My office is on the 16th floor. This evening, I left work, got in the elevator, and it went down, oh, fifteen and a half floors. Then it went kerTHUNK and stopped. I was stuck there for an hour.

The world of Wired (the third book in Robin Wasserman’s trilogy) is an eerie dystopia where the have-nots die young in cities, get sick from the nuclear fall out, and everything is controlled by mega corporations. Not a great place to live. On the other hand, the handful of wealthy people have technology advanced enough to put human thought patterns into a mechanical body. Presumably, their elevators never, you know, just stop between floors for awhile. So hey, silver lining.

An actual review is over at Active Voice.

I’m sick. I’ve been sick for about five days, though recovering steadily for the last two. This is better for me. It isn’t better for my roommate, for reasons illustrated in this graph:

There are no units of measurement in this graph. How exactly would I measure whininess, anyway?

In short, as I start to feel better, I become insufferably whiney that I’m not all-the-way better yet. At my sickest, I dope up on cold medication and mostly sleep; as I get better, all I do is complain.

Translation: Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Today, it came as a relief that I had enough energy to do things like wash dishes and run laundry. And I hate washing dishes and running laundry.

Oh, and just barely enough energy to (almost) catch up on book reviews.

#33: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

See, this is how far backed up I am. I reread Catching Fire the weekend before Mockingjay came out, because I’d devoured it so fast the first time I didn’t actually remember anything that happened, or any of the new characters who’d been introduced. So I reread. This time, the book’s few weaknesses bothered me a little bit more, but overall the story and writing are so compelling that I once again devoured it. Luckily, I didn’t have enough time to forget anything, because Mockingjay came out the next week.

(Wait, you wanted an actual review? Last year, at Active Voice. Of course.)

#34: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

What is there to say about Mockingjay that hasn’t been said? I was at the release party and got to see Suzanne Collins read the first chapter; that was awesome. (BTW, did you know Katniss has an Appalachian accent? I didn’t! But it was cool.) I took the next day off work to read (because the awesome thing about being a grown up is that I can do that), and it took me a long, long time to gather my thoughts on the book. There’s so much there.

I’ll sum it up like this: I wanted to like it more than I did. It does justice to the first two books in the series, for sure. It was fairly well put together, definitely. But getting that isn’t the same as liking it. More on this one, too, is over at AV.

#35: Bloom County: The Complete Library (Volume Two) by Berkeley Breathed

Oh, Bloom County. I grew up reading collections of the strip, over and over, even though I was pretty young when it was canceled. I’ve occasionally joked that everything I know about 80s politics, I learned from Bloom County, but it’s not actually much of an exaggeration. What was really brilliant, though, is that the rhythm and the characters of the strips are so great that even as a kid, not getting about 65% of the jokes, I found it hilarious anyway. So I had not only read a lot of these before, I’d memorized them.

Getting a look at some strips I’d never seen before was great. I also enjoyed Breathed’s commentary. In fact, that was one of the reasons I liked Volume Two better than the first. The first had a lot of annotations about the events of the time, and very little commentary from Breathed; the second had fewer annotations and more commentary. (Don’t get me wrong, having some of the context for stuff that happened when I was a toddler was useful, but a lot of it was also pretty obvious just from reading the strips.)

#36: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This book, sigh. I’ve mentioned in a few other reviews that I often have issues with classics, because I’m so accustomed to (and more easily engaged by) modern pacing. This is the sort of book that shows just how much that limits me: it took me awhile to get into it, to pick it back up when I put it down, but it would have been a real shame if I had let the pacing put me off. The book is lovely.

It’s the journal of Cassandra, a young woman in the 1930s, living in an English castle (but also living in complete poverty). Her goal is to be a writer, so she strives to record all of her encounters and emotions honestly — to capture the castle in writing, you see. The story of the book also takes you through Cassandra’s first love (and the first time a boy likes her) and her family relationships, in a way that’s so real it’s almost painful. The prose is beautiful, but above all, it’s the emotions that the book gets right.

(Are those all the books I’ve read? No! But is it time for me to go take some more medicine and whine some more? Yes! So that’s it for now.)

Or, What I Did on my Summer Not-Actually-Vacation

I’m about to attempt something I do only very rarely: actually blog about events in my life. See, I don’t usually bother because my life isn’t very interesting, but let me lay two fun and exciting facts on you:

1) I am the site manager for TheBody.com, a massive online HIV/AIDS resource; and,

2) Every two years, there’s an International AIDS Conference held somewhere different.

