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I did it. I think

ritaxis: (Default)
Saturday, April 29th, 2006 04:38 pm
I finished the John Brown terrorism story and I submitted it. What;s really exciting is that the nice fellow, who frankly doesn't like much of what I write, did like it.

Now, I wait.

No, I don't. I finish Afterwar and the little romance short thing, and I consider whether I want to write a romance involving Forager Girl, a ghost, and some guy (Chain's taken: Forager Girl needs a lover just like him, but the last time I saw who she was with, in the middle of The Conduit, she was hanging with some nasty yuppie sort of guy and really intimidated by him. It must be bad for her art, right? Because she's a pretty unconventional girl, and the guy is pretty conventional).


The ghost I'm not sure of. I'm drawn to something that comes from the labor history of California, but it's pretty nebulous right now.

Forager Girl's given name is Jill Ann, I remember that.

edited to add

I do know that Some Guy is a psychic, and that they meet in the cafe of the San Jose Modern Art Museum. And I know how they meet: he's at one end, she's at the other, and she hears him talking to her, very low: he's warning her about the yuppie sort of guy and also maybe the ghost, having had a premonition which is a little ambiguous. He's too far away for her to have heard him speaking so softly -- but that's because he didn't speak, he projected his worries, not bothering not to try because normally people can't pick this kind of thing up. So she's a little more sensitive than usually people are, and that's why, later, she begins to channel this ghost as she paints.

No, the yuppie sort of guy is not a serial criminal, and the ghost is not his vitim. But I don't know more than that yet.
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Further filial frustrations

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Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 08:43 am
I cannot send these links to my father, who would react like I did -- I was screaming in laughter. But the weird thing? These menus are completely serious. I searched all around the site and it's true. This guy has not a shred of humor about what he's doing here. Any further comment on this would be overkill. Except that it comes from the Particles sidenar at Making Light.

On a related front, you know that John Brown story I've been working on? It's really difficult but I swear I will get it done by the deadline. I have a week. Anyway, while we were trundling around the Bay Area Tuesday to celebrate Frank and Emma's birthday, we were talking about it and it suddenly hit me just what I was writing:

--- an old man, with a long beard and strong principles about freedom, justice and equality, lies dying, while his young friends gather round him to care for him, to talk philosophy and politics with him, and go off at intervals to make revolution

For the sake of the anthology I've been trying to make him Osama bin Laden but in my heart John Brown is my father.

Which is only one reason it's hard to write.

The "update journal" box is doing something very strange right now. Every new word appears on the line below the sentence it belongs to and jumps up to the proper line after I hit the space bar and type the first letter of the next word. It's really disconcerting. Especially at the end of paragraphs, where it doesn't jumnp into place until after I hit the return key. And if I backspace the word jumps back down to its own line. This has never happened to me before. I can only hope it doesn't affect the final appearance of the post.
  • Current Location: in the dusty library
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Raining here, raining on the deep blue sea

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Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 10:16 pm
One of my earliest memories is of a rainy season like this. My father was a brakeman then and he had gone out of town on a run to I think Roseburg. There are only two people left in all the world besides me who might remember all the details. Anyway, the tracks washed out and they kept sending him farther and farther away. I forget how long he was gone in total, maybe a couple of weeks (he was usually never gone more than a couple-few days at a time even when he wasn't working the milk runs -- the short hauls around the Bay Area). It was raining and raining. I must have been four, or six at the most. I remember playing in the rain all the time, and my mother getting more and more worried. She was always kind of freaked out when my father was gone. She went into an actual depression later when my father spent months at a time on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

So there were a couple of days last week when it didn't actually rain, and both of those had sprinkles and high fog. Other than that it's rained for at least a couple of hours every day.

So I sent my poor dear Afterwar to Zeborah and she made a few comments and this had the desired result: I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel and better than that I can see that the book is much better than I feared, and it actually did the things I hoped it would do.

So the rest of this month, writing-wise, I plan to (1) rewrite the John Brown terrorism story from scratch to make a May 1 deadline: submit something to the Baycon writer's workshop by April 15th: and maybe get Afterwar complete and submit it.

In terms of other submissions, I ought to just gather everything up and send it all out again. I pledge to submit at least three other things besides the three I have already mentioned, and that one of them will be The Conduit.

