Remember that post I made with the saddle that reminded me of Sheri Tepper’s Grass? Today I got awesome spam mail wanting to buy it. Bwahahahaha! And if it *was* like the Grass device, they’d be so very sorry to get it, too.

I’m getting closer to getting the WIP in progress right. Got feedback from my agent today. I have some tweaks and a cool and interesting addition to make that I hadn’t thought of before and then, hopefully, I’ll be set.

Bon Jovi has a new album out. I want to get it. I remember seeing them for the Slippery When Wet Tour in Fresno with Cinderella opening.

My lovely and wonderful husband surprised me with flowers today. Terribly surprising, given he’s in Oregon. I cried. I admit it. Love that man. Miss him. Two weeks til I get to see him again.

All the Crosspointe books and two of the Path books (three will come soon), are available on Audible.com. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, so if anyone has, how are they?

If you haven’t seen this, it’s hilarious. Poor sales guy.

I am more than pleased to announce that Audible.com is going to be making audio books of the Path novels and the Crosspointe Chronicles. I’m so excited. I’m bouncing off the walls.

I don’t have much else for you today. I’m just a blathering idiot about this. Pardon me while I go dancing.

Today I got a call from a friend who’d been attacked by a wooden chicken while cleaning and ended up with two broken bones, a chipped bone, and some ligament issues in one of her hands. This same friend is going to have significant surgery on Thursday. She tells me that it’s my fault. That my clod genes are catching, sort of like the flu. I’d like to tell her she’s totally wrong. Sadly, she might be right. Did I pass my clod cooties to her? Or was it a sign from above (it fell from above)? Or, did she make the singular and unholy mistake of cleaning? Was that the issue? I think maybe so. Anyhow, went to see her after the hospital visit, I gave her a bag of ice, wished her happy birthday, and laughed uproariously at her. I’m that way.

In the meantime, I’ve been revising. This is what it’s like. I am doing things to the front of the book, which, like cracks in a windshield, spread out through the book. Then I make more corrections, attempt to fix more cracks, and more cracks happen, digging further into the book. Rinse and repeat. (Am I madly mixing the metaphors or what?)

Anyhow, the process is a bit terrifying, since I’m not entirely certain that I’ll catch all the inconsistencies and cracks, or that the fixes I’m making are causing irreparable faults later in the manuscript. So what now crops up is a clash between getting the revisions done and terror of doing them wrong. I’m trying not to freeze solid.

In the meantime, hopefully I won’t be attacked by any wooden chickens.

It looks like there’s a publisher who may be interested in the Crosspointe books. If so, we’re looking at seeing an end to the series! Wahoo!

Kate Elliot posted an essay today called Decolonizing as an SF Writer by Rochita Loenen-Luiz. The subject is one that’s interesting to me because a lot of my dissertation and research has dealt with colonization/postcolonization/neocolonization. I think colonization is the most shaping force on all societies in the world.

But what it made me think about today was black people. You might ask why. The subject came up with my children. They were talking about the civil war, and then my son says, “I call black people African-Americans.” I said, that makes sense, but you realize that not all black people are African-American, nor do they wish to be called such. Then my daughter pipes up with “Anthony is black.” I said no, he’s Chinese. He’s racially different from white and black. Then my son pipes up with another kid who is black, and I explained no, he’s Mexican.

Now the thing is that this little town I live in is mostly white. Very white. There are a few black kids and Hawai’ian kids at the college, and then a Mexican migrant population and a fair number of Native Americans. But frankly, the day to day experience with people tends to be blindingly white. That skews the perception that all the world looks like this.

Which makes it difficult to start explaining to children about people of color and their cultural histories and the way that white people are implicated in a lot of terrible things in history. The fact is, it’s a complicated subject and I can’t do it all in a day or even a year. But it is something that I have to talk with them about now and throughout their lives. I don’t think that this history is taught in school, but it’s tremendously important. On the other hand, my kids learn a lot about the real Native American history here. The Big Hole Battlefield is not far, and neither is the Little Big Horn. I’ve been to The Big Hole Battlefield and you can feel the spirits still there. It’s an eerie, beautiful place.

You should read Loenen-Luiz’ essay. It’s well worth reading and it digs into the complexity in a very short space. What I really find important is the way she talks about the friendship/betrayal/colonizer element. That there is a real difficulty in negotiating the tangle of emotions involved in being friends with the people who are oppressing you.

When I finish my Crosspointe books, this is part of what I mean to explore, and what I’ve been setting up all along with the Jutras. I have the Crosspointe people seeing them as invaders and a sort of monolithic evil in the first book, and then slowly they learn that the Jutras are human and eventually they begin to learn that the Jutras have good reason for invading. That good and bad is not as simple as it looks.

And yes, I intend to finish them. While Roc has decided not to publish the last books, I’m looking for a publisher who will, and if not, I will do it myself. I love these books and I want to get them done.