The middle is the turning point! It’s where something happens after which nothing can ever be the same again. It’s the peripeteia, if you spent two years of your teens studying Greek drama and apparently absorbed the general notion into your own narrative structures. While I wouldn’t say that all my novels have a peripeteia, even in my own fairly non-strict definition of the term (Aristotle I am not), there’s always something going on in the middle, something very important.

This post is not, sadly, brought to you by reaching the turning point in The Bone Queen (where Beth and Imi go to see the Bone Queen; Jeckel’s plot has no comparable point), but by seeing a Tweet about not knowing what happens in the middle of a book. Hooooow?

tl;dr – All writers are different, news at 11.

(Fished out so many typos in this post already. I’m sure some remain.)

But! I have news! Because I have sold my story “Fox Bones. Many Uses.” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies!

I have wanted to sell to BCS since they first opened up. Literary secondary world fantasy, hell yes. I’ve had a couple of rejections from them – then, with “Fox Bones. Many Uses.”, I actually tried to write it with them in mind, beautiful secondary world fantasy with adventure and a heart (or so I hoped!) – and they bought it! I’m so happy.

There’s more I want to write about how this story developed and how it interacted with developments in my personal feminism, but that will have to wait until my brain is back on.

….So that’s 2 fox-stories that have sold to awesome pro-paying markets (“Feed Me The Bones Of Your Saints” being the other). Makes me feel pretty good about “Out They Come”, the 3rd fox-story so far, out on submission right now. As soon as The Bone Queen is done, I’m story-ing for a few months, and there are going to be foxes, oh yes, so very many foxes. Fund my dreams, you wonderful animals.

I’m working on Imi’s plot in The Bone Queen, tweaking her first chapter to make it more urgent. So far that’s involved: upping the stakes, removing a chunk of slow infodumping, adding one or two more mentions of her frustration at the dead-end her research has taken.

And then I changed a paragraph into this:

“And it* sounds so interesting. I want to find it all, I want to bring it back into storytellers’ knowledge.” New ideas about the Umer descent cycles were interesting, but they weren’t this. She wanted to be Imi Who Brought Stories Back To Life, not Imi Who Picked At Well-Known Tales. Let Karash do that — and do it wonderfully — but Imi knew she would never find happiness in it. “It looks like I may never know the tale,” she said, and drank deeply from the tea so that she would not cry.

*a story

Which prompted me to write something she’ll say later in the book: “It is said that, in addition to her fascination with bones, the Bone Queen collects stories, and owns one for every vertebrae in her palace’s walls.”

DUN DUN DUN.

But, seriously, one of the most powerful words I’ve found for my characters is want. What do they want, in general, in that scene? Sometimes just stating it brings so much to light.

(I was going to quote “When The Chips Are Down” in the post title, because I was singing it earlier, but then I thought about the lyrics and went NO, THAT WOULD BE BETH’S SONG.)

I have set myself a deadline of 31 March to get this done, but I really need to focus more if I’m going to reach that. (I don’t think I could bear it dragging on even longer, unless it has to.) The novel has 30-something chapters and a lot of it needs rewriting because how the plot unfolds is changing quite a bit. This is doable, I still think; I just need to ignore all other projects, besides the story and the poem with submission windows closing before the end of March. (Having two other things to work on when The Bone Queen is really stuck will do me good, I suspect. Plus, I should remind myself, I can always translate more Ḫammurabi if I’m bored of writing! The Old Babylonian is excellent, but it’s also time-consuming.) As for the other tempting things, they will have to be patient.

One thing that makes me even more determined to do this is that The Bone Queen already has a life beyond the .doc files on my computer.

I’m wearing a Chimera Fancies necklace that Amal gave me, because she saw it and immediately thought of The Bone Queen:

On my desk is a box that Tori gave me, its lid decorated with the Bone Queen herself:

And I have a whole series of sprites and comics and .gifs drawn by Pen, some hilarious, some horrifying (it is best we do not speak of The Boner Queen mockery-cover). This, for instance, is how Jeckel feels when given a rubix cube:

That… probably makes no sense unless you’ve read the book. (He doesn’t like squares, okay, FOR REASONS.)

