The Fast-Forward Festival

I have two big pieces of news this week:

First: I got into the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.  Woot!  It’s a month-long training course in speculative fiction writing and publishing, hosted by the lovely UC San Diego, and taught by professional authors.  They only take 18 students per year.  I’m really excited—it feels like, after two years of banging on the door, I’ve finally been accepted into the speculative fiction community. 

I’m starting a very unique Kickstarter project to help raise money for this venture.  More about that next week.  Stay tuned.

Second: Carmen and I are opening an online magazine called The Fast-Forward Festival.  Right now it’s just a call-for-submissions page: check it out at www.fastforwardfest.com.  Feel free (heck, feel encouraged!) to send us submissions, if you have them.  The totally awesome first issue will premiere on May 15^th.

We came up with the name of the magazine in the dining car of an Amtrak train, watching the agriculture of the Central Valley roll by under a wheezy brown fog.  Our other main contenders were: Six Ninja Princesses, Who Called Sexy Santa?, Maximum Caffeinated Frenzy, and The Marshmallow King’s Revenge.  Greg was no help when asked his opinion: he kept insisting that “Science Fiction Diction!” was the best name for the job.

When we stumbled upon our name—the name we’d choose—I grinned.  “Wouldn’t that be great for a magazine about time travel?” I asked.

I was raised on time travel stories—from Megamorphs #2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs, to Back to the Future, to E. Nesbit’s 1906 classic The Story of the Amulet, to the undoubtedly excellent adventures of Bill and Ted.

That says nothing of the ones I discovered as an adult: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Slaughterhouse-Five, Paycheck (the novella, not the movie), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the movie, not the book), to name just a few.

I guess that time-turner just got under my skin.

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And so, voila!  A month later, here it is in its beginning stages: The Fast-Forward Festival, a magazine of science fiction and fantasy with a timely twist.

We don’t just take stories about time-travel, of course: factoring the preferences of Carmen and I into a cohesive unit, we’ll probably take stories with Midwestern vampires, rampaging nihilistic cyborgs, existential quotations, feminism, unlikely romances, and fairytale-themed underwear.

And don’t forget metafictions: those stories about the act of storytelling itself.  “Intro to Postmodernism” was one of the few classes Carmen and I took together in college, and naturally we want to keep it alive.

Largely, however, we will be showcasing stories that waltz, hula, or do a grim fandango with time.

Look for Issue 1 of The Fast-Forward Festival on May 15^th.  It’ll be a eudemonic (pandemonic?) ride.

Cabin 15b

I was snowed-in last weekend at a motel in Oakhurst, California.

This motel (a Comfort Inn, and deserving of its name) was next to a bar called the Dirty Donkey.  The Dirty Donkey was also deserving of its name: it had a large banner reading “Bikers Welcome!” next to the entrance, and a picture of a donkey’s butt painted over the door. 

Oh the times I could have had, at the Dirty Donkey, if I had only gotten over my sudden attack of the giggles.

It was the first real snowfall of the year: up to that point, winter in the Sierra Nevada range had been unseasonably dry.  Last Saturday night, when we were trying to drive into Yosemite for our family reunion, though, snow fell by the tractor-load.  I woke up, looked out the window, and suddenly realized that that song—“Walking in a Winter Wonderland”—(which Greg always gets stuck in my head, thanks very much)—was actually appropriate.

Yech.  Christmas tunes.

Our cars were hatted with six inches of snow, and the roads covered in a thick sleet that left clear footprints wherever we stepped.  I can’t say this influx of snow was particularly surprising: we’d stopped overnight in Oakhurst (as opposed to pushing on to the cabin in Yosemite) because when we’d driven into the mountains the previous night, the windshield had been bombarded with falling ice.  “How surreal!” Mom exclaimed, taking a picture with her phone.  I gritted my teeth.    

