Author: R. Jean Mathieu (Page 18 of 21)

I received two emails in my inbox the other day, one on top of the other. The first one was from J. E. Taylor, the assistant editor at Allegory. I remember well, I was at my mother’s house, and I thought to myself, “ah, good, another rejection.” I opened the email and read bits aloud, “We really enjoyed your submission…” “…especially endearing to me…” and my mother cracked, “but we won’t take it.” And I laughed.

And then I realized she was wrong. It was an acceptance letter! I jumped up and much alarmed my mother with the sudden burst of energy. On the way home, I sang at the top of my lungs and danced a bit when I got home.

Then I sat down, opened up Yahoo, and read the rest of my emails.

What do you think the next email was?

It was a letter from Asimov’s. They were politely, but form-letterly, rejecting my submission. I said to myself, “they’re getting better! It took them six months to reject my first story!” And then I laughed.

The venerables were right. Before enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and hauling water.

Regardless, I’m celebrating. This Saturday, June 19, 2010, I’ll be reading both stories, as well as my award-winning “Gods of War,” and perhaps a few others. I’ll be at The Rock Espresso Bar, starting at 5:00 PM. See you there!

I’m posting this because, really, I can’t believe I wrote it either:

Continue reading

It was fun.

I drove up on Friday afternoon and arrived just in time to miss the gate and get in. I wandered around Stage Zero for a bit then went back to the hotel room, where I bedded down with only eight other people. Among the people in the room there with me was my good friend James Chen of the Thoughtscream, which if you aren’t reading you really should. Anyway, we woke up godawful late on Saturday, and I went downstairs to get my pass and get in.

I got in line at 11:30.

I finally entered the floor at 1:30.

While in line, I saw a woman who struck me absolutely senseless. She was tall, curly-haired, with a Wonder Woman t-shirt, a quick smile, and her heart on her sleeve. As I left the line, I introduced myself to her friends and then to her, and asked if I could buy her lunch. She stammered ‘o-okay,’ and I gave her my card. And that was the last I heard of her.

Ah, c’est la vie. I hope she reads this, so I can at least call her a fan.

When I got onto the convention floor, I started by wandering around, as you do. I went looking first for the Datesim.org booth, run by friends of mine. While there, I fell into talking with Alexis, the artist for the game, and how she was offering commissions. I started out requesting a quick sketch, but ended up with a full blown, inks-and-colors figure of Green Snake, dressed in a cheongsam, half woman and half snake, giving the sexiest of Stanley Kubrick glances (warning, image is not sexy).

It was a liberating thing, actually, passing ideas back and forth with Alexis. I originally pictured the modern-day Green Snake wearing long, flowing, yet form-fitting clothing, analogous to what Maggie Cheung wore in Tsui Hark’s version, except modern. Then I realized that a cheongsam would work better, and she corrected it. We played around with the hair a bit before it occured to me that she’d probably wear a pixie cut. I’d never thought about her hair before. Alexis added gloves (and now I can’t picture the character without them), and at her third or fourth exhasperated “I can’t draw legs!” I sarcastically suggested she do the snake tail instead.

That worked out fantastically, as it turned out. I highly recommend commissioning an artist any con you go to, just to see what things look like when they come OUT of your head.

I wandered around artist’s alley and the dealer’s hall a bit after that. I did meet Wendy Pini, of ElfQuest fame, and thanked her for that large chunk of my childhood that her work formed. By then, it was getting on in the day, and there is something very, very important that happens on Saturday at Fanime.

I am, of course, talking about Masquerade.

The line did, in fact, stretch three-quarters of the way around the block, as the Mexican ice-cream vendors trundled by in the hot afternoon sun. As I was running on empty,  I agreed to make the run to the Fast Food Joint Which Shall Not Be Named, and as soon as I got back the line was moving. We noshed our burgers, James stuck his chicken sandwiches in his voluminous pants pockets, and we went into Masquerade.

I have good news: Those guys that did the awesome Pokemon skit last year? The one that sent the entire 30k strong audience to its feet, singing, clapping, and dancing? They did basically the same skit again this year. And they won Best In Show. My only problem was either we were sitting in the wrong spot or the sound was just bad, but every spoken comedy sketch sounded like this:

*mumblemumblemumblemumble* COCKPUNCH! *laughter*

Anyway.

After Masquerade, it was quite late, and I ended up in the game room, ostensibly looking for my friend Charlie. Instead, I got pulled into a game of Ninja, the Poor Man’s Twister, by Elphaba from Wicked.  This went on for about four hours, with all of us at one point or another catching the Wicked STD and having green skin paint in unusual places. And then I stumbled off to bed.

What happened the next day? Read on.

I was working on my Fanime update when this popped up in chat.

If you are in support of the Arizona immigration laws, I’d like you to reconsider that support, if only because it’s these people who will be administrating it. The upstanding of Prescott, AZ are driving by a school and shouting racist remarks because the school had the gall to paint pictures of its actual students. Who, as it turns out, aren’t white. At least, not in real life. They are in the picture, now, “because of the controversy.”

