partying

From: Duffy

Just finished reading [And Now We Are Going to Have a Party]. I have a better understanding of Aud now. Love the packaging.

Wondered about how much MS affected you then. You mentioned it, but noticed only one specific description of how it affected you on a day to day basis. I think it had to do with your pen suddenly flying across the room. If this is too personal, please don't hesitate to tell me.

Especially loved your description of how you and Kelley got together. I do believe in love at first sight because it happened with me and Janet, too.I think there's a zen concept, satori moment, not sure if I have that right. It refers to a moment of total clarity and truth is revealed. That's what happened to me when I first touched Janet's hand and it was like all that we were to be was revealed in an instant.

Sometimes, when I actually stop and think about how much a human being can go through and still move on with life, my amazement with the universe becomes spiritual.

Thank you Nicola for this amazing revelation of your self.

The only time I've a faint idea of what it means to be 'spiritual' is when I feel what the early Christians, using a Greek word, described as agape,'an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being'. (Thomas Jay Oord)

It happened after 9/11. The twin towers falling down didn't affect me that much--I've seen too many terrorist things in the UK, been through too many bomb threats, been caught up in an IRA bombing in London in the late '70s (not hurt, just trapped in the Underground for four hours)--but the conversations with friends who were beside themselves really bothered me. We should hit them back, said the more injured and bewildered ones. No, we should pound reason in the other goddamn American heads! said others. And I said, No, stop it, listen to yourselves. Force isn't the answer, reason isn't the answer, love is the answer. Love everyone, love them all. After a week or two I realised I sounded like the leader of some bizarre cult, and, profoundly disturbed, stopped talking about it.

I felt an echo of that all-encompassing love (but much less strange) when I was writing And Now We Are Going to Have a Party. It was an overwhelming and particular tenderness towards all the people I'd known, including the little four year-old me busy taking charge of her life, or the confused, drunk teenaged me, or the blazing with self-belief twentysomething who used to climb on the stage knowing she was the closest thing to god those people were ever going to see, baby!

When I sat down to write that memoir I honestly had no idea what I was doing. I wanted to tell some funny stories maybe, to tell some of my truth, too, and to parade a few of the marvels (marvellous to me, anyway) of my childhood, like that Christmas wishlist (written when I was seven). Then my mother died, and I realised that what I wrote mattered, that she wouldn't be there to read it or contradict it, and it had better be the truth. At the same time I understood it was the story of what made me who I am: a writer. And it all came together. I wrote the whole thing in about three months. There was no rewriting time. It was just one big gush, with a little tidying up at the end. It was a true labour of love: for myself, for my family, and by me, by Payseur and Schmidt.

MS didn't really start to have an impact on my life until I was 28. I went down with what was diagnosed as 'post-viral syndrome' after getting a hepatitis B vaccination and then catching flu. I recovered from the flu but was so tired I couldn't walk more than fifty yards, or, some days, even sit up for very long. I had weird tingles swimming up and down my spine like electric fish. This went on for months. I lost an appalling amount of weight. I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. Then I moved to the US, where that diagnosis was changed to chronic fatigue syndrome (aches, weakness, irritability, as well as the fatigue and weight loss). I gradually got better, being able to walk a mile, or go dancing. Then, when I was 32, I got abruptly worse again--falling down, zero energy--and this time I was diagnosed with MS.

Even before the first official illness, I would have weirdnesses, like getting astonishingly dizzy and falling down for no good reason (though I was doing a lot of drugs, so it didn't really worry me) or having my writing arm suddenly stiffen up, or not being able to quite breathe properly. One doctor told me I was having a nervous breakdown and gave me tranquilisers. I flushed them. Though I had been extremely energetic and vital all my life--every kind of sport you can think of--I'd also been ill a lot. When I was eight and nine I was hospitalised several times for a mystery illness. When I was allowed home, I went to school only in the mornings for a while. So, while being diagnosed with MS was a terrible shock, being ill, on some level, feels almost natural.

Falling in love was shocking, too. And very odd. I've never loved anyone the way I love Kelley. And it happened right away. It was damned strange, and a bit frightening. I love being her love, it feels good--right and true--but, honestly, I'm glad I'll never have to go through that vertiginous internal rearrangement again.

god and tolkien

From: Caite (caitemaire@hotmail.com)

OK, let me get the obligatory...but totally sincere....praise out of the way.

