No-Brainers

Here's tomorrow's homily, for the first Sunday in Lent. I've linked to the Gospel passage below.

*

My husband and I have just started watching the British science-fiction series Doctor Who. In the episode we watched a few nights ago, a high school is taken over by a race of aliens, disguised as humans, who are actually ten-foot-tall lizards with bat wings and ferocious teeth. At a crucial point in the episode, Doctor Who and his companions are cornered by a group of these creatures, who have been using the students to try to unlock a source of cosmic power. The head alien, waving his bat wings, booms at Doctor Who, “Become a God at my side! Imagine what you could do! Think of the civilizations you could save!”

I poked my husband. “Hey! It’s the Temptation of Christ! I’m preaching on that this weekend!”

Doctor Who, of course, says no, just as Jesus does in this morning's Gospel. That’s the thing: they know this story as well as we do. When a ten-foot-tall lizard with bat wings offers you ultimate power, you say no, especially when said lizard has been snacking on children. When anyone invites you to perform magic, offers you rulership of the entire world, or suggests that you jump from a tall building, you say no.

These are no-brainers. I’ve never gotten the sense that Jesus is seriously tempted by these offers; I always picture him rolling his eyes. These three challenges strike me as a pro-forma final exam. I suspect the real test came earlier, when Jesus “was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil and had nothing to eat.”

Whenever I think about what those temptations might have looked like, I remember the moments in the Gospels when Jesus tries to go off by himself. He repeatedly tries to get alone time, and it never works. He’s constantly surrounded by crowds of people who need healing, by curious strangers hungry for good news, and by hapless disciples who can’t tie their own sandal laces without his help.

This pattern makes me wonder if the real temptation of the wilderness was the promise of sweet solitude, of all the time Jesus needed to pray and reflect and commune with his Father. True, he was fasting and hungry, but at least he wasn’t also worrying about feeding 5,000 other hungry people, or about helping the disciples catch fish, or about turning water into wine. If life in the wilderness was hard, it must also, in some ways, have been simple.

If I’m right about this -- if at least one of the temptations of the wilderness is the comfort of distance and disengagement -- the devil’s final three tests appear in a slightly different light. These three offers are, after all, things Jesus is going to get anyway. He will turn the stone of his death into bread for the world; he will be recognized as the ultimate ruler of creation; he will be thrown down from a great height and saved by the power of God. The devil’s greatest temptation isn’t power, glory or safety: it’s instant gratification. He’s offering these things right now, in a false form that’s removed from -- disconnected from -- the needs of the hurting world.

In time, Jesus will provide bread to all the hungry around him; but now the devil is tempting him to feed only himself. In time, Jesus will be adored and followed for his deeds of power and compassion; but now the devil is offering unearned glory divorced from love and service. In time, after a long painful journey, Jesus will plummet through the gloom of Good Friday and rise into the brilliance of Easter; but now the devil is tempting Jesus to test his safety net early, to prove that God will protect him before he has done the work for which he was sent.

The final three temptations, then, are of a piece with the previous forty days. Hey, Jesus, you don’t need to worry about messy human life; you don’t need to deal with crowds, or get your hands dirty, or be betrayed and crucified. You can stay alone, aloof, uninvolved: watching from a distance, an observer rather than a participant. You can stay safe.

Jesus says no. He knows this is a no-brainer. He knows his job is to love people in all their messy, inconvenient complexity, even when they hurt him, and he knows that there are no short-cuts to resurrection. The journey is the destination. 

Jesus knows this. Do we? It’s no accident that we hear this reading on the first Sunday of Lent, at the beginning of our own forty days, rather than the end.

I, personally, would find the devil’s offer, the easy way out, really tempting. I do find it tempting. February and March are the hardest months of the year for me. I’m always beset by work deadlines. I’m always disheartened by weather that refuses to get warm enough fast enough. I’m always cold, hungry, and tired. The idea of Lenten disciplines makes me roll my eyes. This isn’t a time of year when I want to add another set of tasks to an already overburdened schedule. It’s certainly not a time of year when I want to give up any kind of physical or emotional comfort. Unless I can turn hibernation into a Lenten discipline, I want no part of it.

Every year, I joke about giving up Lent for Lent. This year, I almost did. My Wednesday teaching schedule this semester kept me from attending Ash Wednesday services. Lenten soup suppers are equally impossible, and any kind of community service is a joke. I’m just too busy. Why not skip Lent, focus simply on caring for myself -- which feels like enough of a challenge, thank you -- and take the short-cut to resurrection, going into hibernation on Ash Wednesday and emerging on Easter? Why not simply observe, rather than participating? Why not stay safe?

It seemed like a splendid plan. But then I got hooked despite myself: I saw an ad for a United Methodist project, a photo-a-day challenge. On each of the forty days of Lent, participants take a photograph in response to a one-word topic, prompts like “return,” “injustice,” “wonder.” I like taking pictures. This seemed like a safe, easy no-brainer. I could do this.

I’ve done it for all of five days now, and I’ve discovered that it’s a lot less easy -– and safe -- than it looks. How do you take a photograph of a verb like “settle”? How do you take a photograph of an abstract noun like “evil” or “injustice”? What do evil and injustice look like, and where do they live in my neighborhood, close enough for me to take a snapshot of them? Once I’ve recognized them, how can I help change them? While my position behind the camera certainly makes me more observer than participant, the project has forced me to think about the world and its suffering. It’s forced me to connect, however tenuously, with the messy, complicated lives around me.

Our task during Lent is to engage with the suffering of the world, rather than retreating into comfort and complacency. Our task is to live into the day-to-day work of feeding the hungry and healing the sick, rather than taking a short-cut to Easter. Our task is to be fully human while we acknowledge Jesus as fully divine. And if taking pictures still seems like something of a safe way out, well, at least it’s made me think – and feel. The photo project has woken me up from hibernation.

