And On A Much Lighter Note!

Strange Horizons is looking for a few good women to do reviews!

See here.

Oh, So That's Why...

We did our taxes yesterday.  Why we are so very broke becomes a little clearer -- between jobs he lost and jobs I did (because the university cut down on summer teaching), we made nearly twenty thousand dollars less this year than we did last.  

In fact, we made so little this year that we qualified for that Working Families Tax Credit gizmo.

Which -- good shit, that's all I have to say.

No wonder I can't afford to buy shoes.

And -- here's the really bad news -- Dr. Skull (that's his official new blog name) needs a root canal and a crown.  Which dentists in Fuck Smith want the money for that up front, of course.  Our insurance (we do have dental insurance, but it sucks) covers some fragment of it -- about half of the first $1200, as I recall, and then nothing after that.  There's a yearly $1200 cap on dental with our charming insurance.

But!  Good news!  I don't actually like shoes!

Surely tomorrow will be a better day.

How Cool Is This?

Athena got linked on Twisty!

Plus -- yowza! -- Twisty called Athena her new idol.

I think I'd rather get that than win the Nebula, maybe.  

Joys of Homeschooling

I took the kid for her NCLB testing today -- mandatory, but much less painful when you're home-schooling, for I guess obvious reasons.  We're not trying to get funded or get pay raises, so the stakes aren't high.  No real stakes at all, in fact.  And the state, therefore, only tests our kids on reading and math.  The whole test, in fact, only took a couple hours -- from 9:00-11:15.

The less positive, though interesting bit, I suppose, was the mix of people I got hang around with in the parents' waiting room while the kid was doing the test.  As you might expect in Arkansas, almost all of them far-right Xtians; almost all of them had between six and 7,000 children. One of the women sitting on my sofa apologized abjectly to another of the women for only having four children. "I got cancer, there," she said delicately, "after my fourth, and had to have it removed."  The woman she was talking to had had eleven children.  "But three of them are with God," she explained, and then proceeded to describe, at the top of her lungs, in a room filled with toddlers and young children and young adolescents -- because all the kids who weren't getting tested that day, and that was all the kids not in the 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7th grades, all those kids were hanging out with their parents -- this woman described in extensive detail exactly how her three dead children had died.

She also explained how DHS is "owned" by the devil, as is the Fort Smith Police Department.  As are women doctors.  As are Public Schools.  She knows this last because they don't say the Pledge of Allegiance, because it has the word God in it.  

Meanwhile, she had an actual child with her, her youngest, about four.  This child she was totally ignoring.  He kept trying to climb in her lap, and kept asking her for something to eat from the giant Wal-Mart bag she had brought along.  She ignored him as wholly as though no one had been with her at all.  Earlier -- she had five kids with her, three other boys, and a older girl -- the girl with her had been taking care of this little boy, who had started just beating the living shit out of his Down's Syndrome brother, who was about four years older than him, maybe?  She ignored that, too, though it went on for about 15 minutes.  The older sister kept trying to make the little boy stop hitting his brother, but she got no back up.  When she asked the mom for help, the mom ignored her too.  The brother getting beat up did not defend himself at all.  He just let his little brother beat him up.  And I mean this kid was hitting him hard.

One of these kids was in my kid's testing room, the sixth grade.  She said he seemed nice.  Another kid was in there, too: a Buddhist from New York.  She said that one (who gave my kid a pencil when her pencil broke) asked everyone what religion they were.  He seemed pleased to discover my kid was Jewish.  She's the first Jew he has met in Arkansas, he said.

The other kid said he was Christian, but that it wasn't a religion, it was a relationship.

"Which," my kid said, later, on the way home, "okay, that's just sick."

"Yeah, it is a bit," I agreed.

"What," she said, "is he hanging out with Jesus?  Do they go to the mall?  Do they make-out?  What?"

"He's a Jesus 'shipper," I said.

She gave me a withering look.  "Mo-o-om.  That is not what shipper means.  Shipper is someone who says two characters in a work should get together romantically.  Like if someone thought the Doctor and Amy Pond should get together -- they'd be a DoctorXAmy shipper.  Jeez."

"Ah."  I considered.  Then, maybe a tiny bit sarcastically.  "Thanks for clearing that up."

"I spend a lot of time on the internet!  Don't judge me!"

You Can't Do Aikido By Yourself

(X-Posted on FanSci.)

Or writing either.

Alone, what am I?

A solitary, wandering cloud, I guess.

But gathered together, in two or three?  I am a writing group!  

Five or six or even seven is better.  Much more than that I have found is too many.

This post here over at Strange Horizons, about a SF/F writing camp for young teens, started me thinking about it.  It was accepted wisdom when I was a young writer that writers didn't need writing workshops, or to go to school to learn to write, or things like writing groups.  After all, you couldn't "learn" writing.  One "was" a writer or one was not.  In order to write, one had to "live," and then write about "life," whatever that meant.

