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

Consensus as the form of government in my fiction came about from a combination of personal experience with consensus used in a collaborative project (in this case, Wikipedia) & the influence of another science fiction story, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).  I’m doing a lot of reading nowadays about consensus, collaborative decisionmaking, sociocracy, etc. as background research for my writing.  I’m also becoming convinced that those forms of decisionmaking are our best means of recreating our own society & government into one that really is of, by, & for the people.

But for now: just the story of how I decided on Consensus to begin with.

Storymind

When I first decided to write Cold for NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t know much at all about the government or society in which my characters lived.  I only knew that the story began with a question — What does cold feel like? — out of which emerged the story’s setting & first characters: a planet in the late stages of terraformation, and two young women, one who had never lived outside the enclosed habitats of her space-born society, & one who had.  These two characters, Bai & Boleyn, are the center of the story of Cold; but of course there is a world in which they live, a society in which they live, more questions to be answered.  For instance, how did Boleyn come to have experience outside the closed biosphere?  Okay, her family was exiled for a time to a remote facility.  But why?  How?  Where?  And so on.  Well, that’s storymaking, to me: it’s about asking a question, & trying out answers until you come up with one that you like, which will generate more questions, more what ifs.

I made the decision to do NaNoWriMo 2007 in about February of that year.  But I had to constrain myself from actually writing it until November, when NaNo actually began.  Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though; & so what I call storymind became engaged pretty continually.  For instance, I remember walking across the UAA campus one day on a work-related errand. It must’ve been February or March, still winter, so I stuck that day to what we at UAA informally call the “spine” — the enclosed walkways that make it possible to walk most of the way across campus without going outside.  And I thought, hmm, wouldn’t the closed habitats on my story’s planet be build in a modular style, with closed in walkways like the ones I’m walking in now to connect them?  Why, of course they would. Thus in my storymind I began to design the structure of the enclosed community that I later named Turnbull, which is essentially a collection of several enclosed habitats called Commons that are connected together with “tubes” aboveground & tunnels belowground.

(Turnbull itself is named after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like the one my characters were terraforming. The other HabCat compiler was Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, played in the movie by Jodie Foster.)

The battle of the Battle of Washita River

Cold wasn’t all I was thinking about over the course of 2007.  Life stuff, of course, including a trip to Seattle & Spokane to visit family.  Also, I got heavily involved in active editing of Wikipedia.  This began more-or-less by accident when I discovered that the Wikipedia article about the Dena’ina elder & writer Peter Kalifornsky indicated he was alive.  Hold on, I thought, didn’t I recall him having died sometime within the past few years?  Yep, about four years previously — so next thing I knew I was researching him, correcting the article, & doing even more research… on an article which even now I haven’t completed (!!!).  But I sure learned a lot along the way about Dena’ina language, culture, & history (Anchorage is situated in Dena’ina country) — some of which entered storymind to influence some aspects of Cold.  But of course I also got pulled to other Wikipedia articles, & pretty soon Wikipedia editing became a major focus that largely drew me away from my writing life (at least in terms of writing my stuff) until November, when NaNoWriMo helped me to break that fixation.  Nowadays, I do Wikipedia editing only here & there.  (Though it would really be nice if I finished that Peter Kalifornsky article!)

But my Wikipedia experience went into storymind too.  Of particular relevance: I got caught up in huge dispute on a particular article (the Battle of Washita River, if you want to know) with a certain editor with strong anti-Indian bigotry who wanted to paint the Cheyenne people in general & the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle in particular as unqualifiedly evil, & George Armstrong Custer (this editor’s personal hero) as unqualifiedly good & wonderful & perfect.  Never mind historical facts; & never mind Wikipedia policies of neutral point of view (commonly abbreviated in Wikipedia background discussions as NPOV), “no original research” (NOR), & verifiability — policies that are intended to protect Wikipedia’s integrity as an encyclopedia by founding its articles on reliable sources, verifiable facts, & neutral presentation of all sides of contentious issues instead of presenting only “one side of the story.”

Battle of Washita River as depicted in Harper's Weekly for December 19, 1868, three weeks after the event on November 27. Through Wikimedia Commons.

Dealing with this dispute was a big learning experience.  Given my lifetime of socialization in 20th & 21st century U.S.A., my first reaction in dealing with a clearly biased “one side of the story” breaker of rules was to look for an authority figure to whom I could appeal to bring this editor into line: Someone is breaking the law: where are the cops, the judges, can’t we ban this guy?

The closest thing you have to “authority figures” on Wikipedia are admins… but it doesn’t take long on Wikipedia to discover that an admin is not, in fact, a cop.  Wikipedia governs itself by processes of consensus: if you appeal to an admin about a dispute on an article, the admin isn’t going to automatically kick someone’s butt unless there are clearcut problems like edit-warring or personal attacks.  But if the disputes are over content & bias, the admin is going to advise you to discuss the problem on the article’s discussion page, & try to come to a consensus.  Yes, there we go: consensus, one of Wikipedia’s six core policies regarding personal conduct, which also include a demand for civility and no personal attacks, refraining from edit warring, welcoming everyone to edit (assuming they abide by Wikipedia’s core policies, including the conduct policies), & collaboration on, rather than individual “ownership” of, articles.

