Kameron Hurley

"Girlfriend in a Coma, I Know/I Know – It’s Serious"*

I have been trying to write up a post about writing and trauma for the last hour, inspired by this post.

I guess I’m still in a bad enough place that I don’t feel like I can talk about it. Of course, much of my reluctance is that so much of the current situation would also be talking about the private business of somebody else, and that’s not kewl.

So here I am.

Suffice to say that things have not been great for me or my roommate/Clarionmate/formergirlfriend/friend for the last year. There were bad relationships prior to us getting together, professional failures before and after we got together, a bad breakup, subsequent meltdowns, more professional failures, a job layoff, and let’s not even get started on the whole, “Surprise you have a chronic illness”/”OMG Kameron’s in a coma in the bathroom fucking shit fuck fuck fuck!!” thing. Cause that’s some heavy shit to deal with on top of everything else. Or, shit to deal with as a nice appetizer before the meltdown.

We’ve chosen to deal with our pain and grief in very different ways, and I hope that, just as I’m rebuilding, she will continue to rebuild as well, and in twenty years we’ll be better people.

Because, yes, at the end of the day, you do have to go on. If you don’t go on, you die. If you choose to dwell in the darkness, it will devour you. You must find a new life outside of that. It’s not like you’re going to forget the darkness, it’s not like it’s going to go away, but you can build a place in the sun somewhere, knowing that the sun is all the brighter because you are one of those who knows what it’s like in the dark.

I wrote the bulk of GW when I was slowly dying, when my personal relationships were bouncing all over the place just like my sugar numbers, during a time where I wasn’t doing a lot of higher level thinking. It was all about this thing, and the next thing, and sleeping, and drinking water, mmmm sweet sweet water….

It’s no surprise that when I was done with GW and still recovering from the mess of my life, dealing with a lot of resulting emotional craziness on both ends in this house, that I decided that GW wasn’t a book, it was bookS. I didn’t want to start my next stand-alone project just yet. I needed to work with this character and this world. I wanted to work through the issues I had to deal with in the life of this bloody, strong, brutally traumatized woman who masked all her weakness with witticism and pretended she was fine when she wasn’t, and was, in reality, only alive because of the good graces or serious fuckups of others, and who knew it, but told herself a lot of stories about why that wasn’t so, becuase those were the stories she needed to tell herself in order to go on.

And on the one hand, I worry that the GW books will end up being nothing more than Mary Sue-ish books, the sort of cathartic writing we all have to do every once in a while to get through the worst of things. On the other hand, I think they could be some of the best of what writers do: culling all the shit and blood in our own lives, mixing it up with what we’ve seen and heard and read of others, and making something new and powerful and wonderful out of it, something people can connect with.

That would be great if it happened.

In the meantime, it certainly gets *me* through the day, and believe me, right now, that’s a really fucking great thing.

*

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Writers’ Rooms

Theirs.

And mine: old and new.

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Names I’ve Given My Hardware

I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them – my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it “The Beast” because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).

I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.

When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it “bird” because of it’s small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).

When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It’s reasonably light, but far from compact, and I’ve got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.

It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God’s War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW’s heroine: Nyx.

My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx’s female sidekick: Anneke (that’s the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).

If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.

Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.

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When the Plucky Heroine Stomps Her Foot and Tosses Her Hair, You Know She Means Business

I’ve been trying to get through Martha Wells’s City of Bones for a while now, mainly because it’s got a blasted-out desert setting with Old Ruines, bugs, mutants, and pirates, which sounded a lot like GW’s world to me, and I wanted to see how somebody else handled that sort of setting.

And yea, you know, the world’s cool and all, but it lacks a certain richness, mostly due to the writing style, and, worst offense of all – the characters are completely unlikable. I really don’t care if either of them live or die, and they just aren’t interesting.

There are great prose writers and great story writers, and if you’re great at story or great at prose, I’ll read you (I think writers like Catherynne Valente are great at prose, and writers like Stephen King are great at story – I’ll read both, but for different reasons, and I’ll get different things out of them), but great story means I need to enjoy reading about the characters. I want to be invested. It’s not that they have to be likable: they just have to interesting.

