Reineke Fuchs.

Writes, supposedly.

[ffffffocksnorth]

research.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Been a good run, but I finally got COVID. Hibernating for at least a month. Accepting no letters. Taking no calls. Tasting no tasties, apparently, too. Meanwhile, I can't stop thinking about the injustice that is me cracking this ancient Sumerian joke over a year ago and how no one will ever know.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Bright heriot of cosmo's halo

like sundown fireworks. How aga devotee  showboats bountiful 

kaleidoscopic lustre. Thankful to thine daughter,  moon rounds up

peace's prayer. Sky twin out maw

pageantry's voyager. Blanket us,  fey cosmos. Cue hunk

of golden light, Mars, that swam some

months. Ideal kingdom, we

synchronise a youthful whimsy. Silhouetted  the shadow loom. O twee

shades anguished. A tradeoff -

your task which turned

on smoky glory. Fat funny fireflies suffocating.  Bigot gasworks lit. Rift

faith's crusaders, too foggy,

from satellite's white beams. Oh, hold. Halt.

Sunbeam-way banned, shutdown, died. To be

devolved again, transliterate. We obvert bespoken skyhook.  Enclave flesh in faded hall. Oh, the sea

her own, now mere spent.

[ffffffocksnorth]

What had happened to Jamie

I came home so sunburned that my skin peeled off in sheets. My luggage was full of paintings, wrinkly pages of watercolor paper. I gave one to Mom. It was Miranda’s uncle’s barn, a sunset lit blue-purple behind it. My mother hung it up on her office wall.

“This is good. This is really good,” she said. “We should start talking about art school for you. It’s time we started thinking about these things.”

Jamie sat on the couch down the hall, TV on to some scifi show he was streaming, saying nothing. Maybe he wasn’t even listening. I’d like to imagine he wasn’t. College wasn’t on the horizon for him anymore. Sometimes I heard Mom and Dad talking about how he’d get his GED, but nobody talked to me about it, just like no one asked his opinion about his little sister growing up, going to art school, and moving on.

Sometimes I wondered what it was like to be him. Not the dark parts. I never let my mind touch that. But the rest of it. I wondered what it was like to sit around all day at home in his sweatpants, doing worksheets that were far below his grade level for the retired high school teacher the district had hired for him. They had him read Steinbeck novels, slim and important, and write five paragraph essays summarizing them. No analysis. No thought. Once my brother had written poetry. Now, he barely tried. My mother was good to him. Dad, when he was around, was kind. But he didn’t have friends, not really. Even Eli avoided him. I think it was too much for him, too, what had happened to Jamie.

My brother had no friends. Except maybe he did. Because one day I came home early. Cramps. They’d called Grammy to come get me, because Mom had classes--she’d gone back that year, now that the trial was over. My grandmother only dropped me off at the curb. I was old enough now that I could be trusted to take a few tylenol and pass out on the sofa without doing anything irresponsible.

I got the pills from the bathroom, and then went to the kitchen to pour myself some water. My eyes strayed out to the woods. Gumlea felt like the echo of a memory right now. Like the slow, uncertain ache after a migraine. Like something that had happened to someone else. But sometimes I missed it, in the early fall when everything was still warm and bright and green. Now, looking out into the trees as I swallowed down my pills, I felt a yearning inside of me.

That’s when my gaze caught on something. Fire. Distant. Unmistakable.

I went to the bottom of the stairs and called my brother. He should have been there, sleeping the day away. But he didn’t answer me. So I left my glass on the mantle and went out into the backyard.

I didn’t step backwards, not this time. I was grown now, with no time for games. I just stepped right over the creek, which was little more than a muddy puddle in the warm afternoon. Then I went walking through the forest, my feet crunching on leaves and snapping branches beneath them.

My legs knew Gumlea better than my mind did. Before I knew it, I had reached the pirate’s sloop--the picnic table that some other boys, long-grown, had graffitied. There was a small fire blazing in the circle of rocks before it. And sitting there on the table itself was my brother, a joint in his hand, and Neal Harriman beside in his private school uniform.

“Neal,” I said, squinting, the fire making my eyes burn. He was taller and deeper voiced and more stubbly but hadn’t changed much since I’d seen him last.

“Annie,” he said.

I looked at Jamie. Panic flared in his eyes. He jumped to his feet, shaking his head with an almost hysterical urgency.

“You can’t tell Mom and Dad,” he said. I felt like we’d had this conversation before. But now he added, “If there’s anything that’s normal in my life, it’s this.”

He held out the joint, his fingers trembling. My brother was dressed in nothing but a pair of plaid pajama pants and an undershirt, the same clothes he’d slept in. His hair was buzzed short now. Mom had been taking him to the dermatologist, and his skin was clearing up. But that didn’t hide the truth. There was something haunted about him. There always would be. I looked at him, and felt my chest squeeze, and almost wanted to cry.

Instead, I shook my head, too. Without a word I walked over to him, and grabbed the joint from between his fingers. Then I went and sat on the bench, taking small puffs, staring into the fire.

