what we know is true

Work, Work, Complain, Work

Jozzie & Sugar Belle The paperback edition of Jozzie & Sugar Belle is now available! I wish it was possible to do preorders for paper, but oh well. Preorders are live on the ebook editions, it will have to do.

In other news, the Amazing Stories submissions system seems to be fixed, but I wouldn’t submit to them after this whole folderol. Sanford’s Genre Gossip column is a fabulous resource, and Amazing‘s Steve Davidson’s response to his reporting was…well, let’s be charitable and call it “ill-considered”. I wouldn’t trust my work to an editor who behaved that way, frankly. I would, however, recommend Sanford’s column to anyone interested in selling to genre markets, and would even go so far as to recommend dropping some cash in his Patreon.

Anyway. It’s a bright day; there won’t be any rain while running this particular morning. Which is a shame, summer downpours are fun. I suspect, however, there will be bees. Lots of bees. They seem to find my hair as enticing as ever.

Today is also for more Rattlesnake Wind revisions. If I can get those done before the end of the month I’ll count June a win. After that, Harmony revisions need to be done, serious work on comic book scripts and serious wordcount on HOOD as well, and once I get the Harmony stuff crossed off I can shift to prepping Atlanta Bound for publication in October-November and beginning revisions on the next Steelflower book.

Of course, wouldn’t you know it, I look at that mountain and want to crawl into a hole. The avoidance stage, added to bottoming out over the past few weeks, is upon me. The lists break everything up into manageable chunks, and I should just put my head down for a while and work. The trouble is, I keep wanting to glance at what’s upcoming so I can plan, though the plan is already in place, and the paralysis of so. much. to. do. overwhelms me.

The writing is good. it’s the other parts of the process that exhaust me. Except for when a zero draft spikes for the finish and the writing wrings me out like a dishrag. One can’t ever win.

Don’t mind me, I’m just complaining into the wind. There are children to hug, dogs to pet, a run to get in, enchiladas to make tonight, and plenty of work to do. It’s like heaven, and here I am bitching. Sometimes, though, a little bit of bitching makes you appreciate just how good things really are.

And with that, dear Readers, I’m off for a run.

Swim, Surface

Humpback Whale in Body of Water
© | Dreamstime Stock Photos
Last week was rough. I feel like I’ve just breached the surface of a very dark ocean, and am holding myself in tension, taking great gulps of air and hoping not to sink again. I can tell it was bad because I’m slightly shaky, a thin imperceptible tremor running through my marrow. Pouring myself into work to get from one shore to the next always carries the risk of waking mid-current to find myself in a boat made of spellcraft and driftwood (oh, Ged the magician, I’m thinking of you often these days, but mostly Tenar), licking salt-cracked lips and hoping my voice holds out to sing me to dry land.

Mostly, it does. Sometimes, though, the holes widen, and I sink. I don’t even know I’m sinking until I notice the bubbles are rising.

I suppose it was good that least week also involved some enforced rest, sitting in a library and simply reading for a few hours at a time while waiting. “Her days were as long and wide as a child’s…” Nancy Price, in Sleeping With the Enemy, which I reread often, wrote about Sarah reading to distract herself from hunger.

Hunger. Such a funny word, and mistaken for virtue, just like every other socially sanctioned pain to make a woman conform.

…yeah, you can tell I’m not fit for human company right now. I need a run and a book, in that order, but there are revisions due before the end of the month and I’m behind on the comic scripts. The sunscreen has soaked in, I can barely sit still, and my shoes need to be laced.

May we all find the surface today. And may we all swim for the joy of it, instead of struggling to reach land.

Chalk Tangle

Since it’s summer, I can use one of the running routes that goes through an elementary school. I vary my routes constantly, on the principle that my body will respond to exercise better if it doesn’t get bored and (more importantly) anyone watching me won’t be able to tell which route I’m going to choose when–elementary safety for a woman in this society, even one with a faithful canine guard literally attached to her hip.

Anyway, since school let out, I’ve been watching this wall gather more and more chalk. It seems a gentle way to give a message to the world: “Unicorns!”, “Confidence is Power”, “Love is Wealth”, “Valerie was here”.

It makes me happy, so the last time I went by, I had to stop in the middle of the run and take a snap. Miss B, confused, kept pulling at the leash around my waist, so if it’s a bit blurry, my apologies. But you get the idea.

Unicorns, indeed.

Tiny Graces

Yesterday was awful, and now I have plenty to catch up on. I’m happiest when I’m working, I guess, but all the same…I’d like to layabout for a few more days and stuff my head full of fun things. Alas, administrivia and wordcount beckon.

