Kameron Hurley

Digging In

OK. Here we go.

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This Probably Works Better When You’re Not Really Self-Conscious

As I expected, associating “Good” and “Vabbenif” happens a lot more quickly in my lizard brain, but then, as shown, associating the pale figure with *anything* was something I did a lot more than with the dark figure. Try it for yourself.

At least, I think that’s how I read these numbers (“0″ was average. But… Um, I’m not sure what “average” meant. Anyway, this is what it said):

Good and Vabbenif=0.04
Bad and Vabbenif=-0.42
Good and Reemolap=0.213
Bad and Reemolap=0.164

(stolen from ABW)

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A Scrap of Land and 2 Dollars in a Coffee Can

Stephanie’s Old Man’s parents, Nancy and Brian, are in town this week doing home repairs. They’re amazing. They’re replumbing and rewiring the whole house. Last night, Nancy and Stephanie took acetone and sandpaper to all the cabinets in the little kitchen to prep them for new paint and new doors.

Today I came home to see Nancy finishing up the paint. I went to the worn, stained old sink to wash my dishes and found that.. the sink was white. “Holy shit,” I said. “How the hell did you get that out? This sink was *brown*! I thought they’d have to replace the whole thing!”

The lighting and medicine cabinet have been yanked out of the wall in the bathroom. Brian’s adding a much-needed outlet in the kitchen.

I came home early, after my ultrasound appointment, feeling surly and sorry for myself, raging at all the weight gain, my out of control body, angry at lab techs who can’t tell me anything, just push and prod and pat me on the head and send me on my way until they write up a “report” in “two or three days.” I was angry at my credit card debt, my reliance on others. I was angry at the fuckhats at the temp agency who refuse to negotiate my contract. Angry, full of despair, sorry for myself.

I came home and saw the house re-ordered, all this great work being done, life going on. Life going on, regardless. Life. Beautiful, exquisite life.

“When Stephanie gets home,” Brian said, “we’ll go to Home Depot and pick up some new light fixtures for the bathroom.”

Real light fixtures in the bathroom. That work.

Stephanie came home not long after, and Nancy spoke with her in the kitchen, updated her on the work, and Stephanie wandered through the house, marveling at the changes.

A few minutes later, Stephanie came to the door of my room, red-faced and teary-eyed, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m feeling really sappy right now. Can I tell you I love you and give you a hug?”

And, me being me, thinking this is some new disaster, I say, “Oh gawd, are you OK?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “I was just driving home in the car after a crappy day at work, and this song came on, you know, this song where this guy talks about how much he hates his stupid job and hates life and things really suck and then he says, `but I have this scrap of land and a couple dollars in a coffee can,’ and says how lucky he is to have these things, just these little things. And then I started to think about my diabetic roommate and my husband who’s allergic to air and I come home and my in-laws are here fixing my house out of the goodness of their heart, and I own a house, and I have this stupid dog, and I just got so happy, and I felt so lucky, and I want to give you all a hug because I’m stupid and sappy.”

And, god help me, I started getting teary-eyed too, and I gave her a hug.

We have so much. We are so goddamn lucky. Because the other thing I thought about, again, on the way back from the hospital, was mortality. How I keep hanging on. How I still want more. More of this. Of the scrap of land and the house repairs and the stupid job negotiations and words to write and slapfights to get into. I want so much more of it.

And I know, everyday, how lucky I am for every one of these moments, whether I’m fat or thin or dying of ovarian cancer or diabetes or whatever. I have a sappy friend from highschool and her husband who’s allergic to air, and their bad dog and their hugely kind-hearted, generous relatives, and words and words and words. I love my job. I love my books. I love the people in my life. Even the ones who are far away. And I want so much more of it.

Perhaps that’s where all of my frustration comes from with the continuing health issues, the constant fight for one more breath of air, one more shot. Sometimes I wonder if I’m fighting for more than my share. I keep thinking that my continued existence is somehow tempting fate, fucking god, swearing in the face of death. Every minute more I fight for feels like one minute more I didn’t deserve.

And I want it nonetheless.

It’s just all so beautiful.

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For August

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Dissonance

Life just keeps going, doesn’t it? I suppose that’s the definition, but yeah, boy, it just marches on regardless.

Sometimes it’s just stunning, how that is.

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Are You Allowed to Criticise the Fiction of a Writer You’re Sleeping With?

Gee, I hope so.

In a discussion over at Torque Control about a review of the October/Nov 2006 issue of the Mag of SF/F, one commenter pointed out that, as writers/industry pros who knew the writers of these stories, we weren’t looking at the critiques the reviewer made objectively. We were concentrating on the critique the reviewer made of the writers and not of their writing.

