Going a little quiet

It’s February, so my month of absorbing media and jotting down notes is over. Time to get creative again and get some focused writing done. So things are going to be a little quiet around here, as any time spent writing on my blog is time not spent on comic scripts.

Decent news on the comics production front, though. I finally got organized and made up a spreadsheet detailing where different projects are in the production cycle. I have a new comic, Life Interrupts, at the printer’s right now, so that should be available for sale by the end of the month. And I just worked out a deal with another artist for a short comic called Dandelion. I hope :crosses fingers: to have that completed by SpringCon, on May 15-16th.

Email still reaches me, as always. And I’ll be haphazardly paying attention to Twitter. See y’all in a little bit –

Three unrelated things

1. I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut last night with Cavorter. Or, rather, I watch what I watch 80% of the time — I watch up until the big fight sequence between Roy and Deckerd, and then I fall asleep. I have no idea what it is about that scene, but I fall asleep during it on the vast majority of viewings. Watching it did make me think that, sometime, I want to sit down and freeze frame all the crowd scenes — just to watch the fashion.

The sheer number of images and lines from this film that are iconic is overwhelming. The opening flames jets over Los Angeles, the whole V-K test, the high collars on Rachael’s clothes, J.F. Sebastian’s home . . . Icon after icon spinning by on the screen. Just amazing.

2. I recently got the book Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do). The gist of the book is simple — we learn how to cope with the world by experiencing the world. We learn to handle danger by being taught. Today, as part of school, we did the first project — Lick a 9-Volt Battery.

I was really pleased with the kids. They both did it, though M was very apprehensive. We have drilled them in the dangers of electricity enough that he was worried. And, honestly, it’s hard to hold still and do something you know will hurt. Especially when you don’t know how much it will hurt. But they did it (after I did) and were glad of it.

Now there’s one less thing in the world for them to be afraid of. One less frightening unknown, one less fear lurking in the shadows. Here’s what a shock from a small battery feels like; it’s not that bad. I’m tough enough for this, I know I can handle it.

How many things did you do after you moved out of your parents’ home, that you had no idea how to handle? When did you make your first doctor’s appointment for yourself, by yourself? How do you pick a tax preparer? How do you buy a used car? What does your credit rating mean? How do you get your utilities turned back on? What shoes do you wear to a job interview? Does it matter what kind of job it is? How do you put out a fire on the stove top? How do you pick a safe tattoo artist? How do you know when you’re too drunk to drive? What do you wear to court?

The world is absolutely full of experiences which you’ve never had. Full of activities you haven’t done. For my kids, who are six years old, this is even more true. It’s part of my job to ensure that they experience the world in ways that challenge them, that stretch their abilities and limits, while making sure the stakes are not disastrous in the event of a failure. Yet those stakes need to be real. Licking a 9-volt battery, I can tell you, is not a pleasant sensation. Holding the terminals to your tongue for over a second or so starts to hurt. There’s real stakes there — yet, not damaging ones.

It’s a fine line, figuring out what is an acceptable risk. I look at some of the projects in the book and balk. Yet I did those things. Not when I was six, perhaps, but I had my first pocketknife when I was seven. I climbed on roofs when I was ten. I stuck my hand out the window of a moving car all the time. These were acceptable risks for me. I’m pretty sure that, at some not-too-distant future point, they will be acceptable risks for my kids.

3. We’re off to J’s choir concert in less than an hour. It’s about the Holocaust, songs and poetry and readings from people who survived, and from those who died. I’m fully expecting to bawl my way through it, especially the hopeful parts near the end, about how we can strive to live our lives dedicated to preventing such hatred in our own communities. Feh. I can’t even type about it without tearing up. (Note to self: Bring Kleenex.) Anyway, I need to go get the kids into clean clothes.

