Swan Tower

As many of you have probably heard by now, Anne McCaffrey, one of the grand dames of science fiction, has passed away.

I came to her books through Dragonsinger, I think, and the rest of the Harper Hall trilogy, before moving on to Dragonflight and the other, more "mainstream" Pern books (by which I mean the ones that focused on the riders and Weyrs). From there I went onto some of the Ship books, and the Talents, and the Crystal Singer series, and more. She was never quite one of my DNA writers -- not a formative influence on me as a reader or writer -- but she was part of the step out of children's fiction and into adult SF/F. She was, however, a formative influence on a crap-ton of other people, and her oeuvre is one of the big islands in our archipelago.

And, although I never thought of it this way consciously, I think she helped print in my mind not the belief, but the assumption that writing this stuff was a thing done by both men and women. It never really occurred to me that anybody might think otherwise. If you'd asked Teenaged Me to list off important fantasy writers, I would have responded with Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan and Mercedes Lackey and David Eddings and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Raymond E. Feist and -- well, let's put it this way. I was a little nonplussed when I found out Terry Brooks was a man, because that was one of those names that could go either way, and women were prominent enough on my bookshelf that I thought nothing of dropping him in that category.

(No, I didn't pay much attention to the "about the author" bit. Why do you ask?)

(And yes, you can totally see the reading tastes of Teenaged Me in that list. Don't quibble over me putting McCaffrey in with the fantasy, though. I played the Might and Magic computer games. I was, and in some ways still am, firm in the opinion that slapping a bit of technology on a story otherwise stuffed with fantasy tropes does not make it SF.)

So anyway. I'm thankful for Anne McCaffrey, and for a whole host of other people like her, both for putting amazing and influential books into the world, but also -- in the case of the women -- for making it possible for me to cruise along in my blithe assumption of gender equality. That mindset has its shortcomings, but I really do believe it's enabled me to steamroll over any number of small speedbumps that may have appeared in my path.

Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.

No, not my birthday; my date of birth. Which is to say, September first. I was born early, though I'm not sure by how much (I used to think my due date was the eleventh, but recently my mother said otherwise, and now I can't remember what date she said). But really, the amount doesn't matter -- just the result.

Why does it matter? Because my school district, like most, had guidelines for determining when children should start kindergarten. You had to be five or older by the cut-off date. And what was that date?

September first.

I don't know how strictly that was enforced. Maybe if I'd been born a few days later, I still could have started school that year. As it was, they gave my mother the choice, to start me or hold me back. Given that I was already a ferocious reader, she opted to boot me out the door and into kindergarten. And for that, I am more thankful than I can say.

People who would probably not have been in my life if I had started school a year later: kurayami_hime. She would have been two years ahead of me, instead of one, and we likely would not have become friends -- at least not such close friends that these days, my parents refer to her as their other daughter. kniedzw: even if I still went to Harvard, he would have been more than a year out of college rather than recently graduated when I showed up, and by then would have distanced himself more from the friends he still had in school. We would not have begun dating, and I would not be married to him now. teleidoplex; it's unlikely I would have gone to the Castell Henllys field school in 2000, which means we would not have met there. And while I still might have gone to Indiana University for graduate school (thus giving us a second chance to meet), I don't know that I would have ended up playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP -- which created most of my social circle for six years, shaped my academic research, and led to me running Memento, the tabletop game that ended up inspiring the Onyx Court novels.

. . . to name just a few.

This is not to say I would have had no awesome friends, boyfriend/husband, or adopted sister had I entered school a year later. In both high school and college, I had friends a year behind me; I probably would have been closer to them in this alternate history, and they are very cool people, too. But you know what? I like my life. I like the path it's followed. And so much of it is the coincidental result of being at particular points in the educational system at particular times. Shift me back a year, and a lot of the things I'm happiest with suddenly vanish, to be replaced by god knows what.

Dear Mom: thank you for sending me off to kindergarten on my fifth birthday, rather than holding me back an additional year. And thank you to whatever gestational butterfly flapped its wings and caused me to enter this world on September first, just a little bit ahead of schedule.

I sometimes avoid bringing this up, because it can seem like bragging when talking to people who haven't been able, for one reason or another, to travel as much as I have. But I really am thankful for the amazing opportunities I've had to go other places -- particularly foreign countries.

Where have I been? The British Virgin Islands. Costa Rica. Northern England (South Shields), southern England (Winchester), Israel. Wales and Ireland. Ireland again. Japan, with a second trip nine years later. London, four times. Italy, Greece, and Turkey. India.

It's quite a lot for a thirty-one-year-old, especially when you figure in how many of those places I went before finishing college (hint: that list ends with the first Japan trip). I sometimes forget that, since various factors have combined to make my family in general kind of ridiculously well-traveled; I'm hoping kniedzw's work sends him to Poland next year and I get to tag along, because it's rare for me to beat my parents or my brother to a country. (Er, none of you guys have been to Poland yet, right? Watch me be wrong about that.) They've been to Russia and Malaysia and Hong Kong and Laos and Mongolia and Switzerland and China and Germany and I won't bore you with the rest of the list. But I've been to a lot of places, too.