Okay, but we’ve got a content dispute with a biased editor here, & we’ve been told to take our dispute to the article’s talk page & come to consensus.  But what if agreement can’t be reached there?  Then there are additional processes used in Wikipedia through which disputes can be worked through, some of which might result in sanctions against problematic “I refuse to abide by Wikipedia’s policies” type editors (like the guy we were dealing with).  Our problem guy did get the occasional sanction for edit warring & personal attacks (as did one of the folks supposedly on the “right side” of the content dispute, who has since gone on to a long career in getting banned for incivility & edit warring under a variety of different sockpuppet usernames), but it took us a long time to bring the content dispute into some kind of control, just a couple of months before NaNoWriMo 2007 took me out of the Wikipedia biz.

If you’re curious, check out the Talk page & its archives for Battle of Washita River to see all the crap I & my fellow editors had to go through.  Especially see the RfC (Request for Coments) on the article itself & the related RfCs on our two problem editors.  (I’m the user Yksin.)  It took us two months to move from the article being locked down in a biased & inaccurate form to be able to edit it again after the disputes had been more-or-less settled.  It took a long time, but we did it right.  If you think I’m being a naive idealist when I talk about the need to be civil in discussing Sarah Palin, then read through this stuff, & try to convince me that civil, factual discussion doesn’t, in the end, win out over the kind of offal that our problem editors were continually unloading on us.  Patience helps.  I’m proud of the way I handled myself throughout.

Wikipedia was a great experiential education for me in at least some of the possibilities of consensus.  It was also instructive about how “knowledge” is constructed.  I grew to have a great deal of respect for Wikipedia as a source of information — as long as you know how it works & how to evaluate the information there.  (I typically look not only at the articles themselves, but also their edit histories & talk pages.  But I also never consider a Wikipedia page the last word on a topic.  I still sometimes log in & correct typos or misstatements of fact, or to revert vandalism.)

If you’re interested in seeing how consensus operates in a huge collaborative project like this, you can do like I had to do: go into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia. See how editors & admins & bureaucrats (another level of Wikipedia adminship) talk with each other about articles & the processes by which articles are written.  Look at article talk pages & see how disputes over content are resolves.  Check out the process called Request for Adminship, or RfA by which admins become admins & bureaucrats become bureaucrats — which is partially what Cold‘s process of Examination is based upon.  There’s a lot there.   And it’s very geeky but also very cool.  I still think very highly of the numerous people who work really hard to make Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

A constitution on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor image of Pavonis Mons, a broad shield volcano (similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii) located on the martian equator at 113°W. The volcano summit is near 14 km (~8.7 mi) above the martian datum (0 elevation); the central caldera (crater near center of image) is about 45 km (~28 mi.) across and about 4.5 km (~2.8 mi.) deep. Pavonis Mons is the site of a settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars where the Martian Constitution was written. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems via JPL Photojournal.

At the same time in 2007 that I got caught up in Wikipedia editing, I was following my friend Chris’ advice to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo & Nebula-award winning Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — because of one of its overall themes, the terraformation of Mars.  But, as I wrote the other day, I also discovered another them 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.

The Wikipedia article about Kim Stanley Robinson observes,

Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives Green Mars and Blue Mars as a replacement for traditional corporations….

Robinson’s work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting within this environment. Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble anarcho-syndicalist and socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations. In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life, while a persistent threat to social democracy is embodied by transnational corporations, the characteristics of which resemble those predicted by institutionalist and socialist economists such as Ted Wheelwright and Karl Marx.

It should be no surprise to anyone, given my already vociferous criticism of contemporary corporatism (not to mention the foolishness of granting corporations the legal fiction of “personhood”)  that I like this about Kim Stanley Robinson.  A lot.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

The environmental, economic, and social themes in Robinson’s oeuvre stand in marked contrast to the right-wing Libertarian streak prevalent in much of science fiction…  and his work has been called the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with a left-wing libertarian and anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Ursula K!!!  What greater recommend could there be for Kim Stanley Robinson than that?  And The Disposessed is a great novel — thanks, Wiki editors, for the reminder to read it again. If all I am at the moment is a barely-published writer of only a couple of things here & there, still, let it be known — I aspire to stand in their tradition.

(Though I hesitate to call either of their visions as utopian.  I think societies such as they’ve invented are possible & desirable.  But it’ll take us to make them.)

By the beginning of the last book of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, the Martian colonists have finally succeeded in kicking the corporations off-planet (by means of the trilogy’s Second Martian Revolution in the year 2127); but in order to maintain their independence from Earth governments & Earth-based corporations, they decide they need to adopt their own constitution & government.  Thus, a congress is convened in a settlement at Pavonis Mons — one of Mars’ great volcanoes — where the new Martian Constitution is drafted, later to be ratifiied by 78% of Martians who voted (the novel says that 95% of eligible voters voted).  (Tip o’ the nib to MangalaWiki, a wiki-based encyclopedia on the Robinson’s works, which helped me keep my facts on track.)

