Wiscon, and Not Doing the Homework

I’m on a kick of reading a lot of fanfiction.

This is perhaps ill-timed of me. It’s a week until Wiscon, and I always feel that I ought to be reading Wiscon-y books before the convention. You know — works by the hot new writers, works of serious importance, feminist classics I haven’t yet gotten around to reading. Yet, every single year, the thing I am reading in May is about as far removed from Serious Works of SF/F as it is possible to get. This year it’s fanfic. In previous years I’ve been reading the Phryne Fisher mysteries, or Agatha Christie novels, or the history of the Boxer Rebellion, or ANYTHING IN THE WORLD that is not Serious Works of SF/F.

I’m actually beginning to think that my brain is smarter than I am. There’s a piece of writing advice that is very common, which is that to write you must be well-read. A better and more complex version of that is that to write you must be widely read. If you want to write YA paranormal romance, you must read things besides YA paranormal romance — else you work won’t have anything new or different to the genre. You would, in essence, be writing fanfic of a genre. To write, the idea is, you have to read lots of different sorts of things. That those things sit in your brain and percolate, dissolving and recombining in new and interesting ways. And then the things you’ve learned show up, transformed, in your work.

I think this is rather what my brain does before Wiscon.

I always feel, going in, that I don’t know and haven’t read ANY of the things other people are talking about. I listen, and I learn. And, being me, I talk about the things that I have engaged with recently. I bring something to the conversation that other people have not heard or read, in the same way they do for me.

Do I still feel a sense of shame, of Not Having Done The Homework, every year? Yes. Yes, I do. But no matter my intentions, I don’t think I’ve completed my self-assigned Wiscon Reading List in any year, ever.

What about you, my fellow Wiscon attendees? What are you reading prior to the con? Do you feel you have homework? Do you do it? How does this work for you?

.
.

Not actually a spy

As I may have mentioned, my family visited last weekend. Monday I got a series of messages saying that a member of my family had 1) left a laptop at their hotel, and 2) arranged for me to collect it and ship it to them.

This resulted in me driving up to a hotel in the middle of yesterday afternoon, approaching the front desk, and asking for The Item that Dolores was holding for me. Dolores came from the back. I examined the package. Signed for it. I then turned to the front desk and used their shipping services to send the package on to its destination.

I tweeted, during this, that my errands made me feel like Natasha Romonov, aka The Black Widow.

I did not tweet that I felt like James Bond. Fifteen, twenty years ago, I might have. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the only super-spy my brain might have been able to come up with on short notice might well have been 007. I don’t read or watch a ton of spy genre stuff; I only really know what the general culture knows.

Yesterday, I thought of Natasha. Because our general popular culture now has at the very least one badass female super-spy for me to pretend to be while I’m filling out a FedEx form in the middle of the afternoon.

.
.

I renamed this post Burying the Lede

I’m sure something interesting happened yesterday, but I can’t recall it.

1. The baby gerbils are all still alive. The white one is still horribly sick and may yet die.

2. I started rewatching Once Upon a Time from the beginning, because I am a crazy person when it comes to Regina Mills. I recognize that. Please, DO NOT ask me about the show unless you want to be talking to a deranged, profane, fanatic.

3. The weather was cold all weekend, and now it’s hot.

4. Due to scheduling shenanigans I haven’t worked out properly in weeks, and it is making me grumpy.

5. Oh! RIGHT.

The Minnesota Legislature passed marriage equality yesterday. It goes into effect August 1st. I already asked my union rep whether this means my federal benefits could go to J if we got married. He said he’d find out.

I suppose that’s burying the lede a bit, there …

.
.

That was a bit of a weekend

1. The visit from my family was lovely. I like them, they are good people, and it’s nice to get a chance to see them all together.

2. K is learning how to work around her broken finger. It’s on her dominant hand, and she is fairly strongly -handed, so it’s a bit rough for her. But she’s learning. J and I are still working out how things like school and chores are going to go.

3. Work is work-like. The weather is improving, so more and more general aviation pilots are flying. In addition, the photo mission flights have begun. (Aerial surveillance planes, taking surveys.) These flights need to fly very slowly, at fixed altitudes, and can’t be moved. So everyone has to move around them. It’s a bit of a thing.

4. I’m watching the tv series Orphan Black. It didn’t grab me right away, but as of episode four I am invested. Tatiana Maslany is playing at least four characters, women who are clones in a secret project of some sort. There are conspiracies and spies and secrets and all sorts of crazy, and it passes the Bechdel Test constantly, and it has queers and people of color in supporting roles. Also, the show features adoption and fostering in a rightly-complicated light.

Side note, Tatiana Maslany played Ghost in Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, which is one of my favorite movies.

5. Ten days until I leave for Wiscon.

.
.

Everything at once

I don’t normally post on weekends, but yesterday was EXCEPTIONAL.

1. K broke her finger last night, right before the circus show. Her hand is in a splint. She misses the next show, her band concert, and this will affect her first few weeks of the next circus term.

2. The baby gerbils have a respiratory infection. J took them to veterinary urgent care at midnight last night. They may die.

3. Our clothes dryer is not working properly, and may need to be replaced.

4. I found a dead tick on the living room floor.

5. The puppies ate gross things in the yard, the way puppies do, and vomited in the shoes this morning.

Good morning, internets.

.
.

May 10 2013

Happy birthday, J!

Today my family is in town, to see K’s circus show. See you all next week!

.
.

I have no sense of proportion

I can’t tell whether yesterday was a really busy day by some arbitrary standard or not. I have trouble with this, in general — knowing whether something is “normal” or exceptional (for good or ill). So, was yesterday busy? I have no idea.

But, we got the kids up and going, K practiced her instruments, M did his chores and his penalty chores, we went to Spanish class, had lunch, went to Fleet Farm for two hours, got home, laid the last of the dirt, planted, got the hose out of storage, washed up, saw Iron Man 3, came home, got the kids to bed. While taking care of puppies constantly, doing four loads of dishes, and losing only marginal ground to entropy.

The kids got new summer shoes, I got new summer shirts that fit, K replaced her broken carabiner for her backpack, M cleaned up some old and previously-missed puppy pee, I got dog poop on my hands while unfurling the garden hose and scrubbed off, K made her own dinner, M’s ammo packs for his foam dart gum arrived in the mail, we mailed K’s application to the wall trampoline workshops, I email coordinated with my family for their visit on Friday, I had to change clothes THREE TIMES due to dirt, J held the gerbils twice to socialize them, the puppies ate a seed pod, I cooked breakfast this morning and kale chips after the movie, I replied to an email interview –

It’s a perfectly average day off for me. Made easier by the fact that we skipped school and replaced it with gardening.

.
.