Find the True

As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, I don’t spend a lot of time steeped in reality.  This morning, I was worried about how an artificially-intelligent machine would track down one of its friends without the enemy spotting it along the way; later today, I will turn my attention to a reincarnated princess and the nightmares she has of her past life.  For me, the word “reality” is loosely defined.

I wonder, however, if it’s not the same way for writers at the other end of the literary spectrum.  I read an article recently about memoirists, who possibly have the most right to call their works “real”.  These people are writing about their own lives, on which one would hope they would be the foremost authority.  Yet many memoirists talk about how they have to stretch the truth, adding things that may not have happened or skimming over events that they deem unimportant to the story they’re trying to tell.  That’s the point, after all—they’re reshaping their own lives into a cohesive, sensible story line, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s not cohesive and it’s rarely sensible.  Thus, creative nonfiction is a misnomer—there’s a lot more fiction in there than readers might think.

So what about my “fantasy”?  Is there nothing real in that?  If that were true, I doubt anyone would read it, and yet fantasy remains a very popular genre.  In the end, fantasy explores aspects of reality that we don’t often encounter in our daily lives.  What happens when a man can literally look into the darkness of his own soul?  Ask Ged, the main character of Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.  What would be the result if a man could use words to corrupt others’ beliefs and values?  Check out the Graceling series by Kristin Cashore to find out.  How might the widespread use of robots change the way humans interact with one another?  See Asimov’s I, Robot for details.  There are limitations in our “reality”.  Fantasy and science fiction opens doors to more possibilities than this world allows, taking average human beings and planting them in extraordinary circumstances.

Where is the boundary line in literature?  What’s real and what isn’t?  I think people have been asking that question for a long, long time.  They’ll probably still be asking it in five hundred years when cities fly and humans are living on the Moon.  Writers are simply the first to ask “what if?”, and from the answers they come up with, we can learn more about our own "reality".

**The title is a nod to Anne McCaffrey, from the first in her Harper Hall trilogy, Dragonsong.

Tweet, Tweet

A few days ago I did a very dangerous thing.  I joined Twitter.

Now many of you will read that and think, you weren’t already on Twitter?  And the answer is no, I wasn’t.  I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to social media—I have no Snapchat, Instagram, or Tumblr, either, and it took me years to get onto Facebook.  I saw no real need for Twitter, and my novelist tendencies balked at a 140-character limit on every single post.  What could I say in that few words that would interest anyone? 

So what made me change my mind?  It was a post I found via Facebook, about some very negative criticism the singer P!nk was getting on how she looked in the outfit she wore to a cancer benefit.  Now P!nk’s response was epically blasé: she thanked them for her concern and informed them that however poorly her outfit may or may not have photographed that night, she felt beautiful and that she herself was not concerned about her weight.  But I, reading about this on my phone before I got out of bed that morning, got angry.  What right did those people have to talk about her body?  Why was the size of P!nk’s waist more important than the reason she was there?  It seemed to me that our priorities have gotten so skewed, and it outraged me.

Then something happened to me that doesn’t usually happen: I decided to do something about it.  I don’t consider myself a very ambitious or active person; I will be the first to admit that while I have strong beliefs, I don’t usually follow them up.  This time, however, the idea came to me that the best way to fight negativity was with positivity.  I wanted young women looking in the mirror to like what they saw, and I wanted to encourage and inspire them to stop worrying so much about the reflection and look outward to other people.

Thus, my new Twitter handle.  @LoveTheMeISee is focused on promoting positive body image in women (and men, too! Why exclude half the world?), without using criticism or shaming others.  Since I began it, I’ve shared my thoughts there, but also I’ve begun collecting sources of encouragement and stories of strength.  I don’t pretend to be an authority, but I do believe that I have something to offer, that my education and my beliefs might give me a little bit of a voice in this area.

Like I said before, I’m not ambitious.  I don’t expect it to rock the world.  I do think, however, that every little bit helps, and that maybe, in time, I can give some of my sisters some comfort in this crazy, critical society of ours.  If that’s the case, then it will be worth every single tweet.