It grew more perilous the higher we climbed.  The pellets of snow hitting the windshield made it barely possible to focus on the dark, tortuous road.  Flakes struck with mesmerizing regularity, and there were no streetlamps, or other cars, to illuminate the way. 

Finally, Dad decided to retreat.  We were all shaking with adrenaline as we pulled back into town, which was, at that point, still beneath the line of snowfall.  We found the Comfort Inn, which had a welcome matt in the lobby that my nephew Luca (he’s fifteen months old) collapsed onto, saying “Ahhhhhhhh.”  We bundled down for the night, learning that three of the Comfort Inn employees were prevented, by the blizzard, from making it home.    

That’s when it’s great to work in a hotel: if you’re stranded, and they have extra rooms, you’re guaranteed a place to sleep.

We woke up the next morning and scraped the snow off the cars with a lunch tray.  We learned that the highway into Yosemite was passable, as long as we put chains on our tires.  So we ventured up the mountain again, at 21 miles an hour, dodging the random (but seemingly malicious) ice-dumps of overhanging trees.

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Yosemite.  An awe-striking place, if there ever was one, from the crest of Half Dome to the blackened rock around Bridal Veil Falls, to the way the pine trees surge up the edges of the valley like waves.  Yosemite Valley itself is cupped inside of sharp, sheer cliffs.  We stayed in the neighboring (and less majestic) townlet of Chinquapin, which is still within the boundaries of the National Park.

For our family reunion, Cumminses came from far and wide—old hands, new brides—to gather in Chinquapin.  It’s always interesting when members of my extended family clan are trapped under one roof.  This time, we played Apples to Apples, got into an extensive argument about whether Batman counts as a superhero (I say no—unless “money” is a superpower), and built a snowman with quarters for eyes. 

The cabin we rented had six bedrooms, three floors, and a deck overlooking an untrammeled snow-meadow—where we had one day of wading knee-deep through snowdrifts, and aiming snowballs at the back of each other’s necks. 

Then everyone began to get sick.
Don't you love family road trips?

Someone had brought a particularly virulent strand of influenza into the cabin, and there was no escape.  It was kind of like watching a reality TV show—who would drop next?  The people who didn’t regularly interact with children were first.  Then came the children and babies themselves, making us all very sad with their retching.

Then came the people who did regularly interact with children, but weren’t actually parents—including me.  I was congratulating myself on lasting so long, up until I realized that I’d held out just long enough to be at the peak of sickness during the six-hour drive home.

That was NO FUN.  I ended up having to vomit in one of my snow boots.  The puke was red, because of eating three red gummy bears the previous day—which is a lesson in how much dye the candy companies use, everyone.

My mom is the prizewinner of the event, though: she, alone of us all, never got sick.  She puts it down to copious consumption of grapefruit seed extract, but I say it’s because she has the immune system of a true superhero (not Batman).

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            I suppose there could have been worse vacations.  We could have kept driving into the blizzard, up the dark and winding mountainside.  We could have had a serious accident and been stranded, far from help, in the domain of ice.

            The red color in my vomit could have actually been blood.

            But in terms of the worst vacation I’ve had, there isn’t really much competition with the family reunion in Yosemite, during the last days of winter, when I puked in a boot.

Not Rush-ing

            Two weeks ago, right-wing demagogue Rush Limbaugh called law-student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”  Why?  Because she was pushing for legislation that requires health care companies to provide coverage for birth control.

            Rush’s reasons: "Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You'd call 'em a slut, a prostitute or whatever."

            When I first considered blogging about this, I wondered if it was really worth talking about.  The event has garnered a lot of news and internet coverage, and Rush’s general popularity, since then, has been heading for the hills.  And his comments are, after all, just so much prattling and bandying of words.  Words come cheap, in politics, and don’t mean much—and are often used to conceal meanings rather than reveal them.  Because this happened on a radio show with national coverage, however, and because Limbaugh is a public figure who’s gotten away with spouting rhetoric like this for years, I decided I needed to throw in my voice.

