Cyborg Identities: Haraway and Beyond | Fri, 9:00–10:15 pm | Senate A | #Cyborgidentities
Moderator: Sunny Moraine. Participants: Scott E. Gould, Andrea D. Hairston, Lettie Prell, Micole Sudberg

Donna Haraway famously argued that cyborgs transcend science fiction and enter the realm of feminist theory — that we are all cyborgs, transgressing identity boundaries and binaries and, in so doing, recreating ourselves. But many of the most powerful explorations of cyborg identities are still found in SF. What does SF tell us about ourselves as cyborgs? How can we make SF into useful social theory (and can we at all)? What are the implications for politics and power? How can we draw connections between fiction and political non-fiction? Like all cyborg transgressions, is the line between fiction and reality more porous than we often like to think?

When “Love Your Body” Isn’t Enough | Sat, 10:00–11:15 am | Senate A | #LoveYourBody
Moderator: Debbie Notkin. Participants: The Rotund, Jackie M., Kiini Ibura Salaam, s.e. smith, Sunny Moraine

“Love your body” is the hot trend in empowering catchphrases intended to connect people with their bodies and put them back in control, but what happens when it’s not enough? How does it exclude people don’t love their bodies and are struggling to figure out where they fit in? What kinds of structural inequalities are people perpetuating with an exhortation to “love your body,” and how can we change the way this phrase is used?

Roleplay and Identity | Sat, 2:30–3:45 pm | Caucus | #RoleplayIdentity
Moderator: Lisa Blauersouth. Participants: Kurt Ellison, Katherine Olson/Kayjayoh, Talks-with-wind, Sunny Moraine

Many of us use cosplay and tabletop, live-action, and computer role-playing games (RPGs) to explore our own identities and/or that of “the Other” (for many values of “other”). How can these experiences of roleplay help us to expand our understanding of ourselves and the world? At the same time, how can we address examples of roleplay that are exploitative or simply perpetuate stereotypes? And how do we keep ourselves from falling into this?

Outer Alliance: New Writings in LGBTQ SF/F/H | Sun, 1:00–2:15 pm | Conference 2 | #OuterAllianceReading
Participants: Julia Rios, Julie Andrews, Megan Arkenberg, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Catherine Lundoff, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Sunny Moraine, Cliff Winnig

Outer Alliance is an organization for writers and readers of science fiction, fantasy and horror that advocates positive portrayals of LGBTQ characters. We will be reading from a wide range of fiction that fits this description.

And I still don’t know for sure what I’m reading aaaaaaaaa

Been out of the game for a couple of weeks, finishing a book and defending a dissertation proposal and wrapping up a course. Back now. Have stuff.

• Why you dislike singular ‘they’.” I am so fucking sick of people complaining about how it’s grammatically incorrect, or it’s too clumsy, or they just can’t be bothered. Sack up, motherfuckers. Also my sister has some knowledge to hit you with:
  

  I wrote a linguistics final on this: plenty of fluent adult speakers naturally produce “they” as an indeterminate gender pronoun to avoid using the clunkier construction “his or her.” not only is it transphobic bullshit to say third person plurals are grammatically unacceptable, it’s linguistically incorrect.

  BOOM.

• “Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation.” On Time’s awful awful awful Millennial cover story.
  

  Basically, it’s not that people born after 1980 are narcissists, it’s that young people are narcissists, and they get over themselves as they get older. It’s like doing a study of toddlers and declaring those born since 2010 are Generation Sociopath: Kids These Days Will Pull Your Hair, Pee On Walls, Throw Full Bowls of Cereal Without Even Thinking of the Consequences.

• “The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform.” It’s things like the recent discourse around MOOCs that make me seriously wonder whether I’ve made a huge mistake going into academia and whether maybe I should just toss in the towel and leave the country once I have my PhD rather than watch this institution that I love shit all over itself and die.
  

  Since educating fewer students would therefore cost money, in effect—and it would also cost money to fully staff the necessary courses—there is no solution to the problem that does not require spending more money on chairs, classrooms, and teachers to teach them. MOOCs enter the picture, then, as a kind of fantasy solution to this unsolvable problem: instead of addressing the problem by either admitting fewer students or adding more courses, we will define the problem differently: chairless classrooms! Everyone is happy.

• “Star Trek Into the Endless War On Terror.” This piece is fabulous.
  

  Khan is blowing up Starfleet because they used him and manipulated him to built a war machine capable of defending against people like Khan. Self-justifying, perpetual war machines are what we have come to expect from governments. Even if you are defending the war, you have to justify this “new kind of war” by describing and identifying an enemy that demands a war of ambiguous lines and endless horizons. Talk about policing, intelligence, boots on the ground, or peace-keeping missions but don’t question the need for constant intervention. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek might not be the Star Trek you want, but it is definitely the Star Trek America deserves.

• “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults?” Really good response to a recent blog dialogue that questions whether sexual ethics based entirely around consent are a universal good (spoiler alert: kinda, yeah.)
  

  My generation doesn’t treat consent as a lodestar merely because consent permits pleasurable sexual activity that more traditional sexual codes would prohibit. The ethos of consent is regarded as a lodestar because its embrace is widely seen as an incredible improvement over much of human history; and because instances when the culture of consent is rejected are superlatively horrific. The average 30-something San Franciscan has had multiple friends confide to them about being raped, and multiple friends confide about participating in consensual BDSM. Only the former routinely plays out as extreme trauma that devastates the teller for decades.

