The Best Books I Read in 2014

Yeah, we're well into 2015 and I'm just now making my list of my favorite books from last year. Well, what do you expect, this is free content. Suckers.

Anyway, I read a lot of books last year, but very few of them were actually released last year. But that won't stop me from making a list! No rereads, because otherwise The Lathe of Heaven would be on my list every other year. Oh, and it's an alphabetical list, but the first entry is probably my #1 anyway.

On to the list!

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory (2014): Long review here. Oh come on, of course this was going to be on my list. This book follows a former scientist who accidentally created a "God drug," and now has an angel tagging her every move. The research team (who have all overdosed on the drug, and have their own personal gods) decides never to release the drug, but it gets out anyhow, and the thrillerish plot involves Lyda's quest to reach the drug's source and wipe it out. There's also fun stuff like a gentle rancher of miniature bison who takes a drug to become a contract killer, frat boys who take pills to turn "gay for a day," and a CIA operative who overdoses on a drug to promote mental clarity and now sees people as amorphous blobs when not jacked up. There are a LOT of drugs in this book, okay? And a lot of examinations of the nature of faith, mental illness, addiction, etc. It's like the author took everything I like to read about and put it in a blender. I'm hella nominating it for the Nebula and Hugo, and not only because it was the only SF novel I read that was released last year (though I should have the Southern Reach books soonish).

Emissaries from the Dead/The Third Claw of God by Adam-Troy Castro (2008/2009): Yes, this is two books, but it's a series, so whatever. These are mysteries set in an SFnal world that Castro has visited in several of his stories. What I liked about these books were how good they were as mysteries. Often in books that blend speculative tropes with other genres, the other genre takes a back seat. Whereas here, while Castro's universe is well-sketched and immersive, they are at heart more mystery than SF and the books are written like traditional mysteries: interrogations, logical deduction, a final reveal scene, and kooky sidekicks. Claw is in fact a locked-room mystery, and his sleuth (a six-year-old war criminal all grown up) uses brains more than tech to get to the truth. I absolutely love Castro's short fiction ("During the Pause" is one of the most perfect stories I've ever read, and "The Thing About Shapes to Come" is a recent favorite... you know, just go read all his stories right now), and his style holds up just as well in a longer form. I wish there were more of these books. I wish I could read a new Andrea Cort book every year, and you all know I am not a fan of series books by and large. But these exist, anyway, and you should read them.

Empty Space by M. John Harrison (2012): Seeing as how I've reread the other Light books several times over the years, I should have read this when it first came out, but somehow it slipped through the cracks. It follows the adventures of humans living near the cosmic event known as the Kefahuchi Tract, except for the strand that follows serial killer/astrophysicist's Michael Kearney's ex-wife. There's weird shit happening on every single page, from data infecting human flesh to people turned into spaceships to a rain of baby shoes on an alien beach to a summerhouse that burns intermittently but is never consumed. Anyway, if you're already a fan of the Lightverse you'll like this. If you're looking for a more traditional space opera, go elsewhere.

Look Straight Ahead by Elaine M. Will (2013): Long review here. Graphic novel, not genre. A fictionalized autobiography (according to the author) of a teenager with bipolar disorder, drawn in a multitude of styles to portray the protagonist's spiral into madness and the struggle out of it. Jeremy (the protagonist) is an artist, and while that should annoy me in the way I won't read books where the characters are writers, it works here as Will expertly shows Jeremy's fear of losing his creative capacity with treatment. I've sort of fallen away from reading comics, because a lot of what I was reading wasn't really inspiring me. One weird quirk I have is that for as much as I love SF prose, I pretty much only like "mundane" comics. Maybe that's because so many SF comics are about superheroes, which I find kind of boring and insular for people who aren't in the know. And while I read very few graphic novels this year, I'm so glad I read this.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (1988): Somehow I managed to avoid reading the Culture series until last year, despite the fact that it's about a far-future anarcho-socialist utopia. How the hell did that happen?! Jernau Gurgeh, a "man of the Culture," is invited to an alien world to play an extremely complicated game which forms the foundation of the backwards capitalistic Azadian Empire. The plot is really just an excuse to explore aspects of the Culture and compare them to a society based on our own, but I totally don't mind that when the ideas are so interesting. I also loved the fact that the Culture is an unabashed utopia, so refreshing in these days where you have your pick of outwardly dreary dystopia or a bright happy future that's a dystopia in disguise (and my own work isn't helping matters). I can tell there will be many visits to the Culture in my future.

(NOTE: All but one of these books are from the 21st century and most of them are series novels. Either my reading tastes are changing or I've just run out of all the good books from the last century.)

New Stories, New Sales, and the Baltimore Book Festival!

