abstain from romance. You can’t stay asleep in a bed with another person anyway.

9. 8 is void if she feels like it. You better have those tickets.

Bathroom Diagram: Why Sharks Are Perfect

Everyone should do their duty to expose science to the masses. Recently it was addressed that I haven't done my part, and so I'm taking this Sunday to explain a fine principle of marine biology. The following is an educational diagram for why sharks are just about perfect.

If you require a deeper argument, consider: it constantly swims towards A) eating or B) making little sharks. As you can plainly see, the shark is as close to an eating-things tube as it gets without turning into a worm. And no one thinks worms are cooler than sharks.

Bathroom Monologue: Necroromancer, OR, Deathly Romantic

They worked until the work was done – not until they tired, or until their unions compromised they break, or until they got a raise. They were paid exactly what they asked for the work and they asked nothing for the work. When the work was done, they stood still or found a decent place for sitting and sat like ladies and gentlemen. They were the best the world had to offer, and he was always adding to their offered numbers, so that there was always a new person to meet and work alongside. He didn’t hate living society. The necromancer simply preferred to work with professionals.

Bathroom Monologue: Executed

Marianne Smythe murdered two people and assisted in the murders of at least five others. When she was arrested, she had the hatchet, the circular saw and the rope in her trunk, and the DNA of one victim under her fingernails. She refused to assist the police in pursuing her fellow cultists. She never feigned innocence or regret, and at her sentencing hearing, seemed almost giddy for the coming needle.

I’ve told you about Marianne Smythe so I can tell you about the two people who went to her execution. No relative of any victim attended, as the business was something of a mess, and a massive hailstorm pelted the state that night. Solomon James had no interest in the case, other than being the temporary guardian of Jedidiah Smythe. Jedidiah was the second person in attendance, his interest being that his mother was being executed. He was seven years and two months old at the time. He was not known to act out, or to speak with any frequency.

Many people in the institution, the state, and even the free press feared the boy would get the wrong impression from the viewing, but he could not be barred and willingly arrived twelve hours early to beat the hail. Upon his arrival, the warden gave him a grim tour of the facility, assuring him of how humane it was.

As they waited, Mr. James explained how law enforcement didn’t always catch wrongdoers, but pursued all those they could, and always did take care of the innocent.

The District Attorney arrived at noon and gave him a highly redundant lecture on the legal system, its checks and balances, and how many wise people had set up many ways to defend innocent people from punishment.

The warden avoided Jedidiah after that, and the D.A. left early for a fundraiser. Mr. James was obligated to stay with the boy. Marianne Smythe declined to see him, which made sense, as she had declined to see Jedidiah for seven years. For none of this did he act out, and he spoke only to answer “Yes” to the occasional rhetorical question.

I’ve told you about Jedidiah Smythe’s day to tell you about his evening. He sat in one chair for three hours straight, watching the second-hand on a clock. At a specific juncture he was moved to the viewing room, where he sat in another chair watching through a plate of glass. Someone snuck him a cup of coffee. It went cold and stale on his armrest, the top unpopped. It remained on his armrest as he departed the room after the injections finished their course. He did not act out, and did not speak.

It was only as the institution let out a collective sigh that Jedidiah Smythe initiated anything. He paused by an officer’s leg, touching his trouser for a moment.

When the officer bent to ask if he needed help, Jedidiah Smythe reported, “I know this place only executes the guilty, and that the law finds the guilty, prosecutes them until they’re dead. My guardian and I are both witnesses to a gang of doctors killing my mother. They’re all still here, so it won’t be hard to catch them. How long will it be before we can kill them?”

The officer exchanged astonished glances with Mr. James. As they hesitated, Jedidiah’s eyes went from him to the second-hand of the nearest clock.

Bathroom Monologue: Death to Rainbow Heathens

Ours is the Holy Orange Empire, and we have always been at war with Green. It is only Green who have always been splintered, and the cracks in the world began with them. Third sliver from the east of a continent of Orange, we know in our hearts we are truly the center, and the Holy Orange Empire has always been the center of the world.

All Orange is our right, and once Green is chipped away, we will surely reunite. Believe not what you‘ve heard from the Coast of Red or the Isles of Turquoise – they were never part of a whole, and their blending with the Orange slivers is unholy. They spread the fractures that have broken our glass world. Once we were a window into like alike the sun, and we will be again once this war is won.

Death to rainbow heathens.

This was written in response to a photo prompt Catherine Vibert and Lascaux Flash.

Books That Changed How You Saw Fiction

Readers, writers, extraterrestrials – today I have a query for you.

NAME A BOOK THAT CHANGED THE WAY YOU SEE FICTION.

