handful_ofdust

Things that have happened: I went to StokerCon in Denver as a guest of honour, then came back with a spooky (and extremely heavy) little house made from resin in my backpack, having won the Bram Stoker Award for 2021 Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection for In That Endlessness, Our End. I'd hoped it would happen, but didn't dare expect it to; man, it feels good.

While there, meanwhile, I met an agent--Becky LeJeune of Bond Literary Agency. I've since signed with her, and In Red Company is a go. I've got 20,000 words to hammer down into the first three chapters, as well as three short stories and a synopsis to finish by the end of June. As one dows, especially if one is me.;)

Note to self: The process of getting my shit in order has already revealed that I am superlatively bad at organization. Thank god I have an agent, eh?

Anyhow, more to come. How are YOU all?

My friend Neil died. I heard about it second-hand, through a Facebook message; later I spoke with his mother, who still remembered me as one of his "best" friends, even though I hadn't seen him in person for...five years? At least.

He died alone. He'd been clean for years, but these are hard times to stay clean. I feel like I failed him, and I probably did, but I also don't want to make it all about me. I think I'm having trouble processing it. I wonder why that surprises me.

He was my oldest friend. We dug coal together in the child psychiatry mines. I literally met him at my therapist's, in the waiting room. We meant a lot to each other at one point. I don't think I'd be who I am without having known him. And now people are commiserating with me over my loss, but my loss is pretty well nothing compared to his. I'm grateful for the support, obviously. And yet.

So that's how it's going. I make food and do laundry and watch dumb stuff on TV. I sleep a lot. And my friend is dead, and he died alone. I need to think about that. I don't want to think about that.

From the department of odd things to feel bad about, I've been journalling physically--like, in a journal--and can't help but notice that that's been really cutting down on the stuff I enter into my online journal, ie here. Last night, for example, I wrote a big thing about how I'd been talking with a friend about Cal (and Steve, and myself) and his problems with filtering, only to be suddenly struck with a memory about the time I had to interview to get into my alternative high school and had what I thought at the time was some sort of breakdown, but what I now see must have been a classic case of being autistically overwhelmed: I froze, was overtaken by waves of conflicting emotions so strong I felt like they were going to kill me, then decided that I couldn't let them show because that would ruin my chances of getting in. So of course my coping strategy was to cry and bite myself really hard at the same time, so hard I left marks I could stick my thumbnail inside up to the meat of my thumb, so hard it left a huge bruise and a slight scar.

Then I re-interviewed a week later and got in, thank Christ. Probably because they'd figured out that if I ended up "having" to go back into the normal public school system, who the fuck knew why might happen...but whatever, it's over. It's long, long over.

Still, it would have been helpful to know exactly what that was about, at the time. That it wasn't because I was hopelessly broken, but because I was different.

I want to make sure Cal never has to feel like that. If I do nothing else for him besides what I'm already doing, what I've already done, I want that. I want to teach him he doesn't have to show everything he feels, and even if he does, it's not the worst thing ever. It won't kill him. Nothing will, except death.;)

Finally managed to make it out to one of the pop-ups my Mom's been hammering on me to attend and stood in line for basically two hours in a row, but I am now officially booster-shot. Next up: Getting permission for Cal, scheduling his appointment, etc. This is the first time I've had two doses of the same vaccine (Pfizer), which may explain why I'm really feeling it this time around--feverish, tired, snuffly, at least slightly achey. So I didn't get much done today, aside from making sure that Cal attended his afternoon session and having a three-hour nap. Now I'm re-watching Maury and Bustillo's The Deep House while answering email from earlier in the day, and planning to go to bed early.

Today was January 6, of course. A year later. Nothing happened, thankfully. Then again, all that might mean is that these assholes have something new scheduled for later. But I can't worry about that.

Stuff to do: Finish an intro for a friend's book by Monday; write an autobiographical sketch about becoming a writer; update my bibliography; write a new short story (4,000 words at most). I'm thinking I might try to spin it off a section I wrote for a round-robin piece no one probably ever saw, aside from me--it was good work, so why not? Especially if I change some stuff.

Okay, I can't really focus anymore. Fin.

And the seasons, they go 'round and 'round. Today I got up at 10:00 AM, fixing this once more as the time I'm determined to get up at from now on, in the service of turning my fucking clock around yet again. Things got crazy over the holidays, as they tend to, but all that is over now. Cal is supposed to be back at school by Wednesday, Omicron or not; we'll see, I guess. More likely I'm going to be stuck inside and he is too, while Steve steadfastly ignores what's going on completely. And to be frank I don't care much about the latter, so long as HE mostly stays inside as well, and wears a fucking mask when he doesn't. He does seem to have picked up a couple of clues about just how amazingly depressed I've been recently, resulting in him pitching in with the chores, if nothing else. I'll take it, especially the more-than-occasional vacuuming of the rug before it gets insanely crunchy.

