Wordswoman

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.

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.

I spent much of yesterday tending the perennial garden in the corner of my back yard. A year ago, this was nothing but lawn with a couple of shovel marks in it:

Not much is in bloom yet, but I'm so pleased that all the plants seemed to have made it through the winter--including the little plum (bottom right, in the shadows) that had suffered much gnawing from the local cottontails.

I need something tall to plant along the back fence, though; that would be the part just out of frame on the right side of the photo. Most of the plants are much the same height, so something more vertical would be a good addition.

I took Younger Daughter out driving yesterday. She was nervous and reluctant, but she proved to be a good driver on country roads--much better than she'd been in parking lots, our previous practice ground. We cruised the dirt roads and lesser highways in the Northfield area, with her sweaty-palmed but steady in her lane and careful with her steering. I was proud of her. I predict good odds for her passing the driver's test on the first try.

As Eldest Daughter's graduation draws nearer (a week from Friday), each day feels poignant. Early on, parenting milestones are all about firsts: first tooth, first word, first step, first day of school. But at this stage it's the lasts I feel so keenly: last days of high school, last year at home. Each day I look at her and think, in three months I'll be leaving you in a far, far place.

Of course there will be other firsts, with college, career, and perhaps one day marriage and children of her own. But those won't happen on my watch. Our journey together is ending, her solo journey beginning. My job is mostly waving from the shore, admiring the brightness of her sails in the sunlight and praying the seas stay calm.

Many years ago, advice columnist Ann Landers polled her readers about whether, if they had it all to do over again, they would still have children. A majority who replied to her said No. Myself, I suspect the bitter, angry and disappointed ones were simply the most likely to reply. But there's no question--as those replies revealed--that having children is more difficult, isolated and marriage-shaking in this country than is ever admitted in polite company, especially by mothers. It demands nearly endless patience, tested daily. It's messy. It's noisy. It's exhausting. It's thankless. It takes your life apart and puts it back together in an entirely different configuration, one that often bears no resemblance to the future you imagined. It puts someone else's needs ahead of your own wants and dreams for eighteen years. And at the end of all that, there's no guarantee they'll visit, call, or remember your birthday.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Just realized that I forgot to post the link to the KFAI interview. Here it is, although it requires a couple of clicks: first on "Listen Now" and then, after accepting the terms, on the "RealAudio" graphic. Our program starts around 00:1:30 into the sound file. This link will probably disappear in the not-too-distant future.

Featuring four of us from the MinnSpec writers' group: Terry Faust (our host), Hilary Moon Murphy, Michael Merriam, and me. I didn't say much at first because I was scared silly. But eventually I loosened up and had fun, thanks to the smiles and encouragement from my fellow guests. I'd hang out with those three anytime, with or without microphones. :)

Via the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books site, this hilarious NPR "All Things Considered" interview about romance novels and the bloggers' new book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.

Never thought I'd get to hear the phrase "Magic Hoo Hoo" on NPR. :) 

I swear she was tiny enough to fit on my lap just a heartbeat ago...

Kristen's favorite senior photo:

My own favorite:

Eastview High School Class of 2009.
Occidental College Class of 2013.
Still (and forever) my baby girl.
 

Radio stations have many shiny, glowing buttons. I wanted to push them all.

The KFAI radio show was actually fun--and I didn't sound as much like a hyperactive chipmunk as I feared. It felt a lot like a conference panel, hanging out with other writers and talking shop.