I’m supposed to be editing Eastlight right now. Having found that I’ve been mis-using coordinating conjunctions, I’m searching on each one and checking its usage. It is tedious work to say the least. But the dreams that started off the year, with the Moth Box, having stopped and are begging to be written about.

I’ll start with Sunday night. I dreamt that Lesley, Forrest and Jordan (my god-daughter) had moved their life to the same sort of rural existence as my own upbringing. Forrest had decided to stop being a highway engineer and was actually now a highway patrolman. My own father had been a park ranger. Their hats were the same, wide brimmed, round with these yellow tassels that draped after running around the top in a circle. Something in my past is wanting discussion. At issue was Jordan, who I was babysitting and who needed to be fed. This became a mad dash from place to place in the woods as I carried her and kept tripping. Each time I fell I caught her safely but there was a snake blocking my path. They were often twisted and blue, small or large but they were ubiquitous. Each time I recovered my footing and had to try and mix her formula, with the precision of temperature you must use with a baby. This kind of stress dream usually never has a resolution for me. And neither did this one. It was dashing from pitfall to snake until I awoke.

That was Sunday night. Yesterday was Monday and this was different. Brian’s started on the daunting task of cleaning the closets, preparing us for another move and looking at what we own that should be donated or gotten rid of. There is an amazing used bookstore here called Books Unlimited. It is a family owned business and the people who run it are incredible. If you are in Denver, check them out. I’ve always thought of the place as a trove, where hidden treasure can be found if you’re just willing to do a little digging. In my dream they’d moved to Fort Collins, a good distance north of here. We made the trek and the place was busy. The thing of interest was the layout. The store had chosen a space that shared a plus sign layout with three other shops. The square that joined them was a massive gas fireplace where bright flames roared through a large framed sized window. It filled the store with warmth and red light. The space itself was twisted, with small nooks and tables where readers sat with coffee and texts. I ran into my ex, tapped him on the shoulder and we said hello but nothing else. We dug into the cabinets and shelves of the books. I found a Christmas coffee mug my mother would love. But the longer I looked at it I realized that it portrayed the hideous mask of a green ice monster squished together with a snowman. Then I opened another cabinet and within were toys, pristine, from my childhood. I suggested to the shopkeeper that he sell them on Ebay and make a fortune but instead he gave them to me at a steal of a price.

January 2nd 2007. I hung up the phone with my brother and headed out to get on the bus for work. The call that had made me late hadn’t regarded a death, an overdose, or any event of such weight.
“Our father is getting a divorce.” Is how Bonner started. The divorce itself may not happen. It may happen. Whichever route our father’s third marriage takes isn’t really what Bonner wants to discuss. He wants to talk about the blame and where it belongs.

The truth of it should be an easy matter. It’s our father’s marriage. The blame should lie with him and his wife. But that’s not going to stop him from displacing it and if he can, onto Bonner or worse, Bonner’s kids. For a lot of people this type of blame shifting wouldn’t work. They’d tell dad to fuck off or something. But it will work on Bonner, to enough of a degree that he’ll lose sleep over it. He tells me he already has. He spent last night not contemplating the new year, or celebrating with his wife and beautiful family but tossing and turning over what our father the drunk has said.

Me, I was sleeping. Fourteen hours straight. I needed to rest after my own New Year’s eve celebrating and drinking. I was content to go to bed New Year’s Day at four o’clock and let time stop for a while. 2007 would wait. I wanted to rest.
Then I dreamt of Jeff, whose last name I couldn’t remember. I dreamt of high school and frogs and my father’s second wife and a bunch of other people and things but when I woke fully rested on the morning of the second it was already clear that the past was wanting to be dealt with.

I’m thirty-three, just graduated with a BA in History. I have a job that has nothing to do with History that I like pretty well. I have a good life. A good boyfriend and a lot of houseplants. I’m finishing my second novel, and hopefully this one will publish.

