spencimusprime

Whatcom Middle School Fire

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:19:25 GMT

About a week ago, the historic middle school near our house caught fire spectacularly.

Some kid didn't study for his test and prayed for the school to burn down. And he got there in the morning and said, "God, what have I DONE?"

Anyway, here's some pictures.

NaNoARGMo

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:15:39 GMT

I said, I said ARG.

This novel thing is frustrating me.

I think NaNoWriMo is made for other types of writers, you know, the kind who have confidence to leave their firsty first drafts alone. My idea of a first draft is usually something I wrote a week ago and have had time to revise since. I have a hard time just opening the document and picking up where I started.

Damn you people for whom this is fun!

My old agent boss Lori Perkins has a really good post about NaNoWriMo. I always liked Lori. She is one of the most outspoken, fun and life-loving people I've met. She's also completely insane and works about 16 hours most days, wheeling and dealing for 8 of them and reading slush for 8 more. I like what she says here quite a bit and I recommend you read it.

I sense a little bit of backlash against NaNoWriMo, and sometimes I can't blame the people who do so. I mean, I've heard NaNoers talk about blatant tricks to raise wordcount, like having one character say, "I didn't catch that," so another character has to repeat it. (Okay, I actually have somewhat of a trick to raise wordcount. There's a goblin annotating the manuscript and writing footnotes. It's meta.)

But when you add it up, why is a burst of creativity from a ton of people a bad thing? If you want to be a writer, nothing will stop you. Go ahead and vomit 50,000 words onto the page and fix it later. As a teenager, I typically vomited 150-250k words per giant Robert Jordan imitation novel. I think I've done all right for myself since. The sales are slow, but they come. Also, I write the occasional 4k short story now. (It's a gradual recovery from Big Book Syndrome. This little 75k-er I'm working on now is part of the process.)

I do have a major problem when people say, "I have no time to read because I'm writing so much." Sounds like "I have no time to drink water because I'm hiking so much."

True

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:10:11 GMT

mcjulie has been posting some deep thoughts on religion. Her last post got me thinking about some of my own breaks with my faith. I wrote this essay a few years ago to describe some of my feelings on homosexuality and Mormonism, and it ended up getting, I think, pretty deep.

Plus, there is man-love.

Enjoy.

True

A writerly maxim says that memoirists should “go for the pain.” Let’s go back to high school.

In a rural California high school, I was part of a group of devout Mormon kids who hung out only with each other and shunned the Gentile. (Okay, we didn’t actually say that, but it was the idea.) Also, my best friend was the most obviously gay person I've ever met.

So as you can imagine, there was a nice web of stories—I can’t call them lies—in place between myself, Mikey, and the others.

At first he told us he was secretly black. It did explain why he sounded like a black woman. When we were fifteen he let on… that he was bi. Little things trickled out, grains of reality in an epic flood. Can you pick them out? He’d had a sexual encounter with another guy in the group and they now had syphilis. He knew for a fact that the ladies’ man of the group was actually gay, because they had kissed. He was certainly not interested in me, he was interested in the possibility of being “cured,” staying in the Church and serving a mission. He was regularly beaten by his father—or the man who said he was his father.

At one point he handed me a stack of papers chronicling his freshman year. It was a rambling epic in which he boarded a train and went to New York City, our polar opposite in sunny SoCal, and spent days moving in a gray mass of people, away from his abusive home. I suspected it wasn’t literally true, especially when I asked how he survived the rest of the time there. He looked away and muttered, “I… uh, met some people.” Of course he hadn’t thought of an ending yet. But though I suspected, I never confronted him. Everyone had that one friend in elementary school, the guy who made up ridiculous stories. It’s embarrassing that Mikey still did it at the age of sixteen. But it’s more than embarrassing—it’s revealing—that I wanted to believe them.

What’s your favorite story? Here are some I’ve heard: God loves me. My husband is good to me ninety-percent of the time, and that’s what counts. I am close to breaking in, I know it.

But in a very un-childlike way, most people know that they’re unreliable narrators. We suspect, we despair, we give in.

One day Mikey dispensed with stories. He looked at me and said, “If I could turn you gay I would, Spence. I’m in love with you. Does that scare you?”

“No,” I replied. “If I could turn you straight I would. And I believe God can.”

Believe it or not, the friendship survived that conversation. We had an unspoken deal. If I could turn him straight, I won. If he could make me fall in love with him, he won. You have to remember that this was a tight-knit friendship, and in many ways was as twisted as long-term high school love tends to be, even if there was no physical component.

