This Year's Hugos

And firthermore, with respect to Worldcon, this year I'm not a nominator but I'm a voter.

Voting bugged me in the prior Worldcons I attended. I found myself voting for an author -- not because I liked her work, which was full of people grimacing really hard while doing psionics, which is one of my pet peeves -- but because I was taking her side in a beef she had with someone else long ago.
And I wanted to make nice with the science fiction community so I went for the popularity vote. I'm still annoyed with myself over that. A lot of people sincerely enjoyed the book but I was voting for it more out of interpersonal politics than literary merit. 

This year I'm voting and I'll post reviews. I doubt if any of it's better than either KPop Demon Hunters or Dungeon Crawler Carl, but I'll give it a chance, and without any attempts at winning hearts or going for the popular choice. 

State of the Artist

I got an email today about it being the last day to sign up as a speaker at Worldcon. So I did, and I listed this blog and my neglected Instagram as info sources. 

My last entry here was kind of petulant and depressed, because that’s how I’ve been feeling. I was doing my taxes this year and it asked me about my Schedule C, and I had to stare at the screen and ask myself if I was still doing this writing thing. For which I made about three bucks last year, and paid like a hundred bucks in SFWA dues.

I was so stoked when they let me into SFWA. Here I was, hanging out with the other science fiction writers.

Then they did a “Big Question” sort of thing, asking about AI. I have mixed opinions on AI, which is good at some things and terrible at others, so I wrote a piece about “it’s nuanced.” 

But that reply earned me nothing but verbal abuse because the correct hivemind opinion is “AI is evil and should be uninvented right now, and has no redeeming features.” I sure failed that test!

I had just dropped my last novel, Star Language. I’m proud of Star Language but it’s a very antisuccessful book, in every way possible. 

First, I used AI in the cover, and I was very transparent about how I randomly generated a face with one AI, then took it into different AIs to render in various art styles until I was finally satisfied with the result – then I photoshopped the mouth and collaged it into an arrangement with some NASA star photography. 

Apparently there wasn’t enough photoshopping to dispel the AI cooties though. I was about to replicate the cover in hand embroidery (one of the many useless creative forms I’m good at) for that organic authentic look, around the same time I entered it into a literary contest. Which crashed and burned due to the organizer’s sexual misconduct. 

I was really proud of Star Language. It’s currently in the hands of a friend with Mexican ancestry who agreed to subject it to yet another sensitivity reading, because it is what I described as “Intro to Malinche for North Americans, with space aliens instead of Cortes.” I could be wrong, but it seemed to me when I was writing it that while every Mexican person seems to know who Malinche is, not many North Americans do. So I took the idea of Cortes buying a bunch of local women for his men to molest, and one of them turns out to be really good at languages – and learns his, and acts as official translator for the invasion. I turned the drama up to eleven, based the dysfunctional maternal relationship on Jeanette McCurdy’s autobio, and came up with a polyglot heroine – who does not know the story of Malinche, even though she has Mexican ancestry, because her mother is a climber who is busy trying to look white. And history repeats, leaving her stunned when the alien saviors turn out to be predatory conquerers.

I still haven’t re-done the cover yet. I’m still kind of stunned at the way the world kind of gave me a hearty slap for inserting yet another aberrant piece of art into it. After the contest fiasco and the AI-tainted cover I made it to one last Baycon to try and promote it, but lots of things went wrong at the convention, and my cat passed away a few days later, and a few more awful things happened in the wake of that, including chronic pain and neck surgery. I’ve made a few attempts at novels but I seem to be back to the pattern I was keeping for the first fifty years of my life – writing a third of a book before deciding I can’t go on. The current work in progress is a courtroom novel that isn’t speculative fiction at all (although one of the defendants is based on someone who writes it). 

But I’m not quite ready to give up on SF – only mostly. An excerpt from Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler is coming out in an anthology of stories about dinosaurs in space.

I can’t get my co-author to finalize that one, otherwise I’d be seriously promoting it and shopping it to publishers. But Sally has been insisting for the last six years it’s not final, she still needs to make changes … which she won’t give to me. So … I guess that’s her trip, not much I can do there. 

After RWRW with Sally I did one called Approaching Storm, which was half “fantasy lover in a magical dimension” and half “female John Wick takes on Qanons.” Sumiko Saulsen was the editor on that one, and has since had some decent (and well-deserved) success in this field. I took it out of print though, because I was being quite vocal about my political opinions, and did not want them to reflect on Sumiko. Who has very similar opinions and is outspoken about them, but I feel like if I’m going to go around kicking hornet’s nests I’d rather not have anybody else getting stung just because they’re standing nearby. 

It's not like I can just stop being a writer though. I was born with a word-spewing machine inside my head and this is what I do. I just happen to be doing it in challenging times, where people have to do things like building up an influencer persona in order to get their writing out into the world, with heavy competition from robots. 

And while I’m good at writing, I’m not that great at influencing. I’m direct and blunt, and I have niche tastes. I tried following Kesha’s advice – just be yourself, except turned way up – and I can do it for short spurts, but I have a hard time maintaining that kind of energy, especially when I’m dealing with health issues. I tend to make science fictional friends, then get quietly unfriended, and go back through my posts and realized it happened after I made some kind of pedantic correction or did something that I get encouraged/paid to do in other realms. One time I inadvertently informed a writer that one of his friends associated with someone he thought was evil -- straight into the airlock for that one. 

I was eavesdropping on another science fiction writer’s social media, where he was discussing Star Trek, and someone said halfway facetiously that you couldn’t claim to be into science fiction if you weren’t conversant with the latest version of Star Trek. That’s the other part of it. I’m here a little bit because of Luke Skywalker, a whole lot because of Ursula LeGuin and Wendy Pini and Octavia Butler, Robert Sheckley – and so much of the other good stuff that gets overlooked. Right now I’m infatuated with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and have been waiting until I finish the latest book to dive into group discussions (I was holding off on the series until it got near the end because I figured there was no way I could keep a plot that convoluted in my head). 

But that’s the other part of it. I don’t mesh with the hivemind. I don’t watch television, I grew up in a slightly different culture. Right now I’m kind of excited to see the new Andy Weir movie and I’m wading through social media posts going “ugh, Weir is the worst writer ever, he writes for dads, and bro dudes!” And here I am thinking “wow, I kinda liked the book.” 

That’s a constant thing for me ; I tend to enjoy things the hivemind doesn’t like, and vice versa. Being way out of synch with the hivemind is tolerable in a world where people don’t live and die by their social media reputations, but it’s suicidal if you’re trying to be an influencer. Particularly one who markets to kids (even if they’re only writing YA because the market expects non-YA to have explicit sex and I’m way too uninterested in it to compose decent erotica).

