Election results

Normally I don't radiate patriotic fervor - though I'm more inclined that way than I was a year ago last Tuesday. This year's election day was very special for me too. Because I recently relocated out of one of the small cities inside of Houston (it's kind of like an amoeba that has ingested small surrounding communities), I was able to vote in the Houston city elections. This came just in time for me to cast my vote for Annise Parker for Mayor of Houston.

A few days having passed, there were thoughtful reflections in the Sunday newspaper. The newspaper, by the way, had endorsed both Annise Parker and Gene Locke in the mayoral race, and these are the two who will face each other in a December runoff. These were not the two with the most money. But there's new aphorism much in evidence in the local media - and Annise said it on TV on election night: Money doesn't elect people. People do. Of all the candidates, she had, not the most money in contributions, but the most individuals contributing. Each contributor was somebody who really wants to see her as Mayor, either because of her track record as a Councilwoman and City Controller, because she's a Rice University graduate, because she's a fine capable woman politician, or because she's long been one of few openly gay people elected to office in Texas, and her becoming Mayor of Houston would be a victory for GLBT people everywhere.

The individuals most unhappy about the election results (apart from the losing candidates who ran long, hard, expensive, and generally fair races), are the die-hard social conservatives. Some of these folks will not vote for a gay woman no matter how good her track record is. These voters, however, will be faced with the choice between a gay woman who started out as a campus and community activist and a black man who started out as a civil rights activist! It's going to be an interesting few weeks until the December 12th election. Then, oh joy, I'll get to go out and cast my Houston vote again.

Nomadology

Courtesy of the awesome team at Strange Horizons, I have a new story up today about hand-knit his and hers sensory deprivation hoods, golf course detention camps, strip small suicide bombers, improvised homeless shelters, and other flotsam of the Zeitgeist bobbing around in our collective consciousness. "Nomadology" — check it out:

What a fucking awesome party. Talk about "obscene enjoyment." Who knew the mujahideen assassins would have even better reefer than those Scythian priests camped out on top of the parking garage doing their blood bowls? The whole thing was like a post-apocalyptic Cheech and Chong flick.

Osama opened up his Blofeldian mountain hideout for a house party. The place was shaking with woofed-up synthesized Fezcore running through the rebar. You were kind of spaced out, writing rhymeless poems in your bad calligraphy on the fuselages of the anti-aircraft missiles arrayed for launch. I got lost in the rave Abu Ghraib downstairs, with all the Dionysian Abercrombie POWs acting out their skankiest warporn fantasies. "Frat boys are so much better when they are on leashes," you said. I came looking for the tough-loving Lynndie England of my private midnights, and instead I found you. Who knew a latex Barbara Bush mask could be so fucking hot?

Liberian teenagers toting AK-47s haul ass down the David Addington Allée in an overloaded Lincoln Navigator with the top sawed off, dragging the bodies of a well-regarded architect and your vice president of marketing behind the car. You tell me to throw something at them, but come on, you know what a chickenshit I really am. I could lose my job.

Day of the Dead

This year had exceptionally fine Halloween decorations. In my part of town I was particularly taken by a black bat with a six-foot wingspan and glowing red eyes; several yards transformed into nicely creepy graveyards - one of which was crowned by a glittery banner hung from the second floor of the house that announced FANGTASIA! - and a new house by Braes Bayou that had two big furry spiders stalking up the front steps. As to the last, the spiders, plus some skeletons and cobwebs, amounted to a nice scare, but the really scary thing is the adjacent bayou. The house has such a high and handsome set of front steps because it was built to stay dry the next time the bayou floods.