Jamie stood there for a moment longer, not comprehending. It was as though until this moment his mind hadn’t really registered the fact that time had passed for me, too. He covered his eyes with his hands, letting out a small laugh. Then he came and sat between me and Neal.

“Pass it over,” Neal said. I reached right across Jamie and gave Neal the joint. My brother didn’t say anything. His face was a blank mask. He stared into the fire. I felt the cells of my hands all come alive. The fire flashed blue at the base. I stared at it, too. Then I put my hand in my brother’s hand. Nobody said anything, but we stared into the blue-white light, not talking, not feeling, our hearts beating out a stuttered chorus, together.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Apotheosis

Prickly prickly cycle day 30. Feel like a firecracker today, and full of bluster.

I want to say something about the way we talk about success, and failure, and authors’ careers. But if I do, what will people think? Every time I talk about this stuff, people wrinkle their eyebrows, send me kind emails: Are you okay?

And I want to laugh, because I’m more than okay lately, though I wasn’t, once.

So sure of myself.

And sure of this: if I write this, it will be shared less than a book deal announcement.

This business likes winners.

This business wants us to believe that there’s a happy ending at the end of every book, and that ending is a book sale, maybe with movie rights.

This business wants us to believe that the author is the hero, and our career, the monomyth.

This business believes in regimented advice about how to increase your wordpower in 30 minutes a day or by using this software this business wants every book to sell in twelve hours on two paragraph proposal at auction this business will blog and reblog the success of the young and able-bodied and white, the people who are already winning at life, just look at who gets sent on book tours.

And it’s nice work if you can get it.

But so far my journey hasn’t been quite so--idk?--commercial.

We are not supposed to talk about the books that go on submission but do not sell unless we can extract a platitude or easily understood lesson from the experience. Who makes these rules? Who knows?

We are not supposed to talk about the dozens of high concept pitches that we dreamed up and then failed to write. We are not supposed to share messy first drafts once we have a book deal because then people might ask, hey, whatever happened to that book? And you’ll have to say, it sucked I guess, because no one wanted to buy it and sorry you can’t, either. And oh, they’ll look disappointed, but you can’t be disappointed together, then.

Or else, you’ll have to say, I wrote it for eight days and then got bored and a better book came along. And people will look disappointed anyway.

Those books in drawers like dirty, shameful secrets.

Here’s the funny thing, and why you shouldn’t worry about me. Lately, I do not feel the least bit like a failure.

Here’s what felt like failing to me: trying to make my books simply sufficient to sell. Trying to sell on a high concept commercial pitch. Trying to write books that behaved themselves. Trying to make my main characters more likable. Trying to make myself more likable on social media. Keeping my mouth shut when I was in pain. Trying to be a little less weird a little less messy using scrivener and outlining and writing 2,000 words a day or else considering myself a failure. Trying to write boring hot straight guys with abs. It’s nice work if you can get it, I guess. It just wasn’t me.

Me, these days, I’m writing hot mess books in fits and starts between playing in the snow at the edge of the supermarket parking lot with my daughter. I’m saying to myself, how can I make this book weirder, and mean a little more to me? It’s 31,000 word first chapters and prose poetry jammed into the text and queer teenage girls masturbating in the woods like can you get any less appealing, Phoebe? It’s writing about kids who live with one foot in one world and the other in some big Elsewhere, Jewish and angry, New Jersey and beautiful. Pirates, and all the songs you loved when you were seventeen and all the girls you didn’t.

This book, and the last book, I shouldn’t have written. Fuck if I know if they’ll sell. And that’s a triumph. Because I don’t care anymore. But I’m happy and I’m happy and I’m happy.

And if you can get it, that’s the nicest work of all.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Making SFnal Worlds: Perspective

(continued from here.)

As the author, you should always know more about your world than either the characters or the reader.

World-building is the foundation of your story. But what you show of the world-building is a productive of perspective. Think about the aspects of our own world that we take for granted, from the scientific (say, fundamental laws of physics) to the mundane (how our cellphones work). 

You only want to explain things when those explanations would be sensible to the character. In our example book, for example, a teenage girl wouldn’t define the term “OcuViewer” anymore than your average teenager would find it necessary to define the term “phone.” 

This introduces challenges. What if your audience understands less than you’d hoped? Don’t worry too much, though. Our brains are good at constructing universes from context clues. You can show what something is through description or through its function in your character’s life. 

Compare:

The OcuViewer was invented in 2140 by GoogAppMax Inc. It supplies advertising for everything that the viewer looks upon, detailing everything from in-store availability to price to whether it’s trending on the most popular twitstreams. It’s implanted shortly after birth. 

with:

I point my OcuViewer on the can of spaghetti sauce. Nutritional information streams by. Then an ad for a competing brand appears. I furrow my brow and dismiss it. Most of the time, I don’t notice the OcuViewer’s noise. I’ve had one implanted since I was eight days old, of course. But sometimes, when you’re just trying to make dinner for your little sister, it can feel pretty annoying.

