Since becoming a Goodreads member (see my last post), I spent awhile last night adding books to my bookshelves there & in general being a book geek. Along the way, I ended up reviewing a book I’m still reading because it’s already proven valuable to my writing.  I figured I’d share the review here — actually expanded from what I wrote on Goodreads.  And because my blog automatically updates my Goodreads author profile (that unfortunately is still not with my reader profile), it’ll show up there too.

I started reading The Hazards of Space Travel: A Tourist’s Guide by Neil F. Comins off my Kindle for iPhone as relaxing lunchtime reading at the Bear Tooth the day before Thanksgiving — excellent accompaniment for Yucatan lime soup, chicken Ceasar salad, & that dark smooth Moose’s Tooth Pipeline Stout!

Really, I chose it because I was in the midst of NaNoWriMo, working on a story called “Cycler” & thinking about what my character Esti Gusev, born & bred on Mars, will experience when she takes a mag launcher into space for her trip to Earth. “Martian” is synonymous with “has lived her whole life at 1/3 of Earth’s gravity” — she’s had to work her hiney off to get strong enough to withstand Earth gravity, much more so to take a launcher into space instead of riding the space elevator.  So, what will it be for her to be pressed back into her seat at 2 or 3 times Earth g as she rises to orbit?

Much to my surprise, as I read the chapter in this book about gravity, I discovered that I’d had Esti work so hard that she was well-equipped to deal with the high g-force for that brief duration. What really messes her up?  Microgravity. From low Mars orbit to rendezvous with the cycler in which she’ll travel to the Earth/Moon system, she gets sick as a… well, not as sick as a dog, but rather as sick as more than one-half of all astronauts & cosmonauts who’ve ever been to space. What sickens them is a condition called space adaptation syndrome (SAS), which is caused by physiological changes due to the lack of the force of gravity that the species of Earth evolved under:

While all the causes of this illness have not yet been identified, changes in the gravitational force, redistribution of the fluids in the body, and changes in the digestive system all contribute to the disorder. The symptoms include uneasiness and discomfort, as though you are coming down with a cold, drowsiness, disorientation, sweating, headaches, loss of appetite, irritability, loss of motivation for tasks, a knot in your stomach, and sudden vomiting.

Space adaptation syndrome acclimation (NASA). This isn't what Esti looks like, but this is kinda like how she feels looks like. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this enclosed environment, the vomitus has nowhere to go, which adds to your nausea and can eventually case you to breathe in the material you are expelling or have already expelled….

Ewwww.

…. caus[ing] you to asphyxiate.  To avoid these dangers, astronauts today are forbidden to carry out any activities that require space suits until three days after they have arrived in space.

My channeling-Esti pseudo-SAS was not, I must hasten to add, because of Thanksgiving dinner the day before: nobody else with whom I enjoyed Thanksgiving got sick.

I got better, Esti got better, & the book has already proven invaluable as a research tool for my ongoing writing in my Cold/Long Dark story universe. I’m reading it all out of order, though.  Right now I’m reading the stuff about radiation hazards in space. The radiation dangers are so extreme for long-term travel in space, that if I were to retain complete fidelity to science, I’d have to give up this story universe altogether. Therefore I will follow that tried & true method of all science fiction writers: I’ll fudge a bit.

Some of the “Mack’s Log” stories used to illustrate the science verge a little on the cheesy side — Neil Comins is, after all, an astronomer & science writer, not a storyteller.   But all else is good.  This book is immensely readable, interestingly written, & is comprehensible to the intelligent non-scientist reader. I particularly recommend it to writers like me who might want to know a few things before they have their astronauts do something really stupid.

This is my review from partway through the book — perhaps I’ll write more later, after I’ve finished it. Or as additional facts in it affect my writing of my characters & my story world.

Related posts:

1. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
2. Terraforming notes
3. Taking life support for granted

Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, ed. Bart Lieb. Cover art: "New Generation of Leaders" © 2011 by Brittany Jackson http://liol.deviantart.com

Way back in February, I wrote “Whatever in hell I’ve been doing… it hasn’t been writing many posts on Henkimaa.” And lo, here in December, it’s still the case.

In February, I’d just become  co-editor of Bent Alaska, Alaska’s LGBTQA blog, which means lots of my blogging energy went over thataway. Since October, I’ve been Bent’s sole editor — still trying, with limited success, to get other contributors consistently involved with the blog so it’s not only on my shoulders — and there’ve been a few big stories this year that I’ve written, even aside from the normal day-to-day of basic posts about upcoming events and news. I’m also principal investigator for the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey, which has taken up huge swaths of my time over the summer and fall.  I completed the preliminary report on the survey in early November, and will be finishing the final report this month.

That’ll free up some time for what I really want to be doing with this life: writing my own stuff.  But it isn’t as if I haven’t been doing at least some of that.  I just spent the last month doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again — that headlong hurry of the writing month I now call NaNovember, wherein a lot of nutty people around the world attempt, and very often succeed, in writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

Out of which has proceeded — well, let me put it this way.  As I wrote in February, in a parenthetical:

(Meantime, a story finished in the wee hours of November 1 featuring Esti Gusev, born in a really yucky Martian religious community, has been accepted for publication, but I’m constrained to be pretty mysterious about it otherwise.)

No need to be mysterious now. My story “Pushaway” has now been published, as one of a number of very excellent (if I do say so myself) stories in the Crossed Genres anthology Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, edited by Bart Leib.

Bart Leib is one of the founders of Crossed Genres, and selected my story “Cold” for publication in its 12th issue — the LGBT issue — in December 2009.  “Cold” was later selected to represent the LGBT issue in the Crossed Genres Year One Anthology, published in February 2010.

Not bad for a story that came out of my very first day of NaNoWriMo writing ever on November 1, 2007, which also marks the baby steps in my creation of a story universe that I’ve been writing about every NaNovember since — and in between as well.  “Cold” is about two young women, Bai Wang and Boleyn Maheshwari, who live on a planet in another solar system in the late stages of terraformation (that is, being engineered to have an Earth-like biosphere). My NaNo writings in both 2007 and 2008 were mainly about those characters and that world.  But in 2009, I decided to jump back three or four centuries in my timeline to learn more about the people from whom Bai and Boleyn and their contemporaries descended — the inhabitants of the asteroid belt and gas giant moons of our own solar system, who built the ships that traveled the Long Dark between stars that brought Bai’s and Boleyn’s people to their planet.

And thus was Esti Gusev born — early enough, in fact, to have shown up in a brief mention as an important historical figure in “Cold”.  Here’s Bai in “Cold” reflecting on the progress of the terraformation project:

In her own lifetime, they said, they’d be able to walk outside without breathers, something no one had done since Esti Gusev departed Earth to join the Project so many lifetimes ago.

That’s Esti: the last person of the Project to have freely breathed the open air of a planet-sized biosphere: everyone in between, through centuries of time, has lived only in the small human-created artificial biospheres of space stations, ships, rovers, or habitats built on moon or planetary surfaces.  Martian by birth, Esti becomes a citizen of  Consensus — the association of inhabitants of the outer solar system (asteroid belt and outwards) — spends some time on Earth on Consensus’ behalf, and ultimately takes one of the ships crossing the Long Dark… and she’s become an important carrier for me of a lot of how I feel and think about things.