Mikey gave me gifts. He was good. He knew which books in the science fiction section I lusted after, and they kept showing up. He befriended the girls I was interested in, in a weird reversal, as if by offering them to me he would seem more attractive.

I prayed for him. I read scriptures to him. I broke my Mormon scruples to give him a lingerie catalog. (I was still too pious for porn.) “Just look at that the next time you masturbate,” I said. “Just try.”

We were open about our raging hormones, though he never mentioned any fantasies that involved me. I told him in detail what I hoped Latest Hot Girl at school’s breasts would look like unclad, my descriptions of ripe, nipple-tipped globes trying to provoke both disappointment and interest. He countered with calves. Angular calves and tight, hair-kissed thighs.

Then, out of nowhere, he showed interest in a girl. I suspected Mikey was chasing Erica to piss off her boyfriend, who had jilted Mikey in the past. But I pushed it, just in case—after all, this was my gift from God. I told Erica, in a story worthy of gossip glory, that her boyfriend had just kissed another girl. I even found another girl to go with the story.

They broke up. Mikey took Erica out. They kissed. They held hands for a day. Erica was dating another guy the next week.

I watched Mikey for any signs of heartbreak, but he just laughed. “I tried, Spence. I really did.”

The last time I saw him, I had my Mormon mission call. He had been dating a guy, pretty seriously. We laughed about the conversation and I admitted that yes, I had lost. But he hadn’t exactly won either.

He looked at me. It was a mild night, with the kind of slow twilight that suffuses the desert. He moved, and I moved, and when we kissed it was rough, teeth pushing against lips. Our chests bumped, flat and hard. I felt sick and I liked it. I’ve been trying to forget that ever since.

Can you still pick them out?

I was taught to say “I know the Church is true,” every time I was called on in church. And I did know. I knew completely in the moment. The more I said it, the more I knew. I agreed when speakers said things like, “A testimony of the Church is to be found in bearing it.” I knew it stronger than ever when, as a missionary, I repeated the words of Joseph Smith's first vision.

“I saw a pillar of light, exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun. The light descended until it fell upon me, and in that light I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy that of all the stars in the firmament.”

Hold the vowels and shift the rhythms in your mouth. It tastes true.

“One of them spake unto me and, pointing to the other, said, Joseph, this is my Beloved Son. Hear him.”

It feels like an insult to faith when I say that the stories that moved me as a teenager—whether it be Mikey’s New York story, Joseph Smith’s account of finding gold plates in a hill, or the fervent idea that homosexuality could be cured—were lies. They were stories. I don’t tell myself those stories anymore, because my needs and my tastes have changed. Does that make them less true? No. That’s touching, sad and scary at the same time.

So what really happened between me and Mikey?

The reality is about as exciting as the truth about Mikey’s freshman year. He didn’t go to New York—he stayed home, babysat his brothers, and fantasized about Jonathon Taylor Thomas. It’s also about as painfully mundane.

No, what you read is the truth. I promise.

Another Day One Wishes For

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:09:48 GMT

I forgot to blog about this!

"We just adore this piece--it's funny,moving, quirky in all the right ways--and we'd love to publish it in Brain Harvest."

A rare piece of flash from me, Poster Boy For The Novella.

Yesssss.

Should be up December 6th. It's called "Mount Rainier Considers Its Mental Health" and it's about, well, Mount Rainier considering its mental health.

:)

Mormons for (Gay) Marriage

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:36:55 GMT

This site was down for a while, but now it's back:

http://mormonsformarriage.com/

Believe it or not, there is a sizeable contingent of Mormons who fight for equal rights, including Steve Young (formerly of the 49ers) and Harry Reid, Democratic House majority leader.

I don't like it when people talk about the "Prop 8 Mormon millions" or lump all Mormons in with bigots like Mitt Romney any more than your average Catholic likes it when someone assumes they oppose abortion. The church leadership brought this stereotype upon themselves, yes, but it's still a stereotype, and those who use it are choosing not to think more deeply.

Anyway.

Starving Artist Sues Mary

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:41:34 GMT

For your reading pleasure, the fanfic story that introduced the term "Mary Sue." Also, the Wikipedia entry on Mary Sues, which lists all the variations. Apparently Thomas Covenant is an Anti-Sue.

I am conducting a study of Mary Sues ever since someone critiqued one of the characters in my novel as "the biggest Mary Sue that ever Mary Sued." As much as it was an astute critique, I still think Mrs. Bella Sue Edward SparkleKins of Twilight beats this character. I mean, read that Wikipedia entry. Think about Twilight. Read it again. THAT'S A DESCRIPTION OF TWILIGHT.