Though SF/F has come a long way with it’s female characters, they tend to suffer a similiar fate shared by their male counterparts, which is that they end up getting two or three character traits assigned to them, and in the same way a bad actor starts raising their voice during a particularly emotional scene as if to say “LOOK AT ME, I’M ACTING!!!!” these characters display their formulaic template of “plucky heroine” traits: stomp their feet, clench their fists, tug their braids, and then verbally spar with the Brooding Hero who doesn’t get laid because he’s “misunderstood,” and then we move on.

The thing with this sort of set up – plucky heroine & brooding hero – is that that template *can work.* And when it *does* work – when it’s done well – you can create characters people really love (Mal & Inara of Firefly, Alanna & her Thief King in the Alanna books, that Kushiel’s Dart chick and the brooding celibate warrior guy in the first of the Kushiel books, etc); you know, the sort of characters people like to write slash fiction about. heh heh

The problem is when people get lazy, and they reach for that “plucky heroine” template and just scribble somebody in, like this Elen character in City of Bones. When she’s feeling strong emotion, when we’re given a scene meant to illustrate how Plucky & Independent she is, she does one of those clench-my-fists-and-stomp-my-foot things that I find really annoying. You see the same problem with Nynaveave in the Jordan books. When she feels particularly plucky, she’ll tug her braid and stomp her foot, and then you know she means business! (this is amusing the first couple of times in book one. By book six, you want her to die quickly and suddenly; you hope a tree will fall on her).

I wonder how much of this is just plain cardboard character writing and how much of it is just seeing a lot of people rush to write Strong, Plucky Heroines without really knowing how to do that because most mainstream literature was about Brooding Male Heroes. The template you *did* drawn from that had strong female characters was romance, and I’m wondering how many of those Plucky Space Opera Heroines were originally conceived as pure Romance heroines.

So you end up with these women characters who may be smart and spunky, but they’re pretty childish and vulnerable, too (again, how much of this is just poor and/or lazy writing?). After all, if she was *too* capable, and governed her emotions a little more diplomatically, then she wouldn’t *really* be a female character, she’d just be a Guy in Drag.

I guess I’ve just never bought the idea that a fully realized female character who didn’t act like a fourteen year old at thirty-five was “a guy in drag.”

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The Mounting Cost of Living

I received a bill in the mail today for $1617.73.

This is the amount of money I owe to COBRA if I’d like to have continuing medical coverage through March. I have paid $360 of that, which leaves me to come up with roughly $1250 by March 10th or forfeit my ability to be insured through COBRA.

I am currently making $15 an hour as a temp receptionist in the wake of my December layoff, which is a pay cut of about $4 an hour and another, what, missing $400 a year in matching 401(K) benefits. The layoff also meant the dissolution of my high-deductible-though-free (yes, free) health insurance, which is what kept me from going bankrupt when I spent four days in the ICU in May.

All those medical bills and a couple of blown-out computers have left me with roughly 10K in credit card debt (I was bemoaning the fact that I owned nearly 3K about this time last year. Oh, what I’d give to owe 3K!), which I’m paying off, minimum payment a month, $200. Rent and utilities are $750 a month. Medical supplies are $100-150. Gym fee is $109. Student loans are a whopping $300. I’ve gotten groceries down to $70 a week when I’m playing it lean. Transit costs are $90 a month.

I can almost make it with these bills at $15 an hour, cause I can clear nearly 2K a month, and bills above add up to $1900. Every three months, my endocrinologist charges me $95 for a 20-minute check up, so yea, those are tight numbers. Real tight. But I could almost make it.

What this slim little budget fails to provide for, of course, is that $360 a month in health insurance.

I try to keep my spirits, up, yo, but it’s math like this that makes me “grimly optimistic” instead of, you know, optimistic.

It’s also why I’m not a math major.

Numbers are cold, cold things.

Sometimes, just in order to get yourself going forward, to not give up, to stay resolute, you have to just say “Fuck it.”

I don’t think a lot about how I’ll get through all this. I just get through it. I think, sometimes, that if I stopped and thought about it, I might not be able to get up again.

Close your eyes and leap.

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The Greatest Gift

“We allow each other to work. That’s the greatest gift a husband can give a wife and a wife can give a husband. Especially when they’re both artists.”

- Helen Mirren, on marriage

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Lessons

You can give it all you got, and squeeze blood from stones, and you can give a little more after that.

