Kameron Hurley

So you’ve got….

First Three Chapters of INFIDEL Now Available for Download!

Just dying to know whose head gets chopped off next?

No worries. I’ve got the first three chapters of INFIDEL right here available for download – which includes the first head-hacking scene of the book!

Enjoy!

   Download PDF

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(then go pre-order! Available October 4th! That’s, like, SOON! Note that there will be a shot at some Special Prizes for those who post reviews online in October [good, bad, or indifferent]. More details soon!)

Yes, you’re a racist. But it doesn’t mean you have to be a terrorist.

You’re a racist. Ok?

It’s OK. Take a deep breath. It doesn’t mean you have to be a horrible person. I promise.

Just… listen.

For the most part, I’m addressing white American folks in this particular message, because, you know, I’m white. And American. I get it. I grew up here too, in a white ghetto. But no matter what kind of sticky racist programming we’ve been given, I know we can be better people. We don’t have to be terrorists. We don’t have to fear and condemn and imprison our own people. Because the problem is not at all “the Other” we keep lamenting about.

The problem is “us.”

I’ve been listening to tales of “Homeland Security” (I *always* think “Orwell” every time I hear this term used) detaining innocent people for ten years now. I’ve heard of all sorts of people who’ve lost the ability to even *travel* to the U.S. because of our “Homeland Protection” policies (Ok, honestly, it has the ring of Nazi Germany about it, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that. It comes from the same fear-and-terror place). We lost the bid on the Olympics because the whole world knew what we wouldn’t admit to ourselves – we would needlessly harass, detain, and terrorize anyone who spoke a non-American language, had a non-American accent, wore a “different” piece of clothing (those headscarves sure are scary!), or whose complexion looked like anything darker than what a white person would aquire at a tanning booth.

Knowing all of this for so fucking long, I’m not sure why this story of a woman traveling on September 11th who was detained for NO FUCKING REASON along with two passengers who shared her row angered me so damned much. I became absolutely livid. I couldn’t sleep. I went over the scenario in my head again and again.

I realized we, as Americans, had become everything we hated. We had become the monsters. The police state. Because when Homeland Security takes you into custody, let’s face it – you lose all rights as an American citizen. They can detain you as long as they like. Hours, weeks, months, years. You have no legal recourse. That’s what the Patriot Act did, and that’s what we refuse to acknowledge and take responsibility for. I did this, just as much as you did, because when it happened we were so fearful for our lives and our jobs and our health that we just let the government do whatever it wanted, because it didn’t pertain to “us,” because we blindly believed that, of course, only “guilty” people would have any trouble, right? I ranted about it, sure, but did I sign any petitions? Did I protest the dissolutions of our rights outside of some bloggy screed?

No. And that non-action is from someone who feels so betrayed by this bit of legislation that just thinking about it burns through spoons.

But what I found even worse about this bit of legislation was that there were, in fact, individuals who do actually support it, and whose actions in support of this legislation cause needless suffering in others. The fearmongering, the terror, the abject biases, and outright racism that leads somebody on a plane to point to a vaguely Arab-looking woman and two Indian men on a plane and say “They look suspicious to me” (because they went to the bathroom? Because they were playing on their phones?) digusts and sickens me. It has taken me a long time to acknowledge that the Patriot Act was not some weird anomalous thing done in a vacuum by bizzare leaders. The people who elected them, who put them there, and who sactioned those votes, are the same people pointing to non-white people on planes and saying “PUT THEM INTO PRISON THEY SCARE ME!”

If you’re a white person, you may chuckle along and be like, “Well, you know, folks are just sensitive, and non-white people should understand that it’s just SO SCARY TO BE WHITE” (after all, it’s not YOU who’s going to get pointed to and detained… right?). I would like to argue basic human decency here, but we’ve been so brainwashed into “othering” everybody who’s non-white and doesn’t speak American that I know that’s not going to fly with a lot of folks. Instead, I’ll remind you that in Nazi Germany, it started with the disabled, and the handicapped… then the gypsies, and the Jews, and then suddenly Nazis were invading foreign countries and declaring their populations Other and we were ALL destined for concentration camps.

This is how Othering works.

No one is “safe.” When you attack “other” people, you’re attacking yourself. When you make the world unsafe for others, you’re making it unsafe for yourself.

You’ve become the administrator of your own terror.

Listen, I’m in marketing. I understand we’ve all been brainwashed. When Obama was running for president, my mother admitted to thinking they were talking about Osama bin Laden all the time, because the only tall, thin, dark-skinned guy she was used to seeing on the news was… Osama bin Laden. We’re inundated with messages that Muslims and non-white people are the enemy. Are somehow not American. We live in a racist society, and we have an incredible history of Othering people so we can treat them like shit that goes way, way, back, from the enslavement of African Americans to the decimation of Native American, to the degrading of the Irish and Jews and Chinese and Japanese concentration camps to more modern-day hatred and fear of anybody who looks vaguely Hispanic (“Those lazy illegals are stealing our jobs!” Once again, if the only vaguely Hispanic people you ever see or know are those featured on TV [always “lazy illegals”!] then you’re just screwed. I get it).

I like to think I was doing OK right up until I moved to South Africa for a while. Why then? Well, because every time I turned on the news, or went to a party, I heard about all the horrible things that had happened to people, and I can tell you now that not once did I ever hear of a violent crime committed by a white person. Every single crime featured was somebody non-white. Now, considering 80% of the country was non-white and the vast majority of those were poor, and the old white government had worked very, very hard to promote black-on-black violence (divide and conquer, once again), this wasn’t *really* odd (though there were, of course, plenty of white folks committing crimes. They just got lost in the shuffle). That stuff just doesn’t go away in a generation. And all of a sudden, I noticed I was a lot more leery of groups of black kids walking down the street than I was of white kids. This was bullshit, and wrong, I knew, but it started to sink in, and I fucking hated it. I did spend a lot of time in areas where I was the *only* white person, and nothing terrible happened to me, so I did use these experiences to draw from when I tried to subvert the racism. “See, Kameron, you’re just racist!”

