Kameron Hurley

Purported American Apparel Tag

From here. Real or not, I’m still waiting for a day when this is a given, not a privilege or an employer’s recruitment bargaining chip.

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Indeed!

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

I’ve been working on some requested edits for God’s War this week. Revising can be a hell of a lot of fun when you get feedback of the “I’d like more of this! and this! and this!!” variety. Not so fun when you get the “I’m not sure why this doesn’t work, but could you make it work?” variety.

These are fun edits.

One of the biggest writing lessons I’ve learned over the years is that if I want to write good stuff, I need to absorb an incredible amount of media, and whenever possible, a heap of real-world traveling, socializing, listening to others’ stories. And it needs to be varied. And it needs to different. And it needs to be good.

I used to think that writers and “creative” people were just these natural geniuses, and everybody else was a bigger genius than me and that’s why I had to work so hard but they just pulled all this stuff out of their heads that was New! and Different! and Kewl! and they SOLD it!

It may still be true that there are wacky brain-full geniuses out there who pull this stuff out of thier asses, but what I’ve found is that I’m more likely to spit out stuff of the kind of quality and variety that I absorb. One of the reasons I majored in history is because I believed it would expose me to more stories than I’d get as an English major (I figured I was already reading all those books – history would force me to read different kinds of stories), and being a better writer is one of the reasons I’m a crazy credit card traveler. Traveling, for me, is like a drug. I get high on the very idea of all the great ways I can use all the material.

If I spend a lot of time reading Dragonlance novels and watching bad tv sitcoms, I’m going to write something that comes out like a bad Dragonlance novel sitcom (it may have been all very well and good to write Dragonlance back in the day, but there’s nothing new or fresh about it now; if you think there is, you’re probably just new to the genre, or very young).

Garbage in, garbage out.

I didn’t realize how much I did this until I had somebody asking me a bunch of questions about God’s War: how did I come up with the bug magic system? The setting? The holy war ideas? The word “bel dame”?

And you know, when you pick out ideas like that, I can tell you where I got them individually (as a whole, tho, I’ll have to tell you it’s Schenectady, of course).

The bugs came from living in South Africa in a – quite literally – coackroach-infested flat that was also full of geckos and flying ants – swarms of flying ants – on occasion. It wasn’t like visiting Disneyworld where it’s hot outside and maybe you see a big moth and then you go back into the air conditioned superplex. No, there was no air conditioning. There was no fake superplex (OK, there was the Gateway mall , let’s be fair. But basically, there was the Gateway mall and then… everything else). Bugs were just sort of a fact of life. I’ll never forget walking past this huge house one day that was covered – completely covered – from roof to sidewalk with thick plastic sheeting. The vans out front announced the fact that this house was being fumigated.

Bugs, man.

Bugs were a fact of life.

And where does “bel dame” come from? “Bel Dame” is actually an ancient word from Biblical times (Assyrian? Babylonian? I forget now) that meant a person who was hired by a family whose relative had been killed in order to apprehend the person who committed the crime and collect “blood debt” – either by killing the person or getting their family to pay the other family blood money in lieu of, well, blood. (it also is reminescent of “belle dame” – a beautiful woman or beautiful mother. And “bel dam” – an old woman or a witch). It was reading a book about the practice of ancient blood debt that gave me the foundation for the bel dames and ideas about swapping blood and organs for bread.

Everything else came from books, from media. I did a library search at the Northwestern University Library and made a list of books I was interested in; they were all about ancient Assyria, Iraq, Iran (ancient Peria), guerilla warfare, Islamic history, Islamic women, Islam in general, warfare in general. Jenn would pick these up for me from the Northwestern library ten at a time, and I’d go through them like I was writing another Master’s thesis.

I started trying to teach myself Arabic. I started dying from diabetes.

I wrote the opening line for the book, “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert,” a few weeks after I got my IUD, and was experiencing so much blood and pain that I just wanted to rip the fucking fucker out. IUD + dying of diabetes means you’re going to start writing some pretty fucked up shit about the body and one’s relationship to the body.

Those themes get hit even harder in book two. As do themes about loss, dependence, death, and rebuilding.

It all goes in there, one way or another. I still write down particularly witty quotes or witty plot devices from books and movies. I spent last night collecting all of the extra quotes and details and interesting characters pieces that I hadn’t managed to get into the book the first time. Now, I can go through and check them all off when I’ve added them.

