Like I need one more gadget

Eh, I'm a gadget geek. I can't help myself. Wynette sent me a link to Twitter, and at first I thought, "Oh, this is nothing but the geek version of reality TV." But I was just curious enough to watch their little video & set up an account so I could understand this phenom--and then it turned out to have a Blogger widget. I am done for.

The good news: Twitter restricts one to 140 characters. I must be succinct--which is, as you know, a challenge for me. So perhaps I will acquire a new skill. :)

If you're on Twitter, let me know, and I'll put you on my Magic Page.

What's Your Favorite Book?

I'm reeling. The Truth of the Publishing Universe has just been handed to us, and I'm going to be mulling it over for days. Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out "What is your favorite book of all time?" The answers:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
5. The Stand, by Stephen King
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
8. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
9. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
10. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The results of the poll are fascinating, in a first-time-you've-seen-water-through-a-microscope way. You can see Harris's release here. One of the things we learn there is that every demographic group, bar none, chose (in unprompted results!) the Bible as their favorite book. But the #2 through #5 slots have more to do with the distribution of the sample than anything else: GWTW is #1 among women, LOTR among men, for example, and we all know more women than men bother with reading. The next few slots are heavily influenced by age and regional and ethnic identities.

What I take away from it:

1. I am going to have to finally sit down and read Atlas Shrugged, which can't seem to find its way off my long list.
2. The BIBLE??? Seriously???
3. To Kill a Mockingbird sucked. Just sucked. Why do people love it?
4. OMG, the BIBLE. No pun intended.
5. The DaVinci Code doesn't really surprise me. I mean, when's the last time you were flying someplace that you didn't see at least one person toting that piece of crap around? But he's got two books on the list. This makes me shudder for the reading public.
6. Dan Brown needs a really good editor almost as badly as THE BIBLE.
7. Books of Large Size win Fanbases.
8. It's good to be an SFF writer. I'm including Dan Brown for the purposes of this exercise, btw.
9. The Catcher in the Rye only made the list because they didn't interview anyone under 18. I spend a lot of time explaining to people who are now reaching its supposed target age that it was a mind-blowing book in its era, but its era is not our era, and that's why they can't figure out what the hell the fuss is about.
10. People need to read more.

I know I'm weird, but if someone had asked me that question, none of those books would have occurred to me. Oh, sure, LOTR blew me away when I read it--30 years ago. I've read works in whose company LOTR would hang its head in shame since. What is my favorite book now? (Besides the one I'm working on, of course.)

Twofold answer, of course:
Nonfiction (perennially): The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Fiction (today): Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

What are your favorite books? Leave me a note & help restore my faith in the future of reading.

OMG. The BIBLE.

I am weirder than you

Once upon a time, my mother and my mother-in-law were visiting at the same time...and actually achieving rapport. (I hear the married people among you gasp; for the benefit of the rest of you, mother and mother-in-law working together can generate exponentially more aggravation than either of them alone. Go rent The In-Laws if you don't believe me.) At any rate, they were commiserating about how unreasonable and unmanageable Mark and I were, individually and collectively.

"It's like they're having a contest to see who can be weirder," my mother opined.

Well, let me tell you, I Win. Naturally Mark doesn't want to admit defeat, but I know I've got it locked. Not only am I weirder than him, I'm weirder than you.

It's tempting to blame my father. Evidently it was his idea to name me Barbara, the accepted meaning of which is Stranger. He loved the cognitive dissonance generated by pairing it with Friend, which of course was my last name until I married Mark and added his to the mix. Any Rosicrucian worth his salt can tell you that enlightenment can be achieved by disciplining one's mind to accommodate contradictory truths: what they call achieving modulated paradox. (Knowing that, of course, is one of the things that makes me Weirder Than You.) But my father is a very logical person, so I don't think that was the intent.

Nevertheless, there it is: he named me Stranger, and I am.

