Wishes for the Coming Year (and Decade)

Wishes I have for the coming decade.

So one of my people gave me this prompt and it is kind of a doozy. For a multitude of reasons, I am not one generally given to thinking about my personal lifespan in anything other than a year or so ahead of wherever I am at the moment. I’m still amazed I lived to see my 30th birthday. This is, of course, hilarious, given that my chosen major and life passion is history so I’m well familiar with the passage of time and thinking in cathedral time. My only possible explanation for it is that I am a Crusades/Renaissance historian primarily and so I’m accustomed to applying that thinking to the past and not, you know, my present/future. So it massively threw me for a loop when I realized that we’re not only at the end of the year but at the end of a decade. Time is also this weird nebulous concept. It feels like 20 years has passed between right now and this past January. So yeah.

This post is about wishes.

Wishes are super magical things. They are desires and dreams and worries given form and sent out into the great ether. Wishes get transformed into so many tangible and intangible things. Like, if you are looking for the magic inherent in the world, it’s wishes, ya’ll. Trust me on this.

My personal wishes come in weird formats, ranging from the excessively minor to the staggeringly huge.

However, for this next decade, I think the thing I am wishing most for is to be happy.

Uncomplicatedly happy more often than not. This year and decade has done a hell of a number on me personally and also on so many of the people that I hold so dear. So yeah, I want to be happy. Or rather I want to be in a place physically and also mentally/emotionally where that’s something that my brain can latch on to more readily. Depression, anxiety, and chronic pain are no joke, but things have gotten better this decade. I want that to continue.

I wish for the world to be a safer place for people like me. I wish for it to be safer period.

I also wish that someone would come up with a better method for managing auto-immune conditions. Despite not really thinking I’d make it this far, I really want to see 40,50, and 60. Beyond that, too.

So my hopes and dreams and wishes for the upcoming decade come down to health, security, and happiness. For me, my tribe, and the world.

Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part Two)

The NJO came out and rocked my world, I got my first one from a bag of mixed books from one grandparents (it was Balance Point which I promptly opened up, read the first page and then “HOLD ON WHAT.” I got the entire series for Christmas and birthday after my grandparents realized that no really, that is all I wanted and that I was getting “lost” in bookstores just to actually read those books in the actual store because I was that into the ongoing plotline.

Star Wars (and Nanowrimo) also gave me my best friend (now roommate) because of a write in and an offhand comment and then suddenly there was a person there who loved pilots as much as I did. Who even had met the two authors that had written some of my favorite books ever in the EU. I found out later she actually worked for them over Labor Day weekends at this thing called Dragon*Con.

We’ve been fast and best friends since 2006 and cohabitating since 2011 and there is an entire wall of Star Wars Legends books in chronological order surrounding a smallish pilot shrine. The small collection of current canon novels is also arranged on one side.

I’d been so used to being the only fan in the city I had lived in, that meeting actual humans who geeked as much, if not more than I did, over shared stories and characters was three kinds of a blessing.

It wasn’t all sunshine, Ewoks, and fighter ships. I broke up hardcore with the fandom for a while during the time after the NJO. The Dark Nest trilogy left me cold and then the series after that…there were some deep and abiding characterization issues that led me to just fall out of the fandom for a while.

It hurt too much to go back when you had people taking a character that you loved, that you had grown up with in a literal sense and twist them into something incomprehensible with little to no explanation for how he got from point a to point zed. When just the description of the events unfolding made you so vicerally and incandescently angry.

Because this fandom was home in a way that most of my other fandoms had never been. Because this fandom and the characters and the people were one of the things that had kept me going in some really dark times.

The advent of the last X-Wing book, Mercy Kill (read by me as my roommate drove us to Atlanta so she could cackle at my reactions) was what brought me back. Sitting in the panel room, listening to Aaron Allston talk about it was engaging and there were flickers of that same spark that had consumed so many days during my pre-teen and teen years. I’ll never forget however when someone from the audience stood and stumbled a little bit over their words before getting to the meat of the question. “Is it safe to come home now?”

This was before we had an Episode VII or even really the concept of any of the anthology films and the fervor swept over all of us again at the thought of more new Star Wars movies. After the prequels, I hadn’t thought that I would see more new films in the franchise so soon. Especially given the way that the second trilogy had been scoured and picked apart and judged by everyone with a blog and an opinion.

That question from that audience member resonated with me and quite a few others in that track room. Aaron assured us that yes, it was safe to come back now. That the fandom still had room for us and while we couldn’t change what had happened in the past, that there was space to move past it.

