Asakiyume mita

Today's prompt word was "cascade" but what I ended up thinking about was apocalypse-revelation.

Have something portentous!

( what level of apocalypse are you on? )

Posting two days in a row, what?? Is this 2010?

But I wanted to share this quote from Zig Zag Claybourne's Breath, Warmth, and Dream, which I'm reading at a very leisurely pace:


"'There was once'--Orsys stopped to think--'that I taught a child queen to print her name in all the alphabets of her land.'"

Now that's a worthy thing for a child queen to learn. And after learning to write her name, she can learn to write the names of people who use these alphabets, can learn to conform her mouth to their names. But not all alphabets are human-made. Maybe the child queen also learned the alphabet of leaf miners, or the alphabet of animal tracks across a snowy field, or the alphabet of clam siphon holes in the sand.

What language and alphabet would you like to learn to write your name in?

As a kid, I learned English from English language cartoons on FilmNet. I learned from German TV shows. My passion for Swedish crime series taught me Swedish.

But now, the largest tv medium of our time, YouTube, has begun auto-translating everything. Future generations will not be exposed to foreign languages and be inspired to take an interest. (Source)

Apparently the poster is talking not about auto subtitling but auto dubbing. Auto subtitling would be bad enough, but auto dubbing? Terrible. I too have relied on films, TV, and songs for every language I've ever learned. Having all the languages of the world put into English, ostensibly for my benefit, feels like having all the delicious foods that people cook all over the word turned into hamburgers and french fries because that's what I, as an American, am supposed to eat.

In science fiction, you get translation tech. Unless the point of the story is to talk about language (hello Darmok), this tech generally works flawlessly. In some stories, second-rate or old fashioned translation tech is used to humorous effect (Ann Leckie did this in one of her novels, and someone else I read in the past few years did too, but I'm forgetting who). But in all the stories, the tech is omnipresent and everyone uses it.

Obviously translation and interpretation services are hugely important. I want these services to exist. And I do appreciate what Google Translate makes possible. But there's a difference between having something as an option and having it inescapably, ubiquitously present. No one in Star Trek has to learn another language--ever. They just speak, and hear, their own.

This means their ears don't get to hear the different sounds that these languages make. The tones, the clicks, the trills, the glottal stops, the vowel and consonant clusters. (And we're not even getting into how the aliens may sound, if sound is even how their languages are embodied.)

But even worse, it means they can never be truly intimate with someone who speaks a different language. They can never be alone together, just the two of them. There's always a third party present, sliding neatly between them in bed, sitting with them at breakfast, standing between them as they contemplate where next to boldly go. It's just you and me and the translation software, my love. It's just you and me and our neural interfaces, which somehow will figure out how to convey circumlocutions, veiled sarcasm, passive aggression, tentative queries. These things can take us a lifetime to master in our mother tongue, but the tech is clever enough to do all that for us--across languages. In the end, do I love you, or do I love the translation tech? Cyrano de translation tech.

I'm thinking I might want to play with this in a story sometime: ardor driving someone to the boldness of learning their beloved's linguistic ways so they can speak with them face to face, no longer through a [tech] mirror darkly.

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to rachelmanija's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' points of view, plus authorial observations, and various problems of life were glancingly or directly looked at, but then there was this suspense-novel plotline! But I really loved reading it, I think because I liked all those observations. I just liked spending time with the author as she told this story. (I wasn't actually so into the suspense-novel plotline, but I didn't mind it either; I was able to just go along with it.)

And the language, just great. I quoted some last time I talked about the book, but here's a little more. Here, for instance, is what I mean about all the living creatures in the world being present and part of the world in a way you don't often get (and that I love):

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

Or how about this, about lightning:

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

It's not just the beauty of the images, it's that Thomas says the lightning is jealous of the light--it's that living-ness of everything. Just adore it. ... And mind you, she put this in a story of [rot13 for spoilers] grraf orvat noqhpgrq fb gurl pna or fnpevsvprq gb erwhirangr anfgl byq zra. I'm so glad she did! And so glad this story got published!

One more, when a boy who's been teasing her asks her why she doesn't like him:

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

His own blue quality of light. Did you know that that's what people seek? It feels so right.

I thought Thomas must be about my age, but no: she was my mother's age. She's a whole generation above me.

From Wikipedia:

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

Well thank you for everything Ms. Thomas. I really admire your outlook, your observations, and your writing, and appreciate what you gave to the world.