To me, this year's Halloween seemed cleaner than Halloweens over the last six or seven years. As well it might be. The United States, in the form of its government, was visiting death and hell on the Middle East and actively promoting the destabilization of climate and the extinction of species, not to mention Wall Street having its unchecked, obscene orgy of greed. In 2009, there's at least as much scary stuff in the world as there was in, say, 2005, but we're not the most scary, out-of-control, hell-bent monster in the world. That's a good change - and worth a Peace prize. It makes our Halloween decor relatively innocent fun again. (Somewhere in some yard I'm sure somebody put up a dollar sign and a stock market ticker... scares that keep on scaring.)

Better our Halloween should be clean and fun. Halloween is the day before the Day of the Dead, or All Saints in the traditional Christian calendar. In Mexico and Mexican-American parts of the US, it's an important holiday with the sense that dead family and friends return to visit. People who celebrate the Day of the Dead by putting up ofrendas, the altars, clean the house beforehand in honor of the occasion. This time around, the United States managed to clean its house somewhat before the Day of the Dead. And how appropriate that earlier this week President Obama took a midnight helicopter trip to Dover Air Force Base to meet the returning bodies of 18 service members killed in Afghanistan. Today, November 1, we put away the plastic skeletons and pack up the yard spooks and the dead come to help us understand life.

Turkey City post-mortem

Well, another Turkey City writers workshop has come and gone, and near as I can figure it, there were no fatalities this time around. Indeed, it was one of the lowest-key Turkey Cities in recent memory (although by my reckoning, I've missed the last two held). In addition to myself, the other writers involved in this unique form of self-immolation included Bruce Sterling, Meghan McCarron, Elze Hamilton, Caroline Joachim, Paul O. Miles, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Lawrence Person, Jessica Reisman, Fred Stanton and Jen Waverly. Don Webb was originally supposed to attend, but injured his back and wasn't feeling up to it. All of this went down in Chris Nakashima-Brown's ultra-hip urban hi-rise apartment which more than one person had difficulty reaching because of the twin forces of a farmer's market and a cyclists against cancer rally blocking off some or all of Austin's main downtown streets.

There were more sample chapters from in-progress novels this time than any Turkey City I can recall. Interestingly, there were also no submissions that came off as ready for publication, either, which kind of bucks recent trends. Below, the Turkey Citizens hunker down for a frazzled reading session before the bloodletting starts:



Below left, Jessica Reisman, brought a rewritten opening sequence to an in-progress novel. It reminded me of Martha Wells' City of Bones in tone if not content. Below right, Elze Hamilton, a newcomer, brought perhaps the coolest SFnal concept to the party. Her story also provoked the most passionate responses from the group, so that's a score for the rookie.



Below left, Bruce Sterling applies is distinctive brand of literary criticism to a hapless story. Below right, Fred Stanton brought the opening chapter of a mythic, supernatural space opera hybrid. I got a kick out of it, but threw Nakashima-Brown for a loop when I described it as a "Post-colonial pseudo-Pakistani anal-retentive society," which was apparently too close to a Bruce-ism for him to parse coming from my mouth.



Yes, Jen Waverly and Meghan McCarron were up to no good. You can tell by the fact Waverly started hitting the sauce early. McCarron seemed taken aback by the Laissez-faire structure of the workshop, in particular the lack of a timekeeper. Everyone was pretty bleary-eyed by the time things wrapped up, so perhaps a timekeeper would be a good idea.



Traffic stops and pedestrians flee when Turkey Citizens are on the move for lunch. We ended up eating in a nifty Thai place right next to the former location of the late, lamented Adventures in Crime & Space bookstore, which is now a boutique owned by Sandra Bullock. And I also spilled a glass of water on Nakashima-Brown's iPhone, but he'd wisely installed a waterproof ap, so all was well.



Left to right, Caroline Joachim, Lawrence Person and Paul O. Miles. Joachim brought a time-travel romance, Person a R.A. Lafferty pastiche and Miles a story best described as period Texas Weird.



Chris Nakashima-Brown demonstrates exactly what he'll do to me the next time I bring a 9,000-word story to a workshop with a 5,000-word limit.



The critique session gets under way, in which egos are crushed and dreams ground underfoot. Ah, good times...