I first read The Blue Place some years ago, and for some now unknown reason, do not remember liking it a great deal. I seem to remember feeling it was cold and bleak and violent and sad.

And maybe it was to a degree, but who is to say that is a bad thing. Anyhoo, I happened upon a copy of Stay in the library a couple of months ago and thought “that author's name sounds familiar” so I took the book out.

Needless to say, I have now read...and loved...all your books.

I know it is selfish, but I wish you were a faster writer. Finishing the last one made be very sad....

...but I will wait patiently. Since what else can I do?

One more comment before my question. I read somewhere, perhaps in an interview or in an answer to a question here, that there would be no more Aud books. And while I love Aud, I must say that I am happy if that is true. I fear Aud becoming...perhaps... too soft. In someway losing an essential characteristic of Aud-ness.

But if you change your mind, that is totally OK too.

Finally, at last, the question.

Again, I read somewhere or heard in an interview (what did we do before Google searches?), that you are a great fan of Tolkien. That quoting lines from Lord of the Rings was a first bonding experience between you and Kelley. And I agree, considering LotR a classic, a riproaringly good read and excellent book. Up there on my top ten list.

I also read that, if I am correct, you consider yourself an atheist.

So the question is, do you experience any sort of conflict between admiring an author and disagreeing with his or her basic world view, their view of reality? Because I think that Tolkien's work and especially LotR, is an extremely religious book, with a very Christian, in fact Catholic, sense. As he himself stated at one point.

And then your latest...and greatly anticipated by your fans, myself included...project on Hild of Whitby. Whatever else might be true of her culture, I think it would be impossible to really understand her without acknowledging how her Christianity shaped her and her entire world. To see her with too secular eyes I fear will create a Hild other than the true one.

Not that I still won't read it.

I have mentioned that I loved your books, right? Lol

Thank you. to be able to write and give others so many hours of enjoyment must be grand!

I've found that many really good books--the particular ones, the ones you can't mistake for anything else--are sometimes hard to get into if you pick them up at the wrong time. My brother-in-law bought me Dune for Christmas when I was fourteen. I struggled through the first twenty pages and thought, oh fuck that. He nagged me. I picked it up again and ploughed doggedly through the first fifty pages. Seriously, I thought, fuck that. And then a few months later I was really bored, and flicked idly through the first chapters, and just fell into it. I don't know if it's because I'd changed in that time, or whether the initial 20- and 50-page reads had primed the Dune pump, but the third time, wow, it was as though we were made for each other. (I reread it periodically, and there are times it makes me impatient, times I learn something new and marvel, and times when its like a conversation with an old friend.)

When books come strongly recommended, I attempt them at least twice. I did that with Gormenghast (Mervyn Peake), the most recent try being two years ago. I won't be trying again. Me and mannerpunk just don't get on. (With the exception of Ellen Kushner's books.) Other highly recommended books I've failed to connect with enough times that I won't be trying again include Moby Dick (Melville), Sister Carrie (Dreiser), all of China Mieville's books, and, well, the list is very nearly endless.

Some books, of course, are so badly written or so offensive that it's simply not worth continuing past the first paragraph. (Yes, Virginia, you can tell that soon.) Anyway, I'm glad you gave Aud a second chance.

A really good book is like a really good wine--different as the reader ages, different depending on context: wine with old friends on a summer evening will taste utterly different to the same wine drunk from a plastic cup at a harshly-lit art opening. A truly great book, and one that fits us, can stand up to endless rereading. I'll probably read LotR another two dozen times before I die. (Unless, y'know, I get hit by a comet on the way to the mailbox.)

Aud is losing her Audness? Getting too soft? I'll agree that she's changing. She's certainly getting more complex, which means she thinks more about what she does. But the old Aud is still there under the increasingly dense veneer of civilisation. In fact, I have two more books outlined, and one day I might even write #5 because it would rock the thunderdome: Aud goes into total destroyer mode; the dial goes all the way to eleven. But if they ever get written, it won't be for a while.

