Hey, Grinnell alums. Did you know the Back Table’s still alive? There’s an article in this month’s Exit 182. An excerpt:
“But there is a place where the devoutly uncool can gather in safety — the Back Table. This bastion of dorkdom has been providing a safe zone since time immemorial: i.e., sometime in the late 80’s (before we were born…)”
–Sarah Walker ’08
Well, I’ll be darned. I think I’ll write to her.
I finally got my SFWA password, after months of trying. I’m spending the day (and maybe the next few days) reading as many novellas, novelettes, and short stories as I can in order to make some Nebula recommendations before the 31st. Obviously I can’t read everything, but I’m doing my best. I’d really like to see a full ballot next year. I’m focusing on:
I’m going to recommend the best stories I read. I know there’s a forum somewhere in SFF.net for discussing this, but like I said, I just got my password and I’d rather spend time reading stories than learning to navigate the forums just now.
Can someone clarify for me how the balloting works? I understand the 12-month eligibility concept, but I’m not clear on when the ballot is finalized. I was under the impression that Dec 31st was the cutoff for a single year’s ballot, but I just heard that there’s another balloting early next year…? I’m trying to decide how dire the current ballot situation is.
Also, feel free to leave me suggested reading material in the comments. I can’t promise I’ll get to it all, but I’ll try!
Phew. Our annual set of home-made holiday cards are on their way to various destinations. This year’s set is perhaps less disturbing but much weirder than last year’s. Fly free, little cards, and carry good wishes to our friends. Or at least peculiar thoughts.
Shannon did our annual holiday baking yesterday afternoon. I was out for the day, but this morning I found a treasure: the Secret Ginger Spice Burial Grounds. It’s a Tupperware full of broken ginger spice cookie corpses, all mangled by a ruthless spatula. Because of natural pressures and steam, the victims had softened into a sweet mush, rather like peat moss in texture.
And now I feast upon the delicious dead.
You know what would make greasing bread pans a lot easier? Butter-flavored Chapstick.
The first 12 sentences from my blog for each month this year. Apparently I begin lots of posts with short cryptic sentences that mean little out of context.
Jan: As a mentor for Absynthe Muse, my mentees ask me the same questions frequently.
Feb: My friend Rosa Pedersen directed me to this wonderful essay.
Mar: There’s about 100 birds in the tree outside my window.
Apr: Why We Banned Legos.
May: A few links: Shannon’s pictures of Spain.
June: Not me.
July: Just for fun, I’m doing seven themed story-starts this week.
August: Better late than never.
September: When I was in college, I took Russian.
October: From LiveJournal.
November: I think my posts are appearing both on my blog and LJ now.
December: 3 AM is a strange time to be writing.
While in the doctor’s office today, I read this article about the effects of birth order on kids in the family. Picking up TIME was possibly my first mistake, but this is the gist of the article.
Summary: Being the oldest kid rules. You get more attention and resources from your parents. Older kids are smarter and more successful. Sometimes youngest kids learn coping skills like clowning around and getting along with people, but did we mention that being the oldest kid rules? By the way, does anyone know what the middle kid is up to? What, do we have a middle kid?
***
I find it both amusing and infuriating that the article mentioned that middle kids have a huge set of challenges–mostly getting themselves noticed and forming their identities–in only a few paragraphs. It demonstrated exactly the effect they were describing.
***
Here’s what the article says about middle kids:
If eldest sibs are the dogged achievers and youngest sibs are the gamblers and visionaries, where does this leave those in between? That it’s so hard to define what middle-borns become is largely due to the fact that it’s so hard to define who they are growing up. The youngest in the family, but only until someone else comes along, they are both teacher and student, babysitter and babysat, too young for the privileges of the firstborn but too old for the latitude given the last. Middle children are expected to step up to the plate when the eldest child goes off to school or in some other way drops out of the picture—and generally serve when called. The Norwegian intelligence study showed that when firstborns die, the IQ of second-borns actually rises a bit, a sign that they’re performing the hard mentoring work that goes along with the new job.
Stuck for life in a center seat, middle children get shortchanged even on family resources. Unlike the firstborn, who spends at least some time as the only-child eldest, and the last-born, who hangs around long enough to become the only-child youngest, middlings are never alone and thus never get 100% of the parents’ investment of time and money. “There is a U-shaped distribution in which the oldest and youngest get the most,” says Sulloway. That may take an emotional toll. Sulloway cites other studies in which the self-esteem of first-, middle- and last-borns is plotted on a graph and follows the same curvilinear trajectory.
