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

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-06: A lovely NaNovember day (7.5K words)
2. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-11: NaNoWriMo write-in
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is

But at least they finally post.

November 11, 2010: Veteran’s Day; and also Day 2 of the Alaska Division of Elections count of write-in ballots in the Alaska U.S. Senate election (or, in twitterspeak, #AKSen); and also a different kind of write-in: a NaNoWriMo write-in wherein crazy “write a novel in a month” writers gather together to drink coffee… and write!

• RT: @adndotcom: We’ve posted photographs of apparently perfect write-ins challenged by Miller camp. http://bit.ly/bsfa3K #
• Bent Alaska: Honoring LGBT veterans, and a Veteran’s Day message from Alaskans Together http://bit.ly/dCknsy #
• RT: @ImFromDriftwood: Check out all the stories from LGBT veterans on IFD: http://fb.me/xa0RvEIv #fb #
• Nate Silver of 538: Miller’s Chances of Victory Dim as Alaska Senate Write-In Count Begins (NYTimes.com) http://bit.ly/dxZl2V #fb #
• Bent Alaska: LGBT veterans and DADT: True stories from I’m from Driftwood http://bit.ly/cJWZgZ #fb #
• RT: @joshtpm: Zen master say: “what is the sound of one side compromising?” #

All but one of the rest of the tweets are from the NaNoWriMo write-in, where I kicked some serious butt.

• At Brayton @KaladiBrothers in Anchorage for another #NaNoWriMo write-in. I stand at 17,122 words, gonna see if I can get to 20K tonight. #fb #
• Wow, 513 words in 15 minutes? I just won a #NaNoWriMo word war? How can this be? I usually at in the low 300s in that time! #fb #
• 584 words that time. Good grief, what’s with me tonight? Not complaining, mind you. (but this time I got beat. that’s OK.) #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• Just 855 more words to 20K (& being again a full day ahead of the #NaNoWriMo game). #fb #
• This 15 minute #NaNoWriMo produced the number of the beast: 666 words. Geez, I’m kicking ass tonight. #fb #
• 2802 words so far tonight. Only 76 words away from 20K. Booyah! #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• #NaNoWriMo words since I got to Kaladi’s: 3452. Notw at 20,574 total. I rock. #fb #
• RT: @audiocloud: Finally reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hess after a decade of “waiting.”// One of my favorite most influential-to-me books. #

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2009-11-01: NaNoWriMo 2009 kickoff #2, the midnight write-in
2. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is
3. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-06: A lovely NaNovember day (7.5K words)

But by the end of the day, with another 7,500 words written, I was ahead of the game.

I started at Side Street Espresso, my favorite writing venue.

• At Side Street writing. Goal today: 7K words would bring me even in #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• Progress report: so far about 2K words of my 7K goal for today. #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• Was recently joined at Side Street by @nethenekhthon who is busily tapping away across the table from me now. in reply to nethenekhthon #

When Side Street closed at 3:00, we moved over to the downtown Kaladi Brothers in the corner of the PAC.

• Three #NaNoWriMo writers now at downtown @KaladiBrothers. Get your butts over here the rest of you! I’m up to 2.7K words so far today. #fb #
• @ShardAngel Whadddaya mean, soon? I’m _already_ playing catch-up. But: now up to 5 NaNoers hereabouts. #fb in reply to ShardAngel #
• DT @KaladiBrothers has no bathroom key today. Someone took off w/ it & they have no spare. Dumb for a biz that causes caffeine bladder. #fb #
• @redrummy Luckily, PAC right next door has plenty of stalls. Sweet relief. in reply to redrummy #

(Don’t worry, downtown coffee drinkers: Kaladi eventually got its key back.)

• At 3.5K words for the day so far, halfway to my day’s goal of 7K. #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• 5K words today so far. About to go catch a bus, will see if I get another 2K tonight or not. #NaNoWriMo #fb #

I finished my writing day at home.

