Camp NaNoWriMo–the bubbly April and July sisters of November’s National Novel Writing Month. An information session for anyone interested in getting started with the fierce (but fun!) goal of 50,000 words in 30 (…31!) days! Panelists: Samma Johnson (mod), Tania Richter, Becca Patterson, Eli Effinger-Weintraub, E. P. Beaumont
Are we representative of the diverse community at large? How can we have a more inclusive community? Panelists: E. P. Beaumont, Devin Harnois, Cynnthia Michaels, Jen Manna, Hal Bichel
What do you do to get past artist’s block? Let’s share our tips and techniques as well as our insight into the most common triggers. Panelists: Patty Templeton, E. P. Beaumont, Amy Roth
Link to the full list on the CONvergence site here (note: doesn’t work well with mobile–takes you to full schedule).
My mentor passed away last week on 9 June 2015, around 5:30pm US Central. For the previous month and a half, someone from our caregiving collective was there every day, including some who stayed overnight.
Effectively, I took a leave of absence from my work. During that time, I got up at whatever hour, got on the bus and the light rail to the nursing home, came home, and did what I could to decompress.
I did a lot of reading, both fiction and nonfiction. I did a lot of thinking about what holds up (and what doesn’t) in the face of mortality.
Now it’s time for re-entry to ordinary life. A lot of the things I’d planned for this past month didn’t happen, and my book deadlines are going to be moved forward by at least two weeks.
But I wouldn’t have traded the last month and a half for anything.
Talk to it like it’s a horse, Phila says, and don’t insult the ghost in the machine. There are metal-spirits and wood-spirits; water and fire and air all have their souls too, ancient beyond reckoning, and a good mechanic knows that. Sing the body electric, magnetic, and thermal–opening line of an old, old hymn.
We’re servants of the elements, still and yet.
Phila wishes they’d provided her with a cybernetic horse. After all these centuries, she still misses the steeds of South Continent.
In time, in time, I say.
There are things you don’t learn about someone until you have to share an Avatar at close quarters.
***
The narrator is Naime the Shipwright. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
Ah, but if he claims to honor seniority — well, I outrank him several times on that score. It is perhaps long past due for the youngsters to be spoken to and set right in their course.
I speak for the Outposts. I speak for Old Karis as well. It is time for the Shipwright to return and see how the rituals of her Chapel are honored outside festival-season.
***
The narrator is Naime the Shipwright. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
We played chess, among other games, swung upside down by the handholds of the Heart-Ring (for all parents there want their children to be strong, build muscle and bone against the pull of gravity), danced the elements in the Sarronny fashion, built puzzle-palaces of rigid linkages in imitation of the crystal structures too small to see, told stories.
Eventually, from her stories, I realized she must be much, much older than I. She didn’t tell me who she was. She let me figure it out.
***
The narrator is Taryn the Outlander. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
Our cuisine has enough spicing so it doesn’t taste like the very same thing every day, though we all know that the bases number only a few, our old agricultural staples plus some new plants that have entered our diet since we took to humanity’s second set of inhabited worlds. All manner of effort is spent in keeping those varieties healthy and resistant. We already lost a few overbred species before leaving the Original World.
You don’t think space renegades and plant breeders in the same thought, not if you don’t hail from the Outposts, but all sorts of things prove useful that aren’t obvious at first glance.
All specialties are precious, but we try to diversify. So my gene mother Laila-Istvan also bred plants; there’s a variety of bean named after her. Istvan’s legume, it’s called: round and fat, rows of them in edible pods. Roasted and salted in the pod, they’re delicious; you pop the beans out the end of the husk and eat it last.
***
The narrator is Taryn the Outlander. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
My mother Laila-Istvan was sixty-seven when I was born, from genetic material she’d set aside when she came of reproductive age. In ageless stasis, it kept fresh; my gene-father was nearly two generations younger, young enough to have been her grandson.
She didn’t come to rest, to the rearing of a child, until late in life. Her traveling-companions didn’t include my gene-father, but our notion of kin is somewhat more expansive and elastic than some places planet-side, Karis for example. Now we don’t do clan-marriages like them; we form pairs or groups of traveling-companions, and the more dangerous the trade the larger the circle if there’s a child in the picture. Sometimes a mother or father makes a gamete-gift to a traveling-circle; those of us old spacers who daren’t risk it but still want a child are happy for such generosity.
We don’t own our children but owe them.
***
The narrator is Taryn the Outlander. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
Right now, I am spending a lot of time with my mentor who is in hospice, in the final stages of her passage out of life. I’m also working with some of my protegé(e)s who are facing intense deadlines.
So posting is slowing a bit on this blog, but know that I will be back soon. I will continue to post excerpts on weekends, and the interviews and reviews should be resuming shortly.
The restless one has returned. Taryn laughs with her cousin’s former apprentices, swings her kit-bag to one shoulder, greets one and all as she walks down the Heart-Ring corridor with the swagger-and-sway, the bouncing steps, of someone who’s used to shifting between different levels of gravity. Her body experiments: how far will one push from hip to ball of foot launch her center of mass?
She reaches the doorway of her quarters, swings the kit-bag inside, palms the door closed and then continues to Maia’s family quarters by hand-holds, swinging and flexing from one ceiling-handle to another. Like all low-gravity crew, she’s vigilant to keep up her strength, grabs every opportunity to make her muscles and bones work against resistance.
It’s a habit, unconscious, as much ingrained as dancers’ constant stretching, even at rest.
I’ve watched that one, as I’ve watched all of them, grow from infancy. Just short of half a century she’s been with me, so seems still a child.
***
The narrator is Naime the Shipwright. From character interviews for the Ship’s Heart universe.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
“So on Karis, I’d be Jehen Outlander,” Jehen said.
“Oh no, you’d be Jehen whatever-your-epithet-is. Sarronny’s different.”
“Why?” Yasmin asked. Mavra smiled, as if she’d been waiting for that question.
“You know about the Revolt, and the Treaty–that’s why. We’re the water-miners for this part of the Inhabited Worlds. Funny a place this dry … but there’s water below the surface, and that’s what they come here for, that’s why they were willing to make the Treaty in the first place.”
***
Jehen, age 9, her half-sister Yasmin, 8, and their mentor Mavra Two-Eyes, retired starship captain. From novel WIP, Ship’s Heart.
Weekend Writing Warriors offers a selection of eight-sentence excerpts from many different writers. For the full selection, see here.
E. P. Beaumont 