The best Christmas present is a book. (or Five.)

This Christmas we were on a budget. Given the impending financial crisis baby, we decided the course of wisdom was to resort to the old trick of setting a spending limit ahead of time. 

(One of our first Christmas's, we each had twenty dollars to fill a stocking with, and an hour to dash around the mall doing it.  And that was CRAZY extravagant for us then. Fun though. I got crayons!)

We started out at $100 each.  When shipping costs for family and friends hit harder than expected, we revised down to $50 each.

I got him a new-to-us black leather office chair, (Thank you lousy economy for glutting the market with leather executive chairs of decent quality at ridiculously low prices comparatively speaking on craigslist), a husky puppy beanie baby, and a KISS Gene Simmons (dressed as the demon. With the horns and tongue thrown out.) Christmas ornament.

(As a note, the office chair was desperately needed.  The cats have just about completely destroyed the fabric-covered chair his mother bought us 5 years ago.  We have since learned our lesson regarding upholstery fabric and cat ownership.)

As for what he got me?  Well, he got me hope.  My husband and I met on a MUSH game (Multi-User Shared Hallucination.)  Basically you had to write to play.  Your character, what they did, who they were.  You learned to show, not tell, because telling was lame, and you wanted to make people work for it anyways.  You wrote paragraphs and paragraphs for hours on end, as other people contributed paragraphs and paragraphs, as you wove together what essentially amounted to a giant epic story told from the viewpoints of all the characters.  Now granted, some players sucked as writers, and they rarely got better.  But the good ones DID get better.  You learned to read carefully, to edit out your "constant-use words" in order to keep it interesting.  When you're having a conversation paragraph by paragraph, you are forced to stretch your ingenuity to avoid tedium and repetition.  And you got to know people extremely well, by the way they wrote, and the characters they played. 

The Husbthing was a more long-term MUSH'er than I was.  And one of the games he was on, he played closely with another talented writer.  She wanted to be a published author.  She wanted desperately to write books and tell stories. 

Naomi Novik has since written a NY Times Bestselling series, the Temeraire books.  He got me those books, to show me that other people have been where I am and succeeded, and that he believes I can do it too.  I read the first five in the series all day Saturday.  They are PHENOMENAL. I don't know that I'm in her class, as her style is very different from mine, (but her style is WONDERFUL), but my husband seems to think we have equal chances of success.  (He says he's not biased.  I'm generally inclined to believe him as one of the things I love most about him is the fact he is cursed / gifted with utter candor.)

I strongly, highly, absolutely encourage them for reading and enjoyment, but it is a series you absolutely want to read in order.  They're tightly plotted, wonderfully characterized, and amazingly well-researched.  I went through them at awe of the technical perfection of the storycrafting in the back of my mind, since the front was fully occupied with the book.

Good, good books. Wonderful books.  You should read them.  The first one is titled His Majesty's Dragon.

Two days to Christmas

I still have a stack of Christmas cards sitting on my desk, waiting for me to find a handy relative with an address book they're willing to let me raid, since I've managed to lose the few I kept up with. (And the ones I thought I knew, moved on me!)

Christmas presents are mostly bought and shipped off, though I haven't started on the 12th Night presents yet. (In my particular regional SCA group, there's an event that's essentially one giant Christmas party. Sometimes we bring small items to give as gifts to friends. It's the easiest place to catch everyone you see all the time.)

By all normal counts of Christmas preparations like decorating the house, putting up a tree, or having all the presents wrapped by now, we're sort of failing. We didn't even get a Christmas tree. (Discussion decided we'd rather spend the $60 on presents and things that would be more enjoyable than an admittedly wonderful smelling hunk of dead tree that would afford our cats endless opportunity for destruction.)

But really, I've been so wiped out from being pregnant that anything not absolutely required and necessary got relegated to the not-happening box. I'm looking forward to Christmas not as THE Holiday, but as a 3-day weekend that isn't coming fast enough. It'll be a chance to snuggle up with my husb, and kiss the cats, and call my folks, and play Christmas carols on the piano until my fingers go stiff. Honestly the best present of all.