Here’s where Robinson & Wikipedia collided in my storymind: the people who did the actual drafting of the constitution at Pavonis Mons worked collaboratively — &, of course, using computers. —

“At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said.  And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their sections headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police… [and so on]. (my paperback copy of Blue Mars, p. 125)

Later, after they complete their work, they attach all the numerous written documents & discussions that had been generated during the process for reference by courts, historians, & other interpreters who wanted a better understanding of the framers’ intent.  (Much as Alaskans can refer to the minutes of the Alaska Constitutional Convention in order to better understand the Alaska Constitution & its framers’ intent.)

And I thought, what if they actually used wiki-type software, similar to what Wikipedia itself uses,  to draft their constitution?  That way, there would always be a running record of the proceedings (at least, any that were in written form) — edit histories, talk pages to discuss differences & disagreements about difference, & to develop agreement & consensus — the full gamut.

I’m not sure exactly the moment this stuff germinated to such an extent that it fledged itself fully into my story’s Consensus government — but I had it by November 1, 2007, when I did my first day’s writing on Cold — the same writing that became, with not as many revisions as you’d think, the short story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 exactly two years later.

But come to think of it — there was also a third influence in the mix, which I’ll call —

Influence of the Self

— the Self in this case being myself & my beliefs, especially the content of my beliefs with regard to selfhood.

Best expressed by some of my writing about halfway into NaNoWriMo 2007, when I was reading Robinson’s The Martians, which collects a lot of stories & sketches related to his trilogy & its characters.  Among them were some pieces about the Constitution of Mars, with commentary from one of Robinson’s fictional constitutional framers. These pieces led me to additional thinking about Consensus in my story.  On November 19, 2007, I wrote in part,

Two chief principles exist in dialectic, as can be encapsulated in the statement held to by one of the spiritual movements within Consensus: Harming none, do as you will.  I think what I’m getting to is some of my own deepseated beliefs, which that statement plays a large part in.  Basically, whether at the individual level or the community and government level, the  principle of sovereignty over one’s own actions (“do as you will”, self-government) is always balanced against the the principle of nonharm: the recognition and respecting of the rights and autonomy of others.   Consensus has as one of its fundamental principles, which is legal, moral, and spiritual all at once, that the integrity of the Self is paramount, whether that Self be an individual or a body of individuals joined together into a family, a community, or a large body of society.  Violation of such integrity or wholeness through the causing of harm is conceived of, legally, as crime; morally and spiritually, it may be considered sin.  The principle is established in the very name of this type of government: Consensus, indicating the consent of those who make it up.  Government, rather than being something imposed, often coercively, upon the people by a hierarchy above them, is made up of all of the people in a very direct way.

Later that same day —

There is no such thing, in Consensus philosophy and culture, as a government separate from the people.  Everything begins with the Self, the first Self that is each individual human being.  Inasmuch as humans as biological beings are also social beings, Self is also expressed in the yearning for Other, which finds a home in relationship, each relationship or group of relationships themselves forming their own Selves: friendship, sexual pairing and partnership, family, community, Consensus.  Because all levels of society begin with that fundamental Self of each individual, therefore the Self is sacrosanct; its autonomy is the first building block of society.  To violate the Selfhood of an individual is like the breaking open an atom: it’s the beginning of destruction.  The Self, of course, is much more fragile than the atom: it took until the 20th century C.E. for humans to learn how to split the atom; but it didn’t take us long at all to come up with all manner of ways to cleave the human soul, and the chain reaction from that has never ended.  Only some have learned to restore it, only some have learned ways of living with one another in such ways that the violation of soul and Self isn’t inextricably a part of human education, of human “conditioning.”  Even the most intelligent and soul-preserving societies make mistakes.

Consensus begins by recognizing those two aspects of what it is to be human: Self, and Other, in which each Other is also a Self. Society, culture, government is nothing more and nothing less than the provisional solution humans have come to in any given time and place to balance between Self and Other; or shall we say, the multiplicity of Selves, each with its own sacrosanct Integrity.  Thus, the laws of Consensus begin with the laws intended to protect the Self at its most basic level, that of the individual.  Everything else flows upward from that.

And now here I am reading more about consensus & related ideas — collaborative decisionmaking, collective intelligence, sociocracy — all of which reflect the ethic that I was writing about: the idea that every individual has value, & that the integrity & selfhood of every individual must be protected.

But the books I’m reading are taking me even one step beyond that: recognition that each & every individual, without exception, must have a say in any decision that affects her or his life. Government not through the coercion of the powerful over the less-powerful, but government by the consent of all.

Not only are these books helping me to articulate this, but they’re also teaching me the techniques & strategies that can make it possible.  Both in my stories, & in the Real World of which we all are part.

Needless to say, I’ll be writing more about this.

Related posts:

1. Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world
2. Writing life
3. Terraforming notes

• 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

I created this photomosaic & posted it to my Flickr photostream on November 9, 2007 under the title It’s all just an act.

