Swan Tower

[Everything below is from my friend Rachel Manija Brown, reposted with permission from here. I have used the form on whitehouse.gov to contact the federal government; you can do the same.]

I have written a post which I have copied below. Feel free to link if you don't have Facebook. If you do have Facebook, please share it.

Facebook Post

Please share this widely! I’m a resident of Crestline, CA and a former disaster relief worker for the American Red Cross. This is the worst disaster response I’ve ever encountered. One week after an unprecedented snowstorm, we’re in dire straits and getting very little assistance.

Crestline and other areas affected by the San Bernardino snow disaster need help. We need a FEDERAL disaster declaration, door-to-door welfare checks for people trapped in their homes, door-to-door help shoveling paths out of the snow, removal of 10’ and higher ice berms trapping our cars, reimbursement for disaster-related expenses, and permission to return to our homes if we need to leave the mountain to get medical aid or supplies. Please contact President Biden, CA Governor Newsom, and San Bernardino elected officials to urge this help. You can just copy the requests in this paragraph, but read on if you want more details about what’s going on - and my own story.

We are used to snow here, and most residents are well-prepared for a typical snowstorm. Crestline normally gets six inches to two feet of snow. We got over nine feet of snow. Individual residents are not prepared for that, and we are overwhelmed.

Some people are literally trapped inside their homes by snow blocking their doors. Others can leave their homes but not their yards because the snow is over their heads. Many streets are not plowed, so no vehicles can drive. When streets are plowed, the snow is pushed to the sides and forms 10’ – 20’ walls of solid ice which block cars and driveways. The official statement of San Bernardino is that there will be no help breaking down the ice walls or shoveling paths to homes – they are only willing to plow the streets. These are not normal ice berms and individuals cannot break them down! We need help with this.

Many people are running out of food, as the only grocery in Crestline collapsed due to snow and the one in the next closest town partially collapsed. The only food distribution is at city centers, and it’s not in the same places every day. Many people cannot get past the ice walls or walk miles through snow up to their waist or over their head to get to the food. Because the food distribution points rotate rather than being in the same place consistently, people are struggling for hours through the snow only to find there is no food there that day. The sites are announced over the internet the day before, but many people have their internet cut off due to the storm and have no way of knowing where the food will be. We need consistent, daily food distribution sites. We also need door to door food distribution as many people can’t walk to the sites. Remember, our cars are trapped and we can’t drive!

Residents are allowed to drive down the mountain (if they’ve dug their cars out), but if we leave, we will not be allowed back up. No one is saying when we will be allowed back, but officials have hinted it will be at least a week and maybe a month or more. So anyone who drives down to get medical help or food is trapped away from their home with no idea of when they can return. Because of this, everyone is afraid to leave, so we have no way of replenishing our own supplies and no way of lightening the load in general by going to stay with friends. Residents need to be allowed back up the mountain!

Homes and businesses are collapsing from the weight of snow on the roof. We have ten times the amount of snow we normally get in some places, and we need help with it.

As gas vents are blocked by snow and gas pipes are breaking from the weight, a number of houses have exploded or burned down. I have yet to see any assistance shoveling out gas vents. Again, normally we could do this ourselves, but not when there’s nine feet of snow and ice!

Supposedly help is here. None of us have seen it. We’ve seen National Guard helicopters circling, but no boots on the ground. If ever there was a time for a large National Guard deployment, it’s now. The American Red Cross has opened a shelter, but it’s in Redland – off the mountain and 45 minutes away from anyone who actually needs help. We need the Red Cross on the mountain, where they’re actually needed.

We would love to help each other and are doing our best, but we literally can’t get to each other. We are overwhelmed and need help. I am especially worried about disabled, sick, and elderly people who live alone. What happens to them if they don’t have close neighbors who can check on them? We need door-to-door welfare checks.

Here's my own story. At the beginning of the storm, one of my water pipes burst. The water company contacted me and told me they were cutting off my water. I filled my bathtub and all containers. (I also keep emergency water.) They plowed my street just up to my water meter, turned off my water, and backed out rather than continuing to plow the street. That was a week ago and to date they have been the only official response of any kind I have seen on my street.

Soon after, my internet cable broke in the storm. My 4G and telephone service also went out. I live alone and at that point I had no way whatsoever to communicate with anyone. I am five feet tall and my house was surrounded by snow over my head. I dug my way out of the house in the hope of making phone calls asking for help from a neighbor’s house. Then I discovered that the ways out of my property were also blocked. My driveway was under nine feet of soft snow, and my staircase, which is wooden and very steep, was under five feet of soft snow. Both ended in ice walls about ten feet high. Either way out was extremely dangerous.