You know, I've never called myself an atheist. I don't believe there are such things as gods or divine principles, but how can we know? Basically, I don't care, one way or the other, and actively refusing the possibility of god strikes me as a stance that is as impossible to prove as active belief. I'm not a believer in any way, shape, or form. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I'm a nontheist, or agnostic, or perhaps simply apathetic.

As for The Lord of the Rings being a religious book, no, I have to disagree with you. Perhaps after writing the book Tolkien persuaded himself of its Catholicism, but to me the main influences are philology and mythology and his experience as an English person of the era. (By this I mean he got to feel in his bones the difference between small-scale, workshop-based village life, where those who made things took care not to ruin the land around them, and urban large-scale manufacturing where those who bought the goods didn't seen the devastation and pollution caused by their creation; and he went through trench warfare in WWI.) The mythology is Anglo-Saxon and Norse, mainly; the languages are various--lots of Finnish, I think. But it's the language itself that made his motor run; you can feel it, pouring through the chapters like a millstream.

Yes, there's lots of good versus evil, but that's the most ancient story of all. It's the story religion is based upon, not the other way around. And I can speak from experience when I say that most writers, when they discuss their themes and influences, are bullshitting. We have no clue where our stuff comes from. Once we've written it, we can make some excellent guesses, but really what we're doing when we explain our process is just telling another story.

LotR is essentially a two-stranded tale: the story of Frodo (and Sam) and of Aragorn (and Gandalf). Neither of these characters is Christlike, in my opinion. (Though if I felt like it, I could construct a nifty argument that Frodo-plus-Sam might equate to a such a figure. Aragorn, on the other hand, is a pretty classic philosopher/warrior king--and Gandalf is definitely a mythological wanderer god/priest.) So Tolkien might have said, Yep, I'm doing Catholic stuff here, but in my not so humble opinion he was fooling himself.

But it's an interesting question: does the author's personal stance influence my reading of their work? Yes. The first time I read the novelette, "Ender's Game," by Orson Scott Card, I was blown away. Then I read the novel of the same name and liked it less well. Then I started reading interviews of and opinion pieces by him, and realised he was a homophobic arsehole. Knowledge of his homophobia made me think about the person behind the fiction, made me read it differently, and that's when I understood that Card has a twisted view of children and/or experience of childhood. That window into his life creeped me out. I won't read another thing by him. A similar thing happened to me after meeting Amy Bloom. I had admired her short fiction tremendously, for its humanity and subtlety (A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You blew me away), but then I read her novel, Love Invents Us, and was much less impressed. Then I met her and was less impressed still. Now I can't read her fiction.

But I wonder: was I predisposed to not like these authors as people because I'd read novels by them and so seen their hearts laid bare? And did learning even more about them simply confirm that initial knowledge? I don't know. People, and books, and reading, are complicated.

As for Hild, yes, you're right. Her story is, to a degree, the story of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. There are two things I will find tricky to navigate during the course of this book: the fact that Hild becomes an abbess, and that she gets married and has children.

That is, I thought they might be tricky until I found the most awesome workaround for the marriage thing, so I can write in my ambivalence about marrying a red-handed warlord and having his babies. (Yes, she does get married; yes, she has kids, but she feels awful about everything, for a really good reason. The whole thing is, as my sweetie might say, pretty squicky.) So then there's the knotty problem of her presumed god-fearing religiousness. I haven't got to the part yet (Hild was baptised when she was about 13, but didn't take the veil until she was 33; I've got years to go before I have to make real decisions), but her religion is going to be more about a sense of wonder, a need for order, and a humane urge to care for 'her people' than any sense of godliness as we understand it. I think it'll work. After all, half the priest I've ever met didn't actually believe in god. And the wonder she feels will, hopefully, be piercing.

Of course (and please bear in mind my 'bullshit' comment, above) this could all change. I never really make up my mind until I'm writing the words.

But however it turns out, my main aim is been to overwhelm the reader with the sense that, yes, this happened, yes, this is exactly how it was. I want you to be swept away, unable to even wonder if it could be just a tiny bit made up. I want you to believe--to know--when you've finished reading, that this is absolutely who Hild was: the story of her life, the tale of a pivotal moment in English history.