The first words I wrote that went into “Pushaway” came out of my NaNoWriMo writing on November 3, 2009, including the words which now open the story:

Esti Gusev wasn’t the name she was given at birth. It was the name she’d taken. She’d damn well earned it.

Gusev Crater on Mars. This is where Spirit Rover landed, and some many years later (as in, many decades, even a coupla centuries), where Esti Gusev grew up. This is seen roughly from the north, with Ma'adim Vallis in the south.

So how did she take that name?  That’s what “Pushaway” is about: her growing up on Mars, in a pretty toxic religious community, where she comes to believe in that fundamental lesson taught by Jesus that “the Kingdom of God is within you” — only to suffer her community’s efforts to beat that belief out of her.

But I didn’t write “Pushaway” as a completed story during NaNoWriMo 2009.  It became the story it is as a result of Bart Leib’s invitation in May 2010 for me to submit to

an anthology of stories about striking back at the status quo – whatever that might be. The Authority can be real or perceived; the act of subversion subtle or overt; and the consequences minute yet significant, or immense and world-shaking.

I immediately thought of the Esti’s childhood: because what is more subversive to the status quo, just about anywhere or any time, than those people who believe in, and insist upon, being who they are instead of shaping themselves to fit some other person’s, or some other ideology’s, abitrary rules about who they should be.

This story is not an LGBTQ story per se — it’s mostly about Esti’s childhood and doesn’t delve into her sexual orientation or gender identity to speak of (but for the record, she’s a cis-female lesbian).  But look at the last sentence of my previous paragraph: this story is informed bigtime by the encounter that I and most other LGBTQ people have (though we’re not the onlies, of course) of having to fight for our very identities — to live as who we are, instead of forcing ourselves, or being forced into, living as who we are not. In particular, this story is informed by what we in Anchorage lived through during the so-called Summer of Hate in 2009, when demonstrators against an ordinance which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Municipality of Anchorage’s nondiscrimination code repeatedly insisted upon the lie that the sexual orientations and gender identities of LGBTQ people were a “choice” — a lie that continues to be repeated today, not only in Anchorage but all over the world.  On a “here’s how my local community influences me” level, too, there’s also a particular scene in “Pushaway” that grew directly out of learning about the child discipline methods espoused by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and by the clerical and teaching staff of Anchorage Baptist Temple and the associated Anchorage Christian Schools — about which you can read in my September 2009 post “James Dobson’s God is a child abuser, & so is Jerry Prevo’s.”

So… in 2010, I took the germs of what I wrote during November 2009 and shaped it into the story it became, and in the wee hours of November 1, 2010 — as I embarked upoin another NaNovember — I completed it.

I must have done something right, because a few days later, Bart wrote back to tell me he’d like to publish it.  Cool!

So there you have it.

And it’s good to be in storymind again.  And to write this post, right here on Henkimaa.  You’ll be seeing more here too.

Until then —

Buy Subversion!

You can still read “Cold” at the Crossed Genres website for free. But to read “Pushaway,” you’ll need to buy Subversion:

• In print from Amazon.com ($11.95)
• Ebook on the Kindle ($4.95) (Amazon.com)
• Ebook on the Nook ($4.95) (Barnes & Noble)

Here’s the company my story keeps — the full table of contents:

• “Foreword” by Jennifer Brozek
• “A Thousand Wings of Luck” by Jessica Reisman
• “And All Its Truths” by Camille Alexa
• “Pushaway” by Melissa S. Green
• “Phantom Overload” by Daniel José Older
• “Cold Against the Bone” by Kelly Jennings
• “The Red Dybbuk” by Barbara Krasnoff
• “Pushing Paper in Hartleigh” by Natania Barron
• “Parent Hack” by Kay T. Holt
• “The Hero Industry” by Jean Johnson
• “Flicka” by Cat Rambo
• “Seed” by Shanna Germain
• “Scrapheap Angel” by RJ Astruc & Deirdre M. Murphy
• “The Dragon’s Bargain” by C.A. Young
• “A Tiny Grayness in the Dark” by Wendy N. Wagner\
• “Received Without Content” by Timothy T. Murphy
• “To Sleep With Pachamama” by Caleb Jordan Schulz

More about Subversion

(I’ll add stuff to this list as I find it.)

• Goodreads listing
• 12/4/2011. “A subversion of stories” by Sabrina Vourvoulias (Following the lede [blog]). Reviews several of the stories (though not mine) — but my! there’s some good stuff in this anthology!
• 12/5/2011. “Anthologies, birthdays, and other frightening things” by Bart Leib (Subvert the Space [blog]). Bart’s account of how Subversion came to be, and where he hopes Crossed Genres Publications can go from here.
• 12/5/11. “Read, Subversive! Read!” by Kay Holt (Kay Holt’s blog). Kay Holt is author of the story “Parent Hack.”
• 12/6/11. “REVIEW: Subversion edited by Bart R. Leib” by Peter Damien (SF Signal). 4-star (out of 5) review of anthology, with individual reviews of each story. “Pushaway” got 4 stars —” Told in scenes which move back and forth through a young girl’s life, this is the story of a religious cult who forms an unsustainable settlement on the site of the Spirit Mars Rover. What the story is mostly about is breaking free, over and over throughout the girl’s life, from whatever’s holding her down. The story also comes complete with books, philosophies, other colonies and other places with the same old human problems, and because of this, feels like a remarkably well-rounded future.. This feels very much like humanity among the stars: technologically advanced, but still busy being violent, oppressed, questioning and struggling to break out.”

Related posts:

1. Seeking people with genre fiction review experience
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"

….yawwwwwnnnn….

I couldn’t find a photo of me actually yawning, but here’s one where I look sleepy and have my mouth open, so it’ll have to do:

I do have an excuse.

From their Minority Report precog pool, the precogs may be heard to be crying out, “That’s what they all say!” All the same, it’s true: I’ve been busy.

There’s my day job, of course.  That always prevents me from becoming a full-time pajama-clad blogger.

But also, as announced on January 30, I’ve taken on the role of co-administrator (as well as ongoing contributor), on Bent Alaska, Alaska’s LGBTA blog. In the past few weeks, this has meant moving Bent from its former platform on Blogger to WordPress, starting up a Facebook page to supplement Bent’s (more private) Facebook profile, and joining Bent to the Twitterverse as @bentalaska.  On top of that, my co-admin, E. Ross, has been out of town for the past month, and so all posting to Bent for the past several weeks has fallen to me, as was the case last November just before my own trip to Australia.  I’ll tell you, the amount of work involved in just staying up-to-date on news, events, and other stuff in or of interest to the LGBTA community is pretty much a full-time job in itself, much less actually writing posts about all of it — I congratulate E. Ross on all she’s done to keep Bent Alaska going all by herself these past three years.