So that’s where I currently stand in relation to science fiction, deciding whether the fringes are good enough or whether I’d be happier avoiding that subculture entirely and moving to writing about ruthless court battles. Is this my crowd, and do I want to make the relationship a forever thing by writing more science fiction, or am I just a tourist who needs to head to the next stop on my literary package tour? Or do I just need to go to Disneyland again? 

On To The Next Phase

 

I just passed the 10 year anniversary of self-publishing my first book, One Sunny Night. Which grew into a bloated trilogy (with a prequel novella) because I was trying to include my extensive list of “things I wanted in my first novel.”

 

When I started writing these stories I was testing the waters. Apparently in this day and age, the procedure is for one to develop their own influencer-style presence, using social media to cultivate a following and establish one’s branding. And after giving this a shot – including this blog – I’ve concluded that while I’m good at writing, I’m not very good at this particular form of showmanship.

 

For one thing, I’m always changing my mind. In order to be a writer in modern America you need to choose a genre and a demographic, but I have trouble settling. I started out in YA science fiction, tried a dark romance but wasn’t happy with the outcome, then wandered over to horror and ran into a fresh set of obstacles.

 

So I started thinking about what exactly I want to get out of writing. I mean, I know I’m capable of writing well enough to sway hearts and minds, and sometimes I even get paid for my efforts, but I also know I really hate getting locked into a formula where I’m cranking out words I don’t really believe in because I want the money, and I now realize how much I loathe PR (this blog is kind of a testament to that; I keep deleting and re-inventing it).

 

My initial motivation was social but … after some diligent efforts and making some friendships among the 5% or so of SF fandom that I actually get along with … It’s not for me. I have a lot of personal details that diverge far enough from the norm to perpetually keep me in outsider territory. And I never liked Star Trek. You sort of have to like Star Trek if you’re going to be in American SF fandom.

 

I went to a few cons in my teens and early twenties, when I was trying to find my people, but it turned out to be yet another of those subcultures where I can blend but I don’t really feel like I’m at home. After revisiting them in the last decade, my opinion hasn’t swayed. I will be at Worldcon in August, for possibly my last convention, because (among other things), an excerpt from Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler is going to be in an anthology of stories about dinosaurs in space, a narrow genre into which I fit. I’m kind of hung up in a permanent impasse with co-author Sally over that book and won’t go into details aside from mentioning a K-Pop Demon Hunters meets Jurassic Park story might actually be marketable given the recent success of the former.

 

And for another, there are a few people who have blocked me on Facebook so I want to flip them the bird in person. Also I would like to go to Disneyland in a tax-deductable way, and this Worldcon is right nearby. So I’m headed there. I’m only a casual Disney adult but I gotta have my Magic Kingdom fix every few years.

 

I still intend to keep writing in some form or another, for the public, like I’ve been doing since the ‘80s. However, I have lots of creative identities. In addition to being a writer, I also play music. My arthritis is keeping me away from dangerous ideas like starting a band, but I’ve done some poems lately that might make good lyrics. I do textile arts like embroidery, and quilting. Most recently, I started doing miniature fabric arts – costuming Labubus like rock stars, which provides me with lots of entertainment. So I’m not sure if I’ll end up spending my creativity points somewhere else.

 

It’s been an interesting decade and things look like they’re about to get even more interesting.

Independence and Upcoming Plans

I’m feeling extremely independent this July. Also enjoying a little bit of “told ya so” energy lately, not that any good will come of it.

It has to do with yet another interminable social media forward, but this one was about music, sampling, and the Amen Break – and AI. Some dude wrote it, and he concluded with the opinion that we’re not going to be able to uninvent AI, so we needed to get some legal protections in place for creatives that are affected.

Same opinion I was expressing a year ago, when one of the science fictional futuristic societies I belong to challenged us all to write about AI. And I came up with the only opinion which did not amount to “AI is evil and we must uninvent it.” Nobody wanted to engage with it back then, although one dude did stop by to cuss me out.

There was a similar outcry when scientists sequenced DNA. A bunch of moralists wrote a letter demanding they cease all research on this issue right now, because it can only lead to evil.

I’ve been stepping back from science fiction ever since. I do have a couple more books rattling around in my head that I want to eventually write. At the moment I’m fascinated with quilting, and working on my first quilt.

My motivation for taking up novel writing was more about socializing. A lot of people have this bizarre delusion that the main reason people write novels is so they can get rich, but hardly any novels make money unless they’re authored by somebody like Stephen King, who has put a lifetime’s worth of effort into establishing his career. Those type of books have broad mainstream appeal. For the rest of us slobs writing what the publishing industry used to term “midlist” (weird books that appeal to a small audience), we’re on our own. And hopefully we enjoy activities like constantly peppering social media with updates on what our writer persona is doing.

I had this notion that I could spend my twilight years maintaining a writer persona on a small time basis, hanging out at conventions, discussing new technology and futuristic stuff. That idea collapsed once I spent some serious time in the subculture. I made a few friends, but I also found a lot of hivemind behavior like what I described on the subject of AIs. Sometimes the hivemind opinions made sense and other times they were grounded in weird theories steeped in obsolete and speculative ideas. Like the one about destroying institutional discrimination by writing novels with positive role models. Usually it amounted to something more like bullying obscure novelists for their perceived sins against the received wisdom about positive role models (search “helicopter story” and “Requires Hate” for some digressions). Since I’m an obscure novelist, as well as notoriously antisocial, it seemed like there was a good chance I’d eventually wind up on the receiving end of some hivemind dogpile for bizarre fabricated reasons.

That’s why my more politically oriented horror novel is out of print now. I’m not sticking my neck out to criticize politics in an environment where I don’t have a lot of trust in my own side.

The horror novel about how space aliens subjugate earth by manipulating a populist election and basing their strategy on Cortes’ conquest of Mexico is still in print. Nobody likes that one because it has a cover containing multiple elements, one of which went through a few passes of AI, so re-doing the cover in handmade embroidery to give it that authentic sort of aesthetic is on my “to-do” list. I like it though, so it stays up.

Lots of political turmoil is happening right now, and I don’t have much to say about it. Maybe an “I told you so” here and there. Sometimes I tell myself I’m with the Third Thing that arises out of the ashes like a phoenix, some kind of “enough is enough” movement made up of disaffected yet pragmatic folk teaming up to keep democracy and human rights afloat. Other times, I look at what’s happening in the world and console myself with the idea that I’m old and will be very surprised if I last another decade.

And then I close the blackout curtains and resume working on my quilt until the gloominess lifts.

Aside from the quilt, I’m juggling two theoretical projects.