Adia thinks every flying bug is a bee. So the other day a fly landed on her leg and just stayed there, probably throwing up or laying eggs or whatever flies do to delicious young children. Adia smiled and said, "Bee loves me!"

The writing goes slowly, despite the fact that my already paltry hours at work are being cut. However, yesterday I managed to crank out 4k to finish a short story that has been due at the writing group for about three weeks. They read the first half, y'see. This story had one false start in 2007, anther false start earlier this year, and now has a false bottom. Or something. In any case, it's really nice to end it. Now excuse me, I have to get back on my own false bottom (what, you didn't think a butt this good was real, did you?) and write some more.

Come On, Kick Me in the Day Job

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:26:16 GMT

Conversation with the brain-damaged guy I work with, as we ate burgers yesterday:

Me: How's the burger, Steve?

Steve: It's great, Matthew!

Me: My name's not Matthew.

Steve: Yes it is, f*ckface!

He's great. Whenever he's in a good mood, he laughs and says, "Yeah! Come on, kick me in the ass right now!"

At some point I got in this weird side career of taking care of mentally disabled people. Nothing in my education points to this, but I got a job to help put me through college taking care of three mentally disabled men, and then I managed their house,. I've been working this stuff ever since. Whenever I need to pay some extra bills, I go out and find a job taking care of some disabled folk.

These guys can be hilarious. I'll share with you one more conversation, this time with a schizophrenic man and one of my employees as they walked by the Provo River.

Employee: Brandon, are you keeping it real?

Brandon: I'm not a gangster anymore.

Employee: Brandon, you don't have to be a gangster to be keeping it real.

(At this point a man with fairly brown skin of indeterminate ethnicity passes by.)

Brandon: (to passerby) I AM NOT A GANGSTER ANYMORE!

Mother Superior Jumps The Gun

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:16:53 GMT

In case anyone didn't see Jay's link:

Chuck Klosterman reviews the Beatles like he's never heard of them... and like he's an idiot.

The Good Girl Is Trapped In Her Words

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:45:50 GMT

The other day I asked Chrissy, "Which historical figure would you want to be?"

She thought about it for a while. "There aren't a lot of good girls," she said. "I mean, if I'm Joan d'Arc I get brutally executed, and if I'm Queen Victoria I get to be funny-looking and against women's suffrage." She thought some more. "I don't want to be some guy who had sex with lots of women, because, you know, I don't want to have sex with lots of women." She meandered over the possibility of Tycho Brahe, given that she would get a gold nose and a moose.

Then she got this weird good-Mormon-girl look and said, "Joseph Smith."

I said, "You might want to rethink that one..."

Starving Artist Has An Apostrophe

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:11:11 GMT

We took Adia to the beach again yesterday, so she could feed her rock-throwing addiction. After a solid hour of throwing rocks in the water (she didn't even quit when we offered her smores) she started chasing a seagull. "Look Daddy!" she said. "Duck!"

"Yeah, honey, a duck!" I said. I didn't want to disillusion her by explaining that it was actually a trash-eating flying rat. Luckily we didn't get too close or the seagull might have started swearing at her.

I hate vampires. This was a nice gift from Guide to Literary Agents back when I was agenting, to keep people from sending me faux cool black leather motorcycle sexy hanging out on streetcorners undead wanker stories and I want all those supposedly cool sexy vampires to go fall on a forest of sharpened stakes. Wankers.

But I am writing a novel with vampires in it. In my defense, they are all really ugly.

Here's a rough sample from the novel in which my main character, Jane, who is half-vampire, is faking her way through a confessional with an Irish vampire priest. Jane has never learned anything about her father, who is a vampire.

"Oh, I've had evil thoughts, sir. Many evil thoughts about men. Even about the gnome back there, and about trolls, and about--"

"Have ye acted on these thoughts?"

"They are such evil thoughts!" Jane said, rattling on, trying to keep it just boring enough but constant enough that he might drop off. "I think evil thoughts about badgebear men, Father. About their fur. I want to do--things with their fur! And--"

"Child, ye've been too hard on yourself," the priest said. "Our Lord the divvil has said many a time that 'tis no sin to be curious. But know that to fraternize with another, in a carnal manner other than devouring the innards, is a sin against Our Lord who has forbidden mixing."

"Really?" Jane asked. "It's forbidden for a vampire to mix with another?"

"Child, have you not been a-reading your Black Bible?"

"Not reading that is also a sin I am guilty of," Jane said. "I am so ashamed. Tell me about vampires mixing, Father. Tell me the words of the Black Bible, please."