So we came home. And glory of glories, we got more movies and more books and while there were serious upheaval moments (the movie canon becoming separate from the EU/Legends canon was one), we were still a family.

The representation in Rogue One and Episodes VII and VIII were magical. It was like walking into a dream where your favorite fanfic had just become canon. It was the Star Wars we loved with people who actually looked like us. There was more than one badass female character, there were young and old characters, and the storytelling was good.

Every third person was not a white dude and the stark change from the original trilogy was a little more magical because of it. 8pm Thursday night showings became the new midnight showings and the sheer joy of being in a theater with a hundred other excited fans all reacting at the same time to what was on the screen will never not be amazing.

You meet some of the best people at these things, especially in tense moments on screen where your right hand is being clutched by your roommate and your left is being held by the guy next you because the need for physical comfort was so high (Ep VII, you probably know the part).

And then there was the pushback from other fans, who couldn’t quite understand the need for all that diversity. For the additional women on screen or the need for the stories to evolve.

The people who grew up thinking they’d be the Rebellion and instead became the Empire. Unlike the controversies in the fandom before, this one wasn’t much of one. The people buying into that mindset were the vast minority, albeit a very vocal one. The core of Star Wars fandom is still there, glittering like our Space Mom, and eagerly awaiting whatever we get to experience next.

We have so many new stories coming out from a variety of media formats. We have amazing inclusive books and short stories written by so many amazing people, it’s impossible to name them all here.

We have an entire Disney park dedicated to the full immersive experience of being inside the Star Wars Universe.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll get next.

Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part One)

So I love Star Wars, this is not news for people who know me.

Star Wars was and is a huge part of who I am today. I fell in love with the series when I saw it with my dad at the age of nine. Some of my earliest fanfiction was me in the Star Wars universe, exploring things and having all kinds of adventures. My family, of course, was always Corellian. It seemed to fit them the best (still does).

I learned there was an Expanded Universe when I saw The Crystal Star by Vonda N. McIntyre in the Paperback section of our local KY Kroger. I begged and pleaded for my mom to buy that for me. I was a tiny kid who was already reading on a college level at 9. My parents had an easier time keeping me in sneakers than in books.

It blew my mind. Because here was the after I had been looking for, the what happened next, and this book wasn’t the only one. Luke was a full blown Jedi, Han and Leia were MARRIED. WITH KIDS!! My nine year old mind was over the moon. Here were all the details and the stories that happened after! Scoping through some of the pages, I saw that it wasn’t the only one either.

So I fell into this universe in a way I hadn’t before with any of the other things I loved, unless you count reading as a fandom of its own. Star Wars was really the first IP where I actively became part of the fandom as much as I could.

It was pretty slow at first, that was right around the time that we were moving overseas. However Episode 1 came out and saved my life (I wrote about that over here). That Christmas, I got the score and the novelization from visiting relatives and I fell further down the hole of fandom.

As I got older and had more access to the internet, I found websites like TheForce.Net and fanfiction.com and I started reading everything I could. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I joined a forum specifically geared towards Jedi Girls and through it, I met the first person I fell in love with. We moved again and our closest “neighbors” that worked for the same agency my parents worked for had a kid my age that owned a HUGE chunk of the Legends books that had come out at that time. They went back stateside for a year and I got to babysit the books while they were gone. It was kind of a dream come true.

I got to take my time reading through the Expanded Universe and revelling in all of the words and the adventures and the characters. The good and the bad and the weird (I still am not exactly sure about what the hell even The Black Fleet Crisis was about, it’s been 16 years and “Bzuh” is still my entire reaction to that trilogy).

These were the books that taught me what “canon”, “deuterocanon”, and “apocrypha” actually looked like, where 3-4 years of studying religious doctrine and history couldn’t. How piecing together different campaigns from across several books/trilogies actually functioned and the importance, not just of gaining knowledge, but also sharing it (Wookiepedia and so so so many fansites in the Geocities/Angelfire years) so that others could also nerd the hell out.

I fell in love with pilots to the point of ordering the entire X-Wing series with birthday and Christmas money from Amazon.com and having them shipped to me overseas (the estimated time of arrival without having paid for expedited shipping because I really didn’t want to give Amazon an actual kidney was anywhere from 6 weeks to 4 months, depending on the mail and customs). The books I was babysitting for my friend didn’t have all the X-Wing stories so I had to procure them elseways. This drove me bananas, because my impulse control to read all the things had to contend with the fact that I knew reading them out of order would mean that my brain would hyper-focus on what I’d missed.