Pangur bán

I'm working on an enormous AN question about god and Tolkien right now, but it won't be ready until tomorrow. Meanwhile, as I've been thinking about both cats (our cat is ill) and medieval stuff, I thought I'd give you a 9th C. poem about a cat written by an Irish monk. The translation is by Eavan Boland.

Pangur bán

Messe [ocus] Pangur bán,

cechtar nathar fria saindán;

bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg,

mu menma céin im saincheirdd

Caraim-se fós, ferr cach clú,

oc mu lebrán léir ingnu;

ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán,

caraid cesin a maccdán.

Ó ru-biam ­ scél cén scis ­

innar tegdias ar n-oéndis,

táithiunn ­ dichríchide clius ­

ní fris 'tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth-huaraib ar greassaib gal

glenaid luch ina lín-sam;

os me, du-fuit im lín chéin

dliged ndoraid cu n-dronchéill.

Fúachaid-sem fri freaga fál

a rosc a nglése comlán;

fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis

mu rosc réil, cesu imdis.

Fáelid-sem cu n-déne dul,

hi nglen luch ina gérchrub;

hi-tucu cheist n-doraid n-dil,

os mé chene am fáelid.

Cia beimini amin nach ré

ní derban cách a chéle;

mait le cechtar nár a dán

subaigthiud a óenurán.

Hé fesin as choimsid dáu

in muid du-n-gní cach óenláu;

do thabairt doraid du glé

for mumud céin am messe.

Myself and Pangur, cat and sage
Go each about our business;
I harass my beloved page,
He his mouse.

Fame comes second to the peace
Of study, a still day
Unenvying, Pangur's choice
Is child's play.

Neither bored, both hone
At home a separate skill
Moving after hours alone
To the kill

When at last his net wraps
After a sly fight
Around a mouse; mine traps
Sudden insight.

On my cell wall here,
His sight fixes, burning,
Searching; my old eyes peer
At new learning,

And his delight when his claws
Close on his prey
Equals mine when sudden clues
Light my way.

So we find by degrees
Peace in solitude,
Both of us, solitaries,
Have each the trade

He loves: Pangur, never idle
Day or night
Hunts mice; I hunt each riddle
From dark to light.

I found this via Per Omnia Saecula, run by Jennifer Lynn Jordan, who, among other things, every week does a feature on medieval animals.

good writing days and bad

From: Robin

My assumption is that all writers have good days and bad days (writing). Would you be willing to describe what one of each of those days would look like for you? BTW glad to hear your current meds are helping!

This might get complicated. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate a reasonably good writing day from a fairly bad one. However, a brilliant writing day and a terrible writing day are easy to tell apart, so I'll start with those.

A brilliant day begins early, and with energy. I bound out of bed, eat breakfast with Kelley; we laugh at the funnies, sketch out a rough plan for the day (will we both be in for lunch? who is making dinner and what will it be? do we have any appointments--dentist, vet--that day and is it a one- or two-person thing? what decisions will we be making--we usually make decisions during lunch, but it's good to at least look at the shape of things to decide in advance so our hindbrains can be doing the heavy lifting), and then I go exercise. On a really good day I whip through my stretching because I'm eager to get to my desk; pictures, snatches of phrases are falling into my head; I know what music I'll want to listen to, because I understand the emotional arc of the scenes I'm about to write. I get to my desk, open my Hild file, turn on the music--loud, oh very loud; lately I start with a 3-repeat of 'Faster Kill Pussycat' which always gets me pumped--and start reading. Before I know it, I'm correcting the last few lines of yesterday's work, and then, as the rest of my playlist kicks in (current favourite, one I call 'noise', full of Led Zeppelin, Curve, Hednoiz, Pigeonhed, Deep Purple--oh, god, their stuff needs fixing; I'd love to hear a Paul Oakenfold remix of 'Smoke on the Water', the opening riff is so good and then it all goes to hell--Pink Floyd, Evanescence, and of course Brittany Murphy/Paul Oakenfold), zsst, I slide in, I'm there, living the 7th century, seeing it, feeling it, transcribing its rhythms.

