taabe

I woke up this morning with a thought and handed it to my room-mate as she headed out the door — when someone vids Yuri and Victor to Halo, you're gonna tell me, right?

And then the Snowflake Challenge folks gave me this — In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for — a fannish wish-list of sorts. Are we sharing a wavelength?

And I would love that vid, seriously, because who wouldn't. But as I think about it, what I'd put on this wish list is a vid to music Yuri himself would listen to. Because I'd like to know what his music would be. Or fic that knows where he grew up, that can help me to feel and see his hometown, his background, conversation around the dinner table, and what it's like for Victor to spend time with him there.

Also anything at all about Karim and Raheen from Kamila Shamsie's Kartography, because I love the book so — because of their deep connection, the kind of intimacy that shares thoughts and grows over years, and their curiosity and laughter, and the ways they play games with the world, play with words, find magic in street names and histories and in the back garden just by being awake to it. Because they begin the book by finding a mummified cuttlefish. Because I want to walk around Karachi with them and just listen to them talk.

And third ... sometimes I write song lyrics, because sometimes stories come that way, and if anyone wanted to, I'd love to have music for them, especially for Turn Around. (It's a Check Please tribute in Bitty's voice.)

It's a quiet winter day, a trace of thaw before the next storm. It's supposed to be snowing now, but the temperature is the age I've just become. It will be colder before morning.

I'm at the end of a holiday break after a rare week with family and friends. My sister and brother-in-law live across the country, and my brother and about-to-be-sister-in-law live halfway across, so having all of us together takes thought. And they are close friends. We are. We had some quiet time over Christmas and the early nights of Hanukkah, making cookies and lighting candles. My oldest friend and his wife gave us a vid made with 10 years of photos of us all. And then we headed to the farm, and two old family friends and my brother's fiancée's family came up to meet us. So we had a houseful of board games and a fire in the fireplace. I introduced Oracle ... which told us, among other things, that the Swedish Chef can take any three superheroes out there, including the Hulk. With flying lettuce and a blunderbuss.

When I got back, the annual New Years Tribecon was in full swing, with more old friends and games and conversations about the properties of funghi (which evolved before animal or plant life and can eat rock — there's something alive in here.)

And this is a quiet time in a quiet month. I've taken a couple of quiet days to settle in and re-read Rainbow Rowell's Carry On (one of my new gifts, a request because I finally read a library copy this fall and fell into it headlong.) Sanj introduced me to Yuri on Ice, and we watched the whole short, beautiful season. Kouredios, I think I owe you for telling us about it? It's breath-stopping, warm, the rare kind of love story that feels real.

The podcast I've been working on has gone live, and deadlines are easy so soon after the holidays, and in winter. I'm looking forward to a few weeks of quieter time, and to writing more fiction before the journalism catches me up again.

And I'm 39. This morning I opened an email from my sister, and she had written me a birthday poem. It's the first time anyone has written a poem for me. It made me cry, in the best way. And my brother has saved up enough frequent flyer miles so I can visit him. This year may bring plenty I can't predict, for better and for worse, but my people — all of you I am so thankful for.

Today's Snowflake challenge: In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Thinking about that, I started with — I want to keep what I have. What I've put together over the last year. This time next year, I want to be earning a living by writing what I want to write, and living in a place I love, and talking with friends and family.

And then I thought, there's more to it.

This year I want to meet people who will matter to me and teach me.

I want to stretch. I've spent the last year rebuilding structures I'd lost, in new ways, but on comfortable ground. 

Remember the kind of confidence that goes with conversations at all hours, new ideas running like sap, trying for something just within reach and sticking the landing, falling and getting up again, and sharing that high with people who understand how it feels?  

I want to talk with people who will make me think and challenge me. Looking for a mind at work.

I want not to be afraid to tell people who I am and what I do. And to learn to do it well. (Sales isn't my strength, but I need to learn.)

I want to write something that intimidates me and feel that it's good. 

Do you find it hard to start a sentence with I want? I do. I can tell myself I want to l love. I want to write. I want to talk, even to people who intimidate me. Especially to people who intimidate me. I want to hike the highest peak in the state. But saying it out loud? I want to thank this challenge for giving me a prompt. 

Following Kass's lead, because it's a quiet, snowy day ... I'm taking a look at the Snowflake Challenge.

Day 1: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


Lauds begins at the end of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" — it's the first fanwork I wrote for Yuletide and almost the first fanfic I wrote (on paper. Like everyone else, I've been writing them in my head as long as I can remember.) And it's one of the few I've written that I know struck a chord with people.

(ETA: More clearly, it's one of the few stories I've written that seemed to strike a chord with a group of people. Most of the Yuletide stories I've written were for small fandoms, so they had small audiences, and that's wonderful all on its own. There's nothing better than feeling that someone I've written a story for takes it as a gift.)