2019 isn’t what it used to be

Did you know that the movie Blade Runner is set in the year 2019? Do you realize this is only nine years away? My kids will be getting their driver’s permits in the year Deckerd falls in love with Rachael. I know this isn’t really that shocking. After all, eventually we come to all the years in which science fiction is set. But this one matters to me, because cyberpunk was my first really serious foray into science fiction.

I spent my childhood in fantasy books. Mythology and Narnia led to the Belgariad and Mercedes Lackey. I mean, sure, I read Anne McCaffrey’s stuff — all of it, including the overt romance novels — but I was never much attached to the science of the fiction. I read the Pegasus books because they had telepaths in them. I read the Pern books as if they were straight-up fantasy, dragons and spell-singers. I dabbled in Asimov but it didn’t stick. I read Heinlein, but I read it for the women. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I read but did not notice science fiction when I was a kid. Not until I read Burning Chrome.

“It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.” That line still gives me chills. It summons up the heated stink of a city in summer, baked asphalt and ozone and pollution, and the distant noise permeating the air. I devoured Gibson, then Sterling. It was in the anthology Mirrorshades that I first met the work of Pat Cadigan, the story “Rock On,” and it took me three or four more years to realize that Cadigan was not another guy. But it wasn’t until I read the anthology Future on Fire that my heart was truly won by this dark, painful vision of our science future. Future on Fire got to me for two reasons: First, six of the stories in it are by women. Second, this cyberpunk stuff was hopeful and optimistic.

I’ll wait until you stop laughing.

Okay, better?

I understand your confusion. Cyberpunk is lauded as dystopian, as hopeless. So where do I get optimism from? Context is everything. In the late 80s and early 90s, the Berlin Wall had just come down. Communism was eroding or imploding. For the first time in my life, I began to believe that I might live past the age of thirty; that I might not be killed in nuclear holocaust. The science fiction of cyberpunk showed people living in the immediate next few decades. Living, in cities and towns, making dinner, playing games, earning a living (or failing to do so.) Committing crimes, often unsuccessfully. There was a vibrant, stubborn life in cyberpunk from which I could not turn away. I loved this stuff, with its dirt and drugs and these amazing women doing dangerous things.

The characters in cyberpunk were made of black leather and sweat and chrome, and for all of the deckers’ and netrunners’ insistence that the body is just meat, the stories are full of beard stubble and gnawing hunger and unwashed denim. The stories celebrate the physical world by fighting so hard against it. It was a future I could almost touch, smell, nearly taste. This was a future that could come from 1989, from the guitar licks of Prince, the idiocy of nightly television, the dominance of fast-food chains and their wars, the fabricated unnatural colors for clothes and cars. This was a future I could believe in, a counter to the empty radioactive snowdrifts of the rapidly receding nuclear future.

And this future, it was being built by women in addition to the white guys I had thought wrote all science fiction. I had known that women wrote fantasy books; now I knew that women wrote SF. And what SF it was. Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover.” Connie Willis’s “All My Darling Daughters,” a story that made me re-read it with nauseated fascination. Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love.” Susan Palwick’s “The Neighbor’s Wife.”

This one anthology led me both into feminist science fiction — Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends, Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall, more Connie Willis, Susan Palwick, Pat Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler (it is not an exaggeration to say that cyberpunk is what led me to attend Wiscon, once I’d heard of it) — and into my love of noir films and books. Chandler, Double Indemnity, The Long Goodbye, Phillip Marlowe — all those battered losers looking for the main chance.

I can’t remember when I saw Blade Runner, exactly. After I read Mirrorshades, before I read Mindplayers. I didn’t understand, the first time, that Phillip K. Dick was not writing cyberpunk. I didn’t realize that his work influenced later writers, that his noir-science-fiction helped the later folks do what they did. What I saw was a glorious movie, a masterpiece of mood and tone, light and shadow. I saw hard men and harder women, and people lying to themselves about the location and state of their hearts. After I saw this, after I saw Ridley Scott’s vision of PKD’s hallucination, I envisioned the future like this. Leather trenchcoats and plastic shoes and Asian fast food, nostalgia for a past that never existed combined with an unrealistic hope for the future — nothing but a weary contempt for the present.