Besides posting for Bent (all posts for the past month have physically been posted by me, regardless of actual authorship), I’ve also written a few posts there, some of which I do not crosspost here at Henkimaa. The interested can find them here.  Most recently, I’ve written about the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey (published originally as an op-ed for the Anchorage Press), a Fairbanks fundraiser for gay cabbie injured in an assault, the death two weeks ago of PFLAG’s Chuck O’Connell, and the consideration by the University of Alaska Board of Regents — and ultimately the passage last week — of a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation on all University of Alaska campuses.

On the writing side of things, I’m still making it my business to head over every Saturday to Side Street Espresso, which has been my favorite writing venue since 1994.  We’ve lately been joined regularly by my writing buddy Rob, who I met through the past couple years of NaNoWriMo, and his non-writerly-but-nonetheless-very-cool wife Karen.  We’ve also been making it over to a new writing venue for me — the Sugarspoon — which has lots of tasty desserts that I never eat because I’m prediabetic, but also has great quiche, great coffee, great free WiFi, and great hours (Tuesday-Sunday, 11 AM — 11 PM) that are well-suited to the writerly crowd.  That’s also where the Anchorage Write Club (@AKwriteclub) & the local NaNoWriMo group (@AnchorageNaNo) have lately been meeting to cafe-write together every Tuesday late-afternoon/evening.

And what have I been writing? Well, up until the last couple of weeks, not a heckuva lot, really.  What I’ve been doing instead is using a great new (to me) program called Scrivener to get my writing stuff sorted out.  Fellow NaNoer Abby told me about Scrivener at the tail end of NaNovember.  I visited Scrivener’s website — or rather, the company’s website, called Literature & Latte — where Scrivener is described as

a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents.

Well, what could be longer and more difficult than the last four years of chaos — including passages of narrative spanning three centuries-plus of timeline; on-the-fly background notes & invention of a complex story universe; research notes; & occasional whinging about houseflies (mostly in 2009) — that I’ve written in my Cold/Long Dark story universe over the course of the last four years during & between NaNoWriMo’s?

So in early December, just before hopping aboard Delta 2223 for the first of my four flights between Anchorage & Brisbane, I bought & downloaded Scrivener to my desktop & laptop computers (both downloads on the same generous license!), & even started going through its well-designed tutorial during a few cafe-writing sessions with my BrizVegan friend Sian.  I finally completed the tutorial on my return, & spent most of my writing sessions on my return getting all my Cold/Long Dark material in order.  Let me tell you: Scrivener is all that it’s cracked up to be — & then some.  I intend (“They all say that!” cry the precogs) to put together a longer review of this magnificent application soon.

And then — yes.  I began to write again.  At the moment, I’m working on material from a storyline called “Arrest” featuring Louava Solà, who came to Earth as a “data trader” at a Consensus embassy in Vancouver (B.C.) after a childhood & youth at an orbital station around the Saturn’s moon Titan. Whaddaya reckon?

(Meantime, a story finished in the wee hours of November 1 featuring Esti Gusev, born in a really yucky Martian religious community, has been accepted for publication, but I’m constrained to be pretty mysterious about it otherwise.)

(It occurs to me that I seem to have pretty good luck with stuff completed on November 1.)

I anticipate being taken away from writing “my” stuff, at least somewhat, by upcoming work on the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey. Scrivener should come in handy for that, too.  Important stuff… but I can’t help feeling ambivalent, given how good it feels to be running around in a science fiction universe again.

If I had time to write more Henkimaa posts, what would I write? Well, actually, I intend (“They all —!” — there’s those damn precogs again, STFU!) to actually write some.  There’s uploading my Australia pics & writing about my trip.  There’s stuff I’ve been thinking about restorative justice, partly in relation to the Anthony Rollins case.  And I’m still thinking a lot (& still thinking a lot about writing about) the form of governance I learned about last year, sociocracy, which amongst other things has helped me to better understand the governance of my fictional Cold/Long Dark society called the Consensus.  And I want to write more about writing & what I’m writing about.  And then I have a friend who’s saying, could you post more of your poems, please?

I’ll see what I can do.

But that’s what I’ve been doing.

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. October plans
3. Momentum through Mystery

Editor’s note: A couple of days ago in “Jane Doe, Finnish style” I wrote about how Rachel Meikäläinen, originally a character in my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, became a philosophical antecedent & historical figure in the fictional Consensus society in the story universe of Long Dark & Cold.  I also said that she might be writing some guest posts “because so much of her stuff about integrity and violation is relevant to the ways the Real World we live in screws with us too; & also how we keep it together.”  The following, excerpted from a work of hers tentatively titled Whole Numbers, would have a major impact on the Long Dark character Esti Gusev when she read it as a ward of Mars Authority at Apollineris at the age of 14 years, about two years after the destruction of  the New Nazareth armed cult at Gusev Crater, where she had been born. – Mel

The root of the word integrity, is the Latin integer, which means, literally, untouched.  And so an integer is a number that hasn’t been broken or fractionated.  It is complete, a whole number.  Something which is integral is something which is essential to completeness, something which is integrated, which is to say, something which has been incorporated into a functioning and unified whole.  And so to have integrity is to have wholeness, completion, undividedness. But if integrity is undivided, unbroken, untouched — then what, in this context, is it to be touched?

Touch is not a bad thing, usually — but in this context, to be touched is to be breached, broken, violated.  That’s at its worst, anyway. But the worst happens, over and over.  Even when no harm is intended, harm often comes; and very often, of course, harm is intended.  The harms may be physical; the harms may be emotional or spiritual.  Abuse.  Coercion.  The most common harm of all to human beings — the one that most harmed me — was the simple and common harm of those who convince themselves that they are well-intended when they attempt to coerce an individual into behaving according to their arbitrary standards, rather than according to the individual’s integrity — to what should properly be understood as that individual’s true selfhood.

Integrity is whole.  The root of the word whole is the Old English word hal, which is also the root or closely related to the roots of the words heal, hale, holy.  To be truly whole, to be fully and completely healed, would be as though one had not been touched by the harm that had touched one.  But you have been touched, so how, then, can you become untouched again?  Here’s the strange contradiction of it: you must incorporate the experience of that touch, that harm, into yourself.  Meaning literally — because incorporate comes in part from the Latin root corpus meaning body — that you make that touch, that hurt, part of your body: but in a hale, healing way.  How?  When you eat an apple, does it stay an apple inside your stomach and gut?  No, it transforms: your body transforms it with its acids and enzymes into nutrients for your body, while expelling the waste. If  someone has poisoned the apple, you might not survive it, true — but otherwise, all but its waste products become part of your body.  Call it incorporation, call it integration: transformation comes with the territory of it.  You have no choice about the harms that others inflict upon you: but if they haven’t actually killed you, you usually still have the choice to transform those harms within yourself to integrate them into a new whole, a new integrity.  You are not exactly the same self you began with; but you are still your own self.  The Self itself is change.

Related posts:

1. Jane Doe, Finnish style
2. Buddha in the coffee shop
3. Building Consensus

On the third day of writing Long Dark during NaNoWriMo 2009 — which is to say, on NaNovember 3, 2009 — I made a surprising discovery: that another character of mine, from a completely different project that has nothing to do with terraforming or space exploration, was a historical figure in the Long Dark/Cold story universe.  The other project is Mistress of Woodland, a long-term project I began in 1998, which is a kind of fantasy/magical realism novel with lots of Finnish mythical content, and which originated as sort of a story way to deal with some hard stuff I was going through back then.