• 6K words. just 1K to go tonight for #NaNoWriMo #fb #
• Did it: met my goal, & then some. 7.5K words today, bringing me to 11,125 total #NaNoWriMo words (now a little ahead of the game). #fb #

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-27: Last Side Street Saturday of 2010
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-03-06: Iditarod!
3. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-11: NaNoWriMo write-in

But right now: I’m off to NaNoWriMo writing.  I’d better write a lot, I’m way behind!

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets 2010-11-11: NaNoWriMo write-in
2. About "Cold"
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is

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

Today was Third Thursday: which means an evening write-in with my NaNoWriMo peeps, who continue to meet every third Thursday of the month for just such a purpose even when its not NaNovember.  For me, a good productive evening worth 1,277 words, some of which were background/thinking my way to the story writing, but some of which handsomely completed a scene I’d been semistuck with in “Asura,” one of the stories I’ve got in the Long Dark/Cold story universe, which is about murder, Lord Shiva, and restorative justice aboard a spaceship on the way to another solar system.  A welcome break from Sullygate, tea party news, & other politics.

This is why I did my taxes last night, instead of waiting to the last minute like I usually do.

And then a brisk walk home, most of the way accompanied by one of the best damn songs for walking I know of: “Storming New Caprica” by Bear McCreary from the Season 3 “Battlestar Galactica” soundtrack.

Walking is a Very Good Thing, & something I’ll be doing even more of now, along with other exercise (rowing, dance, etc.) — as I enter a new fat-loss phase with a little Start Walking program I’ll be doing with some of my officemates (seeing as the university as a whole is not doing one itself).

And here’s today’s tweets.  Happy to learn one of my NaNo peeps really likes the stories I bit.ly link over the course of the day.

• RT: @kesbian_latie: Photo of the day: http://bit.ly/cN7SJT -This photo was my first exhibited piece. / I remember it! I love that photo. #
• Usually Tax Day sucks. But I did mine last night, so it doesn’t suck after all. Esp. as I avoid all tea parties as a waste of brain cells. #
• Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them? – CNN.com http://bit.ly/cZqj7P #
• The KFC Double Down: One Sandwich To Kill You All http://huff.to/dspK1g — this really is 1 of the most disgusting food items i’ve ever seen #
• Barney Frank: ENDA language finalized – time to lobby your Reps & Senators for LGBT equal employment. http://bit.ly/cth3Gt #fb #
• RT: @nethenekhthon: 3rd Thursday write group tonight! 7pm @ Denny’s on Denali. Bring supplies, write furiously. // I’ll be there! #

Related posts:

1. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term
2. Storyminded
3. Writing life

Mel the disheveled writer at a NaNoWriMo write-in in November 2007, where I began "Cold." I already had my 50K the day before, but the writing I did at this write-in & up to 3 AM that night -- to the tune of an additional 3455 words -- was some of my best.

There are several cool things I could do tonight of a (contemporary) political nature:

• I could attend the UAA Polaris Lecture I just advertised in my last post: Cliff Groh speaking on the wide-ranging federal investigation of public corruption in Alaska.
• I could head over to Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge to be part of the taping of Shannyn Moore’s weekly TV show Moore Up North.  Tonight’s taping will feature a citizen panel drawn from people who email Shannyn today to explain why they’d make a great panelist.
• I could stay home & finish the great-grandmother of all Sullygate timelines that I mentioned the other day I was preparing.

But I am doing none of those things.  Instead, I’ll be heading over to Denny’s to join my NaNoWriMo peeps for an evening of writing.

NaNoWriMo, as I’ve mentioned before, stands for National Novel Writing Month — an annual month-long (& actually international) event which calls upon its participants to write 50,000 words of a “novel” over the course of November — the equivalent of about 6 pages double-spaced for each of the 30 days of November.  I did it first in November 2007 as a way to get my writing chops back; started it in November 2008 but didn’t complete that year due to personal issues; & did it again last November.  The 2007 & 2009 NaNos are where my science fiction novels-&-stories-in-progress Cold and Long Dark originated.