And, this is the thing, you guys. If you want to NOT be an asshole, the first step is to admit you think racist stuff. Just say it, “Yes, I am a racist! I freak out when a man in a turban sits down next to me on a plane or when somebody starts talking in a non-European language! It scares the crap out of me!”

OK? Cool!

But now what?

Now we start the “how not to be a racist asshole 101″ thing.

Because you don’t want to be a terrorist, right? You don’t want to cause fear and terror in others, right? And get innocent people detained for no reason? And throw innocent people in jail?

RIGHT?

Here’s how to combat that:

STOP ACTING ON YOUR RACIST BULLSHIT.

Find some positive examples of the very signifiers that scare the shit out of you. If you live in a neighborhood full of white people who all look and talk the same as you, you have a long uphill battle. If you’re scared to go places where there aren’t (or are very few) people who are “like” you, then it’s time to crack open a fucking book. Go learn all about Islam. Follow some actual Muslims and non-white people on Twitter (and LISTEN to them. Please, DO NOT talk to them at this point. If you’re at this point in your journey, you are just going to look like an ass). Find positive portrayals of non-white people. Go watch Bend it Like Beckham. Study the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. Come to terms with the fact that we have a non-white President, and get to know more about his family. Read books with non-white protagonists. Is it “the gays” who freak you out? While you’re at it, go read books with positive portrayals of gay characters, and non-white gay characters (and as you start to be more accepting and less judgmental, I guarantee you’ll discover that you do, in fact, already know a lot of gay people. If you were actively hostile in conversations about gay people, this is not a fact of life they’ll share with you. It’s the same with your racist bullshit. If people feel like you’re afraid of them, they’re going to be a lot less likely to approach you).

And this, of course, this re-conditioning process right here, is why we need to promote more positive portrayals of non-white  protagonists in our fiction. Because when we’re confronted with racist thoughts and images, there are whole swaths of people who have absolutely no counter examples that they can pull out to combat it.

If you’re convinced that all Muslim women are oppressed, go read some books by Muslim feminists (yes, they exist! I know!). If you’re convinced that all Hispanics are lazy, go read the actual stories from people who worked their fucking asses off to give their kids a good life and are just as American as your anglo-loving self. Go get to know people who are not “like” you, whether because they’re of a different social standing, from a different country, or whatever. Just… ANYTHING that is different from what you’re used to. Half the time people just freak out because they’ve never been exposed to anyone or anything outside their narrow little peer group. If you don’t want to be a racist jerk, you’re going to have to move outside your comfort zone. At some point, you may even be able to get on a plane and travel somewhere besides North America.

The alternative is to become a terrorist. And you don’t want that, right?

RIGHT?

So, push.

I know there’s such a thing as a white ghetto. I grew up in one. I know the media is racist. I know how marketing works. But goddammit, you don’t need to be a fucking asshole manipulated by the media. You have a goddamn brain. You can circumvent your conditioning. We can be conditioned to do any damn fucking thing, including not being racist. You just need to choose to fight it.

Know what I do when I sit down on a plane and a guy with a turban gets on? I take a deep breath, acknowledge any knee-jerk racist thoughts I might have (less and less these days). Because I don’t personally know any sikhs and the media is still all about Othering people who look “different”, I think instead of  the father in Bend it Like Beckham, and what a great guy he is, and how people discriminated against him, when all he wanted was  to get the best for his daughters and play in a cricket league. Is this simplistic? Absolutely. But does it work? Every time. And when I find myself making assumptions about the woman in the headscarf who sits down in a restaurant near me and starts speaking Arabic with her friend, I think of all the powerful voices of the Muslim feminists I’ve read and followed, and I remember that each of us is a complex individual, and assuming anything about her and her choices and her faith and who she is is not at all my place. I put the positive, individual stories ahead of the negative, racist ones I’ve internalized, and slowly but surely, bit by bit, I get fewer and fewer knee-jerk assumptions about people.

And, more importantly…

I don’t fucking call Homeland Security because a couple of non-white guys on a plane are using the goddamn bathroom.

Because I can tell you right now. WE ARE THE PROBLEM, YOU GUYS. Not “them.” Not “the other.” It’s all of our freaky scaremongering crazy that is turning our own country into a police state. We are doing it to ourselves. We are letting divide and conquer work YET AGAIN.

But we don’t have to. We can take positive steps to combat our conditioning. We can do better. We don’t have to be racist assholes who ruin people’s lives. Because whoever these folks were who freaked out on this woman and the men in her row and the 50 other people who were targeted by scared, freaked out people on September 11th just because they chose to GET ON AN AIRPLANE are the actual terrorists.

We are the terrorists, you guys.

And is that really who you want to be?

Free Short Fiction… from the God’s War Universe!

Happy 30-days-to-release-of-INFIDEL day!

To celebrate, I’ve posted two of three short stories set in the GOD’S WAR universe for free here on the blog and hosted in various places. They’re set during all sorts of… interesting time periods, and you can read them in any order, but if you’d like some direction, I’d recommend reading them in the order offered, as they are indeed linked.

(EDIT: I’ve removed Angels &Avengers from this list – it will be out in late 2012 prior to the release of RAPTURE)

Anyhow, enjoy!

Download PDF

View on Scribd

Download from Smashwords 

Purchase on Kindle  

Download PDF

View on Scribd

Download from Smashwords 

Purchase on Kindle  

(Feel guilty for getting something free? I pity you. But if you insist, do pre-order INFIDEL, which ensures the continuation of more fun stuff in this universe )

The Many, Many Faces of Conan, Or: Conan the Schizophrenic

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a Conan fan, so though the trailer for the reboot looked awful, I went anyway – naturally.