I realized recently that one of the things that marks me as different from the norm is my taste for the edge in my business and creative lives. Most people crave safety; I'd rather work without a net. I'm not an adrenaline junkie; it's just that the places where they string the nets are not interesting, and I'd rather have a rich intellectual and creative life. Mark and I have spent our adult lives embroiled in one start-up and/or privately-held business venture after another. There's no net out here; we swing from one chandelier to the next. Sometimes it's fairly hair-raising, but none of the mistakes we've made have killed us, and very few of them were irreparable. We exchange the feeling that we are safe and everything is under control, which is most people's primary motivation for choosing big established companies when they look for jobs, for the opportunity to make our own mistakes, do our own art (his is a scientific rather than *artistic* art, but the principle is the same) and pursue our own visions.

It is my current belief that there are certain experiences which change a person so profoundly and irrevocably that it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was to exist on the other side of that experiential line. Becoming a parent, particularly the parent of more than one child, is one of those things: when you are truly responsible for another human who you know will not thrive unless you give them heart and soul, that changes everything. People who have crossed into the parent zone share understandings that people who have not had the experience will never really comprehend unless they make the same crossing.

Likewise, declaring oneself a professional in the arts works a profound change on the artist. There the responsibility is to one's self; but the necessity of taking responsibility rather than waiting for the Gods of Art to come down and anoint one changes works a change in one's artistic life which is nearly as profound as the transition to parenthood: we become, in effect, artistic adults. Becoming a pro liberated me; I now believe that has a lot to do with the fact that I came out where I did, on the independent side of the line. Becoming a pro finally gave me the control to go with my outside-the-norm ideas.

I have only recently recognized that choosing start-up or independent business models is another of those paradigm-changing choices. Those of us who run our business lives from the chandeliers share experiences and attitudes that people who gravitate towards the feeling of safety view as just plain nuts. We're accustomed to being in the fray of business, to dealing with whatever comes our ways, rather than being insulated; we take for granted that we will make mistakes, but that we will survive and learn from our mistakes, and we know from experience that very few of the mistakes we make will be uncorrectable. We accept all this in order to pursue our own visions, and most of the time we take for granted that this is just the way things are: because we know that working without a net is the price of doing the work that lets us grow.

Wynette likens running your own business to running the Iditarod. I find real resonance in that: running the Iditarod is -- well, am I the only person who has noticed the similiarity of its spelling to the word idiot? It seems a senseless activity. You assemble your team and drive out into the middle of nowhere, under conditions that could potentially kill you. People who have been through the Iditarod not only share an experience, a mode of being, that the rest of us can only look at in puzzlement, but are driven to repeat the experience over and over. Mark and I have been running the Iditarod, metaphorically speaking, for about 20 years now. We haven't won yet; but it hasn't killed us, either, and we've managed to raise two fantastic humans and have some wonderful intellectual and creative adventures along the way.

To outsiders, I know, a high percentage of what I do looks crazy. But I must swing from the chandeliers, indeed must have a fistful of exposed wiring, if I am to reach my potential. It's just one of the things that makes me weird. I am grateful to have a husband and creative partners who understand and are willing to join me out here, beyond the nets.

(Yes, we are secretly having more fun out here. Anyone who has ever heard me laugh the Evil Laugh will surely understand.)

Thinking of dealing with Amazon? Think again!

I am a blogging delinquent, and as I slowly begin to climb out of the morass of tasks that made keeping in touch with the world hover just out of reach, I'd been starting to think about sharing what's been going on with all of you...and I shall.

But today's development has derailed that: Amazon.com has decided, in a move that would put Microsoft to shame, to make it impossible for small publishers whose books are printed by anyone other than their own subsidiary, BookSurge, to get listed on Amazon. Those who are already listed there are finding their "Buy" links disabled, one by one.

If you are a publisher, Powells.com and even--against all odds-- BN.com are your new best friends. And if you're a reader, and a book buyer, I hope you will vote on this reprehensible behavior with your money, which you will take elsewhere.

Unless you like the smell of monopoly, and I'm not talking about the game, STAY AWAY FROM AMAZON.