But this is March, so why am I getting together with my NaNoWriMo buds tonight?  Well, back in November 2007 as that year’s NaNo came to an end, we decided amongst ourselves that we would continue to meet for a write-in throughout the year every third Thursday of the month.    And today’s third Thursday.  I hold it sacred.  So no contemporary politics for me tonight.

But please note the qualification:  contemporary politics.  I’ll still be present in the political world, just not the one I’ve been involving myself in with my work on understanding Sullygate, or reminding people about the federal probe into Alaska public corruption, or saying anything (ack!) about Palin, or preparing an update on Miller v. Carpeneti, the rightwing lawsuit against the Alaska Judicial Council that’s attempting to toss out part of Alaska’s Constitution.  (The suit was dismissed in District court, but has been appealed to the Ninth Circuit; I’ll be uploading briefs in the case over the weekend.)

The political world I’ll be present in tonight is my invented Consensus society that I’ve been building into the story universe of Long Dark & Cold, as I’ve partially described in a couple of earlier posts (“Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world” and “Building Consensus”) — a society based on governance by consent, in which every individual without exception has a say in every decision that affects their life and work.  I’ve just completed reading a couple of books about collaborative decisionmaking &  consensus-style governance, both of which have greatly enriched what I know about how my invented society runs itself — & also sent me into a paradigm shift with regard to the dysfunctional government & politics — local, state, national, & international — that we’re all putting up with right now.  I just finished reading two books in my reading list —

• How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions
  by David Straus (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002)
• We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy — A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines (Washington, DC: Sociocracy.info Press, 2007)

— which I will be writing more about after I finish my Sullygate timeline.  And I think I’ll be putting together a bibliography on consensus & sociocracy stuff too — a bibliography fitting not only to my background research for writing, but also to exposing other people, I hope, to some stuff that works a whole lot better than the messy adversarial way we’re trying to run things now.  All in all, learning about this stuff & writing it into my fiction — & in nonfiction commentary on my blog — seems a whole lot more important in the long term than any of the other political stuff I’ve written about — however important that stuff is in the short term.

At the moment I’m writing a story in the Long Dark end of things (that is, in a time period about 3 centuries before the events of Cold), working title “Asura,” about the murder of one of my principal characters Jyoti by a confused young man who is attempting to effect an intervention by the Hindu god Shiva.  Yep, really.  (See my post “Storyminded” for what I’ve previously said about this story.)  Jyoti is a farmer of sorts — a “farmer in the sky” who is expert in the production of food within a closed ecological life support system (CELSS) (which, yep, I’ve written about this before too, in my brilliantly named post from last September, “Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space”, and in a second one just before last NaNovember, “Taking life support for granted”)— that is, an artificial biosphere such as what would be required for human survival in one of the sublight interstellar space ships that Jyoti & her community live in as they cross the Long Dark from our solar system to the next one.  Jyoti’s murder is a resounding shock to the community of the ship Celeritas, & not only to her partner, Esti Gusev.  But what do you do with a murderer in a CELSS? And what do you do with a murderer in a society that governs itself according to sociocratic principles of consent?  And how do you address the needs of the victim’s survivors?  Here’s my chance also to mess around with how practices of restorative justice might play themselves out in a sociocratic society.

So nonpolitical?  Not hardly.  Just not contemporary.

Should be fun.

Related posts:

1. Writing life
2. About "Cold"
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-15: Writing life

• International Red Cross/Red Crescent or American Red Cross
• Doctors without Borders
• Rainbow World Fund
• Yéle Haiti
• Lambi Fund of Haiti

This story is part of the novel-in-progress Cold, and takes place not long after the events recounted in the story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 (November 2009).  You might want to read that story, too.  Like “Cold”, “Shark” was originally written as part of NaNoWriMo 2007 (on November 5, 2007, to be exact), though it’s been heavily revised since.

Shark

by Melissa S. Green

“So what are you doing, Bai?” Lys Dabrukas gazed steadily across the table at her, looking, for the life of her, concerned.

