During times of great social upheaval, it can often seem safer to say nothing. You get noticed less. You piss off fewer people. You go around making sure the trains run on time. You make your dollars and go home and stuff them in the mattress and keep your head down and hope they don’t come for you.

It’s a silly position, really, because they always come for you.

I think it’s easier to remain neutral on stuff like politics when you think that specific policies won’t affect you. If you aren’t a woman, or non-white, or gay, or disabled, or poor, or chronically ill, it’s really easy to just keep your head down and shut up. “It’s not my concern,” you say, while totally forgetting that we live in a world where our own quality of life is directly impacted by the quality of life of others (vaccinations are a really easy one to point to; so’s universal health care). We forget that our way of life – access to life saving drugs, clean water, abundance of food – is wholly contingent on the skills and abilities of many millions of others who support the systems that care for us. We also forget that for many of us, being a part of some of these groups harshly affected by social policies is just one accident or “bad luck” incident away. Poverty, chronic illness, and disability can happen gradually or suddenly, often when you’re paying the least attention.

I say all this as somebody who grew up upholding 80’s action movie masculinity as the pinnacle of cool. I always liked the idea that strong people were loners, they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, they had witty lines and impeccable health and virility and nobody messed with them. This was more about who I wanted to be than who I wanted to date, mind, and it really influenced how I viewed other people. Life sucks? Do something about it. Stop whining. Nobody keeps you down but yourself.

I’m still gung-ho about assertiveness, negotiating for yourself, standing up to injustice, and the like, but I’m far less likely to tell people that all they should be doing is looking out for themselves, and fuck everybody else. When you look at the way we’ve constructed our entire society, very few of us would thrive in a place where we had to be totally self-sufficient. Illness would kill a great many of us, and childbirth, accidents, starvation… we rely on other people to help us succeed, however invisible those millions of hands are as we pick up that orange at the grocery store or pop a pill to help prevent heart disease or drive a gas-powered car 40 miles to work.

I didn’t have a real appreciation for just how much we rely on other people until my pancreas blew out and just… stopped working when I was 26. Immune disorder, they told me. Sorry. Now you have to take 5-6 shots a day just to survive. The only reason I live is because there are people creating synthetic insulin in a lab.

That whole independent 80’s apocalypse hero I’d hoped to style myself after kind of imploded along with my pancreas, because even if I raided every pharmacy from here to the ocean after the End Times, it’s all got a one year expiration date. If modern society implodes, I do too, no matter how tough, smart, and savvy I am.

It gives you a lot of perspective, being at the edge of death all the time. I’ve gotten really touchy with doctors, health insurance providers, and pharmacies. I scream and yell at them a lot, because when you need something to survive, it makes you a tad nutty if it looks like you may not be able to get it.

It has humbled me a lot, and given me a great deal of empathy.

Being a woman certainly also has disadvantages in our society, but for much of my life, until I really entered the workforce, I could pretend I was a guy, you know, a “real person” and not one of those femmy women that everyone made fun of like they were useless. It wasn’t until I went out into the real world, among strangers far removed from my cozy hometown, that I realized there were people who looked at me as prey just for being a woman, and people who assumed I cared about things, or did things, or wanted things, completely based on my gender instead of what I could do. I got passed up for a raise at the movie theater I worked at because managers had to learn to run the projection booth, and the reels were 70lbs. Nobody ever asked me if I could lift 70lbs (of course I can). They just assumed I couldn’t. So I wasn’t even considered (I learned this later. Things changed, and some women marshaled through by being overly insistent, but it never occurred to me that I’d have to *fight* for something I was obviously qualified for. I still thought I was a white guy, after all).

That was the first time I realized that I was going to be at a disadvantage in the workplace, and that I was going to have to work just a little bit harder than everybody else to get noticed just as much. I had a lot of advantages, too, but I learned early that I had to telegraph them.

I’ll never forget the time my parents went to a swanky restaurant with us kids and received terrible service. We weren’t exactly dressed like royalty, and my mom told me that we’d likely been dissed because we looked poor, and the server assumed we’d leave a bad tip. Knowing that we would return the next night and it was likely we’d get the same server, my parents left a huge tip. I thought this bit of reverse psychology was a roiling pile of shit. But the next night, lo and behold, we got the same server, and boy whoa howdy was he nice to us.

“As long as people think you have money,” my parents told me, “they will treat you really well.”

