I don't want to talk about what happened to Sci-Fi Friday last week. You don't want me to either. It involved a twenty-four hour stomach flu buggy type of thing that stole 48hrs and about every drop of water in my body.

I had plans to talk about something interesting for Miscellaneous Monday today, but I'm nearly too angry to function, to be frank. I can't reference you to a long saga on social media because I have this weird hang-up about how nobody really wants to hear me complain about things, but it's not been a pleasant few days for me. I'll try and spill it all out the short way round so we can all go back to our lives. 

The state I live in has emissions requirements for my county that I could give you chapter and verse on my opinion of but it doesn't add anything to the story and it makes me sound like a card carrying socialist. The pertinent bit is that every year since we've moved here I've spent at least six-hundred dollars a year to get over this hurdle and keep my car tags active. And that's just on my car, not counting my husbands which is an epic, annoying story for another time. I totaled it up this weekend, when for the first time someone looked at me blankly and said 'no, you don't need to clear your check engine light to pass your safety inspection'.

Five. Thousand. Dollars. 

Now, in the interest of fairness three years of that the work needed to be done because my emissions inspection was due. Last year the repair shop I took it to charged me $1900 dollars to clear my board. You can imagine my surprise when I found out they didn't report my emissions pass for last year. It was about equal to when I found out this year they don't even do emissions inspections. Apparently they no longer do safety inspections either. 

My sister in Kansas suggested I could just buy a new used car for that. And maybe I could, and maybe I'm cynical because I don't think that'd fix the problem. I'd just be doing this with a newer car I hadn't payed off yet.

"I wish I could write as mysteriously as a cat."

-Edgar Allen Poe                            

I don't quite know what to do with that. There are absolutely worse writers to be compared to, but I always attributed a certain level of...crazy to Poe. Not just in his private life, but in his writing too. I've been told I'm good at creepy, even in places I don't particularly think I'm being creepy. 

If I ever turn up incoherent in Baltimore, figure out why I died before you bury me please. And for the love of all things holy, don't let someone who hates me write my eulogy. Also, there will be no marrying of thirteen year old cousins (obviously).

It would be nice to manage a decent short story though.

For the sake of argument I put a different book snipped in their thing, and it gave me Cory Doctorow--who I'd never read and I've just fallen in love with the first twenty pages of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

I made a post a while back, about how stories start as snowballs. Tonight has been an exercise in reminding me that it's not just stories that start as Snowballs. 

Once upon a time, a few months ago, Lovely Kate who is in charge of the local arm of First Book and I discussed doing a joint charity thing, she as First Book and me as our local NaNoWriMo bit. At the beginning of the evening it was going to be a small intimate sort of charity thing (I'd call it a soiree, but I have self respect).

Now it's going to be this...

I'm still steeple-ing my fingers like a cliche villain. If things go according to plan there will be local artists and crafters and writers and book lovers and...

I have homework for this week, spuriously about finding event space and also about starting to knock up promotional materials. Can you guess how much of the rest of the stuff I'm supposed to be doing is going to happen? 

New projects are always exciting. 

I promise eventually Sci-Fi Fridays will get back to having science content (as much as I ever had science content, shush you).

For tonight I'm being simple and rambling on for a bit about something I've noticed in Sci-Fi (particularly the movies) and then giving you an update on the Marianas Trench Contest. 

Why is 'the humans are a**holes' a genre? Every time I see one of these I want to punch something small and fuzzy. It's like some ridiculous nod to the 'noble savage' novels that used to be so popular, where the native peoples on a planet are peaceful and nature loving and then the big, corrupt, evil humans come along and ruin everything. 

I'm not in any way saying I don't think we'd do this, any more than I'm saying it's not turning a legitimate historical precedent into a futuristic setting. Mostly I'm saying I'm tired of watching Pocahontas In Space. It's lazy, one dimensional story-telling. And it sells us short. 