For better or worse, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Sadly, much of the badness seemed to come from the fact that the writers couldn’t really figure out what Conan was all about.

I mean, was he a mercenary fueled by money? Or a hoity-toity do-gooder who just frees slaves because it’s “morally right”? You can probably guess my answer to this (and the answer of pretty much anybody familiar with the source material). But for some reason, these guys were really working hard to make him ruled by both instinct and… morality?  

Things seem to sort of happen randomly here, and I got the impression that there was some kind of internal war in the making of this film about who the hell Conan really was. It almost felt like they were going for the “noble savage” thing (popular concept in pulp like Howard’s, offensive as it may be), but you know… Conan is not noble. He is ruled by base instinct and the “Now.” This is, to me, what makes this character so appealing to modern day folks, even though the books are spilling over with sexism and racism and great gouts of poor writing and sneering heads. The appeal of Conan is that he drinks, fucks and fights with no care for tomorrow. Everything is about getting through right now – the pleasure of the moment. For people so caught up in the desperation of trying to ensure a roof over their heads and screaming every time they look at their 401(k) portfolio during shitty times, Conan’s utter disinterest in anything but the pleasurable moment (whether that’s the high of fucking or fighting) is really appealing.   

Yes, there are all sorts of other things Conan is – gratuitous sex and violence and magic and more violence – but at the core of it, I think, the true appeal of Conan for those of us stuck in societies where civil behavior consists largely of sucking up and controlling our natural wants and desires while endlessly plodding along at jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need so we can “enjoy” ourselves in our decreptitude for twenty years of failing health and hospital visits, the barbarian life, passionately lived, looks very pretty on paper (dying of gangrene or dysentery is less interesting, but that’s why we enjoy living it fictionally).

This Conan teetered very close to the edge of that, and very close to the edge of not sucking.  But, well. Yeah.

(SPOILERS AHEAD) It opens with Conan’s birth on the battlefield. His mother – heavily pregnant – has been mortally struck down on the battlefield, where she is fighting. Before she dies, she wants to see her son, so her husband eviserates her with a sword, and poof, Conan is born and his mother dies. Which was a better botched Cesarean scene than I was expecting, but ultimately ill-thought-out. See, later on, Conan notes to his “love” interest that Cimmerian women dress as warriors. Which is cool. But here’s the worldbuilding fail and one of the schizophrenic moments– during the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which we see Conan growing up into a warrior, we don’t actually SEE any women dressed as warriors. For that matter, during the pivotal scene when he’s running out with the group’s other warrior-hopefuls, every single one of the other “warrior” hopefuls is a guy.

So here we have this nice update (because really, if you thought women in small tribal groups didn’t know how to defend themselves, you’re stupid. Hence the recent hullaballoo over the discovery that, in fact, many of the Viking folks buried with their swords were not, in fact, men [as assumed by male archaelogists. If women didn’t know how to defend themselves while the guys were gone, Vikings would have died out pretty quickly), but that update is all hosed up because the rest of the worldbuilding just doesn’t jive with what’s *said.* You can *say* something is true all you want, but until you *show* that actually playing out in your world, it’s just so much talk (remember, your audience comes to a show with their own biases, just like those archeologists. It means working harder to remind people that hey, yeah, really, things are DIFFERENT here).

This schizophrenia continues with our first view of the adult Conan, who randomly decides to free some slaves because “no man shall live in chains” despite the protestations of his partner, who reminds him that freeing slaves doesn’t win them any money or serve any real purpose. But Conan does it anyway, because he is just a moral person (?). 

What?

Anyway, it gave them a chance to surround Conan with some bare-breasted slave girls, so maybe that’s what it was about anyway. If he’d done it to get gold and freeing the slaves was an afterthought, that’s one thing, but since when was Conan all about doing things just because they’re “right”? There is no “right” in Conan. There is only “right now.”

But anyway, the schizophrenia continues when we meet our heroine for this romp, who is in some kind of monastery, all dressed in white like she’s some kind of Vestal Virgin or nun or something. When the bad guys come to the monastery to kidnap her, we find out she’s actually some kind of fighting monk, who is passable with a knife and kicking people.  Trouble is… well, again. Is she a Vestal Virgin or fighting monk? She vacillates between maiden-in-distress and passable-with-a-knife the whole time. To add further confusion, we learn that she’s the last of some bloodline, and is going to be delivered “Home” by Conan (per some prophecy) but we never learn why she was there in the first place, if she even knew her parents or even remembered “home” or if it had any significance whatsoever to her. In fact, she had no real goal or ambitions at all except to go home as her master had decreed would happen via his prophecy. She was, in essence, a blank slate around which the rest of the plot (such as it was) moved. She was, basically, just a McGuffin, and a very badly fleshed out one. It probably doesn’t help that Hollywood is moving more and more toward casting female leads who all look alike. She could have been anybody.

Her non-desires-except-as-dictated-by-plot were also on display when she goes ashore at one point and just randomly has sex with Conan. OK, it’s Conan, I realize we need a sex scene, but there is no lead up to this and no real serious interest given on either person’s part (except Conan’s statement that she looks like a “harlot” I guess, which is apparently as close as he gets to foreplay). It’s just like, “Hey, ship isn’t sailing until morning, so we might as well have sex!” And here’s the deal with that. She’s, like, a Vestal Virgin/Monk, right? So wouldn’t sex be a big deal for her? Wouldn’t there be more angst/talking about it, like “Hey, now that I’m not a Vestal Virgin/Monk anymore I want to get it on” or some crazy lame crap like that? Can she have some kind of desire/motivation for anything at all besides, “Well, you’re here… and I’m here… and the plot dictates that Conan gets some action, sooooo….” One of my favorite scenes in the first Conan was between Conan and Valeria after they’ve had sex for the nth time, and she waxes on a bit about perhaps abandoning the life of thieving and excess and maybe, you know, hooking up for realsies, because she’s gotten envious of those couples would have somebody to come home to every night. And though this could have been a typical she wants to commit/he’s a barbarian thing, it ended up being a nice little moment – she was a hardened thief with a hankering to settle down, you know, maybe. It happens to the best of us.  It gave her a little more depth.