The second one is much more interesting, grabby, voicey, and forward-driving.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t ever just tell us world-building details. But you want it to be organic, realistic. Otherwise, you slow down your plot through infodumping. If you want your story to breathe, you need to infodump judiciously.

To address this, some writers choose the perspective of a newbie to a given universe. Then the reader learns about the world as the character does. This only works well, though, if the character comes from a world similar to our own (otherwise you have to do twice the world-building!). Many of these fish out of water stories end up recreating white savior tropes, too, which is gross--an outsider comes in and “corrects” the problems with an othered society. Not all of them, though. It seems to work well for time travel books.

But even if you don’t want the perspective character to be an outsider, sometimes those characters can work well for producing conflict and shaping the world. 

So let’s return to our incipient image: a teenage girl with an OcuViewer looks at a teenage boy and nothing is registered by her device. her first thought might be that this is a mechanical error. But maybe he’s from outside her world. He’s part of a group of radical homeschoolers! From the future! Brought forth to bring down the corptocracy! Or something! But can she trust him?? Maybe not?!

As the conflict between your characters spurs the plot forward, the world-building you did previously now can help you make choices that will shape your plot, the character’s perspective, and the world around them. You’ll probably find that there are areas you have to finesse or develop as the plot does. That’s fine! The world of your draft is flexible. Things can be polished or made consistent in revisions.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Making SFnal Worlds: Genesis

This is how I approach world-building.

Which comes first, the plot of the universe? I have to admit that I envy writers who begin their stories with fully fledged worlds and then find their way to a story in that world. It seems somehow easier, because then you have the underlying foundation to your story already there. This would be sort of like writing a contemporary novel. Books set in our world and time have no less world-building; it’s just that the world has done it for you, leaving you free to consider voice, character, and plot without wondering whether it makes any sense why we’ve named the days of the week after Norse gods but the months after Roman leaders.

It’s not how it works for me, though. I almost always start with a spark of image, plot, or character.

This means working backwards: how could we conceivably create a world which would support that story.

So let’s say I have an idea for a book. Let’s say it’s near-future sci-fi, where people have ocular implants which supply advertisements when they look at an object.  I’m making this up, okay? It’s not terribly original. But this is how it would start for me. Maybe I have an image: a teenage girl looking at a boy, waiting for ads to appear about his clothing or hair color choices. But nothing pops up. Conflict!

At this point, where, in a contemporary novel, you start working forward, building the plot trajectory, I start working back. Since this book is set on Earth, I need to know how we get from our current time, to a future time where people don’t mind having ocular implants put in. What would make that plausible?

People today are comfortable with a certain degree of direct, custom advertising in exchange for certain privileges. For example, Google has access to my location data in exchange for backing up all of my photos. People might also be willing to agree for more monitoring if they’re motivated out of fear--with, for example, the Patriot Act.

So it seems I have two plausible options here: either people are receiving a service, or this is something that the government has done to address a threat. Or maybe some combination of the two. I don’t really feel like writing a military dystopian, though, so I’m going to go along with the former option.

What are the social problems that exist today that people are eager to address? If this is a YA novel--it sure sounds like one--I’d want it to be something resonant to today’s teenagers. Let’s say student loan debt.

Maybe in the future, corporate-funded college is free, so long as you have an ocular implant that fills your world with advertising. This might sway working class parents, but probably not wealthier parents who can already afford university. But actually, that’s pretty interesting. That would create class stratification, an experiential difference between the haves and have-nots. Maybe the middle class has continued to shrink, and the only people who can afford to pay for college are celebrities and the extremely wealthy, who are draped in expensive clothes and whose lifestyles the underclass seek to replicate through their drone-like post college office jobs.

At this point, I’d want to consider things like language, religion, transportation, currency, culture. How would these all be impacted by this new highly stratified society? I think it’s important, too, not to fall into the trap of assuming your culture will be a monoculture. If your society is grounded in modern American society, this is unlikely to to be the case (and can have unfortunate implications if you assume it is). Consider what life would look like for those of different races in your society, for those with disabilities, for queer people. If everyone is able-bodied cis straight white Protestant, you sure as hell better have an explanation for where eeeeveryone else went (the implications can be pretty ugly here. If you’re working in a dystopian mode, you might want those ugly implications but you should really interrogate these choices for maximally realistic world-building and also for not being a jerk).

Think about what your society would look and smell like. Think about the average person’s daily life inside this society. Do they go to Church on Sundays, or synagogue on Saturdays? Where do our teenager’s parents go to work? What kind of breakfast do they eat? Do they eat around a table, a family meal? Or individually, in front of a TV? How do they pay their bills?

Maybe even as student loan debt has disappeared, credit card debt has risen as average citizens work to replicate the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Maybe everyone eats at a table together, but they’re too busy processing advertisements during meals to speak to one another much. Maybe meals are processed and packaged because your character’s parents work twelve hour days. Maybe they’ve traded one form of debt for another, and for what? A dream of giving their children education, a better life, but that education is corporate funded and full of falsehoods.

