What's New? Sept. 29, 2001

And you can read all the wonderful quotes on the back cover from Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson, Charles de Lint, Jane S. Fancher, and John Grant. You can also see my book blurb, bio, and author photo! :-)

Oh yeah, the Official Release Date is May 2002. However you will be able to pre-order it very soon, at places such as Barnes & Noble, BAMM.com, Amazon.com, Wildside Press, and in all other regular bookstores. More on that later....

The book comes out to be a nicely fat 348 pages.

Oh! Oh! Oh!!! ISBN: 1-58715-584-2

Duh! How can I even forget? LOL!

* * *

Oh, and before I sign off for tonight, to answer Diana and Linda's question as to where do they get all these US flags, I tell you where -- they steal them from people's yards like they did from my front yard. Some lowlife had the gall to take the cute little US flag (from my US Citizenship ceremony) that I had attached to the black metal grille gate in the front of my house. It was only up for three days before it got taken. *sigh*

9-22-01

NEWSFLASH!

Ok -- an aside of normalcy and a very selfish moment of triumph here:

My forthcoming novel DREAMS OF THE COMPASS ROSE and I just received the most amazing compliment in Paul Barnett's "A Top 10 SF Novels" Article at The Zone (zone-sf.com), a new non-fiction SF genre review online magazine and content site.

Go read it right now, and tell me I am not dreaming? Hint: look toward the bottom of the article. :-)

*Cheshire Cat Grin*

9-18-01

NEWSFLASH!

No, Jenn, you are not crazy.

Many other people feel the same way as you, many do not harbor revenge, including myself. It's just that people who feel this way (or lack the whatever it is emotionally that results in the perpetuation of the cycle of violence), are less voluble right now. Our voices seem to be drowned out....

Let me tell you a story.

I was a kid who could never hold a grudge. I could never pout properly. I did not know how to maintain a cold remoteness directed at someone for very long -- never long enough to prove a "point" as it goes, in children's wars.

I would have a fight with a friend, and five minutes later, while they were still "properly" pouting, I'd get bored with maintaining my side of it -- whether it meant giving someone the cold shoulder, not talking to them, never making eye contact in the devastating insulting way that only kids could do to each other, or even throwing barbed remarks.

I used to think that I was some kind of deficient weirdo, that I couldn't hold my anger like some people. Anger in me as a kid was immediate, violent, but cold and pretty well under restraint, or else it would come out in the form of instant furious insult, or even the weeping incredulity that made me "fall apart" and bawl....

But it was like a speeding weather front. It came and it went without a trace, and all I was left with was impatience to just get on with things, dammit, and I could not figure out why people were still upset at me, still angry, still not speaking, etc. It drove me insane! Especially since I was no longer upset at them! Did that make me a shallow moron who could not harbor "deep" feelings?

When I was early grade school age, I tried to cultivate and prolong my internal anger. I tried to remain cold and pouting and even timed myself to see how long I can keep up doing the cold shoulder treatment. But I failed miserably far earlier than my "enemy" of the moment.

Now that I look back, I see that what my natural urge has been all along was a Good Thing.

I haven't changed much. I still get an immediate flaring anger (as I did in the first minutes of finding out about the WTC tragedy, and wanted to nuke half the globe), and then it just... goes away.

And there is nothing to bring it back. It is a thing of the moment.

Because the anger that I feel is directed at an event, an act, a mindset of the moment.

But I never truly feel it toward the essense of any person. No matter if they are an annoyance, an asshole jerk, or even a psychopathic murderer.

I put myself in the place of that person, and I realize very oddly and easily that given their life circumstanes, the exact formula or "recipe" that resulted in them being at the place and time and mindset that they presently occupy -- given all that, I would be just like them.

Yes. I would be doing what they are doing, feeling what they are feeling, acting however they are acting.

In fact, I would be them.

There would be atrocities that I would commit, murder, rape, destruction. There would be war, darkness, blunder, madness -- direct consequences of my involvement, my acts, my dark perspective.

And there would be no justification to any of it. NEVER.

And yet, I could see how I would be them.

Because of that, I feel no need for retribution, since hell is all inside me already, the Alternate Me. All the Alternate Mes. Nothing external could ever come close to such hell, no punishment, torture, abuse, not even ultimate execution.

Think of yourself tied to a stake, with a wall of flames engulfing you with white agony, and vaguely on the other side you see guns aimed at you and bullets and arrows heading your way -- they mean so little now, so little to your agony of the moment, and may in fact be a welcome oblivion unto death....

What I would seek instead, for all my Alternate Selves, would be a lessening of their wall of hellfire that encircles them from the rest of the world, from the normal human senses and reason and understanding.

In my disapproval, I would not presume to give them love, for love at that point would be too much like water against the flames -- too much, too destructive, too tainted with my own negative emotion to be true. Love would simply quench the flames and overwhelm and drown the self with miscomprehension.

Instead, I would give them a Mirror.

For a moment only they would look upon themselves burning in the flames, and possibly they would recognize in that tortured image in the mirror, someone else -- myself, or maybe even you.

And in that moment of recognition and silence, they would cease to burn.

We would all cease to burn.

9-16-01 (with 9-11-01 forever in the background...)