I had a professor tell me that very thing, in fact.  "You don't need to go to school," he said.  "You need to go have a life.  Get a job in a bar, or a restaurant.  Go to New York.  Do something.  Then you'll have something to write about."

And knowledge gained from other writers, knowledge gained in universities, obviously, that's not actual knowledge.

I think about this when I sit down each Thursday night with my writers in my Fiction Workshop at the university; and when I gather with the Boston Mountain Writers every Sunday afternoon in my living room, or up the mountain in Zelda's living room.  I remember how I felt when I was a young writer, 20 years old, sitting down at the long table in my first Fiction Workshop, how exhilarating it felt, even though I wasn't very good yet, even though I didn't know what I was doing and didn't really have anything to write about yet -- to be with other people who took writing seriously.  That was what I needed.  Other writers.  

If we were living in Paris in 1920, maybe we could have found them by hanging about the coffee shops.  Since we're not, we're getting it from writing groups, and writing workshops, and from the blogosphere.

So long as we do get it.

Gathering experience isn't enough. We've got to gather writers around us as well.

That's how we learn to write.

Update on Wisconsin

Last night as I got ready to brush my teeth I was singing one of the songs from the Wisconsin protests, and the kid said, "What? What? Why are you singing that? I thought they lost!"

 "What?" I broke off singing. "No! Why would you think that?" 

"Because! That Walker! He passed the bill."

 "Yeah, but it was an illegal bill."

 I realized I had not been keeping her up to date, and came out of the bathroom waving my toothbrush. "Judge Sumi enjoined them!" I declared. "And that idiot Walker said nu-uh, he didn't have to! And Sumi said he did too! And now--" 

"So they didn't lose?" 

"And now the protestors are recalling 16 Republican senators! And fighting to get their judge on their Supreme Court! And they're still holding rallies! (Including Zombie rallies). And the Teabaggers are trying to mount counter-rallies, but no one is showing up! And--" 

"Are you saying they didn't lose? Is that--" 

"And Fox News is losing viewers like crazy, but mainstream media still acts like nothing is happening, they're covering Charlie Sheen and shit like that, but out on the blogs it's the Revolution Starts Now --" 

"Are we winning? Are we?" 

"The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In The Future There Will Be No Chicken Pox

(X-Posted at FanSci)

(Edited for total incoherence -- apparently I was more tired than I realized!)

I just spent the past two days in various walk-in clinics, the Wal-Mart Pharmacy (because the pharmacy we use, where Everybody Knows Our Name, is closed Sundays), dental clinics and dental surgeries, all to deal with an abscess that suddenly ballooned up on Herr Dr. Delagar's jaw Saturday night -- Friday he was fine, Saturday it started hurting, Saturday night he was in agony.

In the Kafkaesque labyrinth that is America's useless modern medical system, I had plenty of time to speculate what medical systems might look like in the future.

I would love it if these future worlds and their health care systems were as pretty as they appeared in some of the SF books I read in my adolescence: where bright children asked their daddies what cavities were, and it is revealed that cavities were things children used to get before the vaccine was invented against them.

Or Octavia Butler's Xenogensis series -- just don't create kids that will have problems; and then if anything happens to go wrong afterwards, the Ooloi fix it!

Or her other series, the Patternist series, where those who have the talent can reach in and teach the body to heal itself.  Very cool.

Or on Star Trek: McCoy and his tricorder, just a few passes of the remote control, and ipso facto, Dr. McCoy knew what was wrong.  (Unless for plot reasons he did not.  Actually, I never did figure out how medicine worked on Star Trek.  There was that episode where Whorf had a spinal cord injury, which apparently no one could fix.  But WTF?  Aren't we like hundreds of years in the future?  I guess that ban on stem-cell research really worked.)

Or Iain Banks' Culture Worlds, which are post-scarcity, and also have the ability to manipulate human biology so completely that -- so far as I can tell -- almost nothing is fatal.  (A mixed blessing, surely, given what happens to some characters because they can be kept alive so endlessly.)  

Or John Varley's early novels, where no surgeon need her hands before cutting into people, because no harmful bacteria made it off earth -- and also where surgery is so simple any ten year old can replace his own liver with a kit, and people pop in for cancer cures like we pop in to have our oil changed.  Full-body sex changes take longer!  And are also so common everyone has them dozens of times throughout their lives.  But the point is, medical care is available to everyone, very high quality, and very low cost. 

But even if none of these bright futures await us, surely we can dream of a nice future like Sweden or Denmark, where medical needs are met sensibly, rather than being a for-profit industry -- where those without a six figure income aren't forced to decide between staying alive and having a life.

