At the outset, I feel it only fair to warn you that this is and will remain a ramble.  I recommend fetching a cup of tea or some other beverage.  Over on my friend M.K. Hobson’s site, she coined the term Bustlepunk.   I found this to be singularly cool at the time, and I still do.  Somewhere in the back of my head I can hear a teacher/panelist/writer/editor (I’ve heard it over and over and probably so have you.  In fact, say it with me…) “Science fiction is fiction about science.”  Whiiiiiiich isn’t really correct.  I may have to break out a fire extinguisher around here, but bear along for a few more sentences.  In fact, go and have a look at the bookstore shelves.  Even the virtual ones.  Are all the novels that come up when you go looking for science fiction about science?  NO?  I’m shocked.  SHOCKED, I tell you.  No.  I’m not shocked and neither are you.  Science fiction may be about science, but mostly it is about the effect of science, or a device, or a future and about people who live in that situation.  If it thinks like a people, it’s a people.  Don’t even go there. I intend to ramble quite enough without that particular devolution of the conversation.

Now… I like derivatives if they’re polite and play nicely.  Prosecco is high up on my list of preferred grape derivatives, for instance.    Bustlepunk is all about the polite.  Or the lack thereof.  It takes place in a technological derivation from the norm.  Cyberpunk takes place in a futuristic technological derivation from the norm that deals in the interface between wires and nerves, between flesh and computers.  Steampunk has as its effecting setting a deviation from the technological norm a bit earlier.  Victorian era.  People never really stopped writing it, though they may have skipped a bit in the middle between Vern, Burroughs, et al and the last 20 years.  This isn’t about a timeline of Steampunk, but I’d very much like to see one!  Where was I… ah yes, Bustlepunk.

Bustlepunk is such a lovely, evocative word.  The era of the bustle (and the hoopskirt, and right up through the Edwardians… but the bustle is a good middle point) evokes Merchant Ivory dramas.  Masterpiece Theater productions.  Weird thoughts of dear Miss Marple who never WORE a bustle, but who certainly evoked the high ideal of good manners and who certainly should have possessed a lovely broach with clockwork that spun backward for no reason whatever that she would reveal.  Don’t believe me about the manners?  Check out the Gibson Girl hairdos on the covers of Miss Manners some time. The bustle and its era are symbolic.  Much as steam and cyberwear are symbolic.

Bustlepunk, of course, being a speculative fiction genre, is neither a regency romance nor an Edith Wharton novel.  It has more to it than only manners.  It has aspects of Steampunk, certainly.  Zepplins may be present.  It has aspects of Victorian Gothic aesthetic.  Vampires or werewolves or zombies might haunt the gas-lit streets.  However, it seems to me that Bustlepunk, while it sets a gracious tea table at which one or both of those distinctions may have a pleasant repast, sets itself apart with the importance in the turnings of the plot and within the gears of any society… of manners.  It serves this somewhat dainty and sometimes bland repast along with the greatly appealing aperitif observation that social norms may be broken provided one does so with sufficient aplomb and grace.

Bustlepunk need not lack in action, nor indeed in bloodshed and violence.  Good gracious, people, there is such a thing as a duel and also such a thing as a serial killer and even such a thing as that ghastly boor Lord Whateverhismutziz who’s treading down one’s botanical reseach without the slightest notion that it possesses the keys to a lost kingdom, eternal youth, and you will certainly need a zepplin at this point to go off and conduct your field research.  Or else you’ll need a gold mine in Arizona from which you may transfer yourself to Mars.  Did I not mention that this was a civilized tea table, and as such it necessarily hosts the most interesting of guest devices?  Of course I did.  The Low-Techs are such dear, accommodating people once you get past their xenophobia.  And the drooling.

Waaaait a minute, I hear you say.  That’s Cyberpunk pure and classic there!  Trot off and find your copy of the SHORT STORY ‘Johnny Mnemonic’.  It’s a brilliant piece in its folding together of elements.  The science creates the situation.  It is certainly science fiction.  It deals with direct computer interface in human beings and with advanced body alteration unknown to then-medical-science and in direct rebellion.  Certainly Cyberpunk.  All good and fair.  Cyberpunk is a subset of Science Fiction.  Madam has clearly lost her tiny little mind here, eh?   The climactic resolution deals, in part, with the intersection of two social situations, and the hero’s ability to span both worlds.