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I read a book called SLUT! in one of my Feminist Studies classes in college. It was a 350 page deliberation on the current use of the word and its psychological repercussions.

Here’s my 40 word summary:

Though the word ‘slut’ is usually a tag given to females who have, or appear to have, promiscuous sex (where promiscuity is culturally defined and culturally relative), it is also a tool for demeaning the words of any outspoken woman.

It isn’t surprising to me, therefore, that Rush would attack a women’s rights advocate with the word ‘slut.’  Given his track record of vilification, racism, and misogyny, it was actually the predictable move.  What really takes the cake, though, is his conflation of the words ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’—which mean entirely different things.  All they have in common is that they’re related to sex, have implicit negative connotations, and refer, most of the time, to people with two X chromosomes.

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I don’t intend to counter Rush Limbaugh’s arguments through playing by his rules.  There's a famous essay from the Feminist and Civil Rights movements in the seventies, called, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”  What Audre Lorde meant, when she wrote this, was that you can’t undermine a system of oppression using the same ideology as that system of oppression.  

For that reason, I don’t even want to talk about Sandra Fluke’s personal sexual activities.  That was Rush’s tactic of diverting attention from the issue at hand.

            The issue at hand: I don’t understand why contraception isn’t mandatorily covered by health care companies.  It’s one of the most essential, quotidian ways that women control their lives and health. 

Rush said, “I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities.”

            Wait!  I have to stop making my argument!  The times are too “serious” and “political” to be talking about women’s rights!

Who are these “American citizens” that Rush is referencing, who don’t use any form of birth control?  I’d like to meet them, and ask them about their quality of life.

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            I’ve never understood why Rush Limbaugh’s show has run for so long.  He’s one of those martinets who tell listeners how to think, no wiggle room left to disagree.  Do his listeners want to be told how to think?  No leeway to develop their own opinions?  Opinions are glorious things, people—especially informed ones.  Expressing them is one of our greatest liberties: a freedom that Rush enjoys to the max, but appears to grudge others.

           I’m happy to announce that, since this incident, Rush has lost the majority of his corporate sponsors and advertisers.  He’s had to end his show, multiple times, with dead air.

53% percent of voters, in a recent poll, think he should be fired.  I agree.

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I know I’ve been called “bitch” a few times—it’s a rare woman who escapes that stigma entirely.  Have I been labeled (libeled) a “slut”?  I’m not sure.  I tend to forget insults like that, because they have absolutely no relevance to the way I live my life. 

If I was called a “slut” by Rush Limbaugh, though, I might, in a circular way, feel a bit proud—because the only method he had to refute my argument was to attack my sexual practices.  What a petty sort of desperation!

Let’s hope this incident was his swansong—his dying gasp of hate-sludge.  If not, my only advice to people who want to ignore his haranguing, but can’t, is:

Pay attention to the words!  Look at what they’re actually saying!

His imprecision with language is the key to his defeat!

Boots

It’s strange, how thoughts, images, and ideas recur in our minds in different guises throughout our lives.  For example: When I was about fifteen, I was obsessed with the SyFy Channel show Lexx.  This, for those of you who don’t know, is basically Star Trek’s anti-heroic, poorly-funded, juvenilely-sexual evil twin. 

The Lexx, in the show, is an organic spacecraft, piloted by three people: Stanley Tweedle, the cowardly accidental captain, Kai, the re-animated former assassin, and Xev, the half-reptilian, erstwhile love-slave.  The show is exceedingly tawdry, but Xev, a redhead doomed to love the undead, is still one of my all-time favorite SF characters—maybe because of her kick-ass black boots.  What can I say?  They went up to her knees.

At the time I watched Lexx, I was writing a fantasy novel, and Xev inspired my character Cheria, who also had red hair and wore kick-ass boots.  Cheria, a few years ago, transmogrified into a person named Sarah Butler, one of the main figures in my story “The Limits of Monday”, which was published in The Ear Hustler magazine in August, 2011. 