This is another story about how depression & its close relative despair work their way in my life.

But first I will explain what occasions this topic over any other today. For reassurance to my friends, if nothing else.  Today I’m in the grey, & something of a light grey at that, which is all to the good.  I’m not in the state that most of this post is about: what I call the pit. I’m just a little low in mood from having had to go through some boxes yesterday that allowed an egress to some of the grief that I need mostly to have shuttered away right now.  (It’s time will come.)

So I feel crummy. But not dangerously crummy.  Not even as crummy today as yesterday.  In short, I’m okay; tomorrow I should be even okay-er: I’m doing the necessaries to take care of myself.

But sometimes on such a day it’s good to remind myself where things can go if I don’t stay mindful.

A self-portrait I took on October 23, 2007 -- my mom's birthday. I didn't realize until after looking at it that I was feeling pretty low. It's there in my eyes. It was just short of two years since her death.

Two years ago, when I made that photomosaic: I was feeling pretty bad, from a combination of things. We’d entered the dark of the year, which also means the cold of the year, plus there was the approaching anniversary of my mom’s death on November 29, and it was also very shortly after her birthday (October 23). Add in some relationship stuff, & probably I was a bit run down.  Nor did I know about 5-HTP then.

And, as is common for me, I had a hard time just coming out & saying I felt bad.  Even in in how I created & posted the photomosaic: I used Photo Booth (a Mac program), which has one setting that allows for particularly lurid colors which give a sense of melodramatic overkill.  I gave the mosaic tags like Mel o’drama which lent further credibility to the idea that, hey, I was just screwing around, this wasn’t serious (even though it was). I was a little more honest with another tag: the actor sometimes becomes the character played — though even that was sufficiently obscure that unless someone knew me really well, they would be unlikely to interpret it to know its relation to me.

So what was going on with me?  I was in the pit. The black hole.  The well.  Those are names I have for the worst form of depression/despair that I get — when I’m just hanging on by threads, & the threads are unraveling.  My thinking unravels, too: it’s a form of craziness, what my partner Rozz called at the time warped in mel darkspace. Yep. Rozz has seen it many a time. When I’m in that place, I no longer know things that I know when I’m sane, & I can cycle into the crazy pretty damn fast.

I actually pulled out of it that November — can’t remember quite how.  Maybe I just did my basic self-care stuff.  I was in the midst of NaNoWriMo 2007, & in looking back, I see that I wasn’t turning out much writing for a few days around that episode in the pit.  I wouldn’t have finished NaNoWriMo that year if I hadn’t come out of it.  But once NaNoWriMo ended, I started descending into it again in December.  Still, I was just enough sane that on December 2, 2007, three weeks after posting the photo, I wrote a long explanation of what the photo signified.

Written Dec 2, 2007, 3 weeks after posting this picture:

Thing about these pics is that I really felt that way: the mood I was attempting to depict in the photos. Despairing, fucked-up, in the black hole — ridden by my own personal demon that I’ve had most all my life. Over the years I’ve learned to deal with it, what to do when I start falling into the pit, & normally my time there isn’t that long anymore. Two or three days, maybe, instead of weeks or months, & the really horrible intense parts complete with suicidal ideation or at least the desire to disappear last maybe a few hours, instead of as a near constant. When I feel that way, I look to myself: I pull back from obligations, I make sure to get more sleep, I eat healthily, I don’t require things of myself except to take care of myself. Mostly, I try to get horizontal.

Although I have thoughts about suicide or of other self-destructive things at some times, I have never in my life made a suicide attempt. To the extent in my past that I’ve engaged in self-harm, it’s been of the nature of hitting my head against a wall, or hitting it with my fists, or tearing up writing (though that’s a form of suicide), or throwing something of mine. I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Lately, my thoughts frequently will run towards cutting myself off — say, removing all my profiles from sites like Flickr, kicking off all the mail lists I’m on, destroying my files… disappearing. It would be hard to do. Pieces of me are scattered all over the place. When I feel like that, I want to find each & every such piece & extinguish it, & then myself. I don’t do it, I have never come close to doing it but it’s incredibly painful to feel like that.

I have always been held back from trying by thinking about my family, friends, people who love me. I couldn’t do that to them. One time when I hurt that way, I told my friend Scott, who at that time was my roommate, that I almost wished that everyone who loved me would turn their back on me, because then I would be free to off myself. Though it was painful to contemplate such a possibility, too: everyone I loved, betraying me at once? Anyway, Scott just kinda smiled at me wryly & said, Sorry Mel, you’re just going to have to put up with us loving you.

But dammit, when it happens, it hurts like all buggery. (Thank you, Sian, for teaching me that Aussie phrase, which captures the pain of it perfectly.)

So. Why then, the title of this photo? Why the tags that make it seem this is a joke? Why the lurid colors, which also melodramatize it?