• I’m interviewed in the current Outer Alliance podcast, along with an all-star lineup of folks, about the acronym QUILTBAG and the idea of “metrosexual” and current SF awards. It’s fun.
• Finally, a thing by me: “Distant droning murmurs” – a reflection on the issues raised for me by Murmuration, a June festival of drone culture.
  

  Need is by definition a loss of power. And in as much as a drone is a cultural node, it’s a node of political and social power, equally capable of surveillance and lethality, technically exact but inscrutable. A shifting, endlessly accommodating idea isn’t especially trustworthy. But maybe we want to trust. Above all, we want everything to be recognizable. We want to be able to understand.

  What I think may be most terrifying about drones – at least to me – is the prospect that they might ultimately be beyond understanding. But we’ll see what Murmuration can do.

Rihanna and M83 have made a beautiful baby.

But today I’m back on the writing horse, so of course I’m putting off doing any actual work on anything with a blog post.

I’ve talked a lot about my writing philosophy, and even some about how my personal stages of novel-writing work, but I’m not sure that I’ve really outlined the details of my particular process. So, to that end, here’s how I usually do what I do.

1. Open up current project and stare at it for a while.
2. Wander off to mess around on [Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter/current pan-fandom RP game]
3. Go back to project and stare at it some more.
4. Write a few sentences. Maybe a paragraph or two.
5. Scroll back up to where I mentioned some esoteric detail that I need in order to continue but which of course I can’t remember because I refuse to make in-depth notes on worldbuilding/plot/characterization because I’m not all that bright.
6. A few more sentences.
7. More staring.
8. Vanity Google search.
9. Become irritated with book blogs that refuse to give any space to my currently available books.
10. Do nails.
11. Sudden massive output that brings me up to about half of my minimum wordcount for the day.
12. Reward self with more messing around on [Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter/current pan-fandom RP game]
13. Check time and become anxious.
14. Frown at nothing in particular.
15. A few more sentences.
16. Jump at excuse to look something up.
17. Get distracted and stroll through Google.
18. Vanity Google search.
19. Drag self out of Google and back to project.
20. Make use of thing just looked up.
21. Worry about whether it’s being used correctly and whether anyone will notice and/or care if it isn’t.
22. Decide that probably no one will and even if they do I’m not all that sure that I care very much.
23. Check Amazon rankings for my currently available books because I refuse to internalize everything anyone has ever told me about how meaningless Amazon rankings are because, again, not that bright.
24. Check Goodreads reviews.
25. Become annoyed at Goodreads reviews that are stupid and written by people who are clearly correspondingly too stupid to appreciate my work.
26. Check [Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter/current pan-fandom RP game]
27. Vanity Google search.
28. Write a few more sentences.
29. Be struck by inspiration for a fantastic blog post. Spend about twenty minutes writing it.
30. Vanity Google search.
31. Check time again and become very anxious about how many other things need to get done today.
32. Tear through remaining wordcount.
33. Forget everything I’ve just written.
34. Reward self with lunch and/or [Tomb Raider/Skyrim/Dishonored/whatever other game has currently eaten my brain]
35. Spend rest of the afternoon on [Tomb Raider/Skyrim/Dishonored/whatever other game has currently eaten my brain]
36. Engage in period of self-hatred regarding everything that didn’t get done today.
37. Repeat the next day, ad infinitum.

So that’s it. It works fabulously. Truly it does.

I’ve been publishing SF for almost half a decade now, but I still feel like I’m only just figuring out what the hell I’m doing. Therefore, it always makes me slightly uneasy to put myself in a position where I’m giving anyone else advice about writing and how to do it – both the mechanics and the practical elements – and even more uneasy when I’m talking about definitions of anything. and I’m sort of intrinsically uneasy with categories anyway. Given all of that, please let me go into this with the caveat that this is just my understanding of a thing, and it shouldn’t supersede anyone else’s understanding of a thing that may differ from my own.

All that said, I think “how do you know you’re a writer” is a very interesting question to consider.

I’m not sure when I first started thinking of myself as a writer, but I know that I was long before I started getting stories published in places. What changed is that I started to be more comfortable calling myself a writer, and doing so in mixed company. What I wrote for a long time before original fiction was fanfiction, and I think most of us know and would agree that fanfiction is still verboten in many circles, and a thing to be looked down upon. And I don’t think that’s entirely fair.

I do think it’s fair to call fanfiction a different kind of writing from original fiction in a number of fundamental ways. Those differences are subtle and not necessarily clear across the board – as with any system of categorization I think we need to leave room for a lot of boundary-shifting and liminal space – but I do think they’re there.

Different is not worse than.

So what does a writer write? I’m pretty much with John Scalzi on this one:

A writer…chooses written words, and chooses them not just for mechanical and practical reasons, but for (or also for) esthetic and artistic purposes. Writers want to write, rather than have to write. In presenting an idea, the medium they intend for it to be in is the written word.

Intent is what matters here, to my mind. Not publishing – necessarily – and not whether you’re writing with characters you made up. I think insisting anything else is categorical gatekeeping, and I’m not really a fan of that practice because it makes our collective world smaller and narrower, and therefore less fun. It also makes it more hierarchical. Hierarchy is generally bad.