Yes sir. I trust the law enforcement that these people have in place to not abuse their powers under a new law that gives them the right to check anyone suspected of being an illegal alien at any time. I trust that such people would not interpret this law overly broadly. I trust the judges elected by these people would not interpret the law overly harshly. And I trust that elected officials, such as Councilman Steve Blair who is encouraging this behavior with his radio talk show, would surely restrict abuses of such a law.

I mean, seriously, this is 2010. There have been Mexican people in Arizona since before it was part of the United States. I don’t know about them, but in California, the base of our economy runs on illegal immigrant slave labor. There have been Indians there since before Latin was young. There have been Black people there as long as there have been white people there. What the hell is the problem with the town of Prescott?

I’m ashamed that my company is based there.

Well, maybe a few more words...

I know Memorial Day was on Monday, but I was driving home from the end of Fanime that day. And I’d like to take a moment to talk about Memorial Day anyway. It’s a bittersweet holiday, and I like my bittersweet things.

I am a liberal. I support public health care. I am one of the, what, two or three people left in America who admits to voting for Barack Obama in 2008. That’s how liberal I am.

All the same, I took a moment of silence at a gas station outside Salinas, watching the sun set over the mountains and the shadows creep along the valley and all that farmland. It’s never been enough for me to blindly recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I try to think about what I’m saying and why I mean it. I try to actually feel it, and to imbue these rituals of American Civil Religion with real meaning.

I don’t feel comfortable blindly praising “our troops” for “saving our freedoms.” It doesn’t mean anything to say that.

But I took my moment of silence. And to every man who dared and died in the American Revolution, I gave my profoundest thanks. With their blood, they bought me the first nation in the world governed by Enlightenment liberal philosophy. Their blood bought me the First, Fourth, and Ninth amendments of the Bill of Rights. They bought the rest of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution besides, but those are the ones dearest to my heart: the rights to speech, to conscience, to privacy, to silence, and all the rest.

To the men of the Union Army, in well-fought battles or ill, I give my thanks, for defending those liberties with their lives from unscrupulous slaveholders hiding behind the Tenth Amendment and their ‘states’ rights.’ Their blood bought us the Fourteenth Amendment. Those of you who’ve read the Gettysburg address know that Lincoln felt the same way: He could not hallow the graves at Gettysburg, the men already had.

To the American servicemen who fought in World War II, I give my profoundest thanks. The European theater was not to secure American liberty, but the liberty of our sister republic in France, our ally England, the Jewish people of Europe, and all countries that the Nazi regime did cast a shadow over. The Pacific theater was retaliation against an unprovoked attacked, fought to insure that the Empire of Japan would have neither the desire nor the ability to try again. You all gave your lives in defense of America, in defense of the West Coast in particular. I see a sparkling sea out there, and signs of prosperity all around. Thank you.

To the secret men and their secret deeds who died in the Cold War: Your deaths were not in vain. The Soviet Union long ago fell, and the world did not fall with it. We live and breathe, thanks to some of you and despite some others of you, but none of you died in vain.

To the servicemen, and women, now in Afghanistan, you like you grandfathers in the Pacific War fight to retaliate against an unprovoked attack on your homeland. You have overthrown the Taliban and now fight to keep them from gaining the power to attack America again. I thank you, every one of you, who has laid down his life for these ends.

But what about the rest?

What about the men who died in the pointless wars, the petty wars, the unjust wars? The ones who died on Kettle Hill in Cuba, or in the Bay of Pigs? The ones who wore the grey, and not the blue, at Gettysburg? The ones who died in the trenches and at the hands of the first storm-troopers across Belgium and Germany? The ones who died in the stinking jungles of Vietnam, at Khe Sanh and the rest? The ones who die by the roadside in Iraq? The ones who died in undisclosed actions, across the world, from 1776 to 2010?

As a student of history, I cannot credibly thank a Confederate infantryman for “securing our freedoms.” Nor can I credit any American in the Spanish-American war. And some of our wars make me sick, like the Mexican-American war or the Quasi-War with France under John Adams. And there are some wars where men died on the battlefield for freedoms being quickly eroded at home.

And yet…

They were soldiers, not generals or politicians. And some of our soldiers have been bad, and some have been petty, and some have been noble. They, all of them, died, in good wars and evil.

So I said this: “And you, all of you, who died in those wars…you died no less nobly, your blood no less mourned for its loss. For dying, and, whatever sort of man or woman you were, giving that last sacrifice for your country and your beliefs…I thank you. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you, and I wish only that your lives could have been better spent.”

Actually, the other pictures was partly right. Those are the only two words for Memorial Day. And this is the only image.

The Confederate soldier lying under a field in Georgia was no less a man, and no less an American, than his Union brother. Neither is the poor kid from New York who died on Kettle Hill, or the boy from Alabama who bought in Baghdad, or the draftee still left in some forgotten swamp in central Vietnam. I can’t say they were defending my freedoms, but they sure as hell thought they were, and they died for it.

Their graves are, and should be, as hallowed as the graves in Arlington and Gettysburg.

