More Recent Publications!

I have some new-ish stories out this week:

First up, my paranoid VR suburbia story "Days Like These" is up in audio form at The Overcast and narrated by J.S. Arquin. This is a new podcast focusing on speculative fiction from writers in the Pacific Northwest. There certainly are a lot of us here! I hope you'll check it out.

Also, my short story "Hand of God," originally in PodCastle, is now in "print" in Fantasy Scroll magazine! This is an older story, one of the first that I wrote when I started writing again in 2011, There's also an interview with me up at the site. I may have blathered.

Also re: Hugos: I have never cared about them, but now I really don't care. I know that by all rights I should have An Opinion About This. It probably doesn't say anything positive about my character that I don't. Yes, the Puppies' tactics (both sets, though one much more so than the other) were skeevy. But also, it's an award. Just an award. If I were one of the fans who has been attending WorldCons for years or spent the past decade as a supporting member, I might care. But I'm not. I don't have the money to travel to faraway conventions and while I could afford the $40 for a supporting membership, I'd rather use that money to buy books (you get books with the supporting membership, but they might not be the ones I want to read).

I appreciate that people are upset about this and they have the right to be angry, but I also have the right to be indifferent. Seeing the words Hugo (or Nebula) on a dust jacket has never made me any more likely to pick up a book. There are hundreds of quality works published every year and only a fraction of them will ever win awards. That's life. This year, a different and possibly less quality slate of works were nominated. But does that mean no more great stories will be published? It certainly does not. If works of lesser quality are nominated from here on out? Perhaps that's a little crappy, but you always have the option to not care about the Hugos. Care about a different award instead. Or care about... no awards at all. Crazy thought, I know!

Selfishly, I am unhappy that my first WorldCon will be marred by tense conversations about a stupid award. Every panel: award talk. Hugo talk at the bar, Hugo talk at the pool. Maybe all WorldCons are like this? Or maybe by that point nobody will care. That's the best case scenario, a world in which we all just kinda say "you know what, this doesn't matter." And then we all go read things we like, and write other things we like. The work is the prize. All else is gravy.

One-Year Portlandiversary!

1. Today is our one-year Portlandiversary!

The view from the car almost exactly a year ago.

As I told Rob earlier, my life is basically 95% perfect, and it's all because we took a chance. It has been a truly exciting year. In this year I:

• Secured a part-time day job, the schedule I wanted.
• Wrote something like a dozen stories.
• Re-wrote and re-re-wrote my novel (it's done now).
• Started teaching classes at Portland Community College.
• Got some kick-ass tattoos.
• Slayed the dragon and drank his blood.
• Did not have to look at snow for the first time ever in my life.
• Started up my freelance editing business.

It's been an awesome year, perhaps the most awesome year ever. Seriously, the only year that could possibly compare to this one is the first year I lived in Pittsburgh (and if you want to know what I was like back then picture Kimmy Schmidt sans bunker). I am looking forward to many, many, many more years here in Portland with Rob, doing what I do, letting the tiny animal statues downtown alert me to the changing of the seasons because the weather sure doesn't.

They are wearing tiny hats! This isn't a real city!

I figure next year is the year when I'll finally be Oregonian enough to tell those damn transplants to get off my lawn.

2. I have a new flash story up at Daily Science Fiction, "Clarity." It is really depressing! Read it and weep, but also feel paranoid, because if I try to elicit any sort of emotions with my writing those emotions are depression and paranoia.

3. I also sold a flash story to Lightspeed's special Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue! The title is very long! As a bisexual woman married to and monogamous with a male-bodied person living in the most liberal city in America, I am aware that my queerness is largely invisible unless I come out and talk about it, which I rarely do because... sometimes I think it's not relevant? Although it is, and it certainly was in the past, and I think it's important for people with misplaced straight privilege to come out. So I'm out, I've never been in, but now I'm visible and I am thrilled to be destroying science fiction with many fine writers. Full list of authors/stories here.