So besides intent, what – in my estimation – makes someone a writer? Here are a few things:

• A writer writes. Doesn’t talk about writing. Doesn’t want to write (and stop there). A writer does the thing they’re called, and does it with little fanfare, because it’s the thing that they do. If necessary, a writer makes sacrifices in order to write. They make time. For a writer, the practice of writing is important enough that they organize at least a little portion of their life around making it possible to write. You have to do the thing that you’re called. Otherwise I – and most other people, especially writers – don’t buy it.
• A writer wants to write, but is willing to write when they don’t want to. This one is tricky, but I do think it’s important. If writers are people who actually engage in the act of writing, then writers also recognize that any practice is work. It’s craft. Simply waiting for the perfect moment when you feel ideally inspired doesn’t cut it. If it really matters to you, it’s something you’ll carve out space for when you sort of don’t feel like doing it today. That doesn’t mean one can’t and shouldn’t take vacations from it, but it does – again – mean that it’s important to have an explicit understanding that writing is work, and it’s not always going to be a completely joyful, effortless experience. Along those lines:
• A writer is constantly trying to be better at their thing. This doesn’t mean beating yourself up for not working up to your own high standards, and it doesn’t mean working to the point where you lose all joy in writing. It just means that – again – writing is important to a writer, and so is doing it well. Writing for the pleasure of it is an important thing – perhaps the most important thing – but anything that’s worth doing is worth doing as well as you can, even if that ends up being not very well by most people’s standards. A writer doesn’t have to be a good writer to be a writer. But a writer should at least be interested in being the best writer they can be.
• A writer reads. This may actually be the secret behind doing any of it well: if you want to write, you have to make time to experience the writing of others. You have to have interest in it as a craft outside of just what you produce, and that means reading and studying how others have done it. What to do, what to avoid. What you find important and what you think you can safely ignore. Styles and themes you may want to try and things that don’t appeal to you as much. You can’t pull this stuff out of nowhere. You have to go out there and learn. Reading is a never-ending master class. Take it.

So. I think that’s what a writer is. And I think that someone who does all of those things consistently has a better than average shot at actually being a pretty decent writer, too. Going to go back to John Scalzi to close this thing out:

You’ll know when you’re a good writer when your craft is good enough that you don’t worry about whether you can do what you want to do with your writing, and instead you wonder about how you’re going to do it. You probably won’t notice the first time this happens. When you do notice it, it probably won’t be a big deal. You’ll be more focused on the writing.

Addendum: My friend Natalie from Radish Reviews points out quite rightly that I’ve neglected nonfiction writing here – a major oversight on my part, since so much of the writing that I and my friends do is nonfiction. So let me just say that I think all these rules apply there as well: You try to write consistently and you consistently try to do it well? Congrats, you’re a writer.

As to why nonfiction writing and the work that it requires often gets excluded from discussion like this, I think that’s a topic owed a post all to itself.

~

Writing SciFi is fun for a lot of reasons, the world building, the aliens, doing research on orbits and nebulae on Wiki at 4am, but one of my favorite parts of writing L&O was the characters we spun out.  I’m astonished by the awesome feedback we’ve gotten.  It seems like a lot of people really enjoyed our cast, which, not gonna lie, makes me want to preen.

The last time Sunny asked me to guest blog, I talked about what it was like writing with a co-author.  In the initial stages of L&O’s development we each wrote predominantly from one character’s POV (I started with Lock, Sunny with Adam), and over time we became more fluid and switched back and forth, and added a number of other POV characters to the mix.  Because of our history with RPing, the characters were the most important part of story development.  The plot and the world building were only interesting if we had fleshed out, three-dimensional individuals to live through it.

So, I still feel odd doling out advice about writing, given that I am at this moment sitting hung over on my couch in my grad student apartment, but! I guess everyone starts somewhere.  Here we go:

1) Your characters lived entire lives before your story started. They had childhoods; maybe they fell in love at sixteen, maybe they worked the same shit jobs for thirty years and retired, maybe they peaked in high school, or in their golden years.  They’ve had experiences that have led them to your story, but they also went through the mundane aspects of life.  Presidents and pickpockets have both probably been frustrated by traffic, we’re all tied together by the little moments of boredom.  I’ve found it really helpful to keep those histories in mind, and not just the huge, defining moments.  It’s easier to write real, solid people when you have a firm grip on their humanity.

2) Your supporting characters are important, don’t let them slip by. So you’ve got your stars developed; they’re vibrant and well-imagined and they play well together.  Most stories, however, have more than two players, even if they won’t get a lot of screen time.  Skimping on their development or letting them get replaced by cardboard cutouts is tempting, but ultimately draws a lonely picture for your stars.  Being the only interesting people in the galaxy must be exhausting.  Our supporting characters in L&O are the reason the book was so fun to write.  Sunny and I both had moments where we said “This person has SUCH an awesome story, we have to figure out how to tell people about it.”  So, for anyone looking foward to sequels and/or missing scenes, be ready, we’ll probably have a few treats coming out soon.  Anyway < / promo >, treat everyone in your story like a real person.  It’s so much more fun that way.

3) Have more insight into your characters than they do. I’ll be the first person to admit that I’m not as self-actualized as could be.  But, the vast swath of humanity isn’t either, so I figure I’m doing okay. So, this one basically means “Show, don’t tell,” which has been said a hundred times and bears repeating. Show, don’t tell, show, don’t tell.  A lot of fiction is written in limited 3rd person, so the reader is experiencing things through one of your characters’ eyes.  You show five different characters the same thing, chances are they’ll see it five different ways.  Using your characterization to flavor the narrative’s perception of things can be a great way to subtly bring out some of your characterization, even when the character thinks they’re looking at events impartially.  And, when your POV character is going through internal turmoil, it can make a huge different to lead the reader through what they’re thinking, without stating “He felt guilty.”  Your readers are smart, they’ll get the picture.

