The Force Is Strong In Our Family: Our Family Tattoos, Revealed!
So I’ve mentioned the way my wife and my two daughters all decided to get Star Wars tattoos on the week of the release to commemorate our love of the film. And I promised photos when it was all said and done!
(Tattoos done by Matt Madda.)
Gini and I decided to get New Jedi Order tattoos – the school that Luke founded in the old canon, which no longer technically exists, but we are Rebel through and through. This is my second tattoo, but it’s my first real tattoo, in a sense – I cover up my tattoo of my goddaughter Rebecca with just a regular shirt, but this big blazing black logo is impossible to hide.
Gini, alas, has to be a professional lawyer-type person, and so she could not get hers in the same place. So she got hers on her right thigh. But we are bonded by a tattoo.
Erin had the most work done – an eight-hour sitting, wherein she had a blaster tattooed on her hip with a banner of “Never tell me the odds.”
Amy, well, it was her first tattoo, and she went small but significant – a stylized X-wing flying into view over her ear.
How did we feel about this? Wonderful. We kept high-fiving each other all day.
And then we saw The Film. And later today, after I’ve seen it for the second time, I’ll post my very spoillerriffic thoughts on it in a protected area. I went in not knowing what happened. I think you should, too.
But the film itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that we love the old films so much we wanted them on our body, and we wanted them together. And now we’ve got a lovely reminder of what surrounds us:
Love.
And big fucking nerdery.
Wanna Hear Me Talk About Polyamory For An Hour?
I recently appeared on the Loving Without Boundaries podcast to discuss the origins of my polyamory, and some of the challenges I face, and how I manage friendships and jealousies. If you’ve not heard enough of my voice, well, it’s available for all to hear!
(And there’s some great back-and-forth with Kitty Chambliss, the interviewer, so it is fun!)
The Family Star Wars Tattoos: Three Out Of Four Down!
On Monday night, I went over to hold my daughter’s hand as she got a blaster with “Never Tell Me The Odds” tattooed on her right hip.
Despite being tattooed for eight hours, she didn’t really need me to hold her hand. But she let me, because this?
This was our family bond.
Our family runs on Star Wars. Gini saw the movie the first week it was out; I saw it fifty-seven and a half times in the theater on its first run, because I commandeered every relative I had into taking me on multiple occasions. (Including, on one notable occasion, showing up an hour early to the film because my grandparents misread the movie time, going in to watch the Death Star trench run, and then watching it all again.)
When our eldest daughter Erin brought her boyfriend home for Thanksgiving, on the second year he admitted he hadn’t seen Star Wars. This was, in fact, the big secret Erin had kept from us all this time.
“Well, we’re watching that,” we told him.
“Hey, I want to see it,” he said. “Whenever you want!”
“No. We mean now.” And we delayed dessert until he saw Star Wars. And I think he liked it, though four people pressuring him that ZOMGGREATESTMOVIEEVER may have altered his opinion.
Which might be funny if that was the first time we’d done that to one of our daughter’s partners. We’d done that to Amy, too.
And when we got our gigantic big-screen television, and Erin came in to watch the premiere with us, of course it was Star Wars. And I always worry that maybe somehow this was a thing we made our kids do – but Erin was the noisiest out of all of us, jumping up and down in the seat watching the Blu-Ray detail, trotting out the old trivia facts, talking about fine character details.
It was all cemented by all of us watching Clone Wars and Rebels together, whooping and cheering it up.
So on Monday, Erin got her tattoo, and yesterday, Gini and I both broke parts of our nerd virginity; Gini got her first tattoo – the New Jedi Order symbol on her right thigh – and I got my first tattoo that I utterly cannot hide, a matching NJO symbol on my right forearm.
On Thursday, Amy will get her tattoo – a stylized X-Wing – and our family Star Wars Tattoo Project will be fully operational.
And it’s been a helluva bond. We’ve spent time laughing as a family as the ink goes in, knowing this is a permanent way of cementing our love. Maybe the new movie sucks, maybe it’s good, we don’t know. But these three movies are deep in our blood, and on Thursday they’ll be deep in all of our skin.
You don’t get photos yet. Not until Amy’s done. But Gini and I have matching marks on our body, and this is the sort of thing we’d think it was crazy getting matching tattoos sixteen weeks into a relationship, but sixteen years in it feels natural and good and somehow eternal.
I’ll tell you how it goes after the movie. And tell you what I thought. And I’ll show you how it all looks, but right now, I can tell you:
It’s fucking amazing.
Wanna Read A New Christmas Story? By Me? For Free?
I don’t often write Christmas flashfic. In fact, I never have. But then again, Barnes and Noble doesn’t generally ask me to write Christmas tales for them. When they ask me to do them a solid, I do.
And so what I have so quietly left beneath your Christmas tree is a micro-tale entited “A Clean Start For The Holidays” – a tiny fantasy tale of holiday spousal betrayal that, I promise, isn’t too depressing. If ya like it, share it, retweet it, do whatever you kids do with your happy places these days.
And while you’re over at Barnes and Noble, I’ll note that they’ve made the e-book version of my novel Flex only $2.99 for a couple more days. That’s half-off, so I might contemplate getting it cheaply while you can.
But even if not! One thousand words on the true meaning of Christmas await. Go check it out.
A Long-Overdue Review: Michelle Belanger's CONSPIRACY OF ANGELS
There are character books and there are worldbuilding books.
In the character books, you take an interesting character – Kvothe from The Name of the Wind, or Vlad Taltos from the Dragaeran series – and you follow them around to see what happens to them. Worldbuilding happens, naturally, but the main thrust is this person’s quest.