More on other, less alarming, topics soon.

Just call me Penemue

Angel August's Abode - Fallen Angel Quiz - Penemue: "

Take The 'Which Fallen Angel Would You Be?' Quiz
Brought to you by Angel August's Abode

"

I especially enjoyed the question about which famous person I most identified with. Trying to decide between Prince and Galileo almost killed me.

If your head didn't just explode, you weren't paying attention. :)

The Soul Team

Recently, Wynette & I were discussing a difficulty we share in the area of keeping up with our blogs: the fact that, as publishers and people with a dizzying variety of involvements in the tiny little arena of the publishing world, more often than not the thing that most occupies our minds is a thing it would be inappropriate to get into in public. There are days when it feels impossible to say anything in public at all.

Once in a while, fortunately, there are elixirs we can distill from the peat bogs of our lives and share. Here is today's brew:

Some months back, Sonja watched some film about people swimming the English Channel. This is an activity that makes no sense whatsoever to me, but I suppose that most people would find all the craziness that goes into writing and publishing incomprehensible, when it implies making sacrifices in key areas such as free time, one's social life, and the leeway in which to pursue really high-yield pyramid schemes. I digress, as usual. My point lies in what Sonja took away from this nameless film.

In watching the film, as I understand it, Sonja was forcibly struck by the fact that the swimmers who crossed the English Channel didn't make that insane crossing alone: to go it alone was acknowledged to be tantamount to suicide. They were accompanied by support teams, who brought them potable water and (I'm guessing now; I haven't seen the film in question) let them hang off the boat for a bit of a breather now and then. The point is that the one person who the media et al might notice was just the visible part of a vitally important team. Sonja's take, upon reflection: "I need a soul team."

What did she mean? In reflecting on the journey we all make in trying to grow and develop our selves, our craft, our souls, we all need support teams of people who -- whether or not they always agree with us -- at least understand and support our goals and give us help, water, and maybe the side of a boat to cling to when the going gets tough. Because, let's face it, it does. In any all-out creative endeavor, whether it's starting and running one's own business, writing the novel, achieving enlightenment, or whatever, attempting to go it alone is to plan to fail. This doesn't mean that the people on our soul teams must lay aside their dreams and goals in favor of ours; just the opposite. It means we must take care of our soul-team-mates as we pursue our various paths, and share our journeys, and support one another when the water is choppy.

I have been in the midst of some rough lessons lately -- which, of course, is part of why I've been quiet on the blog. But I have been blessed with, and grateful for, the support of my Soul Team, who have let me hang from the side of the boat now and then, helped me consult my (hopefully waterproof) map of the mysterious territory I'm attempting to traverse, and especially brought me the emotional nourishment and support I've needed while I've done my work.

Mark, Wynette, Sonja, Ron... thanks for the water. :)

The power of character names

This week I passed 125K words on The Affairs of Dragons. It has evolved considerably, in a number of different ways, from my original conception of the work -- even if you don't take into account the drafts that came before this one, which are numerous. Today, after mulling it over for a while, I have changed the name of an important secondary character: the character formerly known as Kelvin has become Morgan, for reasons which matter to the plot but would constitute a spoiler. I've given a lot of thought to the change, and to the new name, and I'm confident in the decision. But in the process I have discovered, more forcefully than ever before, the power of a character's name.

Of course /what we choose to name a character/ is significant. Names tell us important things about a character even before we get to know him or her. A name conveys gender and culture of origin at the very least; a well-chosen name also brings with it resonances from its accepted meaning and real-life people who share the same name. But today, changing my character's name changed his hair color.

This is making me crazy. There's no rational reason for it. But Kelvin was always a blond, through all the drafts. Despite all the physical changes I have wrought in him in the course of supporting the re-backgrounding I did for this draft, his hair color remained the same. But while Kelvin was a blond, Morgan is inexplicably dark-haired.

