Once, when I had a day job that often made me froth and rage with incandescent despair, I noticed that the more I raged, the more cheerfully I answered the phone. This went unnoticed by any save my sister, who once called and heard me sing out in saccharine tones, “Good afternoon, Day Job Incorporated! How may I help you?” and said in stricken tones, “Dear GOD, what is WRONG?”

In a similar vein, today I toiled my way to the grocery store through endless streams of totally unreasonable traffic. I avoided collisions with people driving irrationally and with 2" dowels sticking yards out of pickup trucks into the parking lot, and found that my heart was full of aggravation with my fellow man. In fact, to quote our friend Ishmael (with the exception that it was a crisp chill December within and without my soul), I did feel that it required “a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off…” If not their heads. I avoided making eye contact, for fear of accidentally killing people with mind-daggers, and felt that if I were to inadvertently open my mouth, a sheet of baleful green fire might emerge, or at least that noise the monster made in LOST.

In this condition I gathered my vegetables and slinked to the register with my raw poultry. The cashier, a rosy-cheeked lad I had never before seen, asked me for my co-op membership card, and I, coiled in around my core of misanthropy and wrath…said, “Oh yes, here it is,” in a voice precisely one millimeter tall.

I’m amazed he could even hear me. Note to self for future writing reference: humans can be awfully contrarian.

I love reading James Gurney’s blog, Gurney Journey. (I think Steve tipped me to it originally? If so, thanks, Steve.) I love Gurney’s work, and I love learning about art and how it works and has worked. Also, I find a lot of cross-disciplinary pollination in the things he talks about. Sometimes it’s hard to explain how the stuff he says about painting or drawing seems very apt for writing. Sometimes it’s not.

Here’s Thursday’s blog post, “Mutter and Growl”, about perennial Shoulders family favorite John Singer Sargent. It’s about his making a lot of noise as he worked, but here’s the part that really struck me:

Another observer noted that he talked to himself: “This is impossible,” Mr. Sargent muttered. “You can’t do it. Why do you try these things? You know it’s hopeless. It can’t be done.”

Then: “Yes, it can, yes, it can, it can be done—my God, I’ve done it.”

I always feel so grateful when I find that cycle of despondency and triumph in master artists, or hear writers whose work I really admire confess to it. It’s not schadenfreude, it’s recognition: oh, this is fundamental.

When you’re in it, you feel like the only one. Whether it’s a small cycle during one session of painting or a big long-form up-and-down, you feel trapped in the solipsistic agony of it. But you’re not alone. We’re all down there, toiling our parallel ways out of our oubliettes to stand heedless and triumphant in the light.

I was working on a larger post about how Mass Effect 2 stacks up to my cherished dreams and suggestions, but one little digression started to snowball until I gave it its own blog post.

So, more generally about Mass Effect 2 later. One irritation I had with Mass Effect 2 early on was the seeming disappearance of my Commander Shepard’s love interest from ME1. This was addressed later on, and I am (mostly) appeased. However, let’s be clear: my extremely Paragon Commander Shepard puts the “fidelis” in Semper Fidelis. She is a one-fraternization officer. It does not matter what dizzying array of potential flirtations you put in her way, she is not interested.

And wow, does this game have a lot of potential flirtations. Just because I believe in human-alien cooperation, people, does not mean I am interested in that! It got so I was so relieved to chat with Grunt, say, or Miranda — just because I knew no inadvertent signals were being sent or received.

Of course, your in-character interactions in game are scripted, triggered by your choices in the conversation wheel, and there’s no way to tell the game “Please, stop having Shepard lean languorously at the beginning of conversations and lowering her inconsistently rendered eyelashes.” No way to preemptively tell all the potentially interested NPCs in the world that they can take a number if they want Shepard to save them from peril, but if they want Shepard’s number, they are out of luck. I understand, the system’s limited. How would they do that?

How could they implement a passive communication system by which everyone who makes Shepard’s acquaintance could learn basic information like whether or not she’s taken? One that operates on a simple system of checkboxes and information fields?

Yes, I propose SPACEBOOK.

In this as in so much else, your Shepard may vary. But this is my Shepard, and as such, you’ll note an important detail:

Many awkward situations could be thus avoided. Of course, Spacebook would be owned through shell corporations by the Shadow Broker, but who are you kidding? The Shadow Broker knows all that stuff about you anyway.

It’s that time of year again, when SFWA Members Active and Associate can help to form the short list for the Nebula Awards.

I had two short stories of my very own published this year, and I’ve posted them on the SFWA Members-only fora here:

• “Conditional Love” from the January 2010 issue of Asimov’s.
• “The Termite Queen of Tallulah County” from the October/November issue of Asimov’s.

Members can only nominate five pieces in each category, but they can comment on/recommend as many posted stories as they like!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled stuff and nonsense.

I only made four pies this year! I am such a slacker. Although I note that since we had our Thanksgiving gathering on Saturday rather than Thursday, my not posting the pie pics prior should not be proposed as part and parcel of my procrastination.

Maple Custard Pie, photographed by Ryan. Pumpkin in background. Pecan lurks.

As ever, the maple custard pie comes to us via Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-And-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie. Long may it reign!