Today it was the laundry basket's secret code that I felt tempted to decipher:



It's like writing you see in a dream and then struggle to write down as you wake up.

I went for a walk in the woods on New Year's Day with wakanomori--our destination was a beaver pond. It was late: we had to walk briskly to get there and back before dark. On our way we met an older man coming in the opposite direction. He had a polished, painted walking stick. I admired it, and he said he'd painted it himself--the moose, the man in the kayak, the dark pines--all things that were important to him. And at the top, the colors of a coral or king snake, because, he said, he loved snakes. He had beautiful eyes and an accent that reminded Wakanomori of Dorset farmers. He allowed as to how there were a lot of people on the trails that day--but for us, he was the first. (We met several others after that. On our way back, Wakanomori said, "I wonder how many more humans we'll encounter." I gave him a sidelong look. "Your disguise is slipping," I said.)

The mist was rising by that point:

I'm in this issue of Not One of Us with a piece of very short flash fiction, "Freeing .33333..."

It's ironic, maybe, to write flash about a number that goes on forever, but like the narrator, I've always been fascinated by this endlessly repeating number, and a short form is as good as a long form, I suppose, to talk about something infinite.

There are several other offerings in this issue that I loved--noteworthy among them sovay's poem "Fair Exchange," about what the dead want. (You know it instinctively, but Sovay expresses it--and what the dead would pay to get it--with wrenching clarity.)

The poem "Catch the Bus," by Zhihua Wang, is light, humorous--but its theme is about trying to fit yourself in to a schedule where *you* are the piece that has to change; *you* are the one that must adapt, and that's also a theme in the story "Loneliness and Other Looming Things," by Devan Barlow, whose protagonist is psychologically incapable of tolerating an "upgrade" that everyone around her has made or is making. Like someone with a rotary-dial landline phone in the era of smartphones, she's isolated, but the solution being proposed may cost her her only human connection. There's beautiful language on dreams in this story:

There was a oconstant bristle at the edge of my mind, like I had to remember to tell someone something ... At random points throughout the day, I started laughing, as if I remembered something funny. But I never had any idea what the joke was.

In "A Million Wings Moving as One," by Jay Kang Romanus, a changeling who can take and shed an infinite number of forms tries to find a sense of self. These lines struck me:

Outside, the humans drift under its window in an endless river. The changeling watches them, envying their lack of choice.

The poem "Protest" by Rebekah Postupak achieves a giddy-but-grim change of perspective for both the narrator and the reader--powerful!

The remaining two stories, "The World Has Turned a Thousand Times" by CL Hellisen and "Where Dead Men Come to Die" by Ed Teja, have startlingly contrasting settings--the stark semi-desert of South Africa's Karoo region in Hellisen's tale and the tropical humidity of the town of Koh Kong, in Cambodia's Koh Kong Province, in Teja's. Both are stories of transformations of sorts, and self-discovery.

Not One of Us is that remarkable thing in this digital world, a paper zine. Some of my favorite writers, like Patricia Russo and my dad, have published in its pages. Information on buying single issues or subscriptions and on submitting to it is available HERE.

I am back from my holiday, and will have many things to share, but while I was gone, my Amazon/Annihilation story "Semper Vivens" slipped into the world, so that's what I'm going to talk about first.

It's in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine issue 95, and behold, the cover is an illustration for it!



A terraforming disaster, tragic cultists, and frustrated researchers collide...

Twenty-five years ago, catastrophic failure in a seeder ship’s systems had resulted in its entire cargo of LifeMatrix being dumped in a coastal zone at equatorial latitudes on R-220’s eastern continent. Instead of R-220 receiving stepped atmospheric seeding over a ten-year period, the disaster zone received the entire payload in a matter of minutes, resulting in the chaotic cauldron of life visible on the research hub’s screens.

Twenty years ago, Vida Eterna adherents landed a ship in the disaster zone, intent on “achieving unity with Pure Life,” or, as most people would see it, intent on embracing a gruesome death. They succeeded. Their DNA was now part of the bubbling soup down there.

The zine is pay-only, and the price looks hefty, but it's Australian dollars! So I hope some of you give it a try, because I crave readers! (I don't yet have my own copy of the zine, but I'm supposed to get one at some point.)

🌿You can buy it here!🌿

Note: it can look like your only choices are to pay for a single issue with Apple Pay, or to buy a subscription, but that's not the case. Here's what you do:

(1) Choose a format that you'd like to receive the issue of the magazine in.
(2) Instead of clicking on what appears to be the only pay option, Apple Pay, go to "Cart" which is on the right on the banner at the top of the web page (before "Members").
(3) Clicking on "Cart" takes you to a page with Paypal and credit cards purchase methods.