The first one has to do with Sebastian “Baz” Rose, my teen idol character from the dinosaur book. I started writing a sequel about him and got bogged down in discussions with my co-author, who wanted him to be fighting the forces of patriarchy. I preferred having him live in a place where there wasn’t a whole lot of patriarchy forces getting in peoples’ way, so we had a philosophical split that resulted in me losing Baz until the intellectual property battle resolved. Kind of like what Walt Disney went through with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Now that I’ve got Baz back, I’m sending him to a faraway planet, where his assignment is to assemble a band and make a hit record. At first I was thinking of putting him in a crime drama, fighting the sleazebuckets who tend to infest popular music. Then, when I came to terms with the idea that crime dramas aren’t really my preferred genre, I tried going for Scary Science Fictional Psych Thriller, and came up with a Black Mirror-ish plot where Baz was trying to find out who partially wiped his memories.

When I came up with Baz’s character, I did a whole lot of research on teen idols and boy bands. The main thing I learned was that the only common thread had to do with financial exploitation. Some idols fall to the depths of depravity, others continue leading charmed lives until they die peacefully of old age. Then there are some like Michael Jackson, who spend their lives bouncing between extremes. They all get ripped off by older men dangling them before enthusiastic mostly-female consumers.

The second most important thing I learned is that they’re people. We tend to think of them as being the face of a multidisciplinary team of professionals including songwriters, choreographers, and makeup artists, all conspiring to remove money from girls’ wallets. They’re the focus of lots of hate from jealous teen boys. But basically they’re just musical kids, the type who join garage bands. Because of their culture, or their parents, or the opportunities that crossed their paths, or maybe because they were exceptionally pretty or talented, or both, they wound up in grownup show biz instead of high school orchestras. Musical kids are like water, they’ll flow wherever you channel them. The music business, however, is full of predatory opportunistic sharks that occasionally eat their own young by accident. All the biographies I read were full of similar stories about “the time they woefully underpaid me” and “the time I got attacked by deranged fans” and “suddenly I had all this money so I started doing drugs.”

And I realized they were just like the musical kids I’d grown up with, practicing in garages, struggling to cover top forty hits. Singing in chorus, playing in the orchestra. Going to dance class, taking lessons on piano and guitar. They just had parents who steered them in different directions.

I did more research on Baz’s character than any other character I’ve written. Possibly he’s some version of my Jungian animus that I didn’t know about, or the manifestation of my own inner chaos. Since I’m a major Stephen King fan, I’ve wondered if Baz is my Holly Gibney. That’s quite impressive for a character whose job was to look really good in music videos while being an insufferable prick in person. As comic relief. Although he was also incredibly brave and heroic whenever the need arose, and most of his insufferable tendencies clearly had to do with the dysfunctional world he lived in. Like expecting girls to be down for instant sex, because he encounters so many of them who are. The more three-dimensional he got, the more I started gradually making him more sympathetic, until finally he turned into the sort of guy whose voice I could channel for an entire book.

Lately I’ve decided to try taking him back to comedy. I wasn’t happy with either the gangsters or the psych thriller, both seemed market-driven and fake … so instead I decided to make the story ABOUT being market-driven and fake as a lifestyle (i.e. participating in the music business), and now it’s leaning more toward being a comedy with thinly disguised musician gossip here and there. A fish-out-of-water comedy as Baz, who has superhuman levels of confidence, tries to assemble his band and make a hit record. On a tight deadline. On an unfamiliar planet full of aliens and strange cultures.

So that’s the book I hope to have done in time to justify attending Worldcon next year, assuming it doesn’t get cancelled due to nuclear war or anything like that.

I’m not even sure if I want to do any promotion, but Baz sort of needs the kind of creative control that only self-publishing can provide. Mainly because it’s a story about a creative having constant conflicts with corporate overlords over things like having a marketable image. Submitting that to a corporate publisher would be sort of like trying to find a lawyer to represent you in a class action suit against all lawyers. I can’t think of a better way to go out with a bang after a lifetime of artistic self-sabotage.

So it’s more of an internal satisfaction kind of book than anything else.

Then when that’s done I want to write one more, also a comedy. Lots of people can write thrillers, including me, but I also can write comedy, since not many people can pull that off.

Anyway, this last one takes place in Hawai’i. It’s a ghost story, about teenagers who have to repatriate some Hawaiian artifacts stolen by grandma, a Vaudeville entertainer who did a ukulele act playing fake hapa haole songs back in the 1920s but now she’s a ghost trying to repent. That one I’m actually going to aim at a small Hawai’i publisher as a local style beach novel with some stealth history lessons.

Until I actually do any of that, I’m probably going to be putting the blog on hold unless I feel a great burning need to comment on the modern world we live in, and its deficiencies. Being a novelist was an interesting experiment but it’s not giving me the kind of results I’m seeking as far as interesting conversations about the future. Time to head in different directions.

Jumping Right In Front Of My Face

One of the reasons I often find my thoughts returning to GamerGate has to do with the fact that I was running a “games and gender” focused blog for a few years. I shut it down shortly before GamerGate happened, saying that I was throwing my hands in the air and pronouncing the intersection of videogames and gender to be a mere facet of a convoluted thought system I really didn’t care to explain, defend, study, or understand. 

It all had to do with an incident where some woman in an online chat group was having an apparent meltdown following what she described as bullying by male gamers. After asking a few questions, and provoking a few outbursts while doing that, the story came out. She was in an online multiplayer game. Some other gamers came up to her avatar, surrounded her, and had their avatars jump up and down. 

If they were saying anything, she couldn’t hear it as she played with chat disabled. There’s no physical contact in an MMO, you can walk right through people, so it’s not like they were harming her. She could have walked right through their jumping avatars. Or teleported her character to a new location, or entered a dungeon, or switched to a different character. 

I was trying to get to the bottom of this, because games and gender was supposedly my forte, and I wanted to see if I could help her – perhaps file a report against the assaulting players. Except … they hadn’t really done anything, but when I said that, she turned furious.

“They were jumping right in front of my face!!!!!”

And then a man who was in the chat said something like “there there, baby.”

And she turned to him and said “it was awful! Jumping right in front of my face!!!”

“You’ve been through a lot, baby,” he said, comfortingly.

“It was terrible,” she agreed, and I could almost see her falling into his arms as my clueless ass realized this was some kind of stupid mating dance that I’d stumbled across. Not an instance of misogynist oppression. For all I knew, the jumping avatars were his buddies and he’d asked them to annoy this computer-skills-lacking woman as an icebreaker. So he could take advantage of her lack of skills, maybe. And she was eating it up in that particular “desperate for male attention” sort of way that leads one to conclude she might possibly also be looking for people to take advantage of. 