My fourth disk of Rome is now in the mail. I just finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, and re-reviewing In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. I’m still hip-deep in William T Vollmann’s abridged version of the classic morality-of-violence epic, Rising Up and Rising Down.

Today I picked up a copy of The Kite Runner and Ragamuffin. I’m going through my book of Insects and my book of Poisons to pull out some details about bugs and get some inspiration for fleshing out my biological weapons.

This stuff doesn’t come from nowhere.

And I guess, really, it shouldn’t be any surprise. What makes good writers isn’t just being able to put down a sentence. If writing a good book was easy, we’d all be bestsellers and/or award winners and everybody would’ve finished a book and every one of them would be this wacky, unique blend of media and life experiences.

But that doesn’t really happen.

I remember reading Perdido Street Station for the first time in South Africa. It wasn’t, I thought, a great book. The plot was a mess and I wasn’t particularly drawn to any of the characters. But it was wild and messy and fucked up, and the stuff on the page raised the bar for ideas in the genre, in fantasy, for me. Elves and swords were all very nice and good. Genocide and feudalism were fine. But this was something else. It was pushing toward that other place, that someplace that was really different.

And it’s been my goal, since Clarion, to push the envelope. To take everything I do and push it just a little bit more, twist it in the opposite way that I’m inclined to twist it. I don’t ever want to get charged with “a failure of the imagination” again.

If you want to keep getting better, if you want to be really different, you have to do that the whole way. You have to challenge yourself. You have to stop eating garbage. You have to pull in all the stuff you love, you admire, the stuff that twists up your head. And a lot of is, yes, a great deal of it, is going to be about you. All that emotion, all those experiences, are funnelled through you. It takes some courage. And a lot of hard work.

You can certainly make a living not doing that, but that’s not the reason I got into writing genre fiction.

If I wanted to make a decent living, I would have become an investment banker.

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Do I Even Want to Total Up All These Chipotle Receipts?

When the house (including the bathroom and kitchen) is busted down and out for replumbing and rewiring for a week, just how many times did I go to Chipotle?

Man, this is a big stack of receipts. I need to get back on budget.

I also need to sit down and re-budget based on my new salary. Pretty much the only change, though, should be allotting more for credit cards and less for meds…

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Real Age Calculator

Even with diabetes, this odd little hippie test insists I shall live until 90.

This is mainly because all of my grandparents and great grandparents are in their 80s and 90s.

Diabetes genes + Logevity genes = me.

I have no idea what the “real age” part of this test means. Apparently, I have the body of a 10 year old. No idea.

(via jlundberg)

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Ancient Egyptian Prosthetic Toe

Purely aesthetic or completely practical?

These are the thoughts that keep me up at night.

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The Fountain: Two Sentence Reviews

Man must accept death.
Woman must die.

or:

No Plot.
Pretty Pictures.

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Becoming Insurance Savvy

I know nothing about insurance. Really, nothing. My crash course in how my insurance actually worked was my second day in the hospital, after having come out of a coma 24 hours before, when a woman from the hospital’s billing department called me and asked what my insurance information was. At that point, I couldn’t feel my feed and my head still felt like it was, literally, full of molasses. Luckily, Jenn had my wallet handy, and I read my information to them over the phone.

A woman with a clipboard was back the next day, while I sat in a puddle of urine from a leaking catheter and a smear of my own blood because my period has started, and said, “You do know that you have a rather high deductible. Can you pay us something right now?”

“Sure,” I said. But I think that at that point, Jenn and the wallet had left, and I was on my own, and I figured I would pay part of that to shut them the hell up as soon as I got the bill.

Because I’d never bothered to submit any of my receipts to my insurance provider. With a $2500 deductible, you just figure you’ve got exactly what I had: catastrophic insurance. Something that’s only useful if you get hit by a shovel, but everyday stuff, all of my antibiotics and gyno costs and birth control costs and the doctor’s visits, I’d just pay all of those out of pocket. I was young and invincible, so I didn’t feel I had to pay much attention to health insurance.

All that changed on May 15th of last year.