Give us the author, the title, and how. The “how” can be any significant way you choose. Doubtless there are many books that affect you, but pick the one that comes to mind first or that you’d most like to share. If Finnegan’s Wake challenged the validity of linear narratives, or Among Others validated autobiographical fiction, or The Color Purple made you demand authors write deeper women, or Cat’s Cradle left you with an indelible love of tangents – please, share.

I’m fascinated by the lasting effects of literature. We hear about canons, but reading is often a much more individual thing, and we all have books that cast a shadow over libraries. All I ask is that you keep it honest and brief. You can tweet your answer if you like, though some people may want a few sentences. Here’s an example:

Richard Matheson’s Hell House had the gall to seemingly end
and then drop a complete second twist ending in ten pages.
He executed it so quickly that I expected what was still in my right hand would be the typical blank pages and publication notes -
until I read the pages. It played with expectations of what novelists
do in page-lengths in a way that begged me to experiment.

See? Not so tough, though now I’ll have to think up another. In a couple weeks I’ll compile everyone’s answers into a megapost. If you can beat the above for brevity, you’re winning. If we’re lucky, we’ll all walk out of this with a revealing reading list.

Goodreads, circa 1874

So: what book changed fiction for you? And how?

Please Don’t Be This Artist

In 2010 I saw a great movie that went totally under most people’s radars. Even I barely watched it, but caught the trailer and was intrigued enough to put it on my Netflix list. Among the movie’s many strong points was its soundtrack, which mixed ambient sound, classical music and modern instruments, turning some scenes very cheeky and others downright disturbing. I was excited to hear it over and over, to write to it, and to promote it to others. This is how I respond when I like music.

I’ve spent the last two years trying and failing to buy this soundtrack.

I won’t name the movie or its distributor because I don’t want to single out its composer for derision, nor will I name that composer. The day after I saw the movie, I searched for the soundtrack through Google, Amazon, and eventually tried iTunes and Youtube. I couldn’t find it for sale or streaming anywhere. I even resorted to the forbidden areas of the internet, without luck.

Figuring it had limited distribution (if any), I tracked down the composer’s recording label. Their website was a post-modern mess, so minimalistic that it took me what felt like an hour to find a contact feature. They never messaged me back, but I did find the composer’s social networks. When I discovered his Twitter account, I was elated.

He didn’t respond to any of my tweets, and I found that he’d set his account to Private, so I couldn’t read anything he said. I sent him a request to follow him.

It was 2011 before he accepted my request. In 2011, I still hopped on the opportunity. I tweeted at him that I enjoyed the score very much, and was there a way to buy it?

There was no response that day, week or month. A month later, I tweeted at him again. I couldn’t DM him because he wasn’t following me, but I didn’t mind that. It was also then that I noticed his account only tweeted every few months, when his music showed up in something. At that point there would be a single tweet, telling his hundred followers to go watch this movie or show. Because his account was set to Private, no one except his hundred followers ever saw this. It couldn’t show up in any keyword searches or conversations. And never in his accounts history had he actually responded to anyone about anything. He was unilaterally marketing to almost no one.

Within the last month I entered the most desperate and stupid ploy. Seeing that he’d tweeted within the last three minutes, I sent him one more @ message asking if his work might become available eventually. He’s never replied to it. Good chance, he never will. And that's fine - it's clearly a lost cause, and I'll leave him alone.

Maybe he doesn’t know how Twitter works. Maybe he can’t get the rights to sell the soundtrack and is too frustrated about it to talk to potential consumers. Maybe he’s almost blind and can barely use screens, or maybe he’s in a cult, or maybe he’s secretly a dog. I don’t know and I don’t want to judge this individual, but to judge this public appearance.

Specifically, everyone: don’t do this.

Maybe you’re so busy that you can’t reply to every fan comment, or you can’t check into social networks daily. That happens. But come on, the least you can do is:

1)      Don’t hide your promotion.

2)      Don’t refuse to engage with people who need help buying your stuff.

Now ideally, there’d be a 3), and to me, 3) is the most important.

3)      Be courteous to the people who like your art.

But I understand that 3) is tough for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and nobody can sustain that all of the time. Even the nicest people have raw days. You’ll have a lot more, though, if you do the above.

Bathroom Monologue: Grandpa Defends Tolkien

“He should have just sent the eagles,” I said, making the greatest mistake of my week.

“Oh, you like the giant birds?” asked Grandpa. “I’m sure they would have been inconspicuous flying over several hundred miles of terrain that’s populated solely by armies, flying reptiles and the ghost of The Devil. That couldn’t go wrong.”

“Just fly straight to Mount Doom.”

“Because they wouldn’t look there?”

“They weren’t looking for the hobbits there!”

“Because they’re not twenty feet wide and flying overhead!”

“Then send the army.”

“Which is distinctly smaller than Sauron’s and lacks the home field.”

“They went anyway!”