“Having money” or klout, or any other type of invisible advantage will always be invisible in your first interaction unless you like to go everywhere dressed like a celebrity. So, like my parents did, you have to telegraph it quickly in every new interaction. Some of these you’ll never get to do. People will see you first as a woman, or non-white, or a poor person (based on dress),  or, if you go there holding hands with a same-sex date, as a gay person, and you’ll have to fight for every inch of respect you get from them.

I could pretend that legislation regarding women’s reproductive choices, or health care in general, don’t affect me. I could pretend that it doesn’t matter whether or not we think non-white people or queer people are, you know, actual people. When it comes to being queer, I’m invisible, being married to a guy, and when it comes to being non-white, well, I’m white, so who cares, right?

But all I have to do is think about what it’s like when people make assumptions about me based on shitty movies and crap TV shows and outrageous, ingrained cultural assumptions instead of pretending I’m a person they actually have to get to know.

And when people talk about why we shouldn’t have universal health care because poor people don’t deserve to be alive, I remind myself that the people who say that are just one health catastrophe away from changing their minds. But  it helps if some of us remind them of that.

It takes a good many people to keep me alive. I recognize that I need to take steps to support them, too, because we’re nothing without each other.  That’s a position I could shut up about, or tuck under a rug, for fear of, I don’t know, angry emails or lost book sales, but let’s be honest here – the people who think women and non-white people aren’t human are probably the least likely to pick up a book with first lines like mine anyway.

I spent a great deal of my life trying to be quiet and nice and not piss anyone off. I was miserable. It served no purpose. And they still came for me. It made me even easier to dismiss, to overlook, to assume I was just somebody else everybody could roll over and spout off ridiculously sexist, racist crap to without dissent. Nodding and smiling gets old. It makes it easier for people to box you up and ship you off.

I’m only really alive when I’m pissing people off anyway.

And  shooting up insulin.

Last night, J. cooked up a bloody rare steak. It was the first rare steak I’d had in a long time. I’ve been known to prefer my steaks mooing. We raised cows when I was growing up. I’m a happy carnivore.

But as I cut into raw, meaty inside this time, my stomach seized. My gorge rose.

I could not eat it.

When one of my dogs recently came home from a cabin getaway in the woods with a massive tick on her ear, my reaction was not, “Oh, cool!” it was “Wow, that’s incredibly gross. Can we get that thing the fuck off right now?” And when we held our other dog down to treat the far more advanced and engorged tick we found on her backside a week later, I spent the rest of the night flinching at every prickle on my skin and scratching at my scalp looking for vermin.

I’m not a squeamish person by nature. I spent nearly two years in Durban, South Africa living in a flat infested will all manner of nasties. I have a “you’re fine” mentality when it comes to blood and trauma. It’s easy, for me, to shut everything down until a crisis has passed and then emote afterward.

But I have also been writing about war, and blood, and bugs, and meaty wounds crawling with maggots for over eight years now. You might think it was the writing itself that put me off dinner. But in fact, it’s not so much the fake war and fake bugs I write about that got to me. It was all the research I did to create worlds that evoked those things in a way that felt squicky enough to readers to be lifelike.

This started back when I was researching my Master’s thesis, and reading transcript after transcript from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. If you want to get easy access to firsthand accounts of atrocities, it’s a good place to start. After that it was Rwanda, and Darfur, and the second World War, then Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and ancient Assyria and Babylonia and then just War in general. So I was reading firsthand accounts of exactly what it was soldiers and civilians did in wartime – and had done to them. I was reading about repressive regimes, bloody gender politics, and then, mixed in with all that, learning a great deal about all the wonderfully terrible things done to us by bugs and infectious diseases before the rise of penicillin. It was one horror and atrocity after another, and though that work was vital for me to go through in order to paint something halfway believable in fiction, it got to me.

For a few years during and after writing my thesis, I could no longer put up with senseless violence in film. At all. I walked out of movies. It was worse when I was living in Durban, where the constant threat of very real violence meant that violence in film was not an escape from reality, or a thrill, or something different – it was just more of the same, only grotesquely, gratuitously so. I felt like nobody actually sat down and thought about what the consequences of that type of violence really were. Torture porn movies that have no interest in examining what it is we become when we commit that type of violence – and what the consequences truly are – held no interest for me. I actively sneered at their creators. Fuck them and their cushy Hollywood day jobs.  What did they know about the threat violence, and sexual violence, in a country where one in three women are raped (and one in four men admit to having raped, often multiple times) and one in three people has AIDS? Screw you, hippies.