Some temptations really are no-brainers. Most of us, I suspect, would know what to say to ten-foot-tall lizards with bat wings making enticing offers. But the devil takes many other forms, often more difficult to recognize. In the words of writer Kathleen Norris, “We act as the anti-Christ whenever we hear the Gospel and don’t do it.”

Amen.

Sunday

WorldCon is over. I'm registered at Fourth Street Fantasy for next year and on the waitlist for World Fantasy this year. I bought the Laurie Edison ring (tourmaline and sterling silver, gorgeous) as a birthday gift to myself, but because she has to size it, I probably won't have it until after my birthday. Elsewhere in birthday land, I went to Inez' birthday party, thrown by several of her old friends in Reno, which featured a truly fantastic Day of the Dead birthday cake.

Tomorrow, Inez flies back to Iowa.

Many other people are already gone.

I'm both sad and relieved. For five days now, I've been on a little piece of My Planet. Now, most of My People are going home, and I have to resume the stranger-in-a-strange-land gig.

On the other hand, tomorrow I get to sleep in. And exercise again, which hasn't been possible during the con. And maybe get some writing done. I'm very glad I had the foresight to cancel my hospital shift tomorrow!

For the rest of this evening, I plan to be a vegetable.

WorldCon

This WorldCon has, at the very least, been wonderful for me. It may turn out to have been life-changing.

For one thing, I got to see all kinds of old friends, including my beloved former students Kurt Adams and Inez Schaechterle -- with whom I've hung out for much of the con -- and my editor/NYC buddies Ellen Datlow, David Hartwell and Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (most of whom have also edited me at one time or another).

I got very satisfying strokes for the panels I moderated, especially the one on "Faith and Science," which went very smoothly despite the potential for catastrophe. I went to excellent panels and presentations. I got a lot of knitting done.

But I also got a lot of very specific reinforcement about my own identity as a writer. For instance:

* At my first panel, someone showed up with, I swear, a copy of every book and story I've ever written, asked me to sign them, and then gave me a beautiful piece of fluorite to thank me.

* When I was wandering around the Dealers Room, someone told me that "Gestella" is "the best werewolf story ever written."

* Only ten people attended my reading, but one of them was Cory Doctorow, a Much Bigger Name than I am, who appeared to genuinely love the reading and told me it reminded him of some of Kelly Link's work. She's an Infinitely Bigger Name than I am.

* I didn't expect many people to come to my signing today. It was a group signing, and Carrie Vaughn was signing at the same time; I figured she'd have lines around the block and I'd be twiddling my thumbs, so I brought my knitting. Carrie -- sitting next to me, as it turned out -- indeed had long lines, but mine weren't bad. I signed solidly for the first half hour. After that, it got a bit spottier, but not enough for me to get any knitting done. There were a few people who had multiple copies of my books, and someone who had a copy of my very first story, published in 1985 in Asimov's, and someone who said that he's bought anthologies simply because they contained stories I'd written, and several people who heaped praise on "Gestella." And towards the end of the hour, Mega-Infinitely Bigger Name Than I Am Carrie Vaughn turned to me and said, "Susan, I just want you to know that 'Gestella' blew my mind, and as a writer of werewolf fiction I tell other people to read your story, because I think it's definitive."

Holy crap.

* I've always been deeply moved and honored that Jo Walton, whose work I admire tremendously (and who's also much better known than I am), has said glowing things about my work in print. I was very excited to learn that she'd be at Renovation. I looked forward to meeting her in person. I was flattered when she asked if we could have tea together and hang out for an hour between panels, and more than a little startled when she said that one of the reasons she came to the con was to meet me, "because you don't travel much, and I knew you lived here."

Jo proceeded to give me a bracing pep talk. She reads the blog (hi, Jo!), and, among other things, said briskly, "It's perfectly obvious from your blog that you spiral down into depression and then pull yourself back out, but you need to get to more cons. The external validation's really important." We talked about cons: WorldCon and World Fantasy are often impossible because they conflict with teaching. Lately, the only cons I've attended have been WisCon and Mythcon, and even that's been spotty. I'm going to Mythcon again next year; I've been waffling about WisCon. Jo recommended the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, which I've heard about but have never gotten to. Inez and I are talking about sharing a room there next year.

After tea with Jo (coffee for me, actually, which may have been unwise that late in the afternoon), I went home to help Gary get ready for dinner, since we were having Inez and Kurt and Kurt's wife Shauna over. I babbled to Gary about all this. Before I'd even told him about Jo's depression comment, he said, "You need to get to more cons. This is doing you more good than all the meds you've ever taken. It's all about connection and community."

Yep.

I know this probably sounds like a lot of insufferable bragging, but I've effectively been in exile from my community for a long time. Part of that's geographical; a lot of it's been self-imposed; and it's been reinforced and deepened by my increasing marginalization within my department. Some people there admire the fact that I write, but as far as I can tell, none of my English Department colleagues read my fiction, or particularly like it if they do (other university friends, especially in the music department, have been loyal fans and a wonderful cheering section). Various of my colleagues clearly think I'm a little strange -- one person I like and admire once called me a "fanatic" to my face -- and between all that and the fact that the job's become more difficult and less rewarding for all of us, leading to a universal nosedive in morale, I haven't felt deeply affirmed at work. I know some of that's my fault, especially because I'm terrible at certain kinds of political games, but blaming myself only makes me feel worse.

Church has filled in a lot of the holes -- faith's really a huge antidepressant -- but it can't do everything.

The recent three-year grief-fest hasn't helped any of this, of course (and that's not my fault, and I think my reactions have been entirely human and understandable).

So I went to WorldCon figuring that I'd see some old friends and that nobody else would know who I was, and that would be okay, because it would be my fault, because I haven't been writing much.

What I discovered instead is that people in my field know my work and admire it. People I've never met know my work and admire it. People I admire, blazingly successful and famous and talented people, know my work and admire it. I've written things that matter to other human beings.