"Well, the good Daemon Gurgus says it right there, he does, in the book of the Slurping of the Legions, and again in the book of the Gnawing of the Emperor's Liver. Vampires are a solitary people, the only true servants of the divvil, and to mix would be to deny that commandment." A curious edge came into his voice. "Are ye truly half-human, as they said?"

Starving Artist Enters the Vietnam of Blackberry Picking

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:17:17 GMT

Actually, I didn't really get deep into the blackberry bushes and all scratched up and stained purple like I usually do. But I liked the title. So screw it. Yes, that's right. Screw it.

We went to the beach with Adia today. As usual, she threw rocks. In the water. I don't think you understand how FREAKING AWESOME IT IS TO THROW ROCKS IN THE WATER. Adia will tell you. Also, we saw crabs, who we identified as Sebastians. There is a Little Mermaid addiction in the house.

George R.R. Martin is teaching at Clarion next year. Whew. I don't usually apply unless I'm really taken with the instructors (I was shortlisted for 2005 with Octavia Butler and Gordon Van Gelder, but no one died, damn it) so I might have to next year. I love Martin's short fiction. Though most of his short fiction is still pretty long, so I'm not sure how he's going to do grading 4k stories.

I predict one of the writing prompts will be "Create a character you adore and kill them." Followed by "Write about something you always wanted to do with your sibling that you never did."

The Great Faerie Strike goes on. It's a lot of fun to write, and the one project that I don't get stumped on lately, not like the many short stories I've been doing. The idea for the GFS actually came from when I was agenting. I had gone through a huge batch of queries and I was, off the cuff, just trying to think of things I hadn't seen yet. One was, well, a great faerie strike in the Victorian period. Given that the 19th century was the founding age of real labor unions as we know them today, it seemed to work.

The Victorian upper class—of werewolves—has gone too far when they fire Charles the gnome. It seems that the new synthetic blood substitutes (readily available, highly nutritious, completely disgusting) have led these socialites to believe that they can run their factories on nothing but vampire labor. And though vampires are stupid, smelly and ponderously boring, they keep quiet, thinking they’re getting a good deal.

Charles is lucky enough to have a friend among the unwashed vampires of London’s Otherworld—an atypically bright vampire who still has all her teeth, Jane. Charles knows that street marches of elves, fairies and gnomes won’t be enough to get their jobs back. He has to help Jane convince the other vampires to hold a strike, which means that he has to convince the vampires and the rest of the Otherworld to work together. In the process, he finds himself falling for Jane, complicating his life even further, and both of them are steadily drawn into the vicious politics of the werewolf class the more they deal with them. They don’t have to worry about escaping with their souls, since they don’t have any, but their lives—that’s the question.

The Great Faerie Strike is a complete urban fantasy novel of the 19^th century at 74,000 words.

(Yes, I know True Blood has a synthetic blood idea too. There's enough to go 'round.)

Kudos to catrambo , who helped me come up with nearly every aspect of the story through some brainstorming sessions.

.

Homosexuality Fails The Sin Test

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:59:05 GMT

Is homosexuality a sin?

I can't speak for Jewish or Muslim doctrine, but I have spent a good portion of my life studying the New Testament. It's true that Paul condemns homosexuality in Timothy 1 and 1 Corinthians 6. Considering that Paul also admonished that women keep silent in church and keep their hair long, it is clear that most congregations in America today, particularly Mormons, who have thrown their weight behind the anti-gay-marriage movement, take the NT in spirit, not in letter.

Mormons claim to take their leaders' words as scripture, but many of the admonishments--for instance, Joseph Smith's twice-repeated commandment to eat little or no meat--are also conveniently ignored. The modern-day prophets have condemned the gay marriage movement, but they also condemned the Civil Rights movement. Because Mormons believe their leaders to be fallible, and because there is plenty of evidence--Bruce R. McConkie, one of the Apostles of the seventies and eighties, repeatedly said that black men would never hold the priesthood and later simply admitted, "I was wrong"--one cannot really justify homosexuality as a sin based on any literal word.

So in order for Mormon politics of the moment to be justified homosexuality must be a sin in the spirit of Jesus' teachings. A far more complicated question. Or is it?

Matthew chapters 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, are usually considered the summation of Jesus' teachings, with perhaps the addition of John 15-17, in which he instructs his apostles on the mysteries of God. The SotM is famous for repudiating the literalism of the Jewish law at the time; do not commit adultery of the heart, do not become angry with your brethren, do not observe the law while never really sacrificing anything for God. The Jesus of the SotM doesn't seem to care much about things like homosexuality unless it comes with hypocrisy and anger. So a homosexual who calls a Mormon a "faggot" as some homosexuals have done to some of my Mormon friends would probably attract Jesus' ire.