Mom is scared and lonely, for which I can hardly blame her. I still haven't written to my Dad, possibly because I can't figure out what's worth saying. But last night's festivities included an impromptu return to Elementary on the SciFi Channel, a weird but welcome programming decision; Christ, I really do miss that show. Maybe I'll see if Crave has it, and do a re-watch from the beginning. They also included Cal doing a little concert for us, and me making fries from scratch for him in the new air fryer Mom got us. (He liked them, a lot.) Steve ran the Christmas Log channel. Etc.

Anyhow. I have a 15,000-word deadline set for the end of January, plus a book to edit (Dark is Better, all laid out at last). I want to jump-start a bunch of stuff. I want to write, and write, and write. I want to believe I'm only responsible for what I can BE responsible for. It's enough to get on with.

Seen recently on Tubi: A Frozen Flower (2008, wr./dir. Yoo Ha), a beautiful, tragic, relentlessly horny historical fantasy that reads somewhat like Guy Gavriel Kay switching to soft-core. During the Goryeo Dynasty, Korea is under the fist of what I can only assume is the Manchu version of the Chinese Empire; the king is married to a Manchu princess with whom he has completely failed to breed a biological heir to the throne, for the simple reason that he's super-gay, as one might have already figured out by noting that he's not only surrounded himself with a cadre of hot bodyguards literally raised from boyhood to worship and protect him, but is also currently sleeping with their leader. (Part of what I like about this scenario is that it reveals the king as less a femme-y dude fainting over a bunch of himbos than as a guy-ly guy who just really likes guy stuff, including hunting, fencing, and--well--guys.) This relationship between the kind and his chief bodyguard is more than a bit squicky when you add in the grooming element, but still romantic in a very sad way, because a large part of the film spins around the utter inability of the king to ever believe that anyone really loves him for him, per se...I mean, let's face it; the power dynamic is always going to be slanted in his favour.

This becomes particularly obvious once the Manchu Emperor sends a pair of envoys to set a deadline for the king to either damn well finally get the queen pregnant or face someone from another clan being randomly selected as his official heir, and the only plan the king can think of under this sort of pressure is to order his boyfriend to sleep with the queen instead. At first, the chief bodyguard doesn't even know if he can function with a woman at all; one assumes he lost his virginity with the king, and he certainly hasn't slept with anybody else since then. Luckily (or unluckily, as it turns out), he soon discovers he must be essentially bi, and he and the queen quickly move from mutual dub-con embarrassment to surprising amounts of physical enjoyment mixed with deepening emotional bonding. This may well be helped along by the fact that neither of them can initially refuse the king's orders, which later allows them to fall back on that fact when the king starts to get jealous despite himself. ("So, lad," the king asks his chief bodyguard the morning after, for example; "how does it feel to finally become a man?" "I merely followed your commands, sire," the chief replies, face completely unreadable.)

And where does this go? Nowhere good, unsurprisingly: Even when the queen conceives, it's obvious the king is probably going to have to end up slaughtering everybody who's aware of how it happened, and by that time he's already not only clapped his former boyfriend in jail for "seducing" his wife but also had him castrated, to boot. What really gets the king's goat is not just that his queen's affections have gone walkabout, but that the person they left town with is the same person he still loves, thus making him doubt that the chief bodyguard's love for him was ever anything but a polite show of submission. "Did you ever really love me?" the king demands, during their final duel, after he's broken the chief bodyguard's sword; "No, never," the chief bodyguard lies, obviously, just so the king will stab him deeply enough to pull himself within throat-cutting range. And when the queen, who the chief bodyguard thought was dead, runs in screaming with grief over her dying lover, the last thing he does is to turn his gaze back onto the king's dead face.

So yeah, it's great: Operatic and pornographic, by turns. Just the thing I would have obsessed over when I was younger, and desperately wanted to see people fuck onscreen--well, not people, so much, as characters I cared about. To see a movie where, for once, the proverbial lamp DIDN'T suddenly go out when guys started making out with guys.

Finally finished a story I've been working on last night, sliding it in just before the deadline my very patient editor had already extended for me twice, and celebrated by watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was an utterly enjoyable mash-up of MCU and wuxia. It's always good to see Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, together or otherwise, while Awkwafina and Simu Liu make for an amazing hero/best friend pairing. The true discovery, however, is Meng'er Zhang as Xu Xialing, Shang-Chi's perpetually overlooked little sister, the movie's Fah Lo Suee expy. "You're so cool, and everything you do is so cool," as Awkwafina's Katy announces, at one point.