Philosophy from the Subway

I spent the last week on vacation, though I still have difficulty separating that word from summer in my mind.  A friend and I drove up to New York City for a few days, because we had never been and because we had some money from our tax returns, and because why not?  It was a wonderful trip.  Though I have a long list of things that we didn’t have time to see, we hit the highlights—the Empire State, the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Public Library, Chinatown, and of course Times Square.  I’m hoping that I can see the city more often in future, though maybe only once a year.  It’s a bit too far to drive very often, and I definitely cannot afford to fly.

I was a bit nervous, however, about meeting the people.  If I am anything, I am a country girl, and New York is the city to beat all cities.  I’ve heard so much about the way New Yorkers interact with one another, their bluntness, outspokenness, and general disregard for other people on the street.  Everyone knows the reputation, right?  Not mean, not really, but someone who is too busy to pay any heed to a stranger’s problems, and who gets impatient—and says so—when something is not going his or her way.  My friend said on the trip that her mother had told her not to listen to New Yorkers, and a New Yorker laughed and admitted she was probably right.

One incident stands out in my mind.  It was on the subway our first night, coming back to Grand Central after we had seen a Broadway play (Les Mis—amazing!!).  As the train stopped at our stop, a young man turned to an older gentleman sitting next to where he was standing.  “Now, sir,” he said to the old man in a genial tone, “you kicked me, so you wanna apologize, or…?”

I blinked.  It was not what I had been expecting him to say.  The old man looked up with a frown, and I thought someone might need to defend him. 

“You wanna call the police, pal?” he asked, jerking a thumb dismissively.

They continued to argue as we got off the train.  It was a difficult conversation to hear, raised as I was in such a polite environment.  I would never dream of saying anything like that to a stranger, even if they were definitely at fault, and I would almost expect someone to apologize to me even if the blame was on me.  This kind of confrontational attitude is not something I know how to deal with at all.

This kind of thing is what I might have expected of New Yorkers, and I braced myself to see more of the same as the days went by.  I didn't.  Everywhere else we went, we kept coming across surprising acts of kindness from the people we would meet.  A man saw us puzzling over our map and offered to help us find our way; a woman overheard us speculating about our destination and explained what we would find there.  Anyone we asked for directions was more than happy to point us on our way and give us a few recommendations.  We even witnessed another loud discussion on the subway in regards to the need for people to be more courteous to one another. 

So much for generalizations.  I think wherever you live, wherever you are, people are capable of kindness.  It may be easier to be rude, to be impatient, to be snappish or cold, but that doesn't mean that everyone you meet is going to take the easy way out.  Whatever society expects of you, you can find a way to spread good instead of evil.  Negativity only breeds negativity, but fortunately for the human race, the same is true of positivity.

Wasting Time

I am one of those fortunate people who can look forward to the mail’s coming.  All of my nasty reminders—bills and the like—usually come through email, where I can safely ignore them until I’m ready to pay.  I do get the usual junk, but I also shell out annual sums to get fun things, too, magazines on topics that range from writing to literature to politics to “mood-changings manis!”  (Oh, Cosmo, one of my dearest guilty pleasures.)

One of my favorites, though, has been Lapham’s Quarterly, a very unique serial that assembles not modern writing, or at least not only modern writing, but also historical and classical pieces.  The editors there choose a topic—some of those I’ve yet to read are “foreigners” and “swindle and fraud”, while in the past I’ve seen “comedy”, “arts and literature”, and “the future”—that was a fun one.  What I am reading now is "time."

Time is a funny thing.  You can think about it any number of ways—as the movement of the hands on the clock, as the movement of three-dimensional figures through a fourth dimension, as the weight that hangs over your days, as the measure that gives them meaning—but no one really knows what time is.  An artist or poet will tell you it is “what we want most, but what we use worst,”[1] that it is “more valuable than money”[2] and that it “waits for no man.”[3] Physicists will tell you that it is a force just as any in nature, that it is influenced by gravity (a clock on a high mountain will move faster than one at sea level) and that smaller animals perceive time as moving more slowly than large ones.  Nancy Gibbs will tell you that it is a magazine printed weekly offering world news and cultural information (another of my subscriptions).