MoW’s main character, who in the novel is in something of the same circumstances I was in the Real World, is named Rachel.  And if Rachel is a historical character in Long Dark (and by extension Cold) — wooo, spooky — that means that, in a sense, I’m a historical character in my own novels.  Spooky spooky.  And … er… egotistical?  Umm… err… I think I’ll stick with spooky for now.

It all makes a certain kind of sense, anyway.  In my first day’s NaNo 2009 writing, I’d discovered a character named Mordecai, who in the early days of my invented society the Consensus of the Main Belt & Outer Solar System, or whatever-the-hell I’m calling it — the Consensus for short — had been a Consensus spy and “data thief” on the Moon.  That was, of course, before formal recognition by the inSystem governments of the terrestrial planets and Moon of Consensus independence and sovereignty, at which point Consensus had to pay attention to trade agreements covering such inSystem legalities as copyright. Mordecai appeared in my story telling a Consensus “data trader” in training, Louava who was on her way to Earth — and who was actually the protagonist of that writing — about how the philosophical basis of much of Consensus thought had to do with certain ideas about integrity.  Which were based, in fact, on ideas I’d started developing for myself on a discussion list I was on in 1998 where Mistress of Woodland was born.

Here’s an excerpt from my Mordecai writing from November 1, 2009, exactly as written.

Mordecai was a legend. He hadn’t been a data trader or diplomat: he’d been a spy and data-thief, back in the days before the governments of the Inner System had finally given in to the reality that the Outer System was no longer in their control – that if they wanted any of the riches of the asteroids or the gas giants and their moons, they were going to have to deal with the Consensus as a sovereign government. Mordecai, a Belter born and bred, had lived inside of Consensus thought all his life; but somehow, he’d learned how to pass himself off so convincingly as a groundbound that no one of the Moon – his main area of activity – had ever clued in to his real identity or origins. He’d inserted himself into [the base at thus'n'such place on the Moon] and used his position there [to steal all kinds of cool data that helped the Consensus in all kinds of cool ways – scientific info mainly, engineering stuff, perfections of CELSS and blah blah].

“How did I do it?” he asked them. “Mindfulness. In two aspects: first, there is mindfulness of who you are, as both an individual and as a member of Consensus. It’s something you can never forget, or you’ll cease to remember why you’re there, doing the work you’re doing. If you forget, that’s where the corruption begins: your purpose becomes confused, and merit begins to dwindle away. You understand this: integrity, a wholeness of self, is the very basis of our philosophy, whatever else your individual religious beliefs may be; and integrity is in ideal terms about having a clear hold always on who and what you are and what your relationship is to your family and friends, your Kitcheners and colleagues, all the consensuses of which you are a part including the overarching Consensus we all belong to – and also to your antagonists and enemies. Or, if you prefer, your relationship to those who have a different purpose than you do – those whose purpose goes crosswise to your own.

(Note: I typically use square brackets for placeholders when I don’t have exact words and would get hung up and slowed down in my writing to think of them in the moment.  Kitcheners in the Long Story/Cold story universe, are people who share a common kitchen as well as toilet facilities — – since in the artificial biospheres of outer space, it would be difficult and a waste of scarce resources to provide each and every nuclear family with its very own separate kitchen and toilet facilities. Thus a Kitchen is an important basic social unit, including typically about six families, about 20-25 people.)

Two days later, I was writing about a different character, Esti Gusev — & its through her story that I discovered my MoW character Rachel was one of the intellectual/philosophical forbears of the Consensus.  She was also important to Esti personally: it was in fact (I discovered with that writing) Rachel’s writings which led Esti to join Consensus, & ultimately end up on one of the ships crossing the Long Dark to another solar system where the terraforming project of Cold would eventually take place.

Thing is, in MoW I’d never given Rachel a last name.  She hadn’t needed one.  But now she did need one, because she was going to be quoted and otherwise referred to here & there in Long Dark and Cold.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out what it would be.

Meikäläinen

If you Google the word meikäläinen — you can just type meikalainen if you don’t know how to type an ä with the dots — the top search result you’ll get is a page from the Finnish Wikipedia for Matti Meikäläinen. If you ask Google to Translate this page, it’ll tell you its title means John Doe and will inform you in that special Google-translation-style of pidgin English the following:

John Doe is an example of a man, which can be used as a defendant or the owner of the legitimate example. It can also be used for the person whose identity is unknown or which is intended to be anonymous . An unknown woman is commonly known as Mary Doe. For example, the United States responsible appointments are John Doe and Jane Doe or John Smith.

In more fluent English: Matti Meikäläinen is used in Finnish, as John Doe is used in English, to designate an anonymous or unknown person, or can be used as a pseudonym for someone whose real identity must remain confidential, as in some legal cases; and can also simply be used as a depiction of the “typical Finn.”  As explained by user sakvaka at WordReference Forums,

Matti Meikäläinen is a very known person here in Finland. The name is associated with the “commonman”, somebody who can be anyone of us. It is used a lot in sample photos of credit cards and passports, in which real names and personal information must not be visible.

And later,

He’s just an average person, someone that can be anyone of us – just a normal guy.

The first names Matti and Maija are Finnish equivalents, respectively, of Matthew and Mary.  But the “surname” Meikäläinen is only used as a “surname” in this context: it’s not a surname that any real person has.

But meikäläinen is a real Finnish word — a noun derived from the Finnish pronoun me (English we) meaning one of us:

Onko hän meikäläisiä?

Is s/he one of us?

or, as sakvaka explains,

“something that originates from us”. “Meikäläinen kahvi on maailmankuulua” – Our coffee is world-famous. “Älä ammu häntä, hän on meikäläisiä” – Do not shoot him, he’s one of us.

So don’t be fooled by any of the numerous people named Meikäläinen on Facebook (many of them Matti or Maija as well) — these are folks who are preserving their anonymity.

As I decided Rachel wanted to do as well.  But more than that –

Rachel Meikäläinen

– picked that “common person” surname — obviously not her real surname, which I still don’t know what it is — because she identifies herself as of the common people, one of us — entirely fitting to how she’s viewed by Consensus some three or four or five or something centuries after her stuff is written.  As I told my friend Chris in an IM chat last November, “you know me … i need my words & names to really mean stuff….”

So now my main character from MoW has also become my vehicle for elucidating some of the philosophical stuff that was already implicit in this imaginary society of Consensus I was inventing anyway.

I think she’s gonna be a guest poster on my blog, too.  Because so much of her stuff about integrity and violation is relevant to the ways the Real World we live in screws with us too; & also how we keep it together.

Related posts:

1. Integrity, violation, healing
2. Writing life
3. The Daily Tweets, 2009-11-01: NaNoWriMo 2009 kickoff #2, the midnight write-in

Okay, well this photo is of me at one of my local movie theaters reading one of my favorite novels, C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen, while waiting for “The Golden Compass” to begin. So one could say I was awash in storymind in a way — in other people’s stories.