1. My short story "Super-Parents Last All Childhood Long" has just been posted at Daily Science Fiction for your non-subscriber reading pleasure. It's a tale of refrigerator parenting by actual appliances, and breaks my six and a half year streak between professional publications. (Although to be fair, there's an intentional hiatus in there.)

2. My experimental flash fiction piece "Thirty-Six Interrogatories Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation" was also just picked up by Daily Science Fiction, so look for that in the coming months.

3. Speaking of DSF yet again, they are currently holding a Kickstarter to fund the magazine through spring 2014 and keep it free to subscribers. I know a lot of people are Kickstartered out, but if you like the magazine and want to see more speculative flash fiction out there, consider donating or buying one of the books. DSF is a great magazine that publishes everyone from new writers to Nebula winners, and it's not just a flash magazine: longer stories are published every Friday. They publish everything from straight-ahead sci-fi to more literary/slipstream pieces to experimental stuff. So if you're not subscribed, go ahead and do that first, then consider donating to the Kickstarter. Thank you.

4. I will be at the Baltimore Book Festival, and will be speaking on several panels! Come to the SFWA tent in Mount Vernon, Baltimore City to hear me bloviate on:

Diversity in SF: The Protagonist Looks Like Me (Friday 9/27, 5:00 PM)

Come hear our authors discuss the portrayal of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and age in science fiction and fantasy. Is everyone represented? Whose stories are we telling? Whose are we missing? Join in the discussion and get recommendations of stories to read.

Other panelists: Don Sakers, Julie Czerneda, Cat Rambo, Peggy Rae Sapinoza (moderator)

The State of Short Fiction: From Pulps to Anthologies to Ezines (Sunday 9/29, 5:30 PM)

Join us to talk about the state of short fiction in fantasy and science fiction. Our panelists will discuss how it has changed over the years, what are the latest developments, and what stories they recommend. This is also a great panel for newcomers to the genre. If you haven't read science fiction or fantasy, short fiction is a good place to start. Come hear what's good, what's hot, and what's out there.

Other panelists: Rahul Kanakia, Don Sakers, Robin Sloan, Lawrence Connolly, Catherine Asaro (moderator)

And if those topics, and the rest of the programming, isn't enough to make you want to attend, can I remind you that one of the featured guests happens to be Brian Boitano?

This Very Small Amount of Internet Fame Will Go Straight to My Head

In the past few days I've had almost four hundred hits. Four hundred! That's how much I get in a typical month, and what makes it a little frustrating is that I can't figure out where you people get here from. The keywords are not helping, the referral sites are the same ones that always refer my site (and the numbers there look the same), and the pages "hit" are a motley collection of bikey posts, writing posts, and posts way the hell from last year. So if you're on this site for the first time, my question to you is: why?

So I might as well take advantage of my sudden Internet fame to update you with some important life news:

• I got a new job! My last job, as I think I might have mentioned here at some point (or maybe it was on Dreamwidth), was at this deli, and while it definitely gave me fodder for a potential writing project, it wasn't the job for me. Even "in this economy." I'm not going to say anything specific about the new job because hi, separating Internet life from work life is always a solid plan but it's the best job I've had since 2007. Looking forward to staying the course, racking up experience points, and learning much more about the profession I work in.
• I've been re-reading a lot of my favorite books this month, because that always gets me more into the groove of writing my own stuff. First I re-read Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem, which might be the book I've read more often than any other. Now I'm onto the Light/Nova Swing duology by M. John Harrison, which was groundbreaking when I first read it (I still hadn't read all that much SF by that point despite writing it... the fact that I only got into SF as an adult and how that's influenced my reading/writing/thoughts about "fandom" should really be its own blog post at some point) and is still amazing now. Up next: probably some Philip K. Dick, since I'm getting the Exegesis for Giftmas and I want to get in the mood.
• Sparkle Season isn't annoying me this year as much as it has in the past. I still don't like the semi-compulsory participation in a holiday I have no religious connection to, I still really don't like giving or receiving presents, but this season I've managed to be more Andy Rooney than Lewis Black about the whole thing.
• My new work commute is over twice as long as my old commute, which would make most people groan but not me, because I'm insane. Or a bike commuter, same difference really. Maybe I'll write about it on the bikey blog but I update there even less frequently than here. I'm learning how to ride safely with one earbud in which makes the commute all the more sweet. (And will hopefully get me back into music. I've only listened to ONE album released this year, I used to care so much more about new music. Of course, I am also 30, and I gather that one's enjoyment of new music tends to wither after you hit your third decade.)
• Working on stories, same old, same old. The revised story I thought about self-publishing as a social experiment is actually turning out to be good, so I may attempt to publish it for real after all. I've come to the conclusion that blogging about writing is sort of boring because it's pretty much a one-woman enterprise and anything that isn't "hey I finished something" or "hey I published something" (and dudes I totally did publish something this year) is frankly kind of dull, don't you think? Being a short story writer and zinester, I hit this "finishing point" more often than novelists but still, it's not climbing Everest, exactly. Maybe taking "action shots" of my netbook in various exotic locations will help, it certainly works for bike bloggers.