True story:  as I'm waiting in line at my friendly neighborhood pharmacy last year, the one where Everybody Knows My Name, where sometimes when my insurance company is being a Butt, as it often is, my pharmacist will work with me: on this one spring day, this guy in front of me, his kid has some horrible bacterial infection, apparently, resistant to most antibiotics.  So he needs an uncommon antibiotic.  Only his insurance company won't cover it, because, get this, it costs $3000 for ten pills.  Luckily, dude is from Fianna Hills, the rich bit of Pork Smith, and he just whips out his debit card and pays $3000.  

In my broody dark days I suspect future medicine will be like that:  drugs and life for those who can whip out a debit card and pay.  Suffering and misery for those who cannot.

Kind of like now, yes.

That's the future I speculate about when I write SF, for obvious reasons (obvious, because, as I frequently tell my students, no one actually is writing about the future when they write science fiction).  

When I write about medicine or medical situations in my SF stories, almost invariably I find myself writing about that two tier system -- or, well, really, as I know, it's actually more complicated than that.  (Everything always is!)  The two tier system is really four or five or more tiers.

• The topmost tier, which we never see.  They own hospitals, in the sense that they are major donors, major lobbyists, have funded chairs, so on.  Do they make appointments, wait in line, fetch scripts from pharmacies?  Sit in waiting rooms outside MRI machines?
  
• The upper tier, the really rich (but not that 1% who own the country): rich enough to jet across the country to get to the best doctor.  They'll never do without an abortion or a specialist. Plus they have the money to buy the treatment.
• The middle tier.  We can treat abscessed teeth, and broken legs, but we better hope nothing really serious goes wrong.  
• The lower middle tier.  They drive five or six hours to get to free clinics.  These are my students, some of them.  I keep tablets of cold medicine in my desk drawer to hand out to them, winters, and Tylenol.  They're mortified, but they take it.
• The lowest tier.  They never see doctors.  Like the upper tier, they're invisible. They look twenty years older than they are, usually, and are usually dead before they're sixty. 

One of the clinics I visited was filled with the middle tier.  The other was filled with the lower middle tier.  And here's the thing:  I want to believe in a bright future.  It's why I do what I do, why I teach and keep teaching.  Why I write science fiction.  I want to believe the world can change.  But watching the receptionist haranguing the suffering poor of Fort Smith, Arkansas -- people clutching their aching jaws -- demanding 1/3 of the price of having their teeth removed up front before the surgeon would  even think about relieving their pain, and these were people with insurance, well, yikes.

Did I mention Christian music was playing in the background?

What other future could I write, living in this land?

Conservatives Lying Liars -- What A Shock

This post at the Language Log, and its attendant links to a tempest in AZ, brings to mind a reoccurring fuss that arises in my first-year writing classroom every so often.  We'll be talking about immigration, or high school curriculum, or language acquisition -- something, who knows -- but someone will burst out, in fury, exclaiming how "It's not fair!" that they had to study Spanish in high school.

"We had to study Spanish!  Why?  They," usually pausing at this point shooting glares at the Hispanic students in the classroom, "came here, we didn't go to their country.  They should learn English!  Why do we have to learn their language?"

"Actually," I always say, at this point, really tired of making the point, but it has to be made, "you don't have to learn Spanish in high school.  You have to learn some foreign language in high school.  It's just that you," I always pause at this point to stare pointedly at the complaining student, "came from a very small and very poor town.  Is that the case?  One of those little tiny Arkansas high schools that didn't want to consolidate because that way you would lose your football team?  Do I have that right?"

They have shut up by now and are looking sullen.

"Well, when that is the case," I say, "usually such small high schools only have the resources to hire one foreign language teacher.  And when that's the case," I say, "they usually hire a Spanish teacher, because Spanish is most useful for most students in this area.  Don't blame immigrants.  Blame your community, which is poor and broke and refused consolidation."

Sometimes I add a little riff on NCLB, which is taking what funds exist and spending them on idiotic testing, but usually I move on at this point.

But!  Not what this post is about!

Not exactly anyway.

This post is about those links at LL.  Go read those links!  This guy, Tony Hill, writes a letter to his legislator about how these "Mexican" students "told" him they hated white Americans and hated America and were planning to take America back from Americans who stole it from them.  How they tore pages from the textbooks and threw the books at each other and how when he taught those "Mexicans" and black students (love how he inserted blacks in there -- racist bingo!) they didn't want to learn and how if "we" just got the illegal immigrants (cause he could tell by looking at those "Mexicans" they were all illegal, I guess) the class sizes would all go down to nice small classrooms (full of white kids who would read books instead of ripping them up and throwing them) --

Anyway, my point is, apparently the idiots in AZ believed this story Tony Hill fed them.

