A Stranger World, A Frailer World

I feel absolutely fine, most of the time.  I’m just a person, walking around, nothing particularly wrong.
Then I get in the tub, and see my scars turn an angry red in the hot water, and I remember that I’m a patient.
I go to the supermarket, and see all the foods I can no longer eat, and feel the tremendous swell of guilt at all the foods I should be eating but am not, and I remember that I am a patient.
I go to the doctor, who is very concerned about how I’m doing, and he prescribes all sorts of new medicines to get my blood back to where it should be because my heart, my heart could go again, you don’t want that, do you?  And I am a patient.
Patients aren’t people.  They’re problems to be solved, and are expected to be compliant – let us poke you with needles, fill you with medicines, summon you to doctors’ offices at our convenience.  You’re not human on some vital level until you’re well again.
I’ll never be well again.  I’ll always have some heart issues.  I’ll always be a fragile status until, well, my life ends.
Which is not to say that things aren’t good, most of the time.  I have it better than other more serious heart patients like Tobias Buckell, who can’t even go for a run should he desire.  But nine months after my open-heart surgery, I’m still wading through a shock that really, you’re not well, you’re possessed of a body that will kill you unless you constantly monitor and maintain it.  Life isn’t a given now, it’s a thing that must be cultivated, and I’m probably not doing half as well at that as I should because frankly, looking into that abyss terrifies me.
Yet I do.  I eat better, if not a life turned vegetarian.  I get more exercise, though admittedly all of it is with the four-times-a-day pup-walk at this stage.  I take all my medicines diligently.  Yet underneath everything is a lurking convalescence, the realization that all of this is an illusion that could be ripped aside at any time, that one bad reading could send me back to the days when I couldn’t get out of my bed to pee.
It’s an oscillation, because I can’t quite get all the sides of it.  After watching everyone’s reaction to Rebecca’s cancer, I have come to the conclusion that maybe a few bold humans can look the death of a loved one in the eye and process it, but for most of us it’s a horror that we skid off of; we can deny it, we can work around bits of it, we can concentrate over here and kind of slide towards it sideways, but looking it dead-on is something that would destroy us.  And so it is with me, guiltily gobbling a Pop Tart.
I have been instructed that I must go to cardiac rehab therapy, which terrifies the bejesus out of me.  I’ve had the prescription since Monday, but haven’t called, because I know what awaits me: cold tile floors, things hooked to my chest, readings that tell me exactly how sick I am.  And if I avoid them, I can pretend I’m not sick even if I am, I really am.
I’m calling now.  Because I know this is an illusion: I can pretend to be well and get sick, or look at my sickness and get well.
I just wish getting well felt as good as pretending to be well.

The Greatest Idea I Have Ever, Or Will Ever, Have

So Conan O’Brien had this to say:

The new Grand Theft Auto has already made more money than every book sold in the last year.  Which explains why today, J.K. Rowling announced a new book, Harry Potter and the Drug Dealer Hanging On to a Car Hood.

Then I thought: why not a magical Grand Theft Auto?
And with that came a flood of ideas as I, playing a hopped-up Voldemort, wandered through London evading cops and Dementors alike, wielding Imperius and Cruciatus curses upon innocent civilians, sending fireballs into the tourists at Westminster Abbey, sending up the Dark Mark to call my minions to me.  In the end, I eventually discover where Hogwarts is, and lead an assault on it riding a troll.
This would be the most kick-ass game ever, even if you’d have to change all the names slightly so no one would sue, and goddammit I demand this magical GTA now, now, now.