Writing about fake grievous head wounds and maggoty stews was a vacation by comparison to reading about the real thing. But even so, eight years of immersive writing and research about all the horrible things people do to each other can get to you. You start to think a lot about power and violence, and if that’s really our natural state (it’s not. It takes a great deal of effort to make people into reliable killers at close range – from a distance, though, with someone else taking the blame, it’s very easy. Which I find quite fascinating) and who we’d be with different social mores and expectations about what violence meant, and what it signified, and what would happen if we severed the strong cultural link we have between violence and power.

But those thoughts are the sort I hash out in novels, on paper, or in my head, and those aren’t the things I see or notice. What I notice is an inability to eat rare steak, an aversion to needless on screen violence without consequence (especially against women), and a revulsion for bugs that’s all together new to me.

This writing biz changes you. The abyss, and all that. But far from becoming “immune” or “desensitized” to violence, reading about real violence done to real people gave me a much more heightened sense of what violence means. It made me think about what we’ve done with it, and what we continue to do with it, how it changes us, shapes us, and how we live with what’s left behind.

If we really want to teach people why going to war is a bad idea, or how torching their neighbors isn’t nice, maybe we should stop harping on video games and actually teach a history class that shows them what violence really does to people. Our squeamishness for teaching the bloody reality of history is what makes us so removed from the violence we support, and perpetuate. We love to show the spectacle, but never the consequence.

My favorite ads before the movies begin are the ones from the U.S. military. It is the perfect venue for them. I watch gunbuilders use Xbox controls to power turrets and I think, “That’s perfect.” Because we, as a culture, have no interest in sensitizing people to real violence. It’s why nobody teaches us about the past, and why we continue to disinvest in education. The less we know, the easier we are to control.

Eat your bloody steak. You’ll like it.

I had somebody complain about my post on The Cabin in the Woods, saying that, yanno, not EVERY book or film needs to be some great feminist manifesto. Not every book is ABOUT feminism, they said.

Which kinda made me wonder if they knew what “feminism” meant.

Cause this is all it is, folks: feminism is the revolutionary idea that women are people, and should be treated as such. Every book, regardless of what it thinks it’s about, says something about what the author and/or characters think about this idea. Sometimes, as in the case of, say, a John Ringo novel, it says it pretty explicitly.

Because let me tell you a secret: every great story is about people, about characters, and if you’re writing female characters who aren’t real people, you’re not writing about people. You’re writing about non-people, about agency-less objects who merely exist to further someone else’s story.

But sometimes the world is SEXIST, people might say. I should be able to show SEXISM, shouldn’t I?

Let me tell you a secret: people who are discriminated against? STILL ACT LIKE PEOPLE. They are still the heroes of their own stories. They make decisions which impact their lives, and the lives of people around them. They have thoughts! That aren’t even about the protagonist! In fact, sometimes (GASP!) these people ARE the protagonist! Even people living in sexist, racist, classist, fucked-up societies are human people with human stories. They are not spear carriers. They are not (usually) zombies. They do things for their own reasons, to satisfy their own ends (and even the zombies have to eat).

And as soon as everybody realizes that – that the people in a story, regardless of their race, class, gender, or whatever fucked up fantastical background you give them – are PEOPLE then stories will get more complex and interesting.  In fact, stories will get (GASP) MORE FEMINIST. That is, they will acknowledge that women are living, breathing, shitting, fucking human beings with quirks, interests, desires, anger, and ambitions that go beyond pole dancing and finding a proper husband.

Feminist fictions should be the norm, the default, the expectation – not the exception.

Because I’m sorry, folks, but I’ve gotta say it – despite what you may think about feminism because “it doesn’t affect me” everything is about feminism, from how and where you were born, and when, to how you were raised, where you went to school, how you learned language, who/how/why you have sex, attitudes and traditions around marriage, how you’re treated by health care professionals, who’s allowed to treat you, where, and even your workplace interactions, how much money you make, who you date, everything, all of it, from cradle to grave – that all involves women and attitudes, laws, and social conventions regarding their behavior. Yes, even if you’re a guy. Because over half the world is, you know, MADE OF WOMEN.

How women are treated and portrayed, and expectations of what women can and should do and how they do it impacts every single aspect of your life, regardless of gender.