I think my girl might be a member of one of these families. Working class. Non-white. I think they speak Spanish at home. Maybe she’s religious, and Sundays at church feel like a respite from the hustle and bustle of a daily life full of processed foods, compulsory spending, and ads. Her friends at her overcrowded high school talk of little besides celebs and their latest fashion trends. She plays in, but deep down, she yearns for something more. Yet as far as she knows, there’s nothing else out there.

(Like I said, not the most original idea in the universe.)

At this point, you should have a fairly good sense of your world. If you’re the type to write stuff down, go ahead and jot down a few notes. Don’t get overloaded, though. This is a thought exercise. You can easily fall into a hole of just world-building, putting together maps and word banks, a veritable series Bible, but you don’t want to do that. Remember, this world-building exists to prop up your book. We have enough now. So we can move on to making the world serve the story.

[bethrevis]

Writing & Babies

I recently was asked this:

And it is such a big question that I feel like it deserves a much longer answer. 

I am no expert. My son is now almost 9 months old, which is weird for a lot of reasons, not the least because I never really thought I’d be a “Mom.” I could picture myself pregnant, I could picture myself having a child, but I could never really picture myself in the day-to-day life of motherhood, and yet. Here I am. 

Keep reading

[ffffffocksnorth]

Ahhhh, THE BALANCE. That eternal question which inevitably plagues new writer/moms and fills them with TERROR.

Because it’s really a question about LIFE and IDENTITY, namely, will my life be WRECKED and will I lose myself in this new, foreign experience?

When I was six months pregnant, I sent an email to a bunch of my writer-friends, subject heading: Help me be brave. I was working on a proposal for a new book, but my agent didn’t want to go on submission until I had a complete manuscript. But I was worried about finishing it before the baby came. I was anemic during my pregnancy, very tired, and very emotional. Part of me wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and sleep, all the time.

My friends sent me encouragement back. Of course you can do it. You’ve done harder things, written faster. You have it in you! they said, and I dearly appreciated their pep-talks.

But then my dear friend Rachel Hartman said something a little different. Of course you can do it, she said. But it’s okay if you don’t want to.

I’ve read and digested and quoted that email a thousand times, especially this part:

Seriously, if you stepped away from writing for five years, what would happen? Other people would put out more books than you? Fuck 'em. You'd be too old to write? Pretty sure no. This isn't computer science; your skill set won't become obsolete. You'd feel like you'd wasted five years? Ah, see, but that's the thing. You wouldn't have (unless you were addicted to Candy Crush Saga the whole time; that's kind of a waste). Living isn't wasted. Taking time to breathe, slowing down, isn't wasted. A small person will have grown five years in your presence, and that isn't wasted at all. It takes time to refill the well. THERE IS NO SHAME IN TAKING TIME. Tend your garden. Nothing is ever wasted.

And I'm not saying you should take five years off. But you COULD. 

This was the advice I needed at the time, though I didn’t know it. I’m terrifically type-A, driven, career-oriented. I’d absorbed so much about leaning in and the damage of leaning out. I’d read and fretted and stressed about losing myself in the experience of mothering.

And then I did exactly that.

I tried to finish that book, but by the end of my pregnancy, my brain was sludge. I was nesting constantly, preparing for a baby, preparing for motherhood. I didn’t have the energy or the passion I needed to churn out those pages.

And then I had my daughter and I just . . . didn’t want to.

I didn’t stop writing. I wrote another, better book in the seven months after her birth. It was a book I could not have written without the experience of pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding. I was a wholly different person after all of that, as if my very cells had been rearranged.

And maybe this is Bad Career Advice. That book hasn’t sold yet. Neither have the other projects I’ve worked on, slowly, intentionally, since. But there’s one thing I feel terribly certain about: I’m making better art now than I was then. 

Do I make it as quickly? Nah. Of course not. During the day, I provide primary childcare to my daughter, which is a more-than-full-time job. We don’t have daycare, or a babysitter. And because of that, I experienced a period of extreme exhaustion between the time when my daughter was mobile and the time she quit napping at 21 months and started going to bed earlier. I’m just now regaining a routine, momentum, some semblance of my old writing life. I can write quickly again, if I want. But sometimes I want to watch television, too, and that’s okay. I’m doing two full time jobs, after all. I’ve earned some Steven Universe.

And of course, these aren’t choices that would work for every child, mother, writer, or family. But they were right for us.

And that’s the funny thing. Babies are individuals. Mothers are individuals. Families and writers are individuals too. Beth can give you advice based on her experiences and I can give you advice based on my experiences and Rachel can give you advice based on her experiences. None of that advice is wrong. But our lives aren’t your life. Something I’ve found as a mother is that everyone wants to give you the answer, the key, the precise thing that worked for them. But there is no answer, not really, except for the one that works for you and your child.