4) Don’t write a plot and fill it with characters. So, this one is my biggie tip.  When you write something plotty, it is easy to get caught up in whirlwind of planning; how you’ll make the stark beauty of the landscape tangible, where you’ll leave cliffhangers and red herrings, weave involved storylines into something exciting and complete.  But, all that planning can fall short of something excellent if the characters are left as avatars that exist only to advance the story.  Your novel could easily start with you imagining an awesomely climactic scene, but to treat the whole story as motions that deposit the reader there probably won’t be so successful.  If you have your plot in mind ahead of your characters, it’s important to sit down and decide what kind of person you need to create that will achieve all the goals you’ve laid before them.  They need to have the right temperament, the right motivation, and you should know what about their lives has made them into that person.  Even if you don’t include every detail of their life and motivation in the writing, having it in your head as you lead them through the obstacle course of your plot will make their reactions and motivation far more genuine.  In essence, the plot should be driven by your characters, rather than a maze you cast faceless individuals into.

I hope this was helpful!  It was fun to write, even if trying to break down how I do characters into bullet points was a bit of a challenge.  Mostly, have fun with it.  Talk to yourself.  Write silly side stories for your own amusement, if only to see how your cast handles themselves in all and sundry situations.  Treat them like your crazy friends who make you want to pull your hair out because, ugh, Christ, how did they end up in this situation again?  Characters are, well, characters.  They can be weird and quirky and, like in the real world, they’re what make life more interesting.  Have at it!

The Orbital Antares rocket at the Wallops Flight Facility in VA. We were there for the launch yesterday, which was unfortunately scrubbed.

So things sure happened this week, didn’t they?

• Whitney Erin Boesel seriously questions whether images of tragedy belong on something like Vine.
  

  One might argue that this self-repeating aspect makes Vine a powerful tool for reporting, but just because Vine can be used this way doesn’t mean it should be used this way. And Vine definitely shouldn’t be used this way without careful reflection about what it means to put six violent seconds on infinite (and infinitely circulative) self-repeat.

• And I expand on her points with a bit of a meditation on the nature of trauma.
  

  Vine is only the latest, purest iteration of something familiar. Our experience of eventfulness is now the clip, perhaps more even than the still image. A few moments of something, repeated over and over, widely shared and everywhere you go. It’s a feeling of tiny saturation. You may not even notice it as it’s happening. But here’s the thing about the momentary clip, about event-as-seconds: It isn’t memory. Memory involves the incorporation and understanding of a past but also the mediation of a present and the imagination of the future. Memory is what we move through in order to get somewhere else.

  A vine has no past, no future. A vine is a moment without a memory.

• Gawker asks “Is the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk Who Fucks Pigs?”
  

  The back-to-back focus on innocent people of non-European ancestry could imply that the Post is systematically hostile to nonwhite people, and that the paper’s editors are so wedded to the notion that all Muslims are terrorists that they literally do not care which Muslim or “Muslim-looking” person they happen to be targeting on any particular day. We are not saying that Col Allan, motivated by bigotry, is intentionally trying to use the Post to stir up hostility against Muslims. We do not know that Col Allan is a racist. The evidence may suggest that he is a racist, but we are not saying that Col Allan is a racist.

• “Let’s be honest about Kermit Gosnell’s abortion ‘house of horrors’.” Why the whole “cover-up” thing is sort of maybe bullshit.
  

  Troy Newman, a pro-life leader and the president of Operation Rescue, is among the loudest voices sounding the Gosnell alarm. He’s also talking about how Gosnell is a gift from God to the pro-life movement. What Gosnell is accused of doing in his clinic is horrifying and illegal, which is why he’s on trial. His illegal acts are no more an indictment of safe, legal abortion than one child-molesting doctor is an indictment of all pediatricians. But pro-lifers like Newman are glad Gosnell exists, because they can use him to tar all abortion providers. These are the folks who want abortion to be dangerous, gruesome and unregulated. Of course they’re thrilled that they finally found a real villain.

• “Gitmo Is Killing Me.” Read this. If you read nothing else linked here read this.
  

  I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone…There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

• “One Narrative Fits All.” Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is kind of problematic you guys.
  

  Just as ads of yore leveraged the attitudes that made women feel bad about their looks in order to sell products, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty leverages the response to those attitudes in order to sell products. It allows for exactly one way that women can feel about our looks—bad—and creates a template for women’s relationship with their looks that’s just as rigid as the beauty standard it’s challenging.

• “Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement.” Okay, but what’s really remarkable about this is that an economics PhD student is going out with a sociology PhD student.
  

  Herndon was stunned. As a graduate student, he’d just found serious problems in a famous economic study — the academic equivalent of a D-league basketball player dunking on LeBron James. “They say seeing is believing, but I almost didn’t believe my eyes,” he says. “I had to ask my girlfriend — who’s a Ph.D. student in sociology — to double-check it. And she said, ‘I don’t think you’re seeing things, Thomas.’”

• “Living the Dream.” Writing for a living is hard. It’s hard even after you get to the point where you can do it at all.
  