And... that's it! Bye for now, my hundreds upon hundreds of mystery readers.

What I've Been Doing

So, I've been pretty busy for someone without any real responsibilities, so here's a list of some of the shit I've been up to.

• We are moving into Baltimore City! Not only that, it's to the best apartment in the world! This apartment is really huge, at least 1.5 times bigger than everything else we saw. The living room is painted the exact same color of mint green that I would have painted it, if I'd chosen the colors of my walls. The dining room is bright blue, and the bedroom is reddish fuchsia! The kitchen is a yellow which I can only describe as "kitcheny," which is apropos. There is a dogwood tree in the backyard (yes! in the city!) and a small plot of land which I might use for a garden. There are tomato cages which I'd like to use because tomatoes are one of the few vegetables I actually like and the only one that would grow well in a backyard garden. There is a basement where I can park my bike and where we can store excess books. We are almost certainly inheriting a fourth cat from our landlord for convoluted reasons to be explained later.

Needless to say, I am stoked. The last year has taught me a very valuable lesson: don't live in the suburbs. As a non-driver (and one who is increasingly uninterested in getting her license), I can't handle it: the monotony of only being able to shop at chain stores and eat at chain restaurants, the utter meanness of townies who assume you're a student, the impossibility of getting a job because interviewers assume you're unreliable simply because you don't drive. (I've never had to call into work because I had to take my legs into the shop. Just sayin'.) When we moved to Towson, we thought it would be a lot like State College, PA, which is also a college town of approximately 50,000 people. Except that it's a lot easier to get to a big city from Towson vs. State College. But State College is very walkable/bikeable, and to some extent so are smaller PA college towns like Indiana or, hell, even California (which is where I went to college), and I don't think I would have had a lot of problems making friends or getting a job there. Towson is more like Monroeville, except with two colleges lodged in its bowels like nuclear bombs in a mixed-metaphor word salad. Also that reference will not make sense to you if you're not from Pennsylvania. Sorry about that.

• Working on short stories! I have two in the pipeline right now: one about evil cars, the other a Machine of Death story. I had been working on a novel in progress, but sort of abandoned it when my computer crashed and I lost the last five pages of writing. Maybe that doesn't sound too tragic, but it was only eleven pages overall. Perhaps it's for the best, I don't really have the attention span for novels. I've said it before: if I only ever write one novel in my life, that is totally fine with me.

• One of our cats was turned into a lamp by an evil sorcerer:

Rob wouldn't let me put the sweater on her. "It's too hot, she'll roast."
So you can blame him for this picture not being as awesome as it
might have been. It would have been on for ONE MINUTE
and cats are hardy little critters. Simply elucidatin'.

• Selling shit on Amazon. Now, it will be no surprise to people who have been to our house that we own A LOT OF BOOKS. (Although not an alot made out of books.) But we've been practicing Discardia, which means getting rid of many hundreds of our books. In the past, we'd always take the books to a used bookstore, which would maybe give us thirty bucks for four bags of books, if we were lucky. But then I had a brainstorm: why not Amazon? I've bought things off Amazon Marketplace in the past, because used CDs are usually much cheaper than new or digital download. Probably because hardly anyone keeps CDs anymore (although I do!). And yes, putting up hundreds of superfluous books is sometimes tedious, and sending them out is definitely tedious, but I've made several hundred dollars on there already, including over a hundred bucks for an out-of-print expansion board for Arkham Horror, the game of mind-numbingly banal Lovecraftian terror. While I don't want to bad-mouth my "customers," it constantly shocks me what people will buy, and for what prices. Granted, I am not into the mangas that the kids are reading right now, but $40 for a comic book? However, as this is the closest thing I have to a paying job right now, I am going to continue doing it until all the books are sold, or I get a real job doing something exactly as tedious for slightly more money.

(Aside: before beginning my extended period of unemployment, I don't think I realized how utterly useless I'd feel. I am someone who crashes and burns without a schedule, and while I do try to write lists to structure my days, it's easier to follow a schedule when it's imposed from without by someone who's paying you. I feel guilty for doing things that I don't consider my "job," i.e. putting items up on Amazon, going shopping for basic necessities, cleaning the house like a motherfuckin' adult. I don't consider writing my job even though I've been paid for it. It's hard for me to talk about this because it's such a first world problem; we can get along fine on Rob's income and I don't NEED to work. But I've realized that I WANT to, especially if I can get back into the only jobby thing I've ever been good at, medical research. Hello, Johns Hopkins University, soon to be within my reach/clutches.)