What do I think?  I’m not quite sure.  Time, as are most things, is relative.  We all know that a day spent at work seems to go more slowly than our days off.  Based on that knowledge, I would say that time is something rooted in our own minds, altered by the level of our interest in our surroundings.  But if that were the case, wouldn’t inanimate, unconscious things be unaffected by time?  Yet the sea continues to pound away the shore, and plants grow and die and grow again, and the world keeps on turning.  So there’s more to time than just what we think of it. 

Is time an illusion?  Is everything actually all happening at once, and we just aren’t aware of it?  Am I just rambling because I don’t have anything better to blog about today?  That last is most likely.  But it’s worth thinking about, since it seems to rule our entire lives.  Whether we’re aware of it or not, whether we know why or not, time is always moving.  The only way we can accept that is to find something worthwhile to fill the hours before they fade. 

---

[1] William Penn

[2] Jim Rohn

[3] Geoffrey Chaucer

Counting Hours, or Making Hours Count?

Though I have kept journals since I was thirteen years old, I almost never used them to document the events of my life.  They were for what I considered to be more important things—story ideas, poetry, drawings and notes, the raw materials that I will someday shape into art.  My own life wasn’t as interesting to me as those that I saw in books.

When I did talk about myself in my journals, the tone was bleak and despairing.  Obviously I, an awkward teenager, couldn’t compare to the heroes I read about in books, or even to the ones I created myself.  “Every character I write,” says a passage from volume 4, “is essentially based on myself.  And every one grows and improves and becomes someone new and better.  I wish there was someone to write my story, to make me better.  But I don’t think anything like that will happen.”  I was seventeen at the time.

I remember so well what it felt like to think that way.  You never really forget.  But that hopelessness is just a shadow to me now.  My story isn’t dull; there’s just a very significant difference between writing an adventure and living one.  Perhaps these are the years of my life that will be waved away by my biographer in a single paragraph or even a sentence: “There she lived for several years, waiting tables to pay the bills and pass the time, while her nights and her days off were spent chipping out her greater works.”  Simple and brief, except for the one who is actually counting the hours.  My task, then, is to take the happiness and peace that come in these quiet hours.  After all, adventures are rarely all they’re cracked up to be, and no story, however complex, can encompass an entire life.

Why I Never Liked Martha Jones

I normally use this blog as a reflection of my own life, but today I’d like to shift the focus away from me.  Nothing much interesting has happened to me lately, anyway—I’ve spent a lot of time working, writing, and…well, and watching Doctor Who.  But even when I’m watching TV—or to make it appropriate to the subject matter, ‘telly’—I’m sitting here musing away, so I might as well share my thoughts here.

I’ve been a devoted Whovian for a few years now, ever since I started watching the new incarnation with Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith in the title spot.  (I’m also trying to get caught up with classic Who, so don’t scold me for hopping onto the show late.)  The Doctor is always a fascinating and absorbing character—funny, brilliant, loving, and cold as ice when crossed.  But just as interesting to me are the companions, those lucky souls who are invited into the TARDIS for a few wonderful journeys through time and space.  They are the objects of my deep envy, but more than that, they are the people who support the Doctor in his lonely life, the ones who guide him away from despair and inspire him to be the very best he can be.

Of all the companions I’ve seen—Amy and Rory, River Song, Donna and her disorderly grandfather Wilf, Captain Jack Harkness, and of course the unforgettable Rose—there is only one whom I do not love without reservation, and that is Martha Jones.  Played by Freema Agyeman, she was on the show beginning in 2007, after the departure of longtime companion Billie Piper.  From the beginning, there was something about her that I didn’t like, and for the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I wanted to like her—she was clever, independent, sassy, and like all the other companions, brave.  She was devoted to her family, as well as to the Doctor, and her strength appealed to me.  And yet, I hesitate to watch her episodes again, to look back over her era, because there is something about her that makes me uncomfortable.  In the past few days, however, I’ve figured out that it’s not Martha herself who bothers me, but the way she is treated.