4. I have Thoughts about this year's Hugo Awards, which you can read beneath the jump cut below (it got long).

Anachronisms Aren't Just for Historicals

So as I've mentioned a time or thirty-seven, I'm working on a novel. I've been intermittently (usually very intermittently) working on this novel since 2005. And I've run into a curious problem: for a novel set in the present day, which isn't even really about technology, it's absolutely littered with anachronisms.

I'm an old Millennial (or perhaps Xennial... nah, that's dumb). DVDs didn't hit the scene until I was in high school. While the Internet certainly existed prior to 1997, I didn't know about it, and I didn't actually "buckle my seat belt and take a wild trip on the Information Superhighway" until the following year. I grew up in a small town in the Rust Belt which put me about three years behind the coastal elites when it came to cutting-edge technology.

My novel, likewise, takes place in a small town in the Rust Belt, present day. My character is only a few years younger than I was when I wrote the book. A lot of it is based on real life, okay? And even in 2005, there were still a lot of college students who didn't own cell phones. Most nineteen-year-olds still knew what a VHS tape was. The Internet was certainly more of a thing than it was when I was nineteen, but we didn't carry it in our pockets. Not in the Pittsburgh area, anyway. Social media was, uh, LiveJournal and Friendster. Texts cost a quarter to send so nobody did. It was a simpler time.

No Millennial can parse this image.

The novel is still set in the present day, except it's the present day of 2014, not the present day of 2005. Nine years shouldn't make that much of a difference, right? WRONG. It changes everything! I had to rewrite several sections of the book to allow for a cell phone, because even in a crappy Rust Belt small town, even a working-class nineteen-year-old will always have one, and it's going to have a data plan. The character has likely used the Internet her entire life, instead of it being introduced to her around age thirteen or so. Due to other factors, the main character cannot be aged up. Solution: many more references to cell phones (up from zero), some indication of the existence of social media, and a global find-and-replace on every instance of the word "tape." (It's been replaced with "synergy." People connect pieces of paper together with Scotch synergy.)

But even when I modernized a lot of the technology, there were still some anachronistic idioms that needed excising, which I didn't even see because again, I'm too goddamn old. Like describing the main character's vision as being like a videocassette that's been taped over too many times. Someone born in 1981 (or even 1986, which could roughly be construed as her original birth year) knows exactly what this means. Someone born in 1995? Not so much. And I actually had to research what bands "the kids" consider cool now, instead of allowing her to listen to the same music I did/do listen to.

Even though I updated the tech, I'm still not so sure I did a bang-up job of modernizing this novel. As an example, the main character is rather withdrawn and sullen for much of the book, but she never loses herself in the black hole of the Internet*, which is totally something I would have done as a withdrawn sullen older teen. She goes on walks or bike rides instead. Do teens do this now? I'm not sure they do, but she still does, because it's more interesting to take a character on a stroll than to say "well, she was depressed so she just read Tumblr for four hours." There isn't a sense of "constant connection" and most of the conversations still take place face-to-face. I did briefly consider setting the novel in the early aughts or even backtracking to the nineties, but that seemed like even more work and there was no good reason to set it in what is now the past.

So glad this rewrite is almost behind me. I'm also pretty sure that I don't want to write any more novels set in the current era whose characters are so much younger than me. But that's okay. The world still needs books with characters in their thirties, or books that take place in completely fabricated worlds, right?


*Speaking of black holes, there's a TV Tropes page for this phenomenon: Unintentional Period Piece. You have been warned!

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Apartment Hunter

Rob is away in Portland looking at apartments, which means I am home alone for the next week at least (since he has to find the apartment, then arrange for a flight back). Should be a perfect time to work on writing, right? But as it turns out, an upcoming cross-country move is one of those things that is so brain-destroying that it eclipses anything else you might want/need to work on. This includes not just writing but also reading, sleeping well, basic hygiene, and ironically enough, packing for the move. It's just this omnipresent thing hanging over you all the time. If moving anxiety was this bad when we moved from Pittsburgh to Baltimore, I surely do not remember it. But then, that's only 400 miles. (And I also wasn't writing then, so I can't gauge if it affected my writing or not.)

Somehow we missed this statue in September.