Talk To Me Not Of Patriotism

Well, we’re gonna default on the debt ceiling.  Maybe we’ll pull some weird last-minute save, but I’m not betting on it; Boehner and Cantor are sacks of wet Jell-O when it comes to standing up for themselves, and Obama really can’t afford to bend on this particular issue, lest American politics degenerate.
(If you’re really for what the Tea Party is doing, ask yourself whether you’d be cool if, after the next gun schoolyard massacre, a small subset of Democrats refused to pass any budgets until handgun registration was enforced to their liking.  Because I guarantee you, if the Tea Party shows this “holding its breath until we all die” thing works, then it’s going to get used by both sides.  And you will not like the outcome.)
But the Tea Party strikes me as someone who’s severely Othered the enemy, which is to say that all of the people who voted for Obama and Obamacare and liberal politicians didn’t do it for valid reasons – they did it because these maniacs are dangerous and will destroy America.  And in their minds – not that they’ve thought this through explicitly, but it’s at the core – they kinda believe it’s okay if America’s destroyed, because the people in charge of it are no longer American.
It’s kind of like Picard, deciding to blow up the Enterprise when it got overrun by the Borg: you don’t want to let this thing fall into the hands of the enemy.  And if you have to destroy it to show them that you’re serious, well, oh well.
Which is shit, really.  I miss the humanization of my opponents.  I know a lot of conservative people, and they’re pretty dim on some things, and dangerously misguided on others, and in other things they simply have different priorities.  But most of them genuinely want what’s best for people – they just disagree with it.  I can oppose them, and oppose them vigorously, without having to demean or demonize them.  Despite what the world would tell you, “meaning well” is a virtue, because if someone means well then you at least have the opportunity to convince them that your course is the right one.
Someone out to do harm never gets that far.
And so, one suspects, we’ll see America’s credit get blown, and probably have the doors opened to the Chinese saying, “Well, why don’t you peg the currency on our much more stable nation?” and a long downfall of American power.  Maybe not.  I mean, the Japanese looked unstoppable in the 1980s, and they had their own foibles that yanked them back; the Chinese have their own issues now, particularly with their psychotic demographics coming to roost.  But we weren’t as dysfunctional then as we are now, and I’m not sure how to handle that.
I wish the Tea Party didn’t have to make Obama into Hitler, or make Obamacare the worst law ever passed in the history of America (go back to the 1850s, you’ll find a few that might be worse).  I dig things are bad from their perspective, but part of democracy involves losing gracefully, and cleaning up when it turns out that yeah, that was a disaster, the way we did with Prohibition and Slavery, and we’re still reeling from the effects of those bad laws but in general it’s been an upward curve away from the nadir of that thought.
Maybe Obamacare is a disaster.  I’m willing to acknowledge that.  But if so, we’ll need every bit of America’s strength to get through it, and this ain’t helping.

Life With Shasta

*Ferrett gets up from his chair*
Shasta: YOU’RE UP YOU’RE UP YOU’RE UP!  WHAT MAGIC WILL YOU UNDERTAKE NOW?  WHAT CRAZY WONDERLAND WILL YOU LEAD ME TO?!?  TAKE ME THERE, YOU MADCAP HUMAN, OH LEAD ME TO YOUR MYSTICAL GARDENS!
Ferrett: I’m getting the cable bill.
*Shasta dances for another ten minutes after I sit down*
*Ferrett gets up*
Shasta: HE RISES, TO WORK HIS GLORY UPON THE WORLD!  SHOW ME!  SHOW ME WHAT GREATNESS IT IS YOU INTEND TO ACCOMPLISH, OH MASTER!  I CAN’T HOLD MY ENTHUSIASM – LOOK, I’M DANCING!  I’M DANCING!  WHEN WILL YOU UNLEASH THE PARTY HELD WITHIN YOU?  WILL YOU _
Ferrett: I’m peeing, Shasta.  That’s all there is.
*Shasta looks at me expectantly*
Ferrett: Seriously.  You don’t have to watch my every micturation.
*Shasta sits, patiently, waiting for some urine-related magnificence that will never come*