Because some of how this demon came to take such tenacious residence in my soul was through an invitation of sorts, back when I was in high school, & I used to “pretend” I was in such a bad place. At that time it was — or so I though — all just an act. I didn’t have the maturity at the time to consider that maybe there really was something wrong inside of me, that I felt need to manipulate people’s behavior toward me with such an act. I only thought of that when I decided to try to put the act aside, & discovered that it wasn’t an act anymore. Act as if for a long enough time, & you become the character you play.

So I’m caught, ever since, between the rock & the hard place. Even though it’s real, & I really feel this way, I’m also very conscious of how people around me are reacting to my behavior, & I feel that I’m being manipulative, & I feel wrong about that because manipulation is wrong. So nothing I can do is the right thing. If I show myself in this state to people, then I’m manipulating them. If I go into hiding, that may in one part be another way of manipulating, but even more importantly, I cut myself off from the people who care about me, who I often need, to help me climb back out of the pit.

Pretty screwed up thinking, really. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have come a far long way since I was 16 or 17 in high school, & I’m usually pretty good about asking for help nowadays when I need it. But this screwed-up thinking still occurs sometimes, & it’s been occurring a few times over the past couple of months, for reasons that I’m only starting to figure out.

That’s what this picture is. It’s a visual demonstration of that screwed up thinking. Which I put together even as I was struggling with it. Because yes, I took these photos when I was in the deep in the pit, trying to communicate to any who would see them that I was in pain, that I needed some kind of help, if only that my state of mind would be recognized. But see — I believe, I truly believed in the midst of my pain that if I just showed the photos straight on, or even just said outright, “I’m hurting bad right now,” that I’d be manipulating. So I undercut it. Use the “glow” effect in Photo Booth to get those lurid, melodramatic colors. Use tags & a title that make it seem just pretend. Though it wasn’t.

It’s hard to communicate honestly when I’m like that. Because when I’m like that, I’m crazy. It’s a form of delusion, of madness. I literally do not understand that it is okay to simply say, “I’m in pain right now.”

Remote. Photo taken Dec. 2, 2007, the same day I wrote this account.

But you know, lately I’ve been noticing a couple of friends/acquaintances on Flickr who have been going through tremendously painful situations themselves, who have reminded me of that. I’m writing this from a state that is near but not quite in the black hole (same date as the photo Remote), so I’m still near enough to sanity that I was able to check my descent into that screwed up thinking. I’m in a bad headspace today, but today (December 2, 2007) I’m just going to say that. Instead of putting on the act that isn’t an act.

So here it is. I’m in a bad headspace today. It isn’t quite the black hole, but it’s not okay either. It’ll right itself, but it hasn’t yet. Today, it rises out of some events that I’m not really prepared to talk with anyone about. So, I’m probably going to be a little remote for a bit, till I do work it out. But, better to be honest & say so, than to just kite off by myself without leaving a note.

And having written all this, I’m already feeling a bit better. I may not have to go remote for a very long period after all.

Thanks for listening.

As it turned out, the following day was the really bad one, when sanity absolutely fled midway through my day at work.  I was able to hold on to just enough sanity to put out a call for help, which took the form of a tweet, typo & all:

3:23 PM: Imploding. I guess that’s better than exploding & killing someone. But I’m fucked in the head, badlyl.

Wouldn’t you know it: Twitter (still a fairly new thing back in 2007) was updating slowly that day.  I don’t think anyone got my tweet until the next day.  I tried again over an hour later:

4:47 PM: Imploding. Better than exploding & killing someone I guess, but still pretty fucked up.

Twitter still malfunctioning: no response.  And when you’re already crazy, & don’t know the software is muckety-mucking, the paranoid portion of your mind goes, Nobody even gives a shit!

So I’m pretty amazed that I, working late & still in my office, tried again:

6:11 PM: Inside of my mind is getting worse & worse. Could someone pull me out of it please?

6:20 PM: Seriously. Usually I do okay fending for myself, but I’m not fending too well today.

Still no response.  But luckily, my Flickr friend Katie came online in Gmail — probably the very best person possible, because she was someone who knew from the inside the kind of crazy I was experiencing, & therefore knew exactly how to talk me down.  (She told me later her thinking was “hmm. now what would mel tell me when she was sane & i was going through a rough time?”) Here’s a portion of our conversation, a partial transcript, if you will, of the crazy:

me: hey

Katie: hey mel whats up

me: head’s been in a bad place for a couple of days now

Katie: oh dear, whats been going on

me: not sure really but it’s been getting worse today because i’m in a nobody gives a shit mode
& starting to engage in cut & run behaviors
like removing all my pics except one from [a Flickr group we were both in]

Katie: ah yes, i’ve gone through that …

me: & feeling like just removing myself from groups & shit altogether b/c i feel like nobody gives a shit

Katie: dont do that – people do … it’s just the frame of mind you’re in that’s fooling you into thiking so

me: yeah i know i’m just barely remembering that
but it’s on the edge at the moment

Katie: hmm, well i’ll remember for you … don’t do it !

me: some guy here killed his dad with a machete yesterday & then came in to anchorage & shot some innocent grad student in his car & killed him & badly wounded a couple of other people during his rampage
he got caught after a car jacking this morning
& i’m like, well, that’s the way i feel
except i take it into myself
instead of runnign around fucking other people’s lives over
but it’s kinda like today
oh let me not mention how badly i’m feeling, lest i ruin your day