But mostly when I talk storymind I’m talking about that weird space in my own mind when I’m deepstewing in my own creative juices, & I hope I can get all the stuff I’m thinking down on paper (or virtual paper — wherever my wordprocessing happens to take place) before I lose track of it all.

I have a piece I need & promised to write about the ongoing Sheraton Anchorage hotel boycott, & it will get written. But storymind’s where it’s at tonight, sorry folks.

Part of what prompts it is this really cool new blog that my friends over at Crossed Genres started up a few days ago.  It’s called Science in My Fiction — a blog guaranteed to get readers participating in storymind.  Fits right in, too, with stuff I was saying the other day about extrapolating from the present into the future, one of the tools for worldbuilding in science fiction.  I was talking then about extrapolating from the current political situation vis-a-vis corporations.  Science in My Fiction is talking about — oh but hey, let me just quote from Kay Holt’s inaugural post over there:

Lately there’s been an alarming trend away from the logical path. A lot of cultural progress has been undermined by zealous ignorance, and recapturing lost momentum can be the work of generations. Fortunately, storytellers have a shortcut at their disposal.

Extrapolation is the wave of the future. While there’s value in reinterpreting, revamping, and remixing old stories, the impact of those expires faster after each pass through the cultural recycler. In fact, they’ve become ironic; some old stories now fuel the social destruction they originally opposed. People need something to look forward to. Extrapolation can always deliver those goods.

Today’s storytellers have another underused asset within easy reach; science. Yes, science and arts are commonly taught and applied with as much distance between them as possible. That’s not just proof of a failing education system, it’s also a casual disregard of history. Da Vinci had it right; creation and investigation belong together. It’s time to put that concept back into practice. [emphases added]

So there you have it, yeah: extrapolating into the future by means of science — or, as Science in My Fiction succinctly explains:

The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them.

Playful, yes! Check out that first blog post: there’s already a bunch of humans — playful as dolphins — riffing off Kay’s extrapolative speculations about dolphin sapience.  Bounce those ideas around in your melon.  And join in!

Anatomy of a dolphin. From Wikimedia Commons; used per GNU Free Documention License.

But that’s not all that’s got my storymind in high gear.  I spent lunchtime today reading back over some of the 13,500 words I wrote last November 28 in my headlong hurry to catch up with my NaNoWriMo 2009 writing, because it was in that day’s writing that the kernel of a story idea emerged, which I’m planning to cause the further emergence of tonight.  Further extrapolation, if you will, arising out of some of the  what-ifs I already had going in the story universe of Long Dark, which zinged into a whole buncha new what-ifs:

• Ships heading out of Sol System on their way between stars to another solar system, where the events of Cold will eventually take place.  How will the residents of these ships keep themselves from going stark raving nutters in their decades-long journey through the Long Dark?
• Well, obviously, some of them will go nutters.  Even in the relatively peaceful society of the Consensus, wherein each & every person holds equivalent power in every decision that affects her or his life, there will still be the occasional anger or fear or delusion leading to craziness or crime. But what does one do with a criminal — not just a criminal, but an actual murderer — in the closed biosphere of a star-traveling tin can?  Just how does the criminal justice system in my ideal little society operate?
• And wow, we’ve got a murder victim here — a dead body!  What do we do with it?  Do we put it out an airlock like so many SF stories do — the outer space equivalent of “burial at sea”?  Or wait — we’re talking about a closed ecological life support system (CELSS) here — if you dump a body into outer space, even a human body, you’re wasting valuable biological resources that are not all that damn easy to replace when you’re trucking along at one-tenth the speed of light far from the abundance of home.  You need that body. So… how do you bury it?  And recycle it? And deal with the emotional & spiritual repercussions of burying your dead in your own — say it — your own spaceship’s waste management system?
• And who is the murder victim?  Could it be — no, not possibly — but yes, it is.  Jyoti, one of Long Dark’s central characters, she who is the most beloved of Esti Gusev, another central character.  Wow. Am I actually gonna pull a Joss Whedon & kill off such an important character?  Not an easy thing for a softie like me to do, but… yes.  I am.
• But why?  What is the motivation of this creep who kills her?  Could it have anything to do with Lord Shiva? In fact, yes.

Diving in right now.  Working title: Asura.

Statue of Lord Shiva in Bangalore, India. Photo by Deepak Gupta. From Wikimedia Commons. Used per Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany.

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. Now I REALLY feel like a writer again
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")

Mars mosaic from a compilation of images captured by Viking Orbiter 1. At center is the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 3,000 km long and up to 8 km deep. To the left are a volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge — Ascraeus Mons to the north, Pavonis Mons in the middle, & Arsia Mons in the shadow. Photo credit: NASA/USGS (via JPL Photojournal)

Worldbuilding, Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is

the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a fictional universe.

The Wikipedia article focuses on the creation of worlds & the cultures that live in them by writers of science fiction & fantasy — for instance, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings trilogy, or the planet Cyteen in C.J. Cherryh’s novels Cyteen and Regenesis, to name but a couple of my favorite imaginary worlds.

But to my mind, worldbuilding isn’t restricted only to completely imagined worlds & people — really, any writer of fiction engages in worldbuilding, even when writing the most mainstream fiction that takes place in a world looking “just like” the world you & I live in, because any fiction involves presenting the particular world(s) & worldview(s) of the characters that inhabit it.

As if you & I actually lived in the same world.  Because isn’t your worldview, no matter who you are,  so much different than mine?  Yet there are some things we can agree on, at least most of us can — if only that rocks are hard to the touch, & water is wet.  Consensual reality, it’s called.  And that’s the point, at least in these coupla paragraphs of this blog post: there are some things a writer can generally assume her audience is familiar with, so that she doesn’t have to explain them; but other things that exist outside your normal frame of reference — that she has invented — yeah, of course she’ll need to explain.  (Or show. As that familiar writer’s proverb goes, show don’t tell — though, as with all rules, there are exceptions.)  Mainstream fiction, so-called, differs from science fiction & fantasy mainly in how closely it adheres to consensual reality, how much worldbuilding it has to do.

I could go on a lot longer about my thoughts about the different types of worldbuilding in different types of fiction (or, arguably, nonfiction), but then I’d never get to the point of this post — which is my worldbuilding, & how the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC — along with everything else in U.S. & international law & custom that grants undue influence in how our governments & economies & lives are run to the fake persons known as corporations —  is really really really good for my worldbuilding.

But really really really sucko for the world I actually live in.

Good for my worldbuilding

Artist's conception of Mars in process of terraformation from Wikimedia Commons. Used in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

In early 2007 I decided that to jumpstart my writing after “life,” as usual, had decided to interfere with it, I was going to do National Novel Writing Month that November.  The good people of NaNoWriMo itself suggest that it’s best not to do NaNoWriMo with a project one already has underway — which in my case would have been Mistress of Woodland — so I pulled an idea off the backburner of my mind & decided to work on a new project,  Cold, which would be about two young women on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.

I told my friend Chris about it, & he told me I should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.  My brother Dave had previously recommended those books to me too.  So, over the late winter & spring of 2007, I read them.

Good call, guys.