Sweat was drying tight and prickly on Bai’s forehead. She rubbed at it with the back of her hand. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” She was dirty and sweaty from the afternoon they’d just spent in the Turnbull soil manufactory, doing their part to help turn Oikos regolith into soil for the habitat’s expanding greenhouses and farms. As they’d left the manufactory, Lys had prevailed upon her for a brief private conversation, so reluctantly she’d stopped by a breakroom with her while Boleyn and the others went ahead to the showers. That’s what Bai would’ve liked a whole lot better than talking with Lys — a shower, a pair of clean cuvs, a meal with Boleyn and her little brother Chander, and then their plan for the evening: heading over to Blue Commons for the hospitality dance Blue was hosting for their own commons. The Blue dance and gift exchange had been the talk of Green Commons all day — Turnbull Blue Commons was famous even in the UpAbove for its talented musicians. Besides, Bai hadn’t seen her Guerrier cousins since Boleyn’s return, and she was eager to reintroduce them to each other.

From Lys: a frown of worry, a patient second attempt. “You’re really wrecking your chances at Examination, you know.”

Boleyn dropped her hand. “What?” she asked. “How?”

Lys sighed. “Your association with Boleyn Maheshwari, of course.” First and last name, as if Boleyn was some stranger. Lys tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes. She was grungy from the work, too, her face dirt-smudged and sweat-streaked except for the pale clean area around mouth and nose that her mask had protected. “Don’t you see how that’s going to affect Examination? I heard you were going up for it soon.”

Fishing for confirmation of the rumor? Or fishing for something else, too? It was a little surreal, really. But then, this was Lys. “Is this why you wanted to talk with me?” Bai asked tightly. “To tell me this?”

“No, you’ve got to hear me out,” Lys said.

“I don’t know why.” Over the past few days, it had become increasingly apparent how limited Lys’ power among the Green Commons youngers really was. Just an illusion, really, a balloon that Boleyn’s return had burst. It wasn’t Boleyn’s return alone that factored in, of course. There was also the growing preoccupation among their age-mates with the looming initiation into adulthood represented by Examination — a preoccupation only heightened after the rumor that Boleyn and Bai intended to Examine early began to circulate. Examination would mean their formal acceptance into adult Consensus, and upon it depended the initial course of their lives as adults: what work they’d do and where they’d do it, the likely direction of their further education and life work, and along what timeline.

Lys was unprepared for Examination herself, Bai was sure of it. And if Bai and Boleyn succeeded in gaining adult Consensus a full year ahead of most of their age-mates — they’d be just that much further along than Lys. Faced with this, Lys must finally be catching on to the fact that she wasn’t so powerful after all. She’d no doubt thought to have another year to consolidate her influence over her peers, but her influence with Examination was no more nor any less than what any of them had: simply to contribute her own comments and observations about their strengths and weaknesses and what it was like to work, study, and live around them. Examination was not guided by teenage concepts of popularity: what counted there was merit, maturity, motivation, and a record of responsibility and care toward Consensus, community, and — of course — to the terraforming project upon which the future of all humanity in this solar system depended.

“You used to like Boleyn okay back before they were exiled,” Bai said. “What’s your problem with her now? Why should you try to make it mine? Are you planning to run us down at our Examinations?”

“No, of course not!” Lys denied, so wide-eyed that Bai was certain she’d hit a mark.

“Just tell the truth, Lys,” Bai said. “Integrity, like Meikäläinen taught. It’s the Consensus way.” Strange, how the tired old saying she’d heard since childhood sounded actually true and meaningful in this instance. She hadn’t even said it ironically.

“Of course we will,” Lys said, her eyes still wide.

We, Bai noted. She could guess: Lys, Walker, Gavril… maybe Ana. She didn’t think Masozi would go along with anything like that. She must ask him what he’d heard.

Lys was flushing, as if she’d realized her little slip. “It’s not… not as if I could comment much in Boleyn’s Examination anyway, it’s been five years….”