  There’s an inspirational quote that gets passed around, usually misattributed to Confucius:

  “Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”

  I’ve got a job I love, and I’m gonna come out and say this quote isn’t just wrong, it’s so fundamentally opposed to the state of “rightness” that if you put it together with a true quote, you’d create an explosion powerful enough to rip open spacetime and devour Kalamazoo.

  I love being a writer, but if you try to tell me it’s not work, I’ll send goblins to eat your feet.

New Daft Punk makes everything okay.

So something that I and my co-author will be doing in the next month or so is pulling out some of the scenes that were cut from the final edit of Line and Orbit, dusting them off a bit, and posting them here for your reading pleasure.

The scene below is actually a huge chunk of what was chapter three, before chapter three became the segment that introduces us to Lochlan and Ixchel. It should be understood to take place directly after the scene in which Ixchel reads Lochlan’s future. It’s significant in that it’s actually the scene that was originally supposed to introduce readers to Kae and Leila, whereas in the final cut Kae and Leila are introduced only after Adam arrives on Ashwina.

It also features Lochlan being his cocky, promiscuous self. And Kae’s full, glorious name.

For those concerned: There are no major spoilers for the plot itself. If you haven’t read or haven’t finished reading, do not fear. Enjoy.

~

Dancing kept back the dark. It did more than that: it celebrated it, moved through and with it. Bideshi legends went back as far as the days of Terra, before the great self-imposed exile that had sent them out into that endless night. Back that far and even before it, there had been dancing. Life in motion and motion in life.

Kae leaned back against the bar and watched the dancers, who were washed with strobing lights of every color in a thousand nebulae as they spun. Once he had danced like that, leaping, turning, undulating a body that was still deciding what it was trying to be, winking at the pretty girls and playing the clown for the favor of a smile. He still danced now, but it was less common. He was older, stronger, settled within himself and settled in his life, married and thinking about the things that came with marriage. Tied down, Lochlan would have said with a grin and a jab of his elbow. She’s got you under her thumb, Kae, friend of my youth, Sucked you in and trapped you.

And Kae would laugh and jab him right back, because it was true.

So now he watched the dancers, the beautiful young Bideshi practicing their own brand of magic. A drink was sweating into his hand, a smile pulling at his lips, until a touch on his bare forearm made him turn.

A woman leaned in to press a slow kiss to his jaw and he turned his head and slid the kiss into fullness, until she smiled and pulled back again.

“You weren’t at our table.”

“Someone else took it.” He curled an arm around her waist and pulled her close. She was strong, built for grace and speed like the fighter she was, and the way she fit against him had been one of the first things that had pushed desire over into something much deeper. “Besides, it isn’t ours, Leila.”

Leila laughed, backstepping him towards the wall where there were rows of other free tables. “Sure it is, sweetness. You carved our names into it, remember?”

Kae caught up with her, something like chasing in the movement. “I remember.”  Together they picked a table and settled. Here the music was softer, but they could still see the swirl of bodies underneath the lights. “I couldn’t believe you were with me.”

“All you flyboys.” Leila reached up and combed her fingers through Kae’s short-cropped hair, just a touch of mischief in her eyes. “You voel. Maybe I just wanted to see for myself that you hadn’t all gotten yourselves killed. What about our fine and feathered friend? Wing-brother Lochlan? Is he still alive and kicking and tormenting his elders?”

Kae chuckled. “He was missing today, you know. Ying said she was going to ping him to bring him in.”

The music crescendoed and the dance floor dissolved into hollers and whistles, clapping hands. The band was breaking down their set, instruments handed off as the next performers carried theirs to the low stage. Sweat-slicked dancers laughed and shoved themselves to the bar, vying for the barkeep’s attention.

“We should dance,” murmured Leila, looking out at the floor with that mischief still sparking in her eyes, something distant under it. “Let’s dance, habibti.”

“We can’t dance without music, habibi.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She shot him a look and swiped at his hand.

“So in a minute, then,” she said, and just then the floor erupted with noise.

They both turned, and out of the corner of his eye Kae saw Leila’s hand flying to her hip where her jambia was concealed under layers of scarves. But it was happy noise, slightly ironic noise, clapping and cheering. As the crowd by the door parted, the object of the swell of attention moved forward, lifting tattooed arms and waving as though it were an honored guest, some triumphant hero back from battle, having completed daring deeds and won much fame.

Leila rolled her eyes. “Speak of the devil. I do believe I see his horns.”

“Be nice to my friends, habibi.” Kae‘s smile was edged with sympathy as he stood and waved. The figure appeared to spot them and hurried over.

“Kae Sasha Yokohama Kanesh Muhammad d’Bideshi,” Lochlan said, dipping his lean body into a bow. “Honored wing-brother. It’s good to see you looking well. Is your life still unbelievably boring?” He straightened up and grinned toothily. “And your lovely wife. Krasivaya.”

“You’re ridiculous,” said Leila, before Kae could speak. “Sit your ass down and be quiet. The grownups are talking.”

“You’ll find me quite grown if you’ll test me, lady.” Lochlan took a seat, still grinning. “Seriously, Kae, it feels like years since I was here. Never thought a ship so ugly could look so good.”

“You didn’t have to screw and steal your way through the entire western arm,” Kae said, eyebrows lifting. Across the room, the next band was tuning in a raucous noise that barely sounded like it could ever shape itself into music. “No one likes a show-off, Lock.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, wing-brother.” Lochlan nodded at a pretty waitress and held up his hand for a drink, a soft linen bandage covering his left index finger. “They love me.”