Jesus was FIRMLY against divorce save in the case of infidelity--and as I've heard, the infidelity clause was even added by later scribes. (I could be wrong about that.) So we know that Jesus 1) hates hypocrisy and 2) supports marriage. Now let's think for a moment. If two committed homosexuals are married and seeking to be meek, poor in spirit, kind and are followers of Christ, there is no reason to believe that Jesus would actually care about what kind of plumbing they were using for their committed, loving sex. The law of Christ is a law of the heart, meant to thoroughly change the nature of a man or woman from someone who looks outward at the world as something to be changed to someone who looks inward at their soul as something to be changed. The first law of Christ is sympathy and self-reflection.

Jesus' teachings can't ever say one way or the other whether the act of homosexual love is wrong in itself; they rather say "Why would you bother with whether someone else is sinning?"

Sän Is My Biggest Fan, Believe It Or Not

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:13:09 GMT

A note that csinman put on a story I wrote, which had one very short masturbation scene:

Spencer says: I like masturbation and it makes me happy to put it in every story ever, which makes me the happiest in the whole salty, gooey world! Masturbation makes my story literary and therefore it's going to win awards and can be published in places that end in "review" and I can die penniless and reviled by my peers, but hundreds of years later my work will be taught in English classes to torment students who really just want to make out with each other and, you guessed it, go home and masturbate.

I am done writing. This is all the recognition I will ever need.

Starving Artist Not Quite Starving (Damn That Coke Float Was Good)

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:24:59 GMT

Idioms in other languages. My very favorites: Cheyenne:My tapeworm can almost talk by itself = my stomach is growling. Honorable mention for French: I have other cats to whip! = I have other fish to fry! - I have other things to do

Also, a 111-year old veteran of World War I died in England today, and Radiohead wrote a song about it. I was very touched when he talked about going to Germany to meet the oldest survivor from the other side.

I am sad to be missing Worldcon. Mostly because at Worldcon 2006 I stared at George R.R. Martin from across the room at a party, thinking I should really go talk to him, I'm sure he just wants to shoot the sh*t like anyone else, I should talk to him... This time, I would definitely go right up to him and say, "Where's the next book already?"

Oh, and "What was your relationship with your siblings like?"

After a full week of ze Frenchman and almost no movement on the writing, I sat down and cranked 4000 words on Monday, and around 3500 yesterday. Take that, Frenchman. Today, I made 2500, scattered among different projects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm working on a story for jennifer_brozek 's anthology abouot alien urban legends, and I was pretty lost until I started thinking about the California Aqueduct, over by my house in Lancaster, CA.

We used to go up to that thing all the time, crawling through the drainage tunnels underneath it and always threatening to swim in it (there were tons of stories about people drowning in the aqueduct). It was such a weird place, all elevated high above the rest of the town, like this permanent reminder that people were never really meant to live in the Mojave Desert.Anyway, it turns out that musing on the aqueduct makes a story. Let's hope Jen likes it as much as I do.

Life Is What Happens To You While You're Busy Making Other Plans

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:50:06 GMT

Yes, that subject line refers to Adia. Among other things.

It shouldn't be hard to let go of the crazy ideas you had when you were younger, but it is like pulling teeth out of my bellybutton for me.

See, when I was thirteen or so, I decided I would concentrate on writing. I liked music, acting and art, but I decided, of course, to do the most pretentious one.

And I decided that, of course, me being brilliant and not ashamed to admit it, I would be a famous published writer to rival Stephen King by the time I was twenty. A generous estimate gave me twenty-five, though by then I kind of figured I would be getting read to retire.

Around twenty-five I revised the estimate up to thirty. I'm twenty-nine now, and though I'm closer than I was--and I also got the sense to send out everything I have instead of sitting on it--but it's actually causing a little bit of a midlife crisis for me to admit that I'm actually normal. Hell, I write less than a lot of people I know, and I have dry spells, which was never in the plan. It's been easier to be prolific lately because I don't have a job.

This is sort of weird to admit. And painful. And I feel the need to broadcast it to the Internet so that I can get it out of the way.

Old dreams die hard, I guess, even when they're kind of silly (twenty, young self? TWENTY?)

I Just Went There For The Air Conditioning...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:02:27 GMT

A walking stereotype hit on me in Starbucks. He was from India, married, but "she doesn't know about my BF," and yes, he said "BF." He had a Hannah Montana handbag.