At this stage though, I can't afford to completely give it up to Hild. So a little before noon I ease away and do email things--reply to lots of messages on my Yahoo group, deal with business stuff, maybe rough out a future blog post, like this--then I have lunch. After lunch on a brilliant day I take my cup of tea to my office and plunge back in. And now I really do get lost. My playlist is on repeat, I have a huge glass of water to hand, and I just go. On a truly great day I'll write two or three thousand words, and those words will be pivotal to the novel. On those days, I can do no wordly wrong, the sentences purl out, and they're tight and clean and make me just burst with joy when I contemplate them later.

Then I save everything (I save to disk automatically every few seconds--go Alt S--while I'm working, but at the end of the day I order Carbonite to save nownownow, I save to my flashdrive, and--if it's been a particularly productive and brilliant day--upload the file to a private area of my website, too. (This, though, is really rare, usually something I do when I have a whole chunk of a novel done.) Then around six o'clock I roust Kelley from her office and we drink beer and unwind while we prep our dinner. Then we eat. Then we watch TV or read or whatever, at which point I notice how fucking tired I am.

If I'm lucky, after a brilliant day I have a deep and dreamless sleep and wake all sharp and fresh and ready to go again. Sometimes, though, the writing brain is so engaged it won't turn off, and then I just skim sleep while dodging snatches of dialogue and images of What Happens Next.

On a terrible day I feel as though I never quite wake up. I get up and move slowly. I don't want to make decisions, I find the funnies unfunny, I don't give a shit what we're going to have for dinner. I drag myself off to exercise and spend most of the time just lying there, zoning, instead of stretching. No ideas fall into my head. Music is irritating. I open my Hild file and think, Well, what a load of crap. And my mind remains blank. So then I do my email--actually, I read my email but can't be bothered to respond to any of it--and read blogs. Then have lunch. And after lunch I take my tea to the living room and read with the cat on my lap for an hour. Then I haul myself back to my desk, read Hild, and think, Tuh, and wonder what I'd been smoking the day before. And I have no idea how to write what comes next. But I bash my head against it, anyway, for a couple of hours and maybe squeeze out 200 words, which I know I'll end up deleting. Then I give up. I creep into the living room and brood. Then when it's beer time and K says brightly, so how did your work go? I say, I don't want to talk about it! Then we're silent for a moment, then I talk about it.

The good and the so-so and the medium-to-nothing days are more difficult to tell apart. A whole laundry list of factors contribute to making writing easy or hard. Sometimes, writing is hard because I'm tired or emotionally overwhelmed. Sometimes this is connected to the work, sometimes, not. For example, three or four days ago, I was having the hardest time coming to grips with the next section of my novel; I felt a vast reluctance to go there. Partly this was because I was fretting about other things (the cat, actually; he's old and has been unwell) and partly because, unbeknownst to me, the section I was about to embark on was resonating with my grief for my mother and sisters. Once I'd figured that out, though, bam!, I dove back in, and what I've been writing is informed by an extra-rich layer of loss and its possibilities. Sometimes I have a hard time writing because I'm physically uncomfortable, e.g. I've pulled a huge muscle in my back and sitting at a keyboard hurts. Sometimes it's hard because the last thing I wrote was the wrong thing: heading down a bad path, plot- or character-wise.

Sometimes I can have a good writing day yet not write much. This is happening more than usual at the moment, and it's related to writing historical fiction. Writing mainstream fiction is easy--everyone knows what a bed is like, what people eat and wear, how things work. For the seventh century--unlike, say, Regency England (the rake, the dandy, the ball, dance cards), or WWII (the Blitz, rationing, grey skies filled with barrage balloons, weak tea)--there are no handy plug-ins. I have to invent everything, every single thing, from scratch. If Hild walks into the dairy, what does it look like? (Would there be a dairy? Cows were most likely milked in the field, sheep in a pen.) How do you make cheese when there is no stainless steel? What do you store the milk in with no glass, no refrigeration? (You don't; you turn it into cheese and butter and whey.) How many women/girls does it take to milk how many cows and sheep? What are the buckets made of? (Sycamore, because it doesn't leave a nasty aftertaste in the milk.) And that's just process and artefacts. Social relationships were different, too. I've never written anything full of slavery before, never dealt with a heroic society without literacy. (That changes later, of course.) So a good writing day can be a good inventing/visualising day but a not-many-words-on-the-page day.