So if you think that this ranting I do about the lazy writing in books and film is just for the womyns (only half the world!), or just for the lefty womyns with dried up wombs and advanced leftist degrees plunking out stodgy old papers full of rhetoric that nobody reads –

…surprise.

We’re all fucked by stories that dehumanize people. Those stories make us less human.

And I, for one, sure as hell don’t have a care for stories that do that.

When did journalism go from this:

“This thing happened. Here are the factual details of what happened as verified by our in-house reporter. Here is a quote from someone supporting this fact. Here is a quote from someone who explains how this fact will affect your immediate situation. Here are the facts again. Here’s where you can go to get more facts.”

To this?

“So, wow, someone said something! Here are tweets from random people agreeing with them. Here are tweets random people disagreeing with them. I think that both sides have some great points! One might be wrong, but one might be right! Here is MY opinion! What’s your opinion?”

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where the expectation was that it’d be 60 degrees and raining all the time. This made gardening a pretty easy affair. Most stuff didn’t freeze, and it didn’t get hot enough for tropicals, and the sun came out so rarely that if you skipped a day or two or watering, it was no big deal.

Out here in Ohio, my gardening efforts have been rife with failure. I’ve planted annuals too early in the season, and had them burn in the frost. I’ve planted what I thought were perennials expecting they would come back, and then discovered they were tropical plants (tropical plants! They plant tropical plants in the PARKS here!) that were only good for a season. J. and I recently transplanted our well-nurtured plants grown inside from heirloom seeds only to find them dried and desiccated the next day. It turns out that you need to “season” or “harden” your seedlings before putting them outside, even when you’re past the final frost date, to get them used to the sun. Ours turned white and fell over. It was a little heartbreaking.

Then there was the planting of over 500 spring bulbs. Most of these turned out great, but I planted several things in pots that simply didn’t get enough light, and I had nearly two dozen bulbs that never flowered at all. I’m still in the process of pulling them all up and finding new places for them.

Figuring out what grows here and what doesn’t has been a frustrating process. The time and money wasted aggravate the crap out of me. After the scorched seedlings, I got my old familiar, “Just fuck everything feeling,” the one I get when I make an attempt at something that I feel I should know and then it fails. When I encounter failure, or, more often, a series of failures, that’s my default reaction. Just fuck it. It’s not worth it. Trying and failing just makes me feel like a stupid, worthless human being. So why bother?

After a few hours of fuming, though, I can talk myself down. See, we’re not born with some innate knowledge of how to do everything, despite the old “blood will tell” obsession our culture seems to have. “You got it or you don’t” isn’t true at all. And some of the shit we need to learn is really difficult. Anybody who says something came to them “naturally” is probably full of crap. What they mean is that they had a passion or affinity for something, and enjoyed working hard at it to get better. That’s what it’s been like for me and writing. I didn’t “naturally” pick up a pen and start making sentences… And ya’ll know that it’s still a struggle to plot my way out of a paper bag.

But creating stories was something I enjoyed doing, so despite all the setbacks and rejections and hours and hours of reading, writing, and studying, I didn’t quit. Oh, sure, I’ve come close many times. Especially once the long-anticipated book deal came through. There was an expectation that things would be easier after the book deal, that I could just concentrate on writing stories. But instead, what I realized is that I had this whole other half of the “being a writer” thing to learn – the business side. There were contract negotiations, and payment hiccups, and amended contracts, and cover conversations, and angry fan letters and distribution questions and sales numbers and career trajectories. I already felt pretty stupid as a writer who couldn’t plot or pace her way through 300 pages of novel, and then getting slammed in the chest with the business of writing on top of that was overwhelming.

To some extent, I’ve been able to leverage stuff I learned at my day job as it pertains to marketing and negotiations, but even that knowledge came at a high cost and many failures. I remember getting on the phone with someone I sent a press release to and having her patiently and kindly explain why the approach I took in the press release I sent her was garnering no response. During one particularly trying time doing PR at the day job, I even called an uncle with a background in PR and communications for advice to make sure there wasn’t some magic thing I could be doing that would Fix Everything. I enjoy marketing work because it’s honest about what it’s doing (yes, we would like you to BUY something!), and also because I take delight in figuring out how to communicate thoughts and ideas to specific people or groups of people in ways that really connect with them. It’s fun and challenging. But it’s not “natural” or easy.

