An unexpected torture

Funny thing about going about your business. We get so caught up in doing the ordinary that the obvious escapes our notice.

Late last night, I loaded the dishwasher, wearing my handy dandy, long, pretty pink rubber gloves. The children had already gone to sleep, and I wanted to make sure everybody had clean breakfast bowls in the morning.Finished with my loading I did what I do every time. I ran the water and flipped the switch for the garbage disposal.

But something was wrong. The disposal made a loud crumbling noise at me. I instantly worried that my daughter had dropped a peach pit inside it, not knowing they weren't supposed to go down disposals.  I turned the angry monster back off. With a double check glance at the switch to make sure the disposal was a really, really, really off, I reached my gloved hand inside to feel around for that peach pit.

Can you guess what's going to happen next? I sure didn't.

I had left the water on. The scalding, burning water. As I wrangled my arm down the disposal, the mouth of my glove shifted beneath the flow of the hot water. It poured down my glove and surrounded my fingers. I yanked my hand up out of the disposal to try and rip the glove of finger by finger. That doesn't work very well when the inside of the glove has suction due to water replacing the air around my hand. It does, however, empty all the hot water out of my glove, by pouring it down my arm. Oh goodie.

Eventually, I got the glove off and held my scalded arm beneath a nice cool stream of water. Three applications of aloe vera later, the burning calmed down enough to let me sleep.

There is an upside, though. For some reason, I reached down that disposal with my right hand. And I'm left handed. So I'm not completely stymied today. Typing isn't fun, though. Every time my fingers bend, they sting. So I'm using voice recognition.

I've been under rather a lot of stress lately. I guess this just shows how distracted I'm getting. But, onward and upward. I have so much to do, it would be a real shame to flip out now.

A Quiet Breakfast on the Deck...Then, Minstrelbirds!

I heard a chorus of birds in the distance as I ate my cereal in the early morning light on my deck. They were all singing the same trill of notes, and trying to do it at the same time. I didn't recognize the birdsong, so the only thing that came to mind was the mockingjays from Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. Well, with myself on the outside of some delicious breakfast, my brain had the go juice to ponder what kind of bird I'd create, based solely on a unison tune. 

Here's what I came up with: 

The Minstrelbird.

Part parrot for intelligence and mimicry, though only of song. Part beetle (I can't remember which kind, alas) for the group competition to be the first/fastest (I saw a video of several male beetles surrounding a female, waving an arm up and down in almost perfect unison. The female picked the one who moved first.). Part bird of paradise for the showy hopping rituals.Whistling language borrowed from the Canary Islands, and parts of Greece, Turkey, France, Mexico, and Africa.

Okay, cool, but what do I do with him? Where do I put him?

Ah, yes. I have a whole new world I've been building for several years now. I'll put him there, in the mountainous forests inhabited by my version of the wagon-traveling gypsies (more on them in another post).

The upland gypsies capture minstrelbirds using a small, deft child and a plate of grubs rolled in berry honey. Jesses keep the bird from flying away, but let him feel he can still flap his wings. Minstrelbirds who were confined in cages invariably died of depression before they could learn the gypsies' songs. A particular whistle song is constructed and taught to the minstrelbird over the course of a few weeks, until the bird begins to mimic it.

Usual song subjects include dangerous passage, like a bridge or road washing out, or directions to a welcoming home for the night. Other songs direct travelers away from certain hunting grounds, curmudgeons, or love interests. Pranks are occasionally employed using minstrelbirds, but due to the time involved, they nearly always border on grudges. Still, they are often epic in nature, and make the gossip rounds for years to come.

Once his song has been transformed, the bird is released into a part of the forest where his song will serve as informatory to passersby.Minstrelbirds are not picky about their dwellings, so they'll move right in on a nice sheltered branch. As a result of his new territory, the new bird will eventually end up challenging a local male for dominance in a rowdy sing-off. If he wins, all the nearby birds will use his song when they do their speed competing for mates and daily challenges for rights to feed or bathe first. If the bird loses his dominance challenge, the gypsies train another bird.

I already wanted to involve some kind of nearly secret society in my Aurora Meridiani series--secret by dint of location, not of scheming--and these minstrelbirds just add to the natural environment in which my people live. Well, one of my peoples: I have a dozen or so realms on the Peninsula. And I need a different name than "gypsies," obviously. Work, work, always work...

This Latest Publishing Disaster

 Reblogged from Tricia Drammeh:

I recently advised authors not to blog when they're angry, but as usual, I'm going to ignore my own advice and do what I want. Today, I'm blogging when I'm spitting mad. Furious.