In this one, the female lead isn’t given anything to want or wish for at all, not even a for realsies relationship with Conan, which is never even broached (in fact, it would have been a great conversation where she was all like, “You know, dude, I just want to have some sex! I’m a Vestal Virgin! No strings attached!” and she really meant it). At the end of the movie, he just dumps her off in front of a city somewhere, and she looks wistfully after him.

Eh?

Anyway, there’s a plot in here about bringing this McGuffin love interest to some place and spilling her blood into a mask so she can be possessed by some demon Queen. Ho-hum. Rose McGowan is underused here as the daughter of the main bad guy who’s less than interested in her mother coming back because she feels she’s powerful enough to rule the world with her dad. But, just like our other female lead, she doesn’t really take actionable steps to get what SHE wants. She just says she wants something (which is nice – at least she HAS wants) and then backs off and once again backs dad’s plan. Which is not only lazy, but bad storytelling, because it reduces a lot of tension at the end.

Oh well?

At any rate, Conan cuts off some heads and hands and gets revenge for the death of his father and village (not his mother, this time, as she was already dead). Blah, blah, you know the rest.

In the end, I thought maybe they would do something with the sword stuff they were doing throughout, about Conan not being ready to pick up a Cimmerian sword, and then he gets back his dad’s sword at the end, and revisits his village, and I thought for SURE he was going to put the sword back, implying that he was not yet ready, and giving us something unfinished for another day. But instead he just picks it up and yells a lot, and The End.

And I was kinda left with this weird feeling like, “Um, what did I just watch?” Was this a story about a barbarian, or a do-gooder? A fighting Monk or a vestal virgin? An evil witch child or jealous daughter? It was like they were trying to merge these archetypes into actual fleshed out characters by simply smooshing them together – but it just didn’t work. You can’t take complete opposite archetypes and just slap them together and call it a character. They just don’t smoosh right.  You have to sit down and create real, fleshed out people with real wants, desires and motivations that spring from the world and situations they’re involved in. If you just throw a bunch of crap in willy-nilly to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one.

If I had to guess what happened, I’d guess it was this: trying to please too many people. Trying to make Conan progressive/yet traditional, without having any clue about what drove him or the people he associated with. Trying to make the female lead both a damsel in distress/fighter, without creating an actual person (they even randomly threw in this thief character who didn’t become a companion, just was there briefly, basically said, “Come find me for the climax of the movie!” and then appeared later to break him into a fortress… for the climax of the movie).

And the problem with trying to please too many people is that you end up with something mediocre. During the final epic battle scenes, I found myself kind of spacing out. I realized I wasn’t really attached to any of the characters – not Conan, not the Vestal Virgin, not the witch girl, and not the big bad guy. I just really couldn’t care less about what happened to them, because I wasn’t allowed to be truly invested in their stories because they really weren’t invested in them either. About the only interesting character was Conan’s initial fighting companion, who – again – just kinda showed up randomly throughout the movie instead of acting as a constant. I was more interested in the first 20 minutes of the movie where we’re actually learning about Conan and his world than the other 2 hours or so in which we’re just kind of running around after McGuffins without doing any kind of character work (in some ways, I think pairing Valeria and the thief with Conan helped in the first one, as both were allowed to emote – another good scene is when Valeria and his thief companion try to save him from the wind demons. They are allowed to feel things and be invested in them because he is not – but SOMEBODY has to feel things. Remember when the thief says, “I cry because he cannot?” Pure gold, there).

This is a classic pairing when you want to do a character as unemotional/distant as Conan. It’s like Holmes/Watson. SOMEBODY has to be there for the audience to relate to, or to help us sympathize with our rather unsympathetic lead.  But Conan in this movie just kind of wandered around randomly, sometimes alone, sometimes with other folks, but with no constant, nobody with any drive, and certainly nobody I could care about (again, the closest being his warrior-second, who was really underused throughout).

To sum up, no amount of schizophrenic storytelling will make us love a Conan who is not even fleshed out well enough to be truly loved by his cardboard companions.

Ignorance & Lies: Why I Hate Going to the Doctor

When you have a chronic illness like mine and you go to the doctor – any kind of doctor, really – you inevitably get The Lecture.

I am a type 1 diabetic. This is an immune disorder that hit me 5 years ago when I was 26. Basically, it’s triggered by some kind of event that convinces your white blood cells that the cells in your body that produce insulin are now Evil and must be eaten. Over time, your body ends up eating all of them, so you no longer process sugar anymore. Eventually, your body starves to death, because the blood cells no longer receive sugar (food). Most people who get it are kids. It’s rare to get it after your early 20′s, but it happens. And, importantly it is NOT the one generally linked to high carb diets and lack of exercise – you know, the one that’s ALWAYS in the news and so everybody thinks they know about (people are just as woefully ignorant about that one, yet I still find myself enraged when they mistake me for a type 2 and assume I will just “get better” someday)

In fact, I make no insulin. Not a lick of it. I have none. Give me 24 hours without a shot of synthetic insulin, and I’ll die. And unless somebody figures out how to reprogram my white blood cells to not attack my insulin-producing cells, I will never get better. No amount of diet or exercise will ever “cure” me.

Them’s are the bald facts. It sucks. It’s unfortunate.