After having my second round of French Sorrell seeds die on me, I gave in and ordered seedlings online. I planted them yesterday. My grandmother had French Sorrell seeds sent to her from France and grew them in her garden for as long as I could remember. It’s an herb you don’t see around here much, and it has a particular bitter-lemon taste (as children, we called them “sour leaves”) that reminds me of home. Time will tell if the damn things actually take root out here in a climate so different from the PNW and the temperate soil their species originally came from.

But if it doesn’t work out, I’m not going to give up gardening. I may not even give up on trying to plant French Sorrell out here. Because there are other things that could work. Makeshift green houses, or just bringing it indoors, or changing up the soil or where I’ve planted it.

What gardening here the last two years has taught me – even more than writing ever did – was that failure is always a possibility, but not the end of the world. You just dig everything back up, and you plant it again. Somewhere else. Somewhere more suited.

You do better next time.

When I walked in to watch The Cabin in the Woods, I expected a total subversion of the genre. I was giddy at the idea of taking all the old horror movie tropes and fucking with them. I looked forward to the blonde who wasn’t stupid, the virgin who totally had a bunch of sex, the jock who spent the whole time doing his homework, the stoner who gave up drugs, and the “Other” who got romantically entangled with the blond. I expected everybody to live, to fight back, to overcome the sad sorry story of the maimed and bloodied teens in the woods. I expected moments of incredible heroism.

That was not the movie I saw.

No, the movie I saw wasn’t really a subversion at all, but, in fact, a reinforcement of every cliched horror movie you’ve ever seen. We were filling our primordial need for blood and gore and fear of sex as a sacrifice to the elder gods. Funny, right? Ha ha. But it’s a one-note funny. It’s a one-note idea. It’s lazy. And it’s not enough to make a whole movie out of.

You can’t build a subversive movie by simply reinforcing the status quo.

I’ve had a lot of issues with Whedon in this area since Dollhouse. It’s like because he had one show that was more feminist than other shows at the time back in the 90’s that somehow everything he does must be holy and Good for Women and even if he’s showing us women who are maimed, tortured, beaten, and humiliated for being women that that’s OK because a feminist is doing it.

Um.

No.

You know what the thing is with writing feminist stuff? You need to keep exploring what exactly it is, what it means, and push that envelope further every time. Instead, what I’ve seen is a regression in how women are portrayed and treated in Whedon’s work, and it’s creepy.

I knew I was in trouble during the very opening scene of the movie, when the two guys BEGIN THE MOVIE by insulting women generally. Ha ha, right? Women and their funny women’s issues! You funny womens! The movie’s first line! I want to believe this is a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing like, “Ha, those crazy old white guys and their old white guy misogyny!” But throwing old white guy misogyny on the screen in scene after scene without challenging it or interrogating it or presenting an alternative to it is just… misogyny. Plain old misogyny.

And I realized then that if I was already starting to try and “explain away” Whedon’s misogyny in the opening fucking scene I was doomed. Because it meant that I was going to be trying hard to erase a LOT more misogyny later on. La-la-la-la not listening!

But I couldn’t just put my fingers in my ears and pretend somebody else wrote it. I knew who wrote it, and it broke my heart.

And that was just the beginning.

Throughout the whole movie, the guys are the puppeteers. The guys still get most of the lines. They’re in control. Throwing in Sigourney Weaver at the end for the final fight doesn’t magically “fix” the fact that I just watched a very uncomfortable movie about how men maim and humiliate women in service to their dark, primordial desires/underlord. The scene with all the guys oogling over whether or not the blond’s shirt was going to come off was just… unnecessary. As was much of this movie.

The real tragedy here is that, of course, Whedon is a great dialog writer. He does great characters. It’s funny, and often fun. There are cool moments. But as I watched this movie and laughed along trying to enjoy myself despite the squicky bits, I became more and more uncomfortable with it.

I kept waiting for the big reveal. For the huge subversion. But it never came. In the end, during the one scene where our virgin sacrifice finally has the opportunity to make a choice – she doesn’t make it. A guy takes away her choice. And when she finally has the chance to save herself, a guy saves her. And the blond is still made stupid and dies first, and horribly and in a sexualized way. Just as in the horror movies it pokes fun at, the woman is the only one to die while involved in sex. Are we subverting tropes here, or reinforcing them? What does it matter the REASON that these things happened? If you’re infantilizing a woman “for laughs” or because you seriously believe she’s a baby, you’re still infantilizing her. End of story.