“And they only won because the little boys destroyed the ring.”

“They could still go and distract him while the eagles fly over.”

“Again, giant birds fleeing battle to dive into one of his most sensitive locales would draw attention. Here.” At this point Grandpa made a circle with his index finger and thumb. He held it midway between him and his grandson. His left hand balled into a fist and loomed like a cobra preparing to strike over his head. “Try dropping anything into this hole while I use this hand to punch you in the face.”

“Grandpa!” He pushed all the way to the back of his bunk. “I didn’t know you took Lord of the Rings so seriously.”

“I don’t. Fantasy is for nancies. But Tolkien and I both served in the European theatre, and I’m not going to let people badmouth his work just because they like birds.”

Bathroom Monologue: Round One, OR, Amateur Boxing Advice

“So, the first round's in the books, and I just wanted to update you on what I learned about your opponent’s strengths. For instance, he’s really good at punching you in the head. Looks like he was born to do it. He’s got a great right, so maybe you should try dodging it next time so I can get a look at his left. His left is presently an enigma. Could be a pure southpaw for all I know.

“In terms of weaknesses, he really likes hitting you when you don’t him back, which would be a weakness if he seemed to get tired. But I don’t see how the human hand can be stronger than the human skull, so if it’s your strategy to pop one of his knuckles with your forehead, I mean, you’re the professional. God bless, and see you if you make through round two.”

Dark Knight Rises Podcast

So back on July 21, Nat Sylva and I hit the premiere of Dark Knight Rises, rushed home and recorded the timeliest podcast for Dark Knight Rises imaginable. It was comprehensive, covering the scripting, acting, ties to the previous films, the score, the handling of new and old characters - we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Today, on September 15th, the episode finally went on-god-damned-line.

It's been funny watching the relevance of this episode languish, as the opening weekend passed, and then the movie slipped from first place, and then from the top ten movies in the country, and is now well on its way to DVD. I could almost record a podcast about how doomed this podcast was.

Now, I don't want to point fingers (lies, I really do), but this is finally out of the archives. Spoiler-heavy, an in-depth discussion of one of the summer's biggest movies and a retrospective on Nolan's revival of the Batman franchise. You can download the episode totally free right here.

Bathroom Monologue: South Korea Bans/Teaches Evolution

A stunning reversal this morning as South Korea announced it will continue teaching the theory of evolution in its schools, but ban evolution itself from nature. If any life form is discovered to be changing over a course of generations, it will be gassed. If it evolves against the gas, men with heavy boots will be dispatched. Children will be given meal vouchers and a copy of Jurassic Park.

The teaching of evolution has been a controversy for some years in South Korea, which boasts Asia’s largest per capita Christian demographic. The practice of evolution has been less controversial, its tide more or less halted by concrete and Lysol.

Archaeopteryx. Confirmed dead.

Sources disagree over how the controversy began. Sources within the South Korean education system report the dispute emerged over depiction of the archaeopteryx, a primitive bird, as an example of evolution. Sources on anonymous message boards report the dispute emerged over "how shitfuckingly gey teh bibel is."

The truth is a toss-up; a matter of faith. Even conservationists are split over the move to ban evolution from the country. Some see it as a denial of a principle of life, an impractical march against what begat us, or even a refusal of God’s lasting creativity. Others see it as the best way to preserve life. Nancy Atweiler, a native Korean of sixty generations, says, "If you want to save the Asiatic Black Bear, you've got to stop it from adapting. What if it evolves into the Asiatic Hot Pink Bear? Then your Black Bear is extinct. Evolution is a heartless murderer and must be stopped."

Experts estimate that natural selection kills trillions of organisms per year, more than handguns, automobiles and illicit drugs combined. “In fact,” says Chung Jong-kwan of Hanyang University, “Handguns and automobiles are just a symptom of the problem that is natural selection. Natural selection can pretty much take credit for anything dying. It's nature's bureaucrat.”

Beige Countries: places where evolution happens.
Red Dots: dunno.

So far only South Korea has made explicit legislation to ban evolution. There are unofficial anti-evolution measures in other nations, such as Vatican City which applies celibacy to counteract evolution’s sexually transmitted issues, but these motions are the minority. China was previously expected to lead the way on anti-evolution legislation with its one-child policy, but caved to the Evolution Lobby. At present, the United States, Germany and Russia have a laissez-faire policy towards evolution, but sources within the Obama administration claim the president is, "willing to adapt."

Bonus: "A Worrisome Return" by Emma Newman

There’s a bonus on The Bathroom Monologues today! In addition to This Heavy World, we're hosting a tale from Emma Newman's Split Worlds. Emma is delightful lady, a longtime Twitter friend whom I finally met up with at WorldCon. She has a drop-dead reading voice, and has provided an MP3 reading for your additional entertainment. I'll let her set it up her story below.

