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Cats of East Van

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It doesn’t get hot here as often or to the degree that it does in much of the U.S., and as a result comparatively few Vancouverites have air conditioning at home. When it’s hot, we turn on the fans, we run our clothes through the rinse cycle and wear them damp, we open the windows, drink iced drinks, and go outside. We sleep badly and swear we’ll get A/C for next year, and some of us actually do. If things keep heating up, everyone will probably install a chiller.

(My house tends to get five to ten degrees hotter than ambient, which is one of many reasons why I didn’t invite a bunch of people I’m meeting with tomorrow to do it here. Melting one’s friends is so gauche!)

Imagine, now, if you had fur! Rumble spends these days lying beside his friend the toilet. I stuck my foot in Minnow, a.k.a. jumpiest cat alive, the other morning, and she did not twitch a bun. And on the one day a couple weeks ago when it was absolutely scorching, I found many of the neighborhood cats snoozing in the shade, lying on lawns, and otherwise keeping cool by just damnwell getting out out. Here’s one:

Cats of East Van

So, heat. That particular searing day, maybe two weeks ago, K was wrapping up a project at her office and I spent the day in mine, drinking tons of water and sweating like crazy. I find a good bake, once in awhile, to be very gratifying, even healthy-feeling. It was a good day. And since then, it’s been a temperature many would find perfect: hot, but not too.

As we head into this weekend it looks to be heating up a bit more, back into the less comfy range. I probably won’t go out in search of more toasty felines, though–I have that day-long meeting Saturday, a hike with Barb on Sunday morning, and some work that’s crept up on me like one of those cartoon naturalists with a butterfly net. I dealt with as much of the pile as I possibly could today, but I don’t feel as though I’ve got very much think left in me for this evening.

What I do have in me is blueberries. My favorite local farmers have once again set up a booth in the Commercial Skytrain Station, and are selling cherries and blueberries for $2 a pound, or 3 pounds for $5. I shouldn’t be telling you this. I should be keeping it a carefully hoarded secret. I want all the blueberries, which are damn near as big as my thumb, and bursting with archived sunshine. But hiding this information from all of you, when several tens of thousands of commuters stream past these guys all day throwing money at them, would be silly. Go. Eat. They’re delicious.

Slightly related because it touches on my neighborhood and photography, I am thinking of sending a few pictures to the This Is East Van project. It wouldn’t pay, but as far as I can tell they aren’t one of those “you pay us to publish you!” scams that I’m more familiar with from seeing scammers pounce, hyena-like, on young poets. If anyone knows whether these guys are legit, I’d be interested. I haven’t published any photos since I was in some (electronic) Chicago-based Art magazine a few years back. This is because I don’t throw much effort at it. But if these guys aren’t crooks it would be nice to try. You’ve probably all noticed I’m really into my neighborhood, and if you’re not sure on that score, “The Cage” comes out on TOR.COM next week and should remove all doubt.

I will have the next Journey interview for you all early next week. In the meantime, here’s another cat.

Cats of East Van

Texting hexes: when magic meets gadgetry

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Rather than posting here today, I’d like to direct you all to an article I wrote for Tor.com, on the intersections between magic and technology in urban fantasy and ecofantasy. It is called “Text me that hex, please? Kthxbai!”

The post is another tie-in to the Urban Fantasy spotlight going on at Tor.com this month. It gave me a chance to talk a little about the magical rules underlying Indigo Springs and to look at what some other authors are doing in a few new books, including M.K. Hobson’s incandescent The Native Star, whose book trailer is here:
Native Star Book Trailer

The Urban Fantasy spotlight, as I’ve mentioned, will also be hosting a novelette by me, “The Cage,” within the next week or so.

Talkback… or is it soccer?

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Jay Lake ran with my earlier post about internet content that addresses the concerns–both artistic and commercial–of mid-career writers. My note, in turn, started with a germ from Jessica Reisman. What we’re really discussing is how writers talk to each other in these public forums, and what we say to beginners.

You can see what Jay and various respondents said here. Among other things, he points out that there are simply a lot more aspiring writers to talk to.

Me, making the pass..

And Jessica Reisman, kicking it all off.

On a completely unrelated note, if you ever want the Casino security peeps to get really really interested in you, pause in their awning with your great big zoom and photograph what you find there.
DSCN3568

Otherworldly beings from Planet Fab

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I just finished Darrin Hagin’s tenth anniversary edition of The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage, a slice of queer Canadian history that just barely intersects with my life: I was living in Edmonton at the time Hagin writes about, and kelly-yoyoKelly went to high school with one of its queens, Cleo; we saw hir in a Fringe show last year.