Just as with Dollhouse, I’m not going to slog through episode after episode of a woman being tortured, raped, and infantilized just so you can give her a gun later and say “Hey, see, she’s empowered now! It’s all OK! Guns = feminism, right?” No. It’s not OK. It’s lazy fucking storytelling. You can fucking do better. There are plenty of politicians who would be happy to give women guns so long as they remained barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. After all, they’d need to have guns to protect themselves from rapists when their men were at war, right?

Even the cast outside of the woods was mostly guys. We get one woman. One. Who is eaten like everyone else, of course, without doing anything terribly useful. In fact, much of the time, the guys are beating up on her like everything she’s ever done is wrong. She becomes their punching bag – and she takes it.

I have real problems with pretend-feminism movies. I get angry with lazy storytellers who hand women guns but then ensure that guys are making all of their decisions for them, or hand women guns but then dress them in leather pants and spend half the movie saying sexually explicit things about them, which, of course, the women just laugh or shrug off the way you have to do in real life because they are so polite and women must be pleasant and polite  (because in real life YOU DO NOT HAVE A GUN and superpowers that give you the ability to use it without consequence).

I’ve already heard that The Avengers suffers from some of these same issues, and I admit I expect to wince through those parts. What angers me is when people say, “Yes, but there are so many other GOOD things about X movie!” Yes, there are, but that sounds far too much like the old, “Lie back and think of England” bullshit way that we’ve been encouraged to endure every uncomfortable, humiliating thing heaped on us.

Fuck that.  I am tired of ignoring all the crap, lazy writing people do just because they can also write some funny jokes.

If you are going to subvert tropes, you had better be thinking damn hard about which ones you AREN’T subverting – and thus the ones you’ve also chosen to reinforce. Every choice we make as creators counts, and to see the lazy misogyny that crept into this steaming heap of a movie that was so effing close to being great was incredibly disappointing.

Shorter blurb for this one: LEGION is a stand alone space opera about two feuding families battling for control of a legion of worldships sent out beyond the edge of known space. Not that they know any of that.

A lot of folks talk about different aspects of writing like once you know how to do it, you just do it. But the thing is, if you’re somebody really passionate about writing, it’s likely you want to figure out how to be a better writer. Sure, you can write the same formulaic thing time in the same vague setting and make money doing it, but if that’s not what you’re in this for (if I wanted to make money I’d write romance novels or vampire YA), then “getting better” should be high on your list of priorities.

It’s certainly high on mine.

Some of the pressure of starting a new book after a… well… a sorta critically successful series (I mean, I won an award, right?) is that you want to one-up it. You totally want to wow everybody who read the first series and thought it was Something Crazy Cool. Not just in the plot-and-pacing ways I worked on improving in both INFIDEL and RAPTURE after the rough pacing and plotting of GOD’S WAR, but in the wealth of its weirdness. When I read fiction, I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before. That’s the challenge, for me: creating some place totally unique.

The trouble is that everything is working against you.

LEGION is a space opera. That means it’s really easy to pull on old space opera tropes. It kinda creeps me out that the future we painted of 2200 in 1970 looks a lot like the future we paint for 2200 in 2012. I mean, really, folks? I recently read a highly talked-about space opera that, frankly, sucked. It read like a mashup of a bunch of really generic space games, with familiar family and social structures, dull and expected politics, clunky 1970’s future! technology, and characters I’ve bumped into dozens of times in other places.

I was really excited about this one because I’m stealing the plot. That means I’ve already got a detailed outline and synopsis. I already know all the characters and what they’re up against. But I realized as I sat down to write it that I hadn’t sufficiently done what is, to me, the most important part: figured out the gritty details of the world these people live in. I’m a firm believer in creating characters that really could not exist outside of their time and place. The way we view the world, the decisions we make, even many of our preferences, are deeply influenced by culture and place. That should work the same way in fiction, too.

I’m a big fan of organic tech (surprise) and I’d like to do more with that. The challenge is to think a dozen steps beyond the sentient starships of Farscape or Lexx and at least eight steps ahead of what I did with GOD’S WAR. Nobody wants to see you recycling bugs and magicians and boxing ad nauseum, as cool as those things might be.

When I started painting settings in this one, I kept landing on clean, sterile, environments because that’s what my brain assumes when I say “space opera.” But people living the way this particular legion lives are not going to have an understanding of their environments the same way we do. And they aren’t going to be clean and pretty. They are going to be pretty yucky to us. And terrifying.