This is the twenty-eighth tale in a year and a day of weekly short stories set in The Split Worlds. If you would like me to read it to you instead, you can listen here. This story is part of the build-up to the release of the first Split Worlds novel "Between Two Thorns" in March 2013. Every week a new story is released. You can find links to all the other stories, and the new ones as they are released here, where you can also sign up to receive each story free in your inbox every week (starting at the very first one).

A Worrisome Return
by Emma Newman

Aquae Sulis, 2002

Will searched for something familiar in his brother, but the man who walked through the front door bore little resemblance to the boy who'd left four years before.

Will was eight when Nathaniel had left for his great adventure and all he could remember about him was his superior strength. There were countless examples in his memory; being pinned down on top of wooden building bricks that left perfect rectangular bruises on his back and being crushed in a bear hug until he'd passed out.
   
He looked to his sister for solidarity but Imogen was beaming, no doubt hoping for a spectacular gift from their elder brother. Will was the only person in the household who seemed unhappy about his brother's return.
   
"Hullo," Nathaniel looked down at him as he crushed Will's knuckles against each other. "Still short I see."
   
"Hello Nathaniel," Will did all he could to hide the pain as they shook hands. "Still ugly I see."
   
Nathaniel laughed and released Will to clap him on the back. Will squeezed all the pleasure he could from staying on his feet despite his brother's efforts and followed the rest of the family into the drawing room.
   
"So," Father said as he poured sherry. "How was the trip?"
   
"Most enlightening," Nathaniel said.
   
"What was Paris like?" Imogen asked. "What's the latest fashion?"
   
"The only fashion worth noting in Paris," Nathaniel replied, "is that one should never appear to be concerned about fashion."
   
"He was probably too busy trying to get the dresses off them to notice anything useful," Imogen whispered in Will's ear.
   
Will tried to imagine a Paris ballroom full of beautiful women desperate to have their fashionable gowns removed but the fantasy collapsed when he thought of his brother being there.
   
The gifts for his parents were horribly boring; some kind of drink Will had never heard of for Father and Venetian glass for Mother. Imogen was given a necklace that glittered enough to make her happy and then Nathaniel fished out a small package from his travelling bag.
   
"And this is for my baby brother."
   
"I'm twelve."
   
"You'll always be the baby of the family though," Imogen said.
   
Will took the package and unwrapped the top layer to reveal tissue paper beneath. A row of tiny colourful dolls, wrapped in bright threads instead of clothes, lay within. "You got me dolls? I'm not a girl!"
   
Nathaniel laughed. "They're Guatemalan Worry Dolls. It's a custom I thought you'd appreciate."
   
"I've heard of these," Mother said, taking them from his hands to inspect them. "Oh they're adorable. Will, you whisper your worries to them and then tuck them under your pillow before you go to sleep."
   
He peered at them. Surely it was a trick. "Really? Why?"
   
"The natives believe the dolls worry for you so you don't have to," Nathaniel said. "And when you wake up in the morning the worries are gone."
   
"It's such a thoughtful gift," Mother said, handing them back to Will. "I think you should use them tonight. Now thank your brother."
   
***

Will woke in the night, alert and tense. There was a sound from the side of his bed so he peered over the edge. One of the worry dolls was lying on the floor, bathed in the light stretching under the door from the hallway. Thinking it had been pushed to the edge by his night time fidgeting he reached down, but the doll stood up and quivered before he reached it. Will snatched his hand back under the duvet as the miniature figure wobbled its way towards the door.
   
It was followed by another and then another. They were so small Will didn't feel them worming their way out from under his pillow. Casting long shadows, all six made their way to the door and wriggled under the crack beneath it.
   
Shaking, Will got out of bed and went out into the hallway. The dolls were heading for the door out of the nursery wing and into the main part of the house. He wasn't old enough to live there yet. But Nathaniel was. Just as he was about to curse his brother, the dolls lurched to the left and headed for Imogen's room instead.
   
Will followed them on tip-toe and pressed his ear against her bedroom door as the dolls wriggled beneath it.
   
He could hear her giggling and then the sound he hadn't missed at all; Nathaniel's low chuckle. His tormentors were reunited.
   
"Here comes the first one," Nathaniel said and sweat burst across Will's forehead at the thought of what he'd whispered to it. "What burdens are you carrying little fellow?"
   
Will heard his own worried whisper, the one he'd uttered to the doll earlier that evening. "What if I don't get any taller?"
   
"Oh, poor little William." The mockery in Imogen's voice made Will's stomach cramp.
   
"Ah, here's the next one," Nathaniel said. Will pressed himself tighter to the door as his breath seized in his chest.
   
"I'm worried I'll grow up to be just as stupid as my elder brother," the doll reported.
   