Then there’s worldbuilding books, where you take an elaborate magic system and throw some people in it. Brandon Sanderson’s books tend to be this, as is my ‘mancer series – the character’s goal is to, ultimately, explore as many ramifications of the magic as possible, and the book is designed so they run into as many weird complications of this magic as they can.
But the trick to a good worldbuilding series is that the characters still have to matter. Yeah, it’s all fine and well to have a fascinating magical system, but you have to like the people at the heart of the story. Too many worldbuilding books have this energetic swirl of “Ooh, you can do this with the magic!” and then it falls apart into an RPG supplement because what you care about is the magic, not the people.
Michelle Belanger’s A Conspiracy of Angels is a worldbuilding book. It’s got this monstrously complex and cool hierarchy behind it, where immortal angelic tribes war for supremacy over the Earth in plots that take centuries to come to fruition. There are tremendously creepy cacodaemons that wire themselves into dead men’s nervous systems, and a massive terror underneath Lake Erie that makes you wonder what Lake Erie ever did to Michelle, and a hero who can step into an alternate universe called The Shadowside and summon flaming double-swords from his palms.
Oh, and there’s ghost ferrets.
How am I not going to love a book with ghost ferrets.
Yet the people in the books are colorful, and Michelle skillfully juggles a large cast of characters and yet makes them all interesting. The six-foot-six scheming transsexual angel Salriel, her oft-reluctant supplicant Remiel, and the Lady of Beasts who was once married to Remiel and also is attracted to our hero Zachary, which is complicated because they’re brothers but I am getting a distinctly poly vibe as to where this relationship might be headed.
You know a book is good when it starts out with my least-favorite trope and yet I’m rooting for the characters by the end. And that’s what Michelle Belanger’s Conspiracy of Angels does; it takes a literal amnesiac waking up with only a handful of possessions and makes you like the guy. Yet the amnesia becomes a plot point, because Zachary has his own history – he’s centuries old, like all the other angels – and it’s implied heavily that he didn’t used to be a hero. He used to be a lot more direct and brutal. And his relatives, well, they don’t know whether to trust him or whether this amnesia is some weird-ass scheme someone else has tricked him into.
The worldbuilding here feels like she’s put a lot of thought into it, which makes the systems feel real. (The fact that Michelle is a real-life vampire who teaches classes on magic suggests that she may be channeling her own mojo here.) It gets complicated, and occasionally lost me at times, but the magic does have the sense that there’s a lot we don’t know, but the rabbit hole goes so deep that even the most ancient of powers haven’t quite sussed out all the angles in this world yet.
Plus, A Conspiracy of Angels takes place in Cleveland, and it gets Our Fair City Right – a little grungy, a little workaday, but ultimately full of fun places to take a hero. It’d a good introduction to what Cleveland is today if you’re not a resident, and if you are, well, there’s a lot of action scenes taking place at locations you’ve almost certainly been to.
So if you’re into fast-paced urban fantasy, this is a book (and an author) you’ll want to check out. It ends surprisingly well – not where I’d expected, but satisfying. Recommended.
Checkout.
The sheets are warm with the scent of your lover beside you. She’s entwined in your arms, snoring gently, as the first light of dawn pokes through the curtains.
You have three hours left.
Except it’s not even three hours, and that’s the unfairness of it; some of that time will be spent picking up the clothes you’ve tossed around the room, packing away all the bathroom supplies, showering and getting presentable for the ride home.
You’re in a long-distance relationship, and this brief and beautiful moment you could touch each other is now coming to an end. It was always was, you suppose, but on Friday night you barely felt the tick of that clock because it was subsumed in the joy of being reunited, and on Saturday you had a whole day with each other and spent it on grand adventures…
But now it’s a cold Sunday morning, and the end is shining down upon you.
You snuggle into your lover, burying your face in their shoulder, trying to stamp every aspect of them deep into your memory. Long months will pass before this happens again. You’ll text, you’ll Skype, you’ll phone, but nothing will replace that feel of her skin on yours, the taste of her kisses still on your lips, just watching her whenever you feel like.
You curl up for the ritual of The Last Lovemaking, which is always bittersweet; sometimes those final couplings are slow and languid, taking all the time in the world. Sometimes they’re brutal and ferocious, because you want to leave marks that will last all those months, a physical ache to mirror the one in your heart. Sometimes they’re headachy and painful because you stayed up too late last night and drank too much and if you had all the time in the world you’d wait until you were both more well-rested – but this is it, the last time, and you can’t pass it up even if you’re not ready.
But whatever happens, there comes that time when you pull away, and it feels like pulling away forever. Now comes the gruntwork of separating your lives, of packing away all the things that brought you together.
It’s like mourning before the funeral.
Worse, there’s no illusion that this cycle will never stop. Maybe you’ve got lives too distant to get together, children who ensure you’ll never live with each other. Maybe you’re polyamorous secondaries, and she has a husband and you have a wife to get home to, and it would be so rude to run off with them when your spouses have been so very generous to give you this moment. Maybe you realize that your relationship only functions in small doses, that moving in together would tear you apart…
But for whatever reason, this is all you’ll ever get. There will never be unlimited time to spend; there will always be snippets of time stolen from whatever satisfying life you have back home. And it is satisfying back home, in some distant way you know it’ll be good to return to your house and your pets and your food in your fridge, but…
You’ll always be on the clock with this person you love. You will never get to say, “Oh, we’ll get around to that whenever.” You have to plan your meetings, you make lists of Things You Want To Do, and there’s never enough time for all of them, never enough time.
The light streams through the window. None of this has happened. Yet. She’s still asleep next to you, tangled in the covers, still smiling from the intensity of the love you shared last night.
The clock is ticking. Checkout time is coming.
You hold her tight and try not to count the seconds.