Sarah Butler belonged to a world quite similar to our own—a world with county fairs and fast cars and deceased businessmen—but now, in a novel I’m currently writing, she’s having an altercation with a dragon.  Turning the genre-circle again.

I know authors are a little loony, to have mental doppelgangers who shadow their every move for years.  That’s how stories get written, though: the doppelgangers insist (quite stubbornly) that there’s more to it than you’ve told.  They insist that their lives have progressed, since the last time you chatted—that they’ve developed allergies to chickpeas, or want to go to Spain.  They insist, like the rest of us, that their current opinions are the ones that truly count.  They make dumb decisions for good reasons, try their best to ignore the misery of others when they can’t alleviate it, and crave dangerous adventures up until the point dangerous adventures actually arrive.

When did you get so human? I ask my resurfacing characters.

I’ve always been human, they grumble.  You just weren’t human enough to see it, last time we talked. 

            Some people make the mistake of thinking that genre fiction—SF, mystery, fantasy, horror—isn’t “deep” enough to house complex characters.  I have the exact opposite opinion: I think that genre fiction, by dint of being one shade removed from regular life, allows us to see characters as whole entities, working within the fertile milieu of their societies and times.  An excellent book I read recently was Out of Oz, by Gregory Maguire, the conclusion to the Wicked cycle.  In it, Maguire was able to characterize Oz, during a period of social unrest, in a microcosmic way that would be impossible with a real place.   

            Let me say that another way:

            In fiction (even in realism) all worlds are invented worlds.  This is because of how much power the authors have, to include and ignore whatever aspects of existence they choose.  In a truly invented world, however, one that’s based only slightly and slyly on an actual place in the universe, the author has the power to thoroughly explain a certain chain of events.  There’s no hopeless speculation about what was going on in the characters’ minds at the time: the author, if she or he has an active-enough imagination, can figure it out.

            Of course, it’s been my experience that, the deeper authors get into invented worlds, the more they are forced to recognize their own fallibility.  The more text you accumulate, the less possibilities remain open for the content of the text remaining.  You’ve put in something that limits a character, like a newfound hatred of chickpeas—and now that you know she hates chickpeas, you can’t in good conscience have her go on a date to get felafels.

            That’s a silly example, but the main point I’m making, I suppose, is that genre fiction can be just as multifaceted, or multifarious, as mainstream literature—if not more so.  My character Sarah Butler is having an argument with a dragon—and this, rather than simplifying her personality, is expanding it.  Because now I get to find out how she’d react to having an argument with a dragon.  

            A warning to the wise, however: the more complex a place, person, or group of characters get, the harder it is to write a strictly happy ending.  When the happy ending comes, it’s beautiful, because it’s been earned—but it doesn’t come all the time.

            Look at Lexx.  I would argue passionately that, however predictable its main characters may have been, they had a level of complexity that came precisely from their over-the-top wackiness.  Somebody put a lot of mindpower into making each of them an individual:

--The undead man who doesn’t want life, but merely a cessation of existence. 

--The attractive, randy woman who shows the only real courage and talent for leadership among the crew. 

--The cowardly, strangely-likeable captain, who, when not chasing space princesses, spends most of the time huddling in fear.

I would argue that Lexx had unexpectedly intricate characters—and that show didn’t have a happy ending.  Not in the strict sense of the phrase, anyhow.

Maybe it was the boots.

            Okay, I’m being facetious again—but here’s a thought-experiment for you.  Think of a beloved story with a happy ending.  How about—I don’t know—Cinderella?  She doesn’t wear boots.  She wears glass slippers.

            Boots are for the people who need to travel the rough, thorny, less predictable roads—the roads with details, pain, humor, intriguing side-trips, and ambiguous resolutions.

In a choice between boots and glass slippers (for what it’s worth), I’d choose boots every time.