It's done so much for my mind, I can't even put it into words. Not only seeing beautiful and famous landmarks, though that's often been a cool perk; just seeing other places, and all the differences that go with it. It makes the inside of your skull a bigger place. Not always in a comfortable way; it's tiring, the constant mental effort that goes with being surrounded by a foreign language, and with changing your behavior to fit your environment. There's a reason that kniedzw and I, when considering honeymoon possibilities, opted for a Mediterranean cruise; it allowed us to get a taste of some places we were dying to see, while still relaxing and putting out a minimum of effort. I'd love to go to Macchu Picchu someday, or visit China, but the physical work of one and mental work of the other were not what I wanted on my honeymoon.

I have joked -- sort of -- that what I need to do is decide where I want to travel to, and then think up books to write that would justify the trip as a research expense. It's only sort of a joke because I really, really want to go on traveling. I don't have a lot of extravagances in my lifestyle; I don't drink alcohol or coffee, I don't smoke, I don't drive a fancy car or buy much in the way of fancy clothes. I'd rather save that money, and spend it going somewhere cool. The fact that I've been able to do so on so many occasions is a great joy to me.

I lived for about five years in places without a dishwasher. (Well, longer than that -- but the four years in college don't count, since all I had to do was dump my tray at the appropriate spot in the dining hall.)

I am so very, very thankful to have one again.

Dishes fall into that deeply annoying category of "didn't I just do this chore?" No sooner have you cleaned them up than, oh look, there's another dirty plate. Laundry is the same way, and words cannot express how glad I am that I've never had to do that by hand. The one time I ever tried was with a pair of trousers when I was at a field station in the middle of the rainforest in Costa Rica; I got about a minute in, very feebly, before a pair of hands appeared in my field of vision and took the soap and trousers away. I watched the very nice Costa Rican lady do what my fourteen-year-old self could not, and marveled as if she were turning water in to wine. Combine that with my reading about what it used to take to do laundry in the pre-washing-machine past . . . yeah. There are entire months of my life that have been saved by me not having to do laundry by hand.

Dishwashers. Laundry machines. Vacuum cleaners. Hell, showers -- even bathing used to be a bigger undertaking, back when you had to heat the water and fill the tub and so on. Be thankful, people. Be very, very thankful.

I could ramble on for a long time -- not in a "thankfulness" way --with a lot of only vaguely-connected thoughts regarding Occupy Wall Street, corporate accountability, the current state of U.S. politics, media imbalance, economic inequality, police brutality, and a bunch of other things way too big to fit into a blog post. But since I can't begin to sort those into anything like a coherent enough order to inflict on other people, I'll excerpt out one tiny slice that does fit into this series:

I'm thankful for the Occupy Wall Street protest, and its cousins all around the country.

Why am I thankful? Because I'd started to believe, in a fatalistic, "fuck it, I might as well just give up" kind of way, that the political left in this country had lost its will to fight. Let them pass draconian anti-immigration laws, state constitutional amendments against gay marriage, tax cuts for the people who don't need them, cuts to benefits for the people who do, religious initiatives and attacks on women's rights and wars that never end -- we'll just sigh and turn on the Xbox for some mindless entertainment.

No. We'll protest. And not just through meaningless online petitions that only require a few clicks of the mouse: through physical action, through civil disobedience, through a movement that persists until the media can't ignore it anymore. And this isn't Tea Party-style activism, either, where the big corporate interests barely even try to hide their hand inside the puppet: it's grass-roots instead of astroturf. It's real.

Which isn't the same thing as perfect. The movement is more a thousand-voiced scream of frustration and rage than a single message; there are so many things that need fixing, so many of them intertwined, that it isn't as simple as (say) an anti-war protest, whose win condition is clear. OWS supporters want lots of things, and don't necessarily agree on how any of them should be achieved.

But it's my end of the political spectrum finally speaking up. Finally fighting. And doing it with enough force and persistence that people are paying attention. The United States is a big ship; she's slow to turn, and we may not (probably won't) get her on exactly the heading I'd like to see. Still: every degree of turn is a victory. I'm glad to see so many people do, in fact, have the will to grab the tiller and pull.

'Cause I, well, forgot to post yesterday. I remembered at one point during the afternoon, but I hadn't yet picked a thing to post about, and then next thing I know it's, well, now. (And I already did the meta "get out of jail free" thing with being thankful for days off. Clearly, weekends are hard.)

So I'm thankful that you all forgive me for missing a day. You do forgive me, right? Right???

To avoid totally copping out on this post, though, I'm going to be thankful for the internet more generally. I was talking with kniedzw the other night about signal to noise ratios in our current society, and he complained about internet searches: fifteen years ago he could go to Altavista or whatever and type in [some kind of techie query; I can't remember what his example was] and turn up a useful tutorial on how to do that thing. Now he has to wade past various auto-generated SEO traps to get to the actual info. I conceded this may be true . . . but on the other hand, fifteen years ago I doubt Altavista could have pointed me at an online account of the exact route taken by Elizabeth I's coronation procession. The Internet back then was a paradise for techie topics, maybe, but not so much for everything else.

