Plinky prompt:
If you could be any book character, who would it be?

This was the first thing that popped into my head. I tried to think of others, but I came up blank. For what it’s worth, I have a doctorate in English. From Harvard. I’ve read a whole lot of books. In other words, I’m a *highly educated* fangirl. An obviously defensive fangirl. Moving right along.

Pyanfar Chanur is a hani (those big dangerous-looking kitties). She captains her own small (meant for five-ish crew) starship ( Pride of Chanur) and comes from a society where the women kick butt and the men sit around and mostly look ornamental.

Pyanfar’s universe consists of several different space-faring species, all of whom have . . . challenges in getting along with each other. In this first book, they make contact with a new bunch–those funny naked monkeys, one of whom ends up on their ship. Much of the plot comes from trying to keep the poor bastard from being made into sushi, as his species are newbies and a commodity.

Pyanfar just keeps rolling with it. OK, got a human. Whatever. She later ends up with a kif (think the Empire) as well as her own big fluffy husband, all of whom manage to find places on her ship. She is brave, smart, incredibly loyal, thinks on her feet, handles the insane diplomacy with aplomb–and doesn’t take any crap from anybody. She’s the captain; this is her crew, and by God, stay out of her way.

(Yeah, okay, the retractable claws. Confession: While writing my dissertation, I got a cartilage piercing so I could have an earring at the top like the hani do. It wouldn’t heal over a whole year. 😦 I was really bummed. Maybe I should try it again. And . . . *mumble* golden red *mumble* fur.)

BUT I’M NOT A FURRY!!!!!

Poor stupid bastard. That sucky spike through the wrist thing was apparently a waste of time. The crown of thorns is still an asshat.

The gay people I know best have wedding bands, and I found it eminently endearing to hear a man refer to his husband.  That said . . . I live in Massachusetts.

The bottom line is that the denial of literal gay marriage is solidly based on the palpitations of the bewildered masses, who are claiming that God Himself finds this problematic. Thus, the whole thing  is really a matter of church and state. However, the problem with that appealing notion is the irony that it can be argued that that isn’t in literal fact the case.

I’ve been stunned that I’ve heard NOBODY aggressively ask–and catechize–the people audaciously calling themselves Christ-ians about what Jesus said about it. He was only around for 30 years and apparently was well aware of the time crunch–I’m not sure why this wasn’t covered, seeing as He knew He was under a deadline. He was undoubtedly distracted by all those tiresome people He rather disgustingly claimed to love. I mean, God the Father actually spelled out the adultery thing in an actual Commandment–and what does Jesus do in John 8: 3-11?

Thank Heaven that He realized the breadth and depth of His screw-up and zapped Paul so as to provide editorial footnotes, before even bothering to nudge the writers of the Gospels. It’s obvious that the Evangelists were too hung up about this idea of  trying to talk about the actual Jesus guy. Maybe they figured that Paul beat them to the press on a lot of stuff (Paul and Peter had themselves a bitchout, which Paul lost)–or maybe they were just working on spin. Maybe they were queer themselves–although there is certainly no real indication of this, as opposed to the substantial evidence that James I was at least bisexual.  (But Jimbo was inspired by God to produce the only Bible that really matters, so I guess that evidence goes the way of the dinosaurs.)

Yes, it’s really too bad that He overlooked this vital issue, but there it is; and we should pick up the ball and run with it, especially since He was also ignorantly nattering on about “judge not” and whatnot. As Luther said, “In Christ’s realm no punishment is to be found.”

These modern counterparts to Jesus’ cranky Pharisees are the ones who are controverting the will of the person they call their God.  But that’s OK.  The Constitution they’re also controverting gives them the privilege to plop this thing of theirs in to rock’em sock’em with the Flying Spaghetti Monster–it’s all good. But they’re metaphorically infringing on an a copyright upon which they themselves insist; and by gosh, they’re getting away with it, because the average leftist is apparently better equipped to talk math with Stephen Hawking.

I’ve capitalized His pronoun deliberately here to make my point–anybody stop really paying attention to anything I’ve said as soon as they hit it? Tsk. Those black eyes from the knee jerk can be the dickens.

( Helpful hint: The traditional heretical beefsteak should be acquired from the supermarket in the tonier areas–it’ll be substantially cheaper than the one sold in de ghetto.)

I recommend that liberals see that their political stances will be far better informed when they stop sneering at the “fucking holy book”–a phrase with 2,420 hits–and study it thoroughly, despite the stomach-clenching prospect of laboriously acquiring their own data. (Got some links over there to the right for ya.) It’s a pity, since the left has made a few laudatory efforts to blunder about trying to stick up for people following a holy book for a few years now.

