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How the world lifts me up

8/30/2014

I will not kid you. There are days when the world seems impossibly difficult. But then, the rest of you show me how fortunate I am.

I watch a video of a baby born deaf getting his first hearing aid at seven weeks old. I watch the look of wonder on his face as he hears for the first time. I watch five or six times, and then I send it to my parents. (My dad has lost the hearing in one ear due to a benign tumor that grew on his hearing nerve, and a large percentage of the hearing in the other ear due to not protecting his ears when he thought himself invincible as a young man. Now he wears a sophisticated hearing aid.)

Then I watched a video of a man with ALS doing the ice bucket challenge, struggling to breathe and talk and swallow. Struggling. But also laughing. And expressing gratitude.

Then I read on twitter about a trans woman's rental deposit on a sublet being taken by the man she rented from, her calls unreturned. She resigned herself to being homeless for a while. Her friends volunteered their couches.

Maybe that's our great strength. We keep going when things go wrong. We don't give up.

I feel proud to be among you, those whose path is difficult. You are my inspiration. For you, I will strive to train my patience, my humbleness, my helpfulness.

For you, I will keep going on the darkest days. With gratitude. For even at the worst of times, I am fortunate.

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'Lulu

8/30/2014

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He's trying to take over the world.

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On Race and H. P. Lovecraft

8/30/2014

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I've felt compelled to do a bit of digging about Lovecraft's racism, since the new anthology I put together is a tribute to his work.

I did know, though only by report, that Lovecraft had problematic racial views. I didn't really know the extent of them until I started poking around. We do not honor his racial biases with our modern cosmic horror writing. In fact, because his work is in the public domain, we are now able to (perhaps ironically) purposefully write 'Lovecraftian' fiction that benefits from the strangeness of Mr. Lovecraft's ideas while deliberately choosing a neutral view of race. [Or maybe this is too strong a statement. We don't deliberately choose it. We're just not racist, so it doesn't come up.]

When I look back at what he actually wrote or said about race, I am mortified.

When I was a kid, I lived in a very racially divided place. Maybe it's the way of kids, some instinct that has to be beaten or taught out of them, but by instinct I felt that this was wrong and inexplicable. I had many arguments with elders about race, in spite of threats. I remember trying to find books that would support my view of equality and because of where I lived, I found the opposite. My view of interracial marriage as completely fine and essentially just like any other marriage was completely unsupported. The most neutral view I could find in a book (in a library obviously controlled by people determined to reinforce their own racial biases) said that it would create problems because it wasn't culturally acceptable and therefore if you were willing to do it, there must be something psychologically wrong with you.

I was troubled by this, but it didn't influence my behavior or thinking. In this area, I had a strong sense of what was right and I never felt swayed from it. For this reason, I find it hard to forgive the kind of race based comments Lovecraft made.

Regardless of those comments, the eerie, atmospheric quality of his writing has influenced the course of literature. Even if you never read his work, you are likely only a few degrees of influence away from it. We have the opportunity now to take what was influential about his work and utilize it to make new art that doesn't have a racist stigma attached to it.

It's a step toward what we have to do still in the world, as we are reminded by recent events. We must learn how to take what works in our world, or in our literature, what we want to keep as modern and upright, and what we want to set aside as lessons for what we don't want to carry forward.

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Anthologies: What are they good for?

8/23/2014

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I've been thinking about anthologies in a time where short stories have lost much of their popularity.

Writing shorts is a different skill from writing novels. I guess reading sjhort stories is also a different skill from reading longer fiction. Reading a novel requires patience, but that is made up for, if the book is good, by immersion in the story. But what if you don't have the time or patience to read a novel at the moment? That's the moment to read a short story.

Only now there's the internet. So all short attention span moments are devoted to email or Twitter or Facebook.

Why do publishers publish anthologies? Or, a question I can answer wtih more assurance: Why does Ghostwoods Books publish anthologies? It's not for the money. It's fo the authors. It's an opportunity for us to meet and work with new authors. It's an opportunity for us to help authors network with other authors. Sometimes new deals or collaborations are struck that way.

It's also an opportunity for us to show the quality and care we put into our books. We have very little control over what gets submitted to us on the novel front. As a small publisher, we're in a kind of Catch 22, where most of the best books are submitted to larger publishers with more immediate money to spend on them, and more clout to get them seen by audiences. We have to work up to that. But in the meantime, we need to publish books to advance.

It's also fun, as an editor, to work on short fiction. There's some art to putting together an anthology, beyond just deciding which stories to take. There's the ordering, to create a certain pacing to the book. In a themed anthology like you want to avoid too many similar stories. But also, you might have a particular slant you want the stories to take.

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Take Me to Church

8/15/2014

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Hozier - Take Me to Church

I love this song, and this video.

In a time that seems filled with trouble on our planet, this video reminds me of the something good my generation has done.

People can love openly now. No matter what their gender.

We have a long way to go, of course, but that's what we're here for, isn't it?

Bring. It. On.

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World Weary

8/14/2014

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There are no pictures of me crying. Otherwise, I might put one up here.

Oh my god, Ferguson. Gaza, Robin Williams. Amazon fighting Hachette. People calling Lee Child a bully. People attacking Chuck Wendig for having an opinion. Like eighty school shootings in America in a few months. American police forces acting like invading armies.

So. Much. Chaos.

Everyone is on edge right now. Today a lady's tweet was retweeted into my timeline. It said 'RT if you'll still be mad about black men being shot by police a year from now. Tryna see something.' I retweeted it. So did a lot of other people.

Someone who follows me, a crotchety British fellow who I had developed a reasonably good relationship with on Twitter, replied to us both saying that he wouldn't be mad about black men but about anyone shot by police.

What does a person do in this situation? I tried to appease both sides by saying that it was true that we didn't want anyone shot, but right now the numbers are leaning toward people of color.

In my way of handling disputes, I did my very best to gently assert right while trying to make sure everyone expressed themselves. The lady, a stranger to me, was lovely and gracious about it all. The guy wrote out a string of expletives and names, including racist and the c word. He also told the lady to 'die.'

This is not a time or place where it seems like a good idea to gently explain why people of color can't be racists. (Prejudice plus power equals racism. No power, you just have prejudice.) It's hard enough to try to get the uninitiated to buy race theory at the best of times.

So I simply apologized to the lady. And held my breath. And then I said to the guy, "I can't interact with you when you talk to people that way. It's unnecessary." Which given what he'd said to a perfect stranger in my timeline, seemed pretty reasonable.

His response was to block me. Great.

I'm a law abiding person. I tend to think of myself as lawful neutral. But actually that's a stretch. I'm more like lawful good or on very rare occasions, I'll pull a chaotic good card out of my pack. I like to feel like a good person, a blameless person. It seems there really isn't much way to be blameless in the world right now.

Does this really have to be so hard? Yes, I guess it does. Very easy to get dismayed about things.

Can everyone just be a little bit patient with everyone else right now? We're going to need it.

In other news, I wrote one of my famous, mental emails to President Obama, reminding him that we need him right now, and not just to be Presidential, but to react with human emotions.

I'd love to tell you all about the drama that's going on in my personal life, but I can't. Someday I'll be able to. Someday it will make a good memoir. Or Wikipedia entry. But until it's all resolved, I'll keep silent. I know others must be going through difficult stuff as well. And I always try to think about what might be happening in other people's lives that might be making them behave the way they are.

I mean, maybe that guy isn't flipping you the bird while he swims. Maybe he's drowning, you know?

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How the world lifts me up

'Lulu

On Race and H. P. Lovecraft

Anthologies: What are they good for?

Take Me to Church

World Weary

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