The thing about moving to Portland that makes it tough is that a LOT of people want to move there, and there aren't enough apartments for everyone. Supply and demand. We heard from multiple sources that the best way to get an apartment in Portland is to fly out here and walk the streets. Unfortunately, the For Rent signs weren't exactly thick on the ground in our preferred area (North Portland), and even though I knew it wouldn't work out this way, we did not secure an apartment on his first day out there. It's almost enough to make someone utter the b-word, although I'm not certain we're at that point yet.

Anyway, in publishing-if-not-writing news, the Strange Bedfellows anthology (which includes my story "The Afternoon Revolution") is available for pre-order at Amazon and elsewhere. Check it out!


P.S. Props to our friend Alex Wrekk for hosting his stay in Portland! Go buy some buttons and zines from her.

On Not Writing

Confession: aside from a few pieces of flash for a contest, I haven't been able to write or revise anything for the past few weeks.

This is moderately concerning, because in the past when I haven't written consistently I wind up basically quitting for years. While I don't think that will happen this time, because I'm not as much of a moron anymore, it still feels dangerous not to write. It's so easy to fall into the "not writing" trap, and quite difficult to climb your way out of it once you're in.

Comic books awaiting their epic journey.

A lot of the reason I can't write, maybe even all of it, is due to the upcoming move to Portland, which is now precipitously close. Less than two months away close. And while I am totally committed to this move and can't wait for it to happen, even good things cause a ton of stress and anxiety. Moving is right up there with divorce and job loss as a stressor, and this move will come packaged with job loss (with nothing waiting for me) and is clear across the friggin' country. We are literally moving as far away as one can from our current location without leaving the continental US. It's not a coincidence that this "writer's block" coincided almost perfectly with the finalizing of our timetable. There's just so much to do, and I feel like I can't carve out some writing time since I should be packing boxes or sorting out stuff to give away. Although I'm falling down on those tasks as well, truth be told.

People, including Rob, say to be kind to myself, to let the writing flow at its own pace and give myself some breathing space, but honestly? Fuck that. I need to be harder on myself, because when it comes right down to it, the only person hurt if I don't write is me (and maybe Rob, a little). There's nobody out there salivating for my precious words. Sure, it's "only" two months, but that's a hell of a lot of writing time to waste, and I was going at a pretty serious pace up until two weeks ago. (And there's always the possibility that it's not because of the move. I'd rather not think about that possibility.)

I'm sure it will come back in time. I signed myself up for another crazy challenge to write several full-length short stories at the pace of one per week over the next several weeks, and I'm still sticking to my deadline of having my novel reader-ready (if not agent-ready) by April 1, although I probably won't be able to deliver it to beta readers on that date since we'll probably be driving through Montana or some shit.

There's just nothing worse than having a huge block of writing time and not being able to do anything but stare at a blank screen because you're filled with existential dread. Well, maybe those big-ass spiders they have in the Pacific Northwest. I'd rather not think about those either.

***

To pull a total 180, my contributor copy of Spark: A Creative Anthology (which includes my story "Real Plastic Trees") came in the mail a few days ago. It's an astonishing 400+ pages long, and includes speculative fiction pieces from both established and new writers. The paperback book is gorgeous, but there's also an e-version if you prefer that. Pick it up!

Revision Blues

I'm mostly a short story writer. I'm mostly a short story reader. I fucking hate revision, I like getting a story there 95% of the way the first time out even if it takes a lot longer. And yet, here I find myself revising a novel. What have I become?

I'm also using Scrivener. I might as well go all in and write in a coffee shop.

Writing and/or revising a novel is a lot different from short storying. A LOT different. For one thing, you can't write them in one shot, unless you're mainlining Red Bull laced with trucker speed. The fact that they can't be written in one session means there's the possibility of inconsistencies, both in plot details and also in the writing itself. There are parts of this thing that need almost no revision at all! Those were written on "good days." Other parts (most parts) need drastic rewriting. I can tell if a short story is going to fail or succeed (in my estimation, not talking about the marketplace) almost as soon as I've finished writing it. With a novel, I have to hope that the revision will yield something of value, that I'm not just throwing time and effort down a giant sewer.