If I were to summarize the story of Robinson’s trilogy in one sentence, I’d say, It’s a science fiction story about terraforming Mars.  Hence Red Mars — what the colonizers of the planet find when they get there; Green Mars — how it becomes green with growing plants; Blue Mars — how it becomes a second blue marble in the sky, like our own Earth, rich with liquid water on its surface & in its atmosphere.

But really, that’s only one theme of the trilogy.  There’s also an ecological theme: is it right & ethical for us, humans from planet Earth, to remake another planet — even a presumably “dead” planet like Mars — into a second Earth?  And meanwhile, what’s happening environmentally on the real Earth? — climate change, global warming, melting of Antarctica, rising seas, continuing overpopulation & pollution… in short, planetwrecking, at least in terms of keeping it habitable for human beings & numerous of our fellow species.

There’s also a third dominant theme: the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

Sound familiar?

Robinson isn’t, of course, the first SF writer to extrapolate from the scary situation we’re already in today vis-à-vis corporate power into some even scarier futures, with megacorporations having for all intents & purposes replaced any semblance of government of, by, & for the people.  (Unless, of course, you persist in perversely insisting that corporations are people, like the U.S. Supreme Court does.)  The science fiction subgenre called cyberpunk comes particularly to mind.

My imagined science fiction future is already extrapolated from the present, & the power corporations have is part of that.  During NaNoWriMo 2007, for Cold, I started inventing a government called, simply, Consensus, which really is a government of, by, & for the people, but it was during NaNoWriMo 2009, for Long Dark, that I discovered how Consensus came into existence.  I was writing stuff in the same story universe as Cold, but about three centuries earlier in the timeline; there, it became more apparent that the Consensus government came out of particular (invented) historical circumstances: namely, a rebellion by people living & working in the Asteroid Belt & outer solar system against the tyranny & exploitation of corporations, which, as usual, cared more about the corporate bottom line than about the welfare of their workers & their workers’ families.

So you see, that’s what’s so great about the Citizens United decision, & other corporate-power related phenomena. Here’s another word for you: verisimilitude:  the appearance of being true or real. The more our public officials hand over the reins of government to corporations, the more plausible the story world I’ve built becomes.  Wow, thank you Supreme Court!

Except, uh… like I said.  This shit is —

Bad for my world

No, corporations aren’t the only things — er, I mean “people” — whose greed, thoughtlessness, short-sightedness, stupidity, self-aggrandizement, etc. etc., are bad for the world.  They’re just on the current cutting edge of it.  And the more we, or public officials supposedly acting in our name, hand political power to them, the more deeply cutting their edge is.  The Citizens United ruling is just another step in that direction.

And nice as verisimilitude in fiction is, what would be even nicer would be to live in a world in which, for instance, we could trust that our elected officials were really responsible to us, instead of to corporations whose paid propaganda (so called “free speech”) put them in office.

In May 2007, when I was an active Wikipedia editor, I spent lots of time researching the career of Tom Anderson — in fact, I wrote most of  the article about him in Wikipedia. Alaskans will recognize Tom Anderson as the first of our former legislators to be tried and convicted in the federal probe into political corruption in Alaska.  I wrote the article in my typically geeky, super-detail-oriented style, with lots & lots of cites… & it took a lot of energy & effort.  It’s certainly a lot more detailed article than you’re typically going to find in Wikipedia on a two-term state legislator, corrupt or not.

But for me it was well worth it, because compiling that biography, based solely on the written record (mostly articles from the Anchorage Daily News and the Juneau Empire) really brought home the lesson: whenever you bring corporate money into contact with public elections & officials, there are inherent conflicts of interest for those public officials which will erode their ability to serve the people who elect them. Sometimes, a public official will be so bollixed up by the conflict that they won’t even recognize it.  Tom Anderson’s case is particularly illustrative.

For example, consider this instance from Anderson’s career, involving his relationship to Northeast Community Council, the council for the same part of Anchorage that Anderson himself was elected to represent in the Alaska House of Representatives.  (Note that I’ve removed the citations contained in the article for ease of reading; see the article for citations.) —

Anderson played a significant role over two years from 2002 to 2004 in changing the composition of Anchorage’s Northeast Community Council to reflect more conservative political and economic views. Anderson encouraged friends and allies, including pastors and members of the locally influential Anchorage Baptist Temple, to pack the town meeting-style community council elections. By May 2004, six of the nine community council board members, including its president, were friends and political allies of Anderson. While Anchorage’s community councils have no real authority, they are influential with the Anchorage Assembly because, according to Dick Traini, then chair of the Anchorage Assembly, “they are the active people in the community that choose to be involved.” Community council involvement has been a first step in the political careers of several Alaska politicians.

In July 2004, Anderson was criticized in an Anchorage Daily News editorial for signing a $10,000 contract in 2003 with the Alaska oilfield services company VECO Corporation to consult “on local government and community council affairs.” Anderson had earlier told the Anchorage Daily News that he’d been approached by VECO after the end of the 2003 legislative session because it was aware he’d done similar consulting work before he became a legislator. He told the newspaper that most of his work for VECO was in seeking out civic and charitable events for the company to get involved in, and that he also monitored Anchorage’s community councils to see if there were zoning cases or other issues under discussion that might affect VECO. The newspaper noted that Anderson had received about $4,000 in campaign contributions from VECO employees or their spouses in the 2002 election that won him his first term in the Alaska House. By July 2004 he had received at least $3,500 in VECO-related contributions for his 2004 reelection bid.

Members of the community council later recalled Anderson attending all their meetings during 2003, and assumed he was attending as their representative in the state legislature. They did not learn he was there as a consultant for VECO until 2004, when his state financial disclosure form was filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, as required by law.

By the April 2006 election for Northeast Community Council, the effects of the 2004 takeover had been partially reversed, leaving the council nearly half and half liberal and conservative.

Indeed, who was Anderson representing when he attended community council meetings — his constituents in the Muldoon area of Anchorage (including my brother’s family)? or VECO, which was not only lining his pockets as a supposed “political consultant,” but also helped fund his election in the first place?  (Some folks might also have interest in the connection between Anderson & Jerry Prevo’s megachurch the Anchorage Baptist Temple.)

Here’s another instance, from a couple years later —

In July [2006] Anderson was hired by the Anchorage Home Builders Association for $2,500 per month. The following month he testified before the Anchorage Assembly in favor of two stores that Wal-Mart wanted to build in his legislative district. The Northeast Community Council opposed the stores. At the Assembly meeting, Assembly chair Dan Sullivan introduced Anderson as “Representative Anderson,” but Anderson corrected him, stating that he was at the meeting in representation of the home builders association, which favored the Wal-Mart stores.

Again, who was Anderson representing?  His legislative constituency?  Or the home builders association & Wal-Mart?  Obviously, he believed all that was necessary to keep himself in the clear, ethically, was to take off his “Representative” hat & put on his “paid consultant” hat, & magically the two roles would be kept completely separate.  Right.  Based upon the law as written, Anderson was not acting illegally.  But the presence of conflict of interest is obvious — however oblivious he himself was to it.