Do I think, if we ever start colonizing space (basically it's a numbers game, imo, it's gotta happen some time) we're going to do everything right? No. Because we're human, and for good or ill forethought isn't always our most used trait. But fiction is fiction for a reason, and seeing ourselves as horrible wastes of life isn't the only way to make us question our behavior.

Okay, rant over.

So, update about the Marianas Trench Contest. I've decided on a prize, for the winner. I'd post a photo, but I don't have one that I have rights to, so it'll have to wait until I'm finished. So, whoever submits something to me by April 20th will get a hand-knitted plot bunny. I'll make it long before then and post a picture for inspiration.

It's Wednesday again, and I'm allowed to spuriously talk about writing (in that I'm usually talking about reading).

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, squeezing in a blog post because I promised I would, listening to the dish-washer whir away, and having a devilishly hard time thinking of the last time I read a book where I really liked the ending. It's entirely possible most of that is because I'm picky. Because I long ago learned the knack for liking something even if parts of it left me wanting.

I just finished John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and I'd recommend it a hundred times over, but if you asked me for a review nearly everything I told you would be negative. Which makes me sound like some insane keyboard wielding Negative Nancy. Just because he walked away from one tiny little plot string shouldn't ruin an entire series. It doesn't. I just really wanna know what happened.

And right now, thinking about unsatisfying endings all I can think about is Anne Rice. Someone mentioned the other day that she's coming out with a new Lestat book, and this was generally greeted with happy sentiments. By everybody but me. 

I did my Anne Rice phase, and honestly I wish I was still in it some days. I gobbled up The Vampire Lestat, and suffered through Interview with a Vampire both on screen and page. I read the Violin and wondered why I was so sad about a book I didn't even particularly like.

And I read Tales of the Body Thief. 

If there was a sane, straightforward way to tell you of my love for that book, while I was reading it, I'd probably have found it in the last fifteen years or so. I haven't. I savored every page, disappeared into that world with every chance I had, slowly and methodically because I didn't want it to be over. Right until the end. 

After all that love, it's natural to be a little disappointed, right? Because I'd built it up so far there was no possible way to write me a satisfying ending. I can see that, I even accept it. That's not what happened. I wasn't mildly unsatisfied by the ending, I hated it. And if I tell you why I might not stop writing this until sometime Friday. The short answer is I finished the book and felt lied to and manipulated. 

Maybe if I'd read it in my thirties I would have been prepared for that. I've had more than a decade for the world to find new and inventive ways to disappoint me (isn't that a depressing thought) and I'm a little less surprised by it every time it happens. But that one was painful, and it's fundamentally shaped nearly every literary opinion I've had since. 

I feel like there should be a support group for this.

"Hi, my name is Jules."
"Hi Jules," you all offer kindly.
"It's been seventeen years," I tearfully confess. "I'm still not over it." 

I may have to rename 'Miscellaneous Monday' soon, because I think we might be stretching the bounds of what actually counts as Miscellaneous. 

I think everybody knows the famous JFK quote, where he referred to himself as a breakfast confection while (successfully) attempting to reassure West Berlin after the building of the Berlin Wall. If you've somehow missed this little moment in history, there's a Wikipedia article here that sums it up pretty well (although I don't know that I trust it on when the story started). 

I have mixed feelings about Kennedy. It's hard to clearly view any well loved historical figure, particularly one who was assassinated young. Not just JFK, but his entire family had a wide, strange effect on American History. And that's only if you count the good things. 

My Monday Night Peeples were talking about Jelly Donut quotes, and I was searching around for blog inspiration and it made me think. For me, JFK is forever linked with my mother's commitment to voter responsibility. JFK was the first person she ever got to vote for, and it's made her a life-long democrat when I'm never sure she would have been, otherwise. I can't conceive of that dedication to party, but maybe that's because my first ballot wasn't followed by an assassination. 

I wonder what people my generation whose opinions on JFK aren't colored by what their parents think of him? 

Photo at the top from here under this license. 