“Then why are you warning me about my ‘association’ with her?” Bai demanded.

Lys had never seen her angry before, Bai realized. She was really rattled. That must account for her backpedaling reaction and how florid she’d become under the sweat-tracked grime on her face. She looked confused and defensive, as if she had the lower hand, not the upper. Bai had the upper hand, it came to her. Now that was an interesting thought.

Lys rallied. “It’s their Exile, the Maheshwaris’ Exile. You’re…” — Lys hesitated, searching out a word — “tainting yourself with it.” And mightily pleased she was with the word she’d found, too. The flush in her face receded.

“Their Exile is over,” Bai said flatly.

To her surprise, Lys laughed. “Oh please. Don’t be naive, Bai.” She looked at Bai’s face, laughed again. “Surely you don’t believe that it was only about the stupid yaks.”

Bai kept her expression unchanged, not to give anything away. If there was anything to tell her the difference between Lys and herself, it was that. Until the Maheshwaris brought them forth from the Ark, yaks hadn’t been seen by anyone of the Project in three centuries and more. Five generations, six generations, since Project ships left Sol System — but those yaks born out of the Ark-frozen ova and sperm of their dams and sires were only one generation from Earth. Their parents had lived on Earth. Those yaks were not stupid. They were miracles. Miracles, what’s more, which could produce meat, cheese, wool that could be woven into clothing — animals who could even live wild off the land, adapted as they were through uncounted generations in the high mountain altitudes of Earth to the low atmospheric pressures that prevailed even at Metsi. From Metsi, as Oikos’ atmosphere thickened, they could spread to higher elevations — to Turnbull, maybe even as high up as Gusev. All right, so the Maheshwaris had jumped the gun by fertilizing yak eggs before it was fully consensed — but the yaks were still miracles that would help them to live on this world under open skies, just as Esti Gusev and Jyoti Sindhu had dreamed so long ago.

As to issues beyond yaks and meat and wool and open skies — well, she hadn’t thought much lately about what else had played into the Maheshwaris’ Exile. She’d developed only an infirm grasp of other causes when she’d read through the record a year ago. Ma had helped her understand some of the issues then — a little — and two or three of Boleyn’s remarks since she’d come back had give her pause for thought. Clearly she needed to understand more. She resolved then and there to read through the record all over again, and to insist Boleyn do so as well, and then to talk it over with her and with ma and the rest of the family. Both families. Ma had told her what they must do to prepare for entering into the responsibilities of adult Consensus. Politics was a big part of it.

Lys might be a manipulator whose clumsy bullying now was obvious to someone like Bai who’d known her from diapers, but that was just the hamhandedness of a younger. Michael Dabrukas, she suddenly remembered — Lys’ father — had been a key player in the arguments that pushed the Maheshwaris’ case to Court after an initial agreement involving a milder sanction had already come about. Lys had probably learned a thing or two from her father. If she couldn’t become World Emperor, or even king or queen or president, still, ma had said it: Lys was of that kind that idealists claimed Consensus government had put an end to: a politician. “Michael Dabrukas himself says Consensus wiped out politicians,” Mei Wang had said a year ago, “because he’s an idealist. But he’s fooling himself — what’s he, if not a politician? So long as humans draw breath there will never be an end to politicians. Desire for power is as inherent in our biology as sexual desire.”

Being now particularly afflicted with the latter of these, Bai was newly attuned to the lesson. She wouldn’t put it past ma to have reckoned a year ago what would come to pass between her and Boleyn when they met again, and set up the lesson that way just so she’d remember. Now she did remember, all of it.

There they’d been, ma and her on the couch in their quarters, ma sitting sidewise to face her, holding Bai’s hands in her own. It had been three or four days after Bai finished reading the Library records on the Maheshwari case, a reading which had refreshed her bitterness and grief at what still, a year ago, had felt like a permanent loss of her friend. Her love, yeah… ma surely had known that Boleyn and her went that deep with each other, even before Bai did herself. Clever ma.