Overall, I approve of Shang-Chi's supervillain father's transition from (literally) Dr Fu Manchu to legendary thousand-year-old former warlord turned criminal mastermind Xu Wenwu, a man who comes with weird romanticism baked into every inch of him (again, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Near the climax, I muttered to Steve: "Thousand-year soul, aged like an egg," which seemed a fitting eulogy. Meanwhile, I can't wait for the mystical warriors of Ta Lo (the dimension-straddling pocket country Shang-Chi's mother came from) to meet up with Wakanda's core crew at some point: Soul lions vs. war rhinos, Sunday Sunday Sunday.

In other news, I haven't watched Black Widow yet, and I should, I really should. I didn't expect to still be this pissed off with what they did with her, two--three?--years later. Not that it has shit to do with me, or ever did.

At any rate. Now I need to get dressed, go pick up Cal from school and ferry him over to the orthodontist, so we can find out how much his braces are going to cost us.

As I get older, I feel more and more ambivalent about the way that North American culture glorifies the military mindset. The way that everyone wants to think of themselves as "a warrior for" some fucking thing, particularly male-identified people. I'm so happy that Cal's as gentle as he is, even though I get worried for him sometimes when his enthusiasm rockets up into the "could be mistaken for aggression" part of the behavioural spectrum. The longer he can register as a child, somebody other people want to take care of, the better things will be for him. What a sad fucking world we live in, really.

Then again, I did just watch The Suicide Squad, in which literally hundreds of people get slaughtered by antiheroes we're nevertheless encouraged to cheer for, especially when they risk getting their heads blown up by going back to save a city from a kaiju-sized starfish, and one of them finally learns to fight through his musophobia so he can stroke the helpful pouch-rat that insists on loving him rather than punch it into the stratosphere. It's a vicious, ridiculous film, and I enjoyed it completely.

Read an amazingly annoying Toronto Life article today from the POV of a guy who swapped his crazily nice paid-off house next to Trinity Bellwoods Park for a rental farm/mansion on a three-acre patch out in the middle of nowhere, Ontari-ari-o, only to suffer severe buyer's remorse within what I can only guess was a year of doing so. "Look in any direction, and it's about a mile to the next person," he complains, to which I can only think Yet that never occurred to you before you signed the lease, apparently? The whole thing just reminds me of how much open, unoccupied space freaks me out in general, especially when it's essentially just a giant-ass lawn with one house in the back/middle of it: What is it you need all that room for, exactly? To make sure nobody passing by can hear the screams issuing from your basement, or what?

Meanwhile, I see all that space and think When are you putting in a vegetable patch, a gazebo, a bunch of those pre-fab cabins? You could start an artist's retreat. Or Wow, you could rent half of that out as a tiny home village, or whatever. Anything to make sure that you actually have human beings around you on occasion, even cyclically...and I don't even like people, particularly. Hell, I'd probably start a small outdoor theatre. Anything to not be alone underneath the gigantic country sky at night, the stark blaze of naked stars.

These thoughts also probably brought to you by the fact that David Demchuk is moving to Nova Scotia, and while I congratulate him on his bravery, the very concept of doing something similar makes cold sweat break out all over my body. I told Mom that, and she mocked me for it--gently, but even so. As with so many other things, it just sounds to me like a whole lot of work to go through in order to end up feeling unstable and existentially disturbed; I can feel like that here, just as easily. Too easily, by far.

Anyhow. The weather has very definitely shifted, and I feel it in all my joints, the flare of incipient arthritis. I need to get my prescriptions refilled. I need to answer my mail, and start living again.

So. [The secret project] ran out on Friday, at least in terms of the part I signed a contract and NDA for; I've been told they want me back, but not when, or for how long. So I am now at loose ends, catching up on sleep and other stuff. I finished a tiny little story I owed somebody yesterday, for example, and I've been recommending Hallowe'en movies on Twitter. Should do some outlining and catch up on email, especially as it pertains to various things I've been sent to read/blurb. I also have outstanding projects to work on, and a course to teach come November...but man, I miss it already, this work, these people. It's hard not to feel like you've been dropped.

Still, I'm an adult, so I should act like one. I don't have to worry that people don't like me, especially when I have ample evidence that they do. That's what the fucking meds are for, after all.

Otherwise, I've been "doodling" maniacally, filling two whole notebooks thus far with sketches in marker, which I find a lot easier to control and trust than I do pencils. It's all fairly grotesque stuff--I'm not exactly great at realism. I'm enjoying it, though, and it's made for fun stuff to post when you can't comment on anything else you're doing.