My desk has been through a lot. It’s a great big computer-tower cabinet on one side, file drawer on the other, full hutch on top, desk. I bought it to put my first Dell on, some nine years ago. I put it together myself, in the extra room we made my office. If you were to look closely you could probably guess I did it alone, though I mostly followed the directions. I’ll tell you—electric screwdrivers are worth the money. I wished for days that I’d had one. I’ve moved this behemoth—well, moved houses twice. Moved among rooms two or three times more. I’ve dumped coffee on it and shoved cats off it and once my neighbor pushed it down a flight of stairs.

Continue reading

Today I’m a lucky, lucky girl. I got to tour Kartchner Caverns, a marvelous experience carefully tailored to protect the living cave from the likes of us messy humans. We weren’t allowed to take anything in so we couldn’t drop anything by accident. No cameras, since flash photography can be destructive and people can’t be trusted. No gum lest someone decide to spit it somewhere unseen. No touching anything but the metal handrails. Our guide carried little flags, and if we accidentally brushed a rock in passing, she marked it for later cleaning. At one point our guide directed her flashlight upon the tracks the discoverers of the cave left in a mud-flat on one of their first explorations back in 1974. Every scientist who has had to cross since has walked in those tracks. Because of care like this, despite the cave having been open to the public for twenty years, over 80% of the cave floor has never been touched by a human.

Continue reading

I had a friend who used to insist that she didn’t write her stories–they came to her from somewhere else, and she just wrote them down. She had to figure out the best way, of course, and sometimes she couldn’t catch what she was told (or worse, the stories maybe weren’t trying to get to her) but she didn’t believe she wrote her stories. I…could go both ways on that, pretty much at the same time. I write my books. I work hard at them. My characters, though–often they do seem to come from somewhere else. It’s always been that way, even when I’ve been scolded for being “fanciful” (and once lectured for not “taking responsibility” for the quality of my story!) Eighteen years ago I finished my first novel’s first draft. My character Ben was pretty much set from then on–but it’s only in the last few years, in my attempts to deepen the backgrounds of everyone, that I’ve realized Ben is Hindu. I’m researching that now, and it’s amazing how well this ancient religion explains the way Ben has always been. A friend told me I just knew subconsciously back then that he was Hindu and deliberately wrote him that way, but how could that be when I knew NOTHING of Hindu religion then?

Continue reading

I’ve used the webmail of a certain very large website as my primary email for years. Recently I lost patience at last with my glitchy inbox, and switched to another email address as my primary. Let me tell you, it’s been rough. How was I to know I had so many things linked to that one address? I’d done the linking one thing at a time, over the last eight years or so. My social networking sites, my forums, my send-me-a-recipe-a-day-that-I’ll-never-make memberships. Even my 750words.com account–and I can’t change that. I’d have to make a new account, and lose my Albatross badge earned by writing 750 words every single day for going on a hundred days in a row. (Soon I’ll have the phoenix again!) It has been rough, but it’s also been a good thing. I can’t believe how much garbage I was signed up for.

Continue reading

Of all my characters so far, I think Joss Ravid made the best entrance. That, as you’ll see when you get to know him, is very Joss. It started simply. At some point in 2005 or maybe early 2006, I made the decision to stop letting fear make my decisions. I’d love to say that everything changed, but that’s not how life works. I did start taking some risks. I joined a gym. I took a chance on a roommate, and moved out of my affordable but yucky apartment and into a decent house. I went to Yaoi-Con. My roommate and I put it together to take an airplane (gasp!) to San Francisco, where we’d never been, to a con we’d never attended, to meet people we’d only talked to online and revel for a weekend in the wild fun of bishie-stalking.

Continue reading

I used to think I was lazy. I wasn’t the only one who thought so–I heard it a lot. Too lazy to do my chores, too lazy to do my homework. Too lazy to finish that paint-stripping project and so I lived without a bedroom door for months and then put the ugly thing back on, still with its layers of tainted white, dead-turtle green, and bloody-brick red. It was another two months before I found and replaced the knob mechanism. I’d restart the washing machine to avoid hanging out clothes, and you don’t want to know how I avoided doing dishes. I wasn’t too lazy to read, though. Oh no, I burned my way through the elementary school library, then the junior high library, at a wildfire’s pace. I wasn’t supposed to read the senior high books till I hit senior high, but the librarians got tired of telling me no. The day the public library gave me an adult card–meaning I could check out thirty-five real books on my monthly-if-I-was-lucky visit–was a great day indeed.

Continue reading

As I write, it’s the day after a pretty good Christmas. Among the scraps of ribbon, the bits of confetti, the sounds of new toys (and the feline enjoyment of the first two and the boxes the third came in), my eye is inexorably drawn to the next holiday. My eye is also drawn to the remnants scattered across the lovely tray of cookies I received, but we’ll ignore that. As hard as we can.

Continue reading

We’re pretty excited around here about our anthology Winter’s Night. This blog will be pretty short because we’re still working on it, making it awesomer! It amuses me because when we talked about doing an anthology, I mentioned that the story I had in mind was Christmas-related, but I hoped the whole collection wouldn’t be. I needn’t have worried. Winter’s Night has a Christmas story. It has a fairy tale. It has a rondeau, as well as two other poems. It has a story set in Inuit mythology. Turtleduckers…what can I say? We don’t do anything the traditional way. I hope you’ll check out Winter’s Night on December 1st. A percentage of our profits will be donated to UNICEF.

Continue reading