Wordswoman

The little girl with the boats isn't telling me her story anymore, so I think my first TwitFic experiment is concluded. I'd like to try another soon, though. There's an appealing poetic quality to writing in such tiny installments.

Here's how it came out, reassembled into chronological order:

The first boat she made was of paper. She was 5, old enough to fold and shape and to work out why it sank after a few minutes in the stream.

The 2nd boat she made of twigs and bits of yarn. The resulting craft resembled a bird's nest with a tiny mast. It floated, but in circles.

The third boat was a plastic tray from a TV dinner, with Lego sailors. It floated perfectly but she couldn't love what she hadn't built.

By the 17th boat (birch bark, Juicy Fruit gum and paperclips), her parents became a little concerned.

"Amelia, don't you want to play with your other toys? Look, here's your nice Teddy." "He sinks," said Amelia, and reached for the glue.

Her evening bath, once dreaded and resisted, became a laboratory for materials testing: What floated best? What held up the most weight?

The child psychologist reassured her parents. "The mania will pass. Many children have obsessions." A pause. "You might teach her to swim."

The Lego sailors perished in the capsizing of boat #94 (victim of an off-leash golden retriever). A lesson in the perils of a nautical life.

Amelia built a tiny cairn on the beach in memory of her lost mariners. With dignity beyond her years she placed a sand dollar at the top.

Amelia's uncle, a Navy man, found himself confronted on Christmas leave by his furious sister. "Are you responsible for this?" "For what?"

Enlightened, Uncle Davis threw back his head and laughed. "It's only boats, Sue! The child's not stealing sweets or setting fire to cats."

As her uncle helped build boat #103 (balsa wood and styrofoam), the girl suddenly said, "It's going to rain. It's going to rain a LOT."

Now that my husband has talked to his family about his potential Army enlistment, I've unlocked my previous posts on the subject.

He hasn't signed anything, but continues to seriously explore the possibility while digging into an ASVAB study guide and going on daily jogs.

I still feel like I've blundered through a secret door into an alternate universe.

I am both saddened by the murders at Fort Hood and fearful of backlash against innocent Muslim Americans for the crimes of one madman. On news sites that allow unmoderated user comments, the hatred and bigotry being spewed is ugly beyond belief.

Nobody went around saying "That's a white Christian name, it must be a conspiracy" when George Hennard took out 23 people at a restaurant in the nearby town of Killeen TX back in 1991.

Nobody lashed out at all white men with WASP names when the Oklahoma City bombers murdered 186 (and that was a conspiracy).

I pray for peace and sanity in a world short on both. More, I pray for the victims and families at Fort Hood.

I should clarify, after my previous post, that although I would never choose it for myself I am not opposed in principle to military service. Many of my extended family have served in some branch of the military and I respect their decision to do so. I would never disparage anyone for choosing military service as a career.

I believe in the value of an all-volunteer army. I also believe that those who serve are, by and large, good and honorable men and women (or at least as much so as their civilian counterparts). The wars we get into aren't always so honorable, but the blame for that lies with politicians, not the people in uniform.

But it is a serious decision at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. Setting aside the risks (which I can't think too hard about right now), what troubles me most is not that my husband is considering enlisting--shock though it was--but that he's feeling driven to do so at the age of 39 because of recession and joblessness. Military service should be a choice made freely, not under economic coercion.

Try telling that to this guy in Wisconsin, who also joined the Army at 39--to get health insurance for his wife's chemotherapy treatments.

Something is very wrong with this country when a man with a college degree and a lengthy list of computer and technical skills sees his choices reduced to joining the Army in wartime or flipping burgers at McDonald's.

Eldest Daughter has begun packing for college. Her first (and so far only) packed box contains 50 pounds of manga.

I think it's her version of a teddy bear.