That was the point in time when I declared that games and gender were both subjects way outside my scope of knowledge. I folded up my blog and proceeded to delete it, and that was well in advance of GamerGate. So I dodged a bullet as far as the resulting online wars. Since then I’ve positioned myself as an Absolute Neutral, in classic roleplayer terminology. I’m a gamer, and I’m a woman. I’m familiar with both of these things. 

From my game familiarity, I know there are a lot of women players. Some present themselves as men or only stick with friends and family. Some are sex workers looking for naïve men, large quantities of which are present in MMOs. Some are lonely ladies in search of romance, whether real or roleplay. Some just like games. Some were dragged in by their husbands-boyfriends-kids and developed a fondness. 

There are also a lot of gamers who are sexist bro types. A lot of the women I know, who do not play games, are convinced that this is the predominant type of gamer. And here comes a distracting side anecdote.

I’m also a major music fan. Recently the same article was linked by several of my friends and groups. The article concerned racist behavior by a handful of people involved with a music genre. 

When my music fan group linked it, an intelligent nuance discussion resulted, in which fans from all different races participated and contributed. This group normally posts about music, travel and fashion – happy things. 

When my writers’ group – which has lately become a repository for long, catastrophizing copypasta about politics – the reception was a lot different. “That whole genre is bad!” “Being a fan of anything is bad!” “People who waste their time on frivolous pastimes like music instead of politics are bad!” 

Since both groups are mostly women in the same age range, I started looking at differences, and the main one I noted was that the music people were priming each other with happy posts – songs, smiling girls displaying their outfits, invitations to gatherings. The writing people were wringing their hands over various flavors of impending doom. 

They were in that “jumping right in front of my face!!!” headspace, being absolute and judgmental, and infuriated, and absolutely nothing was likely to sway them. 

I’ve seen that same dynamic happen in a great many discussions ever since. People who operate like sentient beings when they’re not under emotional strain can turn into enraged robots, dividing the world into good and bad. All it takes is a steady flow of outrage posts. 

People who didn’t give a rat’s patootie about videogames before GamerGate suddenly read inflammatory material and decided “games are bad.” And people who had been on the losing side of outraged politically correct mobs, meanwhile, flocked to the offended gamers side and presented their own counter-theories like “feminism is bad.” 

And here we are today, stuck in some kind of bad parody of dialecticism that has ratcheted us down into a mosh pit of reactive contrarianism. Measles outbreaks while people are yelling “medicine is bad.” A censorship debate that has veered from “all censorship is bad” to “all books are bad” (seriously rotten time in history to decide you want to write fiction, let me tell you). 

I’ve been stubbornly resisting it on Facebook, hanging out with a cadre of non-spammy types who post good stuff – the album they’re listening to, a picture of their lunch, their trip to the park with their kid and how the leaves looked that day. All my other social media accounts are exclusively dedicated to music fandom. I even have an Instagram for the coat I wear to concerts, because I decorate it with a new patch for each one – sort of an inclusive old-lady version of the punk/metal battle jackets I used to wear in my youth. 

I kinda sorta maybe want to write more fiction. I also kinda sorta maybe want to make a quilt, and embroider some guitar straps, and refine my “in case of total economic collapse” busking set. I’ve got a remarkable singing voice now that my throat is mostly healed, kind of a mean old swamp witch type of sound, like someone who would be doing battle with Stevie Nicks. Although I have nothing against Stevie Nicks and in fact am going to see her in October. 

I think the thing that’s holding me back from making art is the same thing that made me wrap up my games and gender blog. The realization that everything these days gets transformed into a highly polarized issue, thickly layered with other peoples’ emotional experiences. 

For example, I can get behind a feminism that says “women don’t have to get married” and “women can get an education.” I can’t get behind one that leverages those ideas into “women who get teased because they’re new players have been subjected to horrific structural discrimination.” Or the kind of feminism that surfaced in one of my groups where someone declared that it was misogynist to tell a woman she’s wrong. 

As far as the question of who even is a woman, similar things happen as people react and reduce their arguments to polarities like “bodies are a social construct” and “we should imprison women who won’t wear pink.” 

My feminism, if you can call it that, these days runs to a narrow aspect of Korean feminism that I thought sounded intriguing. In Korean feminism there’s a list of things one should avoid doing with men, such as dating them, but there’s also a deliberate focus on building nonsexual friendships with other women.

This hit me like a bolt of lightning, probably because I come from a culture that is sexist in different ways, where the idea of women forming social bonds outside their immediate communities and families is not typically encouraged. So I’ve been participating in music fandoms with the aim of making women friends to enjoy music with. 

And I’ve been retreating from groups set up ostensibly to support activities, like creative writing, that end up being hunting grounds for sexual predators, or captive audiences for cosplay leaders, or potential consumers, or political sycophants. 

One of the things that fascinated me about being a gamer was the way groups functioned once people were mostly equalized in a virtual world where you can’t make snap judgments about people based on their clothes, appearance, accent, et cetera. One griefer can turn the experience into an agonizing stressful waste of time, but one good leader can transform an awkward pack into a winning team. 

And yeah, that one woman having a fit about cartoon characters jumping right in front of her face wasn’t really behaving in a charismatic and influential way, but she chased me right out of the subject of games and gender, because I decided there were so many emotions attached to the subject that it was useless to write about them from a limited context like videogames. The same problems that surface in games also surface in real life. If I’m in a culture where a woman overstates a threat as a way to look seductive in a mating context, talking about the reality of the threat is pointless. The reality has become the performance, not the inspiration for it, at least according to prevalent ways of thinking. 

I mean, I could draw parallels to the current battle over immigration. One side has women doing distress displays, and people acting protective. The other has nerds minimizing concerns, like my coldblooded refusal to appreciate the distress performance at face value. Everyone polarized and slinging poo at each other like monkeys in the zoo, while trying to prove they love/hate immigrants more than all the rest. Communication breakdown, for complex psychosocialsexual reasons. 

I had a beautiful live music experience last week, and my brain is still awash in happiness chemicals. I’m  even less inclined than usual to engage with polarizing rhetoric. I’m mostly in agreement with Pope Leo, I’ve noticed Bill Gates yelling at Elon Musk, and I’m feeling reassured that there are other people out there who are more interested in compassion than cruelty. I hope they prevail. 

Right now I’m reflecting back on the unwinnable games and gender war and thanking my spidey sense that I stepped out of that particular battle before things deteriorated sharply.

Images help SEO so I'm posting this photo of yarn for no other discernable reason

Aloha!

The tour I was following concluded at the Neil Blaisdell Center in Honolulu. A place I know by it’s prior name, the Honolulu International Center, or HIC. I used to go see the Ice Capades there when I was small, and the circus, and even some musical acts like the Jackson Five and the Osmonds. 

