AGAIN?

Dammit, there has got to be at least one speculative fiction novel out there that doesn’t introduce a female protagonist by RAPING HER.

It’s not so much that I disapprove of it happening in a story—stories are great because all sorts of totally awful things can happen to pretend people, instead of to real people, and I could write a whole dissertation on this. All I'm sayin' is, when it becomes the default way to introduce someone, I … get a little unsettled.

This book is pretty damn good anyway, and it does look like the incident serves some purpose of character and/or story development, but I'm starting to regard authors with suspicion when they open this way. Good grief.

Perspective On Conlangs!

A tl;dr Q&A in the NY Times about conlangs

Not a very satisfactory “panel” there—Okrent’s not a conlanger but a sort of outside ethnographer, and Frommer’s a little tangled up in Na’vi right now. It’s most interesting to me as a sort of snapshot of how folks who never thought much about conlanging approach it.* I kind of like reminding myself that not everyone takes for granted the things I do.


*In a lot of cases, with an almost entertaining veiled hostility. Count how many of the questions subtly note that there are a lot of better ways a conlanger could be spending their time! It’s made me decide to start asking vaguely insulting questions about hobbies I don’t share! “Couldn’t you spend that time you use playing football to volunteer at a soup kitchen?” “Don’t you have enough quilts by now? Why make more?”** “Who’s going to look at this sketchbook, anyway?”

**Actually, somebody asked my mom this.

Fun-Size Thoughts

-Let’s clear something up from a couple entries ago: I was being hyperbolic. I am finding a whole lot of awesome books at the library. However, in any genre you get bad or lazy or assholish writers, and a disproportionate number of these like to put in scenes of sexual violence not for story purposes, but because they can’t think of anything else. These books may look quite a lot like the books by good writers on the outside, and when that's the case I have to open them up to find out what they’re like.

-That said, book recommendations are always welcome! But I have quite a long list of books to try out already, so I can’t guarantee I’ll ever get to these books.

-I had to refuse to go to the Yarn Place with Mom thist morning. I have a whole stack of art junk sitting around waiting for me to art with it already. Bead stuff, chainmail stuff, cord stuff, sewing stuff … If I were capable of hyperfocusing, I would have my own damn Etsy store by now.

-I did manage to make Loke a T-shirt out of one of my old ones. It’s not bad for a first effort, but I do need practice in this new (to me) technique. I managed mostly to line up the hems provided, but the shirt is a little lopsided. I wore this shirt a lot, so the fabric was not sturdy—a couple of times it tore easily. But the biggest issue is the neckline—if you’re going to make a pullover shirt for a doll, the neckline has to be big, because dolls always have huge heads, and figuring out the width of the shoulders and the sleeves wasn’t easy. I think it’ll work better next time.


Also, Loke may eat your soul, but you can't deny she looks fabulous in turquoise.

-I've come up with a way to shut my brain up at night when it's compulsively worrying instead of going to sleep: I write a list of every worry I have in a few words, then tell myself I can deal with it tomorrow. It seems to be working ...

-Swimming is nice, but sometimes I kinda wish I could plug in the iPatch and swim along to some music—perhaps flick on my Mermaids playlist, as long as I’m in the water.* But on the other hand, while white noise usually bothers me, the weirdness of underwater noise is kind of nice. I love the sound around me when I exhale.

-I keep having small children in the pool and the locker room throwing me wide-eyed glances when my back is to them. I figured it was just the usual small-kid paranoia of Strangers, until it suddenly occurred to me that I have a tattoo on my spine. Good luck figuring out what it says, small children!

-Finally saw The Shining. Not bad, for a Kubrick film. But my favorite bit was definitely the part where Shelley Duvall discovers just what’s in Jack’s magnum opus, and then just keeps digging through the manuscript. You’d think she’d pick a few key bits-beginning, two or three middle parts, end—in the pile and get the idea, but instead she checks every page. “Well, the last forty pages were all the same, but I wonder if page 41 is different …”


*Alternatives: The Giant Bloated List Of Favorites, The Pirate Playlist and The NERRRRRD Playlist. You have no idea how many geek songs I own.