(P.S. Mannheim Steamroller - original Christmas music? Most fun Christmas music ever. The next few books are not intended for piano and don't translate well at ALL.)

Happy Christmas everyone!

(Or Merry Chanukkah / Feliz Kwanzaa / whatever makes you happy. :) )

School's done!

So much for posting about my wacky adventures during the school year. Turns out I had just enough time to either do the assignments OR blog. Especially since my husband knocked me up, and I found myself sleeping any spare moment not absolutely allocated to something else.

I got an A in my fiction writing class, though I was far and away not the best writer in it. There was this one guy who every time he wrote something, I wanted to read it. EVERY single time. He was from Haiti or Barbados, and he would write about island life and fishing with such a beautiful voice. I hope he writes a book someday because it'd be a crying shame if he didn't.

I wasn't the worst writer either. (Though it is sort of hard to judge that sort of thing, since you know where everyone else falls in your opinion, but have no idea where YOU fall in everyone else's.) I'm basing that mostly off the fact that I could look at a couple other people's writing and know exactly what I'd trim out of it in terms of "telling" not "showing" and so on.

I am glad that I took the class though. It exposed me to some stories I'd never read, and hammered home the idea that people might violently disagree with me about which stories were better. I know intellectually that people have different opinions, but I hadn't appreciated it in a visceral way. When my class almost universally (excluding me and one other person) loved Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" over Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" I was in shock for a couple of days.

I learned about some of my weaknesses in writing, and also that I have a distinct appreciation for drama in my reading / writing. (Go figure. I know this comes as a shock to you all.)

But given that I now have a time frame for the world ending. (I'm due June 20th), I'm planning to really focus on my book. I want to get it done, and into the query process BEFORE the baby comes, hopefully 3 months before. That'll give me time to focus on responses from agents without getting them lost in "ACK SMALL WIGGLY THING NEDS SOMETHING! WHAT! WHAT DO YOU NEED!" time. (I'm not saying I expect positive raving responses. But just in case one DID want to be my agent-buddy, planning to answer those when I won't be coherent is not a good plan.)

Fun times.

Where you go for your writing research.

http://notalwaysright.com/murder-she-wrote/6829

Ha!

Don't Ask, Don't Tell?? - Don't Bother.

"We would have to create separate accommodations and it would cost money!"

"They'll be distracting because of their sexuality."

"Soldiers might be moved to protect a lover over obeying orders from a commanding officer."

"Superior officers might misuse their rank to sexually abuse those of lower rank."

"Other armies won't take us seriously."

Amazingly enough, these aren't arguments against gay people in the military. These are the arguments that were used to say that women couldn't serve in the military.

Women would distract their male counterparts with their dangerous girl-bits. They would require their own showers and toilets, and that would cost a fortune. They would be vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse from superior officers.

We as a society recognized that this thinking was discriminatory and wrong. We recognized that for some military tasks, women are better suited than men, and that women were just as physically capable of serving and dying for their country as men.

Women entered the military, and you know what? We created separate accommodations where necessary, and it didn't cost that much. Women turned out to be exceptionally good at certain tasks, in places distinctly better than their male counterparts, because women are built with better fine dexterity and motor control skills, substantially higher pain tolerances, and their ability to multitask often finds them in key analytical positions collating information from multiple sources.
Soldiers turned out to be capable of working with girls without raping them, and the fraternity of brotherhood has managed to accommodate several sisters without fracturing into disarray.

We're hearing these arguments again, this time aimed at homosexuals. They're not any more valid, or any more correct now than they were then. Soldiers are trained to be strong, independent, capable, and coherent. Implying that they will allow themselves to be raped without fighting back, or lacking integrity and awareness of their fellow soldiers and their responsibilities as soldiers is insulting to our soldiers, and those commanding officers whose job it is to train and care for them.

We have policies in place in case female and male soldiers fall in love, to deal with those issues. What's wrong with those same rules being applied to gay or lesbian soldiers? You can't serve in the same location, or in the same chain of command. If a soldier is raped, it doesn't matter if they're male or female. And allowing gay soldiers to come out means they are no longer subject to blackmail, abuse, or rape they can't report because that might bring up their sexuality in the inquest.