For anyone who's interest, I consider the critique my own story received during Turkey City over at my Gibberish blog.

COEXIST

You’ve seen it. Everybody in the urban United States has, and I have no doubt it’s scattered across the world. It’s the blue COEXIST bumper sticker where the white letters are, respectively: the crescent and star of Islam; the Peace symbol for “o”; a male-female-equality “e”; a Star of David for the “x”; an “i” topped with a Pagan Pentacle; an “s” adapted from the Taoist Yin-Yang symbol; and a “t” that’s a Christian Cross. Though there are many variants, this is the classic. There seems to be some controversy over the copyright of the classic design. Interestingly, the artist is not the party trying to control the copyright, according to a Web site called carryabigsticker.com.

Recently I saw the bumper sticker on a late-model car in the parking lot of a Roman Catholic retreat center. Someone there was evidently on the Coexist wavelength.

Then when exploring my new neighborhood (Old Braeswood in Houston) I found a pleasant little park with a bench surfaced in hand-made tiles. One of the tiles is a bright yellow take on COEXIST. Very sweet.

Turkey City off the port bow

There's a venerable writers' workshop of ill-repute, semi-permanently situated in Austin, known as Turkey City (for the sticklers to tradition, the full and formal name is the Turkey City Writers' Workshop and Neo-Pro Rodeo). Writers of note who've braved this august meat grinder on occasion include Howard Waldrop, Steven Gould, Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer... well, the list is long and impressive. It's held irregularly these days, often coinciding with Bruce Sterling's whirlwind trips through town, and this coming weekend just happens to be one of those irregular days.

Historically (which is to say, by unofficial yet no less sacred tradition) Turkey City participants put off writing their sacrificial piece of fiction until the last possible moment, in some cases scribbling feverishly until the wee hours of Turkey City eve before staggering in the morning of with a crumpled sheaf of still-wet mimeographed copies, smelling strongly of carcinogenic chemicals with enough purple ink to stain your fingers for a week.

Some participants in this weekend's shindig apparently have no respect for tradition, and have used email (aka Tool of the Devil) to distribute their story early. For shame. I, for one, will and am continuing to follow precedent slavishly. In fact, with the deadline staring me down at the end of the week, I broke down Sunday and began to write. Not too terribly much, mind you, but it was fiction, and it was short (or shortish. By my standards). I even have a title: "Where the Rubber Meets the Road." This is, by my reckoning, the first writing that I've done this year that wasn't A) an interview, B) a book review, C) an installment of Memory or D) related to my Chicken Ranch non-fiction book project in some way. It's somewhat startling to realized that here it is, October, and I haven't written a single piece of short fiction for the entire year. Not that I've ever been a prolific writer by anyone's definition, but still.

Last night things started clicking a little bit, story-wise. Word production topped 1,500, which is a good number for me. Some character details surfaced that give the tale much-needed subtext. The ending, which had persisted as an undefined "something poignant happens" vagueness, has begun to coalesce into something verging on tangible. And I've even twigged on the general mood the piece needs, as opposed to the mood I thought it should have. There's still a long haul between now and Saturday, but I'm slightly more optimistic today than I was yesterday that I'll have at least a coherent first draft ready by then.

And if not? Well, I'll have to burn that bridge when I come to it.

Library Moon Rock

I've always thought libraries in general and the one in which I work in particular have so much interesting stuff - starting with but by no means limited to the books. Here is a case in point. Last Saturday, Rice University received a Moon rock in honor of John F. Kennedy. It was in the Rice University football stadium that JFK committed the USA to the Moon race in 1962. The Kennedy family received the rock from NASA in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing. The Kennedys now have donated it to Rice. Through March 2010, the rock is on exhibit in Rice University's Fondren Library.




Photo courtesy David Engle. Check out David's images of Rice and Houston on Gigapan: it's a fantastic photographic technology.