What this means is that no matter how many miles I run, pounds I lose, or how much medication I take, I still won’t produce any insulin.  I will still not get any better.

Got that? OK?

It is also a chronic condition. That means that it will eventually wear me down and kill me, because even if you’re living on eggs and cheese, your blood sugar is never going to be 100% “normal”. Oh, you can get it pretty close if you test about 10 times a day and never, ever, ever deviate from an eggs-and-vegetables diet, but any amount of strong exertion will send you low, and one mistimed or incorrect dosage of insulin could send you low or allow you to get too high, and when your blood sugar gets too high, it slowly starves and damages all your nerves and organs.

A normal person’s blood sugar is about 80. Your body’s always going to regulate your system back to 80, unless there’s something hosed up. When I was wheeled into the hospital five years ago, passed out and vomiting, hallucinating about little black dogs and how I should be doing my taxes in May, my blood sugar was up over 800. For nearly a year beforehand, nobody knew what was wrong with me. I mean, after all, I was an otherwise healthy young adult who ate right and exercised! Surely all the weight loss and exhaustion and infections and blurred vision and urinating and thirst and extreme hunger were just due to stress!  (my non-diagnosis was just the first step in my extreme distrust of doctors)

Anyway, after 20-30 years or so of irregular sugar numbers, your body just starts to fail.

So…. yay!

But what’s often most aggravating about chronic illness (really, any chronic illness, let’s be honest) is that nobody fucking understands how it works. And especially not how it works for me.  

BUT THEY ALL WANT TO TELL ME HOW IT WORKS ANYWAY.

I am so often confused with a type 2 – and, worse, an uneducated type 2 – that I try very hard never to use the word “diabetes.” It inevitably leads to lectures.  As if I don’t know that vacillating sugar numbers are bad for me. Like I don’t know my feet could get chopped off or I could go blind due to overly high sugar numbers.  Like I don’t stick to a stupidly low carb regime and exercise routine to mitigate these effects as best I can.

When my eye doctor asked me yesterday what my lowest low and highest highs were ever (no, she is not a new doctor. I have been there 3 times. And I always get THE LECTURE), I told her I’d been anywhere from 22 (after miscalculating the carbs in a croissant in Spain – I’m more insulin resistant in the morning [like most people], but my internal clock was still on evening, so when I dosed myself the way I would in the a.m. for this carb count, it was too much. I saw black spots and nearly passed out) to 435 (that was an unfortunate night in which my 2 a.m. sugar check alarm didn’t go off, so I missed a correction, which can be dangerous after eating pizza – this is one food I allow myself very rarely).

Are these numbers generally what I’m at ALL THE TIME? Of course not. My lowest lows are usually in the 50s and my highest highs in the 230s. On average, I’m clocking in at about 130. And that’s with regular (planned) exercise, low carb living 6 days a week, and testing my blood sugar 5-7 times a day.

But my eye doctor was shocked (shocked!) that my sugars vacillated between lows and highs like that (ever!), and decided to give me the usual lecture about how eventually I would go blind and have my feet chopped off if I didn’t control my blood sugar, and even though my eyes looked fine, you know, diabetes is a chronic illness and EVENTUALLY YOU WILL DIE HORRIBLY.

Oh, she said it much more nicely than that, with a very chipper smile on her face. And I just nodded my head sagely like it was the first I’d ever head of such amazing things and she knew what the fuck she was talking about. Then I proceeded to lie to her about my numbers the rest of the session.

I wanted to see her work out her diet and exercise and insulin calculations for two full days, let alone five full years, before she started telling me how crazy it was to have a 242 number at 2 a.m. after eating nothing but green beans, chicken, and sugar-free whipped cream mousse for dinner (hint: all the fat in the dairy makes it slow to process the carbs both in the dairy and the rest of your meal. So you may go to bed with a number of 90 and four hours later, ta-da! You’re at 240. The same thing happens with pizza, which means that if you want to eat a lot of it, you have to test your blood sugar and dose yourself with insulin every 2-3 hours or so for about 10 hours if you don’t want to hit that 430 number. Yeah, eating is tons of fun!). Yes, I have learned everything I have about how I react to carbs, certain foods, different types of exercise, and how the time of day affects my insulin doses through very hard, frustrating, scream-worthy, world-raging trial and error.

BUT OBVIOUSLY EVERYONE ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE KNOWS MORE THAN I DO ABOUT HOW TO MANGE MY ILLNESS.

I had surgery earlier this year, and the surgeon insisted I call my endocrinologist for “special instructions” about how to manage my blood sugar before surgury. She gave me strict instructions not to take ANY Novolog insulin that morning, and to take half my dose of Lantus (my 24 hour basal insulin). I knew she was full of shit. When I get up in the morning and start moving around, my blood sugar can jump anywhere from 60-80 points in an hour. It just… does.  Which is why I generally take a half dose of Novolog at 6:30 a.m. on weekends to correct for this spike (even if I’m not going to eat until 9am. On weekdays, I just dose immediately upon waking for breakfast, planning for a breakfast and a.m. workout routine which is always exactly enough insulin to cover 10 carbs). But, trying to be a good little patient, I followed her instructions, and sure enough, come surgery time, my blood sugar was at 160 and then 180, and they were watching it intently, because if it gets above 250 THEY DO NOT OPERATE. So I was in a holding pattern for another 30 minutes to ensure that my sugar was holding steady and not continuing to go up.

Needless to say, that’s the last time I contact my doctor before a surgery. I already knew exactly how my body would react.

But anyway, ignorance aside(I know! You’d think that was the WORST PART!), here’s what really fucking pisses me off about going to the doctor (and when you have a chronic illness like mine, you’re expected to go to the doctor at least 5-6 times a year – 4 times for your endocrinologist, once for the eye doctor, and once for the podiatrist. This is so you can get MAXIMUM lecture time).  What really pisses me off is people telling me how horribly I’m going to die. I’m tired of hearing about blindness, and kidney failure, and congestive heart failure and cataracts, and nerve damage, and amputation, and all the fifty bazillion things that are MOST ASSUREDLY GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME EVENTUALLY.