I never went to the legendary Flashback club. I am so not a club person. In my entire life I haven’t once partied until I dropped. By the time the queens in this book were getting up for the day, I tend to be ready for my nap. A single glass of cheap wine will give me a next-day headache. The world of The Edmonton Queen was as much an alien landscape as any I’ve created in my fiction, or I’ve read about. And yet I shared weather, and terrain with these exotic beings. I could have visited, had I been inclined. Say that for Planet Vuvula!

I picked it off our bookshelf partly out of interest (of course!), in part because of that little intersection with our past, and because I am contemplating whether the next mystery novel, The Rain Garden, might include someone from that scene. Or, rather, it does–I just haven’t decided how she fits into the picture.

Hagin’s style flows nicely, I found myself comparing him favorably with John Barrowman’s autobiography, whose prose and content weren’t nearly as colorful. There’s delicious humor and wit. This hit my funnybone especially hard:

12:45 a.m. Meet in the ladies’ can at the pre-arranged time, in the handicapped cubicle. Squeeze everyone in. Sit on the floor, screaming with laughter at absolutely anything. Drop the acid. Pass around the hairspray. Stay until some dyke kicks you all out for reinforcing negative stereotypes of women. Leave in a huff.

What resonated most with me, not surprisingly, was the stuff about growing up queer in smalltown Alberta. As with these queens, that experience created in me a great need to get away, to reinvent, to find and nurture a truer self. The construction of alternate family, its evolution into something as complex and sometimes dysfunctional as any biopham, was familiar, too. As for the slow terrible parade of death that struck Hagin’s Family… well, I have been to a fair number of funerals these past few years.

One of the most interesting things about this anniversary edition, though, is that it has a long and fascinating coda. Hagin chased down the survivors of the Flashback days, and gave them a chance to offer their perspectives on his version of their shared history. He talks about what it was like to have published and then revisited a story that so many people had such a deep emotional stake in. In the process, he reveals the writer-as-Spiderman once again; his afterword is a textbook illustration of that Spidey saying, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

He told the stories, and he got some things wrong. He saw other things very differently from people who were present beside him in the very same moment. Watching him wrestle with that, and with balancing good storytelling against fairness, provides a deeply interesting behind-the-scenes look at what writing is and how it interacts with the real.

It is also genuinely affecting. You will laugh and cry. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

How to soar when you’re already in flight…

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Jessica Reisman posted recently about how there’s any amount of advice out here on teh Intrawebs for beginning writers, but not so much of it for those who have been publishing for awhile. I’ve been thinking about this, and about the fact that when I do interviews, one of the questions that tends to come up most frequently is “What’s the best piece of advice you can give a beginning writer?”

This phenomenon seems to me to be one of those things that occurs naturally. If you’ve got to the point where your fiction is selling, you probably have a good grip on what you needed to learn to get to that point. You’re equipped, in other word, to tell someone less experienced a thing or two: how to write in scenes, maybe, or build up conflict, or push through a first draft of a novel.

Writing about what you’re grappling with in the present is more problematic. As we move into the later phases of artistic development–next level skills, they’re sometimes called–we run the risk of either writing about something we haven’t really figured out yet or perhaps just being opaque, inaccessible.

On the commercial side, once we’ve stopped talking about breaking into short fiction markets or chasing agents, what are we going to talk about? Contracts, maybe? But the problems start getting specific. Issues with this agent, clauses in that publisher’s boilerplate… stuff that affects your bank balance and business relationships, not necessarily the things you’re going to want to post at loquacious length about.

So there’s general talk about pushing through difficult stretches and life crises, a little discussion about busting writer’s block, and… what else? I recall an Elizabeth Bear post I really liked, about how she was moving on to learning progressively tougher (for her) stuff. Was that last year? Anyone remember? The Jay Lake link I posted yesterday, about how he’s reining in his draft speed, felt like it was about a next-level issue. Is there a difference in the “just be persistent” encouragement we give to a newcomer and the “soldier on, soldier on” speech we dispense to a writer who’s sold three books but who can’t interest anyone in their fourth? Is there something about character or plotting that’s general enough to make a good post but so advanced it’ll spark growth in someone really seasoned… a Cory Doctorow, say? A Connie Willis?

None of us would probably admit to thinking we have it all down, and I know I have a ton to learn about how to write more gooder. If you’ve seen any useful process or craft posts out there that seem like they’d really hit home for established writers, I’d be interested to hear about them.

In the meantime, and apropos of nothing, here’s a White Crowned Sparrow.

White Crowned Sparrow