I agree that we were far more interested in the critiques of the writers than we were of their work, mainly because there were some public facts about the writers that the critic got wrong, and she made some assumptions about those writers based entirely on their stories.

So, sure, when somebody makes incorrect or weird assumptions about people you know, you’re going to be like, “Um, whaaa…?”

But the criticism of our response was an interesting one, because it made the assumption that writers are going to object to critiques of the writing of people they know and be more lenient in their own criticism of those writers’ stories.

I thought about that for awhile, because it’s true that critiquing a writer’s work gets harder the more you know them. To some extent, it also gets easier: “Aha, yeah, here’s that bullshit lazy thing they always do. I’m going to call them on it again.”

But it does also mean that you’re less likely to tell your buddy, “Hey, you’re a misogynist asshole and the race relations in this book suck, you racist pig!” (which I would probably do far more readily, yes, to someone I didn’t know). What I’m more likely to say in response to a writer I knew whose work I saw had some of this lazy, likely inadvertent stuff in it is, “Uh, you realize all the women in your story just want to get pregnant. And I realize that’s very noble and good, but they come across like happy pod people, and this isn’t a story about pod people. And why is the only race/culture distinction made in this book based entirely in the characters’ skin color? There are going to be other slurs people will use. They’ll assign characteristics to the peoples of those cultures/races. Also, in your narrative voices, saying `the white people and the Yupsuks’ is ignoring the race of the white people and setting it up like `white’ is some kind of universal norm race. That’s fine from the POV of a character from that culture, but if you’re being pure narrative, it’s probably `the Kols and the Yupsuks.’” Etc.

Now, that’s *private* critique. In public? Yes, it’s harder for me to post here about writers I know whose work I either hate outright or just don’t get but who I get along great with in person and who I think are great people. I tend to avoid posting about them, mainly because it’s not worth the time. There are better, more deserving folks to skewer and better, more deserving books to talk about constructively.

But you know? Critique is half my job, as a writer. I critique myself and my buddies I call them on weirdly sexist stuff and plot holes and flat characters and stereotypical characters and “why is the only gay guy in the book evil?” stuff. It’s my job, as a writer, to call other writers on their shit, and I fully expect other writers to call me on mine (“Kameron, why the hell is Nyx raped in this book? You’ve set up a society where any guy who did that would be fucking crucified. Is this just another slapdash `look how evil my bad guy is!’ characterization.’ Oh. Um. Yes. Yes, it is. And out the gratuitous crap goes).

There are writers I like quite a lot who’s stuff I hate and whose stuff I love. I love a great deal of VanderMeer’s stuff, but that didn’t keep me from getting into an argument with him about his lack of female background characters in his earlier work (I need to finish reading Shriek, actually; I know the protag is female, but I’m curious about those female background characters…). I also think Daniel Abraham, as a fellow, is about twelve kinds of awesome, but that doesn’t mean I love his books with an undying passion and believe they’re the best thing since sliced bread (but there’s some good stuff in there). There are all sorts of writers I love dearly on a personal level whose stuff underwhelms me to the point where I don’t actually make an effort to pick up their books (and yes, I feel really awful about it).

I love the vast majority of Carol Emshwiller’s stuff, but that doesn’t mean that I think she’s a radically feminist writer. I quite enjoyed Carnival, but I don’t think it was a perfect book (I don’t even think The Hours is perfect – if only because of that shitty one last connection bullshit thing at the end – and I’ve read it at least 20 times. Seriously. 20 times. Of course, I’ve never met Michael Cunningham).

Then, of course, there are writers I know who’s attempts at feminist fiction make me snicker (David “I could *so* write you!” Brin), or whose fiction (some of it) I enjoy but whose politics I hate (Orson Scott Card). Being an ass in real life doesn’t mean you aren’t a good writer and doesn’t mean I won’t like your fiction (I am a huge fan of Hemingway. But then, I’ve never met Hemingway either). And being a kewl person who I love dearly and want to hang out with doesn’t mean I’ll like your fiction.

I love Maureen McHugh and she is eight kinds of awesome. I still get vaguely annoyed at the endings to all of her books.

I’m also reminded of reading a review of an Elizabeth Hand novel written by John Clute. Why yes, even writers who are sleeping together can be critical of each other! (I have a certain someone’s scathing review of God’s War saved for posterity. I intend to auction it off at WisCon in 20 years).

In fact, writers have a long history of saying really mean things about their friends’ work (Algonquin Roundtable, anyone? Expat writers in Paris? Hemingway and Fitzgerald were best friends and best enemies). In our industry, we call that Clarion, Blue Heaven, Sycamore Hill, Milford, Viable Paradise, Odyssey, the bar, and the bedroom.