• Riding my bike, natch. As cycling has turned out to be the loose focus of this blog, I feel obligated to mention that, yeah, still at it. Last night I abandoned my old, broken BSO in my front yard for the first taker, because even though I did have plans to fix it up and teach Rob to ride on it, we all know I wasn't going to do that before moving and it would have just become more moving clutter. Also, it would have been way too small for him, and also a girl's bike. I feel guilty about this, even though I know that's dumb. I'll probably feel better when I see a lady riding around on my old bike, all fixed up shiny and newish. But right now I feel like a consumerist jerk.

Adorabletown, USA

I've been getting some Bulgarian spam on this blog lately, which probably means that it's time for an update, lest my fallow blog serve as a fertile crossroads for Balkan insurrectionists, counter-insurrectionists, counter-counter-insurrectionists, and people selling discount Tramadol at low low prices (protip: it's really Tums).

The week before last, Rob and I went to Virginia for our second anniversary. We started by going to some Civil War sites around Richmond, and then Richmond itself. As previously stated, Richmond is one of my favorite cities, but as I have already spoken of my love for it I don't need to talk about it again. AND THEN we drove down the Blue Ridge Parkway, which I had never been to. And it is fucking gorgeous.

Look at this fucking mountain.

I drove most of the way, and even though I hate driving, it was a good experience to have. Along the way, we passed a group of like thirty people on mountain bikes, which gave me the idea to bike on the Blue Ridge Parkway myself someday, although I probably won't be able to do it on a fifty-pound Raleigh comfort bike. But even through the windshield of a car, the majesty of the Blue Ridge shines through. It was like spending three or four hours in a postcard. And everyone we talked to along the way was really, really fucking nice, the kind of nice where you don't know if they are actually sincere. But they are. They do the same Pittsburgh "make a little bit of eye contact, wave and smile" thing that I've had to train myself out of doing here, because on the coasts eye contact is considered a threat resolvable only by mashing one's forehead into the aggressor, antelope-style. I don't think I realized how much a very slight amount of eye contact with strangers meant to me until I was back in the Appalachian corridor.

AND THEN we visited Roanoke, which is the most adorable city I have ever been to. Among the cute things we saw there:

One of Roanoke's many, many adorable storefronts.

• Tons and tons of old-timey advertisements, including an original Muffler Man, these giant coffee and Dr. Pepper ads on the top of buildings, and "gas" lamps lining the main downtown streets. Oh, and their buses look like old trolley cars. Even the chain restaurants and stores in town (and there aren't many, I only saw a defunct Subway) are made to look old-fashioned. And all these old-fashioned buildings are still functional. It's like stepping into a time machine, except the people aren't horrible, like real old-timey people are.

The only thing that would
make this better is a
squirrel in the saddle.

• Everything is themed around trains because Roanoke used to be an important railroading hub and even though it's not as important now we still saw at least 37 trains come through while we were there. Okay, more like five. But, still, more than you expect to see on a daily basis. Rob is a big railroad geek and even though I'm not as super into it I still thought all the train stuff was awesome. The trainy highlight was a visit to the Virginia Museum of Transportation, which houses over sixty old train engines, a few dozen cars, and three bikes!

• Bike riding is a thing there, which is surprising as Roanoke isn't that much bigger than Towson, but it's way less suburbanized and sprawley. There is even a Roanoke pedicab service. I saw over a dozen people on bikes while I was there, and since we were only in the town itself for like three hours... that is a lot. And even the bike-related stuff is cute; see the bike rack at right.

Roanoke is the kind of place I could see feeling comfortable in for a long time, and while I'm not about to up and move there (I can't imagine their employment situation is great), I felt instantly comfortable there, which is a lot more than I can say for Baltimore. It's no secret that I haven't been very happy here. Although, things might be changing for the better now that we're maybe definitely probably likely possibly moving to Hampden in August. I came to this we have to move NOW realization after my relaxing ride on Easter Monday afternoon turned into a near-disaster when a fratboy (who are to Towson as trains are to Roanoke -- huge, loud, and ubiquitous) reached out of his passenger-side window and grabbed my handlebars while his crony slammed on the horn. Even if it weren't for the hostility toward bikes, there would still be the un-walkability, the crush of chains (hey, I like Target as much as any Walmart-hating hypocrite, but not when it's the only place I can shop), the townies who don't like me* because they think I'm a student, the students I don't have anything in common with because I'm not one... the list goes on. I realize that I haven't really given Baltimore a chance because I don't LIVE in Baltimore. It's like living in Monroeville and hating on Pittsburgh; yeah, maybe you have a taste of what the city is like, but you don't really know, man. I doubt Baltimore will be our forever home, but maybe it can be more than our two-year home. And at least we'll have given it a fair shot.


* An example: I was riding in Rodgers Forge and this tiny shriveled-up white lady in a nightgown cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled "you don't live here!" It was actually kind of cute, but not as cute as Roanoke.