This is so adolescent, my god.

“I did it on a dare. The type of thing where you know it’s a mistake but you do it anyway because it seems to be Mistake Time.” (Mindplayers, by Pat Cadigan) In 1987 I was fourteen years old and that line described about thirty percent of my decision-making. I was fourteen and I was wise, oh-so-wise, I assure you, to the ways of the world. I was wise like Walter Neff, I knew the score. I was also an idealist, blazing towards the unknown future that my friends and I would create — we were the leaders of tomorrow, after all. As for the present, well, adolescence is a time to forcibly create who you are, to divorce yourself from your past and family and prove to the world that nobody owns you and you owe no one. Which sounds astonishingly like both Phillip Marlowe and like William Gibson’s Molly.

I haven’t watched Blade Runner in years. I’m thinking it might be time to do so again. To watch it and try to spot how many things in the film have permeated my subconscious and become merely a part of the reality in my head. (Like the fashions Paul Smith put on the X-Men in the X-Men / Alpha Flight crossover.)

I’m looking out my window as I write this and the sun is shining. Plain old, honest sunlight, without looming arcologies. I look around and I see my phone — a technology never quite captured in cyberpunk — and I see the news story about Spirit in its grave on Mars. I kinda like this future just fine, thanks. But I owe cyberpunk an enormous debt. I owe it noir and feminist sf, I owe it the science fiction of gender politics and queer theory, I owe cyberpunk hours — months, honestly — of my life spent in those worlds. I owe it a vision of geek-girl that relied on skill and talent. I owe it a sense of future.

Yes, it’s time to watch Blade Runner again. I might watch it with a beer and some snack-edamame, and give thanks that its cyberpunk future hasn’t come to pass.

Thoughts on the YMCA

One of the YMCA’s we go to has a super-warm pool. It’s therapy-rated, so when we are there on a Wednesday morning there are always two groups of people there — families with very small children, and the elderly. (Often combined into the same unit — grandparents with small grandchildren.) Occasionally, like today, a group of people with developmental disabilities will show up. Sometimes you see a person obviously doing their post-surgery physical therapy.

It’s interesting, and it gives a view of “fitness” that has nothing in common with Bally’s ads. The people I see in the pool at the Y are trying to change what their body can do, not how it looks.

There’s some of this in the cardio and weight rooms, on weekday mornings, as well. Lots of older people, lots of folks who fail to meet conventional standards of attractiveness. I’m sure some of them are hoping to change their appearance. But a lot are there to change their capabilities regardless of weight or size.

I talked about this with a friend of mine recently. He said his fitness program already keeps his strength and endurance up. He maintains a healthy lifestyle. He’s not motivated to go to the gym because his next goal is to change his appearance — and he’s not willing to commit the daily hours it would take to sculpt himself into conventional boy-bait. I understand; it’s a daunting task.

Luckily, I have no such goals. My YMCA goals are 1) for my kids to learn to swim, 2) for the kids to run around each day, 3) for the kids to learn some sports skills, 4) to increase the strength and flexibility in my bad ankle, and 5) to ready myself for the zombie apocalypse.

Now, don’t mock that last one. I know perfectly well that, come the zombie apocalypse or any other society-destroying catastrophe, I’m a dead woman. I need too many medications to live long. But, none of my issues will kill me right away. So I could conceivably live and protect my kids for a few years. (When I’m being utterly and completely honest, this is why I learned to shoot firearms. To save my family after the zombie apocalypse, nuclear holocaust, or plague aftermath.) My ability to protect my kids will be increased if I am stronger and have better endurance. Hence, working out at the Y.