I was so desperate that I climbed and slid down the staircase, then climbed the ice wall. I found a neighbor with internet and phone service, and began making calls for help. I explained to everyone that I spoke to that I had no communication whatsoever at my house and no running water, and that leaving my house was extremely dangerous. I requested help shoveling the staircase and for my internet and/or phone to be fixed so I could at least call for help. (I couldn’t move in with the neighbors or go to a shelter as I have pets and farm animals I need to care for.)

The response I got was disheartening. My internet company, Spectrum, offered me a service appointment ten days in the future. The San Bernardino official helpline took my number, but I never heard back from them. The plumbers I contacted about repairing my pipe so I can get my water turned back on were sympathetic, but they all lived in San Bernardino and worked in Crestline, and were not allowed up the mountain. One of them said that he has snow cats and a full crew and asked to come up to help shovel people out, but was refused permission to go up the mountain.

My neighbors shoveled a path up my stairs so I could get in and out without risking my neck. I still have no running water and no idea when that can be fixed. My car in under ten feet of snow and blocked by a fifteen foot wall of solid ice, so I can’t leave. I still have no reliable internet or phone service at my house. I am posting this from a neighbor’s house.

Please repost this to spread the word of the desperate situation and shocking mismanagement of this disaster. Please contact President Biden to ask him to declare a FEDERAL disaster. Please contact Governor Gavin Newsom of CA and elected officials in San Bernardino to ask them to send actual help, not just empty promises and false claims.

Thank you.

Rachel Manija Brown, writing from Crestline, CA on March 5, 2023.

Feel free to copy or reprint this anywhere with attribution.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/lrl8dZ)

Sharing on behalf of a friend, on the principle of "there's a lot of anthropology in my fiction and so I probably have anthropologists among my fiction readers":

The Department of Anthropology at Florida State University invites applications for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions in Biocultural Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology (TWO positions for that latter; three openings total). Email Jessi Halligan, jhalligan at fsu dotedu with questions or for more details.

And do feel free to spread the word elsewhere, if you know places it might be of interest!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/M3Vq6P)

In addition to the ongoing SFWA auction (where you've got three days left to bid on the Rook and Rose book + tea sample package and the first, second, third, and fourth kaffeeklatsch seats), there is now also the Sunflower Auction for Ukrainian charity! There are tons of things on offer there, browsable via the tags, but my own contribution is a bespoke short story based on the folkloric source of the winner's choosing. Bidding for that one runs almost to the end of May!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/tJxh5F)

Last week I joined forces with Mike Underwood, Cass Morris, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Dave Robison for an epic session of Agon as GM'd by Sharang Biswas. This turned out not to be the game I thought it was, not quite; I'd bought Agon many years ago at GenCon, but apparently it's been significantly redesigned, I think for the better -- the original edition looked very "grim 'n gritty," while the new version has a stronger aura of fun. We had a blast, and you can watch the results on Youtube.

The impetus behind this was Bag of Giving, a charity fundraising effort that's pulling people together for interesting one-shots. Each month they pick a charity to support; for March it's the The Hero Initiative, which helps comic book creators facing things like medical emergencies. But you don't have to donate to that group specifically; you can choose any charity you like. (I'll note, given the current situation, that we chose our charity well before the invasion of Ukraine. Donations to help refugees would not go amiss.) Then just send a screenshot of your donation, minus personal information, to contact at bagofgiving dot com.

To provide some incentive, every $5 you donate gets you an entry in a giveaway for a book bundle! The titles on offer for March are:

• An Unintended Voyage by Marshall Ryan Maresca
  
• Driftwood by Marie Brennan
  
• Give Way to Night by Cass Morris (hardcover)
  
• Liar’s Knot by M.A. Carrick
  
• Shield and Crocus by Michael R. Underwood
  
• We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen (hardcover)
  

We thank you in advance for whatever donations you make!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dyW41m)

I've been doing a lot of teaching with the Clarion West writers' workshop this year -- first an in-person workshop on writing fight scenes; then four one-hour online workshops on different small worldbuilding topics during their free offerings in April; then a six-hour online workshop on worldbuilding more broadly in May -- and now I'm partnering with them in a different way, by participating in their write-a-thon. This raises funds to cover their costs, including scholarships for marginalized students, so if you can spare a little for them, please do! You can either sponsor me at that link, or browse the list of participants and choose someone from there. I've pledged to do a whole pile of stuff: forty thousand words on the second Rook and Rose book with Alyc (uhhhh, 40K together; not 40K for my half), revision on The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, and two short stories completed. Wish me luck . . .