It is very difficult to communicate what this feels like. Like floating in airless space and then finding yourself standing on solid ground in a beautiful forest? Like being a ghost and then regaining a body? (Good heavens: am I empathizing with Sauron and Voldemort?) Those are cheesy metaphors, and unsatisfying besides. Let's just say that I've found my country again, or my planet, and learned that I was always welcome there.

So yes, I'll definitely try to get to more cons. I'm exhausted, and I'll be grateful to get back to a normal schedule when WorldCon's over, but I'm going to be very sad when everyone leaves.

In the meantime, I may buy myself a token of citizenship. Y'know how in some fantasy stories, people think their adventures Elsewhere were just a dream, until they discover that they still have a coin or a key or a crown they were given there? The fluorite rock would work, but I can't keep it with me all the time, so I may indulge my shopping obsession and buy a ring. Laurie Edison makes gorgeous jewelry and sells it at cons. It's pricy, so I've never bought any of it. But today I tried on a series of rings and both Laurie and I went, "Oh, wow," at one particular one with a shiny blue stone that looks like opal but I think is something else I can't remember at the moment.

If that's still available tomorrow, I may spring for it, as a sign of renewed commitment to my SF/F citizenship. If it isn't available, I'll cart the fluorite around, maybe, or get some smaller thing. Either way, I'll be registering for Fourth Street.

This is an exceedingly long post. Thank you for bearing with me!

Lotsa Stuff

Hi, everybody! Sorry not to have posted in a few days; I'm spending a lot of time over at FB these days. It really is a fun way to keep in touch with people.

A few items of note:

* For those of you in Reno: On Saturday August 13 at 2:30, I'll be giving a talk and reading at the Nevada Historical Society. This is part of a Worldcon promotion. The curator says that after my talk, "we will show the bad sci-fi movie 'Godmonster of Indian Flats' for Nevada-themed sci-fi." Mark your calendars! Bring popcorn!

* I now have 71,000 words of the rough draft, with completion of same estimated around August 10.

* I love weaving on my new Cricket loom and can't wait to try different techniques. My first scarf was short and ugly; the second, currently in progress, is longer and less ugly.

* It's really wonderful to be going into August without having to worry about prepping fall classes. I needed this sabbatical!

* Caprica is well; she goes to the vet for her FIV/FLV tests tomorrow, and, we hope, will be "released to GenPop," as Gary puts it, soon thereafter.

* Last night we watched a TV special about the Serengeti. As a baby elephant and mom traipsed across the screen, James Earl Jones praised the devotion of elephants and said, "The bond between mother and daughter can last fifty years." My first thought was, "Lucky elephant. I only had my mother for forty-nine." I'm doing better, but still miss her.

* There was a wildfire across the street two nights ago, about half a mile away. We watched it from Gary's study; when someone started pounding on our front door, I thought maybe we were being evacuated, but no, it was two friends who'd come over to watch the fire. Summer sport in Reno! (Cars lined the street, too.) Luckily, they got it under control quickly, and there was never any threat to structures.

I think that's about it. Hope you're all well!

My Worldcon Schedule

Worldcon begins on August 17 and will be held at the Convention Center. I don't see the knitting panel here, but will make inquiries. Note that I'm moderating both the Nevada-as-setting panel and the religion panel, which should be interesting. I've moderated faith discussions at WisCon, so I hope this will go as well. In any case, I'll be busy that weekend!

Wed 12:00 - 13:00, Welcome to Reno (Panel), A02 (RSCC)

An introduction of what to see and do in Reno by locals!

Arthur Chenin (M), Karyn de Dufour, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Richard Hescox, Mignon Fogarty, Susan Palwick

Wed 18:00 - 19:00, Nevada as a Setting for SF & Fantasy(Panel), A03 (RSCC)

Nevada's mountains and deserts have provided a fertile landscape for writers and movie makers for over 150 years. Join regional writers to learn more about the books and movies that helped to define this area.

Susan Palwick (M), Colin Fisk, Connie Willis, Mignon Fogarty, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Thu 11:00 - 12:00, When Faith and Science Meet (Panel), A09 (RSCC

Many SF tales, from Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" to Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz to Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, deal with the intersection of unexpected discoveries on the faith of the characters. Cultural discourse often presents religious faith and science as polar opposites, and certainly there's a long history of conflict between them. But many people of many faiths have happily and successfully reconciled their beliefs with a scientific worldview, and SF/F is no stranger to spirituality, either. Both Joanna Russ and David Hartwell have described SF/F as essentially religious. This panel will present a civil conversation -- between people who respect both faith and science -- about how the two inform each other, both in SF/F and in the rest of the world.

Susan Palwick (M), Eric James Stone, Laurel Anne Hill, Moshe Feder, Norman Cates

Thu 14:30 - 15:00, Reading: Susan Palwick (Reading), A14 (RSCC)

I'll probably read some short chapters from Mending the Moon about my invented comic book, Comrade Cosmos.

Thu 22:00 - 23:00, Short Talks about Art (Talk), A03 (RSCC)

Susan Palwick, Light and Shadow: Family, Pulp Fiction, and the West.

Kelley Caspari, Susan Palwick

I'll be reading a short essay, originally published in NYRSF three hundred years ago, about my grandfather Jerome Rozen, a well-known pulp artist who painted some of the original covers for The Shadow.

Fri 11:00 - 12:00, KaffeeKlatsch: Fri 11:00 (KaffeeKlatsch), KK1(RSCC)

Howard Tayler, Susan Palwick, Ken Scholes

Sat 12:00 - 13:00, River and Echo: The Evolution from Victim to Hero (Panel), A05 (RSCC)

Irene Radford (M), Lee Martindale, Susan Palwick, Charles Oberndorf

The description got cut off, but I think the title works fine. As a longtime Whedonphile, I'm delighted to be on this panel.