In fact, it is abundantly clear that nobody on the left can afford not to understand the central text underlying Western culture. Read the thing; read it again; then read the exegesis. Several of them. (Who was Paul? Who was Moses? What does “synoptic” mean? What’s a canon and who says so? Why do those questions matter?)

In any event, ignorance of Biblical history is sadly understandable in a country that reads at a 7th grade level; but surely we can work on the last fifty years, where we have pictures.

Remember the firehoses? They were only hung up when those pictures hit the nightly news and thus became real. Queers are invisible, and there is no clear line of demarcation to pacify the haters.

Just as the Tea Parties are really modeled on the Civil War, instead of the Revolutionary, protecting the rights of gay marriage isn’t akin to the Civil Rights Act per se–it’s all about context, kiddies.  The Act itself has changed the world, which now only vaguely understands its deconstructive implications. The modern but-it’s-all-those-bad-guys’-fault fingerpointers lack the backbone and the stamina of their recent Democratic forebears. I’d like to see them filibuster as did the Democratic 18 out of 19 Senators  who opposed the Act!

But we’re all kind of dumb, and Obama ain’t Kennedy, or even Johnson. He–and the concept of gay marriage–both lack a sufficiently broad base of at least grudging tolerance.

I’m not surprised by Obama’s decision. What did y’all expect, people? For over a year he scampered away from the far less controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” issue–which he *did* campaign on, if memory serves, which can’t be said about gay marriage. Yes, he’s an accommodationist–but maybe that’s not a bad thing, all considered.

Honestly, at this point the Teabaggers would have overloaded into public actual physical violence. So far, queer people have been gradually gaining acceptance, and so far, the Teabaggers have refrained from openly attacking–yet. (Um, while you’re going over that Wikipedia article–use your finger, it’s okay–do a little crayoned collage on why it actually-in-fact-sorry-you-don’t-like-it-really-indicates-change that they haven’t definitively and unashamedly outright called the POTUS a jigaboo. We have also made an important linguistic victory by the substitution of “entitlement people” for “nigger,” as it focuses on a behavior instead of a “race.”)

But junkyard dogs bite when cornered; and as we have let them steal the rope for nooses instead of ourselves commandeering it for leashes, it’s presently good tactics to duck and cover until we really get our shit together–or the Mexicans will just have to make room on the wall.

Or maybe they’ll just drag out the crosses. It’s been done before;  marshmallows optional.

Who knew?

“You’re a finisher!”

I was recently talking to my friend Annaliese, whom I haven’t seen for a while, and sharing some of the things that have happened to me since we last really caught up. (The time spread of this list whapped me upside the head. Sorry, Annaliese. I’ll pick up my end of the stay-in-touch thing and wave it like a happy flag.)

Anyway, I talked a little bit about the process of completing my dissertation. (English and American  Literature and Language,  Harvard, 2006.) I entered my graduate program back in 1992, but ended up taking a seven year hiatus to do things like get divorced and Have Adventures.

During said Adventures, I managed to hang on to my AM diploma–which, ironically, I only picked up because I filled out a form to officially get the degree; I needed to teach. It hung on my wall as a reminder that once upon a time, I had belonged somewhere. Harvard had been wonderful to me, and I looked at it as a sort of heaven from which I had cast myself. I never really thought I’d go back. I was, after all, a loser babe; see “Adventures,” above.

Then a number of self-perceived and inflicted obstacles vanished; and there I was, back in Cambridge. I was getting financial aid, which I needed to feed myself and my kid, as said Adventures had included  making a really bad job decision which bit me on the ass. (Short moral: Academics teaching high school should be aware that “career changers” are often viewed with extreme hostility.) Thus, I viewed making sufficient progress on the diss as my job. I knew I’d eventually fail; but one of my self-imposed obstacles back then was a sense that things happened to me, and that I was powerless to push these looming bad things away. (Loser babe.)

But . . . I have an endocrine disorder, called hyperparathyroidism, which is four feet of trochees and a serious nasty pain in the ass–or in my case, bones. (Short moral: Take your vitamin D, kiddies.) I wasn’t able to hike the mile or so to the library, but Harvard has a short bus. So every morning at 10 am, I would drag my crippled ass out and get on the short bus, which would dump me out at Widener, and collect me again at 4:30.

And if it hadn’t been for that bus, I’d probably still be looking at my AM diploma and whimpering, instead of looking at it and grumping that its pal is missing because I owe Harvard a whole lot of money, and it’s held hostage. So–250 pages later–I completed the yah-da yah-da requirements so on and so forth, got to wear the big pink dress in an inevitably raining Tercentenary Theatre, and ensure that regardless of term bill, a phone call to my department will affirm that yes, I are a PhD.