 

Friends, Trains, & Tiny Pink Cars

          Last week, my good friend Carmen left behind her cramped, ashy apartment in the Bronx, closed the window that overlooks the green swells of the Harlem River, and came to visit me in California.

          Carmen and I have the oddest things in common.  We are equally talented at trivia games, and equally, um…enthusiastic at basketball.  We both, as kids, read this crappy YA series (about gymnasts) that could only be found in used bookstores.  We both can be perfectly entertained for an hour by throwing one rubber ball up a staircase to dislodge another rubber ball.

          Our plan was to visit the wine country, where my family lives, and then the L.A. area, where her family lives—with a long-awaited side-trip to Disneyland.  I asked myself what my favorite moments of our journey were, and this is what sprung to mind:

Carmen saying, “I can’t believe your family has a room full of dirt in your house!” (We do.)  “That is the coolest thing!  Nobody’s house just has a room full of dirt in it!”

Riding Amtrak, over the course of one long Monday, from Santa Rosa to Irvine.  Our porter for the longest leg of the trip (Martinez to Bakersfield) was a flustered but friendly man.  “We’re jam-packed today,” he explained breathlessly.  “If you girls want to move to the dining car permanently, it’ll free up some seats...”

So we sat in the dining car for eight hours, sipped coffee, and stayed entertained by reminiscing about the gruesome ways you can die in Choose Your Own Adventure novels.  We watched the Central Valley roll past the rectangular window beside us.  The dry, flat, endless Central Valley, full of oil refineries and scummy aqueducts where Carmen, as a child, was persistently forbidden to swim.  And fields. 

Fields. 

Fields.

Even the cherry trees, in their dizzyingly uniform rows, were coated with dust.

“Hanford!” Carmen exclaimed midway through our ride.  “This is near where I grew up!”

The distant hills, as bare of trees as sheet metal, glinted in the winter sun.

And finally, watching Carmen drive into the twilit fog, in a tiny pink car.

That, I must explain, was at Disneyland.  I was going to see her again in about eight minutes, once we’d both finished the Autopia loop.  I’ll never get over the cutesy surrealism, though, of watching her speed aggressively away in a car designed for Minnie Mouse.

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I’d like to describe what I thought might happen during Carmen’s visit.  I had this idea, beforehand, that we would, on the course of a road trip, stay in a mysterious wigwam and make hand shadows against the walls.  I have no knowledge where I got the image: it rose from the unplumbed depths of my imagination, where the best characters and dialogue dwell incognito. 

Needless to say, it was a bit too weird to come true—and I can’t say I regret that, considering how I’ve always sucked at hand shadows.  Still, whenever I think of what did happen during Carmen’s visit, its underbelly is this strange moment that didn’t happen, but persists in my mind.

Maybe there was something special about those hand shadows I imagined. Maybe they were a communication from a Danica in an alternate dimension, who is currently trapped in a wigwam and representing her situation pictographically. 

Probably not—but in my trade, it helps to keep an open mind.

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          Friendship is a wonderful thing.  You know that someone is a true friend, a teacher once told me, if you can show up on their doorstep, shout, “I killed the Mayor!” and they let you come inside.

Stick with your true friends—those kindred souls who you can play six (count ‘em, six) different board games with you during a five day span.  Those awesome individuals who will bike with you in out of the way wine-towns, or tell you the name, when you ask, of the main character in The Ewok Adventures.  Those lovely folk who obsess over a house having a room full of dirt.

“No, really!  A room full of dirt and spiders?”  She nodded enthusiastically.  “It’s the coolest thing ever.”

          “Wait ‘til you see the secret crawlspace under the deck,” I promised.  Carmen’s eyes widened expectantly.

I’ve fallen out of contact with some great people, great friends.  I regret it, but I’ve made peace with the fact that separations happen.  Sometimes, they seem inevitable.  Through it all, my family (another bunch of awesomely quirky people) and close friends have stuck with me.   

All I can say to them is, thank you.  Thank you for making me feel comfortable to be my own peculiar self.