Appearance is . . . a minor consideration. I would be lying if I said it was not a consideration at all — I exist in my culture, and am affected by its images of power and beauty and grace. If I managed to somehow be transplanted into Wonder Woman’s body, I would likely not mind. (Presuming it was not part of a horrific and painful supervillain plot. Then I would object.) But, mostly what I want is increased ability. I am not looking to lose weight or change clothing sizes — I am looking to transform more of my present mass into muscle, and to gain proficiency at using those muscles. I want better wind, better endurance, and better balance.

In other words, I have the same goals as the septuagenarian water volleyball players in the pool at 10:30 Wednesday mornings. Except for the zombie apocalypse bits.

Jekyll

I finished up watching the BBC series Jekyll last night. I have to tell you, I was a tense ball of worry on the couch during the last episode, occasionally yelling at the t.v. I really liked this series.

It doesn’t give anything away to tell you it’s a modernized retelling of the story of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. But that only touches on the intricacy of the tale. It’s horror, and science fiction, and a supernatural mystery. And, over the course of the six episodes, I found I could not pin the show down as to genre or category. This is important, because I use my understanding of genre to guide my anticipation of what will happen next. When I don’t know what genre I’m in, I don’t know what will happen to the protagonists. Or, in the case of this show, to the adorable small children in danger.

The actors in Jekyll were uniformly amazing. James Nesbitt as Tom Jackman and Hyde was . . . he was shockingly good. Just, incredible. And Gina Bellman as Claire Jackman, Tom Jackman’s wife, was a revelation. I love her in Leverage, and she is good in Coupling, but Bellman’s role in Jekyll is a cut above. What starts as a fairly low-key wife role ends up as a dramatic co-lead in Jekyll’s ensemble.

A note on that ensemble. Every single character we meet is not what they appear the first time around. Each actor has a meaty part that grows over the episodes. Each character’s depth adds to the richness of the show’s themes. We meet these people over and over and learn more about them every time. By the end, there are no disposable characters, no people we don’t know and care somewhat about.

Jekyll is written by Stephen Moffat. Moffat has written some of the most memorable, chilling, uplifting, wrenching episodes of the new Doctor Who, the episodes I love. Empty Child, The Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, Silence in the Library, Forest of the Dead — and, of course, he’s the showrunner for the Eleventh Doctor. Sadly for me, a lot of Moffat’s other writing credits are comedies. I really don’t like that many comedies. (I’ve watched the whole first season of the U.K Coupling, and it really didn’t grab me.)

I’m really looking forward to Moffat’s tenure as Doctor Who’s creative mastermind. Jekyll gives you a good idea why. The show is deeply creepy, it’s sparing with special effects, it’s funny, the characters are three-dimensional and real, and the actors are given both great lines and room to run with them. Jekyll is out on dvd now, and is available through Netflix streaming. If you like the creepy and suspenseful, I highly recommend giving Jekyll a chance.

Thursday’s child is full of sleet

This afternoon’s drive to Circus Juventas was full of freezing rain and icy roads. Sub-optimal, I say. But we’re here now, and M has finished his Spanish lesson, and I am watching K’s Globes class.

Globes is the circus act where people walk around on a large ball, juggling. Frankly, the juggling component is not what these kids are working on. They are working on more basic things, like, “get onto the globe.” I mean, K is expected to vault herself onto a moving, rotating object the height of her armpits. She is expectedly to smoothly and gracefully rise to her feet and casually begin steering said globe in patterns with other kids. Vault onto a moving object the height of your armpits is, you’ll recall, step one.

K ends her Globes class sweating, every week.

Speaking of exertion, the YMCA’s homeschool swim & gym class started today. Somewhat to my surprise, *both* of my kids liked it. K liked it, obviously, as there were other people in the class. She also likes learning new physical skills, as they come easily to her. (Soccer dribbling was the gym component today, it seems.) But M also liked it. There weren’t any other kids in his age slot so he got private lessons. And M, who is occasionally problematic is class settings, does really well in one-on-one teaching situations.