It’s like, you know what? What the fucking point is there going to the doctor if you’re just going to DIE HORRIBLY ANYWAY? And I swear to fucking hell, if I have to have one more useless appointment where it’s like, “Well, your A1c is fine, but it could always be better! You know, so you can put off having your feet amputated another year or two!” or “Well, there’s no sign of nerve damage… yet!” I think I will fucking punch something.

What the fuck is the point of this? Why am I spending my money to hear all about how I’m “not dead horribly… yet!” And “Yep, still got a chronic illness!”

I am never going to get any better. It’s never going to go away. I’m never going to be able to “get off” my drugs if I want to survive to tell of it.

It will not get better.

So why the fuck am I paying people to tell me how horribly I’m going to die so they can illustrate that they once read an article about how much it sucks to be a diabetic?

You know, if I was a type 2, there would at least be SOME KIND OF CHANCE that I could possibly wean myself off my meds after aggressive lifestyle changes as prescribed by my doctor, but as a type 1, THINGS ARE JUST GOING TO GET WORSE. And yes, thank you, doctor, I KNOW THEY ARE JUST GOING TO GET WORSE NO MATTER WHAT I DO AND THAT IMPROVING MY SUGAR NUMBERS IS SIMPLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE. It’s just a matter of how fast they get worse.

I am so fucking sick of paying people to tell me what I already know.  

Sometimes I feel like they are giving me these lectures every time because, to them, it justifies me coming in. I mean, what else are we going to talk about? “Yep, things look fine!” is just not going to cut it. They must prove their usefulness. So it becomes, “Yep, things look just fine… but EVENTUALLY HERE ARE ALL THE HORRIBLE THINGS THAT COULD HAPPEN.”

Thank you, doctor. I had no idea!

Afterall, I am just an ignorant little bauble head. I never even read a book! Let alone wrote one!

It was really, really hard to stop listening to what doctors told me. You see somebody in a white coat and you assume they know everything. It’s not true. In fact, 90% of them know less than you do about your own illness. There are some good ones, yes, and to be fair my current endocrinologist always tries to be helpful, and has been the best I’ve had for actual lifestyle suggestions (like switching from vials and syringes to pens – this was nice), but for the most part, people are just woefully ignorant, all of them operating on the same knee-jerk assumptions or six-year-old article they read about how you should eat a balanced diet full of carbs if you want to control your blood sugar.

Yes, seriously.

At any rate, that’s why I hate going to the  doctor.

What Little Kids REALLY Learn from Cinderella

The One-of-a-Kind-Bad-Ass-Woman…. Or the Strong Woman Circus Freak?

Many of my recent fictions are about the dynamic of how to be a strong woman among strong women, and what society and its individuals look like after we’ve already crossed over from the “one! kickass! woman! in! the! world!” place to the “OMG assassins at my door! Yes, of course they’re women!” place.

Note that is not necessarily a BETTER place. But it is a DIFFERENT place.

And that is where my interest lies. Because a world in which that is an assumption is a much different world than ours.

There is no longer any “singular badass woman” in my recent fiction, unlike some of my earlier dabblings with epic fantasy. She tends to be one of many, just like the old feminist SF of old, and a lot less like today’s Urban Fantasy with its singular gifted woman.

There are plenty of real-life examples of female fighter pilots, revolutionaries, war heroes, boxers, martial artists, innovators, heroes, leaders, and spies. But when we talk about them, still, we pretend that those particular stories of women are extraordinary. We celebrate their uniqueness. We trot them out like remarkable circus freaks. We make no attempt to normalize them. When I spoke with one of my academic advisors back in Durban about how I wanted to look into the role of women revolutionaries because so little was ever spoken of them, he scoffed and pointed out that women had always been a part of war. Even Shaka Zulu had an all-female band of warriors.

But what specialized academics in particular fail to see, so often, is that the popular cultural narrative is not one of women warriors and female empowerment (strip tease cardio classes aside). When you turn on the TV or listen to the radio, you’re most likely to hear about men making decisions and doing things and women having things done to them. This is still the case. When your most powerful governments and corporations are chock full of guys (when, indeed, men own the majority of the world’s wealth and certainly our nation’s news outlets), it’s highly likely they’ll be the ones making news. Powerful women are still more likely to make the news due to some fashion faux pas or the fact that their husband got caught dicking around with some other woman.

We do not have a cultural narrative of female power in the way that our culture values power (childbirth is loooooads more powerful than money or movie deals, but we place very little value on it because, well, women do it). In fact, the narrative is largely one of female disadvantage and disempowerment, often to such an extent that I have to turn the news off for fear I’ll get discouraged about my chances of not being raped or killed or sexually humiliated because I was born a woman – stories about women that make the news are, quite often, stories of rape, abuse, cheating, murder… or pregnancy. Because “women” only get into the narrative by virtue of what’s been done to them or who they’re giving birth to, right?

Oh, sure, there are plenty of examples to the contrary – always those Singular Women who are trotted out to prove that All Women are not painted with the same brush… just those whores, you know. There’s Oprah (who, of course, wouldn’t be Oprah without the constant churn of interest in her weight, love life, and abusive past), various other female celebrities (always spoken of in terms of how hot they are, how they lose weight, what they’re wearing, or who they’re sleeping with – very rarely purely in terms of talent), and oft-cited “women now get 56% of all degrees so this must mean men are disenfranchised!” (without noting that, in fact, the difference is a little over 100,000 degrees, and women make up 52% or so of the population, so getting a little more than half of all degrees is certainly nowhere close to the ravenous female hordes of degree-stealing blondes that such terrified proclamations seem to wish you’d envision).