I used to say A writer is someone who writes. And that’s true. Even though I write far less these days, and even though there are some days when I don’t write a word. There’s never a time when I’m Not Writing, even when I’m not putting words down on the page. Living is writing. Parenting is a unique life experience that will change you and change your words. These keys that I’m typing on while my daughter plays on the carpet at my feet, these keys waited for me. They didn’t go anywhere.

I did lose myself in motherhood. There were times when it was terrifying. But I found myself again, brand new, and changed. Still a writer, but a better one, too.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Star Wars: Ruminations (Episode II: The Master Wakes)

For Kody

The dawn wakes. The master wakes, too. 

And today, just as he has every day for the past fifteen years, the master makes his journey from the cave at the water’s edge up and up the ancient stone steps to overlook the sea and endless sky.

His body aches. It always aches. Old wounds, that ancient pain which the medical droid said he should not feel. But he always does. His prosthesis hurts where it meets his flesh. It doesn’t move quite like his old hand did, and sometimes, when he goes to brush the salt water mist from his eyes, his skeletal metal fingers seem to drag through the air. It would be easy to focus his mind on the searing points within him. It would be easy to roll himself in pain, to sleep late beneath his robes and never make this trek. He is old. He is tired. He is alone. He never found what he was searching for here. But he cannot let the Dark Side win.

He climbs higher, breathes deep. There are days when he feels the Light pulse and sway inside him. There are days when he knows he is just like these steps, shaped by time, that one day he will drift away into the wind and be nothing more. There are days when he can feel the peace of it.

There are other days. There are times when he struggles. He lost a father he never knew. He lost old Ben, and a young one, too. He won many small battles, but he lost the war, and now the Darkness has swallowed up the lives of those he loved. He should not love. He should be like a stone. It should not bother him that he never found what he came here for. He should not want, because desire leads to suffering, which leads to Darkness.

Every day is the same here. Grey sky. Green moss. Stone steps worn blue with time. The master walks. The master tries to make himself forget.

But today, there is a difference. He almost can’t believe it when he sees it, that ship like a flat coin, bursting through the grey. Bright and blue and unbelievably fast and frankly unbelievable. The master closes his eyes. He feels the ripples through the Force. A return. His old friend.

The smuggler should not have come here, the master thinks, folding his hands within his robe, looking out into the water. The smuggler has so much Darkness within him. His fear, his lust, his petty jealousies. This is a sacred place (even if the master never found the thing he sought). This is not a place for scoundrels, thieves, murderers in cold blood. This is not even a place for heroes.

And yet the master feels a joy, small and trembling, flame within him. He will hear news of his sister soon. And his nephew. And the shifting tides of political alliances. He will hear the smuggler’s dirty jokes. The smuggler never cared that the master had made himself into a stone, without lust, without feeling. The smuggler never hesitated to make the master blush like a young man.

He could be himself with the smuggler. He could be human. The master feels the weight of feet on the steps behind him. He imagines what he would tell the other man, now that they both are old. He wonders if he will admit his failures. How he came here, seeking someone, and found nothing but an empty camp; a fire, coals still warm; a temple echoing with the voices of a thousand dead Jedi and all of their regrets. What would the smuggler say? Would he smile, charming, and make jokes about the foolishness of the master’s faith? Once, it had enraged the master. But now he finds himself filled with Light in anticipation of it. His friend is here. And the master is no longer alone.

Steps on the mossy soil behind him. Joy. Anticipation. Sweet, sweet Light. The master turns, and that’s when he sees the girl. Slight, with a pale hand outstretched, and a weapon within it. That’s when he feels the Darkness smoke thickly within him--the smuggler is gone, and there will be no laughter now--but a Light flicker meekly, too. Because the girl has finally come home, the master’s weapon in her hand, and his quest has, at long last, ended.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Star Wars: Ruminations (Episode I: In Those Endless Nights)

She should have been thinking of spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

She should have been thinking of those dead on Hosnian. Of the millions of lives, snuffed out like a candle in one single, sinister breath. But somehow her heart had broken once, long ago, and then become hardened to such things. Now, sitting at the controls, her face lit by swirling maps and figures, all she could think about was the grey-haired smuggler and the possibility he would return, their son by his side.

There was a time when the smuggler would come to her in the middle of the night, carrying the boy in his outstretched hands. She’d wake, her breasts sopping against the sheets of whatever bed he’d found for her for the week, until their rent came due. She’d been raised a princess, had expected to have her babies in a bed whose gold-painted posts towered toward an endless firmament. But this was the life she’d found herself in, nestling the child’s long body to her body in someone else’s bed, her skin still pale and muscles weak from the labor of his birth.

In the dim light, she’d examine him. Pale flesh, blue-veined, and a slight shadow of fur between his shoulders. The medical droid had said it was because he came early. The smuggler had asked his co-pilot if he had anything to do with it. She didn’t even care that he was cracking jokes while she was torn open and bleeding in front of both of them. Perfect, the child was perfect, nuzzling against her, a flop of black hair, even then. Oh, how her belly had burned when he was inside her.