The rampage mentioned was that of Christopher Erin Rogers, Jr. on December 2–3, 2007. Rogers was ultimately convicted in two separate trials of two murders and four attempted murders in Palmer and Anchorage, plus animal cruelty for his attack on the dog that saved the life of his father’s fiance. And I would say that Rogers, whose confession was heard by the jury in his second trial in Anchorage, very much had a similar kind of craziness going on his mind which prompted his crimes. Read the details for yourself. [Ref #1] Something, who knows what exactly, set him off, & he went explosive, harming & even killing other people. And, as is so often the case, refusing to accept that he was responsible: not aliens, not other people with their perceived mistreatment of him.

Well, if I’m going to sometimes go crazy, I’m sure glad I don’t do it that way.  My tendency is to implode: I don’t harm others (usually), I harm myself.  And I suppose another difference between me & Rogers is that I do my best to take responsibility for my craziness.

Not, to be sure, when I’m actively crazy: then I’m just as likely to blame other people.

Katie: you can never ruin someone elses day by tell them you’re having a bad day

me: no i can just tell ‘em i’m having a bad day & they can go “oh shit, mel’s having a bad day, better avoid her so i don’t ruin myown”
that’s the way my thinking’s giong today
because i’m all fucked up

But at least I recognized I wasn’t thinking sanely.  And had taken enough responsibility for my craziness over the long haul of my life that by that point in time, I had at least a few clues of what to do to help myself, by getting help — especially from someone like Katie who had (1) some knowledge of the kind of stuff I was going through from the inside, & (2) had the patience to listen.

Katie: I don’t think telling people you’re in a bad space will put them in a bad mood, at least it wouldn’t to me … i’d just like to help you no longer be there … hmm, do people actually say that? oh right. okay … well, know that people definitely don’t feel that way, they just get awkward in dealing with depression …
what can we talk about that would help you?

me: i dunno, this is probably helping just to say the kinds of thoughts that have been going through me all day

Katie: okay, keep them coming

me: y’know, i wrote a really long thing to that “it’s all an act” photo to about 4 or 5 am satnight/sunday morning explaining how it all works
laura saw it, rozz saw it, they commented
dunno who else saw it
but this morning i privated it
that’s kinda part of what set me off feeling like well basically most people don’t give a shit
they don’t mind you saying you’ve got the flu
but say anything about the really hard shit, then too fucking bad
well that’s not completely true
[some people have lots of people batting for them]
but me, no, i should be over all the kind of shit that i’ve got in my soul
me, i should just take drugs
me, i should just shit or get off the pot

Katie: you feel like that’s how people feel towards you?
that you should just take drugs or shit or get off the pot?

me: wehn i get like this, meds is one of the first topics to come up

Katie: i don’t think meds are a good idea

me: neither do i
mostly i think people just want to have fun & not be bogged down by someone’s shit

Katie: that might be true – but for the most part, i think people geerally just don’t kow how to handle deep things – because it ends up shining a light inwards to their oen stuff – which they defiitely dont want to deal with

me: though for some reason they get along with some people’s shit better than mine
yeah you’re right about that i think

Katie: it’s not that they don’t get along with your shit mel, i think maybe it’s the fact that you seem strong? i think people might think that when you get down – you just want to isolate and you don’t want to talk about things .. maybe? i’m not really sure

me: this is the worst i’ve gotten into the whole rock & a hard place stuff about feeling like anyting i do is manipulating people in a reaaaaaaaallly long time
which is the very worst kind of thinking i have, i get so confused, i don’t feel like anything i do is right w/ regard to other people

Katie: i think that maybe because you feel like you’re manipulating people, you don’t ask for help … so people don’t really know that you want people to surround you in these times
catch 22
perhaps

me: yeah very big catch 22 gods it hurts

Katie: Hmm … well … i’m going to tell you that … you aren’t manipulating people when you want attention. None of us are. We all want help, we all want attention and there is nothing wrong with it, honestly. But i don’t knowif me telling you that will make that belief real for you or not

me: so i have all these destructive urges giong on
i know that stuff when i’m sane but i’m not sane right now

Be that as it may: the conversation helped to restore me to sanity. It’s also because of Katie that I reset the permissions on the “It’s all an act” photo back to public, & left them there. She went on to “babysit” me for the next bit of time while I finished the task I was working overtime to complete, & by the time I left my office I was able to tweet:

8:16 PM: Better now, thanks to Katie.

I reckon it took another couple of days for me to get completely away from the edge of the pit, doing the things I know to do: plenty or rest, good food, keeping the demands on myself low, & — importantly — not isolating myself.  Nobody got killed, including me.  (At the height of the crazy I did indulge in some “virtual suicide” — deleting files & so on — but somehow restrained myself from destroying anything really important to me.)