On the bright side, I pulled a beautiful four-shot this morning, and here it is for your delectation. It smelled great, and cut with a little cream, tasted even better. And one of the kids loaded the dishwasher already, so that’s one less thing I have to do. Such little things–a cup of coffee, a dog’s nosing at one’s hand, finding the dishwasher already loaded–make life bearable. When I look to find what makes life worth continuing, it’s the tiny graces that end up outweighing all else.

I wish you a day full of small, beautiful things, my friends.

Khan’s Daytime

Sometimes, Khan doesn’t want to be tucked in for his daily rest. Instead, he half-naps outside the covers, keeping a watchful eye and enjoying the air. I don’t mind, for I know a bear is a wild thing at heart, but sometimes he mutters about needing to be on guard during the daytime, and I get concerned.

He tells me not to worry, for he is a bear of much strength and canniness, as evidenced by his many mighty feats during the Nightmare Skirmishes. He is a bear of much tenderness, too, and doesn’t wish me to be concerned. Perhaps he does just want some air, but there’s a warning glint in his dark eyes.

So on days he wishes to be outside the covers, I take extra care. I check the street an extra time before crossing, I reread thrice before I hit “send”, I drink plenty of water and try to be as gentle with myself as I am with my loved ones. And when I crawl into bed at the end of the day and Miss B hops up to settle herself for the night journey, I hug Khan and thank him.

What for? his eyes say, and I settle him in his usual spot.

“For caring,” I say, and open the book I’m currently reading.

It’s good to care, and to be cared for.

Gifts

Sometimes, you come around a corner at Cost Plus and see the absolute perfect gift for the person you’re going to see later that day, and you do a little dance in the aisle and almost knock over a display of champagne bottles, compose yourself, and snatch the box up with the aplomb of a pirate claiming her share of sweet sweet booty after the battle is done.

The only thing better is when you give the gift, and the recipient starts laughing in disbelief and sheer untrammeled glee.

Of such small things are friendships made.

Peace, Process

Maybe I’ve recovered from the zero draft of Maiden’s Blade, because I’m looking at the sheer amount of revision that book will need and feeling the need to wail and gnash my teeth. It won’t help, and a lot of the work is supplementary materials–character sheets, footnotes, etc.–because if I’m going to do a doorstop epic fantasy trilogy, I need to keep names and character arcs somewhere other than my aching skull. It used to be I’d simply stuff it in my cranial corners, but with going back to piano and all I need all the extra bandwidth I can get.

I also have a book on “the poetics of The Tale of Genji” that I want to dive into, dammit, and I can’t until I bloody well get the zero draft in at least reasonable first-draft shape and sent off to yon patient editor. I’m dangling litcrit in front of my face like a carrot before a donkey, which means I’m much more tired than I thought.

I’ve had a few moments lately where I simply stop and look at things in my house. When I catch myself thinking about old hurts, often my eye will light upon a framed print, a plant, a tchotchke I remember placing with care. The idea that I’m forty-two this year, I’d a dul-gurned adult, and that I have arranged my life mostly to suit myself is still shatteringly exotic. I am hideously, unabashedly lucky. From the Nighthawks over the piano to Rembrandt’s Athena in my office, from the glass apples to the half-burned candles on the mantel, from the glass fishing floats to the statues of goddesses watching over the domicile, from the bookshelves arranged exactly as I prefer them to the books gathered wherever I happened to be reading them, from the knitting on my desk to the Princess’s knitting on the coffee table, from the Little Prince’s playing cards (he practices throwing them, I don’t know) in random places to the rehabilitated plants everywhere there’s enough sunlight to fuel them, my refuge is beautiful.

I suppose every May I think about the price of surviving and the measure of success. I worry that having a place to rest will dull my edge, which is just the hypervigilance talking. I’ve gone from considering just-plain-enduring a single day a success to having larger goals than sheer brute survival. Having those larger goals feels like asking for too much. Don’t push it, all this could vanish.

I wonder what I could want, if I’d been raised by better-adjusted people who actually wanted me. I wonder what I’d consider natural and reasonable to ask for. I wonder who I’d be without the scar tissue. I suppose every survivor does.

Right now I am trying to teach myself that I am allowed some peace, that it is a good thing to have, that my sense of peace is a process so if it breaks I can figure out how to fix it, and that lasagna is not necessarily a hideous miscarriage of perfectly good pasta. (That last one is more of a personal preference than a Grand Life Goal, but I might as well tack it on.)

And Athena, hanging in my office, is neither smiling nor frowning, simply gazing pointedly at my desk. That’s all very well, the Maiden says. But get back to work.

Aye-aye, Captain. Back to work it is.