Some of you may have heard about the Dream Foundry, an organization that aims to provide support and encouragement for new professionals in science fiction and fantasy writing and art. I’m a part of the group, and our project just got rolling in the last year or so (you may have heard some of us talking about it at Worldcon in San Jose); now it’s running its very first Kickstarter! There’s a five-year-plan for getting the entire enterprise up and running, and the purpose of the Kickstarter is to fund the first year of weekly articles and a discussion series. If it meets that goal — which is only $2000, and since we’ve already got $1766, the odds look good — then further funds will be used to extend that funding, recoup startup costs, expand our web presence, pay staff (all of whom are currently unpaid volunteers), and even provide the money to start up a contest for new writers and artists, with a substantial cash award and free workshop for finalists.

There’s an added twist here, which is that the Dream Foundry’s financial people have plans to apply for various grants and such — but in the perverse way of such things, it’s easier to get a grant if you can show a track record of other funding and results. So the more the Kickstarter can raise to get the Dream Foundry going, the better our odds become of keeping it going in the long run.

I got involved because my own career got started with an award and the monetary prize from that, and I’d love to see another such project aimed at people who are new to the field. The people behind the Dream Foundry are astonishingly well-organized, so I have every faith that with support, this can become not just a real thing but an amazing one. Back the Kickstarter now to help make that happen!

This Friday at 9 p.m. Pacific Time (9 p.m. Eastern), I’ll be doing a Google Hangout reading and Q&A session in support of The Pixel Project to End Violence Against Women. Here’s the link for the YouTube Live stream; obviously there’s nothing happening there yet, but you can bookmark that and come back to it in a few days.

While you wait for that to roll around, though, there’s a fundraiser as well, which has already made it more than a third of the way to its $5000 goal. This will be ongoing for the next month and change — it ends October 15th — and they’ll be rolling out additional perks throughout; my own donations are currently scheduled to go up for grabs later this week. But there are already several awesome things available, and I’d love to see the project blow through its initial goal well before the fundraiser ends.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

The fundraiser I launched last week has raised over six hundred dollars for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services — $621 to date. Thank you so much to everyone who has participated, whether you bought one book or eight (!). I’m in the process of shipping everything out, which is taking longer than expected due to sheer volume . . . which is excellent news. 🙂

The fundraiser is still ongoing, in the sense that I see no reason to call a halt to it. You can find the list of stock here, and I’ll update the page to note that I’ll go on taking orders and donations.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Strange Horizons is running a prize drawing as a fundraiser for the magazine. Enter for a chance to be Tuckerized in the book I'm writing right now, the sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent! Given the nature of this book, the most likely prospect is that you'll wind up being some kind of expert on the Draconean language or other such nerdy topic, but there are a few other possibilities as well.

The Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II anthology is nearly halfway to goal. If you missed it before, this anthology will feature a short story from me based on the micro-setting I wrote for the Mecha vs. Monsters expansion for the Tiny Frontiers RPG, which took that concept and smashed it full-speed into the idea of high school science competitions. The story is one of the most gonzo things I've ever written, and you can help it become a published reality!

This is a very long article, but very worth reading if you want to get a sense of how terrifying tornadoes can be. I'm lucky that I never experienced one, despite living in Dallas for eighteen years; I did experience huddling in the back hall of our house, waiting to find out if we'd lose that particular game of meteorological Russian roulette.

(Juxtaposing that with the previous item: gonzo as my story is, it doesn't come close to approximating the sheer destructive force of a tornado. But it's also meant to be a moderately funny story, and there's nothing funny about annihilation on that scale.)

Finally, not so much an item as a teaser for something upcoming: stay tuned to this space for some exciting news on February 6th!

Tomorrow, y’all. Tomorrow, Within the Sanctuary of Wings will be available from all reputable vendors of books! If you’ve been waiting for the series to be complete before you pick it up, now is your chance to start! If you know someone who has been waiting for the series to be complete before they pick it up, now is your chance to tell them to start!

My upcoming tour schedule is here, with a new item added: a May 11th signing at University Bookstore in Seattle, where I will be joined by the inestimable Todd Lockwood.

Also, don’t forget that the illustrated edition of Lies and Prophecy is currently 30% off at Kobo. Just enter “APR30” as a coupon code at checkout to get the discount. The sale ends today!

Finally, I’ve contributed a number of items to this year’s Con or Bust auction. There are three lots:

• signed copies of Voyage of the Basilisk, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and Within the Sanctuary of Wings
• signed copies of Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood
• signed copies of all four UK editions of Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire

Bidding is open now, and will continue until May 7th. It’s a great organization and a great cause, so go forth and bid!

. . . see you all tomorrow!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.