I am, generally speaking, not much of a traveler. My basic philosophy tends towards, “But all my stuff is here, so why would I want to go there?” Which I think is a valid life choice, though it baffles basically everyone else. Bah. But I still don’t exactly look gift-horses in the mouth, so when it was announced that the XVIII International AIDS conference (aka AIDS 2010) was going to be held in Vienna, Austria, and that we would be sending a team to cover it, and I was asked if I would like to be part of that team…?

So basically, what I’m saying is that last week I spent nine days in Vienna.¹ And it was awesome. So let me dig back, back, baaaaaack into my memory, roughly two weeks ago…

It began on my birthday, with a string of good birthday luck. My awesome coworkers Olivia and Myles and I met at JFK airport, where we paused to ask someone where to check in. The gentleman we asked said there was a long line, but offered to take care of us himself, and reassigned our seats so we were on aisles, next to empty seats. And then the baggage guy grabbed us first out of a small mob, and then they opened a new security line right as we walked past, moving us up to the front. Birthday magic! The flight left early afternoon and continued through evening, a very short night, and deposited us in Vienna the next morning.

The face of unshowered jetlag: all told, we were awake and working for 31 hours.

The phone thing. That was fun. We wandered the streets on a tip from the hotel desk lady, looking for what we thought was an electronics shop and didn’t learn for four days was actually a subway station, whoops. (I should probably note at this point that I speak the most German out of anyone in our group, and the only thing I know how to say is, “I don’t speak German, can you speak English?”) But after a fair amount of wandering, we found a store helpfully labeled “Call Shop,” run by an Austrian gentleman who spoke about as much English as I do German. So you can imagine the fun hijinks as we tried to ask for the cheapest phones he had, with pay-as-you-go contracts. And then…

The food.

Oh man, the food. Lunch was just spaghetti with tomato and basil, since it was the only thing I was pretty sure was vegetarian on the menu. And I swear, it was the AWESOMEST SPAGHETTI EVER. No, really. REALLY.

So, phones, language barriers, food, and then scooting across town to meet the last member of our party, Mark. Fun thing about working for a website: you don’t always actually know everyone you work with in person. Mark S. King has been blogging for us for ages, and this was the first time we’d met him face to face. He was pretty much exactly what you’d expect from watching his videos (which I highly recommend). End day one. Day two was what’s known as the MSM Forum,³ and the beginning of our coverage.

I didn’t do much for that; everyone else had facets to cover, but as site manager, my job was more techy than anything else. The basic plan was for me to attend panels of the conference that particularly interested me, but other than that, basically to either chill in the media center, prepping our coverage and getting it ready to go, and tracking the conference online; or to plug our recording equipment into the press conference soundboard and record sessions there, so that the people writing coverage were freed up to go to panels that interested them. So (aside from a trip back to the call shop to purchase more minutes for our phones, and figure out how to install them, with the same gentleman as the previous day) my day was pretty chill. Instead of detailing my methods for tracking the #AIDS2010 hashtag on twitter, I’ll tell you this: Vienna’s subway isn’t like New York’s subway.

I suspect we were all a little nervous about the trip, since apparently transportation had been a bit of an issue two years ago for the conference in Mexico City. But Vienna’s public transit, it turns out, is great, and easily comprehensible to a non-German speaker, or at least one who’s used to the complex mess that is New York’s MTA.⁴ It was extremely easy to navigate, with lovely LED signs on every platform that let you know how long it would be until the next train, never more than 6 minutes.⁵ And it was clean! It was almost as if the people of Vienna didn’t treat the track and platform as a series of large trashcans. You could walk the length of the platform without your shoe landing in something suspiciously sticky! I was pretty amazed, though what really marked me as a tourist was the subway doors. In New York, they open automatically. In Vienna, they don’t; you have to either press the button or jerk the handle. I kept forgetting to do that and would stand there, baffled, until someone reached around me to open them. Whoops.

Oh, and did I mention that their subways seem to run on the trust system? That was maybe the strangest difference of all. You pay for your ticket (one trip, day pass, week pass, whatever) and get it punched by a machine so it’s stamped with the date/time you started using it. Then you can get on and off without having to swipe it or show it to anyone or anything, and keep using it for however long it’s valid. There are no turnstyles or anything; you can just walk onto the platform and they apparently just trust that you’ve paid. (Well, apparently there are occasional spot-checks to see that everyone in the subway has a ticket, and steep fines for anyone who doesn’t, but even so, my mind is somewhat blown.)

