... Then I Will Shut Up

A second/final acknowledgement, and I will stop.  For tonight.

This blog is intended to be my pubic, authorial presence online.  I'm aware when it gets tangential, and believe it or not, this is not entirely unplanned.

Of late, between the anger I encountered, stopping me in my tracks recently, and the experiences with my past sexual harasser (his last day is tomorrow; today I was able to say exactly no goodbye, and will never lay eyes on him again), it may be obvious to some why the tangents have become increasingly focused on feminism.

I'm aware this alienates a certain audience, and perhaps someday I'll have an agent, publisher, or even a PR drone to tell me this must not be allowed in my public persona.

Today is not that day.  And I am no more a processed, telegenic Evil Sexbot than I am a published author right now.  When I feel a responsibility to something beyond The Ax and the Vase or my other products and work, it is still my freedom to use my voice.

I don't look forward to ever stifling myself again - though, to be sure, I may prove willing to provide a professional public face sans certain polemic.

But even with this awareness, the woman I am serves the work I have produced and will continue to put out.  (Yeah.  I caught the entendre there.  "Feminism" also doesn't mean I have no sense of humor - so it stands.)

I consider myself an essential storyteller in that I refuse to enslave myself to didactic themes - but the woman I am, and the beliefs I maintain, are the source of the things I write.

As a feminist, my female characters aren't allowed to be feminists.  Still, they aren't stifled.  They are remarkable to me, they teach me how to maneuver without denying the realities they faced.  They seem to love men, though the one central to the work in progress does so with all the complexity and even twisted impulses and motivations we as human beings seem to heap onto the process of loving.

I don't want to alienate anybody.

But damned, right now, if any of you will ever see me stifled again.

When I Really Get Into It ...

... I'm grateful that I have the willpower, when need be, to get back OUT of it.

When I am writing, revising - down in the trenches of my work - it seems to me possible I could write this one book forever.

Tidy

I've just written my last checks for 2011, and filled in a couple blanks in my wardrobe, and have a very clear list of things to do tomorrow.  Church first, then the grocery.  Then home, good shoes and jeans, and off to Carytown.  I need to see some men about some horses.  Then wrapping will be the major hurdle remaining.

No housecleaning today, but the place is tidy.  I ought to change the sheets, but laundry probably won't make it to my list.  There isn't much in need of washing right now, and there are enough clean it's not worth doing a whole load for the sheets.

A fresh deadline question about work cropped up in my sore head this morning, but if I've missed it, worry won't help.  With or without that, this week should be quieter than last, and that one ended, at least, if painfully then on a good note.

Tonight, a trim of the bangs and a wardrobe-pull for church, and I will be done.  In the meantime, Clovis has given me a little to do, and no trouble about it.  The dog is wondermous.  Life is quiet.

Back to You, Chet

Aftermathematics ...


***


I do think we have had several tremors since - but nothing approaching the scale of the main event. Mostly, just the same sorts of wobbles our building is prone to on its own resonating steam (have I told you about that? It vibrates so much some days I - no lie - get dizzy watching my monitor bob up and down. The low-key-ness of the effect can be vertiginous. So a LOT of us thought at first that was what we were experiencing, but it was SO strong - and just kept on GOING - to the point we stopped being angry at the architect and Facilities Management, and sobered up to what was happening pretty quick.

Apparently, the new guy, Doe, had said at lunch he'd never experienced an earthquake. Less than 20 minutes before one HAPPENED.

I'ma be nice to that guy Doe, I tellya.

Now, home again, I haven't found any damages yet, just a lot of stuff slightly shifted around. I'm kind of amazed none of the several glass things I bought over the weekend didn't fall from their high perches, but apparently they had good purchase and held their own. One is amusingly close to the edge of the mantel, though - I might photograph that because for some reason it cracks me up (that it didn't crack - down!). Kind of laughed when I put some groceries away and had trouble closing the cabinet door because "objects apparently shifted during the flight" or something.

Sid wanted nothing but to go outside and get the HELL away from me. So she is out hollering at neighbor dogs going by, and soaking up some reassuring golden sunshine. Aww.