Don't worry, ma'am, that meth you ordered is right on schedule.

Suburban Cycling 101

Even though I've only been cycling seriously for a few months now, I've already learned some Important Truths about biking in a semi-suburban area. Background: Towson is a college town, but its proximity to Baltimore means that it's ironically or not less centrally organized than a typical small town. In a way, the history of Towson is sort of emblematic of America: quaint college town drowned by a wave of sprawl during 1950s white flight, so that while there is still the skeleton of a town here, a lot of it has been ruined by car-lovin' suburbanites who work in Baltimore and drive everywhere. There isn't a neighborhood grocery store anymore (it closed soon after we moved here... coincidence?! (yes)), there's only a strip of "downtown," and most of one's shopping and entertainment is done at big-box stores, complexes of which are at regular intervals from one another. And while I no longer feel like I'm going to die navigating the Target parking lot, it is still not an infrastructure built for cyclists or pedestrians. There aren't even any bike racks in the town itself, which means I actually prefer Target, since they actually have one (or a structure that works just as well).

Where was I going with this? I don't know. On to the tips!

1. Sidewalk riding is inevitable. Believe me, I already know all the anti-sidewalk riding platitudes. It's something children do! No wonder people hate cyclists when they're knocking over old folks and the disabled on sidewalks. Ovary up! And I agree, largely, with most of them: the best place for a bike to be is usually on the road. But I notice that people in the cyclosphere most adamantly opposed to cruising the sidewalks come from NYC, Portland, or other similarly bike-friendly places. Well, shit, it's not exactly hard to avoid the sidewalks if you live in Portland, you know? If we move to Baltimore City this summer, I'm not going to ride the sidewalks anymore either: for one, it's illegal; for two, the maximum speed limit in the city is 25 mph, which means actual car speeds of around 35, and I feel comfortable riding in that kind of traffic.

A typical sprawl-land sidewalk in Alexandria, VA.
Yeah, this is MUCH better than riding on the street.

But on a 40 mph road, which actually means 55? Hell no. I've heard all the statistics about how you're very unlikely to get hit from behind, the only real danger is in turning, just stay confident and you'll be fine on any road. But those are city cyclists riding on city roads. I can't buy that riding on a deserted sidewalk is less safe than "sharing the road" with truckers who have daily bowel movements larger than you and your bike put together. And suburban/small-town governments know this, which is why it's not usually illegal to ride on sidewalks here, and shouldn't be.

And here's the thing: I've ridden five-miles-long stretches of suburban sidewalk and seen not a single pedestrian. People in suburbia just don't walk anywhere, so why shouldn't someone use it? Well, there are still some good reasons: sidewalk maintenance lags behind road maintenance (I've seen sidewalk potholes that would swallow a young child), there are often obstacles like telephone poles and mailboxes, you have more chance of getting a puncture from broken glass (although the only puncture I've gotten so far has been from a carelessly tossed beer bottle on the road). Plus, sidewalks are just not as pleasant to ride on as roads, being by their very nature of inconsistent width and composition, and prone to ending at random intervals. (I don't know how obligate pedestrians with physical disabilities deal with it... sometimes you're walking/riding along, and you either run into a section with no curb cuts, or there's just no sidewalk for a block for apparently no reason. And while it's fairly easy for me to cut onto the road or someone's front lawn for that block, it's a lot less easy for someone with a disability. Just one more example of how sprawl oppresses everyone.)

So, you might have to ride on the sidewalk, but there are things you can do to be less of a jerk about it.
• Always yield to pedestrians. If a pedestrian is elderly or disabled, or there are a lot of pedestrians (again, very unlikely in suburbia, but a possibility), hop off and walk around them. This does mean having to keep a fairly slow speed but your speed will be slower on the sidewalks anyway.
• When crossing a street on a sidewalk, act like a pedestrian. Of course, cars are supposed to yield to pedestrians crossing on the sidewalk too. But in actuality, if you're an obligate pedestrian you know that pretty much every car is out to get you. So wait for the walk sign if there is one, and if not, be timid as a mouse.
• "Timid" is how you should ride most of the time when you're on the sidewalk. You're really NOT supposed to be there, so act like a tourist, not a citizen.

2. You are a novelty. I know I'm not the only cyclist in Towson. I have seen them: almost always male, usually African-American, often riding BMXs. And of course, there is a lot of biking at the college, judging from the number of chained-up fixies around campus. But even if they see us every day, to the suburban/small town driver you will always be just slightly less odd than a guy in a clown suit riding an ostrich.