What the hell is this? The only male Morgan in my experience is Morgan Freeman -- and, yeah, he's dark-haired...but the character formerly known as Kelvin has not changed race. Just his hair.

I am baffled.

a bit of perspective

This short film (click the title for the link) was developed by a man I don't really know but already respect by hearsay, Ali Shehata. Wynette has worked with him; I think if more of our clients were like him, Wynette would still be in the business.

What I really know is that he has something insightful to say. Take a look.

Digging through the creative block: for entrepreneurs, too

I am just putting the finishing touches on my part of the task of filing corporate taxes for last year. Thank all the gods everywhere for accountants: this would be so much worse without mine.

Closing out 2007 finances has been a more complicated task than usual: part of the reason for this is the fact that Wynette is leaving Be Mused. By far the bigger part is that, as the business side of my and our creative life grew increasingly undefined, I grew very resistant to keeping up with the financial tracking, which has always been part of my share of the work. Oh, sure, I paid the bills on time and all that stuff -- but the filing, the logging, even much of the decision-making for the next year wound up stalled in big piles on my desk in the office. That's not typical behavior for me: I don't really *enjoy* that work, but I generally don't mind it, and I am reassured when I can account for all the mundane stuff.

It wasn't until last night, when I discovered areas of my desk I haven't seen in weeks, that I finally began to think about what was up with that. For most entrepreneurs, business life is their creative life. A business about which you care so passionately that you pour yourself into it: that is a creative effort at least as heartfelt as most novels. When a novelist develops resistance to moving forward in her work, we call it being blocked. But as far as I know, there are no such labels to describe the procrastination, anxiety, and avoidance behaviors that manifest in business people when something has gone wrong with their creativity.

But there was no question in my mind, once I looked at my situation in the office with my coach-eyes on: I have been creatively blocked in my business life. Something was wrong, and I was resisting moving forward. In my writing life, I've learned to recognize that a block is often a gift from my subconscious: unless there is something external going on, when I begin throwing up roadblocks on a novel, it's because the muse has spotted something wrong.

I've been peripherally aware that something had gone wrong in the business part of my creative life, for months. After all, Wynette and I had individually and collectively informed the universe, as fall began, that we did not want any new clients just then. (The universe complied, of course.) As the year drew to a close, we began shedding pieces of our business strategy that we could see weren't in line with our as-yet-hazy direction. But it wasn't until Wynette decided to make the final break with the business that I was able to step back, look at the business as a whole, and begin to figure out why I wasn't having fun anymore. At the time, of course, I didn't think that was what I was trying to figure out: I was just trying to figure out how to structure an author services business that didn't offer graphic services.

But why I wasn't having fun anymore was actually the more important question. I have been figuring out the answer, lately; Be Mused had represented things Wynette and I are really good at, aid we could give independent writers and publishers in support of an ideal in which we both believe. But those services we offered were not things we love in and of themselves; we do them passionately in pursuit of our own publishing efforts -- but that passion arises from our commitment to the novels we publish, not the tasks of editing and typeset and cover design. The part of aiding independent writers and publishers that I do love, the part I kept sneaking in around the edges of other work even when I wasn't charging for it, is the coaching and creativity work I've been doing with writers, entrepreneurs, and other visionaries for lo these many years.

If there is a First Rule of Creativity, it goes something like this:

If you're not passionate about the work you're doing, and the job is a creative one, you are wasting your time.

This rule also covers the running of a business. It's true because work done without passion is inherently not our best work: the person who is passionate will give that extra something that makes whatever they do shine.

I may be a very fine copyeditor, and an even better text editor -- but those are not tasks that, in and of themselves, arouse my creative passion. So I will be taking Be Mused in the direction of the things I love: creativity work and development coaching. I'm better at those things, anyway, and they don't make me want to let things pile up on my desk. And now that I've cleaned all the stuff I couldn't seem to face off my desk, I'm ready to dig in and begin the site redesign that will reflect Be Mused's new direction. I'll let you know when it's up.