Sat 14:00 - 15:00, Autographing: Sat 14:00 (Autographing), Hall 2 Autographs (RSCC)

A Little Woven Thing

Last night we finished watching the second season of PBS' Craft in America, which regularly makes me cry because everything the artists are making is so beautiful. One of the artists they featured was a weaver, and I became intrigued, so last night I read an article about how to weave on a homemade cardboard loom, and this morning I made one and produced the above object, a 2.5"x4.5" bit o' fabric (rug for a mouse?) which won't make anyone cry except in pain: but hey, it's my first effort, and considering that I have no idea what I'm doing yet, I think it could have turned out much worse. It's no object of beauty, although I had fun playing with the different colored yards, but it's an honest-to-goodness piece of dense, solid, tough fabric.

Anyway, making it was fun, and I think I'm going to try to produce more objects (coasters? placemats? maybe even scarves?), because among other things, it's a nice break from knitting -- I love knitting, but other ways to play with yarn are nice too -- and it will help use up scrap yarn. I realize that everybody else in the world went through their cardboard-loom phase in elementary school, but I seem to have missed that class.

Obviously I don't already have enough hobbies.

Equally obviously, I have a lot to learn, like what to do with the warp threads. Oh, mbj, turns out that scratchy wool I bought at the art store makes a pretty decent warp, and I bet the yarn there's for weavers.

Our local art museum school is offering a weaving class in September. If I'm still interested then, I may sign up for it.

Oh! And speaking of yarn, there's going to be a knitting panel at Worldcon! And I'm on it! What fun!

Tiny Treats

"There was coffee. Life would go on."

These lines are from William Gibson's brilliant short story "The Winter Market," and pretty much sum up my and Gary's take on mornings. (We use the quotation all the time; it's one of our tag lines.) So imagine our distress this morning when our industrial-strength coffee maker died. We have an emergency-backup French press, so we survived, although we consider the coffee quality inferior. Tonight we went shopping for a new coffee maker, though.

We got a Krups at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It was pretty pricy, but this is an essential home item, so it's worth the investment. Then we went next door to World Market, because Gary was thinking about getting more Adirondack chairs for our deck.

"Honey," I said, "we have enough chairs." In fact, we have chairs stacked in the garage we don't even use regularly. We used them for Dad's memorial service last July; we'll use them again for our Worldcon dinner party this coming August. We need them when we need them, but we just don't entertain that much.

So we didn't get any more chairs. Gary got a $29 side table, though, because he couldn't stand the idea of going into Memorial Day Weekend without any deck furniture to assemble.

Meanwhile, I browsed around the store. I love World Market because it has some of everything, and also brings back happy memories. In 2001, I spent Christmas with my father in Mississippi. He'd had quadruple bypass about a month beforehand, and he really needed me there. It was very much a turning point for the better in our relationship. Before I went down, I asked if he wanted anything from Reno for Christmas, and he said, "A baby elephant." So I went to World Market and got a bunch of elephant stuff: elephant ornaments, an elephant mug, an elephant wall hook, an elephant picture frame, and so forth. That shopping expedition was really fun -- one of my best Christmas memories -- and since then, the elephant items at World Market have always cheered me up.

I needed cheering up today. I'm fed up with the book (although I'm doggedly plowing through it), completely stuck on -- and panicking about -- the homily I have to write for Sunday, being pecked to death by small pieces of paperwork from a blizzard of sources, and basically out of sorts. I worked out on the elliptical for forty minutes before dinner, which helped quite a bit, but I was still cranky.

So I wandered through World Market, smiling at elephant soap dishes and paperweights and wall hangings and mosaics. I didn't buy any elephant things, though. There's just too much stuff in the house (including the elephant gifts I gave Dad that Christmas, and inherited after he died), and anyway, we'd just gotten the expensive coffee maker. I decided I could get a few very small items if they'd get used up, rather than sitting and gathering dust. So I bought two dark chocolate caramels with sea salt (a decadent little treat Gary and I shared in the car on the way home), a small box of fruit-shaped marzipan (because I love marzipan and my mother always gave me some for Christmas), a small tube of jasmine-scented hand lotion for my purse, and a slightly larger bottle of orange-scented body lotion to use after I shower.

Now my hands smell good, and I've eaten a little chocolate, and I have the marzipan stored away as a future treat. So I'm feeling better.

And there will be coffee tomorrow morning. Life will go on.

Joanna Russ

I was sad to learn -- somewhat after the fact -- that renowned science-fiction author and critic Joanna Russ died at the end of April. She was a wonderful and vastly important writer, and it's a huge loss to the field and to her many friends.

I've taught various of Joanna's work over the years, and it never fails to inspire heated class discussion and unusually good work from students. In fact, two of the best papers I've ever read were responses to her novel The Female Man. My somewhat conservative Nevada students, even or especially the women, argued passionately with the book, but it resulted in some terrific writing. (We get a lot of "I'm not a feminist" disclaimers around here from young women who don't quite realize that they owe their voting rights and access to higher education, among other things, to the very hard work of many of their foremothers.)

That was many years ago. I should teach the book again, since I'm constantly looking for ways to slice through student apathy and disengagement. Anything that inspires discussion is a blessing.

I never met Joanna personally, but I absolutely treasure a note she sent me praising my story "Ever After." I was incredibly moved that anything I wrote had meant so much to someone I so admired.

Rest in peace, Joanna. You'll be missed.

Craziness

I've always been one of the reasons the stereotype of "absent-minded professor" exists. Even at the best of times, I tend to be klutzy and forgetful (one of last semester's students noted on a teaching evaluation that I'm "accident prone," and that's true, if somewhat off-topic). But today I really outdid myself. I got to a job talk late because I went to two wrong rooms -- in two wrong buildings, interrupting two classes in the process -- spilled tea all over myself in my first class, and then told the students to have a good weekend.

Sigh.

Well, I do want them to have a good weekend, but saying that on Monday's just rubbing in the fact that the week's barely started, right?