I was thinking about going to Worldcon but it's sort of in the middle of the time we have available for visiting the nice fellow's brother at his sweetie's summer house in Denmark. Along that line, the time we're expecting to be in Europe is August 16-August 30th or so. (Emma, make sure I have the correct date for Jason's birthday) It looks like we'll be flying into and out of Amsterdam, but I haven't booked the tickets yet (you know, I keep getting cold feet, and it's only because the nice fellow insists that I do anything at all).

I went to see the other dental Borg today -- Dr. Cheng who plugs himself into the ceiling (this is so cute: he has this head thing that holds a little halogen lamp and the ceiling has a cable that he plugs himself in to). He's going to dig out my old roots in a couple of weeks, which have fused to the bone, and he's warned me that he may have to dig out lots and lots of bone to do this, and he says it's standard to do a bone graft though insurance companies don't pay for it. A bone graft is not what I thought it was. It's little particles about the size of sand, of mineral matrix extracted from cow bone. I had the impression it was tiny slivers. He says it's only a couple-few months before the body has resorbed the minerals and replaced them with new ones, anyway.

Then, somewhere down the road, I get implants.

I am soooo expensive.

And, well, I'm dizzy again. I wasn't earlier, so maybe whatever it is is going away. And I'm going to bed. Science News today has a bit about how not getting enough sleep makes people gain weight. Well, I knew that.
  • Current Location: around the corner from the sewage plant
  • Current Music: KZSC, a while back
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Back at work

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Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 01:55 pm
I am! Yesterday, 1200 words on the two boys story which now has a place to send to once it's finished (this was the two boys who don't, but now they eventually do, and what it's about really I'm not sure but I love these young men -- they grow up too). It has a name now too: "The Rubaiyyat of Omar Camacho." Omar writes internet porn at a young age, and by the time he's an adult he's writing love poems. Today, 900 words and a lot of research on my glorifying terrorism story.

I'm really excited about my glorifying terrorism story. It's another alternate-history story involving slavery. This seems to be on my mind a lot. Anyway, in this one, due to a change in tactics (but not strategy), John Brown and his Provisional Army survive Harpers Ferry: they go in, get the arms, -- which they did successfully and with minimal harm to themselves in the real world -- and get out, taking the arms back to the Kennedy Farm. The real-world strategy was to build a fighting force that would terrorize slaveowners and liberate slaves, so that's what's going on in the story. Old Brown himself is sick at the time of the story and hiding in a cave in the mountains. The fighting force is broken up into small units moving around in the forest, making alliances with the Indians there. Our guy is a free man who has been captured during a raid on a town where the Provisional Army has torched the houses of -- here I'm still researching, but one of them may be JEB Stuart as a youngish lieutenant, I haven't decided -- killing some white guys and freeing some slaves. Our guy has been beaten and is awaiting either death or liberation, whichever will come. He's deeply religious and has pledged his life to the holy cause of freedom, and John Brown.

In this timeline, when the Underground Railroad conductors come, you say either "I believe I'll go with the old man," or "I believe I'll cross the Jordan," meaning, either you'll go join the Provisional Army or you'll go to Canada, or one of the refugee communities in the territories.

"I believe I'll go with the old man" is the thing that Shields Green, a friend of Frederick Douglass, said in real life when he joined up with John Brown, and again, when he had the chance to leave the party at Harpers Ferry, and again, when he had the chance to take the defense that he was only following orders. So in this timeline, he only said it a couple times, but it became the recruiting pledge for freed slaves joining the Provisional Army.

I am just so pleased with this story. My biggest challenge is not the research -- I knew where to find the stuff already, such as can be got -- but getting the first-person language of the narrator right: I want to evoke nineteenth-century speech patterns and conventions of memoir, while having a twenty-first century story in hand.

And well, if they don't want it for the anthology, I think I've seen another couple of markets that might be interested.

Oh, and one of the interesting things I have discovered is that John Brown's trial was most certainly illegal -- there are several reasons he opught to have been tried in federal court rather than a Virginia court. It was one of several ways in which Virginia was winning battles to impose its will on the rest of the country. That doesn't come in handy for this story or for the other one in which the slavers didn't get their way in the Constitutional Convention, but it may come in handy for something else.
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