"In which Waldo of Hereford and Rabano of Toledo fight fire, find shelter at the onset of winter, and revolt at the end of their illuminations, and truth learns to laugh at last.

We stayed close when the library burned. For three days we watched it from a lower shoulder of the mountain while the walls cracked and the embers recaught and died, and the snow fell over the golden sandstone crags and made no difference. ..."


Rasa is a crossover: Deeba Resham from Un Lun Dun and Haroun from the Sea of Stories. In Un Lun Dun, a city has a kind of shadow, a mirror, an abcity, made out of elements lost on the press of people and things, so there's an UnLondon. But what happens when an abcity's adcity is destroyed? I loved writing these two bright, brave people, and it warmed me that a couple of readers who know their worlds, I think, seemed to think I was on the right track.

Dear Yulewriter,

Three days without travel — three days to read and clean house and knead bread and not have to be anywhere or think anything unless I choose to? Heaven. This is always the part of the year when I start to crash and don't really have time to yet. The busy season eases just a hair, I start watching the leaves and wondering how much of a fall we're going to have, and the leaves get that light-edged, faintly golden sense of dryness. I got to have lunch with Sanj today, and there are red peppers in my farm share. Life is good. Kass brought up a set of questions recently, and in the spirit of having time to think ...
( Here are answers )

I'm so relieved, I'm light-headed. I've spent election night in the newsroom ... collecting a holiday calendar for a special section, because we had extra hands on the night desk, and they didn't need me. I've been here since 11 a.m., because the best way to get through today, after voting, seemed to be to come in and chip away at something useful.

But in fact, at the exact moment the newsroom found out Obama had won the election, I was sitting on the first floor, looking through a glass window at the printing press and talking with a friend. Call it a dinner break; I paused to make a quick phone call and make sure my oldest friend, who lives in New York, isn't under water. And I learned the news first from him. When I walked into the newsroom, just as the official word was coming on screen, everyone was quiet.

I think, like me, the whole room was dizzy with relief and snapped tension. So they went quietly on pasting the right headlines into the spaces they had left open, and my intern-turned-man-of-all-work told me about a series of articles he wants to write about local immigration. And I'm still here, and so thankful. Now I can go home and sleep.

Some of you know this, because I told people delightedly about it at New Years — this story was so good, I had to share it at soon as I read it with whoever I ran into — but I'm very late in posting it here. Since I missed New Year's, here it is for Valentine's Day: Galaxysoup wrote me the loveliest Yuletide story, a Haroun and the Sea of Stories prequel about Mudra the shadow warrior as a child. It's called "Parable," and you don't need to know Haroun to love it.

What if librarians risked their lives?

Thank you!

And thanks, dizzy_fire, for giving me 14th century Pagan Lithuania as a world to play with! I wrote At the Spring.

Carter Stilson, Medical Doctor. My grandfather, my mother's father, who taught me everything I know about boats and maple syrup and almost everything I know about talking to people, who healed families in the city where he was born for 50 years, who built a hexagonal cabin in Maine, who showed me my brother on the day my brother was born, who brought antique barometers into the lab in his med school days to replace the mercury, who brought me to flea markets and teased me for saying actually at the start of every sentence and said it himself, who spent his holidays touring sardine factories and sailing with fishermen at 3 a.m., who brought us Chinese food while he was on call and took phone calls from worried parents — have you taken his temp? You haven't taken his temp? Then take it and call me back. His temp is over 100? Call me again in 20 minutes. — my grandfather, who lived all his life within two square miles, who talked schooner captains into giving him rides out of the harbor when wooden ships still traded on the Connecticut coast, who wore bow ties and gave his patients pretzels — my grandfather, who told me at Thanksgiving how Einstein successfully defended his theory of relativity from attack just as he was given the nobel prize — my grandfather, who came out for Christmas so my dad could feed him a waffle my mom made, one bite at a time —

my grandfather died on Friday, January 7. And I was half an hour too late to say goodbye.

I'll write more soon, but not yet. I don't know yet how to put into words how much I miss him.
Be well everyone, please.

Thank you!

I've already written you to shake hands and turn sommersaults and say how glad I am that we're in this together, hundreds of us trekking into the corners of stories. Now that assignments have gone out, let me say it again. Thank you for setting off into worlds I also like to walk in.

About the story, write what moves you, and let the people taste and see and get muddy and know who and where they are. This time of year, for me, is about fire on cold nights, coming in tired and sweating after a long trip to see family, rubbing down your donkey before you go in to dinner... about risk and raw weather and stripped-down talk. It can have magic in it.

I hope my requests will give you ground to stand on and ideas to play with. Let me tell you a litte more about each one, if only for the fun of it.


( 12th Century )

( Deborah )

( All the Old Ones )

( 19th Century )

Be well!