You see?  And you didn’t think he even owned a waistcoat.  Oh dear.  How extraordinary of me.  Here I asked you to bring tea and completely forgot about to ask – do you take lemon, or milk with your bustlepunk?

Tags: books, bustlepunk, ramble, steampunk, writing
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Sing it with me! Actually, if you have the ability NOT to, that’s definitely for the best. Before you read the below, let me say – there are many, many people I know currently going through FAR worse medical times than I am. This is simply the tale of the circus that has been the last month and a half.

Back in December, my mother at the age of 78 attempted to lift the planet via trying to pick up a gate that was cemented into the ground. A month after the injury, when her doctor realized that there was no x-ray done in the emergency room, she ordered one and what Mom was sure was a pulled muscle turned out to be a vertebrae smashed on one side to the point of a quarter inch of bone holding up her spine. What followed was immediate vertebroplasty – where they inject bone cement into the mass of splinters to glue it all back together.

This process, re-inflating the vertebrae, caused the one above it to break. Either because there was an undetected crack, or just because it was weak. The date was now two months after the initial injury. My sister, who lives near Mom and Dad, is a divorced Mom of two with a job that requires travel. She had used up all her vacation, personal time, and about every other extra second of ‘not in the office’ that any sane job could permit. So I got on a plane the day Mom went in for her second vertebroplasty. Fortunately it went spectacularly well. I stayed in San Antonio for a shade under three weeks while she recovered and got some of her strength back, and while my awesome husband played single dad.

I then came home with my arms intermittently stabbing me about the work I’d been doing that involved motions which my arms resent. My wonderful doctor didn’t have anything new to try for the arm nerve situation. Soooo… though I still like him and respect that he was stumped, I went and found a new doctor. New doctor has some new ideas which we’re working on to see if we can find a way over, under or through the wall. Or maybe we’ll just check around the back. I’m having real feelings for the Ferlinghetti poem about ‘Kafka’s Castle’ (it’s #16 in his book ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’).

I think I actually have my brain back.  Duck!

Tags: family
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Some of you know, and some of you may not, that among other medical peculiarities I have had nerve pain in my arms and hands on and off for ten years.  It is not carpal tunnel.  It is not arthritis.  It is not fibromyalgia.  It is not disc pressure on the nerve trunks as they come off my spine.  I don’t have any extra ribs.  Electrical conduction tests confirm that the nerves work just fine.  Oh boy, do they work.

I’ve been seeing my current doctor for quite a few years now.  We’ve been around Robin Hood’s barn with this thing.

I’ve been through a parade of doctors prior to this one, physical therapists, neurologists, and chiropractors.  I have tried exercises, electrical treatments, nerve flossing, stretches, vitamins, and painkillers that made my brain not work.  My desk setup is extremely ergonomically specific.  Monitor height, negative incline keyboard arrangement, good chair.  The only thing I haven’t tried acupuncture.  Needles make me pass out.  No, they don’t hurt.  After ten years of nerve pain believe me they do NOT make the bar of ‘what hurts’.  I still pass out.

The thing that seems to reliably keep me pain-free sounds very simple.  Avoiding or carefully limiting certain motions and activities.  The trick is that the actions that are known irritants are anything that requires me to reach forward or over my head for even short periods of time, or fine motor actions over prolonged periods.  So… changing a lightbulb in an overhead fixture.  Putting away dishes.  Washing my hair.  (And if another PT tells me ‘just don’t raise your hands above your shoulders’  I may scream.  I challenge anyone to wash their own hair without putting their hands above their shoulders.) Typing.  Driving.  Knitting.  Vacuuming.  Sewing.  How much of any or all of those things I can do depends on the day and my symptom level on that given day.

What does a really good doctor repeat to me after years of beating his head on this wall?  “We’re going to keep trying until we figure out what causes this.  This is about the quality of your life.”

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Someone asked me recently what I thought it was that made me a writer.  The quick and obvious answer is that a writer is someone who writes.   I’m a writer because I write.  Yep.  Heard it a hundred and forty seven thousand times.  What is it that makes me into a me who writes?