Before I left my office for my first class, I downloaded Google Chrome and set it up with the same apps and extensions I have at home. When I returned to my office, the apps included two games that I swear, swear, I didn't download. (I promptly deleted them, since I hardly need more ways to fritter away time.) So either my computer's possessed or someone's sneaking into my office. Neither idea is reassuring.

Gah. Time to set up the computer so it won't come out of sleep without a password. Pain in the patootie, if you ask me. Not, of course, that it makes any sense that someone would break into my office to download games. There must be some other explanation. It's still mighty strange.

On happier notes:

I'm listening to an audio version of Kate Braestrup's Here If You Need Me and loving it. She's a chaplain for the Maine State Game Warden Service -- coolest! job! ever! -- and I highly recommend the book.

Weather permitting, which it looks like it actually might, we're going to San Francisco for the long President's Day weekend. I have a professional gig on Friday, visiting a class on "Philosophy and Science Fiction" at UCSF -- they'll have read two of my stories, which we'll be discussing -- and the rest of the weekend we'll see our friend Ellen and her family, and walk on the beach, and hike the Land's End trails, and eat good food. We have a hotel reservation and a cat-sitter. Now we just need good weather! This is a real extravagance, especially so soon before the Spring Break cruise, but it's the trip we didn't get to do over Christmas, and I think I need it. Maybe when I come back, I'll be less spacey.

Oh, and check out this cool photo. Behind the English building on campus there's a small manmade pond called Manzanita Lake. It's frequented by ducks and swans and geese that are fun to watch, especially when they have their babies in the spring (although the babies often get picked off by owls, which isn't fun, although necessary for the owls), and it contains concrete rings, mini-pools, whose function I don't quite understand. On my way home tonight, I looked at the lake and at the trees reflected in it, and I realized that the calmer water inside the concrete ring was reflecting the tree much more clearly. So I took a snapshot. Interesting image, isn't it?

Finally, have you all seen the happy news that dark chocolate is healthier than fruit? Of course, since the study was conducted by the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition, there may have been some bias involved. But I had some dark chocolate after dinner anyway, just in case it's true.

Well, Nertz!

Back when I learned that the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention would be held in Reno, I invited some friends to stay with us for the convention. My friend Claire from New York and my friend Inez (an old student who's now teaching in Iowa) said they were interested.

Now it turns out that neither of them can come.

I'm sad. Gary and I were really looking forward to having them here, and we've been hanging on to some extra beds (survivals from the great Alan-and-Fran-Move-to-Reno Project of 2008) in anticipation of houseguests. I guess we won't need those after all.

On the other hand, my friend Arthur Chenin tells me the convention hotel booked up the second the room block became available, so maybe we'll have some takers anyway (although if there's anything we have lots of in this town, it's hotel rooms).

Oh well. I'll certainly see lots of old friends at WorldCon, even if I won't have the fun of hanging out with Claire and Inez. But I'm still sad!

Cucumber Gravy

The story's now up here. And there's an interview with me here.

Enjoy!

Let's Hear it for Space Cucumbers!

My story Cucumber Gravy, originally posted on the late, lamented SciFiction site in 2001, is being reprinted in the January issue of Lightspeed Magazine. You can buy the e-book of the entire issue here, or wait until January 11, when the story will be posted on the website (I'll post a link when it's up). But $2.99's a steal, yes? And if you buy the e-issue, you get so many other goodies too!

I'm really fond of this story, which I describe as C.S. Lewis meets the Coen Brothers in the Nevada desert, and I'm very happy that it's back in print.

Words to the Wise

This gem courtesy of YouTube via the Mythsoc listserv.

I'm going to show this to my fiction workshop on Monday. Too unbelievably funny, precisely because it's so true. I've heard would-be writers say all of these things.

Enjoy!

Try, Try Again

In 2001, Ellen Datlow bought my story "Cucumber Gravy" for the late, lamented Scifiction e-mag. I describe this story as "C.S. Lewis meets the Coen Brothers in the Nevada desert." I've always been very fond of it, so when the good folks at Tachyon started going through my short fiction to figure out what to put in The Fate of Mice, I hoped they'd choose CG.

They didn't. They weren't fond of the story, which features a slightly challenging central character, and they didn't think the tale fit the marketing label of "literary fantasy," which is what they were going for with my book. (Me, I'd have been fine with a marketing label of "versatile," but, you know, just try finding that section at Borders.) They're very good editors, and the collection hangs together beautifully -- largely because of their selections and ordering -- so when they said CG wouldn't be a good fit, I acquiesced, trusting them to know what they were doing.

I was a little sad, though.

A while ago, John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed sent out a request for reprints. I mentioned CG, but he said that while he loved the story, he didn't think he could use it, partly because it's too long. But a few days ago, he e-mailed me to ask if he could reprint it. Naturally, I said yes. It will be posted in January, along with a short "Author Spotlight" interview with me about the story. I'll post the link here when I have it.

I'm really glad that story will get some more readers. It's always nice when a piece that seems to have been consigned to oblivion gets to come back that way.

As many of you know, I've been publishing the occasional medical poem (and still hope to turn the ED sonnets into a chapbook; that will be one of my sabbatical projects if I get the sabbatical). Quite a while ago now, I wrote a new sonnet about an ED experience and sent it off to The Bellevue Literary Review, which is more or less the New Yorker of the medical humanities, and where I've now been rejected several times. (Getting published there is one of my new life goals.) They rejected this poem, too. Disappointed, if not terribly surprised, I sent the poem off to Pulse, another place I'd really like to be published sometime.

They rejected it. I got that note the same week -- possibly the same day -- as a lovely, warm rejection note from Sheila Williams at Asimov's, who couldn't use a long story I'd sent her.

As I constantly tell my students, writers have to learn to handle rejection, but I hadn't gotten quite that much of it in a while. I was feeling a teensy bit flattened (although Sheila's friendly note helped lessen the sting).