When Martha crosses paths with the Doctor, our erstwhile hero is in very bad shape.  He’s recently lost his Rose, the love of two lifetimes, his companion who stayed with him through multiple disasters and put her life on the line for his sake.  Separated from her by impossible circumstances, the Doctor is grieving for her as if she were dead.  He has also just been rejected by another possible companion, Donna (though she does later return and joins him after all).  He needs someone to support him, but there is no one he can turn to.  So when Martha helps him with a difficult situation (something about an entire hospital abducted to the moon by rhino-headed aliens; see series 3, episode 1, “Smith and Jones”), the Doctor automatically lays some of his burden on her.  She bears up beautifully, and so he invites her to continue on with him.

The problem is, there’s too much exchanged between the two of them, too soon.  While he has no interest in a romantic relationship with her, he does send her some very mixed messages—a kiss, close physical proximity, and a certain flirtatious behavior that’s integral to his character (or at least as played by David Tennant).  All of this would be natural to him in his interactions with Rose, and he doesn’t seem to realize that Martha is reading these signs differently.  He places heavy trust in her almost right away, expecting her to do difficult and dangerous things, to support him in his reckless charge through his dangerous life, and she never receives anything in return.  To put it quite baldly, he uses her.  There was never any malice intended.  By the end of her time with him, he realizes what he has done to her, and indeed she goes through the most change of all his companions, beginning as a medical student and ending as a quasi-warrior, a protector of the planet.  The Doctor understands that this is his doing, that the burdens he set on her have taken their toll.  But the fact remains that he was in pieces when he met her, and he expected her to put him back together for the simple and heartbreaking reason that there was no one else to do it.

Here’s the wonderful thing, though: she did.  Slowly but surely, Martha built him back up again, supported him through times of fear and doubt and pain.  Martha taught the Doctor how to stand on his own two feet again.  And what’s more impressive is that when it was done, when she gets to a place where she can see their relationship clearly, she ends it before it can decay.  On the heels of a triumph, she looks him the eye and she understands that he will never see her the way she wants him to.  She accepts that, and forgives him for it.  But she has suffered in helping him, and her family has suffered, too, and she knows when to say enough.  She leaves him behind, knowing that he will be all right, now, and more, that she will be all right.

It took me a long time to unravel that relationship, to realize why I didn’t admire Martha as I did the others.  It was never Martha herself, but the place she occupied, that relationship we have all been in where you give so much more than you will ever get in return.  The reason it made me so uncomfortable is because I’ve been there, and I don’t like to remember it.  No one would.  But that isn’t fair to the character.  That isn’t fair to this beautiful portrayal of a person who, finding an absolute wreck of a person, does whatever is necessary to make that person the hero he was always meant to be.  And it certainly isn’t fair to the writer who gave us an honest look into the cruel necessity of bitter, dead-end relationships.  So here’s to Martha, one of the strongest women I’ve ever seen in fiction or in real life.  Though hers isn’t a happy story, she made something out of it, and if that isn’t worth admiring, what is?

2014 in Retrospect

Super late on this post!  So without further ado...

January—I began the month without a computer, my laptop having crashed over the holidays.  The purchase of my very first desktop followed, which was all very exciting.  My new possession was promptly dubbed George III, affectionately called Saint George, as it is all very fancy and important.  It did take some getting used to, of course, not being able to pick up my computer and take it elsewhere.  But in no time I was enjoying my new tool immensely.

February—a huge snowstorm rolled through in the middle of the month, dumping a foot of snow over us and teaching me what most adults have to go through when there is snow.  It was quite an education, driving on snowy streets (terrifying!) and digging out the parking lot (quite a slog, especially without a shovel; we got creative with house cleaning tools instead).  The bad weather made for a quiet Valentine’s, despite my working in a restaurant.  Afterward, however, I had something of a social life, having friends over to supper and going over to visit with them.

March—during this time I was working on a piece of music for the Hollins choir, which was a great opportunity.  I had a chance to work with all stages of a piece of performance music, from the lyrics, which were provided by an admired professor of mine, to the practices with some very talented musicians.  As I was also working on a fourth-wall-destroying script with my filmmaker friend, it was a very creative and rewarding period.