"What!"
   
Will covered his mouth with both hands to stifle his laughter.
   
"What if I have a nose like Nathaniel's?" Reported another doll. "What if I come back from my Grand Tour with as big a-" A thud cut off that one and no other dolls were invited to report in.
   
Will dashed back to his room, satisfied that he'd emerged from the prank as the victor. He knew Nathaniel hadn't changed and that there was no love behind the gift. His only regret was realising it after he'd whispered to the first doll.

Bathroom Monologue: This Heavy World

“World isn’t full of heaviness. It isn’t full of death and despair and failure. If it was, those things wouldn’t hurt so much. If the world was full of heaviness, nothing could drag you down. You’d be heavy in the middle of other great weights, and stay right where you were. If we plummet, it is because there are lighter things in this world, often above us, but isn’t the sky nice? Laughs, sharks, flatulence, sunny days, cool water, beaches, orgasms and overwritten poems. It’s a big place, of many masses.”

Saturn, Disability, and the Hugo Awards at ChiCon 7 - The Wrap-Up

THE ADLER

Good view for a Thursday.

A beautiful building right on the river, across from Chicago’s unparalleled skyline, was the perfect place to spend Thursday night. I spent sunset chatting about Hugo nominees and waiting for Saturn to become visible. While it was tiny even in the most powerful telescope we had, it was striking. Even when its figure is smaller than the tip of your pinky finger, you can make out its rings. Until then, I’d honestly thought that was an invention of cartoons, but it really does look like one of the glowing stickers I used to have on my wall as a kid.

While you’ve probably heard some complaints against the con-runners (and are about to read some more), they handled the Adler very well. Admission was free if you had your convention badge, and they rented eight buses to shuttle everyone to and from the planetarium for hours into the night.

ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES

While everyone working at the Hyatt Regency Chicago was courteous to me, I couldn’t recommend using the site again. Giving the floors arbitrary color names rather than numbers, and even less sensible themed names for the rooms (good luck finding “The Gold Coast Room” on “The Bronze Level”) were one thing, but the hotel is split into two towers that can only be navigated by three means:

1) a skybridge on the second floor where no convention events took place, requiring you to take either an escalator or a second, much slower elevator downstairs.

2) crossing the street outside on the ground floor, between a floor with three panel rooms and a floor with none.

3) crossing an underground bridge on the Bronze Level, where there were many panel rooms, including at least one that was only accessible up a set of stairs.

Complicate that with some elevators going down only to this set of colored floors, and some stairwalls only going this high, and you had a lot of baffled attendees walking indoor miles per day just to get lost. I expect to hurt when I’m at a convention, and had to set aside an hour every day to be in private over body tremors, but that’s my issue and I can handle it.

If they ever want to make a WorldCon Risk...

If you were in a wheelchair, though, you routinely had to cross to the other tower just to get downstairs and cross back to the tower you’d just been in to reach a room. That’s no reasonable way to ask someone to get downstairs. There have been reports of handicapped con-goers only being able to attend every other panel due to travel times within the Hyatt. They were rightly furious to make such long treks only to find a room with its own private set of stairs and no other point of entry. 

Especially at this point, I don't think outrage at con-runners is constructive. You can't fix architecture; you can only avoid patronizing it. WorldCon sites should be accessible to all attendees. Right now there are bids for 2015 between Florida, Washington and Finland. At none of the room-parties for these respective bids did I hear anyone pitch accessibility services. I’m hoping the post-con furor raises awareness. When you have over a thousand attendees, your location needs to start with being accessible.

THE HUGOS, AND A LITTLE SOMETHING

I am a longstanding and publicly-admitted cynic about awards shows. They are generally artificial and reek of politics-over-product. I can’t say that about the 2012 Hugos; at least half of the nominees claimed not to have written speeches thinking they would lose, and that same number looked genuinely shaken, stunned or overwhelmed. Whoever screamed in surprise when E. Lily Yu was announced for the John Campbell for Best New Writer was perhaps the single loudest I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m told it was Yu herself.

There were a lot of class acts. Jim Hines won for Best Fan Writer, mostly for his amusing series on how women are objectified on book covers, and excused himself from the category for every future Hugo to ensure that more new voices would be recognized. Ursula Vernon (Best Graphic Story) gave an endearing ramble on how she entrusted her boyfriend with the ending to Digger, just in case she ever died before it finished. John Picacio was the only figure to swagger up to the podium, and while he hadn’t prepared a speech, he remembered in the six times he’d previously failed to win Best Professional Artist the names of artists he’d grown up on and wished had been recognized with their own Hugos. He waited about a decade just to name them from that podium.

This is Jim Hines.
As far as I know, this is not a degrading pose,
but he sure has a grip on that thing.