But it's not like this has never happened to me before, so I came up with a new longterm goal for the story, and yesterday I sat down to study the sonnet again. On a whim, I submitted it to the Annals of Internal Medicine, a major medical journal which happens to publish some poetry along with refereed scientific articles. I didn't think I had a chance of getting in, but why not try?

Like many journals these days, Annals uses a computerized manuscript tracking system. Yesterday I submitted the poem and got an e-mail acknowledgment. This morning I got another e-mail, congratulating me on having my manuscript submitted. Blinking, I reread the thing. Surely it was a computer glitch? Surely there'd been no time for anyone there even to read the poem?

But at lunchtime today, I got an official acceptance e-mail from one of the editors, talking glowingly and in great detail about the poem. Needless to say, I was flattered and delighted.

So it's been a good week, writing-wise: not just because of the publications, but because I've been reminded how important it is to persevere.

Opting Out

Here's the traditional career path for an academic: You're hired as an Assistant Professor. After six years, you endure the nail-biting anxiety of going up for tenure, a process normally linked with a promotion to Associate Professor. Once you have tenure, you theoretically have job security -- at least, most of us breathe a bit more easily at that point -- and can look forward, in the fullness of time, to another and final promotion, this time to full Professor. At UNR, each promotion comes with a ten percent raise.

To be promoted, you need to be vetted and approved by your department, by your college's promotion and tenure committee, by a university committee, and on up the food chain until you get to the Regents.

I was tenured in 2003. Like most people who've gone through the process, I have my horror stories, but everything turned out fine. Since then, though, the promotion process has become increasingly difficult. An extremely accomplished and distinguished friend of mine (in another department) is going up for full professor even as we speak, and is being raked over the institutional coals in ways that wouldn't, I think, have happened before the current budget disaster. Yes, more and more documentation has been required since my promotion to Associate: multiple binders of paperwork, five letters of support from people at other universities (rather than the three I needed), ever more careful scrutiny by the various committees. But watching my friend's ordeal has made me question some of my assumptions: a) that the departmental vote is the most important, a decision almost always supported by the ascending levels (after all, one's immediate colleagues are best at understanding one's work), and b) that promotion to full is a matter of continuing to do what you were tenured for doing, although perhaps at a higher level.

Keep in mind that I firmly believe my friend will indeed get this promotion. But watching that ordeal has made me dread the promotion process for myself even more than I already did. Every year, my chair sends an e-mail to anybody who's been at Associate for four years or longer, inviting us to e-mail him our CVs so the full professors in the department can offer advice about preparing for promotion. I've been getting those e-mails for several years and ignoring them: I find CVs about as pleasant to prepare as tax forms, and I was in no rush to start collecting all the material for those binders, either. But I had to update my CV for my sabbatical application anyway, so I thought, what the hey, and e-mailed it to my chair, who then shared it with the other full professors.

Last Thursday I met with him to discuss their recommendations. These are offered, mind you, in the spirit of wanting colleagues to succeed; they're very much constructive criticism. My chair identified two problems with my case:

1. Lack of national service. It's evidently no longer enough to do a lot of very nice local service. The university insists that full professors have a national profile. This is relatively new, and it surprised my chair when he started shepherding people through the process. In my case, such national service would need to take the form of, for instance, being elected to an office in an august professional organization like the Modern Language Association, being asked to judge a lot of writing contests or to review a lot of manuscripts, or publishing lots of reviews of other people's work ("dozens," my chair said, to clarify this).

I don't do this stuff. I never have. It doesn't interest me. If it interested me, I'd already be doing it.

2. Although my colleagues like how much I publish -- and tenured me for writing SF/F, for which I'm eternally grateful -- my publishing record needs to be more accessible to people who don't know anything about science fiction. So my chair, who was doing everything humanly possible to be helpful, said, "The problem is that people outside science fiction don't know about Tor. But Tor's a subsidiary of Macmillan! Everyone's heard of Macmillan! So what you need to do on your CV is say that you're published by Tor-Macmillan! That would be completely justified! And then they'll get it!"

This is ludicrous. Nobody in SF says they're published by Tor-Macmillan.

My chair ended the conversation by saying that the Upper Echelons would want outside letters that said, for instance, "I've known her work for years and think she's wonderful," rather than, "I've never heard of her, but I really like her work."

I went home feeling rather like a squashed cockroach. I'd expected to be told that I had several years of work to do to get ready for promotion -- another novel, say -- but I hadn't expected the prospects to look so bleak. I said mournfully to Gary, "I'm not famous enough to be promoted."

"Then don't go up," he said promptly. I have tenure; people retire at Associate Professor rank all the time, and there's no shame in it. The big drawback is not getting that ten percent raise (the only chance for any kind of raise, in this economy), but as Gary points out, I could go through the agony of the promotion process and not get it anyway, because each tier is now under increasing pressure to shoot people down. My safest shot at extra income, not to mention additional fame, is to publish more. Running for Grand Poobah of national professional organizations would definitely interfere with that, as would writing dozens of book reviews.

On Friday morning I saw my therapist, who emphatically agreed with Gary and thinks that doing the work I'd need to do for promotion would be actively bad for me. My friend Sharon, who probably knows me better than anyone in town except Gary, was even blunter: "It would kill you." And when I talked to my chair again and said that I was seriously considering just staying where I am, he gave what sounded like a sigh of relief and said, "Yes, I think that's right." Then he told me about two people in the department who've been Associate "since before we were born," because they wanted to focus on their families and on other matters closer to home.

It's a mark of how little any of this matters -- or of how little attention I pay to it, anyway -- that I didn't even know those colleagues' ranks; I'd assumed both of them were full, and were startled that they weren't. I'm really glad my chair told me that, though, because it made me feel better.

In all kinds of ways, I think this decision makes a lot of sense, and I can always change my mind down the line if I achieve unexpected stardom. In many ways, it's like my decision to walk away from ordination to the diaconate (and it's easier than that was). But because I've been an academic overachiever most of my life -- although you wouldn't know it from my non-national profile -- I've had to give myself a stern talking to about how this is a free choice, not a mark of shame or failure.