It’s amazing, that this book isn’t published, isn’t even agented, and already I have things like this, gifts from people that connect to this book. I can’t properly imagine what it will be if it does get published.

It will be edited. It will be done.

Be bold, be bold.

A has been inflicting quotations on me. So many quotations. I don’t have enough of Bacigalupi’s terrible Thai at hand to inflict on her in return, so I’m instead passing on the TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE LOVE to you.

ENJOY.

He was practically vibrating with geeky (endearing) excitement. “Cool, innit?”

“That is totally, totally unfair, innit?”

“A man has two lovers, he should have twice as much sex,” Basil points out. “Laws of…physics or sommat, innit?”

“Your back’s hurting again, innit?” Basil asks, putting a vessel of tea down beside Kalp’s arm.

“First task of Integration,” Basil says cheerily, “is learning which lunch lady to flatter at the canteen, innit?”

“Can’t go changing the timeline,” Basil said with a cheeky grin. “That’s the Temporal Prime Directive, innit?”

Basil whispered quickly, excitedly into her ear. “Yeah? But it…it’s perfect, innit?”

Basil smiled wryly against his mug, lips still on the rim. “Innit?”

APPARENTLY Brits say innit a lot. Nevermind that people who say innit a lot generally have an entire accent going on. NEVERMIND THAT PESKY FACT. (Although to be honest, it’s probably for everyone’s benefit that the author didn’t try to render a glottal stop, let alone a full accent.)

“Blimey, do you see this phone? I can’t use this! It’s a bloody beige brick, innit? It’ll never interface!”

I remain convinced that this line is parody. There is no other explanation.

“She’s…she hasn’t grieved. Any of it. It’s not…healthy, issit?

“So that’s it, issit. All over, then?” he asked

“Your mother has seen you in a filthy uniform. I don’t think a little barn dust is going to make much of a difference, issit?”

I’ve never even heard anyone say ‘issit’. And aside from the ‘innit’, most of the people I know speak pretty much exactly like this guy.

“Bugger.”
“What?”
“I’m stuck. My — bollocks — my bloody sleeve! Grab my trousers.”

C-C-C-COMBO.

Meanwhile he says ‘fuck’ exactly once a grand total of four times.

It’s some kind of bizarre modern equivalent of TALLY-HO PIP PIP that I want to take out back and gently shoot, for its own good.

It has a cover!

It has a TOC!

It has a Kindle version on Amazon US and Amazon UK! It has an ebook version on the publisher’s website! It has a print version on Amazon US and Book Depository! I’m afraid I don’t know why it’s priced so much higher than the first anthology. I hope you will consider buying it, in paper or e-form.

It has reviews! In which awesome things are said about my story, “Selin That Has Grown In The Desert”, and the anthology as a whole! Here are some snippets.

Aliette de Bodard, reviewing the book on her blog, says:

“On balance, I thought that the best stories in the book were those that moved away from the stereotype of two women falling in love, and dealt with other aspects of the relationship: either further along in time, like Nisi Shawl’s “The Return of Cherie”, or by questioning its power dynamics and putting it into a colonial framework (such as Stephanie Lai’s “One Last Interruption Before We Begin”); or by eschewing the mad adventure steampunk altogether and focusing on much smaller-scale events (Alex Dally MacFarlane’s awesome “Selin that Has Grown in the Desert”, by far and above my favourite story in the book).” [Read the full review.]

Tori Truslow, reviewing at Sabotage Reviews, says:

“Another highlight is Alex Dally MacFarlane’s ‘Selin That Has Grown in the Desert’. This one’s also low on the steam. As a whole it’s a brilliant, understated anti-steampunk tale – and structurally a kind of anti-romance – which manages to do all that and still be sweetly (but certainly not saccharinely) uplifting.” [Read the full review.]

Rebecca Fraimow, who is I guess slightly biased by being a contributor, deems the entire anthology awesome and has this to say about mine:

“This story is just kind of adorable – it’s set on the steppes, about a young girl who is just starting to figure out her own sexuality, and her friendship with a woman from far away, and figuring out a way to be herself within her culture. I wanted to hug everybody in it.” [Read the full review.]