Pass-saic (yeah, running low on 'em now)

Further adventures in email (yes, I know these are repetitive - I *said* this would be an unedited mosaic!):


***


3.7 miles underground was the last I heard.

I really have never felt anything like that. It's not that we've never had them, but as I said earlier I think - around here, "earthquake" means one boom. A sustained and serious shake like this was unbelievable - a terribly surreal experience, in the way you at first refuse to process it, and then angrily your brain wants to refute it. Then of course you sort of realize ... POWER. Which is enough to give anyone heartburn.

I was out over lunch, less than an hour (less than half an hour) before it hit, and the day was hot, golden, dry - beautiful. As it still is, of course - but so peaceful.

Really bizarre

Pro-saic

The massive emotional impact of the quake:


***


I was scared myself, I've never felt a quake like that before, and there's something to be said for the sensibility we have as humans regarding the solidity of the ground beneath our feet. At this point, I have a sustained headache of a unique variety - not of a type I haven't had before, but of a type I don't get regularly, and the distraction is palling mightily.

It's a really stupid observation (and no longer a joke, saying this for the sixtieth time this afternoon), but I am shaken, and really want to go home. I want to see what is broken and take care of the Sidster and shuck these clothes, frankly, which really smell like nerve-sweat to me. I want to walk with her, and feel that ground beneath our feet. Oh that poor old thing. I feel so bad for her.

More-saic

From an early email today to X ...


***



The quake was a 5.8 magnitude, and centered RIGHT HERE. Z felt it in Brooklyn, and apparently it was felt in NC as well. I had things falling, and it was definitely scary. Sustained. Not typical for an eastern seaboard quake. We've had no evac and no damage to the building, but I suspect I will have one disgruntled pup on my hands in a few hours when I go home. I called mom and her response was that she's NEVER here for the really scary stuff (she missed Isabel several years ago, and a tornado once too). I mean, naturally that'd be the response - that "are you okay?" thing is strictly for amateurs, right?

Heh.

Further Assurances

Some thoughts from a post I placed at Historical Fiction Online ...


***


The epicenter was only several miles from me, and we really shook, but the general area appears to be fine. We didn't even evacuate at work (formally, anyway - tons of folks toddled off with their laptops, though; any excuse!), BUT the tremor did last unusually long for central VA. We've had quakes here before, but they tend to consist of one single BOOM moment, which you can actually miss even if it's big. This was a sustained, clearly wavy, shake, and things did fall, but the essential upshot appears to be more broken pottery and jangled nerves than anything else.




Though it was a pretty good magnitude for this area at 5.8, the origin was also 3.7 miles beneath the surface, so the effect was very queer, and not sharp as it were.



I came home to a Siddy-pup VERY offended that yet again I had left her ALONE to suffer death, and a whole lot of "shifted during the flight" sorts of stuff in my cupboards etc. - but, remarkably, nothing I have found yet appears to have been damaged, nor anything fallen. Which, considering how much time and money I spent in antique stores wandering home with new pieces of beautiful glass just this past weekend (of COURSE), is pretty amazing!



It was in fact scarier after it passed and realization set in than during -when it was almost comical in some ways. Afterward, hearing one of my coworkers calling his scared-sounding kids, and being so smart, and so reassuring, and so generous with them and calm, was really affecting. They sounded stark terrified, and he was just wonderful for them.



I am okay and my dog is milkin' it. And I am encouraging her to. Good old girl.

And the Beating Goes On

I got the R today from one of the agents I was impressed by.  It was a nice letter, actually, even if the rejection it indicated came pretty much instantaneously.  The woman has some very fortunate clients.

Thank you for thinking of me, Diane, but I didn't connect with the subject matter of THE AX AND THE VASE the way I would need to in order to consider representation, so unfortunately I've decided to pass.


I'm sorry not to be writing with better news and wish you the best of luck elsewhere.

Not an exhaustive litany of regret to lose me, to be sure, but at least it was personal, specific, and written with respect.  Which is to say:  by an actual human.
 
I don't even mind auto responders the way some people do.  They at least tell you (a) you got received and (b) you were at least seen, if not read by the right audience ... yet ...
 