Among other advice like, "don't hit on straight guys with wedding rings on," I should have told him, "if you're trying to attract adult men, accessorizing like a twelve-year-old girl is not the way to go."

Starving Artist Week SWEET SPAGHETTI MONSTER, IT'S HOT!!!!!!!

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:14:20 GMT

The Scholes Clones Are Upon Us!

A thousand congrats. I'm very happy for them and their new transformed understanding of all things. Seriously.

(A quick PSA: There's this weird thing that some people do--oddly enough, the people who did it the most to me didn't have kids--when your child is first born. They love to tell you how you'll never get enough sleep, time to write, never have sex again, turn into slime molds... if you're tempted, please, for the sake of me at least, RESIST. It's meant in jest, but it drove me crazy, and I had to look really hard to find a place to bury bodies in Seattle.)

(Ahem.)

This week I FINISHED the story I was rewriting for Analog. Considering I've been sitting on Stan's note for three years, I'm very happy with myself. It's 16k, which even for me is long. (My standard length when I don't watch myself is usually 12k). Also, I wrote a story that is exactly 3930 words, because I was bound and determined to stay under 4k. This is the new, trimmer Spencer. My goal for my once-a-month stories for the rest of the year is under 4k. Can I do it? Can I shut up? Can I? Huh?

Work on the Vietnam-War-Meets-Paradise-Lost novel has officially stalled, though. The Frenchman is having a field day. "Ze boulders of life has damned ze noveleest's wellspring of sweet mocha-flavored wine zat once fed ze createeeveety and all he can get from ze wellspring ees peepee. Oh life. Oh peepee."

I had a blast--both metaphorically and a blast of heat--celebrating my 29th (holy crap) birthday with kehrli ,criada ,csinman and a bunch of former graduate students yesterday. We barbequed. For once in my life I let the briquets actually turn gray before I tried to cook on them. Keffy, Lisa and co. gave me Cherry Coke Zero and Peanut MnMs, which pretty much makes them the most thoughtful friends ever.

It's really, really, really hot in the Northwest. One of the few air-conditioned places in Bellingham is Starbucks. I plan to live there tomorrow.

maryrobinette 's beautiful pic of the Scholes babies, in case you haven't seen:

She can really work those baby photos. This is her ever-so-slightly-touched up version of a pic of me and Adia:

Boobs, or How To Solve Your Problems, Realms of Fantasy

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:12:04 GMT

http://douglascohen.livejournal.com/189645.html

The latest controversy on the Internet, after Walter Cronkite killed Michael Jackson, is, in a nutshell, boobs. (Boobs don't fit in a nutshell, by the way, so don't try.)

K. Tempest Bradford says, with a good point, that Realms of Fantasy favors covers that are booby. Doug Cohen defends his decision to feature boobs on the latest cover and insists that he is not the kind of guy who just puts boobs on everything. If he were, he would probably have a nice set himself. (He didn't say this in the post, but I think it's probably true.)

Tempest wants to cut the level of boobs and maybe bring in some penii, some man-candy.

Now, I'm no expert on boobs, but it seems to me that there is another side we haven't considered that could solve everything. We could have boobs and not-boobs if we want. We don't have to be limited. Ken Scholes can write all the stories he wants about hot redheads with boobs (has anyone else noticed this is a major theme of his writing? I see you, Ken, wink wink, nudge nudge).

This is how we will solve this problem:

They have to go Amazon.

That's right. Every Realms of Fantasy story with boobs in it has to cut one of the offenders off. If your right boob offends you, cut it off, or if your left, etc etc. Just get rid of one.

Keep one for Doug, cut one for Tempest. Keep one for Robert Jordan's women to still cross their arms under. Cut one for Arwen to more realistically draw her bow. Keep one and you can still get a side shot in a Boris Valejo painting. Cut one and you reduce the cost of a chainmail bikini by one-fourth. Keep one, dye your hair red and Ken Scholes will describe it lovingly. Cut one and the scar will still be kinky in a Jacqueline Carey or George R.R. Martin novel.

Oh, wait, she meant to metaphorically cut down the boobs? Huh. Never mind.

(I apologize if this was horribly offensive. My wife always says I shouldn't be allowed to talk without a filter.)

Starving Artist, Week Three

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:33:19 GMT

Some part of me wants to go get an honest job. NO... NO...

I don't know where this urge came from. I blame csinman , because he is the cause of most things that go wrong in the world. Just the other day he told me the meaning of life was sexual fantasies about Mormon missionaries. Yeah, if that's not a Doctor Faustus-style red flag, I don't know what is.