If you find yourself letting things pile up, finding excuses not to do tasks you believe you should be doing, I suggest this is likely to be a message from your subconscious. Figuring out exactly what that message means may require some uncomfortable explorations in the territory inside your own head. But figuring it out may mean the difference between spending your days in joyous pursuit of your dreams -- and dragging yourself through the motions, wondering who said this business thing was supposed to be fun.

Go have some fun. Be Mused. :)

A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations

Anyone who's ever held a phone conversation with me knows I am an inveterate multitasker. I've got to be, if I'm going to complete all my self-assigned tasks. While I'm on the phone with somebody-- clients, friends, and family alike -- if the conversation lasts longer than three minutes, chances are I'm doing something else at the same time. I've talked to clients while weeding my garden, driving to school to pick up my daughter, making dinner, and performing myriad other tasks that require half my attention or less. EVERYONE has held phone conversations with me while I did the dishes: I am the mother of two teenagers, a scratch cook, and wholly committed to organic food, and the dishes just never stop piling up.

However, I can't hold the really intense conversations with clients that our creativity work necessitates while doing much of anything else: all of me goes into those conversations, and I am very nearly as oblivious to the outside world as I am when I'm writing. I probably shouldn't even drive -- and I generally don't. Usually these conversations are scheduled, and I'm able to be safely ensconced in my office while we talk.

Yesterday, however, I had an Idiot Moment. I was on my way from Point A to Point B, in fact just pulling into the gas station to fill up, when my phone rang; the caller was a person I have just begun working with, who is working on the most challenging project anyone I know has had the guts to take on. The project is esoteric by anyone's standards (yes, even mine) and my caller has taken on the challenge of communicating some mind-blowing ideas even though not a writer by nature or training. Last week we had an intense, wonderful session that led to a fantastic breakthrough in the structure of the project -- but it was one of those breakthroughs in which you can see why your approach isn't working, and maybe you have an idea of how to proceed instead, but that idea taps into challenging and scary territory. After a session like that, it's normal to need to sit with one's own ideas and feelings for a while before even attempting to move forward -- and equally normal to feel the need to talk to one's coach when the moving-forward begins again. Suffice it to say that I was eager for the next conversation, because I hate the feeling of leaving someone I'm working with at sea, even when I understand it's a necessary part of the process.

Even though I shouldn't even attempt to drive during such conversations, and even though every instinct I possessed shouted for me to just park the car while we talked, I was on a mission that was pretty important in the mundane sector of my life, and I knew if I didn't keep moving forward I'd miss a deadline. So I decided to just get through the situation on force of will, pump my gas while holding this important and demanding conversation, and drive on to my next destination. My caller graciously offered to call back another time; but I didn't want to leave the conversation hanging. I pumped my gas while talking and drove to my next destination, finishing our call in the parking lot before going inside.

But while I did successfully pump my gas, I failed to contain my wallet. I was too locked into the conversation. Because I was working without a headset and attempting to pump gas one-handed, I set my wallet on the roof of my car while I pulled out the credit card for the pump, and -- wait for it -- drove off with the wallet still on the roof.

Of course it's gone. I should have known better. I should have understood and respected my own limitations. I can do two things at once, but I can't do three -- and I really can't do anything else when engaged in intense creative work, whether it's mine or someone else's.

So, today's lesson: understand and respect your needs and limitations. Creative work is not like the other sorts of work we do: it demands everything we've got. To give it less is to guarantee failure of some sort. All things considered, I'm lucky that my wallet was all I lost.

The Society for Free Range Muses: lessons learned

I touched on this in the previous post, but my keyboard runneth over as usual. Wynette and I founded the Society last year -- and have decided that, for the time being, it should go dormant.

We both feel passionately about the importance of writers and artists of every flavor honoring their creative needs and taking control of their creative lives, and we founded the society with the nurturance of those ideals in mind. We can see so many good uses for a cooperative of artists who prefer creative control and blazing their own trails to the pressure and seemingly-unending heartbreak of trying to work within a faltering paradigm. More than anything else, however, it turned out to be a venue for a group blog in which a bunch of writers participated for a couple months. It very nearly morphed into a small press consortium, but in the nick of time we realized we really didn't have time to run one more organization no matter how much everybody at MileHiCon loved the idea.