Her new home away from home:

I never quite managed to love this book, even as a horse-crazy child. To my young mind there were too many scenes with Velvet's working-class butchershop family, too few with the horse. But something about it stuck with me, and National Velvet survived all the purges of my bookshelves over the years.

Re-reading it now is a revelation. Not only does it contain one of the most memorable mothers in fiction--Araminty Brown, a huge, fleshy, silent, enduring bulk of a woman who in her youth swam the English Channel--but it has remarkably prescient things to say about the way that a media frenzy can eat youthful stars alive.

Here, a character who's just helped Velvet escape a mob of press advises her:

The Velvet of the book couldn't bear less resemblance to the 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor who played her in the movie. No raven-haired, violet-eyed beauty, this; young Velvet is plain, pale, fair-haired, thin as a stick and flat as a board, with a bad overbite and a tendency to vomit when she's overwrought. But the reader never doubts that Mrs. Brown's indomitable spirit also flows through scrawny, nervous Velvet, a child whose passion for horses is so fierce that it borders on a religious fervor.

The characters are masterfully written. I'm sure Taylor was luminous in the film role, but the real Velvet remains between the covers of the book.

I'm in the market for some serenity, but I'd settle for a good night's sleep.

No clue whether this is midlife hormones plaguing me or if I'm just struggling too hard in this web of worries, but damn...I would pay money that I don't even have for one decent full night of sleep this week.

Eldest Daughter is now blogging over on Wordpress. Check out her Kawaii Robots blog here. "Kawaii" means "cute" in Japanese, so it's the Cute Robots blog.

She also designed the title banner on the blog, which is darn cute also. I should ask her to make me some LJ icons.

Less than 7 weeks before I take her to college. She's signed up for a pre-orientation excursion, so we'll be heading there early, on August 25. Then she'll disappear for 3 days of Los Angeles arts & culture while I...well, play solo tourist, I guess. Practically speaking, I could just go home at that point--she'll have moved into her dorm room early, seen the campus, and connected with far better guides to L.A. than me. But this is my first child's first time at college, so I'm going to stay for the parent portion of the regular orientation.

If she comes back from the pre-orientation so bonded with new friends that she doesn't want to hang out with Mom, I will consider that a great success and go find myself a beach.

It's all coming up so fast. Not for her, mind you; anticipation is making the summer crawl for her. But for me.

Younger Daughter turns 17 the day before we leave, so it'll be a week of many milestones.

Whew! Thanks to a generous offer from my husband to hand-deliver my entry, I will get a story in for the Tamarack Award competition this year. Today's the deadline. Talk about squeaking in under the wire.

Am I confident in the story's chances? Not especially. It's as close to a first draft as I've ever submitted, and part of me wants to yank it back and spend the next year polishing and improving it for the 2010 competition instead. But I swore I'd enter this year, and I want to hit at least one of my summer writing goals.

So good luck and godspeed, little story. Write if you find work.

Just in time for my birthday, a happy bit of news: PodCastle is buying nonexclusive podcast rights to my story "Kissing Frogs". Yay! I'm very excited to hear it read by a professional.

PodCastle, along with sister publications Escape Pod and PseudoPod, is doing wonderful things with podcasting of speculative fiction by new and established authors. I'm not clear on their revenue model, since they are paying their authors but not charging their listeners--but I see a "Donate" button, so if you love what you hear, send a little cash their way in appreciation.

I got sucked into the latest Facebook meme, and thought I'd repost my reply over here.

15 Books in 15 Minutes

"The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

My entries are more or less chronological:

1. Dr. Suess's Green Eggs and Ham, because it's one of the first books I remember being read to me.

2. Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gag, because it's one of the earliest books that I remember fascinating me as much for the illustrations as the story. The story, in retrospect, is quite disturbing: all the millions of cats except one EAT EACH OTHER UP. Man, that's quite the carnage for a children's book.