A few years ago I was following a different band, sort of an alternative jam band from the nineties. They had a lot of cool people in their fandom and I hit it off with some of them. Until one day I found myself in a monumentally stupid argument with the non-binary offspring of one of the band members. 

This was right after the Lahaina fire. I was being sad on social media, when suddenly this person appears in my comments, angrily informing me that I am not allowed to mourn for Lahaina, or even visit Hawai’i, because I am an evil colonizer. 

After this exchange I found myself unable to appreciate that band anymore. The dude I once respected as a freewheeling poet had suddenly morphed into a drugged-out loser who couldn’t be bothered to do any parenting after spawning a psychopath who appeared to be missing a few empathy-related chromosomes.

I also feel like that was the moment when I completely cut my ties with the angry left, who were following what they thought were hivemind marching orders regarding how to think about Hawai’i that originated with a conspiracy meme spread by a real estate speculator trying to scare people away and buy their land cheap. I note that exactly one month later, the Gaza attack happened, and the same people moved to denouncing the Israel side as evil colonizers – it’s like the rage was already there, it was just waiting for a current event to move into the next available parking spot. 

I had Palestinian friends back in the nineties. I’m aware of what has been going down. My opinion on Middle East politics is that I’m generally in favor of minimized killing but I accept that this is a place with thousands of years of history and culture which I could never understand without years of focused study, and my related opinions are not worth much. 

I do have a few opinions about Hawai’i. I haven’t been studying it intensely for years but I was born there, in the sixties, on Maui. At the time, the island population consisted of approximately thirty thousand people, most of them involved in growing rice and sugar. There was no tourist industry yet and Kaanapali was undeveloped. The few tourists interested in Maui stayed in Lahaina, at the Pioneer Inn. 

My dad was the manager at the S.H. Kress store, which was sort of like Woolworth, or Target, or Long’s without the drugs. He wore aloha shirts to work. We lived in a house next door to a farm, and the highlight of my toddler day was watching the cows get led between the pasture and the barn. Our dog, a black laborador-boxer cross named Winnie, would bark excitedly to let me know the show was happening.

When I was about four, we moved to Wahiawa, in central Oahu, which was big and crowded compared to sleepy Maui. We spent a few years there. My teenage cousin came out for an extended visit due to family trouble; she attended Lelehua High School and was always bringing her teenager friends over to play Beatles records. Without realizing she was starting a little addict on a lifetime of chasing musical highs. 

We acquired my brother when I was five. Like me, he was adopted. That was right around the time I started kindergarten. 

My childhood was complicated beyond my toddler years. I was spoiled. Morbidly obese in kindergarten. All the toys I wanted. My parents acquired me when they were in their mid-thirties and smothered me with attention. 

My dad, Cecil (just like the sea serpent), had a mean grumpy mom, a series of stepfathers, and a younger brother, John, who was smart at math, and got into IBM way back in the fifties. And had a normal name too. Older brother Cecil served in the Navy during the Korean War and fell in love with Hawai’i, and moved there after the war was over. He wasn’t a surfer, or a fisherman, or a boat enthusiast. He was just a dreamy impractical guy who loved to stare at the waves. He was always taking me to fanciful movies like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantasia, Arsenic and Old Lace. He took me to Lost Horizon, a musical about Shangri-La, and told me it had been his favorite story as a kid – Western woman finds her way to mysterious exotic Asian town where the people are beautiful and never age, where she falls in love. That was how he felt about Hawai’i. He genuinely liked Asian and Polynesian culture, although it was definitely from a bit of a colonizer mindset. He was more about integrating with the community than profiting from it though, which is why he stayed in retail instead of making money in the nascent computer industry. 

My mom, Layla (just like the song), was unusual. Orphaned at three. Raised in a strict Texas orphanage which followed the “science” of the day, such as swapping out caregivers regularly so the children wouldn’t get attached. Extremely dependent all her life – never learned to drive, never went farther than a couple blocks to the grocery store without my dad. Family curses left and right – her genetic family carried Huntington’s Disease, as well as a certain toxic mindset. One particularly memorable example: mom’s niece refused to let her attend mom’s sister’s 100th birthday party because she didn’t belong to the same church. 

And yeah, she passed that emotional abuse on. And then she’d feel guilty, and feed me a fattening treat. And tell me I was special. Better than the other kids, thanks to that 160+ IQ, not to mention the natural blonde hair. The other kids didn’t like me much, and I don’t blame them. 

Later in life, I encountered my biological mother Susie (as in “Suzie Q”). A cerebral nerd who had wanted to be an anthropologist. But her dad refused to pay for her education. He did pay to put her through school to be a dental hygienist, so she did that, and then moved to Hawai’i and got a job at the Kamehameha School helping students with their teeth while attending anthropology classes at U of Hawai’i. 

Fortunately for me, and not quite as fortunately for her, she encountered my dad, James (as in Bond), who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a submarine, the U.S.S. Charr. 

So here’s where I get all of my names … my adopted parents named me Sharon (for Walt Disney’s adopted daughter) Leilani (for the song Sweet Leilani, composed by the bandleader at the Moana Surfrider, where I was just staying). 

When I was a teenager and interested in punk rock, I determined that “Sharon” was not punk enough. However, if I changed one measly letter, I could have the much cooler name of Charon, which evoked yet another song, Sails of Charon by the Scorpions. As well as the moon of Pluto, and the ferryman from mythology, and a bunch of references in comics and science fiction. It was my stage/pen name for a while, and then I started writing and actually getting paid by checks in that name. So I did an informal name change and started working and paying taxes as Charon, and after doing that for about forty years, the Real ID laws forced me to go to court and spend five hundred dollars doing a formal name change so that my license would match my tax records rather than my birth certificate. After I had only been doing it twenty years, I learned that I had inadvertently named myself Charon after my dad’s ship, Charr. In the Steven King Dark Tower universe, names including “Char” relate to death. 

My dad was an asshole. Very handsome, very drunk, very irresponsible. Sired lots of bastards, including at least one with a girl under eighteen. Died of a massive heart attack on his favorite barstool on his fiftieth birthday, after many years of disappointing the women in his life. He hooked up with my mom, she dumped him after getting to know him a little better. They ran into each other at a party in Waikiki, and both of them had been drinking, and here I am. She tried to make it work and they stayed together for the pregnancy, moving to Pa’ia on Maui for my gestation, but Suzy decided in the third trimester she didn’t want to be the wife of an unfaithful drunk, so she gave me up for adoption. 

When I asked my biological mother what she would have named me, she told me “Lonne.” It’s a German boy’s name that belonged to her grandfather, who emigrated here from the real estate that would later be known as Germany. She thought it would be an unusual and distinctive name for a girl. It’s pronounced more like “Lana” at home but she wanted to call me “Lonny” along the same logic as Bette Davis. Since both my mothers were in agreement about at least part of my name, I use “Lani” socially.

