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Hey, I'm not on here much anymore, but my book is now a solid object that I can hold in my hand. The cover was designed by the incandescently talented Tara Bush.

If the Stars Are Lit is now in the pre-order stage, which is a bit like the face hugger stage, only you get to keep down everything you've stress-eaten, and it's marginally tastier than what they serve on the Nostromo.

#science fiction #gays in space #angst in space #SF #Luxury Space Communism

followthebluebell

Yardstick, I don't think you can eat an entire turkey

Some Thoughts on Time Travel, The Way Home, and Losing a Parent

Colton Landry is the ghost of Christmas past, a soft patriarch bordering on cloying. I’d initially assumed that Hallmark added him as a bone to traditional audiences, which yeah, they did do that—but it turns out they were doing a lot more.

In Season 2, he’s still there when Del requires comfort or Eliot’s having his daddy issues, appearing in present-day flashbacks or in the past, and always, always with the right words. And then—twist-- Colton’s a time traveler, too. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we learn he’s been fine-tuning these interactions on a loop, calibrating the moments where they might have an impact.

In one sense, it’s a writer’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, a chance to retrofit those thwarted reassurances and confessions into characters’ mouths. But in another, it’s a self-referentialism that transcends Hallmark winking at its own tropes—see Kat’s throwaway line about the career woman returning home. Instead, they've folded them into the mechanics of time travel itself.

Writers sometimes use tarot cards to draw on archetypes or shift the dynamics in the story. I’ve tried it a few times with limited success, but here, TWH’s writers have taken the Hallmark card itself and slotted it into the arcana.

It’s dazzling, but it also made me think about the hollowness of the right words—how little comfort they offer even when you get them right.

Colton can’t change the past. He’s left to his voice, and however refined his delivery may be in hindsight, he can’t be certain of its impact. Add the Paradox of Ineffectuality to that Grandfather dilemma.

My father died two years ago. A cancer that had gone into remission returned suddenly, carrying out its imperative in weeks. I canceled my classes and boarded a plane, missing his passing by a few hours. Days earlier, I had spoken to him over the phone while he was still lucid. I told him I loved him, that he'd inspired me. We talked about Orwell (his favorite) and joked that he’d better not go religious at the last minute.

Later, my mother told me he said that I had said “all the right things.”

I’ll never really know what that meant.

#The Way Home #Colton Landry #Time Travel #Kat Landry #Thing I've been mulling but I don't have a blog yet so...

Excerpt

Maggie’s case files have been swept off the dining table, now covered in a laminated board dotted with stars and planets and the gleaming droid faces. Her phone is switched off on the kitchen counter, but Maggie hasn't so much as glanced at it in hours. She’s hunched over the board with her jaw set, a focused, almost wild look in her eyes.

Parker’s rolling a set of dice in her palms, making a clicking noise that works on Maggie like a sounding bell. "So you've just disembarked. There's a prison break on the other side of the ship, and the stormtroopers have been diverted. You show the approaching sentinel droids your pass, and they wave you on as the mechanics see to your ship.”

“Wait, I’m in?" Maggie says, faintly alarmed at the excitement in her own voice.

"Yeah. But don't get cocky. You've now got to infiltrate the communications hub and send a message through to your contact on the bridge. It's just a ten clicks ahead on the upper level, but security is tight. You head toward the lift. No guards and only one person manning the substation so you push the button to summon it.”

"Yeah?" Maggie says. "Go on."

"So far, you haven't ticked off any alarms, but as the door to the lift opens, an officer steps out, one of those sub lieutenants with an imperial stick up his butt. He bumps into you on his way out?”

"Why?"

"Have you seen a lift in a Star Destroyer. They’re toothbrush cases. Anyway, that doesn’t matter because petty officer is petty. He sneers. Demands to see your ID. Do you grovel or punch him in the face?"

“I’ve got decent combat abilities, right? Let’s punch him.”

Parker looks at her in disbelief. “Really?”

“It’s to my advantage.”

“Okay, that’s a choice. Let’s see if it’s a wise one.” Parker shakes the dice and rolls, her face sinking as they scatter out two ones.

"Shit!" Maggie says.

"Poodoo," Parker corrects her.

"Poodoo?" Maggie shakes her head. "If I was me, I could take the guy. Why do I have to lose to some Imperial milk toast. They practically grow them in those admin centers on Coruscant!"

Parker is silent for a moment, as if she's seriously contemplating the question.

"What?"

"You remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

“Rank, the officer training school, the world even.” She beams and snatches up the dice, giving them a little rattle in her palm. "This is working, Sawyer. I’ll have you speaking Ewok by morning.”

She and Parker play for hours. Maggie hacks into the communications hub and gets her message off to the spy on the bridge. She makes off in a Tie Fighter with a pretty Correlian smuggler she's freed from a cell. She’s having so much fun that when Parker cuts her off, it feels like last call in the bar.

"It's three am,” Parker says. “The Empire will still be here tomorrow. Besides, I need to get some sleep. Long drive to see my family."

"Wait?" Maggie sits back, feels a stab of disappointment. “What? “No. We have to train. I need to learn this stuff.”

“We are," Parker says. “And we will. Just not…” She looks at her watch, her tired grimace softening into comprehension. “It’s uh, Thanksgiving, Sawyer.”

“Yeah,” Maggie says. “So?”