Hunh.

I considered this question in great depth for about a second and a half and up blinked the word ‘curiosity’.  It isn’t the only thing that makes me a writer, but it’s certainly a solid cornerstone.  I’m curious about people.  My husband is endlessly amused and wry because I talk to people that I don’t know.

I converse with the lady at the meat counter (her dog has squeaky toy issues).

I chat with the dry cleaner (the roofer recommendation?  Awesome.).

I listen to nervous people on airplanes (one lovely young lady was studying casino management).

So why does that make me a writer instead of nosy as all get out?  Okay, so I am ALSO nosy as all get out.  I’m curious about people, about things, about history, about virtually everything.  Well, maybe not Nascar, but possibly I just don’t know enough about what makes that interesting to people.

I’m curious about people, about what makes them do what they do, how they think what they think.  I wonder what would make them change.  What would they do if some situation radically changed the world in which they live and how would they respond?  How do people respond to challenges in their lives?  What kinds of responses make someone, maybe even a very broken person, into a hero?

Do you write?  Why?  I’m curious.

Tags: writing
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The wonderful thing about knowing nothing is that no one has yet explained to you why something is impossible.  Thus, I have an idea.  I’d like to preface this with the disclaimer that, though I have worked in retail sales, I know nothing whatever about running specifically a bookstore.  Nor do I know anything whatever about running a publishing house.  The below idea is the result of a panel I attended at World Fantasy Con last weekend.

Publishers have a structure they use to price a book aside from the obvious cost of printing, shipping, and their overhead.  Every hardcover they print has to pay for two copies.  The one the customer buys, and the one that the bookstore didn’t sell and will return to the publisher for their money back.  Paperbacks aren’t returned in whole, rather the bookstore tears off the cover, recycles the book body, and returns the cover for a refund.  Every paperback pays for something like three others.

Independent booksellers must take advantage of the return policy because their competitors do.  The brick-and-mortar stores are already being killed by their competition because of the deep discounts being offered by larger organizations (Amazon, CostCo, Walmart, Target…)

Independent booksellers, I’m told, return far fewer books and strip far fewer books.  One of the gentlemen claimed his returns were as low as 1%.  If this is the case (and I have no reason to think he was mistaken), why can small booksellers not arrange to buy from the publisher at a steeply reduced price with the guarantee of no returns?  They can’t afford to buy at the same price as others and NOT take the return policy advantage.  Small stores in retail frequently run on a profit margin that’s positively frightening.  If they could buy at lower prices, then smaller brick-and-mortar booksellers could offer lower prices, thereby offering more reasonable competition to the large chains and the online market.  After all… at that point the publisher doesn’t have to gamble with their pricing.  They get paid, end of transaction.  With print-on-demand, publishers might even be able to print a special reduced cover price for books bought under such an agreement.

If a publisher no longer has to try to figure out the return percentages and can simply SELL the books they sell… and if the independent bookstore has a close enough finger on the pulse of their customers to keep their failed sales under a certain percentage and could cut their buying costs enough make themselves more competative… that seems to me like a good thing all around.  Also, by keeping the independents running, publishers keep their market diverse, large, and thereby safer for themselves in the long run.

I’ve never, ever heard of a bookstore that’s happy to strip books.  My friends who’ve worked in bookstores positively loathe it.  Returns aren’t much better – they take time and are a general pain in the behind.  Publishers hate returns too.  They’re likely not any happier about stripping paperbacks.  After all, we assume publishers value books.  These policies are bad for both publisher and bookstore.  They are colossally wasteful.  So… maybe by working together they could find an agreement that makes them both winners, and kills the system.  It’s past time for the strip and return system to be euthanized.

[edited for a particularly egregious spelling error.]

Tags: books, bookstores, publishing, shopping
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This is a story (you may begin to find a theme with these posts) about hospitality.  It is also about the town of Coldwater, Kansas.  The names and relationships below are falsified, but the fact that they were there remains the same.

The summer between my 8th and 9th grade, my family moved from Farmington, Missouri to Carson City, Nevada.  My parents, me, my younger sister, and our college-age brother along with four horses, a Welsh pony, and two cats.  We set out from Missouri in a U-Haul pulling a four and a half horse trailer, a Volare station wagon pulling an 18′ boat, and a Toyota Celica from back when they were tiny sports cars.