Anderson was ultimately convicted of seven counts involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering after taking $26,000 worth of bribes funneled by Anchorage lobbyist Bill Bobrick through a sham corporation that Anderson was supposedly “consulting” for.  The scheme was supposed to be for the benefit of a private prison company, Cornell, which was reportedly unaware of any of this; one of its employees, Frank Prewitt, was funneling the money as a confidential informant for the FBI.

I ran out of steam to write more detailed coverage on Anderson’s trial & its aftermath, but I remember quite well that his obliviousness to his ethical lapses extended into his public statements about his conviction.  He still (or so he claimed) believed he’d done nothing wrong.  Other former lawmakers convicted out of the same federal corruption investigation seemed similarly oblivious.  Vic Kohring, Ted Stevens (who in my opinion is guilty even if his conviction was set aside because of prosecutorial misconduct) — all of them claim I did nothing wrong — even Pete Kott still claims this in spite of being caught on camera taking a bribe.  I did nothing wrong.  They take it as a given that it’s okay to take money, gifts, not to mention campaign donations, which will now be supplemented by unlimited campaign advertising from corporations so long as the corporations like them.

A lot of members of the public take all this as a given too.  A lot of the public is going right along with the Citizens United decision, stating it as a great victory for “free speech.”  Uh, s’cuse me — don’t you mean paid-for-with-megabucks speech?

Why do they take it as a given?  Name your own theory, but here’s mine:

Most of us have become desensitized.  We’ve grown so accustomed to the power of corporate money in every aspect of our lives that we take it for granted.  It’s the famous “boiling frog” thing all over again.  Over the span of many years — more than a century, now — as our lawmakers & law interpreters (the courts) progressively hand more & more power over to corporations —

• corporate “personhood”
• privatization of government functions — e.g., prison privatization, use of  corporate private armies (mercenaries) like Xe (formerly Blackwater), etc.
• deregulation
• granting corporations “ownership” over segments of nature, like water, genes, microorganisms, etc.
• unlimited corporate “free speech”
• etc.

— we’re gradually, just like that frog, having the heat on us slowly turned up higher & higher & higher.

Okay, so the Citizens United case was a bit more widely noticed.  See how many people are looking around and asking, Whoa… how’d we get here? This is fucked up.

Most of us do know that something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree what the problems are, & therefore their solutions.  And thanks to the power our government has handed over to corporations, they are free to use their “free speech” (that is, their money) to influence & distort our perceptions about what the problem is.  So we continue to point our fingers at the wrong causes,  propose the wrong solutions, fight about it all — & the heat keeps turning up, & corporations continue to enrich themselves at our expense, & accountable honest government slips ever further out of our hands.

Big Government (the kind the Tea Party folks don’t like) & Big Corporations are just two different faces of the same phenomenon: the fading away of democracy.  The replacement of government of, by, and for the people with government of, by, and for the powerful few in order to control & exploit all the rest of us.

You know what I’m saying — that psychopathy thing I talked about a couple of weeks ago with reference to corporations.   But y’know, psychopathic Big Government like, say Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or a theocracy like those which Christianists are aiming for — in which anyone who doesn’t agree to toe the line of whatever arbitrary set of rules established by whatever arbitrary set of preachers or priests who claim to hold the blueprints of the heavens of some arbitrary bully-god — none of that crap is exactly desirable either.

What is desirable?  Real democracy, of course.  Real government of, by, and for the people. Government in which every stakeholder has a say and every stakeholder’s rights are protected and honored. Every stakeholder means every single person (real persons, that is, not fake “corporate persons”) who has any stake at all in how we operate our society. Which is to say: every. single. one. of. us.

That’s not how the U.S. government was set to operate, unfortunately. Our Founding Fathers did their best according to their own lights, I suppose, but they left a lot of stakeholders out of the loop. Women. Slaves. Children. Etc. Some of these oversights have been partially corrected through constitutional amendments, but the fact remains that real franchise — real ability to have a say in how society operates, & to have one’s own rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness — is still heavily restricted according to various kinds of status. Most of us still live under other people’s thumbs in one way or another. Some people win. Some people lose: their jobs, their homes, their families, their lives.

It’s just the way of the world, you say.  But why?  Is there another choice?

So here we are, back to worldbuilding

How can a society that is based on “some people win, and so does everybody else” be built?

That’s in essence what I’m trying to do in inventing the government of which my characters are part in Long Dark & Cold, which I named, simply, Consensus.

Notice that I said the government of which my characters are part.  Not, by which my characters are governed.  Because in this government, being a part of the government & being governed by it are one & the same thing.  Nobody is not a member of the government.  It truly is of, by, for the people.

Whoa, now, but wait a minute.  Isn’t that pretty damn unrealistic?  What about, y’know, that big word I used earlier?  Verisimilitude.

Well, that’s the thing.  I think it is realistic.  Not only that, but just as the corporate exploitation against which my characters’ ancestors rebel can be easily extrapolated from the stuff we’re already living with in the world we live in here & now, so can I extrapolate my society’s Consensus government from forms of governance that already exist & are used successfully in the world we live in here & now.  There are places, there are people, who are doing it now.

So nowadays I’m reading a lot about consensus, sociocracy, collective intelligence, & related ideas, on top of all the thinking & writing about this stuff I did on the fly during NaNoWriMo 2007 & 2009.  I’ll be writing more about this in other blog posts.

Meanwhile, may these ideas be the foundation of more worldbuilding in the here & now of 2010 planet Earth. I see little hope for the old tried & untrue methods of adversarial & often antagonistic systems of governance that we’re more accustomed to.  Health care reform debate, anyone?

How very pretty & hopeful our world looks out of the hostility & namecalling between political rivals these days.  Not.

Related posts:

1. Building Consensus
2. Toward a 28th Amendment: Corporations are not human persons
3. Terraforming notes

And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

Rebekah & me at our midnight write-in kickoff at Denny's for NaNoWriMo 2009.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

The new name for November: NaNovember.  For the entire month is devoted, amongst a certain set of crazed writers, to writing something that we will pass off as a “novel” of some 50,000 words, all in 30 days.  That averages to about 1,667 words a day, about 6 double-spaced pages.

A bunch of us Anchorage NaNo’ers assembled at the Denny’s at Denali & Northern Lights beginning about 10:30 PM & got in a bit of socializing or, in my case, coffee fortification before the stroke of midnight set our fingers tapping on laptops, typewriter, or whatever the dedicated wordprocessing gizmo is that Rebekah uses.  A little later we had a writing break, which turned into a photoshoot of those of us who were in Halloween costume.  Then people began to get tuckered out & departed.  Rebekah & I were last to leave, around 2:00 AM — but I was determined to at least get my daily quota in before I hit the sack &, having the bad habit of editing as I write (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but tends to be a liability when you want high word production, as is the case with NaNo), that took me till around 5:00 AM.  Well, & I was a bit over quota too, at 2,138 words, which is nice.  And then I slept in. (Wrote later in the evening, and ended the first day at 2,653 words. Only 47,347 more to go!)