But anyway, all this crap just kinda got to me after a while. I wrote a lot of angry, venomous posts here a few years ago about just these issues, and I still get worked up enough to rant sometimes. But after a while, you know what? All that talk about how shitty it was to be a woman got to me too. I started thinking, “Shit, man, it really sucks to be a girl. I hate being a girl.”

And you know what? That’s bullshit. It sucks.

I wanted to imagine something better. Where me and women like me weren’t victims, but active agents – in our own success or demise. We were the ones doing things, not having things done to us.

I was tired of talking about how shitty things were, because it ended up being at the expense of how powerful people could be – it drowned out all the good stories of how we could make or break worlds.

We needed to highlight the good stories. Yes, we need more good stories, always – but MORE than that, we need to actively promote the good stories. It’s the sensationalist crap that bogs me down. There are plenty of people writing about rape culture, and domestic abuse, and power, and yes, sure, I’ll comment on that stuff sometimes. But when I sit down at the keyboard, I’m not here to imagine a world exactly like this one where I’m getting constant messages about how much it sucks to be a girl.

I want a different narrative.

And oftentimes, if there’s nobody else promoting or creating that narrative, you need to be the one to do it.

Remember When Fantasy Books Were AWESOME? Thoughts on The Cloud Roads

Remember when you were 9 and or 10 or 12 and you stayed up until all hours reading your favorite fantasy novel? Remember that strangely comforting feeling of slipping neatly and completely into some other place and so totally embracing the story of another person that you were engrossed until the sun came up? You remember that sense of awe and wonder when you encountered fantastic peoples, creatures, vistas?

Oh, sure, I enjoy reading now, to a point. Mostly, though, reading is drudgery for me, filled with lots of interesting but in-need-of-help first novels (including my own), and lazy writing, and plot holes, and all those other clunky things that jerk me straight out of a story (no matter how engaging) and fling me back to planet earth. I didn’t experience that much when I first started reading the genre, but after a while, you read and critique enough stories and you start to see all the crappy holes in them, and it sucks the enjoyment right out of the story.

I’d heard Martha Wells had some new fiction out, and being a fan of her book City of Bones, I decided to go ahead and check it out (also, we now have the same agent. Once again: my agent has such good taste!).

I had some trepidation, initially, because I knew this one was about a flying shapeshifter, and the last “weird” book I read with a flying hero was Steph Swainson’s Year of Our War, which – despite the interesting world building – I hated because the main character was a whiny, drug-addled and totally uninteresting person. So I had my biases going in about what was going to happen with some flying loner guy.

I should not have worried.

The Cloud Roads is the story of Moon, a shapeshifter (again! Not exactly one of my favorite things to read about in my fiction, due to how overdone it is) who is uncertain as to what kind of creature he truly is, as he has encountered no one of his kind before. He exists in hiding in his “groundling” or non-flying form, which more-or-less allows him to mix with other types of groundling races of – literally – all colors, types, stripes, and creeds. Because all the races are so different, and there are so many, he is not seen as too terribly out of place – unless he shifts. Because when he shifts to his flying form, he reminds others of a disturbingly violent race of baddies known as The Fell, who make it a habit of eating groundlings and destroying their cities.

One of the things this book does well is paint a picture of that classic odd-kid-out who’s used to being betrayed and bullied, and has grown up his whole life not only knowing he’s different, but knowing he will be actively hunted and possibly killed for it. I’ve heard some folks say that this would be a great YA book, and I can’t disagree with that. It’s a story about finding your place in the world, and the heartbreak of losing everything you love and trying to trust people again. This whole concept could have gone over syrupy-sticky, but instead, the way the protagonist, Moon, is presented was terribly sympathetic without being sticky. It reminded me a bit of how Robin Hobb’s bastard boy was introduced in the Assassin books – someone who simply ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and crapped on by everybody else because of how he was born.

Though Moon is pushing 30-something, his race is long-lived, so the fact that he is emotionally still a bit of a child is understandable – it doesn’t help that he’s never had to socialize with his own kind, and has a lot to learn.

Moon does eventually bump into his own people, and discovers what he is, but the road to get there isn’t exactly the one you were expecting. What made this book really work for me was that it challenged your expectations of family groups and social structures (oh, PLEASE, guys, give us more books beyond the hetero family pairing!). Moon’s people are socially complex, and the Big Bad that the plot hinges on actually has to do with selective/forced breeding for particular powers (not the nicest thing in the world, and especially not nice after you’ve gotten to like all the characters).  Moon himself is also incredibly well-drawn in a way with a bit of a uniquely unreliable narrative turn involving his refusal to trust others.  This makes him not just wary of betrayal, but expecting it at every turn. It means that when he tells you what he thinks just happened in a scene… well, you learn quickly not to believe a word of what he says to you about what someone’s motives are. That said, his caution is sometimes dead on, and saves some folks from disaster. It is this – his resourcefulness and survival instinct – that really made me respect him.  He is a little heartbreaking, and broken, but instead of that being a turnoff to him as a character, it makes your heart ache, because – for many of us – there’s that place inside where you will always feel like the outsider, unloved, like everyone’s going to betray you, and you start to cheer for Moon and hope for the best for him, even as he tries so very hard to just expect everything will fall apart.

This is a lovely book, with strong worldbuilding and sympathetic characters. The only real critique I have is that, for me, there were almost too many characters to keep track of toward the end (the folks involved in fighting the Big Bad are numerous, as in the end, his entire new adopted family comes under attack). Aside from that… well, really, I don’t finish a lot of books these days, and few of them are so seamless or engrossing. And none have tapped into that adolescent love I used to have for fantasy fiction so strongly as this book did.

Highly recommended.