Writing this novel reminds me of writing Ammonite. There's so much world-building that in order to really visualise it, I need, on some level to spend my days there. This means I can't work for two hours then do something else, like go out for lunch and see a movie. This kind of imaginitive work requires immersion. I can't make phone calls, do interviews, do a reading & signing, go to the neurologist and discuss my treatment at length, because that pops me out of the world, and it takes a while to get back. More and more I wish I could divide my life into chunks: two months on an island without a phone and no ferry, two weeks downtown going to all the fab new restaurants, seeing the films; two months on the island. I hestitate to tell people this, mostly, because it sounds so...self-indulgent and artsy. But it really is becoming more and more necessary for me to become a complete hermit for days at a time.

Where was I? Ah. What seems like a good writing day--a thousand solid words with some nifty metaphors, a plot twist, and a poignant moment--can turn out to be a dead end, and everything created that day, the mental scenes and relationships as well as the words, gets deleted. Or, rarely, it can turn into a good writing day on an entirely different project: a whole scene of dialogue for my sword-swangin' fantasy novel (or, as I'm starting to think of it, my alternate history fantasy), or feverish notes for a new essay.

So, from day to day, it's hard to tell. But, hey, yesterday--I'm pretty sure--was a pretty damn good day. And things are looking promising for today. Two hours from now, with luck, I'll be utterly lost.

self defense for couples

From: rhbee

Ever since I finished reading Always Terr and I have been discussing the idea of taking a self defense class. She is 44 and just had gall bladder surgery and has chronic shoulder problems from the kind of work we do. I am physically fit, run every day, ride my bike everywhere, dance a lot, and generally feel great but I do have nerve damage to my right arm that I generally have to work around. The thing is, that physical things aside, neither one of us knows if there actually are classes in self defence for couples or for that matter for both sexes. It seems silly to me to assume that men don't need to know how but then the way the world looks at things is quite often silly. So I guess my question is this, are there classes for both of us or should we be looking to take a class separately and then share with each other?

Where do you live? East coast? IMPACT in Boston does women and men's classes--though I'm not sure if they teach both at once. The Center for Anti-Violence Education in Brooklyn teaches women and men (though I think they may have a policy that you must belong to a community--such as trans or gay or women--which is statistically more at risk. But check.) For links to these and others, including west coast and national organisations, see the community resources page of my website.)

I think there should be SD for couples. I think it would be seriously cool. Just think of all those films we've seen in the last few years, e.g. Batman Begins and The Brave One, where couples get attacked and killed. Imagine if they had known what to do. (No story. No movie. Uh-oh...) Both Kelley and I have studied sd. I taught my previous partner while we were together. I think it's really important to have the same perspective in case of emergency. Most men are stronger than most women, but SD isn't about strength. So, yes, men could learn a lot from SD workshops.

SD is for everyone, no matter one's age or physical ability. I was recently asked if I'd teach a SD workshop at a camp for people with MS, later this month. I had to say no because I couldn't fit it into my schedule. But it would be marvellous to help people who have, to some degree, begun to think of themselves as helpless, as victims waiting to happen, to unlearn that attitude. You can learn SD if you're ninety, or blind, or have cerebral palsy. You can learn if you're six, or one-handed, or in a wheelchair. Clearly if you belong to one of the above categories, you can't do some of the things that young, fully-functional, or healthy can do, but you can do a lot. SD is as much about awareness as anything else. Please do check out those links and talk to people. If you're in a big city, I think it's very likely you'll find something suitable--but it'll take a bit of looking. And if you do find something, please let me know so I can add the info to my community resources page.

awesomer than that awesomest thing that ever did awesome!

I have one last question to go, about self-defense for couples, but I thought today we all deserved a bit of fun.