On that topic, I am so in love with The Cambist and Lord Iron. I listened to it twice. It's a rare story that makes me laugh out loud, but the ending of this one had me giggling while I was on my daily run. Which can make you swallow your spit and cough, by the way.

This has been a pretty good week, except I'm slacking a bit on the novel. I'm just not that excited about it. It's weird, since handwriting usually means that I'm really relaxed about what I write.

I did yank out a short story I wrote years ago and finished it, which is cool except I think the ending has problems--hence the leaving it alone for years. But it has an ending. Like many people's butts, it has problems but at least it's there. (You wouldn't want to go buttless.)

I've also been working on the only story I ever got a personalized rejection from Analog for (as you know, Bob, personalized Analog rejections are generally invitations to rewrite unless they say otherwise). It's killing me. It's a whodunit with lots and lots of science involved, neither of which is my strength. I checked out some mystery anthos at the library today to help.

One of the "mystery stories" consists of a girl holding her baby brother and climbing onto the roof. That's it.

THAT IS NOT A MYSTERY!

So I suppose I'll give up hope, cry, and eat a tub of ice cream.

And now, a picture of Adia naked in a baby pool, which you can use to blackmail her when she's a teenager.

The Muse At Work

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:15:57 GMT

Where do I get all these ideas? A two-year-old whispers them in my ear, of course.

I finished a short story that had been sitting unfinished since 2007 this week. In case you are interested, here is a snippet:

There’s two men I know of done wrestled an angel. One, of course, was old Jacob-Israel, who wouldn’t let the angel go till he would bless him.

The other was Pastor Tucker, though in his case it was a fallen angel, and he wouldn’t let Lucifer go till he agreed to split for good. Course, as we’d all seen firsthand, old Scratch was the worst kind of bad penny.

Back when Pastor Tucker was young, he’d been just as soft-spoken and gentle, but big as an ox. Full of the fire of ministry, he’d asked around, heard about Wadesville and headed on out here to shine the Lord’s light into the darkest place.

The pastor always said there weren’t no problems in the world didn’t have an answer in the Bible. And when he’d seen Wadesville, seen the whoredoms going on in the street and smelled the stench of corruption and bootlegging, seen how the common folk were afraid to deal with each other for fear of all the cheating going on, well, then old Pastor Tucker, he did what a man should do. He buried himself in that Bible. Four whole days of fasting and prayer he looked for the answer, and he come up at the end and called out the Devil himself for a wrestling match.

See Pastor Tucker, he figured he had the faith of Jacob-Israel, and he knew that the devil wasn’t no stronger in body than any other angel. So he made his challenge, and pretty soon folk started talking, and the Devil had to put up or lose his standing.
Satan came on down to the lawn right in front of the church, where Pastor Tucker marked out a spot for them. He jumped right in and wrestled the man of God. Just like in the Bible, it went on all night. Pastor, he’d been praying all that week, but he’d also spent a few good years roping bulls in the rodeo circuit, and that was what got him through. Around four AM, Pastor Tucker got a good full nelson on Lucifer, and that was it.

Or so they said. Most folks who heard the story passing through didn’t believe it. But once you’d been here a few years, and talked enough with the pastor, it just sank in. Good folks will believe the truth, when it’s clear what the truth is.

Starving Artist, Week Two

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:22:42 GMT

They know my name at the Bellingham Library. I've been coming here and writing every day I don't have to work (coffeeshops get a lot less romantic once you realize how much a latte costs) and when I told one girl I didn't have my library card, she just looked up my name. I was kind of ashamed I didn't know hers. I asked, and her name is Allison. Thank you, Allison, library girl, who knows my name and my soul.

Also, thanks to criada who just finished reading my 187k monster novel. This is the first time someone's read a novel from me before Chrissy, my dad or my sister read it. Which proves my theory that criada and I are related somehow.

Can you see it?

The LJ people will know what I'm talking about, but for the Blogger folks reading this, jaylake is battling a serious bout of cancer. He is a prolific and talented writer, a great teacher and all-around funny, affable guy. He's also--and I don't think I've ever told him this--a big inspiration to me. Jay has been cranking and cranking his writing all through the process of raising his daughter and working a full-time job. Being a family man and a write can sometimes seem like a consistent sacrifice of one or the other, but he does it and does it well. So keep him in your thoughts, prayers and karma.

This week has been all right for ze starving artist. I have this weird struggle with the novel I'm working on (or as the voice-over in my head says, zis art zat I court like a eediot lover) in that I have to handwrite it first. I did this as an experiment when I wrote the first 7k of it, for a class in 2008, but I didn't think I'd go back to handwriting--too labor-intensive--yet now every page I write on the computer just seems like it needs more filtering.