We are ending the group blog: we both felt it fulfilled an important need in some ways but derailed us from our responsibilities in others, and we have both finally understood the necessity of applying our energies (which are, sadly, limited by Universal Law) in the most effective ways possible. And for the time being the Society will be quiet, as Wynette and I make other adjustments in our professional and creative lives. But, like the Terminator, it will be back.

One of the most important things I learned from what we did with the Society was precisely what it is that's so difficult about maintaining one's own blog. I also gained a sense of how to begin correcting the problem. In essence, blogging is hard because it usually boils down to solo writing, when it's supposed to be a social activity. Like all writers, I spend hours every day writing alone; regular blogging, done properly, fills the same slot in a writer's social life as did the epic emails we all used to send one another before blogs became a Requirement. Or it attempts to, and that's the problem: all too often it's like shouting into a canyon. One blogs, and no one writes back. The emails I used to get from my writer friends were so much more satisfying.

The group blog we had on the Society site was different; it was truly social. We all posted in a common thread, talked about our writing lives, and discussed one another's thoughts. It was no wonder Wynette's and my private blogs languished.

So one of my goals for blogging this year is to do more in the way of starting discussions -- and one of my great hopes is that you (yes, YOU) will chime in. Let's talk about writing, publishing, creativity, and whatever else comes up. That's why there's a comments function. Please come by & toss ideas around with me!

Long time no blog...

It's been such a long time it's hard to know where to begin. Last year's highlights:

Mercury Retrograde Press

Yes, it is what you think. I took the plunge and founded an independent press. We will be releasing our first two novels this year, and I am insanely proud.

Rachael's Bat Mitzvah

Rachael celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in November. It was, without question, the Best Bat Mitzvah Ever. All business came to a screeching, or perhaps whining, halt for nearly two months while I devoted all available energy to supporting her through the process. Time well spent. Yes, I will be posting the rest of the pictures everyone shared! Shortly after I update my business websites, which are in dire need of attention.

Be Mused

My business and writing partner, Wynette Hoffman, and I spent much of our time and creative energies aiding writers and fledgling independent publishers in readying their creative efforts for market. We learned even more than our clients did, I think.

the Society for Free-Range Muses

This was a good idea, just slightly ahead of its time -- as is par for the course with everything Wynette and I do. And it turns out that I've got so much to say on this topic that the only sane thing to do is to make it a separate post. You can read it here.
Other things that happened while I was away from my designated blog:

* Mark took a new gig, with LSI
* Mercury Retrograde Press hosted its first-ever Writers' Retreat. I almost didn't come home!
* Daniel played lacrosse, played Gus in a production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and drove himself to school every day. (!!)


It was a pretty interesting ride. This year is shaping up to be even more exciting. Some of the things I'm engaged in/looking forward to:

* my novel, The Affairs of Dragons, is scheduled for release this winter. I just passed 118,000 words, out of an anticipated 180-200K. Hey, I know how it ends!
* I will once again be serving as editor on Wynette's next novel, the much anticipated Raised By Wolves: Treasures. As one of her alpha readers I have the privilege of knowing that this one is already even better than the previous two!
* I will be editing and publishing Larissa N. Niec's debut novel, Shorn, which is scheduled for release this summer under the Mercury Retrograde imprint. I am unspeakably proud that Larissa chose to let me publish her work, which could have commanded Large Advances from Publishers Who Shall Remain Nameless.
* I am engaged in developmental editing for a couple of very exciting nonfiction projects of the New Age/self-help variety. More to come!
* more and more of the people I work with are getting serious about nurturing their creativity and learning how to manage their creative processes. We are having such wonderful, rewarding, intimate sessions together, and this is rapidly becoming my very favorite aspect of my client business.
* Larissa taught me how to knit at the Writer's Retreat last year. After my triumphant completion of two scarves, I am knitting a sweater! (Yes, unreasonably excited about this.)
* Rachael is in the process of choosing and applying to high schools. Daniel has entered the serious phase of his college search. It is my job to act as facilitator in both of these endeavors -- and to observe in awe how well they understand themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, their needs as students -- and the process of courtship with schools, which has become a mutual-interviewing rather than a supplicant-based process for their generation.