Last week I read a most wonderful blog post by Michelle Schwartz about The Blue Place. Here's an excerpt of a list she kept of Aud's incredible traits. Aud:

1. Is a former member of the elite Red Dogs unit of the Atlanta Police Department.
2. Has inherited a vast sum of money, leaving her wealthy enough to never work again.
3. But that’s not who she is, so she keeps busy working as a bodyguard and private detective, charging exorbitant fees, driving expensive cars and wearing gorgeous suits because she’s worth it.
4. Her mom is head of the Norwegian consulate to the United Kingdom, and has connections to everyone. Aud is thus a dual citizen with Norway and the UK, and seems to be a permanent resident in the US as well. She speaks Norwegian, English, and Spanish, and I’m sure many other languages that didn’t come up as part of this story. She seems to have been everywhere at least once and knows everything about everything. And I mean everything.
5. She can drive stick.
6. She is also a pool shark.
7. She is six feet tall and much of the book is devoted to long passages extolling her exceptional muscle tone and piercing eyes.
8. In her (seemingly endless amount of) spare time she:
a) Teaches self-defense to rookie cops.
b) Practices at keeping her black belt in some form of exceedingly difficult martial art.
c) Lays sod, digs flowerbeds, and generally creates a garden paradise in her backyard.
d) Does home renovations by herself that include building an entire deck and replacing the beams in her ceiling with antique wood.
e) Expertly builds custom furniture by hand.
f) Climbs glaciers specifically looking for deadly crevasses to peer into.
g) Can seduce any woman she wants, just by existing in the same room.

9. She has saved a skydiver from certain death by cutting the cords of her own parachute, plummeting to Earth like a rocket, grabbing the person with a faulty chute and holding on to them with her thighs, pulling her emergency chute with just seconds to spare.
10. She looks great in evening gowns and combat gear, but spends a lot of time standing around, gloriously naked.
11. She can hold her breath for minutes while remaining under freezing cold water.
12. She can treat bullet wounds to her own back while suffering from hypothermia.
13. She can drive any speed she wants without ever getting pulled over.
14. She can kill people left and right and never get in trouble.
15. She even makes her bed in the morning.

In conclusion, Aud is awesomer than that awesomest thing that ever did awesome. She is like Wonder Woman, Ripley, Sarah Connor, and a unicorn - all rolled into one hot package.

Michelle is funny. Go read her stuff. And while you do, sip on one of my new favourite cocktails, a James Bond:

James Bond Cocktail

• French but not viciously expensive champagne
• excellent vodka
• angustura bitters
• sugar cubes (the rough, brown kind)

Pour about .75 oz. of delicious, frozen-to-viscosity vodka (e.g. Grey Goose) into a champagne flute. Fill flute to about the three-quarters mark with chilled brut champagne (a good cremant, like Lucien Albrecht, also works, but do not, do *not*, use cava or sparkling American wine, tuh). Take sugar cube, hold with thumb over mouth of bitters bottle, tip for a 3-count. Turn sugar cube around, soak it for another 3-count on the other side. Drop cube into flute, serve. Aaah.

Askablogr

from: Chris DeVore

Hi Nicola, thanks for giving Askablogr a shot. Have you seen Clive Thompson's spin on sci-fi & literature? Does that feel true to you?

Many thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Askablogr widget. I tried it, as you can see, but I don't really think it's a good fit for this blog. For one thing, this isn't a technical Q&A space, it's more conversational. I think we'd need a limit of something like 2,000 characters, not 200, which would seriously screw with the Askablogr community guidelines. I'll leave it up for another couple of days but then I think it'll come down. Thanks again, though, for thinking of me.

Clive Thompson says, in part:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas. From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball.

Yes, sf--at least some of it--has remained philosophically robust and willing to explore Big Ideas while much litfic has grown etiolated. Sf could have been designed for such exploration. At its best, it's metaphor made concrete. As Delany has pointed out more than once, in sf you can say, 'Her world exploded,' and it's more than a figure of speech. However, I'd hesitate to go as far as saying litfic has 'dropped the ball'. It hasn't been playing with the ball. While sf has been shouting and drinking beer and throwing the football, litfic has been wrestling with chalkboards full of meaningless equations and startling at loud noises.

Most literary fiction these days is about small people doing small things, living lives of quiet desperation. I loathe it. I like books where stuff happens *and* people ruminate on why, how, what for etc. But stuff has to *happen* to hold my interest. But, oof, I've written a whole essay about this, called "Brilliance and Beauty and Risk."