“I’ll bet,” Leila murmured. “I suppose Aidsa was keeping you busy this evening?”

“Looks like Ixchel got to him first.” Kae reached over their glasses, catching Lochlan’s hand and ghosting his fingers over the bandage. “Is that right?  Did the ghost woman get you?”

Lochlan snatched his hand back, looking abruptly sullen. “Fuck off. You want some pointed attention from the old bat, you go ruffle her skirts for a while. I’m done being her plaything.”

Leila sighed, taking Lochlan’s hand in hers and inspecting the bandage. “You’ll be done when she is, I’m afraid. That’s usually how it works with her, Lock.”

“What did she say?” Kae asked, nodding at the fresh bandage.

Lochlan sighed, perking up only slightly when the waitress came back with three more frosty glasses of dark lovina. “Thank you. He kept eye contact until the young girl laughed and flushed.

“No problem,” she said, dark curls spilling over her shoulders. “You need anything else, come find me, yeah?”

Lochlan toasted her with the new pint. “I will. I will do that. Thank you very much.”

Leila cleared her throat. ”Charming. You’ve been buying pheromones off the Sepiod merchants again, haven’t you?”

Lochlan lifted his shirt and sniffed at it delicately. “Water pump was broken on Volya.“

Kae laughed. “You could make easier repairs if you’d come home once in a star’s life. Where were you for so long this time, anyway?”

Lochlan shrugged, took a long swallow of his drink and glanced at the dancers, who had reassembled themselves and dived into the reeling with fresh fervor. “Nowhere in particular,” he said, and Kae fancied that the casualness in his voice was perhaps a little too pronounced. “There was a festival on Juno. That was worth a look.”

Kae arched an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me. A fertility festival?”

“Actually, yes,” Lochlan said with mock stiffness, drawing himself up in his chair and raising his glass. “An old and a noble custom, born of a rich culture. I had a wonderful time.” His face darkened slightly. “Until the riffraff showed up.”

“What do you mean?” Leila leaned forward, frowning and curious, and Kae didn’t blame her for being so. Since the beginning of their exile, the Bideshi had been the ones to take in those called ‘riffraff’ by all others, the unwanted and the strange. He could see where this was going, and he wondered with tired resignation whether he might have to break up an open argument. Leila and Lochlan didn’t often square off, but when they did it could be something to see.

“The landed lords showed up for a tour and a grope,” Lochlan said with fine scorn. “Protectorate shits. Raya.“

“Lochlan,” Leila pulled away and frowned even harder. “You know that’s an ugly word.”

Lochlan shrugged and took another swallow of lovina. “An ugly word for ugly people, lady.”

“You’re lucky we’re not near any children or I’d scrub your mouth out to show them what happens to brats.” Leila was actually getting angry now, her eyes bright. “You should know better, you–”

“Lock,” Kae said, laying a soft hand on his wife’s arm. “Why don’t you go get us some refills? Eh?” Again he was the mediator, but he’d had years of breaking up brawls between the escort fighters and it wasn’t as though it was anything new. Lochlan looked mutinous for a moment but at last he pushed back his chair and got up, giving the two of them a quick nod before he vanished into the crowd of people around the bar.

“Habibi–” Kae started, but Leila lifted a hand and silenced him.

“I know. I shouldn’t let him get under my skin. I try not to, Kae, I do, but when he rolls out that kind of language…” She sighed and raked a hand through her hair, letting it fall back over one shoulder in a dark tumble. “We can’t afford to think that way. He should know that.”

“He does,” Kae said softly. “He’s just angry.” He reached out and took her hand, lifting it to his mouth and kissing her knuckles. “So don’t you be, though you’re gorgeous when you are. Dance with me, habibi.”

She allowed herself a smile and rose. “I suppose I could stand it. If you make me tired enough…”

“I’ll do my very best,” he murmured, lips close to her ear as he led her onto the floor and took her in his arms.

* * *

It didn’t make sense to be so angry, so suddenly. He wasn’t even that drunk, not yet at that belligerent stage where fights tended to start, and he wasn’t usually the type to start them anyway.

Raya. They had come in and spoiled his fun, simply by being there. Tourists. Spoiled children, and so perfect it made you sick. I don’t know how the fuck you can stand there and defend them, he had once yelled, Leila staring him down with her arms crossed over her breasts, for this was only the latest round of a very old fight. After what you’ve seen. The way they treat people.

And then Kae had stepped in before things could carry themselves any further. Kae the peacemaker, always pulling him back from the edge of nasty things, demanding that he keep a cool head. Which was good, and he was grateful for it, but now his hand was throbbing and his temper was high. What he wanted was a dozen drinks and a pretty thing to take home, and to get away from the disgusted twist of Leila’s mouth. She didn’t understand, but she never had to. No one had ever showed her just what they were capable of, and stories didn’t do them justice.

His temper was still flaming and he was talking himself into a foul mood when he stopped, caught sight of a turning face thrown into sharp relief by the lights, beautiful and strange. He stepped forward, letting himself be distracted—wanting it, close to needing—and the face turned again, eyes locking with his, features delicate and straddling the line between clearly male and clearly female in a way that could only be described as delightful.

“I’m in need of a diversion,” Lochlan said, sliding up and against, close enough to touch though he wasn’t going that far, not quite yet. He smiled, half rueful and half cunning, making a joke out of it without any attempt to disguise the want in his gaze. “I’m after myself. I’ll never get away if I can’t distract me.”

