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Month: February 2018

Lessons Learned

I have been unemployed/self-employed for seven months now. It seems like just yesterday that I was laid off. But time has gone by, and I have learned a few things. I had originally decided to focus on editing and virtual assisting, things I can do from home. And I have applied literally everywhere. And, for the most part, I haven’t had much luck. Have I given up? Hell no. Here are some things I have learned from this experience so far: 1. Anything that is worth it is worth fighting for. I have a number of health issues, and I knew once I was laid off that the type of work I was doing wasn’t going to work for me anymore. I took a risk in not pursuing that type of work in favor of work from home jobs. It’s not that I don’t want to work. I realized I was in a unique position to try to change careers. It hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been fun, but I still believe this is the best thing for me at this stage of my life. And so I keep keeping on. 2. Sometimes you simply need a break. My former job was very stressful, especially toward the end. I had been living in a constant state of stress so severe I had lost 2/3 of my hair. I just realized about a month ago that gee, my hair came back. Because the stress was mostly gone. I had been working through severe…

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We Must Escape!

In honor of V-Day, friends, I’m going to tell you about what we did for V-Day. I surprised my husband with a trip to a local escape room. Do you guys have these where you live? In case you don’t, these are places that offer a number of rooms (and they are literal rooms) filled with clues and puzzles. You have one hour to solve all the puzzles and escape! (A lot of them are literally that–figure out how to get out of the room–but some have a goal you have to achieve before escaping, such as solving a mystery.) We quite a few around here, and they’ve been on my radar for a while, but we haven’t managed to get to one before. But Friday we had a free night, so I booked us a room at a new one close by because they wouldn’t smoosh us in with random people (some places will stick small groups with other small groups, and that did not sound like a good date). The end goal for our room was to steal the diamond before the detectives arrived. Our gamemaster was very sweet, giving us a rundown on how the whole process worked since we’d never done one before. She warned us that it might be a little hard for just two people, especially first-timers, and let us know how to ask for a clue if we needed one. And then she locked our phones away and let us into the room. It was…

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Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Did you all hear the news that legendary SF author Ursula K. Le Guin passed away recently? Her death leaves a great disturbance in the Force, to cross a few genre threads. She was one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. And, thankfully, she was acknowledged for it during her lifetime — she won all the major genre awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and the World Fantasy Award) and was only the second woman to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction (after Andre Norton). I was always awed by her mastery of storytelling at any length, whether short story or novella or full-length novel. And storytelling for all ages, from picture books to YA to adult — very few writers can do that! Her writing was both precise and poetic, crystalline and immediately recognizable. She was interested in ethnography and sociology, how peoples relate to each other, what cultural assumptions we make without knowing. (For example, The Left Hand of Darkness is, famously, all about deconstructing gender.) But she was brilliant at character, too, and worldbuilding. How can one person be so good at so many aspects of writing? Yet she was. Personally, I’ve read about 10 or 15 of her books. Earthsea (a trilogy at the time) was my first exposure, as it was for many. Later I went on to The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, her later Earthsea books and her collections of shorter works. I never got as far as her poetry…

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The House Robot

The House Robot A free short story by Siri Paulson     Priya’s house was the last one on their street in Jaipur to get one of Reenu Mehta’s house robots. By that time, everyone knew how many things house robots were good for. You could order them to do your laundry – cheaper in the long run than paying a washerwoman. You could teach them to cook basic curries and naan faster than you could do it yourself. Some of them would even diagnose female complaints and tell you what medicines you needed. Only a woman engineer could have thought of that, the aunties said approvingly. So Priya talked her mother into putting aside some of Priya’s teaching salary, little by little, until they could buy a second-hand house robot. It was just as useful as advertised, and, even better, her mother was able to boast to her friends about what a good deal they had gotten. During this time, Priya’s uncle drove in from the village once in a while to see how they were getting on after the death of her father. At first he had brought money, but that had stopped after Priya’s mother turned down his offer of marriage. It was only right, he said, that he should marry his brother’s widow and so look after her. But Priya had seen the way he looked at her, and she knew it was not her mother he wanted. Since then, he only came by to issue…

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