Life is pretty good. Until the phone rings and my family, and the past, comes pouring in. The term dysfunctional won’t really work here. They function, barely sometimes, but they function and I pretty much work the same way. I get through each day, go to work, cook and sleep, keeping my craziness as internal as I can. The gym helps. The daily ritual of coffee and writing on the bus helps.
I critique my city. I watch the people on the train. I do my job. And I wait for the next phone call: “Your father is dead” or “your sister has overdosed.” Instead I get “your father is getting a divorce” and this starts off my year. He tried to call me yesterday morning, to wish me a happy new year his message said, but I wasn’t going to fall for that.

The frogs I dreamt of were massive and they would eat their young. Jeff, whose last name I can’t remember, explains to me that these bullfrogs do this to any young they think can’t survive. The parent frog somehow has access to their offspring’s entire blueprint, a map of what they are going to be. So the frog wisely consumes any offspring that is going to evolutionarily disappoint. Jeff was cute, now that I think about it. Dirty blonde like me, he was a bit acne-ridden and slightly nerdy. Like me. We were never close, never friends, and I only remember one conversation with him in high school. Dreams are weird that I think of Jeff now. Whoever and wherever he is now, I hope he’s happy. I hope he got out. That’s the best wish I can have for anyone in Oklahoma, or at least in the version of it I lived in.

My brother tells me the root of the issue: our father attributes his first divorce, from our mother, to us. He says that we gave him our permission and therefore it is our fault. He blames his second on Kaleb, my brilliant nephew. The fifth of gin my stepmother consumed daily and my father’s own excessive drinking have nothing to do with it. It was an eight year old who deftly unraveled the tapestry of passion, angry sex and abuse that my father and his wife wove together.
I calmly stress the need for boundaries. I repeat this several times. I don’t talk about instances. Instances are just symptoms and they are without count. That Bonner and Kaleb aren’t responsible for what is not theirs. And I feel a twinge of guilt. Because I left. Because I got out. And I rarely look back unless I’m forced too: someone dies or someone overdoses.

I’ve had a little time this month to get back to reading in between querying agents and trying to put together the next thirty pages of Eastlight. In organizing my library I realized that once again, I’d given away my last copy of A Wizard of Earthsea. If you haven’t read it, I have to highly recommend Le Guin’s essentialist form of writing fantasy. She manages in two hundred pages what so many epic writers can’t: she brings her world alive to you. Ged’s story is still almost crystal clear to me since the first time I read this book nearly ten years ago.
I just started my Hero’s Journey course last night. It’s one more piece in the seemingly endless puzzle of my college education. We have to choose a book for our research paper and despite its small size, I’m going to use A Wizard of Earthsea. If the paper is of any note, I’ll post it but I love it when I get a chance for my personal love of a book to converge with my studies.
Le Guin made me dream in a very real way about writing fantasy. Since then I’ve always wanted to instill and inspire people the way she did me all that time ago.
How about you? What’s your favorite fantasy book of all time? What timeless book did the best job of transporting you out of the real world for a while?

If you’re not reading Miss Snark and you are trying to publish, she’s a fantastic wellspring of spiky-heeled information.
Currently she’s going off on an agent who is listed as one of the 20 worst by a watchdog group and the fireworks are worth the show.
I’m kneedeep in the query process for Neophyte and I can tell you that it really doesn’t help to know there are “agents” out there willing to take advantage of my aspirations. Sites and blogs like Writer Beware are an immense help as I wade through it all, learning the dos and don’ts. It’s been a while since I dug out my old A.C. Crispin books (high school to date myself) but maybe it’s time to dust them off. I’ll have to call my mom and see if my copy of Yesterday’s Son is still lying about.