Here’s to the fallen soldiers, in good wars or evil, and all they fought for: Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just got done reading this story, Tim Pratt‘s “Impossible Dreams.” And when I was done, I did something I’ve never done before.

I clapped when the story was over. I clapped for a full minute. Because this is one of the best short stories I’ve read in a long time.

And it seemed appropriate to applaud when the movie was over, and that’s what this is, it has the lush and slightly blurry quality of film rather than the grainy realism of video. It’s the kind of cinema Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make…except it’s a short story.

Some of you might remember my story, “Only the Good Die Young.” I tried to write an alternate history story about a different music industry, where Lennon’s alive and Dylan’s long dead, and those of you who read it know that it didn’t quite work.

It’s strange. I carried that story around in my head for years, and finally got it down, and it was this misfit. So I wanted to do it better. And now that I’ve read “Impossible Dreams,” I realize I don’t have to…the story’s already been done. And far better.

I have to wonder, of course, if there’s some alternate reality where Pratt chucked his story, and I thought to build mine around a romance. Then again, I probably never got into science fiction at all, as Bradbury never finished turning “The Fire-Man” into a novel. I wonder how Pratt would differ.

Go and read “Impossible Dreams.” Then come back, because you’ll understand what I mean when I say “Impossible Dreams” is what “Only the Good Die Young” could’ve been.

—

PS – speaking of alternate histories, one day I’m going to write William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Siddhartha, or the Awakened Man. I’ll file it next to my republican Confucius and that Viking version of the Diamond Sutra as “things out of my Civilization 4 games that amuse the hell out of me but are of no interest to anyone else.”

I tend to put together my stories in pieces. I have a whole catalog of half-ideas, a scene, a character, a plot without a place, even just a description. One I have sitting on top right now, just at random, is “the horns of the street were like an ecology of their own: the deep chuck of the police van, the high warble of a bus, the angry growl of a Nissan.” Other half-ideas I have sitting around are “Zen Technician v. Natural Prodigy” and the image of Green Snake, reborn as Madame Green Snake after spending the whole story grown pale and blind.

I have a whole backlog of story halves, waiting for me to match up the other half (or threesome). But I don’t have any such thing for blog posts. For this reason, I found it impossible to sit down and write one. James Chen at the Thoughtscream advised me to sit down, and start writing, and let inspiration come after. So I have, and so here I am. You’ll be seeing a lot more out of me here on out.

And Red Penny Monday stopped because I started writing up my own version of the Legend of the White Snake for the next week’s entry. I’m still writing it. It will be awesome.

On the other hand, some of them are.

However, there is one statement that I keep hearing variations on from the intelligent Tea Partiers that I know:

“We have to return to the Constitution.”

First, what does this mean? And second, how can you defend it?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m given to understand that what is meant is “we should run the government according to the fundamentals outlined in the Constitution,” sometimes with a side dose of “strict interpretation.”

To which I have to ask: If you support government by the Constitution alone, would you include the first ten amendments (e.g. the Bill of Rights)? Even now, you’re getting onto unsteady ground, as the existence *of* amendments implies that the Constitution could be interpreted or even changed. But I think we can all agree that things left  out of the original Constitution, like a right to free assembly and a right to not purjure oneself, are good things. I don’t meet many Americans that hate the Bill of Rights as such. Well and good.

But…

If you support the Bill of Rights, do you also support the *other* amendments? Like the fourteenth, that prohibits slavery and provides for due process if the State is going to deprive you of life or liberty? Or the twenty-seventh, that limits the power of Congresscritters to raise their own salaries? That last one was passed in the 1992…pretty recent, and pretty far removed from the world, and intent, of the Founders.

Let us say you also support those, because it’s bad politics to say you oppose the motions that abolished slavery and prevented finanical abuses from On High. Well and good.

In that case, do you support the so-called “right to privacy?” This may be a statistical artifact among my Tea Party friends, but it seems like Tea Partiers value their right to privacy more than the average citizen. They don’t want other folks interfering in their business, especially their financial business.

Except that there is no such thing in any of the above-quoted documents. Go ahead and read  them, you’ll find no such phrase. The “right to privacy” was concocted by a couple of lawyers in the 1890s who decided that such a thing must exist, and was implied to exist by the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth amendments. Not that it’s explicitly written there, that it’s implied to be there, that those amendments (and other things) create a “penumbra” or shadow of a right to privacy.

And, if you support the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and amending the Constitution as time and circumstances dictate, and the interpretation of the Constitution to provide powers and rights that aren’t explicitly written there…

…how can you say you support government by only the Constitution?

If I’ve gotten the position of my intelligent, Tea Party friends wrong, I apologize and invite you to correct me. If you’ve been arguing for a strict interpretation of the Constitution, I invite you to consider my words. And if, after all that, you’re willing to support the Constitution alone, without any of the other documents that have accrued around it in the past 221 years…well, I look forward to our merry war of the ballot box, and may the best argument win.

*in Categorical Standard Form – Some members of the tea party are not people who are stark raving bonkers.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, Red Penny Monday did not update as scheduled. It will be up tomorrow.