I'm lazy, and it's my anniversary this weekend, so you're getting flash fiction instead of a post. And yes, I realize how close to not-friday-anymore it is. Shush.

Jaegar Deep Sea Class PerSub, Marianas 
Twelve years. 
Twelve years, three girlfriends, three missed weddings, one Christmas his mother still wouldn't let him forget, three diplomas, and more student debt than he could count. 
Thirty eight million dollars he'd begged, borrowed, and done everything but steal for. 3 million hours designing an entire class of personal submersible. Six test dives. Two late-stage redesigns. Three grant re-fillings. 
One hiatus due to Giant Squid attack. 
All for this. Because there was a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and he needed to know what was behind it.
None of it had prepared him for the truth.

It's not as if I don't have enough to do. It's nearly halfway through the month, and I'm woefully behind on my writing goals, and barely hanging on to the editing ones. I should have plenty of time to add extra stuff to that, right?

I'll wait for the hyenas in the back to finish.

While I was faffing about the internet looking for blog inspiration (or any kind of inspiration at all, if you happen to be paying attention) I came across this article on Buzzfeed and it sort of reached out and grabbed me. 

I read a lot, and one of my goals this year was to read more consistently. To pick a book every month and at least get through that one. January was The Cuckoo's Calling, February was TFiOS. March is the last of John Scalzi's Old Man's War trilogy. Yay, that seems to be going fine, right? Except for the whole thing where I've got nine months left, and only three more books on the list. 

There are a few on that list of books people say they've read that the haven't that I've got every intention of picking up, but a list of classics isn't what I'm looking for. I don't want books a literature professor would suggest, or the NYT Bestsellers list. I want books people love. 

So, it's time for more audience participation (and I still haven't come up with a prize for the last one, but whatevs). Now you all get to be book evangelists. No holds barred, no caveats. Any book, any genre, any content. If you love it, drop it in the comments and I'll add it to the list.

I'm going to risk condemning us all to another few weeks of winter and call it spring. I slept with my window open last night and didn't wake up freezing, and that's good enough for me. 

I could blather on about how much I love spring, and all the things I plan to do, but I'm actually kind of partial of all the seasons in their own way. I like spring, but not more than I like winter or fall. I even like summer, for about two weeks before I'm tired of being hot. 

Spring is special, absolutely. Everything starts to grow again, and I can hear birds, and the light is yellow which--other than making it impossible for me to sleep for the first two weeks--I really appreciate. Sunlight in winter is too white, it doesn't feel like sunlight. I can't find it anymore, but I read something once about this being because of our angle to the sun, and the wave-lengths of light that gets through the atmosphere. 

It's still early spring, so it's a pale yellow, but in another week or two the cherry blossoms will be out, and the trees out behind my house will be a cacophony of bird noise, and the squirrels will re-discover their favorite pastime (i.e. torturing my cat through the screen door). 

And I feel like looking at pretty things, so I'm going to put a gallery down below with some of my favorite spring pictures. Hopefully it's more entertaining than making you all look at vacation pics.

Do any of you have special out-doorsy plans for this spring?

Today's Sci-Fi Friday post is all about audience participation (I'm lazy, three times a week is harder than it looks).

So, it's the internet and rumors abound, and apparently every time I'm hard up for a blog topic we're going to hit one. Don't question. Today's rumor, spurred on by a certain XKCD comic, is that James Cameron found a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 

I'm going to just stare at that for a minute, and bask in the fact it's under this license and I'm totally allowed to do that. Also, if you click on the comic it'll take you to the xkcd website where there are so many other comics and I don't even know where to start. 

Anyway, here's the audience participation part. Tell me a story (in summary or whatever) about what Mr Cameron found behind that door that I'm about ninety-percent sure wasn't there. I'll devise some sort of prizey thing for the one I like the best.

Edit: I'm not sure how legal this is, but I'm claiming it anyway. Anything down there in the comments belongs to and is the responcibility of the poster.