Magic is an integral part of fantasy. It is also a core plot device in my writing but the question becomes, how does it all work for my characters? The closest thing I can do is relate it to my own current, incremental, learning experience with mathematics.
Math, and Algebra in particular, have always been something I’ve avoided but like a Byronic hero you can’t hide from some things forever. So there I sit, Saturday after Saturday, learning the ropes of everything from fractions to polynomials and surprise: I’m not bad at it.
I’m on my third tier of remedial learning and so far it’s all As. Last night, like a foreign language, I was dreaming about it. Math is a background item. You don’t need to know how your car operates to drive it just as you don’t need to know how your computer’s CPU works to surf the net or write your blog. Don’t get me wrong for an instant: math does not come easily to me. I am working hard at getting it. My key to success is knowing when my frustration limit has reached its peak. I walk away for a few hours or a day then return to the problem. The difference between the me of now and the me of high school is that I would have walked away for a year or a decade. As I learn, incrementally, I begin to appreciate Physics and the knowledge that math does in many ways shape our world.
For my characters, the magic is usually just as ever present, but just as unseen as wind. They feel its effects but for those who aren’t in the know of the why, its a puzzling situation. Like me, every Saturday for what feels the rest of my life, they are learning by baby steps to move towards what makes the world work. They are finding within themselves the strength to move forward. They are falling a lot but even then they are taking steps.
Math is a science just as grammar is. Since I’ve started learning math, a number of friends have expressed a desire to write. All of them wanted to know how to get started and I found it very complimentary considering I’ve yet to achieve any commercial success. My response was to just start: put pen to paper and take those first steps into an unseen world. Learn the rules as you go. Practice your grammar but most of all don’t get frustrated and walk away.

So I continue to settle into my new home. The library/spare room is starting to look livable and both the lemon trees survived their transition. I’m slow to settle by nature, as the books take a lot of unpacking and sorting. Having one BA in History and another in English Literature makes for a lot of hardbacks.
My art and swords are hung and I’m finally ready to go through that last box of old poetry. If I ever need to feel better about my writing all I have to do is pop open some of that stuff. Never I think was there a more angsty teenager than I had been. That’s some bad stuff handscrawled on legal pad (I was still using lined paper then). And though angsty, I was a prolific young fellow.
A funny story with some not so funny outcomes is what happened the last time I sorted. I tossed out enough of stuff to fill a dumpster and the next morning it was gone. In the night, people had come through the alley to take it all away. I say people because this was not a one person job. I had been careful and frankly a home shredder wasn’t going to do the trick but I must have missed one copy of an account number somewhere along the way. A month or two later, poof, someone attempted to put a pretty big check against my bank account with a really old address. And all that time I’d been thinking they were just reading my old stuff for some low quality entertainment!
Who takes that much work and goes through it for information? I was a pretty tortured kid, most of it self inflicted. Sure they got a bank account out of it, but I hope the bad poetry at least stung them a little. My bank caught the check and now I’m all freshly accounted but I keep thinking about that old, bad poetry. It’s still out there, circling, inflicting badly written angst on casual eyes. It’s like toxic word waste lying about, emitting background melodrama into a perfectly filthy alley. Even worse, people who stumble into this sticky emotional floatsm won’t know who is responsible as none of it is signed. They’ll curse my anyonymity even as they try to wipe the green goo of teen heartache from their shoe. Next time it’s shred and recycle for the safety of us all.

On the ipod right now: Ani diFranco, Pulse

It is a very gray day in my adopted city and if ever there was a day to call in from my regular job and curl up with the laptop, this would have been it. Unfortunately I have an important presentation today so it wasn’t really an option.
If there are two things I miss about the southern midwest where I’m from, they are the manners and the rain. If there two things I need to remind me about why I left they are the intolerance and overt, ignorant, racism. In Denver it rarely rains. My colleagues in other states ping me to ask how the snow is going and I constantly have to stress that while the Rockies get dumped on, the city has as much sun as San Diego. It’s quite hard to get a good emo mope on with all this daylight!
Today the city isn’t just gray, it’s drizzly and my skin feels like it can breathe again for the first time in a long while. I dawdled too long around the house and missed my first bus, resulting in a half hour wait outside and it was delicious. Denver in Sprintime is incredible but I miss the temperate air of back home, where you could let yourself get a good autumn soak and just feel clean.
But a guy has to eat and this brings me to a Room of One’s Own. The mental gymnastics Woolf goes through to prove her points in that essay are elaborate and regardless of one’s sex, there the matter of money strikes home. Whether male or female, you need food to write. The romantic notion of the starving writer has never worked well for me. When I was hungry and cold I had a surplus of angst but not a great amount of creative connectivity. Woolf understood that you have to eat in order to do your work. You must be well fed for all the right neurons to fire. I used to think that being happy might be a detriment to my writing and I have to laugh at that David of ten years ago. I’ve never been happier, better fed, or a better writer. A lot of that is practice and a lot of it is having a comfort zone to work in every day.
I have to add something else to Woolf’s premise: you need space and food, but you also need life experience. My day to day work experience fuels my writing as well. Even as a fantasy writer, I don’t think secluding myself to a room and writing would be good for the stories I want to tell. As a reader, I cannot connect to a protagonist whose life is too radically different than my own. There has to be something familiar and human about a character, no matter how morally flawed or heroic they might be.
It would have been a great day to seclude and type but it’s a good day for gaining some experience too.