And as coldhearted as I am, Jo Walton almost got me to choke up. She deserved the Best Novel Hugo that she won for Among Others, but still seemed to be processing merely getting nominated. She me by recounting something Ian Osmond told her: "Lots of people have said Among Others is a love letter to fandom. Didn't you expect to get a reply?"

It was well worth the half hour traffic jam leading to the sole escalator back upstairs.

It was also at the Hugos that I had my highest point. It was perhaps the only time of the year I’d wear a tie, and the last day that I shaved, but I couldn’t help being myself. I sat with an exceptionally good-spirited group of guys, and we quickly fell into joking about great novels and bad Adam Sandler movies. When they asked what I did, I described my upcoming novel and they showed keen interest, though I didn’t know how keen. I just enjoyed making them laugh, because that’s one of my favorite things to do for other people, even if it’s at the expense of Deadman and Jason Todd.

It was as Jo Walton finished her acceptance speech that one of them leaned over to me, writing on a scrap of paper. He asked how to spell my last name. I told him, then asked what was up.

“I can’t wait to read your novels,” he said. “You’ve got a fan for life.”

I shook all of their hands and probably failed to express how much that meant to me. Exhausted and pretty sick with the syndrome at that point, I couldn’t have felt better.

I still want a Hugo, though.

Reading and Writing at ChiCon 7

Day Two of Three from the ChiCon 7 diary. Tomorrow I want to touch on disability issues at the hotel, the Hugo Awards, and seeing Saturn for the first time. Today is devoted to the public readings and private writings that go on at these sorts of conventions.

THE READINGS

I went to my share of readings over the weekend, and saw some very talented writers. The one that rocked me back in my chair was Mary Robinette Kowal, sharing “Locked In” from Apex, at the Broad Reading meeting. It’s a piece of flash fiction that captures Science Fiction, Horror, Tragedy and the Medical Thriller without succumbing to nearly any niche’s expectations, and it’s a great reminder of why Apex Magazine is a top resource in the industry.

I managed to make a total ass out of myself afterward by congratulating Kowal on that story and not realizing she was the same Mary Robinette Kowal up for a Hugo for the superb “For Want of a Nail.” It’s great when you realize the two people you’re a fan of are the same person. Not so great when you realize you're an idiot.

This is not two people.
Some people have a harder time learning this than others.

Broad Reading was a neat setup, housing over a dozen quick readings from individual members in an all-female writing group of all levels of expertise. Most official readings were for one person. Jo Walton, who won the Hugo for her touching tale of adolescence in Among Others, read from her work in progress about teens in space who want to party on the ship forever instead of land. George R.R. Martin’s reading room couldn’t have been packed any more hopelessly if he’d written it.

Friend and fellow #fridayflasher Emma Newman showed the chops she’s honed recording audiobooks in a fine reading from her short story collection and the upcoming Split Worlds. Probably the highlight for all readings for me was when she read of a curse being cast on our hero, and somewhere outside our walls, a pneumatic hiss went off and filled the room. You couldn’t pay for better publicity than that, though the hotel should check that elevator.

There’s a lot you can learn from a reading, even a bad one. Maybe especially a bad one, because you can study how authors psych themselves out. One author, who I won’t name, kept stumbling over her excerpt. At first I felt bad, but then I started constructing narration in my own head, and realized her errors were highlighting how strong the voice would be on the printed page. It was kind of uncanny, and reaffirmed a couple of things I suspect about how plot progression works. One of my recent hobbies is listening to readings or audiobooks and testing how it would sound in my head, as opposed to how it’s intended.

THE WORKSHOPS

These are an institution at WorldCons, and will hopefully be for the foreseeable future. Oz Drummond and Lou Berger organized at least eighteen different groups of three aspiring authors (“victims” is the official unofficial name). These trios were joined with two professionally published authors, forming critique groups of five, to hone the victims’ craft. I had the pleasure of working with Martha Wells and Gregory Wilson, who treated all three of us with total professionalism and consideration.

Typical writer reaction in workshops.

Our session lasted two hours, and we spent about forty on every victim, myself included. Your mileage will vary, but we were all serious about craft and I don’t think a minute was wasted. This workshop was a big test for my thoroughly peer-read The House That Nobody Built, as I thought it was near publishable an wanted to see how it would stand up to scrutiny. I left jubilant, having retained more of the positive feedback than the negative. But just as important, the negative feedback was all reasonable, like the desire for a few details, or how to streamline the synopsis. Reasonable, and addressable in just a few minutes of word processing.

So it was the positives I lingered on, which is rare for me. One of my pros asked if I’d already queried it, seeming to think it was ready. One of my pros also described it with what I wish to God will be a cover blurb: 

“This is like Dungeons & Dragons, except awesome!”