I know that, the more writers I get to know, the more self conscious I am about posting about their work, but I’d like to think that if somebody I knew wrote something I took serious issue with (as opposed to just it not being my cup of tea) that I’d post about it. I certainly post about books I enjoy and hit the points I think are weak in addition to the stuff I think is good. I love Nicola Griffith’s Aud books, but I think that travelogue to Scandinavia in The Blue Place was, pacing-wise, really weird and awkward.

Writers are not perfect people and they’re not perfect writers. One of the things a lot of writers, fans, reviewers and publishers yearn for is really great criticism in the genre. We don’t get enough of it. It’s probably one reason why we’re so interested in reading fan reviews of our work and the work of others (because, let’s face it, we’re all fans), and it’s one reason why we all get so disappointed when we read lazy and/or incoherent rants about our work (I had someone review a story of mine who got the title wrong. The review went downhill from there. It was a “positive” review of my story, but that doesn’t mean it was a “good” review. And this was a review posted in one of the genre’s secondary review sites. I’m hungry for good criticism as much as anybody).

None of us want to write in a vacuum. As a writer, you want to have an audience. You want to be read. You want discussion, passionate debate. That’s the whole point behind sending it out instead of keeping it in a drawer. There are certainly writers who despise criticism and/or who don’t take it well, but I’d wager that many-to-most of us really welcome it. We want to get better. We want people to call us on our bullshit.

We want a dialogue.

It’s why we write.

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Clipping

I work for a minority-owned company, and it just so happens that the majority of our franchisees are also minorities and women (I love the stupid word “minorities” to mean “not white!” because, you know, you put together all of the “not white” people, and suddenly, they’re not so much a minority, but Let’s Not Think About That and then there’s that “and women” addition, like women make up 20% of the world or something. Anyway).

So one of the things I have to be aware of, even more than my “liberal” sensibilities call for, is the inclusion of women and Everybody Else in things like, say, visual representations. Because how incredibly stupid is it to whitewash the whole world, not only on the basic, you know, human decency “because it’s not right” level, but on the actual real-world holy fuck, that’s a PRETEND WORLD you’re telling people to buy into level?

I’m currently in the process of moving our ops manual into an online format, and I couldn’t *believe* (or maybe you would…) what a fucking pain in the ass it was to find clip art of black men and women, Asian men and women, or just women all together, doing something really active and powerful.

It took me several days of working through the clip art galleries before I started to realize that, yes, actually, those images are *there,* sort of. They’re just harder to find, because even though they’re there, I’m having a lot of trouble seeing them. Why am I still seeing a universe of white people?

And I realized as I was setting out images for different sections, thinking, “OK, there’s an image of a black man here, and I have a woman here, and an Asian woman here and… oh god, is that too many women? Are there too many pictures of women and minorities? Is this going to scare off white guys?”

SERIOUSLY. I thought that.

I thought, “But WHAT ABOUT THE POOR WHITE MEN???”

Here I was getting stuck in the 1/4 rule: any time women make up 1/4 of the room, you assume half the room is full of women. Same with any character who’s not slice-of-wonder-bread white. And when there’s *more* than 1/4… well, then THEY’RE TAKING OVER, OH NOOOOSSS!!!

What I find fascinating is how well we’ve all been trained to keep making sure that the fragile white male ego is protected, like it’s so incredibly impossible for white men to relate to the humanity of women and men of other races.

How condescending is that, to create an entire structure, an entire subserviant class, whose duty it is to look after the fragile white male ego? If men are really *that* fucking weak, then patriarchy is some fucking joke.

And yet here I am, thinking, “OH NOoOOoooSsss! The poor white men!”

Gawd.

One of the things I try and tell people is that we’re all racist. We’re all misogynist. When you live in a racist, misogynist culture, you pick these assumptions and stereotypes up as easily as breathing; you’re trained to maintain the status quo. What it means to be a decent human being is to be aware of these prejudices and to fight them, fight them, fight them. Because none of it’s true: it’s all a bunch of bullshit.

The world WILL NOT END if 3/4 of every piece of clip art shows a black woman and an Asian man and a Hispanic woman and an Indian man being powerful.

In fact, the world might look a little better for it.

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Reading Wikipedia in French

I’ve been busting up on my French for awhile now, trying to get in at least a few pages or lessons or some kind of exposure to it at least once a day. It’s been a goal of mine to be able to get around in French for some time now, but it was one of those things I just never made the time for. Some of that was because I assumed I’d need to take a another community college course, and I never had enough time or money to fit that into my crazy Chicago life.

I’m not sure at what point I realized I was passable enough to stop buying the “intro to French” refresher books and to move on to the French verb conjugation books, but it happened sometime after I got to Dayton.