I have days when I wish I were younger, which is really just a highly displaced way of saying I wish I were more decorative. It has taken me this long to get to the point where I could be living this life. No way would I go back in time!

Happy New Year, all. Having spent such a big chunk of last year making the changes that made everything I'm doing this year possible, I finally feel ready to be consistent about keeping the Outside World updated. Please check in and comment, because there's a lot I want to chat about.

Why we can all stop trying to develop book trailers

They've killed it, baby. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

Warning: you don't want to have any sort of beverage in your mouth...

Conundrum

We had a water main break a few miles from here: one of the big 48-inch deals that carries All The Water For a Long Way Around. While they attempt to replace or repair the thing, we are instructed to boil our water. We worry about e. coli, of course. So, for tonight, we are switching away from drinking filtered water (just how much can that filter do? We're not sure.) to bottled water. So far so good.

But a little while ago I found it necessary to clean the cats' litterbox. I can assure you that is how much detail you want on that activity: it needed doing, and I did it. But afterwards, I stood at the bathroom sink wondering: when one is under a boil-water advisory, and one has just cleaned out a litter box, is it helpful to wash one's hands?

This problem may keep me awake for hours.

Bravo, Mr. Harris!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6413773.html?nid=2286

Prairie Lights, about which I lamented last week, has rescheduled the reading with Krista Jacob. My heart is gladdened.

Bravo, Mr. Harris!

The most depressing development this week

I recognize that this is a tragedy of a fairly abstract variety, but it makes my heart heavy anyway:

Prairie Lights Bookstore, the literary hub of Iowa City, closed its doors early Tuesday evening in response to threatening phone calls and letters received by store owner Jim Harris that day. Although PW Daily was unable to learn the specifics of the threats made, they clearly were in reaction to a reading scheduled for 7 p.m. that evening by Krista Jacob, an abortion rights activist and the editor of the book Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice (Seal Press, 2006). Jacob's collection of essays by a number of feminist writers explores the impact of race, economics and culture on women's reproduction rights and women's attitudes toward abortion.

Iowa, for those of you who don't keep score, is -- against all odds -- one of the most significant literary destinations in the country. In the scheme of things, this was an important reading. Whether or not one happens to agree with Ms. Jacob's philosophy (and I must admit I haven't read her work; that's not the point) the fact that a mob was allowed to shout her down is an outrageous offense against some of the most important flavors of freedom humans are supposed to have.

My first reaction, on reading this, was (of course) outrage at the terrorists who made the threats. My second was horror that the owner of an independent bookstore -- in Iowa, of all places, where they take the literary as seriously as they do their religion -- caved in and gave the terrorists what they wanted.

According to store book buyer Paul Ingram, the decision to close the store was made by Harris, who was preparing to leave the country the next morning. "Jim did not want to subject people to possible harm when he was leaving town. He did not want to leave his staff in an awkward situation," Ingram said.

How can free speech be less important than that trip? Miss Outrage thought, immediately. Postpone the trip by a day; cancel it if necessary. A stand must be made. We'll hand out flak jackets and mace to everyone who comes to the reading...

What? The owner had staff? And they would be present, because their boss required them to be?

Even Miss Outrage must admit this is a quandry. I am, after all, that same wild-eyed chick who was prepared to go chica-a-chica against the crazywoman who threatened the old lady working the counter at a boutique in Red Bank: her broadsword against my, er, machismo. This was an old lady we were talking about, and none of it was her fault. I could see how to take the crazy one. But the pregnant friend with whom I was shopping was, well, outraged at the suggestion that she should put her pregnant butt on the line. And once the adrenaline wore off, I saw her point.