Having recently attended driving school, I know that future drivers of Maryland are given next to no instruction about cyclists. There was a brief mention of the three-foot rule, a comment from the instructor about how "bicycles shouldn't be on roads," and that was it. And of course, bicyclists don't have to attend any instruction at all in order to ride, which is as it should be (requiring a license to ride would mean the death of cycling). But still, one thinks that a comprehensive driving program (it was thirty hours of instruction) would include some information about the most commonly encountered non-motorized vehicle on Maryland roads. But I guess one has to carve out time for rape apologism.

Drivers express their surprise at seeing a cyclist on the road in a number of ways. The most common response is "bike!" said in the same manner as "dog!" or "fire!" Not really that annoying. There are also the people who will tell you to get on the sidewalk if you're on the road, and vice versa. (And no, we don't have bike lanes here, it's one or the other, folks.) And then there's the lady who, when coming up from behind me, slammed on her horn with all her might and kept it on as she passed me, her beady blue eyes glued to my face like I was the Devil's daughter. Please don't be that lady. Just... don't.

3. Get confidence, stupid. Yeah, so even though most of this entry is about how you should ride on the sidewalk if you feel scared, when it's safe for you to be on the road, own that road, motherfucker. This is something that has taken me awhile to learn, since I find traffic terrifying even when I'm in a car. But roads were originally built for cyclists and pedestrians, and even though it's not a good idea anymore to jog down a 30 mph road (although I've seen it done... no sidewalks sometimes, remember?), if you're on a bike you have as much right to be there as a car. You may not be able to go as fast as a car, but it's a speed LIMIT, not a minimum speed. Sorry, Autobots, you'll just have to spend an extra two minutes on the road today, on your journey from your sealed-off air-conditioned office to your sealed-off air-conditioned home.

If I had the option of using bike lanes, I would. But since I don't, the next safest place to ride is square in the center of the lane, or maybe a little bit to the right (cars drive on the right in the US). I don't like riding in the extreme right, due to the fact that the pavement is usually crappier there, there's a chance you might scrape up against the side of the sidewalk, and there are often drainage ditches which can be a hazard. Also, riding in the center forces the driver to recognize that you exist and hopefully give you the mandated three feet of space. If you're in his peripheral vision, it's easy to misjudge and not grant as much space. Yeah, drivers will be pissed. I even had a cop cross the double center line on the residential stretch of Joppa Road to get around me, which was hilarious. But if you've been around the Lancaster, PA area and seen the Amish buggy drivers, you know that they don't take crap from anybody. Be confident. Be Amish.

I'm sure there are more things I could mention about being a semi-suburban cyclist but it's very sunny out so I think I'll go for a ride.

It's Tricky

I'm roughly 500 words from finishing a new short story, so instead of finishing it I'm going to lay down some honest truth about the act of writing, like I'm some grizzled professional instead of someone who's just had four piddling short stories published. So without any more ado, may I present....

Writing Tipz & Trickz for the Easily Bored Author

Let's face it, people: writing is boring. You're sitting down at a laptop/typewriter/weathered Moleskine, often for very long periods of time. No matter how into your story you may be, there is always something more interesting going on elsewhere. This ain't sky-diving, kids, or action painting! This is writing, one of the most sedentary of the art forms, and at times it can be a drag.

There are two basic ways to get around the drudgery of writing: good old-fashioned "dedication," and trickery. I've tried being dedicated, and all it's gotten me is feeling like a loser because I can't churn out novels like so much organic butter to be sold in a Vermont co-op for $6.95. Trickery it is. Here are some things that have helped me get through this last story:

1. The Last-Minute Rush: This one mostly works if you have an SO, or a kid/parent, who works or does things out of the home while you can be at home. Basically, you start writing twenty minutes before they are scheduled to arrive home. That isn't much of an explanation because that's all there is to it. It works for me because twenty minutes is an easily quantifiable amount of time, and I know I won't be able to concentrate on my writing when there's another person around. Yeah, sure, I technically have ALL DAY to do some writing, but it's hard to really plan out seven or eight hours. There's no sense of urgency there. But by creating my own urgency, time seems to shrink and become something I can deal with, instead of "yeah, I can write whenever." I have to write NOW, or I can't do it at all. And if I don't write at all, I run the risk of committing genocide upon the tiny race of people who live in my computer (see #3).

2. Battery Drain: This works with laptops. You unplug your computer and take it elsewhere. The screen will start to fade! Well shit, man, you'd better get cracking if you want to hit your 500 words (or whatever your daily goal is) before the computer shuts down. I'm guessing this is really bad for your computer, but I still do it. The slowly dimming screen and green battery bar also provide a physical ticking-down of time left over, which increases one's sense of panic and anxiety. Which leads into my next tip, which is really the most important tip of all and probably should have been first on this list. Oh well!