The pretty creature tipped their head back and laughed—shoulder-length hair dyed a deep purple, eyes dark with khol, body swathed in flowing gauze and curving sweetly against his. The barest brush of full, darkly-stained lips against his jaw and Leila was forgotten, and it was as though there was no Protectorate and never had been.

“And you need my help, sweetheart?” his new companion murmured. “Tell you what: buy me a drink. And then we’ll see what kind of merry chase I can lead you on.”

* * *

Lochlan backed through the hatch with his hands still occupied, moving over angles and curves and edging under cloth so light it almost wasn’t there. He tripped, stumbled, managed not to fall as his back hit the bulkhead and he started to laugh.

His companion arched against him and leaned in to stop the laughter with another kiss, hands doing some of their own exploring. “So maybe you’re more focused than we thought.” The words were hot and soft against Lochlan’s ear. “I hear things about you. Let’s see.”

Lochlan grinned and reached between them, still pleasantly unsure of what he might or might not find—found hard flesh and palmed it roughly, and the person—the boy, at least in one sense—parted their lips and moaned.

You didn’t argue with a gift like this. Not when there wasn’t anything in the universe to argue about. He’d abandoned Leila and Kae in the bar, some distant and more responsible part of him knew. No guilt came with the realization, just distant acknowledgment and, if anything, satisfaction that they were used to it and would forgive him in the morning. If Leila wanted to call him a child, then he’d more than live up to her expectations.

“We gonna do this here?” asked the boy, one eyebrow arched wickedly. “Or are you gonna show me my other options?”

And Lochlan laughed again and pushed away from the wall, pushing and pulling his new friend with him as they stumbled through the narrow entryway and into the main room.

His berth on the homeship had never been large since he’d first left Ying’s home and claimed a stead of his own. Never large but he kept moving, stricken by an odd inability to stay in the same place for more than a few months at a time, a feature that was intrinsic to the Bideshi but which seemed unusually strong in him. But wherever he went, the berth was always small, always cluttered, a mirror image of Volya in many ways. The central room was dominated by an enormous plush sofa piled with cushions of all colors and patterns and strewn here and there with loose items of clothing. The steel flooring was covered by a threadbare rug, a complex design from the master weavers of Jantabar, spirals within spirals and lines that somehow never began and never ended but turned and turned until one grew dizzy with following them. A small and messy kitchenette lined one sloping wall. A broad table before the sofa was covered with glasses and bottles and old books, half burned candles, bundles of white sage and sandalwood. The lights were low and one or two flickered faintly.

“Fire your maid, sweetheart,” murmured Lochlan’s companion, and chuckled.

“I keep her too busy.” Lochlan was walking them backward again, back toward the low doorway that led to his tiny bedroom. “I can show you how. It’s really quite something.” He ducked his head for another kiss, slow and wet, and lips that parted against his tasted delightfully of alcohol and clove smoke. Long fingers slid over the coils of Lochlan’s hair.

Somehow they had turned and switched positions, rotating around and caught in each other’s spin, and the backs of Lochlan’s legs hit the bed, nothing more than a mattress on a low platform. He let himself drop down onto the bed in a controlled tumble, pulling the lithe body with him, kissing them again as they went. The bedroom glowed as they moved, sensing their presence, and the boy pushed up over him, straddling Lochlan’s hips as the rest of the cloth that wrapped him began to come unwound. Lochlan’s hands framed skin the rich color of old-growth wood from the Klashorg jungles.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

The boy grinned, teeth gleaming in the dimness. “You’re all talk.” He reached up, closed a hand over Lochlan’s wrist and placed it back between them, rolling his hips down against it. “Let’s have some action now.”

So they had it, and it was hard and fast and very good. And afterward with the nameless boy damp and breathing deep at his side, Lochlan lifted his hand into the soft light and saw that the cut on his finger had opened up again, and the boy’s perfect shoulder was lightly smeared with blood.

image by Rob Wanenchak

There is a lot this week.

• I wrote a thing for The Sociological Cinema on teaching with SF and the myths that underpin social inequality.
  

  Myths and legends are all-too-often dismissed as untrue; what this attitude fails to recognize is that the deepest, most foundational stories are persistent precisely because the best of them are vectors for the most profound elements of who we are, of how we understand ourselves to be, of where we imagine we might go. These things may be harmful, they may reproduce things that we find undesirable, but we need to understand them on their own terms before we can act.

• “My So-Called ‘Post-Feminist’ Life in Arts and Letters.” What it’s like to be a woman saying things and writing books. There is some potentially triggering stuff in here about rape (non-explicit) and general misogyny. I have no particular triggers and I found it upsetting.
  

  I consider throwing in the towel. The lack of respectful coverage, the slut-shaming and name-calling, all the girly book covers and not-my-titles despite high literary aspirations, has worn me down, made me question everything: my abilities, my future, my life. This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it. A few months later, after delivering a lecture on the media-invented “mommy wars” at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, a song pops up on my iPhone as I’m walking back to my hotel room: Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” “When you ain’t got nothing,” Dylan sings, “you got nothing to lose.”

  Yes, I think. Yes.

• “‘You’ve Lost Weight! You Look Great!’ Isn’t a Compliment.” I have felt this forever but haven’t articulated it to myself anywhere near this well, and oh my god yes yes yes
  

  When we think of it in that way, it’s not such a great compliment. It’s a set-up for self-consciousness and negative self-judgment of our past selves. When remarking on weight loss is offered as a compliment, the speaker clearly thinks that there’s been a noticeable and notable improvement in how the person looks. Without the normative standard of “thinner is better,” the comment would have no value as a compliment at all.