I know people who love writing novels, which is great for them! I hope to be one of those people someday! But right now, it feels like the worst thing ever. Can you imagine writing a series of these things? Well, you probably can, because most SF/F writers love series. I know people who say writing a series is easier than writing a short story, which is absolutely insane. So much to keep track of! So much text to keep in your head at once!

This is my short fiction writing process: I basically have the entire thing plotted out in my head (not on paper, never on paper) before I touch fingertip to keyboard. First line and last line are set. If the stars are right, the story just comes out. Boom! We're done here. Then it goes to my in-house editor for a pass, and after some revision, it's sent to magazines who will either publish it or they won't. Super easy, super fast, with built-in validation in the form of occasional sales.

Novels though, man. First you have to write a first draft, which is probably not even going to be close to your real draft. You have to find beta readers, because a novel is much too much work for an unpaid in-house editor to take on alone, or maybe you don't have an in-house editor. Then you have to revise a manuscript that is of inconsistent quality. It could take years before you're given that yea/nay by a wise and all-knowing publisher. (Around eight years and counting for me, although I was retired for most of that time.)

I do know that I need to find a way to up my writing speed if I'm going to write novels. When I'm actually writing, I'm extremely fast. But with short storying, I basically don't write until I'm ready to write. Write every day? Fuck no I don't write every day, that way lies mediocrity in the short story game. But now that I'm really knuckling down on this revision, I see the wisdom in writing or at least revising or at least opening up the document every day. Because writing short stories is about inspiration, but writing novels is about persistence. I have the one, but not the other.

So yeah, the slog continues. I hope to be finished with this draft (which is probably not even the real and final draft, fuuuuck) by the time we move to Portland, at which time I can send it off to others and get started on another. Fucking. Novel. I guess. Maybe I should take a break to write a flash fiction piece, that will make me feel better about life.

Sexism in Cover Images

I've never read anything J.K. Rowling has written, and I don't consider myself a fan of hers. But I still think this is bullshit.

So, Rowling released a gritty crime thriller (level of grit undetermined) under the name Robert Galbraith. It got decent reviews, but flopped, until she came forth as the author. Here is the cover released when nobody had reason to think Galbraith was female:

Kind of a typical crime cover, showing the shadowy male protagonist quite grittily walking away down a fog-filled London street. Fences to symbolize the fences we put up around ourselves, blah blah. I don't love the cover, it looks a little bland to me, but it clearly marks the book as a crime novel.

Here's the second printing after the big reveal. Name's still Robert Galbraith, but oh, the differences:

You can almost see a little phantom Oprah sticker in the upper corner. While I haven't read the book, and don't plan to, I have no idea WTF this cover has to do with the contents of the book. A lady's back? There's some kind of camera thing on the right, but this doesn't at all say "crime novel" or "gritty" or even "slightly gritty" to me. And of course, flowery cursive writing, the kind of thing women love. Women, am I right?

Yeah, it's possible that given Rowling's stature she had input on every stage of the cover design process, or at least veto power. Maybe this doesn't bother anyone else. But I haven't seen a side-by-side comparison of these covers yet, so hey, I've got this one.

It sucks that books with women on the cover, with flowery cursive writing, aren't taken more seriously. But they just aren't. As it looks now, this cover is heavily coded female, and if it were a crime book by an unknown female writer, I would fully expect it to tank due to its insides not matching up with its outsides (probably?) and looking like the kind of book many people would be embarrassed to pick up. I have zero interest in self-publishing, but this kind of explains why some female writers choose to do it.

That SFWA Thing

So it seems that less than a month after joining SFWA, it has managed to disappoint. If you're involved with writing SF at all then you already know the details, but I figured I'd put up another post about it anyway, because it's always good to have another voice in the room. So, the details:

1. SFWA publishes a trade journal called The Bulletin, a subscription to which is included with SFWA membership. The Winter 2013 issue had a cover featuring a lady in a chainmail bikini, laughingly juxtaposed next to a headline asking "Where Do the Dues Go?"

2. The next issue featured an editorial about career longevity that included an extended metaphor about Barbie, how she doesn't dress like a tramp the way those Bratz girls do, instead maintained her quiet dignity the way a woman should. I read the article while over at a SFWA member's house, and thought it was more bizarre than anything. The metaphor didn't even make sense in the context of the article; Barbie changes "her" style all the time! "She" can't remain true to "herself," because Barbie is a plastic toy licensed by a corporation.