Bai had known the Exile was about more than the “stupid yaks,” but she’d never fully understood why. She hadn’t gotten why Lys’ father and the others in his camp had pushed the case up the line to Court to make the sanction harder, or why Boleyn’s parents — hell, why Boleyn herself, and Chander and Ajit — had accepted it. She’d known that what she didn’t understand was important, so she’d brought her question to ma along with her tears. For her tears, ma had held her hands. For her question, ma had given her pragmatic explanation. Desire for power, as inherent as sexual desire.

“Because of that,” ma had said, “we can’t afford to be idealistic about it. Politics in itself isn’t evil — get used to that. Consensus is just as political as any other system of government. It’s different only in that it levels the playing field so that we all have a say, a real say, limited only by others’ perceptions of how reliable we are. You’ve read history —.” Indeed Bai had, far beyond what Ser Carey had required. She’d read back all the way to the chaos of Earth, because ma had said she should. “Some governments,” ma said, “were based on a concentration of military power, or terror, or economic power. Even many of those that claimed they were democracies were really based more on money: who had it and who didn’t, who could afford to buy votes or political advertising, or who controlled powerful business corporations like the ones our ancestors in the Main Belt and Outer System threw off. Our system is based on what you might call a concentration of the persuadable. What gets influence isn’t money, but argument — persuasive argument, backed by the integrity and merit, so we hope, of those making the arguments. What happened to Akash and Elizabeth, and to Boleyn and her brothers, was in part the result of arguments that convinced a supermajority, first of Consensus, and then of Court. It doesn’t, however, mean that the arguments which prevailed were correct arguments.”

“Then they shouldn’t have had to go!” Bai had protested.

“I didn’t say they were incorrect arguments, either,” her mother had said. Before Bai could protest at that, she said, “I believe they were incorrect. But Akash and Elizabeth admitted they did wrong, and in some eyes that left them with little moral ground to stand on. Besides, they themselves were influenced by certain private argu—”

“Why not?” Bai interrupted. “You’ve taught me one should admit one’s wrongs, and that honest and sincere confession always leads to mercy.”

“No, not always. I’ve never said always. Sometimes a shedding of blood brings mercy. Sometimes it brings sharks.”

Then she’d had to explain that metaphor. Bai, being her mother’s daughter, had looked sharks up in Library next chance she got. Ugly, she thought them. Ugly and fierce. Maybe one day they’d come out of the Ark and she’s learn what they really were.

Lys wasn’t ugly, not physically in any case. Fierce?… perhaps. There’d been a time, before she’d turned into so much the bully and manipulator, that she’d been something of a friend. In the first months after the Maheshwaris’ departure, she’d been one of the few of Bai’s own age to whom Bai had exposed her grief. Lys had been kind, then. Blood, and mercy. But if she were to expose herself now, Bai thought, Lys would be a shark.

Just the same, back then she’d been kind. Bai had to remember that. She wasn’t herself a shark. Integrity, like Meikäläinen taught. Like Esti Gusev taught. Like ma taught. And so she couldn’t say anything other than what she said next.

“What any of the adults might think of me or Boleyn when our Examinations come,” she said, “that’s up to them. But you know me, Lys. Be fair. Be fair to me, and be fair to Boleyn. Your Examination will come up too. I promise we’ll be fair to you. We’ll always be fair to you.”

She could see from Lys’ face that, again, she’d hit the mark.

She got up and went for her shower.

Now it’s your turn.

Please donate to Haiti earthquake relief.  Here are the links again:

• International Red Cross/Red Crescent or American Red Cross
• Doctors without Borders
• Rainbow World Fund
• Yéle Haiti
• Lambi Fund of Haiti

See also other Post a Story for Haiti stories. Post your own, if you have one.

Related posts:

1. Writing life
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-13: Haiti earthquake
3. Haiti: Disaster profiteering v. helping Haiti rebuild for Haitians

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