3. Get Anxious: As stated before, some writers have a dedication to their craft. The act of writing brings them joy in and of itself. (This group probably aligns closely with people who enjoy stamp collecting, butterfly taxonomy, and BBC miniseries.) For the rest of us, the joy of writing comes in the completion, in the act of finishing a story, forgetting about it, and then finding it again and being able to say "I wrote that, and it was awesome." So it is sometimes necessary to unleash a little bit of psychological torment on yourself, so you can enjoy the spoils of your work later. Imagine that your writing is powering a tiny village living inside your computer, and if you fail at reaching your quota, everyone dies. Make up your own tiger mom! Writers like us don't feel the benefits of writing until the act is complete, so do whatever you can to speed up that completion.

4. Accountability Friends: This is something I'm still searching for, mostly in my search for a writing group here in Maryland. I never got more writing done than when I was in writing groups. In fact, I think that productivity, not critique, is the main benefit of joining a writing group, especially for lazy Type-B writers. Writing groups give you a built-in audience, they give you deadlines (which aren't as serious as, say, newspaper deadlines, but deadlines nonetheless), they give you an external reason for writing. I can let myself down, but I have a harder time letting down other people without feeling guilty or anxious (see tip #3). So make it so that you HAVE to write, if you don't want to be the gaping hole in your critique group's schedule.

5. Visualize the Future: I can't write a story without knowing the end. Not just the end, but most of the plot twists. And because I'm a very visual person and also a person that tends to go to extremes, I go a little farther: I see it as a movie. Or, rather, since I'm a short story writer, I pretend that I have my own anthology TV show like Ray Bradbury, and I need at least sixteen stories to fill out the season, because it's on basic cable (SyFy probably, maybe USA). This is the kind of thing that makes people think you're full of yourself if you tell them, and of course I don't believe I actually will have my own anthology TV show. But thinking of it like that helps with story pacing, it helps with dialogue, it helps solidify characters and place, and most of all, it means that the story is already finished. You're just describing something you've already played over and over in the Hulu of the mind. And isn't that easier than writing something from scratch?

I hope these tricks are helpful! And remember, procrastinators aren't serial killers, so you've got that going for you.

Finally Loathing Yourself

So I am a person who needs a to-do list to survive. Without my to-do list, I have a tendency to flail randomly through my day without much plan at all, considering that I don't yet have a job here in Maryland yet. I'm pretty crap at structuring my own time, due to my ability to get distracted from my "goals" by pretty much anything: a shiny rock, the antics of cats, rainstorms, the Internet the Internet the Internet.

Having a to-do list, though, helps a lot. But there are a few issues. One of my problems with writing to-do lists has to do with the time of day when I write them. I usually write my lists at night, when my motivation and ability to follow through on things is basically shot. Night-self can't accomplish shit. But night-self also sees all the things that day-self has accomplished, and comes to one conclusion: day-self is a genius.

So night-self loads day-self's list with stuff that she thinks day-self will be capable of, and she is very optimistic. Night-self has complete faith in day-self, the confidence of the half-asleep and therefore only semi-conscious.

Day-self, of course, is not a genius. Though considerably more productive and organized than night-self, the fact is that these lists would be impossible for almost anyone to complete fully. Like you'd have to bend space-time in order to even physically complete all the tasks, even if you were a first-class multitasker wearing amphetamine-powered rocket skates which sad to say I am not. A lot of the time, day-self looks at the gargantuan to-do list that night-self has cooked up, shakes her head, and winds up playing Puzzle Quest until noon, when she decides it's probably time to tackle at least SOME of the list.


Generally, the easiest tasks get done first, with "harder" tasks shuffled to later and still-later slots in the to-do list. Normally, if something has been shunted every day for a week, it drops off the list entirely and is either completed by my husband or reappears much later.

In my quest for guides to writing the perfect to-do list or learning how to clean my house (because I don't ever actually notice the house is dirty unless it's really, really bad), I came upon a website called Flylady that promises a simple, structured routine for cleaning your home and keeping track of chores, designed for easily-distracted "home executives." Flylady is written by a real-life Jean Teasdale, and it is hilarious. Take a look at the website, which hasn't been updated since, I assume, 1999. (It is, however, sadly missing an animated construction worker GIF.) In some ways, I feel like a jerk for laughing at this website because it does help a lot of people, but in most other ways... come on. If you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself, it costs maybe $1000 to create a well-designed, accessible, attractive website, which a best-selling self-help author could easily afford.

But, seeing as how I truly AM in need of someone to tell me how to clean my house and run my life, I hung up my poor-web-design snobbery and decided to give it a shot. I signed up for the email list, which is even more hilarious than the website, but also sad. (Sadlarious!) In one email, "the Flylady" says that women never deserve physical or sexual abuse, but that if you're experiencing emotional abuse, it's probably because you're a shitty wife. Or you have a bad attitude. Let's turn that frown upside-down! There are emails about the ways in which "flybabies" pamper themselves, which for one woman means spending an extra dollar on dishwashing liquid that contains aloe vera. Man, what a selfish harlot.