I already knew about the chainmail bikini cover and the Barbie article when I joined, and while I was annoyed by those things, I wasn't actively offended. I rolled my eyes, yeah, sure. Because it's a trade journal, not the cover of a pulp magazine (and SF magazines haven't carried those types of covers for a very long time). This would be kinda like the AMA journal putting a sexy nurse on the cover, or the American Bar Association trotting out its hottest new lawyers on the front page of an issue otherwise devoted to tax policy. I'm all for sexy nurses, hot tax attorneys, and yes even chainmail bikini babes (although I didn't find the image on The Bulletin all that sexy, I felt the composition was poor and the coloring muddied). But on the cover of what's supposed to be your organization's flagship publication, the professional face you put out to the world? I've railed against the expectation of professionalism in writing before (of course, that was when I was told that "professional writers" shouldn't ever mention politics or personal problems to anyone, because nobody will publish your stories/novels if you don't present an absolutely blank-slate face to the world), but when it comes to something like The Bulletin, I think that professionalism is something that is required.

And that leads us to...

3. The latest issue, the first I received in the mail and which was worse than the other two fails combined. Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, two writers I have never read but who have been in the SF game for a very long time, engaged in a "conversation" where, over six pages of fairly small type, they railed against anyone who was offended by the bikini cover, said that nobody would complain if they called male writers or editors "beautiful" (yeah, but you didn't do that, did you?), and closed out the article by stating that "If they [feminists] can get away with censoring that, can you imagine what comes next? I'm pretty sure Joe Stalin could imagine it. Even Chairman Mao could imagine it." Because truly, thinking that a pulpy image isn't necessarily the best cover for a trade journal = killing ten million people. The editor, Jean Rabe, seemed to think this was a counterpoint to a very good article by another male writer, Jim C. Hines, about ChainmailFail and sexualization of cover images in general. (It's also worth noting that the length of the Malznick piece was twice the length of the Hines article.)

Where do the dues go, indeed!

It seems that the editor (who has since resigned) seemed to think she was offering a different view by placing the Malznick piece alongside the Hines piece. But the thing is, the Hines piece didn't need a counterpoint. Equal rights and respect for all don't need a differing view to "further the dialogue." Also, invoking "fascism" is a lot like bringing up Hitler. You don't automatically lose the debate, but you've set up a hell of a job for yourself.

I'm not going to quit writing SF. You don't need to be in SFWA to write SF, and let's be honest, all my attempts at straight fiction come out SF anyway (there was one story that I wrote in college that came so close to being just a normal lit piece about relationship dynamics but then I had to go and make the metaphor literal). And I'm not going to stop interacting with the SF community, at least now that I've found a corner of it that doesn't suck. I also know there are some amazing people in SFWA (largely women) who are currently scrambling to make things better.

But I gotta say, it DOES piss me off that I paid $80 of my money to pay for two old dudes to talk about what a fascist people like me are. I guess I'll spend this year deciding if it's worth it to me to continue. I think a lot of people in SFWA are going to spend this year deciding that.

(Crossposted from LiveJournal.)

Experimentation and Productivity

After a talk with my husband Rob this evening, I came to two conclusions:

1. I need to experiment more with my writing.
2. I need to start writing a lot more.

The first one might seem strange if you've read a cross-section of my writing. I prefer present tense. I enjoy strange POVs. Almost all of my narrators are unreliable, and my favorite of my own stories (most of which have yet to see publication) have ambiguous endings. It's obviously not on the level of a truly avant-garde writer, but for SF/F, my writing is clearly on the experimental side.

And yet... I've never written anything like a physical fight scene. I've never written a story with magic or myth as a plot device. I've never written a narrator that wasn't on some level paranoid or neurotic, I've written exactly one functional romantic relationship. My stories are formulaic; it's not a formula that might be used very often (at least by published writers), but it's a formula nonetheless. As Rob put it, if I were given a prompt to write a story involving a gun, it would probably be a story about how the gun turned out to be a hallucination and the narrator would spend the rest of the story trying to uncover the machinations behind it. This is what I read, this is what I love. But couldn't I be doing something else?