I want to take some of body horror from shorter works like Geoff Ryman’s “The Unconquered Country” and Christopher Priest’s “Whores” and build an entire living, breathing galaxy (or perhaps solar system, depending on how one views the Legion)/ecosystem out of them. There are all sorts of assumptions that come from living in a place where your womb literally creates weapons of war, or spare parts, or food, raw textiles, and, of course monsters – the very stuff of life that your people rely on – especially in an artificially closed environment. There are massive economic shifts that will happen with that, big changes to social interactions, community mores and the like that have to be addressed.  When I throw around concepts like this, I’m also really aware of the millions of pitfalls that lie in wait. I know exactly how I could do it all wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

And there is also the environment itself, and how people relate to it. How does your conception of the world change when your world is always on the move? When it always changes? And, since this is a book written by me, how is war waged on these types of worlds? When things are destroyed, what happens? Is that it, or does it regenerate itself? How quickly? Can certain people control it?

And, of course, the most important thing: what kind of people would this type of world create? What are they really afraid of? What do they really want? What do they consider creepy vs. cool? What’s your relationship to your children when you produce them the same way you would a sparkplug?

When my characters start off life in a blank room, I know I’m not quite ready to start. What ends up happening is I write a lot of character-in-blank-room openings until the details start to come out. That’s what my challenge is now. My goal is to become not only a better writer, but a faster one, and in order to do that, I’d like to cut down on the amount of churn at the beginning and end of my writing process. I need to figure out more of how things work – and the gritty details of those  things – before I start working. Thing is, until I started working, I had no idea how little idea I had about what I was getting myself into.

So here I am, taking a step back and sketching things out more thoroughly. Before God’s War, I did this with all my books. But God’s War was a much more organic novel, where I just did a lot of research and then kind of dove in and saw what happened.  This time, I haven’t had as much research time, and I think that’s hindered me. It’s likely back to the library on Friday.

What I really need, of course, is that powerful first sentence that tells you exactly what you’re getting into when you pick up a book. I need “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.”

I’m just not quite sure what the equivalent of that is in this world yet. And until I’ve got it, it’s back to the library.

Well, maybe you didn’t. But I sure did.

That’s why I was pretty stoked to read Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, a solidly S&S novel complete with ghuls, dervishes, shape shifters, monster hunters, and swordfights. If, like me, it’s been a while since you read S&S, you may mourn at the appearance of the novel’s length and scope – right up until you remember that that’s exactly what you used to like about those slim little hack n’ slash novels you picked up at the used bookstore.

Throne of the Crescent Moon follows Adoulla, an aging ghul hunter and his fighting dervish apprentice as they uncover a nefarious plot cooked up by a big, bad sorcerer type that could result in the bloody ruin of their city.

The worldbuilding is strong and lovely, and the book clips along nicely after the initial few pages of introductory dialog. There are plenty of things to love about this book: the strong writing, worldbuilding, clippy plot, easy reading length, monster fighting, but what I loved most was the characters. It was like stumbling upon your favorite street rascal-turned-monster-hunter forty years after the events of the book that gave you his origin story. I see a lot of origin stories in epic fantasy in particular (as opposed to S&S which always has a more mature type of warrior), which means that we often find ourselves reading about characters with fairly blank pasts. They’re all sixteen or eighteen, without parents or even siblings, no children, no real love in their lives beyond the first crush, and they’re… well, they’re relatively still naïve and hopeful about life.

And yanno, you read about enough of these folks, and they can be kind of boring.

This is the story about the guy who went through all that hell and is moving toward retirement. It means he has a far more complex past, a far different view on life and what’s important, and best of all – a lot of stories. One of the most delightful parts of the book was getting these hints about all of his other adventures. “Remember that time when…” stuff that I found more hilarious than I probably should have.

Adoulla, unlike his young dervish apprentice, understands that politicians are often corrupt, and morality can run gray at times. Being forced to make uncomfortable choices that may trouble our sense of right and wrong is a big part of growing up, and watching a kid stumble through that through Adoulla’s eyes was something I haven’t often seen in this type of fiction either. Everybody here (except maybe the Big Bad) is a fully fleshed out character with Issues, including the excellent female characters. One of the benefits of fully fleshing out all of the characters is that it means the women don’t suck either. You will love them all.

I loved how the two younger characters – the ones that the epic fantasy stories are traditionally about – are seen treading the same sorry path that Adoulla and his own sweetheart tread (only a little tragically) much earlier in their lives. Oh, young people, you are so… young. The parallels are great.