In those endless nights, she’d put him to her chest. He was frantic, always starving, and trembling, and red faced, and angry. Until, like one of her brother’s magic tricks, he’d latch. And then something would happen. They’d relax into one another. He’d slit open those tiny, black-lashed eyes and she could swear that they spoke to one another without speaking. Maybe this was the Force. Maybe it moved through her, too.

Those nights were never ending. The whole galaxy falling apart around them, and for one moment, it didn’t matter. She thought her whole life would be blasters and sabers and gunners and running. There was no running with him. Only his hunger, and then the silence of his satisfaction as they both drifted in and out of sleep.

The future stretched in front of both of them. Maybe she’d marry the smuggler. Maybe she’d give the child his last name. Maybe he would be funny. Maybe he would fall in love, like she had. Maybe he would build a better world than the one she imagined for him. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

It didn’t last. It never does. He’d fall away from her, his mouth open and wet with milk, and then startle himself awake and cry and cry. It isn’t right, she thought as she cried too and struggled with his swaddle, to do this alone. She should have her mother with her, and her mother’s mother, unfolding like a ladder to the past. All that knowledge gone, squandered. Where was her Yoda? Her Obi-Wan Kenobi? Where was her god damned Ben?

Ben.

She looked down at the child, his face like a monstrous mask as he cried. She took out her breast, and snuggled his writhing body against hers. His mouth had made her bleed again, and she winced as his tongue moved against her. But then it happened. The light side of it all. The sigh. They settled into one another. She stroked his tiny, fisted hands.

“Your name is Ben,” was what she said. The smuggler in the bed beside her stirred. She’d forgotten he was there.

“What was that?”

“We’ll call him Ben.”

“Okay,” he said and then, turning over, he went back to sleep.

#

The smuggler never returned. Only a girl, freckle-faced, with eyes like two brown pebbles. Death was written in them. That’s when she knew she’d lost them both.

She opened her arms to the girl, folded her within them, and felt something, deep and true and painful, for the first time in a long time.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Kylo Ren is everybody’s high school crush

Kylo Ren hates spoilers. Kylo Ren thinks that people who spoil the latest episode of their favorite space wizard movie franchise should be dragged into an alleyway and shot.

Kylo Ren is not your boyfriend. Kylo Ren says that what you share transcends labels.

Beneath his mask, Kylo Ren has a soft, beautiful pelt of wolf hair. Kylo Ren would like you to tangle your fingers in it.

Kylo Ren will never be as strong as you. Kylo Ren wants to be your teacher, because he can teach you how to use your strength.

Kylo Ren has scars beneath the voluminous robes of worn black linen. Kylo Ren will not tell you how they got there. Kylo Ren will only smile knowingly, alluringly, mysteriously.

Kylo Ren is a man, but you will call him a boy, but not your boyfriend. Kylo Ren has a boy’s face on a man’s body. Kylo Ren was on Girls. He’s older than you, but not in a way that makes you feel old. Kylo Ren likes girls with small hips, tiny tits. More than a handful is too much, Kylo Ren says. Kylo Ren is always telling you what kind of bodies he likes. Sometimes it is your body. Sometimes it is someone else’s.

Kylo Ren is related to someone you know, but that doesn’t make it creepy. It just means this was all fated to be.

Kylo Ren is not pale because he lives in his mom’s basement. Even though he loves his mom.

Kylo Ren has daddy issues. They aren’t as bad as your daddy issues, but you will spend all your time trying to heal him.

Kylo Ren can take it, so you might as well give it to him.

One night you will drink too much and Kylo Ren will tell you that he put those scars on his body. He won’t let you hug him. He’s not sorry.

Sometimes Kylo Ren gets angry. He throws a bottle. He throws a lamp. He’s angry at his dad, though. Not at you.

There’s light in him, somewhere. He struggles with wanting to snuff it out.

Kylo Ren sees visions, hears voices. Kylo Ren will be a great leader. 

Some nights you’ll go to a bar full of alien-faced men and Kylo Ren will let you sit on his knee while he talks about the philosophical implications of living in a world where god is manifest in all of us. When you try to speak, he puts a finger in the center of your lip and says “Hush, child.” You are eighteen fucking years old. You can vote, even if Kylo Ren has to buy you your drinks.

Kylo Ren has acne under his mask, but that just makes him more human, more approachable.

Kylo Ren is not disgusting until you are older now than Kylo Ren was then. Kylo Ren would no longer find you intriguing, anyway. Kylo Ren is always winning these arguments, even in retrospect.

Kylo Ren does not understand why you’re upset about Captain Phasma. Kylo Ren just wanted a chance to bask in the glow of your force.

You liked the way you looked when lit red by the light of Kylo Ren’s stick.

[ffffffocksnorth]

#whyiwrite

When I was fifteen I lived a double life. I guess you could call it “fantasy.” Every cool attractive boy or girl on the PATH train home from my sister’s was a new potential friend or lover and I was a second me, a me who was brash where I was retreating, a me who kissed and lied and gave the world the middle finger, a me who could cast lightning strikes with her bare hands and with the flint strike of her teeth start a fire and burn it all to glitter dust and ash.