The irony, of course, is that much of my lack of fame in the academic context arises from my working in popular fiction, in a genre accessible to more people than your average issue of PMLA. Twice in the past year, I've had casual conversations with people who wanted to write SF but didn't know I was a writer; when I said I'm published, they asked me coolly who my publisher was, and when I said Tor, both of them went wide-eyed and babbling. "You're published by Tor? I'd give my [fill in the body part of your choice] to be published by Tor!"

Meanwhile, at my fiddle lesson on Friday, I told Charlene that I wasn't famous enough to be promoted. Her eyes bugged out. She gestured at the bookshelf across the room -- her husband reads SF, and it was stuffed with Tor paperbacks -- and said, "You're published by Tor! Whaddya mean, you aren't famous enough?"

Yup. Of course, I'm not a famous Tor author, which is probably the larger issue -- my readership is exceedingly discerning, but very small -- but in many circles, Tor's more recognizable than Macmillan.

I really do think remaining at Associate is a healthy decision for me, and who knows? Maybe the economy will improve; maybe someday we'll get merit or cost-of-living raises again. In the meantime, I won't be slaving over binders. But the choice also represents the loss of a professional goal, however dimly held. It shifts my internal landscape, already eroded by too much loss over the last two years. And it puts more pressure on my writing, a process that often shuts down at the first hint of pressure.

Yet another reason why the Auburn workshop is perfectly timed!

More Technical Dificulties

It's been a glitchy month. On top of trouble with car registration and Blogger, my Kindle also's been displaying a startling tendency to reboot at odd moments: like, when I'm in the middle of reading something, or when the device is simply sitting on a table or resting in my purse.

I did enough research to gather that this is a known, if rare, problem. I downloaded two software updates that were supposed to fix the issue. It kept happening. So finally, last night (or rather, this morning, since it was after midnight), I called Kindle Support again. A pleasant tech brought up my device's log -- he swore he needed my consent to do this, but does anyone else suspect Big Brother is watching? -- determined that yes, my Kindle has its own agenda, and said he'd send me a new one.

My old Kindle is really a Cylon.

Because Amazon has a warehouse in Reno, my new Kindle will arrive today. Talk about customer service! The tech sent me a link to a prepaid mailing label; I'll use this to send the old Kindle to a secret laboratory, where it will be interrogated under klieg lights and forced to confess everything it knows.

There's an SF story in here somewhere. All the misfit Kindles get together to take over the world. Nah, it's been done. Okay, all the misfit Kindles get together and start their own small-press publishing outfit, complete with a literary manifesto.

I just hope the new one works!

Glaciers and Salmon and Bears, Oh My!

We saw glaciers! We saw one glacier calve, like, four times. This particular glacier, the name of which I can’t remember, moves seven feet a day, which makes it the speed demon of the glacierverse.

The eeriest thing about glaciers is the beautiful blue light inside the cracks in the ice. The on-board naturalist described this as a function of very high-pressure ice formation, which produces ice with different optical properties than the stuff we put in our drinks. All I know is that the blue light’s beautiful and otherworldly, like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie. I got a photo that shows a tiny bit of it: nothing like the real-life effect, but enough to give you some idea. I’ll post that tomorrow, along with a string of other photos.

I lied. I took pictures of Glacier Bay. So sue me.

Also, the naturalist announced that he saw a brown bear fishing on a beach. Gary saw the brown bear walking. Many other passengers saw the brown bear, too. All I saw was a gigantic gray rock. Later, another passenger told me kindly that the bear was some yards to the right of the rock, and was in fact much smaller than the rock, “a little brown speck.” That made me feel a bit better.

We may see more whales this evening. First, though, Gary and I are having dinner in the super-fancy restaurant, where I’ll do my very best to have no salmon, since at lunch I had the salmon appetizer followed by the salmon entrees.

In my next life, I’ll be a salmon. Or possibly a brown bear.

Later:

We like this ship, really. We love this ship. We’d live on this ship if we could. But we do get plenty of giggles from the decor, and the super-fancy restaurant outdoes itself in Outrageous Cruise Tacky. The chairs, although comfortable, are contorted pewter and black leather and look like something designed by the villain in a Tim Burton film. The carpet’s plain blue, extremely restrained by cruise standards, but the ceiling more than makes up for this by featuring bizarre blue and red platter-like objects shaped like jellyfish and suspended by chrome fixtures. These aren’t lights. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what function they serve. Some cruise exec probably looked at early plans for the place, scratched his or her head, and said, “Hey, great work on the chairs! But the ceiling isn’t ugly and weird enough by half! You’d better do something about that, especially since you’re using plain blue carpet!”

The designer must have been on drugs. Supporting this theory, the finishing touch of the decor is a continuous mural of the Dutch masters, painted on glass panels and backlit. The Dutch guys look a little glassy-eyed themselves. Also, the Maitre D apparently graduated from the House of Slytherin, or possibly Castle Dracula. Thin, smarmy, too many teeth. I’m sure he’s a lovely person, but if I saw him on the street, I’d be scared.

The food’s really good, I have to say. But the design strangeness extends to the plates and silverware. Individually, the elements are understated and elegant, unlike the general decor. But the elegant steak knives, if one places them on the elegant plates, slide elegantly into the food, which meant that several times I had to wipe filet mignon juice and garlic mashed potatoes off my knife with my napkin (the first time the knife traveled, I asked for a new one, but after that I just cleaned it up as best I could). Clearly, the servers need to test-drive the place settings.

I do give them high marks for desserts. Immediately after I’d ordered the decadent chocolate volcano, they brought us a small plate of decadent chocolate truffles. Good thing I bought a large pair of sweatpants in the giftshop today.