• “Why I Will Still #uninstallmendeley.” If you use academic citation software, if you care about the state of academic publishing, if you care about justice and righteousness, read.
  

  If Mendeley wants to hitch their horse to the Monsanto of academic publishing they can be my guest. The service will probably be amazing. But remember that the money they gave you –all the new resources you have at your disposal– were purchased with tuition money and charitable donations that should have gone to higher education. Instead, it went to Elsevier (and Thompson Reuter, and Springer and…) so that they could find new and inventive ways of hiding research so that they could continue to charge exorbitant prices.

• “Autofill Mythologies.” Fantastic piece on information and imagination and our experiences of difficult urban spaces.
  

  Lewis Lapham once argued that the imagined city, the one of our collective making, is realer than what we’re fed by maps and demographics, buildings and structures. The ideas, the symbols, ultimately carry more for us than the realities of its dwellers—the people in the neighborhoods that you see when you’re walking down the street.

• “Needing a Bigger N+1.” This is a wonderfully biting response to a terrible essay on why critical sociology is useless and how there’s too much of it. That piece is actually not worth reading if you don’t want to; the response summarizes its major points pretty well.
  

  Insofar as you want to make an institutional critique of sociology… well, I pay an extraordinary (for me) fee to a disciplinary association tasked with intervening in public debates and government policy. We have strong disciplinary traditions and mythologies of activism, including Hull House and the Feminist Wire. We give a fecking ASA award. I’m not saying our house is 100% in order, but if I have to shift into your all/nothing, everyone/no one idiom, I’m going to say we’re all clear.

• “When Facebook Stopped Being Fun.” Facebook users are growing up. This does not entirely bode well for Facebook.
  

  Facebook is like a nightmarishly intense, never-ending school reunion where all of the people you don’t really want to talk to get to expose their lives in self-congratulatory detail. Resentment for that is remarkably difficult to dispel.

• “The writer’s neuroses.” All of this is so incredibly painfully true.
  

  What if my life work, these novels that I have tried to make as clear and articulate and passion-filled and honest and intelligent and entertaining and genre-resistant and accessible as I can manage, aren’t judged to be among the best? Well, as I will find out the news in a hotel room on my own I will probably end up crying on the edge of a bed while shoving salted cashews into my mouth and wishing I’d never ever written a vampire novel.

• “Academia’s indentured servants.” Basically the system to which I have given ten years of my life and a great deal of my mental health is completely broken. I knew that because I’m IN IT, but still.
  

  To work outside of academia, even temporarily, signals you are not “serious” or “dedicated” to scholarship. It does not matter if you are simply too poor to stay: in academia, perseverance is redefined as the ability to suffer silently or to survive on family wealth. As a result, scholars adjunct in order to retain an institutional affiliation, while the institution offers them no respect in return.

• “The entrepreneurial activism of Tim LaHaye’s theologized politics.” hey everyone Tim LaHaye is a very bad person
  

  Consider this: from 1995 through 2007, Tim LaHaye co-authored a series of runaway best-sellers steeped in John Birch Society ideology. During those years he sold more than 60 million copies of books that served as propaganda for a particular political agenda. The tea party movement sprang up in 2009, espousing the exact neo-Bircher ideology and agenda promoted in LaHaye’s novels. Is that just a remarkable coincidence?

But there is The National.

I have signed the contracts for my dark fantasy novel Crowflight (which was formerly known as A Murder of Crows), which will be released in September by Masque/Prime Books.

Which is really very exciting except that now I have to go write the other books in the series.

Will update with more details when I have them.

Cyborg Identities – Haraway and beyond (I proposed and will be moderating) – Donna Haraway famously argued that cyborgs transcend science fiction and enter the realm of feminist theory – that we are all cyborgs, transgressing identity boundaries and binaries and, in so doing, recreating ourselves. But many of the most powerful explorations of cyborg identities are still found in SF. What does SF tell us about ourselves as cyborgs? How can we make SF into useful social theory (and can we at all)? What are the implications for politics and power? How can we draw connections between fiction and political non-fiction? Like all cyborg transgressions, is the line between fiction and reality more porous than we often like to think?

When “Love Your Body” Isn’t Enough – “Love your body” is the hot trend in empowering catchphrases intended to connect people with their bodies and put them back in control, but what happens when it’s not enough? How does it exclude people don’t love their bodies and are struggling to figure out where they fit in? What kinds of structural inequalities are people perpetuating with an exhortation to “love your body,” and how can we change the way this phrase is used?

Roleplay and Identity – Many of us use cosplay and tabletop, live-action, and computer role-playing games (RPGs) to explore our own identities and/or that of “the Other” (for many values of “other”). How can these experiences of roleplay help us to expand our understanding of ourselves and the world? At the same time, how can we address examples of roleplay that are exploitative or simply perpetuate stereotypes? And how do we keep ourselves from falling into this?

Outer Alliance: New Writings in LGBTQ SF/F/H – Outer Alliance is an organization for writers and readers of science fiction, fantasy and horror that advocates positive portrayals of LGBTQ characters. We will be reading from a wide range of fiction that fits this description.

Not sure what I’ll be reading yet.

omg wisconnnnnnnnnnnn