I remember that summer I came back to it, that summer in grad school when I wrote books again, that summer in grad school when more than half my cohort was more than half a country away and I taught five days a week and had lunch alone in shining delis and then ran home under the threat of rain and it was like coming home, those five hundred not-very-good words a day, the only thing that could push me home fast enough under the threat of thunderheads words words words these worlds I built, I learned to build like I learned to paint in my basement in high school: unclothed messy messy messy but you keep on pushing pushing pushing until something beautiful comes through. That summer. That thunder and green summer. Where I was a writer once more.

And I wrote and I wrote through Virginia and through Israel, through 900 mile round trip drives, first lines on my lips, worlds in my mouth and my cat in the passenger seat mewling and long distance relationships and weddings and fights and joyfulness stolen words and days where writing was the only thing and I wrote until writing was as much a job as those spreadsheets and I wrote through rejections and retreats and triumphs and I wrote through two books you may have read and many more you will never ever read.

And now my life is falling asleep nursing, falling asleep watching television surrounded by puzzle pieces and q-tips my daughter throws into the open shower, dozens of q-tips and giggles and dancing and now my life is painting walls and smears of turquoise on my forearms and pulling ivy and courting rain. And yet still I pull myself awake well past midnight, I pull out my phone while she sleeps in the backseat, I steal words with breakfast and steal words when the world is asleep, fat toddler feet on my belly, I write and I write and I write.

I write because I could be selfish and I could be hard, I write because sometimes there is a grey ball of negative space inside me and it sucks in both darkness and light, I write because empathy is the last weapon of human kindness, the last sword against solipsism, the signal flare that someone else is out there, that the world continues to be beautiful and miraculous and strange, I write because I have a universe in me, three galaxies, seventeen planets, four nations, I write because of a city, a small town, a rail station where the dandelions grow as big as your fist, I write because there’s an apartment, a house, an attic bedroom, a bed in a shared room, a girl a girl a girl and a purple marble notebook decorated with stickers and those words inside are a promise against mundanity against ordinary against routine:

I will write I will write I will write.

[marxvx-deactivated20170329]

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

[madgastronomer]

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

[feminesque]

2011

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.

AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden

The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.

The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.

Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project

Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

We Were Here (2011)

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.

[ayellowbirds]

Please, if you are following me right now, read this. It’s so important to remember this, to understand how much we lost. To understand that, when I was a little kid, the biggest thing about the community was that shared loss. 

[thesylverlining]

There is a lot I want to say and I don’t have the spoons but. Yeah. This is all so, so important. Please read this.

[strixus]

I’m in my mid 30s, and grew up in a major gay center of the US (not SF or NY). I remember there was this quiet bubbling for a very long time. A neighbor who lost a “house mate”, people talking about being careful, and so on. And then… suddenly it was out in the open. And we were all terrified. 

[coldalbion]

Also in my mid thirties and well, this shit was on TV on the 80′s when I was a kid in the UK:

Both of these were on the TV repeatedly, over and over again. The reason “small groups” is mentioned is tied to the horrific deliberate policy of not mentioning homosexuality in the UK (which included the infamous Section 28 where you couldn’t talk about it schools, lest you be accused of ‘promoting’ homosexuality.)

Basically? If we weren’t going to get nuked in a Cold War apocalypse, we all thought we were going to die in the 80′s. This is why people of my vintage of LGBTIA+ are so twitchy about AIDS now being regarded as ‘just another disease’, because not only did people we knew die from it, but we had this nightmare fuel piped into our brains for years!

[halduncan]

Yup, this. I’m 43 now, so AIDS and Section 28 were a fucking double-tap execution of my teenage dreams. In ‘86 when the monolith ad came, I was just under fifteen. I was coming on seventeen when Thatcher (may her name rot in fucking infamy) brought in Section 28. Clause 28 it was called before it was passed. Catch 28 was what I called it, after Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Why? Because the year it was being touted, I was in the newly-fledged debate society my English teacher had set up. Me and this girl decided this hot topic, so relevant to ourselves as school kids, was perfect debate material. We suggested it to the teacher, but he had to veto it: if he let us debate it, that could have been deemed a breach of the law itself. Let that sink in for a second. The law literally forbade us from even questioning the law.

Man, with that fucking law and AIDS lowering over us, that nuclear winter wasn’t just a spectre; it was a dead future already with us; it was a fucking metaphoric existential condition of soul death. I was too young at the time to personally know anyone who died from HIV, but the reason I found the courage to come out to my folks in my early twenties was because one of my teacher father’s colleagues–Eileen her name was–volunteered in hospice care, and when she came round to visit she’d talk about her gay friends, all sick and dying. It was only the fact that my folks were somehow, gobsmackingly, actually friends with this woman that made me, one night after she’d left, heart in my mouth, turn to my parents and say, “I’ve got something to tell you…”

Fuck, AIDS was the fucking Grim Reaper at large in the world, far as i was concerned. Sex would’ve been a game of Russian Roulette, so even if the age of consent for a would-be Sodomite hadn’t been fricking twenty one right up until I was past it and legal anyways, I can’t imagine my teen self daring to step out into that dance of death.