Well into Kansas, my mother and I (in the Volare), noticed the left rear wheel on the horse trailer beginning to wobble.  We noticed it about five seconds before the wobble went volcanic and the whole wheel ripped off the trailer and went bounding across a wheat field.  A few lug nuts had been loose, and the whole thing had gradually sawed itself off the lug bolts.

My brother (his car was the ancient Celica) retrieved the rogue wheel.  We loaded it into the boat and very carefully began to limp along the edge of the highway.  VERY slowly.  We definitely weren’t going to make Amarillo, where we had stalls and hotel reserved.  My parents portrayed it diplomatically as a grand adventure as evening started to roll around.  Privately, I think we all thought it was going to be a very long, horrible day.

A highway patrol officer came along and stopped us.  A very nice man, who looked at our caravan, and the Welsh pony with her head out the side to see what was going on, and decided we needed help.  “Well I’ll tell you what.  Go on up another X miles.  Milepost Y.  There’s a road on the right.  Go on up there ten miles and turn right, and you’ll see a sign for the fair grounds.  My brother’s buddy is up there.  I’ll call ahead and let him know you’re coming.”

We thanked the officer profusely, loaded ourselves back in the parade vehicles and limped along until we came to a fair grounds outside of Coldwater, Kansas.  The manager there explained that the stalls were… well, not so great.  But he could let us put the horses in the arena overnight.  Worked for us, they were used to being in pasture together.  The horse over the lost wheel got out of the trailer so shaky we were afraid she’d fall down.  We got them all brushed down, fed, and turned loose, and my dad was explaining cheerfully that we were going to camp out in the U-Haul when the manager came back.

“My sister-in-law’s cousin has a bed and breakfast she opens up when there’s a county fair or the rodeo.  I told her about you all and she said to send you over.”

We blinked.  Blinked.  Gulped.  Thanked the manager profusely.

“I’ll talk to Lenny over at the garage.  He has a nephew who does welding.  Between the two maybe they can help you out with that trailer.  Enough to get you into Amarillo, anyway.”

We thanked the manager some more, got into the station wagon and the Celica and headed down the road to see his sister-in-law’s cousin.  The Lady of the house came out to meet us, bundled us into her house and fed us dinner of left over stew with fresh rolls she took out of the oven as we sat down.  The rooms were freshly opened, the beds newly made, and she apologized for the closed air smell.  “Make sure you let the poor kitties out to stretch their legs.  Yes, yes, I know what the sign says.  It’s a misspelling.”  My mother found she had something in her eye.

In the morning this Lady fed us fresh-fried donuts, more biscuits, eggs, bacon… the whole midwestern ranch breakfast.  She sternly lectured my sister and I that we were to make sure we took donuts for the road.   We thanked the lady and went to feed the horses, my dad and brother went to take the trailer to the garage.  An hour later they were back.  With the trailer with all four wheels.  We loaded up four horses, one Welsh pony, and two cats.  We went on our way.

Those people scraped us up off the side of the road and were altogether amazing and wonderful to complete strangers.  Coldwater, Kansas will stand out in my mind to the end of my life as a town of exceptional grace, kindness, and hospitality.

Tags: horses, story
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Today is the 80th birthday of one of the grand dames of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin. Happy birthday to a great and gracious lady.

It’s also the 40th anniversary of ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, so if by some cruel twist of fate you have missed out on Le Guin’s work up until now, this might be an appropriate place to start.

Tags: birthday, writing
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Artist Mike Libby creates steampunked insects, and they are amazingly beautiful work.  So amazing, in fact, that they’re part of Neiman Marcus’ Christmas Book.

Tags: art, shopping, steampunk
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My friend Nicolas Ward found these steampunk cakes.  The amount of fondant is staggering, but there’s no question it’s worth it for the results.

[edit - my friend Nicolas who has no 'h' in his name!]

Tags: steampunk
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Arthur Chenin found this, and it’s so amazingly neat I had to share.

I read Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ when I was 13.  We were living in central Arizona.  I don’t remember how I came by it, but I still have that battered, dog-eared, much traveled book.  When did you read ‘Dune’?

Tags: books
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