I'm not going to start writing high fantasy or lovey-dovey heterosexual relationships or anything like that. My heart couldn't be in it. But that doesn't mean I couldn't maybe try to break out of the "paranoid near-future psychological soft-SF story in present tense POV" niche/rut I've got going. I think at this point I'm pretty good at cranking out what Rob lovingly refers to as an "Erica story." It's time to see if my "talents" for lack of a better term can reach beyond that.

As for the second conclusion, I had a goal to write one short story a month, which is more productive than I have been at any other point in my writing life. 2012 was my most productive year of writing ever, with five stories in the can. Five! Sorry if that doesn't sound amazing, but I don't think I've written more than three stories a year at any other time in my life, not even the big writing year of 2006, although I was also working on a novel at that time. So in those terms, twelve stories makes me a friggin' speed demon (no actual speed involved). But Rob says, why not shoot for two a month, i.e. 24 stories?

And that's kind of hilarious to me, because I don't think I've even written 24 stories I'm happy with in my entire life. So that goal is not going to happen. But still... maybe? Will shooting for quantity help me maybe get more stories of higher quality? Is it okay to write a story that's only 80% as "good" as something I've spent over a month on, if it means I can write two of those quality-level stories in the same amount of time? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do think I can maybe write two short stories a month for at least part of 2013 if I make more of an effort to write during the week, and also let go of the idea that my writing has to be perfect on the first go-around. Since that is something that's a major stumbling block when it comes to writing more (although it obviates much of the need for intense revision, and revising is my absolute least favorite thing to do).

Basically: 2013, you were shaping up to be a pretty good year for writing, but maybe now, you'll be a little more amazing. Not by much, though.

Reality Doesn't Have to Suck: That GM Ad

There was some predictable outcry over the above General Motors ad a few days ago. Basically, the ad is terrible and so is GM (for a much bigger reason than this). But, IDK, I can't get as fired up about this as others.

I think my take on it was a little skewed compared to the rest of the bikeysphere. The "Reality Sucks" line struck me at hopelessly nihilistic, and definitely connected to the car (as it's a car ad) instead of the bike. As Rob likes to tell me when I go on about hating cars and driving, driving is a reality, and it's not going away, and yes, for most people it does suck. Yet, why a company would want the term "sucks" to come anywhere near their product baffles me. Fast food is often a necessity in our modern lives, but would you see Burger King running a commercial where a family is sitting down to a nice home-cooked meal, and then there's a cutaway to a dad rushing home with a bag of Whoppers? "Reality sucks, stop cooking, eat BK." No, because it's insane to compare your product to a slower, yet far more fulfilling alternative. Likewise, cars are a tool, ones that are often a necessity in our modern lives, but being reminded of this "reality"... does not strike me as the best way to go. If anything, it might cause someone to think "Hey, yeah, driving DOES suck! Wait, you can ride a bike to work, like it's a car? Does that suck as much as driving does?" Putting your competitor's product in your ad is a risky venture, and should only be done if you're absolutely certain your product is superior. It isn't at all clear that driving in areas that allow for transportation cycling is superior (in fact, proving that it's inferior is sort of the point of bicycle advocacy, right?), so really, the main thing I take away from this is GM is a self-hating corporation which is secretly engineering its own downfall.

The pictures further fuel this interpretaton. For one thing, the cyclist is attractive! He's not really my own type, but he's definitely got that generic advertising-model look going on. And while he's not smiling, he also doesn't have a doomed expression on his face saying "oh, man, I wish I had a truck right about now." He looks like he's concentrating, which I can understand, as my own face tends to scrunch up when I cycle, to the point that I look like I'm probably not enjoying myself very much. The girl in the picture, meanwhile, is smiling at him. Not sneering, or rolling her eyes, but genuinely smiling at him, even if she's WAY too close. Meanwhile, she's not watching the road. Does this mean GM customers are bad drivers?