Pretty sure that the only people happier than me getting those books were my family members, having to put up with my anxious slightly manic self. They were in 3 packages and I didn’t get them in order. I remember getting books 1,2, and 8 in the same package and agonizing because I wanted to read them in order and waiting until I had all of them was a special kind of torture. It paid off though because the joy of getting to binge read the entire series was so good.

Episode II came out and I saw it three times in the regular Brasilian theaters and then wonder of wonders, it was still in the Imax theaters near my grandparents when we landed stateside for a brief assignment. My dad took me and my sister to a late night Imax showing of it and it was the best thing in the world.

Episode III was the one where I camped out for tickets. Nothing was getting in my way from seeing this. Coming out of the theater from that movie and then pretty much getting back in line for tickets because I needed to see again. There was so much there that my brain needed to unpack and filter through what we already knew of the universe and how it fit into the EU and this opened up so much more of the already vast universe.

Part Two Tomorrow!

Weekend Writing

Okay so this weekend, I tried to plot out more bits of the We Don’t Talk About Book Club universe which started as a kind of Nanowrimo dare type one-shot story. It was supposed to be a self-contained fun one-shot story.

To the complete lack of surprise to my beta-readers, it did not remain a one-shot. So my plan this weekend was going back to kind of figure out more about the world and overarching conflicts and some of those behind the scenes moving parts. The universe is quite popular among some of my Patrons so I had picked one of the earlier stories that hadn’t gotten fleshed out yet to focus on. Outlining it out on the whiteboard ( because my brain wasn’t being a help much this weekend) revealed several things that I had not previously known before.

There is apparently a constabulary type organization in my shadow world and one of the MC’s not-a-boyfriend’s is one of them. That my MC has a particular hate-on for some of those folk that ties back to her choosing a mostly mundane life up until then. That incubi lore is rather thin on the ground if you’re trying to not use the Catholic mythologies and don’t have access to certain books (I’m ILL-ing one of them and put one on my list of books to buy when I start buying books again).

Also that there’s a wedding I semi-forgot about and in the process of figuring out all of the above, also realizing that I’ve created the perfect circumstances for an inter-dimensional war. My goal was actually to try and make things less complicated, not more. Failing at that is pretty on brand for me.

Writing is not for the faint of heart, ya’ll.

Cutting The Cord

So earlier this year my household decided to cut the cord. Just as an experiment because we were both stuck in a kind of rut where we just got home from the respective day jobs and sat and just zoned out to whatever random TV we decided on that evening.

It wasn’t good for our writing or for getting house chores done or really anything.

So we decided to cut that cord and see how that would impact the household. We weren’t going completely cold turkey because we knew neither one of us would be able to deal with that. We still had our Prime and Netflix accounts and the living room TV was one of the smart TVs so we could also connect the Movies Anywhere/VUDU apps to it to be able to access the digital copies of the movies we own. We also rediscovered our Spotify accounts and being able to play some of our lists off the TV is pretty awesome.

Neither one of us can work well without background noise so having those options available has been good for our productivity levels.

We’re seven months into it and so far we haven’t missed it much (my kingdom for the ability to just pay for MSNBC without having to pay for packages of stuff I neither need or care about – at least there are podcasts of the shows I actually care about oh well). It forced us out of the rut and while it hasn’t always been sunshine and daisies, it’s been a lot better for both of us, in terms of actually being able to get things done. For me, particularly, it has helped me whittle down the list of things I needed to watch/read/listen to. That list was getting seriously out of control and this push was what I needed to gain some momentum there.

I have been able to finish several things I kept meaning to, but time kept getting away from me, etc. Cutting the cord took away some of my excuses and that was grand, all on its lonesome. Granted I have some complicated medical issues that don’t always allow me to get everything I want to get done accomplished in the timeframe that I want.

Cutting that cord however gave us back money in the household budget and made us really stop and think about the habits we’d acquired and why we’d acquired them.

It’s not the answer for everyone, but it’s done a lot for us in terms of mental and physical health.

So for anyone else thinking about it or if you have questions about it, let me know. Happy to answer anything about our thought process going into it and what we told Comcast when we dropped it.

On The Renaming of Awards

I’ve mostly hermited the past two weeks or so, having gone directly from Dragon*Con into a short week at my day job which generally means twice the work and twice the intensity and urgency of every. little. thing. all compacted into three days before you get a small breather before the normal end of week shenanigans begin.

Which is why I haven’t said anything on this yet. First, let me state that, Jeannette Ng’s speech was a thing of awesome and I am so happy and proud that they finally renamed the award to Astonishing. It’s been a long time in coming and I am happy to have been able to see it happen in my lifetime.

The renaming of the Campbell Award to the Astonishing Award has brought back up the possibility of renaming the Tiptree Award.