I have a feeling, though.  It won't be but so much longer.  You watch me.  Twenty-plus more agents to research, this week alone?  Interesting things will happen, even before I get to the Conference.

Conversation

I'm an absolutely horrible repeater of things. I tell the same news or story to the same person twice, I come up with the same points quasi-spontaneously over and over again, my mind has its grooves and habits. We all do, but with me I think the tendency is particular, and it helps me as a writer, but it can make me insufferable as a conversationalist. I know it, but I've never concentrated hard enough to cure it.

One thing this recycling spin does is to bring ideas to greater clarity.

A great number of the posts here started life as conversations, or go on to become conversations. Probably the disproportionate contributor is X. We were talking the other day about how the concept of album-rock, something so common as to actually be a part of our social lives growing up (I remember going over to my friend P's to listen to his records, and often to listen to him playing album tracks on his guitar ... "woo Stairway!" ... or to M's to sit in his mother-in-law's apartment pad with the homemade party light, set to pulse *to the music*) but now now that format is clung to mainly by prog rock and less mainstream genre music these days. CDs are losing supremacy (NPR says the digital format actually sowed the seeds of its own demise, and that does have an interesting sense to it, yeah), and people pick and choose their tracks.

I don't think the world is becoming greatest-hits limited necessarily, but the harvest is a lot less even now.

X also came up with the descriptor of me I used recently, in the black sweater on a book flap blurb.

A lot of people don't "get" the X thing, and it's not like it tickles me to death all the time, being too far away to see him enough - but his brain, his conversation, are indispensible to me. The way his brain makes my brain work would be literally painful to live without - life would be less without him, even "just" in the only real form we have, conversationally.


When we memorialized my dad, I said of him at the time that life with him had been one long conversation. Our last had nothing to do with the hospital he lay in; we talked about X a little bit, about my birthday, which was near. We talked about Roman history, the end of the republic, the dictator Sulla, the women in that world. I miss talking with dad. There was the one person who set a standard of interest in others that's probably ruined me for most other people's attentiveness.

He never knew about my book. I didn't start it until after he died. Talking with him about it would have been ...

... I've missed being able to talk with dad. He would have been so enthusiastic. He was so interested, in so many things. He was a nice person, but not just some grinning schmoopy happy face. He respected people, but even so they had to earn it. He was differently musical, omnivorously literate. He was always quoting Ogden Nash, or classic american poets, or Kipling, or snippets of music, when he whistled. Mozart, Souza, or Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang, he was varied. As educated as he was, when he had a heart attack, it was probably spy novels he consumed the most of. Dad loved Bond and Le Carre, he was a bit of a "man's man" in certain entertainments, but he also had a big collection of original Broadway musical albums.

Dad was a really REALLY interesting person, and the longer I go without talking with him, the more he fascinates me.

He also, I think, probably had a talent for keeping me on a point. What the one was initially guiding this post appears to have been lost, unfortunately. But stream of consciousness. This is a blog, after all.



I miss my dad.

I'm also hungry. So I'm going to put down the maudlin-pencil, so to speak, go out in the sunshine he would have described as "glorious!", and forage for a meal.

It'd be sensless, after all, to sit here pinned to a computer, with a Sunday like the one we seem to have going on, going on out there. Just moping about the departed. So in memory of dad: a quest for a good meal, on a lovely spring day.

Adele Redux

I feel so hip and "on-trend" as the egregious magazines like to say. No sooner do I post the video for Rolling in the Deep than Adele appears for an interview on NPR (with that track backing a good bit of the segment). I'm not accustomed to being cool, but if it means digging that song like a double-wide grave, I will take it.



Adele is such a beautiful, and such a very *young* woman. She says she hates to hear her voice - that dissonance so many of us have, between the reassuring, familiar sound of our voice as heard from within our own skulls, and the sound outside, as heard by everybody else. She says she has no expectations, that she's not confident her career can last, but that what success she has seen she is so grateful for.

She's no less lovely for hearing the person behind the *belt*, that amazing delivery.

I like music with intense power. Rolling in the deep is a terribly, wonderfully potent song.