So, really, my deconstruction of the ad would have to be: "The reality of our current transportation infrastructure is sub-par and often requires the use of a car, which we provide. However, there are alternatives, and these alternatives may not 'suck' as much as our product or others like it. Have we said 'suck' enough? Suck suck suck, our products suck." Awesome pitch for my side, GM! Here, have another bailout.

Of course, that's not what GM was going for by a long shot, I know that. I realize that my interpretation of this ad is influenced by my own hatred of cars (despite their "reality"). Still, I wonder just what they were going for. Nobody who currently has the privilege of being able to ride for transportation is going to "make the switch" after seeing this ad. I guess it makes GM truck owners feel a little better about themselves and their choice to carry around a 3000-pound steel cage. And of course, it got us all talking about GM, which is the ultimate goal of any and all advertising.

The below response ad by Giant is pretty awesome:

Basically, the fact that a major car company even deigns to "attack" transportation cycling means just one thing to me: they're scared and we're winning. Even ten years ago, you wouldn't have seen an ad like this, because cycling was so on the margins that this ad would have been a waste of GM's ad money. Call me an optimist, but I count this as a victory.

Like, seriously, fuck car culture. Right in its EAR.

I swear I'll get back to funny/light posts that aren't about transportation issues eventually but this is too important a news story to not comment on. Raquel Nelson, an Atlanta woman whose child was killed by a drunk driver while she was crossing the highway in front of her apartment building, is now being charged with vehicular homicide for her son's death. Nope, not the driver who actually killed him. The woman who lost her child due to the combination of a selfish asshole driver and piss-poor urban planning is being charged with murder. Welcome to another battle in the war between pedestrians/cyclists and drivers.

Of course, comments are making much to-do over the fact that she crossed illegally. This is true, she did. But why should a mother with three young children be forced to walk almost a mile round-trip to get to the crosswalk? Why are crosswalks so scarce in this part of Atlanta? Why did the bus let her off in an area without a crosswalk? The story says that other bus passengers also illegally crossed there, and if I'd have to guess based on the aerial picture on that link I'd say that it's a pretty popular spot for illegal crossings. There appears to be a large housing complex on the opposite side of the street from the bus stop, a wide median strip, and no obstructions to prevent walkers from seeing cars speeding toward them. And there also doesn't appear to be a sidewalk on that road, meaning that walkers who do choose to travel along the shoulder to the crosswalk would still be in danger from cars drifting onto the edges of the road, plus the exhaust and harassment and possible disease-ridden debris normally found on shoulders. I've seen dead rats and broken beer bottles alongside highways, been panhandled, had things shouted at me. I don't blame her for taking a chance crossing that highway instead of mucking around on a shoulder for an additional half hour with three young kids, who tend to be inquisitive and put things in their mouths and such.

Naturally, race and gender have a lot to do with this, too. Would Nelson have been charged with killing her child if she was a white man? Well, maybe not, but maybe so. It's no secret that non-drivers are marginalized almost everywhere in the United States; a greater percentage of non-drivers are POC/poor/disabled which skews things, but even a person privileged in almost every other category becomes suspect when they choose not (or are forced not) to travel in a two-ton death machine, when they live in a walker/biker/human-unfriendly place. And in another news story, which did not mention Nelson's race, a commenter came right out and said a woman with children who doesn't own a car is a child abuser. Awesomesauce, right? To top it off, Nelson's jury wasn't comprised of her peers, not just because all six (and since when does a jury only have six people on it?) jurors were middle-class whites, but because they were all drivers. God forbid, if I am ever in a serious accident, I for damn sure don't want people who have never walked or cycled anywhere to be on my jury, no matter their race or class. (Actually, I don't want people who have never walked, cycled, or taken public transportation in their lives to even exist but we're talking about possible hypotheticals here.)

Being a pedestrian in a walker-unfriendly city is not a crime. Raquel Nelson is guilty of crossing a road illegally, but nothing else. The drunk driver who killed her kid bears the greatest responsibility (natch), but so does the city of Atlanta for allowing this situation to happen via some seriously shit-ass urban planning and bus routing. I think it's about time for people who take "alternative" transportation to start organizing around these issues, and for cyclists to care more about pedestrian issues, and vice versa. Walkers, cyclists, bus-riders... we all have more in common than we think we do, and the Nelson case sets a dangerous precedent for all parents who can't or don't have a car to be charged with murder (like, really, my mind's still trying to wrap around that one) for just attempting to get their kids safely home.