Also, he does better when there aren’t other kids around to watch him fail.

The thing is, M has a bulldog tenacity for learning things on his own. But he *hates* looking bad in front of others. I relate, I really do. But this means he screws around in classes instead of trying. He would rather get introuble for goofing off than try and fail in front of his peers.

O my son, let me speak wisdom unto your tender ears: get the hell over it.

You will earn far greater accolades in life by being a good sport, I *swear* to you, than by being a screw-up. Being a class clown and a general fuck-around is only entertaining to others until about age twenty-four or so. If that. And then you have the rest of your life.

Sigh. Think he’ll listen to me? Maybe. I kinda doubt it, but he’s young yet and I can warp his brain a little while longer. But *I* wouldn’t have listened to my advice when I was younger. So I can’t hardly expect him to do so.

New eras, and all that

Yesterday’s house project was “clean the office.” This was mere preparation for today’s project, “install the kids’ computer.” Cavorter did a bang-up job, and got a serviceable older desktop (running Windows 7) set up on the office table. M, having lost his computer and video privileges due to an unfortunate screen-scratching incident, does not have an account yet. But K does.

Setting up a Gmail account for a novice is more work than you might think. There are so many parts to explain . . .

What an internet form is. How to fill it out. What CAPTCHA is, and how to pass it. “Terms of Service.” “Privacy Policy.” Banner ads, targeted ads. Bookmarks. Tabbing through something. Drop-down menus. Buttons. And that’s just to get into a gmail account. Once in, there’s things like address field, headers, the body of the email, sig files, reply, forward, and address books. There’s a lot involved, just to send a one-line email to grandma.

But there it is, and she’s all set up. Later this week we’ll set up Skype.

The thing is . . . The thing is, I want K (and M, eventually,) to be able to manage their own online presence. I don’t want to have to handhold every step. Which means I want them to understand what s going on. I want the kids to be able to make good choices about their internet use and participation when they are ten, or fourteen. I want to teach them the pieces they need bit by bit, starting with “don’t click on buttons unless you know what they lead to,” and moving up to “don’t post drunk pictures of yourself to [insert future version of MySpace here.]“

Email is the first step. Here, this is spam, don’t click on it. Don’t forward things to people just because someone says to. Don’t open attachments from people you don’t know. Don’t click “yes” if the attachment says .exe, unless you know what it means. Ask a grownup if you don’t understand what the computer is telling you to do.

This is how we learn complex things. We start small, we start with something manageable. We build on it and add parts as we gain confidence. I expect that K will want a PopCap Games account pretty soon, and maybe a Flickr. In the meantime she can send emails to her family and adult friends, and start learning the lay of the land outside her front door.

Oh, and I am awarding myself some sort of parenting prize. The first site K wanted to visit on her own? The BBC News frontpage.

LWOP and other things

I got today off of work, which is lovely. It’s also faintly frustrating, because I don’t really have enough leave to take this off with vacation time. I’m taking LWOP, which is a non-guaranteed leave, and isn’t granted ahead of time. So I couldn’t pre-plan this and, say, stay in Chicago overnight with my old friends and fly back today.

But I do have today off, so we have plans to go to the Y and also to clean the office, as well as walking the dogs. At the moment J is taking K to her choir practice, and M and I are watching a MegaMachines episode about the Ekarti Diamond Mine. M loves this series.

Oh, I just got a call from J that she got a flat tire on the way to Unity Church. So perhaps no choir today.

My flights to and from Chicago were good, albeit crowded. I may ask to sit in the window emergency exit row every time I fly alone. Car rental went smoothly, once I figured out where to go to do it. I was inordinately pleased to spend the drive to and from Aurora listening to the all-Spanish-language pop stations, which we don’t have here in the Twin Cities.