Okay, so. The conference finally got into swing the third day we were there, with the official opening session, keynote speaker Bill Clinton. I was, somehow, the only person from our group who was interested in going. That also blew my mind because it was Bill Clinton, you guys, he’s kind of a big deal! Or at least he’s a really engaging, funny speaker. I was blown away, though some of that was certainly jetlag. He said lots of smart, interesting things and generally oozed charm in exactly the way you’d expect him to. Nothing he said was controversial, and he went out of his way to defend Obama’s HIV/AIDS policies.⁶ It was interesting, and I’m glad I made the trip for that alone. (Here: have my official coverage of the thing.)

I wish I could tell you about the awesome activities and sights and sounds over the next few days, but honestly, it’s all kind of a blur. We did go out for delicious food almost every night, but were also working incredibly long days. I only went to a handful of actual sessions: a workshop on how AIDS organizations can best work with the media,⁷ a really fascinating panel discussion about sex workers and HIV, and a really dreadful panel I won’t get into because it seems polite (but which was the only thing about the conference itself I didn’t enjoy). Conference food, of course, was mediocre. But the people were great. (I also went to a tweet-up of people who were posting about/following the conference on Twitter to exchange thoughts on new media and HIV, which was pretty directly up my alley.)

We didn't have time to explore Vienna, but we did stand in front of some pretty buildings.

There was also the human rights rally, culminating with a concert by Annie Lennox. If you’ve ever read this blog before (or looked at the category list to the right) it shouldn’t come as a shock to hear that I’m a bleeding-heart progressive lefty liberal type. What blew me away about the human rights rally in specific and the conference in general was this: being surrounded by about 20,000 other people who care like I care. The rally had people from dozens of different organizations, representing, in no particular order, anti-homophobia, anti-racism, anti-poverty, anti-ableism, anti-ageism, feminism, sex workers’ rights, drug users’ rights, etc etc etc. Hey, guess what, it turns out there’s a lot of intersectionality around HIV, because HIV hits so many communities that are already lacking in privilege. If you’re fighting an *ism, there’s a pretty good chance HIV affects your cause.

More food I experienced: goat cheese patties, goat cheese baked into fresh pastries, goat cheese and spinach tarts; cucumber salad, pumpkin spice salad, and baked goat cheese salad.⁹ Not to mention the amazing gelato and pastries. Even the hotel food was delicious. Heck, even the airline bread (the only thing I could eat on the flights) was fresh and yummy. I’m not much for food. In fact, as a general rule, if I could photosynthesize instead of eat, that would be kind of awesome. But I have to say, damn, there was a lot of good food on that trip.

Time passed really strangely while we were there. Each individual day was really, really long: up at 7 AM, not back in the hotel room until midnight, and more work until 2, if the hotel’s wireless was functioning. Individual days were lonnnnnng. And yet, when the conference ended and we were packing up, it seemed like no time had passed at all. It was kind of surreal, actually, and felt like leaving the day after we arrived, and once back in New York, it was only the jetlag exhaustion and all the chocolate I brought back that made me sure I’d been anywhere at all.¹⁰

The flight home had none of the smoothness of our trip there. I’m pretty sure all 20,000 conference attendees were leaving within the same four-hour frame or so, so the Vienna airport was a freaking madhouse with an enormous mob of people we had to wade through for an hour before getting to the actual line. We were rushed through, frazzled and harried, while someone demanded to see our printed itineraries and wouldn’t let anyone on the plane without one.¹¹ Oh, and my rolling suitcase decided not to roll, which made getting from JFK back to my apartment by public transit (in 100 degree weather, on zero hours of sleep) super duper fun.

But I eventually got home. And then slept for, 16 hours. The end. You know, unless you want to look at our official coverage or check out what I wrote on the scene.

First things first: I wrote an article for work about the increasing funding issues that AIDS Drug Assistance Programs are facing, and specifically about a woman who, after years of drug addiction, getting her HIV diagnosis in jail, and then doing a 180 and turning her life around, was kicked out of her drug assistance program. Though the story is pretty depressing, she was a lovely, fascinating person, willing to share all that with me despite not being out about her HIV status and needing to remain anonymous to avoid stigma. So if you have a moment, please do read.

–

Over at AV, I recently reviewed The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. Two cupcakes. Not great.