My names are both incredibly hard for Americans to pronounce. I don’t really blame them for Charon, the moon and the song are usually pronounced with hard Ch- (cherish, chain) rather than the soft one (Cheryl, champagne) that I use. I am more mystified by how they botch Lani by pronouncing it Lainey or Lanny instead of the “Lawn Knee” that I tend to expect. 

When I’m in Hawai’i, though, I can order coffee with zero hesitation, and they’ll pronounce it correctly when it’s ready. Same thing happened in New York, actually, where they’re more cosmopolitan. A lot of Americans stumble.

I don’t consider myself an American. I’m a legal citizen because I was born in the United States of America four years before it became a state, and all four of my adopted and biological parents are citizens too. I was not, however, born on the North American continent, nor was I raised there.

I didn’t find my biological parents until I was in my thirties. There was a big experiment back then where the US was trying to save money on social safety nets by taking kids from the poor and/or unprepared and/or single and swapping them into comfortable middle class families. Then psych students would go interview them as busywork. Go see the movie Three Identical Strangers for a good introduction to the whole Baby Scoop Era thing. 

Until then, there was sort of an underlying assumption that my birthmother was some naïve girl who had found herself “in trouble” after an ill-advised affair with a local, back in the days when abortion was illegal. I didn’t get confirmation I was white until I was mid-thirties. Until then, I went around with a sort of skeleton-key approach to race – could be half-anything. The mirror told me that Parent X was likely not full Black or full Asian, but potentially hapa (that’s what we say instead of “mixed” like the people from the American continent say). I’ve got a solid build, and people have speculated I look slightly Polynesian. 

Although I owe my existence to abortion being illegal, I have No Opinion about it. I respect both anti- and pro- believers as having valid opinions. I’ve worked for both pro- and anti- forces in my legal career, and was peripherally involved in Dobbs, which I saw as a big disappointment. It’s not my focus, and I believe it falls under the umbrella of Universal Healthcare, which I emphatically support. If people want to use it as a political football that distracts from UHC, well, that’s not a strategy I’d personally choose assuming I wanted to win. So I reserve the right to remain detached as far as my abortion opinions. I have zero problems with affirmatively supporting the idea that people of all genders should receive appropriate health care that doesn’t have a bunch of philosophical or religious strings attached to it. 

Anyway, I’ll blather more about politics later, but that’s sort of why I abandoned that alternative nineties band and their overly zealous offspring in a red-hot minute, and then they broke up anyway. During the pandemic I got interested in different music, especially this one particular K-Pop idol, and I made a bunch of online friends fangirling over him. We planned to meet if he ever did a world tour, which seemed remote at the time, but he just did his world tour, and I followed it to four different stops: New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Honolulu. 

My last band was all “haw haw, you have to say you hate your birthplace or you can’t hang out with us!”

My new band is more “hey Lani, would you like an excuse to visit Hawai’i because I added a stop there?” 

I love my birthplace more than I loved either of my mothers, in fact. My adopted mother was at odds with Hawai’i. Terrified by the bugs. Repelled by the fish (she was a meat eater from Texas who refused to have fish in her kitchen, or to eat in a restaurant that smelled like it). I never ever saw her in a swimsuit. 

Plus, there’s a certain kind of “my husband dragged me out here to this godforsaken outpost” type of haole (the Hawaiian word for white) wife that winds up in the islands. They moved out there because their husband wanted to, or his career requested it. And they wanted to be a good wife so they said okay. But when they got there, they got smacked in the face with the multicultural reality of Hawai’i, which looks a lot different from the Hawai’i in the travel ads, where everyone is slim and sexy and white. So they get snubbed by their neighbors for acting high and mighty. Pretty soon the only people who will associate with them are other white bigots who don’t quite fit in, and they sit around telling each other how different and weird things are.

I thought my mom was weird because she was always remarking on things that I was born with as though they were foreign and unusual. My classmates’ names were so exotic! Oh look, I drew local flowers in art class! Wow, look at me eating Japanese snack foods! I developed the impression that I belonged there, but she didn’t. And when I got old enough to socialize, I gravitated toward the snack-sharing Asian nerds as opposed to the bossy haole girls. I was still fighting with my own brattiness but even then I could tell I was far better at sitting quietly with the other nerds, reading books, than interacting with power-tripping non-reading kids who resembled me. 

There’s a scene in James Michener’s Hawai’i where one of the missionaries makes his kids wear long wool underwear in the winter, even though they live on Maui, because that’s accepted as a superior and healthy practice back home. Kind of exemplifies the whole “we’re not really from here, we’re BETTER” attitude that haoles, particular the American ones, occasionally get.

Me, I’m a haole from the islands. I know better. I know I’m not the racial majority and the world does not exist for my benefit. I try to live with Hawaiian values like aloha, and being pono, and doing malama. I’m on the other side of this silly line my mom insisted on drawing. By the time I hit my teens, that line had calcified. We’re from different civilizations. Different cultures. Different worldviews. Yours is grounded in ignorance and supremacy, and I reject it. And you think mine is unforgivably brown, and a tad too savage. 

I still think about moving back. Then I remember I’m addicted to live music. In Hawai’i, live music is something that usually involves cover bands or local jams, not going out to see some big star. That’s why I was so grateful my K-Pop dude added Honolulu to his list. Also, I have rent control in San Francisco, in a Victorian flat where I’ve been happily living for over thirty years.

There’s water on three sides, plenty of Asian food, and I can see a palm tree from my window. Too cold for swimming here though. 

When I go to Hawai’i I end up doing extremely pedestrian things, like eating in food courts. This time I took the bus to the museum, stopping at the mall before and after for plate lunches. I ate meat jun, tan tan udon, katsu curry, char siu fried rice, macadamia nuts, and low-sodium spam. 

I spent most of the time in Waikiki. I had a lovely room at the Moana Surfrider with a window seat looking down on the entrance and I would park myself there with a sparkling water, playing Hearthstone on my iPad and watching the crowds, listening to the buskers outside and the dance band downstairs. Early in the mornings I would spend an hour or so floating around in the ocean. Then I’d run away before the sun got too high, wash my hair, and wander around Waikiki in search of lunch. Late afternoon I’d go back in the water, after applying a thorough coating of sunscreen, and that’s how I managed to avoid getting sunburned. 

A few times I thought about going exploring, but I decided it would just make me sweaty, and sad, and nostalgic. This trip was partially to commemorate one year after my neck surgery, and it felt good to be stretching my muscles in the ocean. Rather than bouncing around in a car. 