"Look," Parker says, trying to cover for that sad elephant in the room. "If you're that into it, which is great! We need you to be. I've got another option.”

She reaches into her backpack, digging through the rattle of goodies she's brought over to pull out a game console. "It's my old one. I've got a subscription to Starboard." She grabs a Sharpie and jots down a password in block letters. " You can log in after you've gotten some sleep and some food. I'd recommend Andor's Burden and Nebula Quest to start.”

Maggie takes the console, holding it up like a leg of raw turkey. "Thanks."

"Good luck, Sawyer," Parker says, she hoists her backpack over her shoulders and then pauses, looking back at her with a somewhat guilty expression. “And Happy Thanksgiving."

#Sanvers #Star Wars names are placeholders #original to fic #in the between space #Maggie Sawyer #Parker Torres #Star Wars LARP

bitter69uk

Recently seen: In Laura Poitras’ lacerating Oscar-nominated new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), fierce 69-year-old photographer Nan Goldin - think of her as the Marianne Faithfull of modern art (or as Variety puts it, “the post-punk Diane Arbus”) - emerges as a captivatingly blunt tough cookie. The film deftly weaves together her art, activism and history of personal trauma and Poitras wisely mainly lets Goldin narrate it herself in her broken chain-smoker rasp.

The focus encompasses early family tragedy (the story of her doomed older sister Barbara is wrenching), Goldin’s artistic epiphany photographing her LGBTQ friends and her early years hustling in grungy 1980s New York (she go-go danced in New Jersey “titty bars”, bartended and did sex work at a brothel to buy rolls of film). Goldin eventually achieves international acclaim but also weathers the AIDS crisis, violent relationships and drug addiction.

While Goldin has openly battled substance abuse over the decades (she frequently depicts herself in rehab in her self-portraits), nothing prepared her for the hell of OxyContin, which she was prescribed following an injury. Once Goldin recovered, she was enraged to learn the very galleries that display her work benefited from the support of the Sacklers – the mega-rich family behind Purdue Pharma whose wealth is tainted by the OxyContin-fueled opioid crisis and who position themselves as art world philanthropists as a means of image-laundering. Forming the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018, Goldin undertook powerful demonstrations to shame the world’s cultural institutions into cutting ties with the Sackler family. (Goldin witnessed Act Up protests in the 80s and clearly took notes). Bittersweet as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is (and the Sacklers retreat into their wealth rather than face any real consequences), it’s gratifying to see galleries finally start refusing the family’s money. There are vivid glimpses of totemic avant-garde downtown NYC denizens like Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick. And as you would anticipate, the soundtrack is hip (Klaus Nomi. Bush Tetras. The Velvet Underground. Suicide). Pictured: Self Portrait 1st Time on Oxy, Berlin, 2014 by Nan Goldin

konoko

shellyshell2u

My Leukemia walk is this Saturday!!! 😁 I’m not quite at my goal yet but I did make it over $1000 collected, which I’m happy about. I’m also really excited because I’ll have a group of friends and family coming to walk with me ❤️ If anyone else wants to come with, let me know. And if you still would like to sponsor me, here’s the link to my donation page:

https://pages.lls.org/ltn/chi/Metrochicago24/MMeents

comickergirl

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SPACE DAD EARTH MOM SPACE PUP AND THE SUPER KIDS - “The Last Sled of Krypto!”

Maggie’s mother, if she is her mother, might be the 32 she was when Maggie’s father left. She might be the same 34 when the police say they found her body. She might be ten, twenty years older than that. She had those bones, Maggie’s father used to say. “You aren’t going to age either, kid.”

In the photo, she’s smoking a cigarette, glass of wine in hand, although Maggie’s mother never smoked. Never drank. She’s wearing a slim black dress and earrings, although Maggie never saw her in anything other than practical pantsuits and jeans on those rare occasions when she let her hair down.

Oh, and she’s smiling too.

Sitting in a love seat in a theater lobby, her legs crossed demurely, listening to someone out of frame, a shadow pitched across the ornate broadloom carpet. The photo is black and white and undated. Maggie found it in the city’s historical archives, one of the few interior shots of what used to the Elm Theater, later the Deacon Street Cinema,until it wound down its last years as a Slavic church. If you drive by the fenced-in ruin, you can still see the notice for Sunday services on the marquee.

Ho y Mass & Yout choir.

But this is a theater lobby, the wall bordered by framed, oversized posters. Red River. The Searchers. The 39 Steps. Classics, for show. Nothing that would help her put a date on things. An age on her mother.

If it is her mother.

She’s pretty sure it is.

She got a postcard of the Elm Theater when she was sixteen years old. Illustrated. Unsigned. She’s been getting them every couple of years. A night sky scene from Monument Valley. The Empire State Building. A celebrity octopus in some Florida aquarium. The writing is sparse and cryptically wishy-washy.

This is the life.

You’d love it here.

No signature. No name. But she knows.

#snippet #Sanvers #AU Maggie Sawyer #supergirl #maggie sawyer

elliothier

General Danvers - Rainbow Gif Pack

charliejaneanders

Today I am issuing a plea: Please be a book hipster! And by that I mean: Please go out of your way to hunt down the books that hardly anyone else is talking about, the gems that have been passed over in favor of the handful of books that usually get celebrated.

Please be a book hipster (my latest newsletter)