Which is the other side of it, really. I mean, you had those who came of age just in time to get out and find their community before they had that community scoured from them, friend by friend. But for me, in the era before Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and whatnot, that devastation was all elsewhere, in the cities that should have been havens for us. San Francisco, London, New York, all these wonderlands we might have whispered of in our hearts, the bright lights we would have set out for, to find love and pride and rainbow flags and glorious fuckery. Mother Sodom. To my generation, that was a distant city razed to a desolation of salt and sarcoma. Born just too late, when we heard of these havens, of this haven culture of gay communities distributed through the cities of the world, we heard of it first in images of its annihilation. The tombstone and the iceberg that stood where the glory of Mother Sodom had been scoured from the earth.

That’s why this blog’s called Fuck Yeah New Sodom, by the way. Because I believe with every fibre of my being that we can and must rebuild what was lost. I look at that image of the quilts laid out in a grid and I see city blocks, streets running crosswise, boulevards stretching away to the horizon, and buildings rising where each patchwork quilt lies on the ground, all those losses become bold and brilliant multicoloured blueprints for a future of ferociously defiant diversity. Aye, fuck the tragedy and the noble suffering. Fucking fuck it to fuck and then some. Let the raw naked grief and the raw naked rage that goes with it serve as fuel for the fight to rebuild. I came of age into the fucking wasteland made by HIV, but since I was spared… I’m damned if I won’t see Mother Sodom risen anew before I die.

[ffffffocksnorth]

Hal fucking Duncan. These are important things to talk about.

[mollyostertag-deactivated202310]

OKAY SO when I watched Fury Road (the first time) I thought it was strange how eloquently the Wives talked, but then when I watched it the second (and third) time I noticed that their prison room was filled with books - they’re the only educated, well read people in the world of Mad Max. So then I…had some feelings and made a little comic!

[lilylilymine]

wow this is amazing and so much better than the Vertigo prequel comic. PERFECTION.

[mazarinedrake]

This is EXACTLY the kind of prequel content I most dearly desire! 

[ceruleancynic]

YES PLEASE MORE OF THIS

[zenosanalytic]

Something I found rather cool about that is how historically accurate it is.

Keep reading

[mollyostertag-deactivated202310]

bless

[maariaaargh]

Of course he’d be into plant stuff

[ffffffocksnorth]

I fuckin love this.

[chairmanchurchbuttercup]

I saw this in a book I just started reading That’s so cute

[ffffffocksnorth]

True story: I meant to try and get in touch with Mrs. G before Starglass came out. I felt a little weird about it, like, I haven’t spoken to you in 19 years, okay if I dedicate my book to you? But then I got pregnant a few books before my book came out and I completely forgot. My baby turned my brain to mush, I swear. So one day I get this email.

Hi Phoebe, It’s Susan Garatino. I believe you dedicated your book to me?

Truth was, I was relieved to know that she’d heard about the book and the dedication, and even more relieved that I had the opportunity to tell her how much she meant to me. I sent her a signed copy, naturally. 

Things like this make me really glad the internet exists. Because otherwise, what were the chances? (My second book was dedicated to my husband. He got a signed copy, too.)

[ya-pride]

As a closeted teenager, thinking about any kind of future for myself was an act of speculative fiction. I attended a conservative all-boys prep school, a place where, at the time, athletes were kings and heroes and there was only one way to be a man. Any deviation from that way was seen as a personal failing. And I was failing. I had deviant desires and strange daydreams. I was different. I also had no gay role models and no books with gay characters to look to. Without any external guidance to look to, my imagination had to provide. When I daydreamed about a life out of the closet, a life of openness, I was writing fantasy. I had to create a world so very different from my own. When I read a character in a book as gay, in spite of any authorial intent, I was writing fan fiction. I created the world I needed in an alternative universe, one where I was out, my friends and family were accepting, and the heroes of my favorite books were just like me (Ironically, I considered Ender’s Game the queerest of all my books, and loved it largely for that reason…just goes to show, readers bring what they need to a book and the author best get out of the way…). Amazingly, in the years since I finished high school, the world of my fantasies became my reality. I came out; I traveled; I fell in and out of love, then in again. I was lucky to have friends and family who embraced me, and later embraced my husband. Thanks to generations of LGBTQIA+ activists, I was able to bend reality to match my teenaged daydreams. And yet, in the books I loved, the speculative fiction that had trained me to dream other possible worlds, the characters were still mostly straight. So I set out to write the YA novel that I wished had existed when I was a teenager.

alex–london (author of Proxy and Guardian) in his guest post We’re All Bending Reality on GayYA.Org (via thegayya)