I made some cool friends among the other music fans at the show, and on my last night, two of them took me out to a fancy dinner at the Aulani resort. I made this patched and embroidered mini-skort to wear to the show, which features anime character Princess Knight; someone from the meetup just happened to be wearing a shirt featuring her picture. Princess Knight was very popular in Hawai’i – another reference mainland kids from America don’t understand. 

I’m really not sure where the world is going to wind up. I have people on my social media feed adamantly insisting it’s going to be thoroughly dystopian. So I decided to travel to all my happy places while I’m at this intersection of being financially capable, physically strong and living in a peaceful country. 

I’ll probably elaborate on my politics at length at some point, having already said more than I intended about that subject. One of the things that I was reflecting on during my trip was the idea that while I’m firmly behind liberal science (high speed trains, walkable cities, sustainable energy, anti-racism), I’ve got issues with liberal religion (Freud, Marx, solipsism, nurture, purity testing and so on). As such, I’d rather focus on nuts and bolts practicality like healthcare, and then when everyone’s pain is being treated we can expound on personal philosophies such as the one that goes “I’m the center of the universe and I created all of you in my mind!” 

For now, Hawai’i tends to save me from extremist thinking. For example, I had one pop up on social media today, a meme about the new age tendency to split medicine into Western (greedy, corporate, profit-centered) and Eastern (enlightened, wise, holistic) as a sales tactic, realizing their mostly-American consumers aren’t really familiar with Asian-ness and see it as exotic and mysterious. Maybe they’ve even seen movies about the ageless people of Shangri-La. Or maybe they identified with the rich girl in Breakfast Club who packed sushi in her lunchbox – familiarity with the exotic as status symbol. 

A lot of people presume I’m rich, given my upbringing in Hawai’i. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My dad worked as a retail manager and my mom was a housewife. We were solidly middle class, with a dark blue Dodge Dart and a black and white television set. We went to the drive-in movie theater, and to McDonald’s. We attended church luaus and Easter parades. On the weekends we’d do beach picnics or the zoo, or sometimes Sea Life Park to see the dolphins and the reef pool. We were frequent visitors at the Bishop Museum, a place I recently dropped by. We didn’t have a boat but occasionally we’d get invites aboard other peoples’ vessels, and sometimes the sunset dinner cruise boats would do off season madness, like raise a Jolly Roger and offer a pirate cruise where all the kids get free eyepatches and fake doubloons, and I loved that sort of thing. 

I fought with my parents a lot, but I had fun with my friends. We were one of the first families to move to Mililani, a suburban housing development in the center of the island. The family across the street had seven kids, with two daughters in my approximate age range, and we liked to explore the border between tropical jungle and neatly plowed land awaiting future houses. Sometimes I’d go with their family to Barber’s Point Beach on the weekends, which was for military only and had lots of cool lava caves to explore. I was still a fat prissy whiny brat, but age and socialization were mellowing me out. Eventually I’d discover psychedelics and introspection. Back then I was just a chunky bookworm, working off the baby fat by riding my bike as far as I could go. 

Weird things make me nostalgic. I was walking around the Museum neighborhood and saw a school that looked a lot like one I attended, classrooms open to the tropical breeze. I remember kids would bring their favorite records, 33-speed albums and single-song 45s. We would stash them in our cubbies all day, and then after school a couple of the cool teachers would bring out the school record player and let us throw a dance party on the patio. Everyone danced. We didn’t have that social stigma about boys asking girls to dance that mainland American kids have. Everyone danced, either in groups or solo, and we had a great time. I sat there looking at that schoolyard for a while, thinking about dancing to ABC by the Jackson Five and Fire by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Probably looked a little creepy, so eventually I moved on. 

The only mainland place that gives me positive childhood memories is Disneyland, which we used to visit every year. Until we moved back to the mainland, and spent a few years struggling. Things were more expensive, and there were bill collectors rather than vacations requiring airplanes. Puberty was smacking me around, and I did not fit into the mainland social scene at all. 

My relationship with my parents backfired on them. When I was little they had successfully bought my love with plenty of toys and fattening food, and once they ran out, I got belligerent. I left at seventeen, still relatively feral until various boyfriends and roommates schooled me in basic human interaction. 

Hawai’i always had time, and space, and patience, for me. Even when I was struggling with the rest of the world. After moving out I spent twenty years before heading back, after my first pregnancy turned tragic. And learning there had been a Hawaiian Renaissance in my absence, and discovering terrific artists, and musicians like Hapa, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and Keali’i Reichel. 

Since then I try to make it back there every few years, just to see what has changed. And float in the water off Waikiki. And eat too much local food, although this last time I behaved myself and stuck to low-sodium spam and unsalted macadamia nuts. And only a few lilikoi-flavored things, most of which I didn’t finish. 

I’ve been thinking about lots of heavy things on this trip. My mortality, which might come to an end sooner than I was anticipating, and whether Social Security will continue being available or if I’ll just end up working until I drop. Which I actually wouldn’t mind, I like my career. 

The writing part, however … 

My first few books concerned teenagers. There were no explicit sex scenes. There were teens doing off-camera sexual things, impliedly, in the Sonny Knight trilogy. There was some ineffective awkward unconsummated bumbling around related to sex in the dinosaur book, which ended with the heroine deciding she wanted one romantic kiss with Mr. Trouble, but nothing further. And there were a few gay characters. 

That means they’re way too lewd for red states, and not nearly lewd enough for the speculative fiction writing crowd. Somewhere in the Twilight Zone of lewdness. I note that some hapless author writing pedo-flavored explicit fiction got hauled into jail in another country. I would never go there. Writing erotica doesn’t come naturally to me, I rarely read it, and I have to have other people go over it to make sure I’m not being cliched. I’m coming from the other side of the problem, as an asexual worried my material isn’t lewd enough. 

I tried writing adult horror, with lewdness, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was more of a way of dealing with pandemic anxieties. The pandemic really ruined a lot of horror themes, since suddenly life was scarier than escapism. My horror wasn’t successful, and I’ve taken one of the books out of print. The other one, which deals with immigration themes is basically a retelling of Malinche and Cortes as a fotonovela-style drama set in America involving space aliens. I think I put lots of brain cells into that one but it’s a total flop. 

Which leaves me in a weird limbo. I don’t want to write for kids at all, let alone explicit material involving them (and secretly I’m rejoicing that I don’t have to try to write that sort of John Green, Sarah Maas, non-explicit erotica sort of thing anymore now that it’s emphatically out of fashion). I really don’t want to write anything erotic, period, since it would be market-directed fanservice rather than anything I really wanted to do. 

So I’m not sure whether I’ll continue writing anything at this point. Possibly it’s time to pursue another art form, or just devote my twilight years to coloring books and acquiring World of Warcraft achievements. 

There are two books that I think are still in me, however. The first is a spin off from the dinosaur book featuring one of the boy band dudes. I want to make fun of the music industry basically, except on a faraway planet where all the names have been changed. 