And, finally, Oreotalpa at Goodreads has this to say of mine:

“Loved the setting, loved the writing style, but I felt like this tried to cram way too much into a short story, rushing the emotional denouement and wrapping up loose ends too conveniently. I’d read the novel.” [Read the full review.]

I must admit to some agreement with that last one – which I suppose is even more inevitable given that I’ve written a far longer and more nuanced version of events in the novel. 60,000 words is a somewhat bigger canvas than 9,000. There are one or two other things I’d have tried to do differently about the story if I wrote it again (particularly Dursun’s relationship with Aynabat, which becomes very different in the novel) but I’m nonetheless fond and proud of it and I hope you enjoy it.

As I’ve studied war (literally: I have a BA in War Studies) and seen it play out on the news, I’ve got a lot less interested in the narratives that make war sound really exciting. Space opera and military SF continue to be guilty of this; only this month I saw a call for reprint submissions that talked about “the ultimate enemy” and the future lying in “the hands of the warriors who use the weapons”. Fairly recently I actively decided that I want my stories and novels in my SF setting to focus much more on the regular people, the ones who actually have to deal with the consequences of the war; and when I made this decision, something clicked in a way it never had before.

To state the obvious: War is many things. It is terrible, always complicated, sometimes the only recourse left to a people, sometimes an act of imperialism (whether in the 19th Century sense or the modern sense), and so much more. One only has to follow the news to understand this. I have never been involved in a war situation, either as an active combatant or a civilian or anywhere along the frazzled, bitter line between the two; I am an observer from very afar. I feel very passionately that the glorification of war is a very risky thing, certain to damage at least some people, if not all. I have specific feelings about the modern wars being conducted by the US and UK, mostly to do with how amusing it is that in a so-called democracy a government can go to war without consulting its people, how disgusting it is that people talk about the defense of our countries (defense of “our” oil, sure, but let’s at least be fucking honest; and it’s not ours, anyway) against some poorly defined threat, and other thoughts.

Anyway, this is preamble, telling you where I stand.

A person I used to be friends with runs a tumblr called soldierporn – which is a title that has bothered me since I first saw it. The header says that this is “Not a glorification of war”, but “rather a recognition of the soldier”. I’m leaving aside the complicated issue of disentangling the soldier from the war because I can: it turns out that other words speak louder than those initial words.

I’m going to slap a big ol’ warning on this now: Potentially very upsetting attitudes ahead.

It kind of veers all over the place really. The post that made me write this post, after gritting my teeth at a few other examples shared between a few of us who all used to be this person’s friend, before things got faily, is a reblog of a post about a soldier with 255 confirmed kills. Its subject: “255 Confirmed Kills: Meet Navy Seal Chris Kyle… The Deadliest Sniper In US History”

Sounds kinda like a movie tagline, huh.

No, those aren’t R’s words, but R has chosen to reblog them and not comment upon them; to me, that is a sure sign of support. Apparently killing 255 people is awesome.

There is then a discussion of the sniper’s favourite weapon. Not, oh, a consideration of the fact that 255 people (at least) have died at this person’s hands, in a war with no clean line at all between ‘bad person’ and ‘good person’.

Not long ago, the US pulled out of Iraq. Shortly afterwards, bombings killed a number of people in the capital – the post mentions 69, but I don’t know if that was the final count. This time we have R’s very own words on the matter: “We’re gone less than a week, and this is how they celebrate. Why am I not surprised?”

There are no words, really there aren’t, for how disgusted this still makes me.

In another post, an image of soldiers in an isolated village in the Nowzad District is given the title “Where the streets have no name”.

I am pretty fucking sure the streets have names, you fucking tool; you just don’t know them, the soldiers don’t know them, perhaps even the people of this village have lost them or cannot identify old streets among the rubble; there is nothing fucking poetic about saying the streets of Iraq have no name.

I read a novel with a similar title, written by a Palestinian woman, Randa Abdel-Fattah, about the occupation of Palestine. It’s called: Where The Streets Had A Name.

SEE THE DIFFERENCE.

It’s also a fantastic novel.

To return to the topic of R reposting other people’s hideous words, here’s another two.

“A display of jubilance from the gunner. Just seconds later in response to the query “How does it feel to be in Kuwait?” issued by a reporter standing on the ground, the soldier definitively replied, “AWESOME!”” [Post.]