Soapbox dismounted!

The Map Is Not the Territory

Yesterday I took my new bike (yep, crap!bike finally died on me) out for what I thought would be a quick trip to Target, followed by a journey to yon distant Starbucks two and a half miles away, instead of my normal Starbucks that's only a ten minute trip. Because that's how one gets one's "kicks" here in suburban Maryland. But instead of a pleasant four mile or so round trip, it turned into a 10+ mile death ride ending with me staring down a four-lane highway, weak from hunger, pursued by demons. All because I can't read maps.

It started out as just wanting to extend the ride a little, because after leaving Target I wasn't quite ready to settle down for an afternoon of bloggin' and zinin'. So I decided to explore the residential area between Target and Starbucks. What could possibly go wrong? Unlike Pittsburgh, which based its street pattern on the Parisian catacombs, the roads in Maryland are usually quite straight and make more rational sense.

But "more rational" doesn't equal "can always find your way around, anywhere, anytime." Added to that, there's a trend here toward apartment and housing complexes based on brownstone styles, which can make the streets look really same-y. After about five minutes, I was lost. Ten minutes after that, I realized I was lost, and pulled out my smartphone.

The smartphone is one of those inventions that you don't know you need until you get one, at which point it seems impossible that you've ever lived your life without one. Like an mp3 player, or heroin. Sometimes I regret getting one because of how much it's tethered itself to me, but I would have had to get one eventually anyway. It's quite useful in situations like this, that is, unless your ability to read maps is severely compromised by a rare fake disorder I am going to tentatively call "dysgeographica," or the much more fun to say "dysmappia." Otherwise known as the inability to read a goddamn map.

You're no help.

I consulted Googlemaps and found that I only had to go back to the main road. So I did! And went the wrong way, which I didn't notice until I was approximately four miles farther away. Re-consult Googlemaps. Find that there's a side road that is safe to ride on (I always prefer to ride on the road instead of the sidewalk) that hooks up with the main road that will get me home. Alright! Go the wrong way again, approximately five miles away now. Third opinion! You... can fill in the gaps from here. Somehow I wound up getting seven or eight miles from home, staring down that aforementioned highway. And I couldn't even get home under my own steam, because I'd only eaten a single bowl of Coco Wheats for breakfast, believing that I'd get calories at Starbucks and that I'd only have to ride four miles that day. Luckily, my long-suffering husband Rob drove to my give-up point and picked me up, which let's face it, is a massive humiliation. Especially as he has the directional sense of a homing pigeon and can't understand how I could consult my smartphone not just once, but over six separate times, and still get lost.

But my ability to get lost is both legendary and pervasive. I even got lost in my old neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and as humiliating as having to get picked up after a failed bike excursion is, it pales in comparison to being forced to call your husband to figure out how to get home when you're less than a mile away. Usually it takes me at least two years of living in a place before I figure out how to not get lost so much, but there's no guarantee that I won't ever get lost. I also have a much harder time in suburbia and small towns vs. big cities, I think because what little navigation I can manage is all based on landmarks, and there's more landmarks in a city.

When it comes to maps, though, I don't even fucking know, man. To me, a map makes as much sense as one of those fake equations that take up an entire chalkboard in movies when you want to show that the protagonist is some kind of crazy genius. On a map, everything is the Parisian catacombs. And because it's easy, both on a bike and on foot, to kind of zone out and not pay a lot of attention to where you're going, it's easy to take a few wrong turns and wind up next to the pile of skulls with a rat coming out of every eyehole. Metaphorically speaking. I will say that the ride itself, though longer than expected and without the intended outcome, was quite enjoyable up to the last half hour or so.

And I really don't know how I'm going to deal with driving when I don't have a co-pilot/navigator, because there's nothing that looks quite as same-y as highways. Guess I'll have to make sure my smartphone (whatever good THAT does) is always charged and accept that I'll probably waste a lot of gas and time.