One of the starting "rules" of Flylady is "dress to shoes." The rationale for this, according to the official website, is that "you are more professional." As it stands now, I'm not exactly a captain of industry, so I figured I'd give it a shot. This lasted a month.

With my shoes on, I'm always on edge, which I guess is kind of the "point." I certainly wasted less time. But it also made me sort of anxious; I could never relax enough with shoes on to read a book or work on creative projects. (Although considering that the creative projects of "flybabies" begin and end at non-ironic needlepoint portraits of Jesus, perhaps I was not intended to factor this into my decision to stop wearing shoes 24/7.) My husband also said he found wearing shoes in the house to be "creepy" and after some thought I had to concur. Although perhaps it's not as creepy as trivializing emotional abuse.

In addition to self-help tips, Flylady also hawks quite a few very overpriced cleaning tools on her website, including a $10 lanyard, $15 kitchen timer, and perhaps most egregiously, the "Rags in a Bag" set of purple microfiber cloths that "make you feel like royalty" whenever you use them. And clearly, people do, according to the many glowing "testimonials" sent in by her legions of readers, who count themselves so blessed to be "brainflywashed" (the site's term, not mine).

To be fair, the site/emails do have a few good tips, like cleaning in fifteen-minute increments to avoid distraction, and designating certain days of the week for certain chores. But, like the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the wisdom is buried deep in a pile of sour-tasting confection that makes you fling brown spittle everywhere if you talk while you're eating it, and you can't take it out of your mouth because there's nowhere to set the thing down, and you can't bite down on it because you might break a tooth and man, you really don't want to go to the dentist because he'll yell at you for going three years without a cleaning. And then when you get there, it's an anticlimax, because the Tootsie Roll isn't even as fresh as the individually-wrapped ones, and you're not a fan of Tootsie Rolls anyway.

But do keep a to-do list. Because nothing makes one feel more accomplished than drawing a line through all one's accomplishments and then visualizing The King of All Cosmos praising, yet also denigrating, your efforts for the day.

RESOLVED: cats are adorable

Normally I don't do New Year's resolutions, because I think they are hokey and also kind of pressure-making, which might be the point. But ever since I've started making daily to-do lists (about which, more later), I've reconsidered it, for what is a New Year's resolution but a to-do list for the entire year? So I've made a few very basic resolutions which I think I can complete, and am sharing them online, because I have heard that nothing makes you want to stick to a resolution like sharing it with the "blogosphere." OK here goes!

1. Write in this blog at least 50 times. This works out to one post a week, roughly, which seems do-able. Of course I am not going to say "post every Friday" or something because that's just setting myself up for failure. So maybe sometimes there will be two posts in one week or weeks without one, and that's okay. This is where having a dedicated specialized topic for my blog would help, but oh well, that's not the way I roll.

2. Write at least five short stories. Again, this doesn't sound very impressive, until you realize that I only wrote two short stories this year (and one was flash fiction), and a whopping zero the year before. I'm never going to be as prolific as some people, but if I can sound like sort of a jackass, I kind of think I have a fairly low crap-to-noncrap ratio. Instead of a dozen awful novels on my hard drive, I only have two, and I don't think one of them is very awful at all. I don't write unless I feel I truly have something to say, and while this leads to some very long droughts, in some ways this is better than having a billion words to pare down and refine. Perhaps it is not a good idea to even put a hard-numbered short story writing goal on this list, considering that I've proven that I can't possibly stick to the writerly maxim of "write every day," but I feel five stories is more than achievable even with my scattershot output, and even if I only get three, well, that's better than this year or the year before or really any year except 2005, which was a freak year in so many ways which I will not get into right now.

3. Do everything in my power to get a driver's license. I can't control whether I will pass the test or not, or whether my eyes will even be good enough to get a (restricted) permit. But I have to try. If all goes well with the eye doctor next month, I'll take my knowledge test the next day, and then on to state-mandated driving classes. If things don't go well with the eye doctor... I find another eye doctor (or a surgeon, since implanted contact lenses are something I want to do eventually anyway, this is the final excuse). Maybe I'll get another half-dozen failures on my permit, but I doubt it; I kind of think driving will be a lot easier for me this time around thanks to Vitamin R.

4. Write another zine. No way this one won't get done. It is on the list so I can have at least one goal on this list which is sure to be achieved. HA! (P.S. Obligatory distro link drop.)

There are of course other things I hope to achieve, like getting a part-time job, and making some more friends in Maryland, but those aren't really things you can put a benchmark/timetable on like you can writing projects. "Make five friends/receive 12 callbacks from potential employers?" That's just silly. Besides, as this is my first time making New Year's resolutions, I figure it's better to start small, sort of like I did with the to-do lists.