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Writing Down the Bones

One of the things I’ve tried very hard to do with my adult life is to be a strong woman. I took it for granted that I was nominally intelligent: I could put a sentence together and pass a test without homework and I didn’t put my hand on the stove just to see what would happen.

What I never had – or felt I never had – was physical strength. I always felt big and uncoordinated, and all attempts to lose weight were met with fierce resistance from a body that will never see a size smaller than two digits.

It took me a long time not only to accept that but to embrace it, and to begin building myself not based on the template I was given by the popular media, but a template that a body like mine could find more immediately useful; something far more realistic and attainable. I started taking boxing lessons and lifting 30 lb weights and going jogging, and I firmed up and got super strong and finally started to feel comfortable in my body. I started to define myself by how far I could run, how much weight I could lift, how good I felt when I threw a punch.

All that changed when I started to get sick, and found myself rapidly falling toward the fulfillment of that media template in the skinny department but spiralling futher and futher away from the goals I’d set for myself – the ones that really mattered.

It’s hard to fall off the path I created for myself. I worked a long time to get comfortable in my own skin, to find my own strength, and to feel like that was all brutally ripped away from me with the unexpected devastation of a natural disaster was… well, devastating.

One of the most horrifying parts of coming out of my sugar coma and being able to think clearly again, to look forward, was my deep fear that now, finally, after all this work and all this time, after I finding the strength in myself, after learning to love and accept myself – all that was being taken away from me. I wasn’t going to be strong anymore. I couldn’t be this person I wanted to be. I had to take on the shroud of an invalid and live out the life of some other person, someone I had not chosen to be.

And that hurt. That was hard.

Worse: it wasn’t true.

But when you’re getting to know your new body, your new condition, when you’re learning how everything works now that something is broken, you aren’t sure what’s true, what’s not, what’s possible and what’s pure fantasy. You read up on all the horror stories and you lie in bed at night and you fight all those feelings of despair and you tell yourself, “I’m going to be different.” It’s what I’ve told myself about writing fiction for the last fifteen years: failure, giving up, that’s what happens to other people. I’m going to work hard at this. I’m going to succeed.

And, like the writing, there are days when I feel like a total fool. You wonder if being delusional is really the appropriate way of handling yourself. Maybe you should be preparing for a different kind of future. Maybe you should be studying tax law and forgetting about climbing around Peru. Maybe you should just be small and quiet and weak.

There’s already a template there to step into. Pull on that hopeless shroud! Complain about how “hard” it is cause you have a “condition”! Just hide under your bed and feed on your own feelings of self-hate and self-disgust at your body’s own weakness, at your inability to cope like the strong woman you were supposed to be.

You can flog yourself with this shit forever, but it’s not going to get you out from under the bed.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is give myself time to pick myself up again. I wanted to spend a couple of months setting things in order, learning my limits, and emerge like a phoenix. I wanted to be better this minute, this hour, today!

I have learned a lot about my limits since May, and some of those limits have been disappointing, but most of them have been surprising. I can still do all the crazy shit I want to do. It’s just going to be harder. Some days that does get me down; it feels overwhelming. It feels like the whole sky is going to fall down, and it feels too big for me to bear, and then I flog myself for being so weak minded, so stupid, when did I become so weak?

The hardest lesson of all has been to measure out when I need to be hard on myself so I don’t hide under the bed and when I need to ease up to allow myself the time to heal that I need. I have a whole new template to create. The last time I did it, it took me ten years. At least now I have a base to work with now, something I was very happy with, but learning to accept myself, to create a whole new conception of self, to some extent, that’s taking so much longer than I was ever prepared for.

It is such a long road. I realize life keeps going until it stops, and, like writing, it doesn’t get easier, but it’s supposed to get better.

I am working toward a better place. A stronger place. With some patches perhaps, some addendums, some allowances for error.

There is always someone I’m striving to be, and I try to live like I’m already that person. It’s why it’s so difficult now to act when I feel so lost.

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Year’s Best SF 12

I was going to wait until they officially posted the TOC, cause there’s always the chance of the story getting cut, but I’ve seen a couple of other people mention that they’ve got stories coming out in it, so hey:

My short story, The Women of Our Occupation, should be coming out in Cramer & Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 12 this spring.

If you buy a copy, I’ll even sign it for free!

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BW is Back! Long Live BW!

& etc.

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