The same point applied to Mr. Harris, unfortunately. It wouldn't have been right for him to DRAFT his staff into the War on Troglodytery. But in my heart I wish that, just for that one night, I was an employee of the Prairie Lights Bookstore, and Mr. Harris was taking volunteers.

Oh God Yes

http://www.getafirstlife.com/

I need the t-shirt. I'm just afraid that if I wear the t-shirt to cons, I'll get roughed up by geeks.

Well, ninja geeks maybe.

Am I gorgeous yet?

Lately I have been looking at humans with the eye of an exobiologist. Yeah, okay, I'm an SFF writer. But while most of us will look at most cats, most horses, most members of whatever other species we have decided is generally appealing, and just appreciate their highly varied beauty... when we look at humans, we make judgements. He isn't as ripped as the models we see in ads; her thighs are too big; doesn't he see how stupid he looks with that cheesy moustache?; I might look good if I weighed 20 pounds less, dyed my hair, had plastic surgery, worked out 12 hours per week, whatever.

Models aren't beautiful enough yet -->>

Porn stars aren't beautiful enough yet -->>

But what I have observed, lately, as I looked at humans as individual examples of a widely-varied species, is that they are all different. And when I look at them the way I look at cats, or horses, I see the beauty in all that variation, and I wonder where all that judging comes from.

Someone (with an awful lot of time on his/her hands) figured out, a few years ago, that if Barbie dolls were real women, they wouldn't be able to stand up -- they're that distorted. In the short film about the model in the link above, the most telling moment for me was the part where whoever finally prepared the ad elongated her neck, shrunk her shoulders, and rearranged her eye sockets until she was as distorted as poor ol' Andrew Jackson in the new twenty dollar bill. In fact, seeing the final product of the billboard in the short after having seen the process through which the billboard was developed, I was finally, forcefully struck by the distortion in the image. I wonder how many other distorted images seem normal to me. I wonder if I've ever seen anything real in the media at all.

Of course, because I am an SFF writer, this makes me wonder how people can object to SFF on the basis of non-realism. At least, in SFF, we're honest about the ways in which we rearrange the truth. But I digress, as usual...

The Iron Man Returneth

Mark finally came home yesterday morning, after circumnavigating the globe in 9 days. "Eighty days? Pheh! Real men do it in nine!" says he. After meetings in Texas, China, and Israel, presenting at a conference, and more nights upright in airplanes than in beds, he should be an absolute mess -- and he isn't. Oh, sure, by the time he got to Israel he'd developed swollen ankles -- but, sheesh, one transcontinental flight will do that to me. And when he got home yesterday morning, without the adrenaline that had been the wind beneath his wings, he was tired enough to spend much of the day napping. But he was not the mess that anyone who had transited 24 time zones in 10 days should be.

How does he do it, you ask? Well, homeopathic has a lot to do with it. Our dear friend Sonja Benjamin, world-class homeopath, put him on a regimen of Arnica (yes, that same stuff you take when you've overdone it on the tennis court or injure yourself running), which is apparently the classic remedy for jet lag. Having spoken with him from his last stop in Israel, where he sounded nothing short of chipper, I can attest that the stuff works for jet lag as advertised.

Sonja gets to reap the benefits, too: we're all going out tonight, Mark & me & Sonja & her husband Walter, an iron man in his own right-- for jazz, drinks, and art that has escaped the Louvre, at the High Museum. Tomorrow morning, we plan to sleep in. And then, perhaps, things will return to normal.

Well, normal for us. Which is really not normal at all. :)

In case you had forgotten how powerful ideas really are...

The right blurb can shake up someone's whole day.

What I know, with unshakable confidence, is that I NEED a container of Certainty. I must find out where to purchase one, and then have it shipped to me...by UPS, obviously. Clearly FedEx can't take the risk.