The phenomenon known as de-identification may also work against a middle-born. Siblings who hope to stand out in a family often do so by observing what the elder child does and then doing the opposite. If the firstborn gets good grades and takes a job after school, the second-born may go the slacker route. The third-born may then de-de-identify, opting for industriousness, even if in the more unconventional ways of the last-born. A Chinese study in the 1990s showed just this kind of zigzag pattern, with the first child generally scoring high as a “good son or daughter,” the second scoring low, the third scoring high again and so on. In a three-child family, the very act of trying to be unique may instead leave the middling lost, a pattern that may continue into adulthood.
***
Now I want to declare middle kids as a protected class.
But seriously. This article hit home for me, especially the parts about de-identification. One major reason I’m a writer is that my older brother definitely wasn’t. It was one thing I could do better than him, even though I was smaller and younger. And by writing disturbing, horrific stuff, I could differentiate myself from my adorable baby sister (did I mention she had cute blond curls?). While these aren’t the only factors in my writing, they’re definitely relevant.
Here’s my Christmas wish. If you know a middle child–one of your kids, or one of your siblings–go pay some special attention to them. Or call them up and just say hi. Life as a middle kid is really tough sometimes, and not everyone notices it.
If age-appropriate, get them a copy of The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, which is Judy Blume’s first published book and the secret fantasy of middle kids everywhere. I treasured this book.
So who else is a middle kid?
From several sources on my friendslist, a meme. Professional accomplishments for 2007:
Emotion crept into my voice. “I want to meet the Om. I want to know what they look like, and how they think. Are they like us, or unimaginably different? I want to know.”
We pick up the shards and cut each other, glass on skin, liquid with liquid, hoping to cut through to the bone and beyond.
But his photocopier is special. She’s the mother of his first hundred duplicates, and only one of them is smudged. She’s good for breeding and he likes that about her.
Candy streamed out of the faucet like the entrails of a slaughtered piñata.
Because it’s not every day you experience death. Only every three months.
Hi, and welcome to Sessumian Consensual Chef, the cooking show for spiritual purists!
The problem is that I’ve been here long enough to start dying. I lost two fingers last week. They fell off while I was sleeping. I found them next to my pillow in the morning, and put them in a shoebox with my big toe.
How nice for you, that you look so good in jackboots and a uniform! Your secret police are so dangerous that they’re sexy. They kick the enemies of the State in the street, like Rockettes in steel-toed boots.
Also learned that Lydia’s Body and Keybones, both published in 2006, received Honorable Mentions for the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Lydia’s Body was reprinted in Horror: The Best of the Year 2007. Through the Cooking Glass was a finalist for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award.
I attended Launch Pad and participated in the Glorifying Terrorism reading at WisCon.
3 AM is a strange time to be writing. Everything is dark. All the lights are off. It’s just me and my computer screen.
I’ve always had weird sleep patterns, which are worsened by my inability to nap. Basically, I get one shot at sleeping every 24 hours. If I get 8 hours in, great for me. If I don’t, I’ll be very tired that day.
I used to be a night owl. 3 AM was a lovely time–perhaps a bit late, but pleasant–for heading to bed. Lately I’ve become an extreme morning lark. Last night, I was so exhausted I lay down at 7 PM. I woke at 3 AM.
It’s odd to wake at 3 AM, feeling rested and alert.
So I’ve been writing all morning. As I sit in the dark room, bathed in the glow of technology, I’m considering how the perception of time is altered by the effects of day and night. Time passes just the same while we sleep, even though we’re not observing it. In fact, days pass normally in the Eastern Hemisphere while I’m asleep and unaware of them. But from my perspective, I fall asleep and then the next event is that I wake up. It’s like a short hop into the future–a subjective illusion about time itself.
3 AM is both night and morning, and the flavor of that hour changes depending on whether you’ve seasoned it with sleep first.
Kaigou has posted a terrific pair of essays about life on the streets and common mistakes writers make. I learned a ton from this. If you’re writing about characters on the fringe of society–urban fantasy, near-future science fiction, or anything requiring you to know what life is like on the streets–I recommend these posts very highly. Go read them. An excerpt:
2. There are rules at the fringes of society. They’re just the opposite of your rules.
There are rules on the street as much as there are rules anywhere, but talking to Di made me realize the key is Joplin’s phrase: freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. When you don’t have anything, literally, all you have is your cred. Sure, street kids can be loners, but the loners don’t last long; in that environment, you gain points by your actions and by your connections. Who you know, who introduces you, is also who bails you out or backs you up, and I bloody well wish more urban fantasy authors would take the time to actually meet a few former (or current) street/fringe kids, to realize this instinct doesn’t expire just because you’ve managed to reintegrate with society.
Vylar Kaftan 