That was my last trip into the pit.  (Knock on wood.)  Even over the past year, during which I’ve experienced considerable loss — I’ve gone into the grey a number of times, but never into the pit.  When I feel myself at its edge, I’m lots more ready to follow the advice that Katie gave me, same advice I have given others when I was sane & they were not: ask for help from the people I know care about me.

It also helps that I now know about 5-HTP.  And use it.

References

1. 4/2/09. “Accused murderer Rogers blamed aliens for 2007 attacks — ROGERS: Jurors hear taped confession of deadly events in Palmer and Anchorage” by Debra McKinney (Anchorage Daily News).

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. Cold, the blog
3. Pausing under the clouds: A how-to guide for getting out of the grey

Yesterday at lunchtime I had a great IM conversation with Ptery — as my former partner Rozz is now known — & our friend Chris.  I hadn’t talked with Chris in a really long time: he lives in Salt Lake City now, & what with, first, a lengthy period of being in the cave from about last August to last March, followed by Anchorage’s Summer of Hate & other political this’n'thats, I haven’t been that great at keeping in touch with him.  Ptery I’ve kept in better contact with, at least when he’s on the grid: he’s a transman who is living something of a nomadic life right now.

I dug around in my Flickr photostream to get a photo of both of them, & found these: photos of a hike we took along the very northern part of the Kenai Peninsula adjoining Turnagain Arm in May 2006 with Jesse (Rozz’s nephew who we raised from age 9) & Jesse’s dog Sweetheart.  I surprised some emotion looking at them: I had no idea when they were the changes that would follow, which leave us all except Sweetheart & me living in different places now.  (Though I do see Jesse every couple of weeks or so: he’s in the Job Corps in Palmer.)

Distance.

But despite distance — what a great talk! I’ll be talking with Chris more tonight when I get off work.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again in November, & I was really happy to hear that Chris is too.  We cheered each other along all the way through NaNoWriMo in 2007, and at the tail end of it, with both of us having successfully completed 50,000 words or more in the month, we both kicked back at the Bear Tooth Grill to celebrate.  I don’t know what he was drinking, but I was drinking Pipeline Stout. And that’s Rozz he’s talking with on my cellphone.

I should mention that Chris writes really cool poems. We first met in a small poetry workshop that I facilitated for several years beginning in 1998. Maybe I can persuade him to let me post a couple.

Related posts:

1. Sweetheart lived up to her name. May she rest in peace.
2. Tramping in the woods
3. Divorce, financially interdependent partner style

was able to take the first day’s writing from my 2007 NaNovel Cold, dust it off & revise it, & submit it as a short story instead.  And I’m very well-pleased with the result.  So are my friends I’ve shared it with who’ve come back with comments.  I hope the editors of Crossed Genres like it as much.  And if they don’t — well, heck.  Maybe I’ll post it here.

“Cold” the short story, like Cold the novel-in-progress, is about two young women, Boleyn & Bai, on a planet in the late stages of terraformation.

The editors of Crossed Genres did like it: it will be published on November 1 in print & electronically.

So I won’t be posting it here — not for a long while at least: my contract with Crossed Genres gives them exclusive worldwide print & electronic publication rights for 12 months.

So go subscribe to Crossed Genres! Then you’ll get to read not only my story, but lots of other really good science fiction & fantasy.

The issue I’ll be published in, by the way, is the LGBTQ issue, the same one another publication called Flash Fiction Online refused to place an ad for because its editor believed that it was “sexually themed.”  I wrote a post about it last month.  After all that, I’m especially proud to be published in Bart Leib’s & Kay Holt’s great publication.

Related posts:

1. Crossed Genres anthology released — complete w/ my story "Cold"
2. Seeking people with genre fiction review experience
3. Crossed Genres LGBTQ issue: The ad goes live

So far the most detailed work I’ve read on terraforming in SF literature has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Just read them this past spring, tuned into them by a friend (Chris?) after I told him about what I wanted to write this November. That helped quite a bit, giving me a basic idea of some of the processed that might go into the terraforming of a planet. Though when I think back on the state of my knowledge before I read those books, I knew a bit already, just from all the other SF books I’d read. And while not a scientist, I’m not exactly ignorant of a few basics either. A geology class I took backwhen was a big help, not to mention the research I did for a poem I wrote called “Spiritus Mundi” which is in part a sort of a shorthand description of what geologists believe went into the formation of the Earth’s lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere — rock, water, wind — all of which are necessary for the support of the biosphere —life — & with it the noosphere — the realm of humanity.

My premise for the planet on which Cold is set is that it was a lifeless planet in a solar system some many light years from our own, that exploring humans or perhaps robot ships run by humans had come across & deemed capable of being engineered through terraforming to support an Earth-compatible biosphere. Another premise is that it’s now sometime later, decades & perhaps even a century or two later, & the terraforming project is far advanced, such that there is now breathable air on the planetary surface, & it’s increasingly filled with life. But it’s still a tad cold. And most of the humans who now live down on the planet are part of a culture that has for centuries lived within protected habitats: the spaceships that got them to this solar system, the ships or space stations they lived in while they mined the system for the metals & minerals needed for some of their work, the habitats on the planet itself where they lived as the work proceeded.