3. Best-Loved Poems of the American People, because my dad read from it to my brother and me so many times when we were young. I have our original copy now, falling to shreds, and my own newer edition with a special message to me from my dad written in it. I haven't been able to open it since he died, but one day I will, and have a good cry.

4. Black Gold, by Marguerite Henry, because it's the first book that made me cry. "On three legs and a heart, he finished it."

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. I identified completely with Laura, who always wanted to be outdoors helping Pa in the fields rather than being ladylike in the house with Ma and Mary. And who wouldn't want to go sleigh-riding with Almanzo Wilder?

6. Jefferson McGraw, by Weldon Hill, because it's the book my parents went out and bought me after they caught me reading a book called "The Stud" from my dad's, er, private collection when I was 10. "But there wasn't anything else to READ!" protested I. For the rest of the summer, they made sure I had regular access to a library.

7. Trixie Belden mysteries. Unlike Nancy Drew, who was rich and privileged and well accessorized, Trixie was a tomboy like me who wanted to ride horses and have adventures, but also had to weed the vegetable garden and look after her little brother.

8. The Three Investigators mysteries. I pretty much wanted to marry these boys when we all grew up. Yes, all three of them. I was an open-minded sort of child.

9. I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert A. Heinlein. A dying millionaire's brain is successfully transplanted into the body of his sexy young female secretary. I read it at age 10 or 11 and thought it was deliciously racy. It may also have influenced my desire to marry all three of the Three Investigators, since Heinlein was rather advanced in his views of marriage and fidelity. Not sure why my folks didn't take this one away from me like they did "The Stud," but I'm glad they didn't. Although I don't read Heinlein much as an adult--the sexism drives me nuts now--his books, along with the original Star Trek series, hooked me on speculative fiction forever.

10. The Earthsea Trilogy, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I remember noticing, really NOTICING, the writing in this one, and also being keenly aware that unlike most of the science fiction and fantasy I was devouring at the time, these books were written by a woman.

11. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The first book I remember making me actually ache when it ended. The scene where Scout meets Boo Radley for the first and last time, and walks him home, is one of my favorite and most poignant moments in modern literature. Also one of the few books that I had to read for school that I've re-read again since (many times).

12. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The first time I read it as a kid, I was bored and impatient with the long descriptions of scenery and history. And I remember even then wishing that the author could've imagined a world where women had a bigger role to play. But the characters and their quest kept bringing me back. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but I think what kept drawing me back into it was the epic scale of Tolkien's worldbuilding, so finely imagined down to the last leaf.

13. Steinbeck's East of Eden. In school they made us read The Grapes of Wrath, but somehow that one never hit me like East of Eden, Steinbeck's multi-generational Caine-and-Abel novel, which features one of the nastiest, most conniving, purely EVIL female villains in all literature. Of course, I had a track record for disliking things I was told I should admire (including Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, and just about all of Faulkner), with #11 being a notable exception.

14. Tryst, by Elswyth Thane. I have no explanation for why this sappy English ghost story is one of my favorite books of all time--so much so that it inspired a novel-in-progress of my own. It just is.

15. Americans' Favorite Poems, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. I love this one as much for the stories from the submitters--regular folks all--about why they loved these poems, as for the poems themselves.

Hmmm. Pretty sure that took more than 15 minutes.

I'll bet today's XKCD cartoon wins the prize for the most Wikipedia searches ever inspired by a webcomic. I must've spent 15 minutes reading all the theories of the origins of the manuscript...and then 15 more getting sidetracked by linguistic terms...and another 15 musing on the possible plot of a science fiction novel that would explain it all. Da Vinci Code meets the Rosetta Stone!

The Voynich Manuscript

In unrelated news, Younger Daughter will have oral surgery today to remove four wisdom teeth, all heading in the wrong direction. I'm not sure who will be in more pain afterwards: the kid with the mouth full of gauze and stitches, or the parents who have to pay the bill. Dental coverage sure doesn't pay for much. "Ouch!" all around.