The highlight of dinner was a whale sighting. Someone at the next table, next to the window, pointed and called out, “Whale!” and everyone got up to look out the window, and sure enough, a humpback slapped the water with his fin. We all applauded, even the wait-staff. (I forgot to mention before that the first time we saw the glacier calve, a woman standing next to me called out, “Thank you!” I believe there was applause that time, too.)

Now we’re in our usual spot, listening to the string quartet. The waiter in this lounge now greets us as “Miss Susan and Mr. Gary,” chats with us about our day, and remembers our favorite drinks.

We love cruising. We just have to do something about the interior decoration. Over dinner, we fantasized about starting a cruise line decorated entirely in Shaker style, or maybe Arts & Crafts for people who really want fancy surroundings.

Tomorrow: Juneau, where we’ll ride a tramway, attend a salmon bake, and shop for yarn (well, I’ll do that; Gary will be bored). I’ll also post tons of photos. Aren’t blogs great? If vacation photos bore you, you can just skip over them, instead of being confined to someone’s living room during endless slide presentations.

Oh, and we’ve met some really interesting people. The ship’s librarian is a musical-comedy actress who reads and writes SF/F; when I told her I did too, she asked me who my publisher was, and went very wide-eyed when I said, “Tor Books.” Meanwhile, we’ve been listening to chamber music every evening with a charming engineer named Steve, a serious amateur violinist (or possibly semi-pro; he has a lot of gigs) who also reads SF/F. All the best people!

Another Fifteen Minutes of Fame

This coming Sunday at 3:00 PM, I'll be giving a reading/lecture about Nevada as a setting for speculative fiction. This is at the UNR library, and it's free! With free parking, even! If you're local, please come by and check it out. If you aren't local, at least check out this snippet of the snazzy poster, which is too large to post in its entirety.

Alternatively, check out the library web page about the lecture series.

I hope to see you there!

Space-Age Toothbrush

Yesterday I got a super-duper electric toothbrush my periodontist recommended. He said it would save me thousands of dollars of dental work, and I'm all for that. There's a steep learning curve with this thing, though: it has roughly as many parts as the space shuttle, including a wireless instructional device that tells you how long to brush each quadrant of your mouth, times it for you, and sounds a warning beep if you're brushing too hard.

I swear I'm not making this up.

When I'd opened the package and blinked at the gazillion-and-one parts, I went downstairs and said to Gary, who was wrestling a brownie recipe into submission in the kitchen, "I have a problem."

"What?" he said. He hates being interrupted when he's cooking.

"I don't think I'm smart enough to use my new toothbrush."

Gary started laughing. "That's why I'm sticking with the old-fashioned kind."

When he was finished wrestling the brownies -- which were excellent, by the way -- he came upstairs to help me assemble the toothbrush. It took two of us several minutes to figure out how to get the battery cover off the wireless guide thing-y. See, you have to take off the battery cover to find the switches that let you change settings before the toothbrush is charged. Once it's charged, you can change at least some settings from the toothbrush itself.

I was very proud of myself when I managed to get everything set up the way I wanted it (counting down the seconds I was to spend brushing each quadrant of my mouth rather than counting up, for instance). I also finally figured out that the small blue plastic square that had come with the package was a piece of super-duper adhesive for attaching the wireless thing-y to the wall over the sink.

"The toothbrush command center is now on the wall next to the mirror," I told Gary. "I'm just letting you know so you don't think it's a thermonuclear device."

"If it starts counting down from 100 in red letters," he said, "I'm getting out of the house."

So far, that hasn't happened. The wireless guide has informed me how long to brush each quadrant and then flashed a smiley face when I've brushed for two minutes. Sometimes the smiley face winks. I expect the wireless gizmo to start singing "Daisy, Daisy" any day now, while the toothbrush harmonizes.

The toothbrush has a bunch of settings: gentle, clean, superclean, clean-and-floss, clean-for-people-with-braces, polish, and chainsaw. I also strongly suspect that someone on Etsy has invented vibrator attachments for it; if not, there's a lucrative market waiting to be tapped.

But I gotta say, it gets my teeth real clean.

How to Conquer the Cylons

Thanks for all the comments on my last post; I'm glad everyone enjoyed that particular bit of whimsy as much as I did! (And inky, we've seen the pilot of Caprica and liked it a lot, but will have to wait until the first season comes out on DVD to see more. We're currently behind on our DVD watching, anyway, because I've been so busy at work.)

I didn't even know about the MacMillan-Amazon imbroglio -- Gary filled me in over dinner last night -- but I'm glad it's over.

Now, for the important news. Those of you who've been worrying about the Cylon menace, fret no more! We have the answer!

Cats! (What else?)

I walked into my study yesterday and found Bali on top of the Yarn Vault with his head and front paws dangling over the edge. From this vantage point, he swatted at the shiny Cylon foot poking out from the top shelf, until he'd sent Cylon, knitting and yarn careening to the floor. He then jumped down and proceeded to have his way with the robot and the yarn.

I rescued both; the Cylon now sits in the middle of the shelf rather than the edge. I also took the opportunity to arrange his knitting properly. The experienced knitters among you will have noticed that his right-hand needle's in completely the wrong place in the photo (I'm surprised no one called me on that!). That problem's now fixed. I may post another shot when he gets a bit more done on his scarf.

I'm tempted to buy a teensy-tiny violin for him, but I haven't found one small enough yet.

In any case, it's deeply reassuring to know that in case of Cylon invasion, Gary and I are well-defended.

In other news:

I'm back to practicing my fiddle, and I think my tone's slowly coming back.

My hospital shift this weekend was eventful but satisfying, even though I made several missteps during one visit. At least I know what I did wrong, though.

This morning I sent off a poem I wrote about this weekend's shift. I started with the top market, BLR, which is the New Yorker of the medical-humanities field. I don't expect them to take it, but there are plenty of other places to try.

I swam an hour today, using various combinations of resistance equipment.

Go, me.