–

Somewhere in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books — I suspect one of the later ones, which I haven’t read as often¹ — there’s a character it always rains on. He actually turns out to be descended from a rain god, but doesn’t know that, so instead he just copes with the fact that everywhere he goes, it rains.

I’m starting to think I’m something like that. But with leaks.

Growing up, my bedroom leaked. We had the roof rebuilt and reshingled, but couldn’t find the source of the problem. This was upstate New York, with all of its ridiculous blizzards; after every one, we’d shovel the driveway, and then my dad and I would climb up on to the roof and shovel that off, too, hoping that it would keep snow from melting directly into my bedroom.

It didn’t.

When I got to college, the source was eventually found. It was one of the joys of living in a very old house: the thing had been built out over a hundred years or so, the front rooms being the original section — then the next two rooms built on, the upstairs, and finally the back section of the house, which included my room. The house was built on a hill. And whoever added on that last section did not, as it turned out, build a foundation under it.

My bedroom was slowly falling off the house and down the hill, and whatever stretch and strain that put on the house opened it up to leaks.

I moved to the city four years ago this month, and within three months there created a leak from our bathroom into the next apartment down. (I still feel guilt over this, accident though it was.) I flushed the toilet, got in the shower, and when I stepped out, discovered ankle-deep water on the bathroom floor, and rising. Luckily, that building had the greatest super of all time, who not only fixed the suddenly-broken pipe and helped get the water under control, he also calmed down the downstairs neighbor. Phew!

Greatest super ever exhibit number two: a year later, when a leak opened in our ceiling — barely a drip, but definitely there — within 48 hours, the super had the ceiling open, the pipe replaced, and the ceiling closed back up, repainted, and all the dust and debris swept up and dealt with. For those of you who’ve never seen something like that in action, that was remarkably efficient. My sister and I left that building really reluctantly because seriously, that guy was awesome.

All of which is a leadup to this series of pictures of my kitchen wall over the last week:

The hole.

The large hole in relation to relatively small me.

“The hole will be fixed today!” …It wasn’t.

We didn’t even know about this leak; the pipe was between our wall and the neighbor’s, and dripping into the basement while affecting us not at all. But it had to be fixed, and our wall had to come down to do it.

The worst part wasn’t even the return of my leak-inducing superpower, or whatever this is. There were two real issues: #1, with the kitchen totally disassembled, we had the sink sitting on the floor, and the cabinets in front of the fridge, and everything that had been in them piled on the stove. Meaning there was no way we could, you know… cook. For the four days it took to get this settled. Yeesh.

But worse yet was what happened to poor Lily Flufferson, the terrible mouser. She couldn’t be allowed to roam free with construction stuff sitting around and a giant hole in the wall for her to get lost in. She’s not smart enough to avoid such things. So for three days, she had to stay in small rooms if we weren’t home or awake to keep an eye on her — meaning the whole work day, and overnight. On day #3, I worked from home because we just couldn’t do that to her anymore. Poor kitty.

She’s fine now. The wall is fixed. Ish. The kitchen is still a wreck, but what are you going to do?

In conclusion, have a picture of my cat being adorable. (You’d think with that much fur, she wouldn’t want to sit directly in front of the radiator.)

I feel like I should say something because it’s the end of the year, and decade¹. And also because I haven’t updated in awhile. So.

I was thinking about why I never update, and it’s because I feel like every post needs to be long and have a central thesis and be well thought out.² That’s what the original point of this blog was, sort of, several years ago. But I don’t actually have a lot of deep, thinky posts in me, and it seems silly to feel like I can’t post on my own personal blog unless it’s something big and deep, when I am a small and rarely deep person. So: either I’ll post more in the upcoming year, but it will be less thoughtful, or I will continue to not post much. Either way. Shrug.

Regarding goals I had for this year: I didn’t accomplish any of them. Whoops? This was the first year in ages I’d bothered making any sort of resolutions, and now I remember why I don’t usually. But actually, it’s pretty indicative of my year in general. It wasn’t a bad year, but I didn’t have a lot of forward motion in it. So I’ve got some sort of mental goals for the upcoming year, but I don’t feel like putting them out on the internet, so I won’t. So there.

Let’s see. Other things I can talk about…

We got a Wii fit! If my year was stagnant, well, so was I; aside from the three months of physical therapy for my wrists, I don’t think I did anything involving working out or moving or not sitting on my ass. My sister thought the Wii Fit would be fun, and so it is. I’ve worked out more in the last week than in the few months leading up to it, which is good.