At the beginning of the “Much Ado About Nothing” production in the BBC’s Shakespeare Retold, the credits roll over events several years before the action of the play. Beatrice is preparing for a big date; Benedick is preparing…to skip town for a big job.

Now, some of you may realize this isn’t countertextual: it’s a spinning out of one line:

DON PEDRO: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of
Signior Benedick.

BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave
him use for it, a double heart for his single one:
marry, once before he won it of me with false dice,
therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.

I could go on at some length about the casting of this production — Damian Lewis as Benedick, be still my heart; and Sarah Parish, the pretty, witty Beatrice with the motile face. But I’m here to talk about the introduction and one shot in particular where Beatrice scatters red rose petals over her bed, then looks at them, goes off screen, and comes back with a dustbuster to remove them. With her expressive face, you see the whole thought process play out.

I love this moment. It crystallizes something very important: Beatrice is a reluctant romantic. She is a romantic, or she never would have thought of the petals: but once deployed they strike her as too much, too obvious, too vulnerable, too earnest. Too romantic.

I can sympathize. I don’t know what scholar put forward the idea of the romance cult, but I first read about it in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Basically, the idea is that as the power of the Church has declined in post-Medieval Europe (and the European-inflected West) the place of Christianity has been supplied by worldly romance. Sure, the Western world is still chock-full of Christians, but Christianity can no longer safely be assumed to be a universal constant. Stories told in the Renaissance and later depend on different universal truths and aspirations, a different transcendant happiness: romantic love. Love, moreover, that transforms and elevates, that is itself a destiny and purpose. True Love with One person, Forever.

It’s natural, perhaps, that this world order should have its cynics, just as the religious one did. But most of us — not all, I note — do crave companionship, and the idea of a lasting partnership that will fix us and save us from ourselves has been programmed in from an early age. Even those of us who believe more in density than in destiny often have a yearning heart.

And so, for us, there are the reluctant romantics, the bickering lovers, the banterers and sarcastics. Beatrices and Benedicks, Hans and Leias: characters who are strong and self-reliant, resistant perhaps to the vulnerability of love or belief in it, characters who demonstrate with every barbed word and cynical protest that they will not go gently into the sunset. It’s become an overused device itself, but done right, it still enchants. In the process of convincing their doubting hearts, they convince ours too.

For the second time in recent months, I’ve woken up from a dream that I rapidly realized could be a novel idea. I scrambled out of bed and found my writing notebook and started scribbling notes. This is still a really weird sensation for me — I’m used to dreams where everything Makes Perfect Sense that, upon waking examination, Doesn’t. But these have a few plot threads which do make sense, and a bunch of images or characters I find really compelling. In this dream, I had the advantage of seeing it as an unfolding fiction while I was in it, and having a spectator along (my mom, I think?) to whom I had to explain world elements.

I have no good explanation for this, and I’m almost ashamed to talk about it publicly. I know it’s my own brain, and I put all the stuff into that subconscious soup that’s now bubbling to the surface, but it feels too easy. It’s like cheating. It’s like a gift.

On the other hand, maybe it’s less of a gift and more of a nag. Maybe my self-conscious wants me to write faster, and won’t stop putting the spurs to me until I pick up the pace….

I have written a limerick for my sister to put under a windshield wiper, should she so desire:

Every day two teenagers play hooky
To park on this street and get nookie.
Allow me to hint it:
Your windows aren’t tinted
All the neighbors could have them a look-see.

I’m currently watching over the baby monitor as my sister and brother-in-law take in a show. When they left, they asked me to go in and check that the younger nephew was sleeping in five minutes, which I did. Fast asleep. And this, mind you, with his door cracked and next door, his older brother keeping up a running dialogue with himself about whether he wanted to be a construction worker or an “old-time car driver”. Yes, he was supposed to be asleep. No, he didn’t want to be.

It made me wonder if those two perennial favorites of psychological study, birth order and sleep, have ever been considered together. When the older boy was this age, surely, we tiptoed around as he slept? The younger one is learning to sleep through all sorts of outbursts and upset. It might be interesting to find out if many older siblings are, like Ryan, light sleepers. For myself, a younger sibling, I am a deep diver into the sea of sleep. Probably a specious theory, but perhaps worth looking up tomorrow, when I’ve completed my night’s dive.

I’m having yet more travel days – this time to Seattle for what one might call Nephewcon, if one weren’t yet over the humor of appending “con” to things. (One isn’t.) Here, however, in lieu of actual content, is my favorite of the photos I took last week:

He is a fish, obviously, but I haven’t yet researched what kind. Should any of you know, please enlighten me. I feel I should have an inkling, but I have just started Mass Effect 2 so now he looks like a Krogan to me.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I should have the time to throw some links in the meat of the letter I am going to send to several branches and nodes of government about this TSA outrage. Just because my congresspeople are going to get it on paper doesn’t mean I shouldn’t imbue it with linkjuice for you, denizens of the intertube. I will also be making a version for my state government, because this seems like a good idea.

Sidenote: when I write fiction, I tend to write skeletal drafts which need fleshing out. When I write angry letters, I tend to write more voluminous drafts which need to be trimmed to a crisp, incisive point. Now I’m going to go watch a YouTube video of kittens to relieve my civic angst.