I finished.

But it was a fluke, brought on by the short bus–no, actually, by not wanting to make Bonnie unhappy. (Bonnie is the incredibly nice lady who runs the short bus, and we had a number of lovely conversations.)

Meanwhile back at the notebook: As I hope all writers know, the best way to start to write is to start to write. And so, while sitting in Child Library on Widener’s third floor, I would somewhat guiltily spend my first hour or so noodling about, writing fake email between me and my imaginary friends. (Oh, yeah. Like most writers don’t have them. Pull the other one.) This correspondence got somewhat involved; and unbeknown to me, the friends were gathering depth. Slowly, imperceptibly; like that small-flake cold snow which whispers into many-inch drifts, and stays there.

And meanwhile back at the TV, Angel was being canceled. This was upsetting. Mr. Boreanaz is lovely to the eye, and other viewers will recall that they were plotting themselves into a corner; and I wanted more. Well, no. But over one weekend, I found myself thinking about vampires, and what if they were or could be real, and how would that work in terms of biology–and within the space of a very few days, my friends were all alien vampires.

I kept poking around at the biology part and reading up on things like transient amnesia and hematopoiesis. And then I wrote a short story, and looked at it for a while. I’d never actually finished a short story that was worthy of the name. It felt weird. So I posted it on deviantArt, and sort of looked at it, wondering if I could write another. But I knew I couldn’t. I was a loser babe who’d tried to write fiction before and failed. So it was a fluke.

Poor vampires. But they wouldn’t get out of my head, and pieces of their culture joined the snow.

Then, out of the blue, one of these guys poked me hard in the ribs; and I started telling his story, and I told it for five years. I carried a notebook with me wherever I went: On the T; to set painting for MIT’s Gilbert & Sullivan group; to and from a really good contract job. Terry talked and talked and talked. I became aware that I was writing a book, and he became my anchor.

And then I got sicker, and had more Adventures. Being a loser babe, you know. So Terry, the notebook, and I went to various poverty offices; and then to a homeless shelter. (Can’t work=no money=can’t pay rent=get evicted=that’s the way it goes if you don’t have family.) I was a loser babe, and I knew it. For three months or so the third or fourth filled notebook sat in a little pile. But I knew Terry was still there, and that somehow he thought I was still the person who told his story, and the story of all the rest of his fang-pumping pals. So I wrote one of the climaxes of his narrative on a little couch outside of our room in the shelter, and every week I would haul down to Harvard and work for the afternoon. (Choir practice took the place of the short bus.)

And then we got an apartment, where my perceptive friend Preston (who was graciously reading the damned thing) pointed out that there was stuff Terry really didn’t know–so I spent months turning half of his narrative into third-person. By this time I had realized that my role in this movie was to be the writer, and that a goal here was actually publishing the damn thing and making money. Then I started worrying about the fact that it was a little more novel-y than the genre novels its likely readers enjoy, and that it needed pizzazz. So I thought that vampires needed slayers; and hey, how about a serial killer?

Poor Damascus started out as something of a sleazeball, and I began wondering how he ended up that way. So just for my own edification, I started telling his story off to the side. When I was finished, Damascus was more than a plot device, and I started thinking that I really was writing one damn fine book.

Which would never happen, because I’m a loser babe. I knew I’d never finish, and my daughter and Preston would be disappointed in me, but that’s just how my life was.

We all moved back to Cambridge, where I’m currently on disability. Terry went off and sulked for a while–but by then a whole lot more people were telling me about what was happening in the third person part; so screw Terry anyway.

About a month ago, I found out exactly how it was going to turn out, and stared at the chapter outline in the table of contents. And I realized that some unseen and unknowable force inside of me was going to bail; because for the entire five years, I knew at bottom that I’d never actually finish it. I finally winced through a word count, and discovered that I had somehow managed to spend five years writing *two* books. But on I went down the home stretch; Terry and I had a come-to-Jesus;  and in two manic RSI-risking days . . .

. . . I was finished.

Well, the first draft, anyway; but that for me was the hard part; and now I get to do the fun part of transcribing it into an automatic second draft. But–it’s finished.

All that said, the reader by now has picked up the rhetorical emphasis on my essential core self-concept being that I’m a loser babe, and so when Annaliese said proudly, “You’re a finisher!” it hadn’t occurred to me that I was.

I have ADHD, and I do the usual thing of starting a lot of little projects and wandering off; and, being after all a loser babe, that was just the way it went.

But by golly, it turns out that I’m a finisher. So I went back and read my own resume, as it were–and I’m a finisher. Not a loser babe. Heh. Who’da thunk?