Good, fun things: I was skeptical of how much actual working out would happen with a video game, and I still have no idea how accurate it really is in terms of calories burnt and such. But I certainly feel like I’ve worked out after I’m done for the day. If nothing else, it’s moving and stretching, and I’ve recently rediscovered the muscles in my thighs and abs. So there’s that!

I also like working out with it because it is super fun. Little Mii characters are constantly applauding and encouraging you, even for things like jogging, which I absolutely hate doing, you know, in real life. (Also: it’s cold outside, but warm in my apartment.) And, dorky confession that should surprise absolutely no one who knows me at all, when we first got the Wii we made a whole bunch of silly Miis based on TV and movie characters. I… may have made the entire cast of High School Musical.³ But jogging is way more fun with, say, Chad Danforth!⁴

On the other hand, it’s pretty problematic in that if it measures your BMI as above “normal,” or you gain weight between days, it berates you. That’s neither healthy nor helpful; at best, it’s obnoxious, and at worst, potentially triggering for people with disordered eating.

(And on a personal level, it makes fun of me. Much of the Fit’s whole shebang is based around balance and posture; and while my posture is pretty great, thanks to the physical therapy, my balance… uh… Look, some of us failed out of ballet class when we were four because we fell over too much, even for toddlers. Why yes, Wii Fit, I do often fall down in my daily life, thanks so much for asking sarcastically.)

Other than that, not much going on. I’m on vacation for a week and I enjoy sitting around doing nothing quite a bit.⁵ For at least the third (probably fourth) year in a row, I’m going to do New Years karaoke tonight. Should be good times.

Here, have something adorable to end your year with:

Running laundry in my building is like doing a word problem for a middle school math class: there are six washing machines, but three of them hold only half as much as the other three. Of the larger three washing machines, only one actually works. There are three dryers. All of them work, but the first two cost more than the third to achieve the same level of dryness. However, the third sometimes eats laundry tokens rather than drying your clothing. Assuming optimal conditions in which none of the washers or dryers are already in use, how many tokens do you need in order to run two loads of laundry in the most efficient manner?

And then there’s the laundry token issue in and of itself. The washers and dryers don’t take quarters, only tokens — not that there is a sign explaining this anywhere, which was very confusing the first time I tried to run laundry and no machines would take my change. There also isn’t a token dispenser or anything helpful like that. To acquire tokens, you have to knock the super’s door and ask his wife for them.

This is complicated by three factors. First, the wife — who’s name I don’t know, which I should really rectify one of these days — isn’t always home, and no one else in their family speaks English, and I only speak English, so trading quarters for tokens requires a lot of elaborate hand gestures. Second, I have an almost pathological fear of bothering people, so needless to say, knocking on the door and asking someone to stop what she’s doing to give me tokens is really, really, really not my favorite thing. Third, about half the time, they’re entirely out of tokens anyway.

We’ve been living in this building for well over a year, so I’ve mostly learned to deal with all of this. But there are still weeks where I’d rather buy five new pairs of underwear than go to the trouble of getting laundry tokens and then trying to negotiate the actual washers and dryers.

–

I feel weird and self conscious writing about writing here. Can’t quite explain why. But here goes.

It’s coming up on National Novel Writing Month, wherein people strive to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I know a lot of people who are signed up already and getting psyched, writing outlines, totally geared up to go. I, however, am not one of them.

Way back in January, I made passing reference to trying to get a manuscript into shape to start submitting to agents by the end of the year. This is not going to happen. But I have revised that goal a little: I’d like to have my current round of revisions done by the end of the year. I’m not at a point where Nano, as much fun as it is (and it is!) would help.

Or rather: I’ve done Nano successfully four times (2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007). I am totally secure in my ability to write a whole lot in a short time period. And I got a lot out of Nano, beyond four unreadably bad novellas. It really did help me get into the habit of coming home from class (and later work) and opening up my project, sitting down and getting to work, and getting a heck of a lot accomplished.

But I can do that now. I know I can. Writing messy first drafts is not my problem, and motivating myself to work on them regularly is also not my problem. I have plenty of rough drafts, finished but never revised, sitting around on my hard drive or printed out and gathering dust. I love writing rough drafts. I love discovering things, world building, working out story structure, and getting lost in it all with no pressure for it to be good. I can do that. I’ve done that.