Scott’s memorial was . . . It was the recreation of what Club Pseudo looks like in our memories. It was people bringing their best in honor of the dead, and in deep respect for the living. There was absolutely no doubt that everyone wanted Scott’s family to know that he changed lives, and is missed.

It was fascinating to see the depth of talent now-matured. People twenty years older, at the mid-point of careers. Fascinating to see adolescent passion pursued until it is now part of the performers’ everyday lives — just a job, thanks. Performing at Pseudo took the daily mundane use of talent and transformed it into gifts. Gifts of talent and service and humor. I remember, we used to be told — all the time, it seemed, at every convocation or ceremony — that we were the Leaders of Tomorrow. And while the intention was that we would lead in science, math, and engineering, it seems that the school’s vision was overly-narrow. The arts and letters are well-represented among graduates of IMSA.

It was good to see everyone again. Even the people I had trouble placing or remembering — that’s my fault, not any of yours. It was truly good.

Three things from the mind of random.

It’s been a weird week. My normal life is doing normal things, while punctuated by communications regarding Scott’s funeral this coming Saturday. I got the time off of work, I got a plane ticket, and I’m going.

On the way to Circus class this evening I thought of a great idea for a comic or story, then realized I was mentally rewriting the first issue of J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars. So much for that idea . . .

I joined Goodreads this week, you can find me here. I have no earthly idea if I’ll keep up with it, but it’s a start. Feel free to friend me on it, I’ll add you back. Even if I don’t know you particularly. After all, what bad is there in book reviews?

Scott Swanson

No day is good when it begins with insomnia and a splitting headache at 2:45 a.m. I called in sick to work and lay down, trying to get back to sleep. When I did get up, around 7:00, I found out that an old friend of mine had died the night before. The rest of my day was about average.

I hadn’t talked to Scott in years. The thing about a death like this — a friend who was once very close, but isn’t now — is that one isn’t mourning a present loss. One mourns the long-lost past, and the endlessly missed chances of the future.

I miss the Scott I knew. I also miss the kid I used to be. Okay, not so much, really. But they went together, that Sigrid and that Scott. He was my prom date, for pete’s sake — we got along well. I don’t miss the confusion and melodrama of being in high school and college, that’s for damn sure. And I don’t miss the headlong rushes of exhilaration that went with them. But I remember the good feelings as well as the bad, and Scott is in a lot of the good memories.

Scott was argumentative, lord, he was stubborn. But he was stubborn in the pursuit of causes, frequently causes that benefited others. I was unsurprised when I found out, some years back, that he’d spent much of his adult life mentoring others. That he continually found himself on advisory boards or in leadership positions. The man never could shut up, not until everyone in the room understood his point.

In the Dungeons & Dragons campaign we played in for, oh, three or four years? Scott was the paladin. Stubborn, goal-oriented, certain of his path unless he was in the midst of a crisis of faith, brow-beating of others, profoundly empathetic and compassionate — Scott continually over-reached himself in an effort to bring about the world he saw in his dreams.

He over-reached his abilities, sometimes. He over-reached the capacity of those he worked with, pushed until he occasionally pushed people away. He over-reached and exceeded his body countless times, defying the childhood predictions of early death given to him by physicians. Yet the physical problems Scott was born with did not lead him to bitterness.

Anger, certainly. Frustration. But that anger and frustration led to action, not a soul-destroying rancor. Scott didn’t blame anyone for his organs that never worked right, not for more than a few hours of vented fear. He simply set out to made full use of the time available to him. He chose the regrets of action, not the regrets of never-did and never-was.

Imperfect in body, imperfect in temperament, imperfect in action, as we all are, Scott didn’t strive for perfection. He strove for One More Thing. One more day, one more student mentored, one more grant raised, one more friend seen, one more project sparked. Imperfect, yet hurtling onward.

Scott’s motion has come to a rest. It hasn’t been a presence in my life in some time, but I miss it all the same.