If you’re a fan of character-driven sword and sorcery with monster fights and mayhem and bustling cities you can get lost in, this is a book for you.

Before I came out here to Ohio, the whole “cabin in the woods” horror movie cliché thing was foreign to me. I *lived* in the woods. Why on earth would I want to rent a cabin in the woods? And why would I want to go somewhere without a cell phone signal?

But now that I’ve lived in and around cities for the last six or seven years, and since developing a terrible Twitter addiction, the cabin idea started sounding really great.  Half an hour from the nearest town with no wireless internet or cell phone signal? Boy does that sound divine.

The first day we got in, my friend Stephanie spied a note from management that said, “Thank you for visiting our cabins! Please remember that you are in the WOODS. There are BUGS in the woods, and though we make every effort to spray for bugs, you will see some insects in the cabin. It’s important to remember that there are NO refunds for bugs.”

And as night descended we discovered that there were, in fact, BUGS, which delighted my dog-who-thinks-she’s-a-cat to no end. Caterpillars, regular moths, giant moths, june beetles, flying ants, black and orange centipedes, several kinds of spiders, plumes of mosquitoes, and massive deer ticks. The place was not infested, mind, the bugs simply… well, they were merely additional residents, spied occasionally lurking in bathrooms, and riding the wind in from the outdoors through neglected doorways and catching rides on dogs and toddlers alike.

My surprise at the sheer number and variety of bugs, despite having grown up in the woods myself and living in subtropical Durban, South Africa for a time got me to thinking about how easy it is to get disconnected from life outside of both urban and suburbia. We forget about how mundane it is to wash ants out of our hair and pick ticks from our legs or shake out sheets before going to sleep and shoes before putting them on.  These are everyday details that are also easy to forget about in fiction, and it occurred to me that this is likely one reason that so many fictional societies look as cleanly polished as a daytime sitcom.

There are a good many details that go into creating a place. The water out there tasted strongly of sulpher, which, to my palette, actually tasted a lot like chlorine, and made the stuff barely palatable. At night, it actually got dark. I mean, really dark. Deep, black, there-is-shit-gonna-get-you dark, and totally still. In the morning, all I heard was birds (and the happy running toddler, of course). And there was nothing to occupy our attention online. It was all reading and cooking and playing card games.

I see a lot of people fail when it comes to creating places, and I’m not always sure why that’s so. If you can’t afford to travel, you can get all the sense of place you need from reading (good) books about places that are unlike your own. Maybe we don’t read enough and spend too much time watching TV about the same places, so everything we write about has the bland feel of television. Maybe we forget how weird and scary and buggy the world can be. Some of my favorite reactions to God’s War were from people who were creeped out by the bugs. I’m creeped out by bugs, too, but man – how did people who can’t stomach roaches ever live outside? How do you live anywhere but the mythic fantastical scrubbed-street assumption of this particular time and place?

Because boy oh boy, let me tell you – in life, there’s no refund for bugs – and if we’re making real living, breathing worlds, there are likely going to be a hell of a lot of them.

It’s also due to my publisher on April 30^th.

Learning how to balance book marketing/promo/public presence with actual writing has been one of my toughest challenges the last year and change. Add in a day job that’s been very busy the last few weeks (Ok, months), and another manuscript I need to start working on as soon as RAPTURE’s turned in and I’m just about ready to unravel.

So this is just a note to let everybody know that I’ll be a bit incognito the next month-and-change. As of THIS INSTANT I’ve instituted a hard stop on checking book sales numbers and looking for conversations about the books online. At this point, inundating myself with more feedback is just going to get me derailed.

I do this with some sense of trepidation. It used to be that going dark wasn’t such a big deal. I mean, if you got a letter from somebody on the other side of the country every six weeks that was great. After all, what could possibly happen? But these days, dropping off the face of the social web is bad form. Entire internet memes will peak and die in this time. Movie deals will be made. Contracts for fan fiction will be signed. And I fear that when I return, it will be to a landscape far different from the one I left.

That’s how I know it’s time to take a break. Because I need all of the head space I’m using to try and stay hip with the times to finish up the last few scenes and final polish on this book.

I will still be checking in on Twitter, and responding to emails and such, but for the most part, please don’t be surprised to find that in the next month, the only platform I’m on that really gets updated is the God’s War wiki.

Know that I’m not dead or anything, just very busy creating new things.