What I’ve never done is made the leap from a jumbled bunch of good ideas to a polished version that I’m not embarrassed by the thought of other humans reading. I’m not good at revising. It intimidates the crap out of me. And when I’m not going “Aaaaugh, how do I do this???” I find myself going, “Aaaaaugh, why did I ever think I could write well, this is the worst prose that has ever happened, omg I give up.” And then I give up and write another rough draft of a different project.

So it’s time. I’ve got a very rough, but I think salvageable, manuscript draft. Writing it from the ground up took me about three months, if you take out the few months in the middle when my computer broke and I lost everything and then was too busy sulking about what I’d lost to get back to work. So I’m hoping three months will also be adequate to make this next leap. What I’m looking at now, I think, is about 2/3 rewriting to 1/3 revising existing text — with frequent pauses to polish the bits I’ve rewritten, which is not something I usually do when writing rough drafts.

So that’s my plan. I’m putting it out here because making it public makes it feel real to me, and I do better with an actual deadline. Wish me luck. (And to all you Nano-ites out there, have fun!)

I keep meaning to write actual entries here, but then can’t be bothered until they are no longer relevant. So instead, have a list of random bits and pieces that have been on my mind of late.

Random thing #1: I got antsy about this blog, which meant it was time to change the theme. The last one was whimsical but way too narrow, and also, I wanted something bright and cheerful. So: pink! Hooray! I also upgraded to the newest version of WordPress. (Man, the more I use WP, the more I love it. Like, in a grade school, if-you-love-it-so-much-why-don’t-you-marry-it? kind of way.)

Random thing #2: I dropped the “Nerd at Peace” tagline because I never liked it anyway. *shrug*

Random thing #3: Following up on my last post, way after it’s still a thing being discussed, Justine Larbalestier’s Liar did indeed get a new cover, this time with a person of color on it. It still doesn’t match the description in the book, but is a step. A small step, though. Avalon’s Willow explained the remaining issues very well.

Random thing #4: Once upon a time, when I was seven years old, apparently I was featured in a “word on the street” type thing in my hometown’s itty bitty newspaper. I don’t know which was better, my answer or my mom’s rockin’ sunglasses:

Random thing #5: It is a good season to be a Yankees fan. That’s all I’m sayin’ about that.

Random thing #6: I may change the format around here a bit, and link to stuff I’ve written on various other blogs and elsewhere. Mostly because I would then actually have things to post, as this is my least-frequently-updated blog. (Possibly, I have too many blogs…) Over at Tweenage, I have recently written about The Wizards of Waverly Place movie and joined Jess to review Bandslam and Aliens in the Attic, and if you’re bored and like pop music, might I recommend our Official Tweenage Wasteland Official Boy Band Watch? And at Active Voice, I significantly less recently reviewed Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix.

Random thing #6.5: Speaking of things I’ve written, some small pieces at work: Innovative Video Game Helps Teach HIV-Positive Teens About Safer Sex and Annie Lennox: Singing Out Against HIV, so there are those.

Random thing #7: If I do not feed my cat soon, she will likely claw my eyes out. So this is the end of the list.

Over at Active Voice, Jess and I are doing a YA readathon. For charity! Some cut’n'pasted details for you:

This coming weekend is the Fourth Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge, in which bloggers read – and blog about – as many YA books as possible within a 48-hour period. For charity! Since we Active Voicers are strongly in favor of reading as much as possible and then yammering about it, and actually benefiting the world for once by doing so, we have decided to participate.

What does that mean? Basically, from Friday through Sunday we’ll be reading all the YA we can get our hands on, sci-fi/fantasy or otherwise, and liveblogging about it here.

Where does the charity angle come in? Well, if you so choose, you can sponsor one or both of us for a certain amount per books read. Comment on this post telling us whether you’d like to sponsor Jess, Becky, or the entire Active Voice team, and how much you’d like to sponsor per book. At the end of the weekend, we’ll multiply the amount you offered by books read by whoever you chose to sponsor, and you’ll send us that amount. So if you decide to, say, sponsor Becky for $1 per book and she reads 15 books, you’ll send us $15 through PayPal. (Contact details for that will come in a later post.)

We in turn will send all donations to Room to Read, a very excellent non-profit organization that operates in rural communities in Asia and Africa, building schools and libraries, publishing local language literature, and providing scholarships for girls’ education. These are all things that the Active Voice team feels pretty seriously down with!

Obviously, any and all donations would be gratefully accepted, if you have a few dollars to spare.