I’m calling this year’s NaNovel Long Dark, which isn’t likely to be a novel — more like a set of stories or vignettes from earlier in the timeline of the same story universe that “Cold” is set in. Right now I’m writing about the first trip to Earth of a data trader, who somehow appeared in my imagination a couple of weeks ago.  She’s a member of, and agent for, the Consensus, which is the society of people who live in the asteroid belts & on some of the moons of the gas giants of our solar system — the same people who will send out the ships that ultimately colonize the binary system where the planet Boleyn & Bai (of “Cold”) will be terraformed.  It’s the rich resources of the “Persian Gulf of outer space” — especially helium-3, which will be a major energy source using fusion — that will ultimately finance voyages to other star systems. My data trader, whose name at the moment is Louava, is riding down a space elevator from orbit & staring in fascination at everything she sees.  And, it turns out, remembering in quite some detail some of the training she & other data traders & diplomats got from a past spy & data thief whose name somehow became Mordecai.  I never heard of this guy before last night.

NaNo writing is so weird.

Here’s my tweets for the day:

• 2138 words for NaNoWriMo thus far — 471 over the daily quota of 1667 average. Going to bed now, will write more upon rising. #
• The real reason for switching from daylight savings to standard time on Nov 1: to give NaNoers an extra hour to write today. #
• Blogged at Henkimaa: Crossed Genres announces its first short story anthology — and “Cold” will be in it! http://bit.ly/mmcRe #lgbt #
  

Several of our number came in Hallowe’en costume, & we got pics during a writing break. Here’s the slideshow. Dr. Horrible, eat your heart out!

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2009-10-29: NaNoWriMo 2009 kickoff #1
2. The Daily Tweets, 2009-11-19: return to NaNoWriMo
3. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-11: NaNoWriMo write-in

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

Did I say a couple days ago that a bunch of books including Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics by Peter Eckart (Microcosm, 1997) that cover topics I need to know a bit more about to write the story universe of Long Dark & Cold were on their way to me & should be here by Wednesday?

Why, yes. I did. “Sublight,” quoth I, “but still pretty damn fast.” In fact they got here a full day ahead of Wednesday.

Given the importance of biospherics to the story universe I’m writing, I’ve temporarily set aside Centauri Dreams, which I’m about one-third of the way through, & started in on Eckart’s book.  So far I’m finding it even more helpful than I thought it would be, & I’m not even into the CELSS stuff yet, other than whatever I gleaned on a fast page-through before sitting down to read it properly.

Some historical background: biospherics as a name for the study of closed ecological systems was first discussed in July 1987 at the First International Conference on Closed Life Systems hosted by the Royal Society in London; & was adopted unanimously by delegates from Russia, the European Space Agency, the United Kingdom, & the U.S. at the Second International Conference on Closed Life Systems in September 1989 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. (p. 2) Eckert’s book Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1994, was the first book that summarized knowledge on the topic; Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics, published in 1996, is an update of that book.

What I didn’t expect is that a book on spaceflight life support would begin with a chapter talking about the fundamentals of the first biosphere, Earth itself.  But get into it: it makes sense.  It’s Earth’s ecological characteristics that any life support system will have to imitate to a lesser or greater degree.  Traditional spaceflight life support systems — physico-chemical systems — are on the lesser end of the scale: while they are well-understood & (relatively) easy to engineer, they don’t replenish themselves, & require an umbilical cord of resupply to keep their occupants alive. Greater: well, that’s where you’re getting into closed ecosystem life support systems (CELSS).  I’ve tended to think of them as being closed in the sense of them being inside an enclosure of some sort — a spaceship, a space station, a habitat on the Moon or Mars — but I’m starting to get that Eckart (& others who study this stuff) especially mean closed in the sense that they’re self-sustaining: ideally speaking, they don’t require inputs from outside themselves.

So far, best I can tell, the only truly closed ecosystem life support system we know of that’s really worked has been Biosphere 1: the Earth.  Experiments like Bios 1, 2, & 3 or Biosphere 2 have been just that: experiments to refine our knowledge — one day, it’s to be hoped, we’ll know how to build a small spaceship or space-colony-sized CELSS that will work.  Of course, my story universe assumes that we do.

Now, again, I’m early in the book — haven’t gotten to the CELSS chapters, not even to the physico-chemical LSS chapters — heck, haven’t even gotten to  the end of the Earth as an LSS chapter.  But there I was sitting on the bus today on my way from work to my dental appointment, & Eckart reminded me of a fact that I first heard so clearly stated by the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki: most of what keeps us alive on spaceship Earth, we get for absolutely nothing.  Eckart:

In fact, man is able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort, because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating in a coordinated manner out there in the environment.  Life support is provided by a vast, diffuse network of processes operating on different time scales.  Unfortunately, there is a tendency to take nature’s services for granted because no money has to be paid for most of them. (p. 13)

But once you decide you want to take a big jump out of the gravity well, you can’t take any of it for granted.  Not least because it costs a lot in money, energy, work to rocket one’s way up into outer space, & to rocket everything one needs to keep one alive up as well.

It’s really pretty sobering when you think about it.  How much we get for free, just because nature is kind enough to provide it.  Next, notice how increasingly services that are given freely — that are part of the Commons belonging to all of us — are being claimed as property by this or that human entity, & especially, in recent years, by the fake persons known as corporations.  Patenting seeds? Patenting the human genome? Claiming intellectual or other property rights over stuff they didn’t do diddly to develop?  What bollocks.

That political element of the division of nature into property & my rejection of treating corporations as legal persons do have a part in what I’m writing.  But even more pertinent at the moment: the simple fact that in outer space, you can’t take life support for granted.  All my characters from Long Dark and Cold have lived — up until the moment that they successfully terraform the planet (still without a name, still just called XXXX) in Cold — in a situation wherein they’re unable to take life support for granted.  Even once CELSS has been developed to the point of making long space voyages possible, those systems will always need constant monitoring by humans or their tools (computers, AIs, whatever): intervention in thought & deed, if not by way of CARE packages or an umbilical cord or resupply from Mother Earth.

Such thoughts popped a lot more quickly into my head on the bus today than it took to write them up just now.  And so I quickly found myself thinking about Pina Chomko.

Pina Chomko is a character I invented two years ago during NaNoWriMo 2007 for Cold.  She’s important: not only as one of Bolyen Maheshwari’s most influential teachers & mentors, but also in her own right as one of the first inhabitants of (damn, I really need to give my planet a name!) XXXX.  She’s an ecologist — more specifically, a planetary ecologist: & that’s pretty kooky really when you stop to consider that she was born in a spaceship or space station aloft; all her ancestors to 5 or 6 or 7 generations back also lived in spaceships or other closed habitats; & she never set foot on a planet until she was upwards of age 25.  Until then, all her knowledge of a planetary ecology was theoretical stuff that came out of books (or, more properly, Library) or came from other people whose whole knowledge came out of books/Library.

She has never been able to take life support for granted.  Her dream is to do so.  To seed the planet & let it grow not under her watchful eye.

Next thing you know, I was laying back in the dentist’s chair thinking about Pina Chomko & how I’m going to fill out her story.

It’s not easy to write a story when you’ve got two people’s hands in your mouth.  But I made some good headway.

Related posts:

1. Biospherics
2. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
3. Terraforming notes