I got a story rejection, and the editor said if I wanted feedback, he could give it--because he was always bummed to send stories in someplace and then just get a no--but he didn't want to force it on me if I didn't want it.

My first instinct was to say thanks-very-much-but-no-thanks, but then I thought, What the heck? This is a story that has had only three readers--or rather, only three readers who talked to me about it (it's been out on submission to other places and gotten form rejections). Here's a reader--and an editor, to boot!--offering his reaction. Why not find out what he thinks? So I said yes, please, and thanked him for the generous offer.

And I was quite pleased, because he said he loved the characters and the pacing and the plot, just not the ending. He didn't like how the ending just ... happened... how things could have ended some other way, but happened to end this way, how close to much-worse it was, and yet it didn't end with everything fixed, either. He wanted a little more, he said.

And that kind of pleased me too, because the thoughts he had, the feelings he had, were exactly what I wanted to leave a reader with--so, yay! I did the thing! But boo, too, because it was an experience that was dissatisfying for him. I'll muse on that a bit.

Sometimes you can try to bake a cake and you forget baking powder, and it comes out like a brick. Then, if someone tells you, "If you add baking powder, this will be much more light," you can do it, and yay! Proper cake.

Other times you make a cake--let's say a lemon cake--and the person says, "this is a great cake, but it's lemon flavored, and I prefer cakes that are chocolate or vanilla flavored." Then your question is, does all the world prefer chocolate and vanilla, or are there lemon-cake fans out there?

To continue talking in metaphor-eeze, I hope someone out there will like lemon cake and will decide to serve it up for people to eat, and that there will be many happy eaters of lemon cake. One day!

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I've been doing microfiction, a tiny story a day, based on single-word prompts. Three of us create prompt words for the month. We intend to keep it up for a whole year! So far I've only missed one day.

I posted an entry here featuring one I wrote, then lost confidence and deleted the entry. The thing about microfiction--especially, maybe, mine, is it's VERY slight! Not much to see! ... But I deleted the entry more because I feared it might read as saccharine. I like the story! In the words of the immortal Krusty the Clown, "I don't mind the taste!" But I get shy of revealing just what a prissy moralizer I can be. (LOL, though if you've read me here for any amount of time, you've probably figured it out.)

Anyway, I'm going to post some of the word prompts I've written for, and you choose which one you'd like to see, and I'll give it to you in my reply.

(The shamefully embarrassing one was for the word "tree," and if you're curious, you can read it here.)

THESE ARE VERY SHORT. They have to fit in about 450 characters.

speaker
atlas
light
dunk
stock
case
vision
milk
plume
captivity
chest

rachelmanija's great review of Goddess of Yesterday (by Caroline Cooney) made me want to read it too--I did, and I enjoyed it very much. It really truly felt like the story was being told to me by a young girl from Trojan War times. I liked Anaxanadra very much, liked how observant she was, how she learned quickly and worked for her own survival, and that she took a liking to--and then felt loyalty and concern for--the various people she met.

What had absolutely pushed me from "Hmmm, cool book; maybe one day I'll read it" to "I want to read this NOW" was the example Rachel gave of Anaxanadra's wonderment on first encountering a glass container, and I was rewarded with more encounters like that (first time encountering enough of something that you need to use the word "one thousand," first time encountering horses, etc). Even just her ordinary observations had a feel of ancient Greece to them that I loved, as when she describes the sound of water slapping the side of a boat like dogs drinking, or this, describing dolphins:

Dolphins swam alongside. Now and then they would leap out of the water and spin themselves like yarn.

And then radiantfracture posted a poem the other day, "Pahkwêsikan," by the poet Samantha Nock, that made me want to read the rest of the collection, the author's debut collection. It has a gorgeous cover:

( but the image is a little large, so under the cut it goes )

And now I have a copy!

Speaking of images, check out these great dusky swifts (Cypseloides senex), posted by Aves do Brasil, a bot that posts photos of birds of Brazil. Facebook says that the original photo was taken by Frodoaldo Budke.

( great dusky swifts )

With those intense, deep-set eyes, and clinging to the rock face like that, they seem like a pair of heroes: loyal siblings or friends, or intense lovers, out to redress a wrong. I want to write a story with them as the heroes ... maybe in human form--but that intensity!