First, an excuse. For a change, it’s not that I’ve been too busy or too lazy to blog. It’s that I’ve been unable to use the computer for non-necessary… anything. For a few years, I had occasional wrist pain. For a year and a half, I had moderate wrist pain, and protected against it by wearing wrist braces at work. Problem dealt with.

Then, about six weeks ago, moderate wrist pain became, “Oh holy shit I can’t use my hands,” wrist pain, and I am now in physical therapy twice a week. I’m lucky, as these things go, though; I’ve got insurance, and it isn’t carpal tunnel and it isn’t nerve damage, just a combination of muscle weakness and strain, brought on by overuse and bad posture. Anyway, it’s getting better. Huzzah!

So here’s some reading for you.

I Was Followed, Harassed, And Ambushed By Bill O’Reilly’s Producer

Amanda Terkel at Think Progress made some critical comments about Bill O’Reilly and his comments on rape victims. She was then stalked and harassed by his producer. Here’s her account of the story (the “interview” is expected to air at some point soon), and the very important conclusion:

The main issue remains: O’Reilly should offer an apology/explanation of why, when a woman is raped and murdered, it’s relevant what she was wearing or how much she was drinking. O’Reilly never asked me for a statement nor invited me on his show before sending Watters to harass me. Since I’m a 5 ft, 100 pound woman with an opinion that he doesn’t like, perhaps O’Reilly believes I deserve to be treated this way.

Racefail ’09

Okay. This one is… massive. Much more so than a few paragraphs and a couple of links can explain, but basically, a discussion started in January, about writing the other in science fiction and fantasy. Writer Elizabeth Bear made a post about writing the other; Avalon’s Willow made a post critical of Bear’s actual writing of people of color, and what started as a smart exchange quickly spun into several other conversations, some productive and some racist, and many still going on. Aside from writing the other, discussions covered cultural appropriation, racism and the (lack of) representation of people of color (as writers, characters, and recognized as readers) in sf/f, and anonymity on the internet, among others. And all this comes on the heels of the casting of the racist casting of the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie.

You can get a basic summary, and links to more detailed explanations, here.

It’s been vast and overwhelming to follow. I’ve done a lot of thinking but no writing on it because, aside from my wrist problems, I don’t think that I have anything to add. One thing the conversation has made clear to me is that some voices are valued over others, and it’s the voices of people of color that too often aren’t heard. As a white person who’s trying to find a way to be an ally despite my privilege, I don’t think there’s anything I can say that wouldn’t be about me and my experiences. There may be value in them in some ways, but those are more personal and less related to the general conversation. So they’re not useful here, as far as I can tell.

So a few posts that really stuck out to me:

I Didn’t Dream of Dragons

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

A conversation I WANT to have

The world of fantasy should not be all White People + Various European Architecture + Magic (possibly dragons). The world of fantasy also shouldn’t be White People + Various Asian/South Asian Architecture + Magic. It’s not White People Gaining Power From Kachina Dolls. It’s not White People + Dark Savages + Magic. It’s not White People + Voudoo (Hoodo, Obeah, Santeria). It’s definitely not White People + All 4 of the previous mentioned practices, mixed up and rolled into one.

… So the conversation I want to have now is – what next? How do we start? Do we use the internet and go small press the way various erotica writing female writers have utilized it – making a space for themselves? How do we make space for ourselves? Do we embrace the labeling? Do we embrace the separate little bookshelves in the bookstore? The African American Lit. The Asian Experiences. The Jewish Commentaries? With their little signs? Do we accept those labels? Do we try to burst out? Where do we move next?

One possible “what now?” solution might be found in Verb Noire.

Ryda Wong has collected many, many, many more links about RaceFail here.

Other Links

Crossing Lines: Deconstructing Black Superheroes

I know a lot of people out there wonder why it matters. These are, after all, only imaginary superheroes. Why does the way they are created and portrayed matter so much? The answer is because they perpetuate the stereotypes as they play on them, they reinforce these ideas within the minds of fans. We are meant to look upon most superheroes as just that — heroes. We are meant to look up at them as people to emulate and aspire to be. This makes it especially unfortunate that black superheroes and specifically the ones chosen for this list are part of a pattern that continues to portray black people on the basis of opinions and stereotypes formed decades and even centuries ago, a pattern that continues to erase black women from any kind of discourse or agency. For a medium that endeavors to look into other worlds and possibilities, it seems reluctant to release the preconceptions of this one and that’s a true shame. This list doesn’t help dispel any of that at all.

Via The Angry Black Woman.