Conservatives make up lying lies and other conservatives believe them.

No wonder that Jesus thing plays so well in their community.

Look!

This story here, on Strange Horizons, by Zen Cho.

I loves it.

(Full disclosure: I became a fan of Zen Cho when I edited another of her stories, "Prudence and the Dragon," for Crossed Genres.  That one is also a wonderful story.)

Hey! Wow!

Two bits of news from Crossed Genres today.

(1) One of our stories, "Drag Queen Astronaut," by Sandra McDonald, made the Tiptree Honors List, which, wow, this is a big deal.  I'm very pleased.  

(2) The conclusion to Broken Slate is up.  Now you can see how it comes out!  

Print copies available starting in July.

Too Good to Leave in the Comments

From the comments, of my previous post, Athena Andreadis points me to her essay on this topic: The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction.

Go read!

What is it Good For?

(X-Posted at FanSci)

Nah, this isn't another political post.  (Athough...)

I was at a conference a couple years ago, I can't even remember which one this time.  Might have been the PCA, might have been the CEA.  

But as always, I went to all the panels that had anything to do with science fiction, because that's pretty much all I even mildly care about these days.

This one featured a professor who promised to explain to us what science fiction was for.

Which -- cool! -- because up to that point, I have to admit to you, it hadn't occurred to me that science fiction had to be for anything.  So I got my coffee (the best thing about this conference, as I remember it, was that between sessions there was free coffee and sometimes also tiny packets of shortbread cookies) and cookies and settled into the back row with my notepad.

Sadly, my notes from the session do not survive.  So I can't tell you the professor's name. I do remember it was a good session, and that she did not actually come to conclusions -- so I can't, in fact, tell you what science fiction is good for.

I do remember that she had some general ideas, based on her years of reading and teaching science fiction.

Science fiction, she said, often seems to be for some of the following:

• introducing new technology (the way-cool effect)
  
• increasing hunger for new technology and new ideas 
• challenging common perceptions of our culture (you thought this was true, but no, look, this is actually the truth)
• opening the door to new ideas -- either cultural or technological

These last two might look like the same, but (as I recall) they are not: the third is reactionary and the fourth is progressive.  That is, the third takes new aspects of our culture that the writer finds disturbing and shows why these changes in our culture, which many in our culture might find favorable -- gay marriage, for instance, or the use of birth control, or polyamorous relationships -- and writes fiction in which those changes are shown to be destructive or foolish.

The last is progressive.  It takes changes in our culture, or changes that haven't happened, even, yet, to our culture, and shows how those changes might benefit our culture.  I'm thinking now of works like Eleanor Arnason, or Joanna Russ, or the early novels of John Varley.  (His latest stuff, not so much.)

Of course, my students, when I start all of this, like to explain to me that science fiction is just for fun.

Ha! I tell them.  Ha!  We're working for heaven and the future's sakes here, lamb chops, I tell them.

Mortal stakes!

Aw, rly?

Alas, poor Walker.

The judge says no.

Where Are My Cookies?

Each month lately -- and by "lately" I mean the last 18 months or so -- Herr Doctor Delagar and I run out of money just a little bit sooner.

The last few months we've started running out of money on about the 8th or 9th of month.

By "running out of money" I mean the money is nearly gone. I have paid the bills, I have paid the rent, I have paid off the credit cards, and now I am looking at what is left in the bank and counting down the days to the end of the month. So it's 21 days until the end of the month and we have two hundred and sixty dollars left and we have to buy food and gas and pay for all the emergencies that might arise over those 21 days as well and I'm thinking, well, if we eat a lot of split pea soup and nothing horrible happens, maybe....

Then gasoline rises to $3.45/gallon, and WTF.

Oh, yes, and I still haven't filled my prescriptions, which I couldn't fill last month, because we didn't have the $211 dollars last month either, and now I'm down to about eleven doses of each, despite the fact that I've been skipping doses every sixth or seventh night. So I really have to refill fill the presciptions. Or, well, I could just die I guess.

And when I drop by the store for milk and eggs, food prices are skyrocketing again. Which goes with the skyrocketing gas prices, I know, but you know what is not skyrocketing? My salary. My salary, if we factor everything into account, despite a couple of tiny, tiny COL raises, has actually gone down over the past four years (because I've lost summer teaching gigs, because this administration has stopped paying us for extra work, because we're paying more now for health insurance).

So less money to take home. And everything I need to buy with that money costs, I'd guess, about three times as much. And the solution from our state and federal government is to give the top one percent more tax breaks.

And why am I angry again?

Yeah, Now!

It's been a long time since I link to Twisty, but that's not b/c I've quit reading her.

And here she is again, with another brilliant post: how performing feminity impedes the revolution.

I loves me some Twisty.