By now, I'm sure you're all familiar with many of the sordid details of my publishing experiences with a small press. Well, guess what? The story gets worse...

Read more… 737 more words

Absolute Write also has a thread addressing this particularly foul situation.

Authors who seek publication acceptance from small presses, PLEASE do your research before submitting your hard work.

Pot of Plot

Just saw an epic plot play out in the pot in which I was boiling water for spaghetti. Yeah, I'm that geeky. I added a bit of olive oil first to keep the pasta from sticking--at this point, the water wasn't even bubbling. 

But as it warmed, the blobs of oil began to swirl and bump, like influential houses testing each others' mettle. Some smaller ones were quickly absorbed, or sent to the edge of the pot, seemingly out of the action.

I picked one blob to be my protagonist. It was doing well for awhile, absorbing a couple of small blobs, avoiding being absorbed by larger blobs, and avoiding some odd, long string of oil that invaded from the edge, then broke off into rampaging bands of brigands. But then, tragedy! My blob was joined to the edge, and spread itself evenly around the pot, seemingly consigned to watch forever more.

But no. That's not how my pasta water and I roll. The rival blob that had been my blob's biggest threat lengthened and got pinched between two other, smaller blobs who I swear were teaming up. It got bent and its edge lost its cohesion, and while it was joining with one blob, the other changed its mind and joined forces with my original blob, now guardian of the edge of the known world.

Suddenly, the edge had power! And just then, the water began to boil. Bubbles rose up beneath the last remaining oil blob. They ran together and joined forces, creating rifts, holes, within the group. Eventually, to my surprise, they joined and so destabilized the oil that it split into two rival halves who batted at each other in the hot, tense environment of my pot. Meanwhile, my protagonist remained calm and poised, riding out the storm.

A minute later, the rival factions of the last remaining oil blob joined forces again, but it was too late. They'd become riddled with microbubbles. Their power was spent, and their destruction was assured. Never again would the cooking pot see such power struggles, such epic contendings for prime spots atop the water, such alliances smooth and inevitable. Such a twist in the holding of power--the seeming downfall of the hero turned into the one true bastion of strength--would never come again.

Until suppertime.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Over the past few years, I've read several novels that had a gay/lesbian side character who, at some point in the book, made a comment about a member of the opposite gender thusly: "Ooh, that character's so attractive, he/she could definitely turn me straight!"

Seriously, there are so many of these lines out there that I don't even have to think about their existence. They're out there, a mini phenomenon. But recently, I stopped to consider what that line actually means to me. And I'm not happy with the results of that thinking binge, not at all. Which is always a risk you take when you start thinking, so don't worry. I know the risks of binge thinking, but they won't scare me off. I'll be at it again soon.

Anyway. My binge thinking began by reminding me of this fun video on YouTube, called When Did You Choose to be Straight? From there, I started feeling this as-yet-unnamed horror creeping up my psyche, in regards to the quote at the top of this post.

Why is it that only the gay and lesbian characters say that line? I've never seen a straight character say it. I don't hope they're out there, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, but if there were books with straight characters saying some version of that line, I'd at least feel that I were living among slightly less discrimination than usual.

See, when only the homosexual characters say that line, it implies that authors, as one body of writers, are living with the apparently obvious "truth" that gay characters can change their sexual orientation at will, while straight characters wouldn't even consider it. Reading that line runs me right past "Oh, it's just a flirty line saying someone's hot" and straight into "Maybe you should stick to writing what you know."

It gets worse, at least in my head. I tried to apply that line to myself. How would I have to be feeling if I were to say that line out loud and mean it? I couldn't come up with any possible situation. Then I worked on creating an equivalent statement for myself, and I got horrified enough to get out of bed and post this before breakfast.

For me, personally and individually, "Ooh, that character's so attractive, he/she could definitely turn me straight!" is the perfect equivalent of: "Ooh, that character's so attractive, he could definitely make me like getting raped by him!"

Just. No. The line is only humorous until you stop and think about what it actually says: that GLBTQ characters have no original orientation and don't want one. I'm as straight as they come and I'm offended. (I hope that's okay, because that isn't changing, either.)

This is just one of the many examples of homosexual stereotyping in fiction that have been jumping out at me as poor choices for creating a balanced reaction in readers' minds. Homosexuality is just one facet of real people's lives. Why does it have to be expanded into glib stereotyping in fiction? It doesn't.