It means giving all our soldiers the same respect, and same protection. If a gay man takes a bullet protecting my little brother, then I will be grateful and glad for his being in the air force next to him, and I will fight to make sure that he is given all the rights that he's fighting to protect.

Discrimination is discrimination, and it's still wrong.

I'm not disturbed, I'm perfectly comfortable.

Literary Agent Susie Townsend is sponsoring a book giveaway on her blog (found here)

Write 100 word story, using certain words, in this case hormones, blood, claws, curse, moon, and bonus for Krokolian Rage.

I asked my husband if he wanted to read it.

"No."

"But I wrote about paramedics!"

"You don't know anything about paramedics."

"Uh huh, I get paramedical points by osmosis."

He leaned over to read.

After reading it, he got this horrified look on his face and looked at me. "I sleep next to you?! You're disturbed lady."

Here's my entry.

It’s a full moon. The paramedics are exhausted by a night full of losses. The whore moans on the gurney. Her acrylic claws are broken, the blood from the wounds inflicted on her attacker staining the flesh underneath. A delusional Twilight-fan stabbed her with a wooden stake because of her body glitter and red hair. She screamed, “I did it for Edward!” when they arrested her. Juvenile assailant. The surgeries are full. She dies in the hallway, waiting.
“Twilight kills.”
“Krokolian Rage.”
They are punch-drunk, tired and ravaged, denied time to reflect and recuperate.
The radio chirps. They both curse.

(Get it, whore moans = hormones? Ha!)

So, anyone else want to vote? Disturbed or perfectly normal for suitably wide values of normal?

Severed Heads and Punctured Egos

My husband has been having a couple of rough weeks, in the way that only a paramedic or cop or other civil servant tasked to deal with catastrophic trauma can. Since his birthday, and 1 year as a paramedic anniversary was last weekend, I decided to kidnap him and run away to a B&B on Carolina Beach, in hopes of getting his stress levels back to normal or lower.

It worked marvelously. We played with a boogie board I bought, soaked in the jacuzzi, and drank red wine from a Styrofoam cup under the full moon on a deserted beach, picking out planets and stars and various thoughts from our heads.

And my husband reminded me why I really married him. As we were sitting there on the beach, I told him about the two critiques I'd received about writing, (namely that when I tended to write in first person narrative, the other characters weren't fully developed as personalities. Both people said they wanted more of a sense of who the other people were.) And instead of petting my nose and telling me not to listen to those mean people, my husband dropped a bomb on me.

"That's because you aren't a good conversationalist."

"What?"

"You are a great story-teller, but what you do when people talk is you wait impatiently for a point at which to contribute your own experiences, rather than building off of what they said, and asking questions to expand their statement. They may start talking about watermelons, and the conversation segues into bicycles, and when you get a chance, you immediately interject a story about watermelons, even though the conversation has moved on."

Ow. More so because I immediately recognized the truth of what he said, and also realized that I had been completely unaware that this was in opposition to what a good conversation REALLY is.

"Oh lord. I'm a bore?" I asked, still reeling from the epiphany.

"Sometimes. But I love you."

I always admired the bit in Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, when Lord Peter tells the woman he loves that she hasn't yet written the book she could write if she let go. She admits that it might hurt too much. And he looks at her and says brutally, "What does that matter, if it's honest?"

The fact Lord Peter was willing to savage Harriet's ego because it was the honest thing to do always seemed one of the essences of a true marriage of minds. Your partner has to be willing to tell you the unpleasant and painful truth, because sometimes they are the only ones who can or will do so.

If there were no other reasons for me to marry Max (he makes me laugh, he's a great kisser, and he's a genuinely good person), the fact that I can trust him to tell me the truth I don't want to hear is enough.

The hard part is giving the full measure of credit for insight to a man who squee'd like a girl when he found a severed rubber head (with windpipe and esophagus) of Jason, the serial killer from Friday the 13th, in a Walgreen's and promptly bought it so he could hang it in his ambulance for Halloween.