Learning another language is a lot like learning to read your mother tongue for the first time. It’s a lot of frustration and banging your head against the desk and trying to figure out why it seems to be so *easy* for other people, and then, almost like magic, after persistent head banging, something clicks in your head. It’s like this whole time, you’ve been wearing out this groove in your brain, and one day you realize it’s there, and the words start to click together. And then once you have those words, you can guess many of the others based on context.

I remember thinking that reading was a really magical process, this idea that you could set down words and thoughts for other people to see and understand, and then *you* could learn to see and understand the words and thoughts of others. And learning another language is a lot like that for me. I mean, sure, I took my two years of high school French like anybody else, and my grandmother’s from France, so I can “la lalaala la” with the best of them, but the minute they asked me to start doing past tense, it was like my brain hit a huge, hard wall. And everything stuck. It got hard, I balked, and the idea of pushing past that wall hurt my head just to think of it.

Now it’s a matter of wearing down the wall. It’s not like I’m taking a sledge hammer to it. It’s like I have this hammer and pick, and sometimes these big blocks come out, but mainly it’s just me chipping away.

When things are slow at work, I used to cruise Wikipedia or write, but the last few weeks, I’ve replaced English-language Wikipedia with French Wikipedia, just to get me some more exposure.

And what put me in mind, again, of this whole process was reading the beginning of the entry on “Impression à la demande.” And I’m sitting here reading “La principale caractéristique de l’impression à la demande est dans la possibilité d’imprimer un seul exemplaire à la fois, contrairement à l’impression traditionnelle (Offset) qui oblige un tirage minumum de centaines d’exemplaires à la fois.” and thinking:

“OK, it’s about books. Making one example. “Seul exemplaire.” Is this about first editions? No, it’s “one example” something… one example…. “à la fois.”

One example at a time…

And I realized I was reading about print-on-demand publishing (which I would have learned anyway by the end of the article regardless because they use the English terms, but bear with me). But it was funny, because it was that one phrase that did it, that made the whole article click for me and threw light on what the rest of the passage meant (with help from a handy French dictionary as well, of course). It’s like finding a linch pin, sliding it into place, and things start to go click click click.

I remember being very frustrated when I first learned to read. I learned in the first grade, and I felt like I was learning oh so slowly, far more slowly than everyone else in class. My mom says some of my frustration likely came from the fact that I was ready to read long before I actually learned how; it’s just that nobody taught me and I didn’t think to try and teach myself. Once I started picking away at it, all it did was make me frustrated and angry.

I grew up being told that I was smart, and so believing that I was smart, but for some reason, I believed that being smart meant that things came easily and naturally to you. You would be like my friend Matt, who was reading fourth-grade level books in kindergarten and skipped a grade because he was so smart. This was what smart was. Because of that, I started to believe, in school, that I just wasn’t smart enough. That there were only so many things I was good at, so I should try to concentrate on those and not do the hard stuff, since if it was hard, it meant I wasn’t good at it. Those things made me feel so stupid, and who wants to be stupid?

This is really dangerous thinking for a kid to have, and I’m not sure where we get this impression, since I can’t remember my parents or teachers saying “smart people don’t have to work hard.” I think it’s more along the lines of an assumption we get, as kids, when we’re told, “Oh, you did well! You must be really good at this.” Instead of, “Oh, you did well! You must have worked really hard on this.”

To some extent, I started to learn the problem inherent in this belief with writing. Sure, I had a natural affinity for it, but natural affinity only takes you so far. You’ll be the best kid in class up until you break out of your local highschool and/or community college classes, and then all the sudden, what you’ve got doesn’t cut it (and if you start subbing stories early, as I did, you realize really quickly that you’re competing against a huge number of people who work far harder and are way better than you are). So when I subbed stuff at 15 and it all came back in rejections, I realized I was going to have to work a lot harder, everyday, and it’s that concerted practice that’s gotten me to this point, not raw talent. Part of my experience of growing up, of becoming an adult, has been learning how to have the guts to branch off into areas where I’m not so good, where I don’t have a “natural” affinity, where things are hard. I’m always picking apart parts of my writing that I’m not good at. GW was about learning how to write good dialogue. I’m not focusing on plotting. I find the thing I’m worst at, and pound my head against it for awhile, until something starts to stick.

At some point I realized that there were a lot of things I wanted out of my life that I wasn’t magically good at. I was going to have to work harder.

I find it baffling that it took me so long to figure this out.

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Why Do I Always Overcorrect for Whole Wheat Pasta?

Why? Why? Why?

I love my graham crackers and all, but when food is medicine, it’s just not as fun to eat, particularly when you’re up feeling woozy past your bedtime.

Blarg.

I would like to magically be able to tell my body to stop eating my pancreas.

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Rome

Why is Cleopatra a drugged out, sex-crazy, slightly dimwitted pale-skinned whore with no hair?

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