Carrie’s Analysis of Urban Fantasy Part I: The Formula

Apart from the presence of the supernatural and a kick-ass heroine (often wearing leather pants and wielding a semi-automatic), which are big parts of the urban fantasy formula and traits readers look for in these books, I’d argue that the framework boils down to two things: character and world-building. This genre is primarily character-driven: the main characters are at the hearts of these series, and readers keep coming back because of the connection they feel with them. And world building: readers want a world they can fall into, that they can believe in, often similar to ours but the fun comes in seeing the differences, in imagining what it would really be like if these things really happened. When these two things come together, along with the tropes that cause readers to seek out these books in the first place (vampires, kicking ass, etc), you have a successful urban fantasy novel and series. I believe this is what readers are looking for, and what writers in the genre are striving for.

(Also check out Part II: When Things Go Wrong and Part III: Deconstructing Urban Fantasy. Via The Swivet.)

Phtoshop Adbusting

A photoessay of an adbusted subway poster, that started with perfected pictures of singers — the original ads — and added the menus from Photoshop that make such perfection possible. Powerful stuff. (Recommended reading: No Logo, which I’m currently 3/4 of the way through.)

And finally, a “this is so stupid I can’t even get properly annoyed” link: Sci Fi Channel Aims to Shed Geeky Image With New Name. Right. Because “SyFy” rebranding will make science fiction non-geeky, and attract women. Yeah, good luck with that. Meanwhile, as a woman who already likes science fiction and geekery, all I can think is, you know, I prefer not to associate with the ludicrously misspelled.

That’s it. More… Someday.

So Rachel and I tentatively refer to Lily, our cat, as the failiest of fail cats. She’s a cat who climbs up on top of our highest cabinets and then can’t get back down. She’ll get so excited someone is petting her that she’ll roll right off the couch. She is exceedingly ginormous, but not terribly ferocious.

Tonight, Lily caught a mouse. This is the good news.

The bad news — other than the fact that our building in general and, evidently, our apartment in specific, has mice — is that she is still a fail cat. So she ran from the kitchen where she caught it, past us in the living room, and into my bedroom, and then, whoops! Dropped it.

IN MY BEDROOM.

Now, Rachel and I used to be country folk; we grew up in a house with birds in the eves, a few bats in the attic, occasional mice, and on one very memorable occasion, a raccoon in the bathtub. So it’s not like we’re afraid of such things. On the other hand. MOUSE. HIDING. IN MY BEDROOM.

After our moment of shock that our failcat is secretly a mouser — albeit a bad one — and some very brief shrieking because such things are startling (AND DID I MENTION SHE LOST IT IN MY BEDROOM?) we tracked it down, hiding behind my bookshelf. This necessitated removing all books from the shelf and moving the shelf itself, at which point the mouse naturally ran out from behind it, and in underneath it, in the approximate half-inch of space there. (It was a very small mouse. And brown. And actually quite cute, but I DO NOT WANT IT IN MY APARTMENT.)

Luckily, Rachel was on the phone with our friend Erin at the time, and Erin is super smart and suggested perhaps, if we could flush it out from under the bookshelf, we could catch it in Tupperware and put it outside. This was the best solution we could think of — Rachel and I are both vegetarians and have been for a long time, so even if we’d had a convenient way to kill it, we probably wouldn’t have.

How does one flush a mouse out from a dark space under a bookshelf? Well, if one is me, one uses an adorable (and, it turns out, highly functional) keychain with a rubber ducky charm. A charm that happens to light up and quack. Presumably terrified, the mouse dashed from its hiding spot and right into the waiting Tupperware, and we carried it out the apartment and halfway down the block without pausing to put on coats (or, in my case, shoes — going sock-footed in January on a New York City sidewalk: I don’t recommend it). We let it go and it scampered off, which was probably for the best, since that meant it likely hadn’t been hurt (just terrified) and wasn’t in pain. The down side is that even if it can’t get back into our building, it likely will get into someone’s somewhere, because where else could it go?

But at least not back to ours, we hope.

On the other hand, mice rarely travel in packs of one.

So we’ll see. This requires some serious thought and consideration about how to prevent future mice in an apartment when we have no control over the building as a whole, and what to do with any mice we might catch. Or maybe consideration of moving. Either way.

I’m off to go put all the books back on my shelf and clean up the havoc wrecked by the cat, the mouse, and me and my sister. Then clean the kitchen top to bottom. So I leave you with a picture of the mighty huntress:

Isn’t she ferocious?