NEWSFLASH!

On Tuesday September 11, 2001, the world changed.

I am a writer, and my strongest tool is words, but my tool failed me. This is one sure symptom out of many that the world changed -- at least my own personal world.

At first there was deathly cold. Then anger. The need to lash out at anyone, at the same time as the cold slithered and weakness set in. By the middle of the day, the anger dwindled and softly dissipated into numbness.

There were constant changing of images of terror, sorrow, apocalypse, framed against monochrome dust and the carcasses of fallen skyscrapers. Fallen glass and steel and ashes.

By the evening of September 11, there was disorientation. There was also fear in the darkness of the night.

Upon waking up on Wednesday, fear and disorientation continued, but it was mostly disorientation that ruled.

Plans no longer had any relevance. Short term plans, long term plans. One's purpose also came under question.

Immense shift of perspective, like a wide-screen version of a film suddenly pulling out and off to the side to show more things there, things previously hidden.

What point was there in writing? Novels. . . What are novels or short stories, or popular literature, in the face of all . . . this? Death, destruction, and global war.

And since there was no point in writing, what point did I have to exist?

Disorientation deepened into despair by the evening of Wednesday.

Thursday morning, disorientation and despair mingled and married to engender paranoia. Was there going to be another strike? Where? Who was it? A complex secret enemy is out there, possibly anywhere. The US Government is wisely biding its time, gathering resources, laying the groundwork for the next Act.

The day was a lost cause, empty and hollow. No meaning in things, except empty rhetoric in various online forums, back and forth, meaningless because no one really understood anyone else, and the frustration lay in conveying that at the root of it we were all one, all hurting equally.

Thursday ended in exhaustion.

On Friday, the first thought was for the first time not of despair but of faint curiosity. Had there been any new developments overnight?

Numbness persisted throughout, a new slight numbness that took away the top cream off the layer of emotion. Everything subdued, and tears rising easily at anything, at extraneous detail.

Friday ended in a complex swelling of emotion, a sight of votive candles burning in the darkness, stilled faces and everywhere the red white and blue flag. . . .

United in grief.

Saturday was a day of oblivion. Sleeping for about 16 hours, waking up then sinking back down, not wanting to surface. Surfacing finally into more hurtful online rhetoric, and needless miscommunication. Somewhere there the hope to see survivors pulled out of the rubble has dwindled and a new anger came, at the helplessness.

Couldn't something else be done? Couldn't they dig faster, damn it, use more heavy machinery to move the piles of rubble, couldn't they drill underground and do SOMETHING??? Those people buried deep inside, on cell phones calling out, get them out of there!!!

DO SOMETHING!!! NOW!!!

Anger and futility at the media images, at the small token group of idiot Palestinians dancing in celebration and thus dancing a death dance for their own people. . .

Peripheral memories, images of Lebanon, of the tragic poor, images of the Arab world -- Moslem, Christian, human. More images of faction-ridden Jerusalem, ancient holy city. All peripheral. All the history of the Middle East conflict mixing, blending into one, faces of semitic children, sorrowing Israeli Jews, mothers crying over fallen Jewish sons. Old women in handkerchiefs, with contorted faces.

Frustration, and a reassessment of things. Introspection directed outward and turned upside down.

All perspectives pulled and distorted and mixed up like putty clay in the hands of time.

Drowning in sleep and unable to sleep again.

Sunday being another day of somnolence, but this time riddled by nightmares. Images of Online and Real World and TV all mixing. Waking up and feeling the framework of one's soul shaken with multiple aftershocks of the emotional earthquake that has happened on September 11, 2001.

The shock waves are lessening and receding, tentatively, carefully. The self retains weakness, but regains a semblance of cohesion.

Anger at the self for giving in to despair! The will to live is back!

The sense of one's purpose has returned. My writing has meaning again, yes!

Somehow.

My words will matter, and there is a reason for it.

And now here I am, sitting and staring at the screen before me, and writing.

In the act of writing, I create a record of the history of the world.

You recreate the record by reading this.

Together you and I live in a changed world. And yet, we live. And we remember.

But do we understand?

The perspectives are all here, all thrown in a kaleidoscope before us. It is a kaleidoscope of baroque intricacy.

Each human being is one Eye of the World -- a single eye looking out at the truth, and each eye must be kept open together to view the only true picture.

The temptation, always, is to blink. Because the true picture is very great, very bright, very overwhelming.

But when you blink and when I blink, we miss a moment. It is natural and inevitable, and we are only human.

Therefore, after each blink, each moment of human weakness, we must open our eyes again, and keep them open for as long as we can.

9-10-01

NEWSFLASH!

Okay, so I am back from Philly Worldcon which was absolutely wonderful (see con reports in my newsgroup), and I have the threat of fish flung at me from the NAW Lawyer /s/h/a/r/k/ if I don't update the journal. So, okay, he is right! :-)

Before I forget, I need to get back to the habit of posting my fiction submissions in my journal. So here is one for today -- an SF story sent to Fantastic Stories. Let's see how long it takes for it to come back. This is a story being resubmitted from Aboriginal which is now sadly and officially a dead market (in case you didn't know, well, now you do).

Oh, and check out some new NAWticisms... :-)