Interesting Writing Techniques: Ann Leckie And Holly Black

I cannot write well if I’m not reading well, for I am a seething mass of envy and hatred.  Some people read great works of literature fling up their hands, and cry, “How can I ever write like that?”… whereas I buckle down, read harder, and think, “If I read their works hard enough, I will steal their souls.”
I never do, of course. Souls are very firmly affixed.  But I do pick up interesting techniques as I go, learning things I didn’t realize could be done.  And so the more I read, the better I write, for I learn the mechanics of writing from masters.
This week’s masters are Holly Black and Ann Leckie, both of whom took a pretty standard cliche in literature and turned it on its head.
Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl In Coldtown is about vampires, and it teaches us all a lesson about in media res.  Too many people think that in media res means “in the middle of the action,” and so you have beginning authors starting a story with “He shot her!!!!!  In the face!”
The problem is, we don’t care about the people getting shot yet.  People think gunshots are exciting, but seeing a random Stormtrooper get hit means nothing to the average person.
What in media res actually means is “in the middle of things,” and what Holly Black knows is that while it’s good to start as close to the action as possible, you need to build up the character as quickly as possible – so that we’re invested in their story, and care about what happens.  And so her lead, Tana, wakes up in a bathtub after a party, and as she works her way through her hangover to find her shoes in the clutter, we see Tana’s lifestyle – how she got too drunk last night, made out with the wrong sort of people to show up her kinda-not boyfriend, the regret and weird shame she feels.
Then she discovers all her friends dead in the next room, sucked dry by vampires.
That’s not the trick, though.  Because weirdly enough, I felt my interest start to drop as Tana found her dead friends, because I’d seen that scene before – the sole survivor, baffled, has to figure out why her friends died, and expresses confusion about what’s going on.  There’s going to be the inevitable Oh, but vampires don’t exist! narrative, and the muddled cops who somehow blame Tana for this event, and the clue that only she finds that puts her on the trail of the supernatural…
…and Tana immediately determines that someone must have drunkenly left a window open last night and knocked aside the garlic cloves, that’s how the vampires got in, and oh God she has to call 911 but she’s lost her phone.
That hiked my interest way up.  Because that single reaction hints at a ton of worldbuilding bubbling beneath the surface – okay, vampires in this world are a known danger.  Furthermore, clearly they can just roam around and attack parties at will.  But there are still cops, and suburban teenaged parties stealthily held when the parents leave for the weekend.  So how does this all work?  We’ve got a whole new world working here, and my interest jumped as I wanted to see what Tana did next.  Because even if what Tana did was entirely normal (hint: it isn’t), the world Holly has hinted at is sufficiently different from ours that we want to explore it just to find out how it ticks.
Note that cleverness here: there’s a lot of worldbuilding in The Coldest Girl In Coldtown, as Holly’s posited a mostly-working version of how vampires would work in a world that still remains similar to ours, but she does not deliver this via infodump.  (At least, not in the first chapter; there are infodumpy sections later on, but I think those are unavoidable in a world as complex and stories as Coldest Girl.)  Instead, she presents us with a situation people would react to in a standard way, and instead informs us that this place is very, very different by having her protagonist’s concerns be wildly different.  Which is subtle, and effective, and gets us through the first chapter – the most important point in any book.
Ann Leckie also has a different character problem to solve in her debut novel Ancillary Justice, which has been making waves because she’s got a great twist on space opera: her lead character is a warship.
Yet that’s an issue, because the warship is actually a centralized intelligence: it has many bodies, called ancillaries, that it works and sees through.  The trick is that the warship was actually destroyed due to some nefarious sabotage, and her protagonist is one of those stray bodies seeking justice.
Ann does a lot of work with language here, as she gets across the concept of an AI in a human body by using slightly formal words to describe everything.  There’s something clinical and compelling about Breq, who feels emotions but recounts them at a slight distance at all times – a stiff formality in reporting that serves to make Breq feel alien without robbing her of humanity.
Yet what Ann faced was an interesting challenge: how do you write a scene from the point of view of a fully-functioning warship?  After all, in her prime, Breq – or Justice of Toren, as she was known in her fighting days – had a hundred bodies working from a hundred different viewpoints, all analyzing and recording things on a scale no human could match.  And there’s a lot of ways one could write that to lesser effect – flashy stuff like having each of the datastreams be in a different font, to constantly flashing between bodies, to having some other jumble to represent the warship’s multiple point of view.
It’s a risky act.  Because if you don’t do something from a narrative perspective, then a warship’s viewpoint feels too human, and you make what should be the extraordinary mundane.
Ann found a great solution, though: scenes from when Breq was a warship are written from a mutated third-person omniscient narration.  Breq/Toren knows everything there is to know about the officers, as she’s not only lived for millennia and knows their family history personally, but also can read their biometrics, so Breq-as-Toren becomes almost a different setting.  She’s a warship, expected to keep her opinions to herself, and so what we have is Breq’s memories of the event as she saw other officers making history on her decks, and the subtle biases a living warship enacts to the people she dislikes on it.
(I should also add that having read through the entire book, I don’t necessarily know that Breq counts as a “she,” as there’s a lot of work with language and gendering in Ancillary Justice.  I’ll call Breq a she.  Even though really, she’s an it.)
So what we get is active, betrayed Breq in the current storyline, trying to work her way back to her homeworld, and a more studied version of her past where we get a sense of the political issues that brought her to this point.  Which is a very interesting, and effective, way to handle it – since we’re constantly flashing back to Breq’s old self, we get a sense of what she’s lost in being made singular, which intensifies the “current” segments.  (And if you’re interested, there’s an interview at the end of the book where Ann confirmed my suspicions of how difficult this was to write from a warship’s perspective, outlining some other alternatives she considered and discarded.)
This unique viewpoint is why, one suspects, Ancillary Justice is getting a lot of buzz.  It’s got some serious juice behind it.  I’d go check it out, if I were you.