By the Numbers: Earning Out the Advance on a First Novel

When I got my offer for GOD’S WAR, I was woefully ignorant of exactly how many copies I needed to sell to earn back my advance, or how to track those numbers. Every writer’s situation is different, so it’s hard to glean any data from other folks online – even the few who are willing to talk about it. Looking back, it would have been smart to simply ask my publisher or my agent directly, but nobody likes to look like a n00b… So there was a lot of worry and gnashing of teeth.

I had managed to find a book numbers post from exactly one author, and her advance was far larger than mine from a bigger press, so it wasn’t really useful for somebody like me with a book from a small press. The runs are smaller and the numbers I need are different. So I’ve mainly been sitting around gnawing on my nails for months waiting on royalty statements to see just how screwed I was writing a feminist science fiction novel with far too much religion and billions of expletives.

I’ve been running in professional writing circles since I went to Clarion in 2001. That’s… well, that’s a decade now. And though I’ve sold some short stories, this was the first experience I had with publishing an actual book of my own. I’d heard a lot of horror stories about never earning out your advance, about selling just 26 books in 6 months, or 300 books over four years. The thing is, every book has a different breakeven point. The advance for Fight Club was a whopping $2k. I’m sure Chuck Palahniuk is still laughing about that, though it wasn’t funny at the time.

When GOD’S WAR launched, I had access to Amazon’s Author Central, which gives you your Bookscan numbers for books. Bookscan says it reports about 75% of sales – but libraries, book clubs, independent booksellers, and most e-books don’t show up here. Still, it’s supposed to give you an idea of about how well your book is doing in a given week. This service is actually more hinderence than anything else, though, because there is, in fact NO ACCURATE WAY TO TRACK YOUR BOOK SALES NUMBERS outside of a royalty statement. The fact that it’s so incredibly difficult to get ACTUAL, real-time updates on what your publisher sold (why don’t publishers have an author dashboard of some sort that streams this data?) is… batty. But anyway.

I did some math before GOD’S WAR launched, and figured that if I was getting about $1.20 a book (my royalty on paper books), I needed to sell about 5,400 books in order to make back the $6,500 advance I got for GOD’S WAR (minus my agent’s 15%, then minus 30% in taxes, etc. Whatever, yes: if you think you will immediately retire on your first book check, you are very wrong. Luckily, running in writer circles as long as I had, I already knew this, so it was not hugely shocking to find that 5 years of work had made me a little over $1k a year… to start). For somebody with bigger, scarier numbers to earn back, your initial check looks much nicer, but I expect that your trepidation is much higher as books hit the shelves.

Believe it or not, I was really terrified about needing to sell 5,400 books. Again – feminist SF, new author, etc. If we could sell 5k over the next few years, well, that would be nice. I honestly expected we’d sell about 3k. My ultimate hope was that we could clear 10k. It was just… that kind of book. And again: I knew enough writers to know that I needed to be realistic, especially with all the economic weirdness going on.

Right before I got my royalty statement for summer, Bookscan said I’d only sold about 2,000 copies (at best) from January to August, and the way your numbers generally work is that you get your biggest push up front, and then they dwindle off into nothing (barring some big movie deal starring Michelle Rodriguez, Isaiah Mustafa, Gina Torres, Vin Diesel, and… what? Oh, sorry). So I went from selling 100 books a week in February to 20 books a week now (says Bookscan). It was looking, to me, like I’d be lucky to earn out my advance in 2 years (two years being the generally accepted time in which I could earn out with any hope of ever getting a contract again). Which was sad, but hey, I figured I could start another marketing push with INFIDEL and that might help get the GOD’S WAR numbers up.

When exactly I would get around to finishing the actual writing of book three while doing all that, I don’t know, but you do what you have to.

So you can imagine my surprise when my agent emailed a couple weeks ago and said I’d already earned out my advanced and was, in fact, owed money for GOD’S WAR.

I honestly didn’t believe this. How on earth was that possible? Had I magically sold 2,000 ebooks (which I get higher royalties on), or what?

When the royalty statement came, I boggled a little at the numbers.

Who had BOUGHT all these books?

According to the statement, I’d sold 5,968 paper copies of God’s War and 521 electronic copies and had not only earned out my advance, but was owed a check for over $1,500 (which works out to having made $1,600 per year of work on the novel. I’m rolling in it, folks! ROLLING).

So I was busily hopping up and down until some other writer folks pointed out to me that this first statement was BEFORE returns.

Yes, that’s right: bookstores often return 25-50% of the books they buy from your publisher. So though my publisher reports that I’ve sold 5,968 paper copies, odds are good that a quarter of those will come back, and I’ll end up -$200 or so in the hole. Which, by the next statement, I will hopefully have made up. That’s why you don’t actually get your first royalty check until nearly a YEAR after your book comes out… it gives bookstores time to return your books.

Yup.

BUT STILL.

Even if I end up with some wacky 50% return rate, that’s still more books sold than Bookscan reported – the same Bookscan I’ve been obsessing over since February. When I went back and looked at some other authors’ thoughts on Bookscan, people were saying that it could report as little as 30%-50% of sales (so much for that 75%).

So, if I learned nothing else, it’s to just fucking ignore Bookscan and bide my time for the fucking royalty statement, as nutty as that may make me. I had known this on a rational level – I knew I should only check Bookscan for a general idea on how a specific marketing channel went, not for actual numbers, but Bookscan being Bookscan, I gave it a lot more trust than I should have.

This is pretty good news for the future of GOD’S WAR and INFIDEL. It’s not runaway crazy success talk, it’s just sort of-did-OK success talk (which may not sound sexy but tends to be more the state of things in the publishing world than those $1M advances and 500,000 print runs you see in the news), which means that if anybody wants to see book three, RAPTURE, we should still move a few more copies.

It won’t hurt, folks.