“I am going to be brutally honest here folks and realize that this statement applies to me and me alone, others have their own opinions. Ladies and Gentleman COMBAT IS FUN!!! Yes there are many moments where bad things happen and you wish you were far far away, but when you are in the heat of the moment and you are closing with and destroying the enemy as you have been trained to do all your adult life that is fun.” [Post.]

Spoilers: The second person does not then go on to discuss the immense psychological difficulties of adrenalin-fuelled highs in a situation they do not want to feel high about, which is something that I can imagine being hellishly complicated to cope with. No, this guy apparently just likes “destroying the enemy”. If his views are indeed more complicated off the page, then I respect that; but R is showcasing excitement at “destroying the enemy” without any commentary and EUGH GET IT OFF.

In case all this exciting terminology is confusing anyone, “destroying the enemy” is another way of saying killing people. Which is exciting. Or interesting. It’s certainly something.

I don’t know about you, but I find images like this a little bit terrifying. But it’s a highlight of December on this tumblr!

Many posts on this tumblr are not as terrible as the ones quoted above, thankfully. But these views, scattered throughout the other posts, shine out the strongest – they are un-ignorable, un-forgiveable.

And these are exactly the views that I still see in both society at large and genre writing. War is exciting! Killing “the ultimate enemy” is exciting! (Or should I say “destroying”?) It’s also totally okay because aliens aren’t people and and – What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong with our society that we wage a war like the one in the Middle East, a war of 21st Century imperialism, and some of us continue to valorise its combatants? They are not engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Hitler, nor are they fighting a faceless alien force. Sometimes they are in the military because it beats unemployment, because it gives them skills they couldn’t otherwise attain in order to gain employment outside of the forces – there are many reasons people join the military and I will not assume that every single US and UK combatant has the same motives and feelings about this war and about war in general. Nor will I say that our soldiers cannot do heroic deeds – a person who risks their life to save another person is pretty awesome, in my view, and there are some incredibly good acts being committed in that region alongside the heinous ones.

But that some of us, the observers, are promoting an attitude in which the reality of this war is hidden behind applause for mass-killers and narrow-mindedness – I cannot abide this.  I cannot stand it.  In life, in fiction, anywhere.  I would like there to be a genre anthology about the reality of war instead of dstroying “the ultimate enemy” – and perhaps it would be a symptom of progress.  Perhaps.

In 2006, archaeologists working at Shahr-e Sūkhté in southeastern Iran found what appears to be a ~5000-year-old prosthetic eye, engraved and gilded to look like the sun.

“[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE.” (Text looks to come from Wikipedia; I don’t know the image’s provenance.)

I want to write her a story.

In other news, I have finally begun my Old Babylonian (Akkadian) assignment, which is due next Wednesday. I hope to split it into pieces, doing a bit each night until it’s complete. Tonight I transliterated some cuneiform. There’s a marker used for determinative signs – +D – that I keep reading as a smiley. Thus is my generation wracked upon the shores of the internet.

And I am developing an itch to learn Linear B.

Speaking of the Nebulas, I have one piece of work eligible this year:

• “Selin That Has Grown In The Desert” in Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk. This falls into the novelette category.

If you’re a SFWA member and would like to read it, let me know – I’m happy to email you a copy of the story.

At the same time, I would love to hear some recommendations. I’ve read woefully little short fiction this year, so what have I missed? What did you love in 2011? What have you got that’s eligible? I don’t think I can go buy anthologies or print zines at this point, but I’ll read Word docs if your story wasn’t published online.

I have no idea what OOE Cottage means.

Inside is a sparse selection of old wooden furniture, dirty and probably only used as an occasional shelter by the homeless, although I saw no signs of very recent habitation. A small graffito marked one wall. The nettle stalks outside stretched almost as tall as me, winter-dead. The rain drizzled on me. Some of the deer were in the next field, watching me.

I’ve been meaning to take a few photos of this place for years. Today seemed as good a day as any – I don’t know if OOE Cottage will be here for years to come or if the farmer will take it down in a month’s time. Whims of the countryside.

Maybe a fox-witch lives there.