Now, straight up, I will tell you right now that as a SFF writer and reader, I love what the award stands for. I will also tell you that as a disabled person, the idea that this award is named for Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr is overwhelmingly abhorrent. Before you click further, I will let you know that the explanation involves some sensitive topics, primarily murder by caregiver.

Continue reading “On The Renaming of Awards”

Books That Made Me – Part Three: Bridge to Terabithia

Bridge To Terabithia, where do I even begin with this book? I found it by accident in the library at my elementary school (the KY one instead of the AZ one). I had been looking for something else entirely and found Bridge To Terabithia instead. I was always the last kid out of the library so I had to hurry because the rest of my class was waiting on me. So I grabbed it and took it home and proceeded to have my entire world wrecked. I think I read it four times in the week I had it.

I’ll try to explain a little more about that without getting into massive spoiler territory for anyone who hasn’t read it. Bridge To Terabithia is a book about the power of imagination. It is also a coming of age story. Our protagonist is a boy kind of stuck, wanting something else, something different, but not necessarily having the ability to change much right now. There’s a multitude of reasons for it. His family isn’t that well off and he’s got at least four sisters that are named in the text. There are expectations he’s supposed to meet.

And then he meets the force of nature that is his new neighbor and there’s all of a sudden light at the end of the tunnel that he can almost reach. There’s a glimmer of hope that he’s able to see. That he doesn’t maybe have to stay stuck, that it’s actually possible to get out.

That was really important to kid me.

Coming back to this book as a grown-up, I also love that it emphasizes that once you get out, you reach a hand down and pull up others who are looking to make their own way out and free. All in all, there’s a bittersweet magical quality to the book that leaves you a bit different after you read it.

The Originals/Legacies S5/S1

So I am a little behind with this, I know. But this past week/weekend I was finally able to finish The Originals s5 and the first season of Legacies. This is also your SPOILER WARNING.

Holy wow, Batman.

I mean we knew that things were going to be bad after the way that s4 ended and to know that there was going to be a time skip on top of this being the last season of Originals? The showrunners aren’t exactly known for their happily ever afters. So I was already braced for things to get deep down and dirtier than even what we’d seen before. The show did not disappoint there and neither did the cast.

The amount of emotion that each of them put into every moment was fantastic and it was a good way to send the show off. Certain moments had me sniffling into the couch. It was a really fascinating look at the different factions and how far they’d come since the beginning and how far certain characters had come.

One of my favorite moments is when Vincent marshalls the New Orleans coven and gets rid of the Ancestral Well, putting all the Ancestors to peace at last, and letting go of that power sink. It was a good moment for him and the right decision if the coven wanted to move ahead.

While I hated losing some of the characters that I really loved, it was a good send off to see Klaus and Elijah going out on their own terms together. And for New Orleans to really recover/bounce back from the faction wars between the big 3 and then between the Mikaelsons and the very Nazi-esque faction of blood purists – the Mikaelson vampires needed to go as well. Klaus and Elijah are gone, Rebecca is marrying Marcel after she takes the cure and becomes human so she’ll eventually pass on. Marcel may or may not follow her. Kol is married to Davina and may well follow her when she eventually dies. Freya is human and while powerful, she’s not immortal. So with the Originals sorted out and Hope going back to the Salvatore School…it was the perfect tee-up to the first season of Legacies.

Legacies takes a look at the next generation with Hope Mikaelson , Josie and Lizzie Saltzman (yes those twins) and others. It’s a season about hard decisions and their consequences and like the title tells you, the legacies that get passed down from parent to child. We get to meet some amazing new characters and see exactly who and what and how things happen in a world post-TVD and TO. It also explains a little more about certain plot threads from The Originals and TVD.

Con Prep: Dragons Ahoy!

It’s August. Which means that con prep has shifted into high gear(as of the writing of this blog post, I have 23 days, 5 hours, and 33 minutes according to the countdown on the con website .)

I have my tentative panel schedule and it looks awesome. Of course, with it comes a fair bit of homework. Pleasurable homework – this year it’s rewatching/finishing 4 seasons of TV, rereading two books, and writing an updated workshop as well.

You know, in addition to my day job, writing the novel, and also working on Patreon things.

It’s going to be Crazy Pants McGee here in the Hobbit House that Nerd Built which is just the way we like it (it’s also the reason we take September off to recover).

I’ll post sneak peeks of my schedule throughout the month so you can see some of the awesome fun stuff I’ll be doing over Labor Day weekend.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there as well! I’m in the program and on the website under my Muggle name. I’ll be in the app too as soon as this year’s version gets released.