There were some other developments at the convention I can’t speak on yet, but cross your fingers for me. I’m doing everything I can with what luck I get. I can’t praise these workshops enough, if you have the fortune of attending a convention that runs anything like it. If I turn “pro,” I’d be happy to help operate one.

The Panels of ChiCon 7

Last week I had the pleasure of attending ChiCon 7 in Chicago, host to the 70th annual WorldCon. My digital camera died going through an airport scanner, so there are few photographs, but some things about the convention beg to be shared. I've split it into three days on different subjects so as not to drop a giant hunk of text on the site. Also, the Panels of ChiCon 7 really deserve their own post.

There were at least three panels about the schism between real medicine and Science Fiction. The con devoted over a dozen rooms to a plethora of topics, ranging from formalized book clubs (I hit the one discussing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to thoroughly unformulized nostalgia. You wanted zombies? You got zombies. Ethics of book reviewing? Could you biologically engineer a plausible dragon? They had experts on all of this. All you had to do was find your room on this map.

Behold: The Mapocalypse

There were two particularly stand-out panels, one a raucous group effort, and one a gutsy one-man act that I doubt many people in the field could match.

Jack McDevitt might have been the single-handed king of the convention for me. He’s a prolific Nebula-winning author, but even his panel’s circumstances impressed. Just hours from his flight into town, and minutes from having fought through Chicago traffic to get there, McDevitt ran a 90-minute one-man panel on what gets your work rejected from magazines and publishers.

He riffed on the audience, he was funny and insightful, and seemed to know how to work a crowd just as well as how to edit a manuscript. There was the traditional advice of cutting adverbs and using only as many characters as was absolutely necessary, but also analysis on how hooks work, and why forcing the reader to wait can be a great strategy (his formidable example: waiting for the murderer to strike in Horror).

There's no better reason to go to the next EerieCon in Buffalo than to catch him as the Guest of Honor. His best advice was perhaps the best advice of the whole weekend, and I furiously scribbled it down:

"Keep the exposition short, but get it right. ...
It's the things you think you know
and don't look up that you get wrong."

Jack McDevitt, taken by Maureen McDevitt

You couldn’t beat what McDevitt brought, but you could excel at something entirely different. For instance, moderator Myke Cole, Jean Johnson, Scott Lynch (of Lies of Locke Lamora fame), Marie Bilodeau and the man known as “Eightball” discussing Disaster Relief in Science Fiction.

Everyone on the panel has real life experience in disaster relief, from firefighting to wrangling Deep Water Horizon, and so you wouldn’t expect them to put on the funniest show of the weekend. What began as an inquisition into what film habitually gets wrong and how strong the human spirit is devolved into a ten-minute debate about how to put a tourniquet on a bleeding asshole. Cole’s facial expressions as he listened put me into tears laughing. You know you’re winning when the Iraq-veteran-turned-moderator is hiding his face in revulsion.

Myke Cole could kill me, or entertain me with his giddy list-making of horrible disaster movies.

The depth and variety at these events left me deeply desiring to do one. It also left me deeply desiring that audiences shut up during them. There's little worse at a panel than the nerd who can't help yelling opinions, or raising their hand for a question and then monologuing on their lives for five minutes. The strangest thing of the weekend came not from religion or cosplay, but from an audience member breaking into a screaming fit against Apple when someone merely mentioned Amazon's business tactics.

An honorable mention for Achievement in Panels goes to Kendall F. Morris on the Medicine and Science Fiction panel, who shared a unique insight from engineering cough medicine:

“We learned if you cough a lot, it’s irritating.

If you don’t cough at all, you die.”

Bathroom Monologue: To Serve a SciFi Nerd

Step 1: find a SciFi nerd rabid enough to argue that Star Wars is Fantasy.

Step 2: suggest that Arthur C. Clarke’s third law means that Star Wars just has some micro-technology the aforementioned nerd can’t discern from magic. Comfort him/her by saying Captain Picard probably couldn’t tell them apart either, and that Star Trek’s Q was essentially a wizard, as were the aliens in Contact and Clarke’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Step 3: persist until he/she coughs up blood and passes out.

Bathroom Monologue: Kick a Child, Save a Life

I'd like to ask you a question about violence.

Consider the platform at any train station. The sky is grease-grey today. Many adults are lined up waiting for the train to come in, and it blares its horn to signal its closeness. One of the adults is a mother, who looks exhausted, smudged with grime, leaning for a moment's respite against an advertisement board.

Her son springs from her side and runs down the row of waiting adults, arms out at his sides, pretending he is flying. He whirls around a bench and flings himself toward the train tracks. Just as he crosses the warning line at the edge, one of the adults whirls around and kicks him squarely in the chest, such that the boy falls on his butt on the concrete rather than fall onto the tracks. The boy opens his mouth to cry as the train rushes into the station ahead of them.