These days, I may indeed have to wade past random crap -- but the information is out there, so often it simply boggles me. I can, without leaving my office, look at a topographical map of the area around Dover Castle, or read back issues of the London Times, or get instructions on embroidery stitches. The sheer amount of info contained in Wikipedia alone is astronomical. When I try to imagine writing the Onyx Court series without the 2007-2010 Internet to help me out . . . well, actually, I try not to imagine that, since it leads to me curling up under my desk and wibbling. (I dunno. Maybe it would have been great, because I wouldn't have had so much red meat to feed my obsessive tendencies.)

So I'm thankful for the Internet, and all its wonders.

You do forgive me, right?

What? I never said all of the things I'm thankful for were going to be meaningful.

In this case, I am grateful for alternative pizza sauces. I am currently chowing down on a pizza crust that bears cheese, chicken, spinach, and pesto sauce. I could have had creamy garlic instead, and next time I may go for that. Mmmm, garlic.

Why am I thankful for this? Because when I lived in Bloomington, pizza was very nearly the only food you could get delivered.* And my friends and I gamed a lot, or watched movies, and the result was a whole lotta pizza ordering. Much to kniedzw's sadness (because he could eat pizza every night and be happy), after six years of this, I became so very tired of pizza that I almost never wanted to eat it. Three years on, I'm slowly regenerating my interest -- but that's helped a lot by restaurants that offer me greater variety in my choice of sauces. See, if it's got a non-tomato-based sauce, it's enough Not Like Pizza that I'm more willing to consider it. This, incidentally, makes not just me but my husband happier, and those are both good things.



*Except for Baked! And here I'm going to go on a tangent and talk about something I miss a great deal, and would be thankful for if somebody else would seize upon the WORLD'S BEST IDEA and make it available where I live.

Baked! was a restaurant that would, until about two or three in the morning, bake you custom-ordered cookies and deliver them to your door. Fresh. Hot. And you don't even have to get off the couch. You could choose your dough (sugar, chocolate, oatmeal), your fillings (chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc), a frosting if you wanted it. I adored sugar dough with dark chocolate chips, craisins, and walnuts. You had to order at least a dozen cookies total, I think, and the minimum for any given flavor combination was three -- but like that's a hardship.

And yeah, the name was no accident; the business was basically run for stoners, by stoners, and sometimes forty-five minutes after you placed your order you'd get a phone call from a spacey-sounding driver who couldn't find your house and turned out to be on the wrong side of town. But you know, that's a small price to pay for fresh cookie delivery. Why this has not taken over the world, I don't know.

Yeah. I know. I'm lazy. But it's true; I'm thankful for Netflix Streaming, and other services that allow me to enjoy movies and TV from the comfort and sloth of my home. :-)

Not only because they enable me to act like a total slug, but because they make it me more willing to give a shot to various things I wouldn't have tried if I had to make an effort to seek them out. And, as a corollary, they make it easier to give up on stuff that isn't any good. If I've rented something, or waited for the disc to be sent to me, I'm more likely to feel as if I should stick it out for the whole thing, even if it isn't really holding my interest. If it's streaming, though, I feel very few compunctions about quitting after fifteen minutes. And that frees up more time for me to try the stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph!

(Mind you, it also means I'm apt to let such things suck away more of my time in general. But there's a price for everything, I suppose . . . .)

It's the Brioche Bakery, and they show up at our local farmers' market every Saturday morning. Why am I grateful for them? Partly for their tasty, tasty baked goods (om nom apple cinnamon muffin, or their scones -- oh, their scones), which have become the standard Saturday-morning breakfast for me and kniedzw, but also for a less direct reason.

See, their baked goods are so tasty that kniedzw and I will actually go to the effort of obtaining them, nearly every Saturday morning. Not only does this get us out of bed and out of the house, it gets us to the farmers' market. Tasty baked goods in hand, we wander up and down the aisles, where we pick up more things: fresh-squeezed orange juice (also so very tasty), fruit to snack on during the week, specialty ravioli (like ham and cranberry and smoked gouda -- it's fabulous), and other sundry foodstuffs. At Christmas time we get a wee lil' tree. All of which are good things, but I can't say with any certainty that we would actually have the motivation to go and get them if it weren't for the bakery.

So thank you, Brioche Bakery, for your muffins and scones, and also your cheesy garlic bread, and your cookies, and your loaves of other bread that tastes really good with that spreadable quark cheese the stall about halfway down sells, which reminds me, I really ought to buy some quark next week.

Yeah. :-)

There is, of course, some overlap between this and the previous post, as I count a number of writers among both my colleagues and my friends. But my non-writer friends very much deserve a nod, too. I know a lot of very cool people, some of them living nearby, some of them in other cities or even other countries -- which makes those latter hard to hang out with, but on the other hand, it often means I know somebody in the places I travel to. And that's pretty nifty.

Friends are especially a thing to be grateful for given how isolating my job can be. If it weren't for you guys, I would have gone insane(r) a long time ago.