April—what stands out here was the beautiful wedding of my best friend and her long-time sweetheart.  It was a gorgeous ceremony, performed at sunset in the open air, with the most adorable little flower girl ever being trundled down the aisle in a red wagon.  I was so glad and proud to be there, though I did have to leave rather too early—the very next day was the performance of my choral piece, Activist, at Hollins, which I wouldn’t have missed.  The close proximity of the two events made for a very hectic weekend, but the thrill of it all carried me through the next few weeks.

May—I spent a good half of this month on my own, with my roommate off on an extended trip to Japan with a friend.  I was very jealous, but it did mean I got a few adventures of my own when I brought her to the airport, and then fetched her back again a few weeks later.  At first we stayed with a dear friend of hers, a fellow alumna of Hollins.  The second time we caught a hotel—after I had spent a few hours in the airport in the middle of the night, waiting for a delayed plane.  That was less fun.  The month ended well, though, with my attendance of my second-year reunion at Hollins University.  So many familiar faces and new friends—it was a good time all around.

June—the beginning of the summer also marked the beginning of a long struggle at work.  A new manager arrived at Ruby Tuesday, a man about whom the less said the better, most likely.  His coming made a significant change in the atmosphere of the place, and I began to dread going to work.  My only escape from the drudgery this month was a brief interlude into the fantastic, when I modeled—me! modeling!—for a friend’s photo shoot, which was remarkable for the simple fact that good pictures of me were the result.  (I tend to avoid cameras on principle.)  At any rate, her photo shoots have continued, and I’ve been privileged to attend a few since then.

July—my birthday month was rather unexciting, though I did have a few opportunities to get sunburned.  My main accomplishment was completing my sci-fi novel, which has been at the forefront of my mind ever since.

August—the primary attraction of this month was the weekend I took off to North Carolina with a large group of very fun girls from my bible study group.  I admit, however, there wasn’t much studying of the bible going on that weekend—we spent a great deal of our time playing games, shopping, and exploring.  The food was excellent, thanks to the culinary talents of a mother-daughter tag team, and we were spoiled and silly and tons of fun.  I very nearly came home with a cat who had a mustache, but that’s another story.

September—we got a pair of new neighbors in this month, two very dear friends from our college days.  They took the apartment in the next building from ours, much to our joy.  It’s been lovely to be able to walk over to see them anytime we like, and they to see us, which I admit happens more often.  And why not?  This is where the tea is.  I also began editing my novel this month, having let it rest to make it fresh for the tearing-out-of-pages stage of work.  And at the end of the month, after much waiting and a couple of not-very-pleasant emails to the computer company, George IV or Georgiana arrived, a brand-new laptop which I've taken to calling Gigi.  It was almost worth all the trouble, though not quite what I was expecting.  I don't think I will go with a Chromebook again--fun and convenient it may be, but I miss Microsoft.

October—the month of spontaneity!  I was tugged hither and yon by friends all month long.  My almost-mother and her friend found a giant gourmet mushroom while hiking, and they decided the obvious solution was to make a vat of soup and share it with a large group of friends.  It was one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted.  Not long after that, I carted Katie and Kathryn home with me to go on a trail ride, which was a bit more complicated than we’d expected.  A demonic attack (or a curious goat, depending on whether you ask horse or rider), much shuffling of horses and riders, and three sore tailbones occurred that weekend.  It was delightful, and we will most likely repeat the exercise.

November—I took the easy way out for NaNoWriMo, instead choosing to use the month to work all the way through my novel, in the hopes of completing its editing by Christmas.  That goal, however, was not met, and the month was otherwise characterized by stress, as I dealt with trouble at work and tried not to worry too much about how useless a job search was turning out to be.

December—by the first week of this month I was already sick of Christmas music, but I did warm up to the holidays as the day came closer.  I had a good long time to be at home, and an unexpected present came in the departure of the aforementioned unpleasant manager, making my work environment that much nicer.  I will say, however, that it is very difficult to get five siblings together for a family portrait when three of them live out of town and two of those in a separate state.  Somehow we managed it, and my plotting paid off with a good photo to remember the year by. 

It was a long one, but thankfully my calendar remembers the good and forgets the bad.  May we all do the same in the year ahead.