Now I am writing it in a very special book, a little leatherbound red Lord of the Rings-themed journal that was given to me by an ex-girlfriend long after the breakup. Clearly that is a gift that says, "I want you back like the shore wants the tide." It is entirely possible that this book has unholy power over me, cast on it by the ex. Considering she gave it to me around 2002 and I didn't use it till 2008, the spell could be a little stale. Or Chrissy's mojo just overshadows all, which is a theory I can subscribe to.

Starving Artist, Week One: Report!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:49:57 GMT

I decided to live the dream and become a starving artist this summer. Yes, that's right. I will crimp my back hunched over the keyboard late into the night, feeling the growl from my stomach and ignoring it for ART. My friend Sara King, who has shot a bear and might soon shoot her ex-husband for trying to claim intellectual property rights on ANYTHING SHE WRITES AGAIN EVER, is also living the dream and we've been swapping stories back and forth.

Unfortunately, I only semi-qualify as a starving artist since I have a nearly-full-time job. Also, I have a wife and child who support me and understand my longing to make it as a writer, which ruins the qualification that "no one understands me." Also, I can't grow a beard. Like a good starving artist, I blame society.

Also, I don't really starve, because I spend too much of my rare money on ice cream.

But other than that...

Last week started as a good week for starving artistry. I woke up with angst, ready to cast myself from society. After reading four or five short stories in one day, a short story just fell out of me between Sunday and Monday. Six thousand words, on the page like poop in a bucket. It was a beautiful thing. Not the poop. The story. Chrissy thinks it's one of my best.

I started work on a novel that I did 7000 words on for a class a while ago and then left for later. I wrote seven thousand more words and then... pbbt. It sucked. I printed it all, deleted everything for the computer and am now retyping carefully to filter it. As you can imagine, this causes annoyance. I don't like writing the same thing over again, even if the story improves.

And when I have trouble with the novel, the Frenchman comes. He comes into my head and says things like this:

"Ze novel does not go well. Ze noveleest walks across ze street to heez favor-eet cafe. He sees patterrns on ze walls in ze bricks. Zey look like cheeldren laughing at heem, mocking ze arteesteec ambeetions. A single tear falls eento heez coffee."

I Know This, Because I Have A Master's

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:29:21 GMT

New word.

Spunic: noun; a tunic worn by Spencer.

Spunic.

I Am Iron Springs, Do We Wanna Eat a Buncha Hot Young Things?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:09:01 GMT

I ventured forth to the Iron Springs Writers' retreat this weekend, with fabulous folk too many to name. But I will name jaylake , who ran a great critique group. His energy, humor and friendliness were all at top level and pretty amazing given the stuff the guy's dealing with. Also, he's still damn sexy. That hair...

And the other folks in my crit group--kehrli , criada , Sean Forbes, Laura (whose last name has reached escape velocity at the moment), Jack Bell, and our housemate Sarah Avery who, with her lovely husband Dan and cute-as-sin kid Gareth (named after one of the only consistently likeable knights in Le Morte D'Arthur) was a lot of fun to share a house with. They really buttered me up and gave me constructive criticism on a novel beginning that has been moldering aroudn my computer waiting to get kicked into high gear.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a critiquer myself, though. I tried the best I could. I think that the stress of graduating and finishing what was a massive load of work for my on-campus job at the end of the year, plus the anxiety of trying to make it financially on what will soon be very much less money, made it just difficult for me to really analyze a story. (Also, it's making it difficult to construct a sentence. These are long.)

The best part for me, though, with the inner wannabe teacher, was doing the presentation on query letters and the Care and Feeding of Agents. People brought their queries, including Chelsea Campbell, who went all the way to book sale from a simple little query. Hark! It's a damn good query Chelsea has there, too.

We went way longer and people were way more into it than I thought they would be. Lots of people practiced pitching face-to-face, lots of people and lots of anal sex jokes. I'm still not sure how that came up. But it was quite cool, so much so that I would like to write them all down one of these days. Not the anal sex jokes, but the insights on breaking in that everyone came up with, and the way we analyzed the heck out of query letters and flap copy.

Also, there was a bald eagle.

Under The Table (Oh You Know It Baby)

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:24:05 GMT

That scandalous title leads me to tell you that I...

am writing some freelance stuff about comics and Seattle. If I get enough hits, I even get paid. Here's a review of my favorite local comic store, based on the first time I went there:

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-13087-Seattle-Comic-Books-Examiner~y2009m6d20-Comic-Store-Reviews-Bellingham-The-Comics-Place