How do you feel about what the adult did?

Bathroom Monologue: The Segregation of the Best Man

Finally, here comes the bride. I didn’t know they wore white, too. Looks funny against her… brown. Why don’t they call them ‘brown’? You should call a thing what it is.

Think better thoughts, man. Think warm thoughts; look like you’re thinking warm thoughts. Look at Jasper; look how he’s looking. Okay, less lust than he’s got. What a perv. You can ogle her later tonight, dude. Her parents’ are in the front row.

Front row left. Front row right are Jasper’s. White on right, or, I guess kind of beige. His dad is kind of turnip-colored now. Souse.

Why are my guts churning? Why does this feel wrong? Jasper’s so happy he’s rocking on his heels. The perv looks horny as hell, which is as close to happy as he gets without pot in hand and baseball on TV. He isn’t wrong. My guts are wrong. Look at her.

Am I wrong?

Rainbows. When we were really little and I drew rainbows, I’d have all the colors in their own bars. Nobody said that was wrong. I’d look out and see a real rainbow and all the colors would mix into each other, and I go, “Oh yeah, that’s what it is.” But the next time I got out my Crayolas, damned if I didn’t scribble all the colors in their own lines. That wasn’t wrong. Everybody draws rainbows like I did, except sometimes I forgot orange.

That’s just how people work. Jasper knows this. Akeelah knows this. You jump rope during Gym, and you draw rainbows during Art, and then you put all your papers together in a binder. You have a sock drawer, and a shirt drawer, and a pants drawer. If the economy isn’t crapping on you, you have a bed room and a kitchen. You put kitchen things in the kitchen, and bed things in the bed room, and socks in the sock drawer. Akeelah didn’t get that dress from a pile of crayons and used books. She bought it off a rack of dresses at a store that sells dresses, because that’s how order works. Wish she’d bought a looser one.

Okay, smile. Smile. Yes, smile for Akeelah like you don’t think this is weird. A little nod. Let Jasper make the big gesture. Don’t make it seem weird that she’s not wearing a veil at a freaking wedding.

Think of sports. Think of all the players in all the teams in all the cities in all the divisions in all the conferences in all the leagues in all the world. Number 67 from the Red Sox can’t just join the White Sox because he feels like it, or because he loves the shortstop. They’d holler at him, just like my mom would have hollered at me if I tied a red sock and a white sock and called them a pair. People have sock drawers for a reason.

Is the room dizzy?

I am not going to pass out. No, I am not. Jasper will never forgive me. Okay, he’ll forgive me a minute later, but he’ll never let me live it down. If I pass out on top of the groom, or worse, fall onto Akeelah’s side. Onto the black side. The brown side of the wedding. Then I’ll be the one messing up the order of all things, and Jasper will never stop making fun of me.

Jasper! Stop eye-banging her like that. She’s a person, not a pair of floating mams.

She’s a person. He’s a person. They want to be together. Isn’t like I’m going to scream, “Rainbows!” when the pastor asks for us to speak now or never yadda-yadda. I know I’m wrong.

Do I know I’m wrong? My guts know one thing: sock drawers, baseball, Gym class and English. Separating things is the way. It’s human nature. Can I go against it? Is that possible? I mean, if I know that what I know is wrong, then don’t I also know another thing that is right, and isn’t that also in me? Am I right and wrong, stowed away in the same brain drawer?

I mean, I don’t have to marry her. I don’t even have to touch her. Jasper will take the ring and then he’ll touch her. They’ll handle all the touching themselves. God, she looks so happy.

I will not pass out. I will not pass out.

Say your vows already! I need to sit down. About now, I need a bottle of Grey Goose and the head off of that ice sculpture.

Not that ice sculpture heads go in drinks. Cripes, she’s getting to me.

They’re not even listening to this priest. He probably cost a lot of money, and all you’re doing is salivating. Jasper, your mom is watching. Your bride is watching. And Akeelah, you, you…

Man, she is watching. Has she been looking in his eyes like that this whole time? Why isn’t she mad at him? Don’t they get mad? How can you not be mad at such an obvious perverted fuck? I mean, he is my friend, but he wouldn’t be if he stared like that. I even want to slap him, and I’m not on her side. I mean, the best man is never on the bride’s side, but that’s only… fuck it.

Did she wink at me? Is she happy I’m here? Lady, you would not be winking if you could hear my thoughts. Unless you can hear them. In which case… I mean, why didn’t you wear a veil? Also, is his horniness funny to you, or do you actually love him? Because I don’t know if I can handle this. I’m really sorry if I pass out at your wedding. You look very nice, as Jasper is making obvious. I think I wouldn’t mind red and white socks going together if they looked as happy for it as you do.

God, please make them say their vows already so I can get drunk.