The other one has to do with wanting to give back to Hawai’i. Writing a beach book that amuses and entertains tourists. Or maybe collaborating with an author on a storybook, or a non-fictional coffee table book. It doesn’t even have to be a book, but since I’m a writer, it sprang to mind. I feel that if I do that, I’ll feel okay about returning there for my final years. Which is something I’d really like to do.

Running Around, Doing Stuff

I’ve been traveling. I spent a week in New York City, then I went to Los Angeles and treated myself to a day at Disneyland. Soon I’m heading to Hawai’i. I’m visiting all my happy places, while I’m happy. There are all sorts of things looming in the future which threaten my continued happiness, but for now, life is good. Because I can afford to travel, and I'm healthy enough to sleep on strange beds and climb subway stairs. 

When I’m in a multiverse frame of mind, I’m convinced that I’m a New Yorker in at least half of them. Visiting New York City gives me an odd combination of longing and déjà vu. Possibly even past life memories, or epigenetic experiences handed down from my ancestors’ adventures in the city. I feel both like I belong there, like I’ve always been there, and like I can’t wait to get back home. Every block is crowded with amiable ghosts, whispering that there’s an apartment available here, that I should try the deli there. That happiness, love, companionship, and the elusive state of never-being-bored are all right around the corner, waiting for me to change my zip code. Gooble gobble, one of us!

The weather report was predicting heavy rain, and I was thinking I’d spend my time inside museums, but instead it snowed. I generally dislike snow, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to settle in San Francisco rather than New York. We don’t have snow, except for an occasional thin yet photogenic dusting over the Golden Gate Bridge. We have cold clammy fog, and we also have cold sunny days, and usually it’s hoodie weather except for the annual cold snap and heat wave.

New York City was wicked cold, and I was glad I was well prepared with a bulky down jacket and warm cashmere scarf. And a hoodie, and a thermal shirt. And a tiedye for the concert. Lately I have been rebelling from my self-imposed fashion tyranny of band shirts (the greater bulk of my wardrobe) and wearing a uniform to shows consisting of a tie dye and either cargo jeans or my cargo jacket which is decorated with 100+ patches representing all the bands I’ve seen while wearing it (@ConcertCommandoCoat on IG if that sort of thing interests you).

I’ve been dressing like one, but I was never really a Deadhead. I liked them, and I saw them live a handful of times in the eighties and nineties. Their music never really grabbed me but I was fascinated by their scene, and still have a lot of friends who are in it, and many of those friends make tie dyes. Meanwhile I’ve been trying to shed an unfortunate goth phase which led me to dress mostly in black, with band shirts, and tie dyes are a nice colorful alternative. There’s also the added bonus that people tend to treat me gently when I present myself as an old lady in a tie dye, as opposed to dressing as the gloomy old music nerd that I am.

On my first day in New York, I went for gloomy old music nerd, and wore a t-shirt celebrating The Downward Spiral (see last post). And then I walked to Central Park. In the snow. I wandered around the trails and took photos of the frozen edge of the lake, and I hung out with a Russian tour group inspecting the John Lennon memorial.

Then I went over to look at the Dakota, setting for one of my favorite novels, Time And Again by Jack Finney. And slowly made my way through the Upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the Seventh Avenue that you can’t give it away on, the Broadway I regarded. I figured out the subway relatively quick and found my way to the World Trade Center crater, and Greenwich Village, where I ate an overly rare yet delicious steak frites across the street from the Stonewall memorial.

I never did get around to seeing a Broadway play. We have those here. I’m not a major fan, although they’re fun once in a while. Nor did I eat cheesecake, too much sugar. I did eat White Castle, pastrami, and several slices of pizza. And I drank several flavors of seltzer, and had a couple baristas doublecheck to make sure I didn’t want it with cream and sugar. I balanced out my street food with visits to a couple of fancy restaurants, the Algonquin Hotel and the Russian Tea Room.

New York, to me, feels like the most American place in the world. I haven’t seen a lot of America, mostly tourist attractions and places where you transfer planes. My sole ventures outside the US have been brief stays in Mexico and Canada. I’m a homebody. If it weren’t for live music I’d never leave my county. Even with my limited experience, New York hits me right in the patriotism button. It’s full of the same kind of regular normal Americans I grew up seeing in movies and reading about in books.

I did not grow up feeling like a regular normal American. I grew up in a conquered Pacific island nation, and when I grew up I found myself wanting to live around gay commie liberals and similar people. Flag waving confuses me. I’m more about that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which in my mind means living a European lifestyle as far as walkable cities and grandiose architecture (and food) and also an Asian lifestyle with regard to technology (and food). The whole thing about living in outer burbaria and doing your shopping at a big box, and spending hours of your valuable time in a car … just no. Cars give me headaches. Probably relates to my neck issues.

I had neck surgery almost one year ago. Basically my own body was stabbing me, growing arthritis spurs that sliced my discs to ribbons and trapping one of my more frequently used nerves. The surgeon freed the nerve and fused a couple levels of neck, which helped a lot, but I also had to basically grow new muscle tissue. Which hurts. So does having a bone graft in your neck that lights up whenever it’s cold or the barometric pressure is erratic.

I’m accustomed to pain though. And now that I’m having actual zero-pain days for the first time in years, I feel like I’ve won the lottery. While I won’t speculate on what the future holds, I’m taking advantage of the fact that I can walk and subway all over New York, and then bounce back for Disneyland. After taking a few days to recover from a cold.

One of the things I’ve been doing on my journey is trying to figure out what to do with my creativity before I die. I do love writing novels but it’s an impractical labor of love. Most people don’t read novels. And I don’t get along with that many people in the subculture. I just tend to encounter the toxic call-out type of person, and make enemies for stupid reasons. I’m still planning to show up at the 2026 Worldcon, because Disneyland, and that means I’m going to crank out a novel for it to justify the expense, but you’ll hear more about that when I actually figure out what it’ll be about, and then write it.

I’ve been playing my guitar. My old lady voice is actually way better than my twenty-something voice, because I’ve got loads of character and a low alto range. There was a chance the surgery was going to make it worse, give me a permanent rasp, but it’s actually made my voice better. I’m not extroverted enough to play music though. I lack that all important customer service attitude when it comes to audiences.

And I’ve been doing fabric art. I actually learned quilting and made my first square for a group collaboration. And absolutely hated it. I’m an embroiderer, used to making visible stitches with a huge needle. Not invisible stitches with a tiny needle. I can decorate the hell out of basic garments though, so I’m experimenting with that.

Seeing New York and Los Angeles with my very own eyeballs was good for my art. It reminded me that there’s a greater America – intense concentrations of America, in fact.