I.e., a project like this would be a big damn project, would take a long time, & would have a huge impact on the structure of the human society that was actually working on it. The project would, for these people, be their society & culture, & it would be a society & culture that had little trust for the open spaces outside the enclosures of a spaceship or space station or habitat, because open space in outer space is unbreathable vacuum, & open space outside a habitat on a planet undergoing terraforming might have an atmosphere composed of the wrong sorts of gases for a human or other earthly animal to breathe. The safety procedures that started just as commonsensical rules for the humans who first left Earth but knew what out-of-doors was like would become, in time, institutionalized & internalized as being the very nature of things by later generations who had no experience of breathing open air. So when the time eventually comes that the whole goal of terraforming is reached, a lot of the members of that society are going to be too damn scared to walk out of the habitat without a breather.

Change comes with the next generation, with its youth. That’s why the main characters of Cold are young.

But back to terraforming. I don’t want to have to know everything about it. But I do need to know just enough to get me by. Such as what kinds of occupations might people hold in a society that is completely geared toward such a project.

Enough for now. Another of this post’s purposes is to test out the method I intend to use in November — writing in Google Docs since I can do that from both my own laptop & from my computer at work (during lunchtimes only, of course) without having to email files back & forth to myself — & then, when I get done with a day’s writing, to publish it directly from Google Docs to the blog. Of course, I could always do the writing directly in the blog, but it doesn’t count the words like Google Docs does. Right now I’m at… 870 words. Whoa. That would be more than half my daily quota of 1,667 if this was November! Hey, this might be possible after all!

Related posts:

1. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
2. Taking life support for granted
3. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space

The blog is private for copyright reasons, but I’ll be inviting a lot of friends, family, & Internet acquaintances to it so they can keep up with it if they want. If you haven’t received a direct invitation, but would like to see what I’m up to this next couple of months, write an email to yksinainen at gmail.com to ask me. I’ll email you an invitation. In this email, there’ll be a link which will let you do one of three things:

* Sign in to an existing Google account.
* Create a new Google account.
* View your blog as a guest (no account required).

In the first two cases, you’ll be given permission to view my cold-brr blog anytime you’re logged into your Google Account. As a guest, you can see my blog by clicking the link from the invitation email, but this guest pass will expire after two weeks. After that, you’ll need a new invitation. That’s okay with me: just ask me when you need a new one.

The writing of the novel will be in November; but I’ll also be posting backstory notes & the like to the blog during October & probably during the writing itself.

NaNoWriMo 2007 registration opens tonight. Time to get ready for what promised to be a wild ride.

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is

[Originally written at cold-brrr.blogspot.com, a private invitation-only blog where I posted all my NaNoWriMo posts during November 2007.  Since Cold is still a work-in-progress, most of those posts still remain private.]

You can read more about what NaNoWriMo is & why I’m doing it in my main blog. The origins of the idea for Cold, the novel I plan to write this November for NaNoWriMo, is there too. But about Cold itself:

About Cold. Cold is (or will be) a novel about two young women who live on a planet in the late stages of terraforming. They’ve just met again at age 17 after one of them, Boleyn, returns from a sort of exile that she & her family have been in since Boleyn was 12 due to some kind of disgrace that her parents got into — they’d been sent to some kind of hardship duty at a remote project facility for five years. Emphasis will be more on human & social issues than on science (good thing, since I’m not a scientist) — I want to explore how human communities, & the overall ecologies they are part of, might evolve in a place that’s truly new, with no other populations whether human or alien to be “conquered” or “assimilated”? How does a planet that was formerly barren of life become, eventually, “home”?

About this blog. I’m writing this post on October 1, just a few hours away from the opening of sign-up for this year’s NaNoWriMo. A good time to start up the blog, then. When November comes along, I’ll mostly be posting the actual daily writing necessary to meet the goal of a 50,000 novel (or some travesty thereof) in a month. But before then, & probably also during, there will be other posts that are notes, lists, speculations, backstories, maybe some scribbledy maps — the kinds of stuff that gets written around the actual writing. But no actual novel-writing until November 1. I’ll make it easy to distinguish between actual novel writing & notes with labels. For example, notice how this post has the labels notes and about (below). A Table of Contents will show up at some point too.

Feel free to comment or ask questions. Anyone invited to read this blog is my friend, & comments, whether critical or laudatory, are welcome. Questions too! Yes, & I’ll even answer ‘em! Just remember this will be a hell-bent-for-leather writing, so you can expect some rough spots. We’ll save the polish for later.

Related posts:

1. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
2. Cold, the blog
3. NaNoWriMo 2007: What it is

I did this icon, based on the main NaNoWriMo icon, for a Facebook group for lesbians/dykes who are writing novels during NaNoWriMo this November, and/or who have lesbian/dyke characters in the novel they’re going to be doing; or who are friends/family offering moral support to either of the above. Dunno if anyone will join; guess we’ll see. Meantime I’ll use this for my NaNo posts here too.

Related posts:

1. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
2. About "Cold"
3. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term