On the ipod: Black Hawk Down Soundtrack
In the backpack: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

Frank Herbert will probably never be topped. He wrapped up conflicts of resource so tightly in his Dune series that I doubt you can get a better Mideast Oil allegory going. I’ll stick to religious conflict but there is definitely some interesting details to our modern resource conflicts.
I’ve read a lot of history in the pursuit of one of my BAs, most of it ancient, so I’m used to dense books but Kevin Phillips weaves so much information into his writing that I’m having a hard time following all of his information leads while keeping pace with his point.
He made a brief appearance on Bill Maher’s show a week or two back and impressed me enough that I wanted to read his book. A few chapters in, I’m finding that he does a great job of tracking our relationship to oil, the most important resource of our time, back through the years. He ties this to religious beliefs in our country and the Middle East, which led me back to Dune.
We move from one resource to another in our history. Sometimes these are realworld items: gold, water or land. Sometimes they are less tangible concepts, with concrete effect, such as feudal power.
I’m thinking a lot about sub-motivations in my characters lately and the concepts that define their ends. Political safety and privacy are a large root of many actions in the Dioscuri series. The fear of exposure definitely has my sneakiest character working it as hard as she can to keep the truth under wraps. For her the only resource she’s hoarding are secrets. She’s set against the main character of book two, Prodigal, whose main resource is freedom. The third main character is starting to define his resource as knowledge. These are pretty broad intangibles, distilled down for each character to work with but it doesn’t hurt to think about how they’ll deal with local, realworld, resources either. The world they inhabit lives on grain and for that control of land is an important goal. It’s been a motivation for war in their recent history and it’s a motivator intrigue in their present. All these motivations are starting to come together, conflict and if I’m doing my job right , explode in a fantastic but believable manner.

So Germany is tomorrow and it’s looking rather cold. I finally replaced my long wool coat and while it’s not the full on blanket my Ralph Lauren was, it should still provide me with some warmth and a sense of cloak in the streets of Trier.
I’m the most excited for the first leg of the trip. Worms looks like it’s going to be the best of everything I want though I’m also afraid I may just stay forever in the antiquities on Museum Island in Berlin. There are some definite pieces there that should help my research on the Dioscuri though my mentor, Dr. Miller has warned me that the Germans weren’t too careful with the preservation of the early marbles they acquired.
All of that aside, I won’t be taking my laptop for once and instead will be switching back to pen and notebook for two weeks. I don’t get a lot of productive writing accomplished when I travel: just larger ideas that take time to filter down into the work so I’m not too concerned about going low tech for a bit.
I wanted to have the next Hraefn/Kinos sections online before I left but I feel like they still need a bit of editing.

She had a great voice and brought a lot of insight. My friend Alfred Utton introduced me to her some years ago when he was completing his Literary Criticism capstone class. I hate to know that such a unique talent won’t be inspiring us any longer. At 58, she died far too soon. I got the news from Broadsheet on Salon but followed scifi.com’s reference to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. site:

http://www.sfwa.org/news/2006/obutler.htm

If you haven’t read Parable of the Talents, now is a good time:

http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=aBoBxA3sw_K6?s=showproduct&isbn=0446675784

or:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446675784/sr=8-1/qid=1141073638/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6390233-3776714?%5Fencoding=UTF8