I received a $28,000 hospital bill and a slew of other, unrelated bills. The doctors who treat you aren’t actually employed by the hospital. They charge you bills in *additional* to the room and board and machine costs the hospital charges you. So there was a $600 cardiologist bill, a $500 endocrinologist bill, a $400 ambulance bill, and all these random bills for tests, lab tests, I didn’t have any idea what any of these tests were for. There were X-ray charges from when the cardiologist ordered that I get a chest X-ray because I was having trouble swallowing. The endocrinologist later figured out all I had was thrush caused by bacteria from the oxygen tube, and treated it with some $4 antibiotic that I was charged $20 for.

All of these bills were submitted to my insurance company. I had to pay my $2500 and 80% of hospital bill, but after I shelled out 6-7K or so for meds, supplies, my portion of the hospital bill and assorted 80%s of the other bills, they finally started to cover 100% of everything. I’d reached my out of pocket limit, apparently. I wasn’t aware that I had one. I thought I’d always be paying my 80% after my deductible.

With my catastrophic plan, I didn’t have to worry about a primary care doctor or in and out of network or anything like that, I figured, because what was the difference between covering 100% and covering 80% when you were shelling out $2500 a year regardless before you saw any benefit from it?

But, now.

Well, now I have another slew of insurance choices, and tricky things like choosing an “in network primary care physician,” which I’ve never bothered to do before. Why would I choose a “primary care” physician? If it was gyno related, I’d go to a gynecologist. When it was a sore throat, I’d go to a walk-in clinic.

Now I have to see the gyno, an endocrinologist every three months, a podiatrist (recommended) once a year, and the usual vision check every year, plus, of course, anything that comes up as far as complications or additions goes (sore throat, pelvic pain, bronchitis, etc). I go to the pharmacy for meds at least twice a month (I have to pick up testing strips at least that often, and I *should* be getting insulin once a month, but I keep trying to make it last longer than it should).

What this means is that I’ve finally reached the point where I finally have to fully and completely deal with America’s fucked up, confusing, incredibly inefficient and debilitating healthcare system. I have to choose something called a “primary care” physician if I want 100% of my costs to be paid, but it can’t be a truly useful primary care physician for me, like an endocrinologist. It’s going to end up being somebody who does the work of a walk-in clinic and prescribes antibiotics for sore throats.

My new endocrinologist only agreed to see me so long as I was clear that she would *not* fill the role of my primary care physician. She refused to be listed as such, even if, my some strange coincidence, the plan I was a part of had her name on it.

There are a lot of really confusing things in here, and they’re worded really awkwardly like this one under the list of “Limitations and Exclusions” for my new health plan. It says, “Unless stated otherwise, no coverage will be provided or paid for or on account of:” and number 4 is: “Prescription drugs, including insulin and syringes, vitamins, unless medically necessary for a medical condition and nonprescription drugs or medicines, except for diabetes supplies.”

What?

I had to read this three times before I realized they weren’t saying, “We won’t cover insulin.” They were saying “we’ll only cover insulin if it’s medically necessary.”

Which is fine, but that’s a really fucked up way to phrase that, and it made me really apprehensive for about three minutes.

Why is insurance coverage so hard? This shouldn’t be rocket science. This shouldn’t be hard. If you’re sick, you should be able to get better. You should be able to choose the best way to get better; the best doctor, or the most convenient doctor. You should be able to pay your $20 co-pay for anything. Fucking *anything* and go home and get better.

These policies have been written and created to provide the least amount of care possible to the healthiest number of people possible. Which might make a lot of money for somebody else in the end, but is going to ultimately result in a lot of unhealthy and ultimately dead people who aren’t any good to anybody.

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HIRED

As of tomorrow at 8:00 am, I will officially be an employee of the financial services company downtown, working (officially!) as a document, technical, and copywriter.

Benefits start first day.

I’m not allowed to disclose how much I make according to the Employee Handbook or I’ll be fired, but I’ll say it’s more than I made as a temp in Chicago but less than I made as an employee in Chicago.

Basically: I’ll be making just enough.

WITH FIRST DAY BENEFITS AND $20 PERSCRIPTION CO-PAYS~!!!!

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I Have the Sweetest HR Manager

They were doing July birthdays today, with cake, and the HR Manager went out and got a sugarfree pie.. just for me.

I still have to take a shot for it, but it’s less likely to give me a headache.

How terribly sweet.

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