Ash by Malinda Lo

I started crusing the Young Adult section of bookstores years ago, looking for new material for our daughter's four hundred page a day habit. Then after she talked me into reading a few, I started looking for myself. And that I'm writing YA, I'm checking out the new releases all the time.

Which is why I noticed Ash by Malinda Lo. It was one of many new hardbacks with a young girl on the cover in some fantasy attire, so it blended well with its contemporaries. What drew me was the author--hey, I know her! I thought, and picked it up.

Somewhere, in my years writing for the queer community, I've been in correspondence with Malinda Lo, who is the former managing editor of AfterEllen.com, the largest news and entertainment website for lesbian and bisexual women. I knew her name.

Shortly after, our local library had a copy of Ash on the new release display right by the library entrance (it happens to be the most-used branch of the library in the state, and routinely has a waiting crowd at opening time), and I snatched it up to add to my pile.

I knew it was a re-telling of Cinderella, was in the fantasy genre, and probably had love interests both straight and gay, something I haven't come across before in a YA except in Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series, which I adore (Clare also gives Lo a great blurb on the back of her book). Almost all Young Adult fiction I've come across that includes same-sex romance are "problem novels" like Julie Anne Peters' Keeping You a Secret (she also gives Lo a great book blurb, as well as Meg Cabot, the Stephen King of YA).

I've been reading Ash in bed during my recovery from surgery, just finished the first of the Morganville Vampires series by Rachel Caine on audio, and before starting Ash finished Impossible (another fantasy/fairy tale, based on the song "Scarborough Fair"--it is awesome, romantic and thought provoking) by Nancy Werlin. My first comments on Malinda Lo's book are: perfect narrative pitch, maintains willing suspension of disbelief from the first page, and "I wonder where we go from here?" on page 168.

Doubtless I'll write a full review, because I can't help myself, and also because Lo has done something I've wanted to see in YA fiction for a long time, and something I want to do in one of the books I'm working on--she makes orientation a non-issue. And in a fantasy world based on British Isle fairy stories, that's a major accomplishment.

In her story we believe in witches, in "modern" doctors who bleed patients to heal them for lack of a better idea, in the possibility of fairies and magic remaining in part of the land, in spoiled girls angling for a rich husband (we've heard that one before), and we believe that attraction can spring up between a poor step-child living as a servant, and the King's Huntress, a species of fairy tale female new to me.

The book appeared on shelves on Aug. 9th this year, amid an avalanche of fantasy YA hoping to tempt the thirsty Twilight readers, needing another fix. I want to know--are they drinking it up?

I Didn't Plan on Time Off

Then again, I didn't plan on having a jagged-looking incision above, below and skirting my bellybutton. It was just supposed to be day surgery. A quick snip and stitch. Like my other two hernias, fixed when I was twenty-three and twenty-seven. Instead it was three hernias, lots of snipping and stitching, a panic attack upon awake from anesthesia because the morphine didn't cut it (and an empty stomach for surgery means no anxiety meds that morning), and an overnight at the hospital.

I'd been putting off the surgery for months, because any surgery would be inconvenient, so the noticeable bulge of a hernia had to wait awhile before being presented to a doctor for appraisal. By the time I went, it was getting uncomfortable, by the time for surgery, it was bothering me all the time. So it needed to be done. But good heavens.

If I'd known I'd be bed bound with painkillers for days, I would have thought, "Oh yes, an opportunity to get some writing done." Because I forgot about pain, and what that's really like. And how you really do need to rest to heal. And how motivated I would be to not over-do it because it HURT.

Now will be the harder part. My brain is back to normal (thus the laptop in my actual lap), the pain is at over-the-counter level, and my wife has got to go out of town tomorrow. She arranged a chauffeur for our son to school because I'm not supposed to drive (stomping on the break would be disastrous, according to my post-surgery directives, for a few more days). But normal life will resume, and it will kill me not to do everything.

This is where I have to tell myself, "Ah, those writing days, those are when the kids are in school, and you aren't allowed to do any manual labor--no toilet scrubbing, no grocery shopping, no lifting of anything over ten pounds. Those excuses not to write your novel, they are kaput. Get working."

I'm writing a novel this month, supposedly, or at least 50,000 words of one. If I can find the time. My mantra above might work. If I'm lazy enough, I just might get some work done.

God Bless the Internet

In the early days of my parent trip, back when there were two kids, not three, I made Halloween costumes for the kids. There is a huge box of them upstairs as proof of my perhaps manic devotion to this practice, which often took two weeks, many bags of mini-Butterfingers and a whole lot of babysitting-by-PBS to accomplish.

Actually, I did some of that after kid #3, though he himself was happy with cast-offs from his elder siblings before this year. After all, there were so many choices in the costume box: guinea pig, Pokemon, karate kid, Harry Potter, mouse, dinosaur, the seal costume he wore 24/7 when he was three. One goal that keeps slipping off the ever-evolving to-do list is to untangle the jumble and put them in plastic tubs to protect them from the mice who might invade during the frozen days of winter (I saw one, blast him), but alas, it goes undone.

But the costumes are done this year. In two clicks of a keyboard (maybe an underestimate, but Amazon is easy) costumes were winging their way to our teenage daughter and six year-old son and arrived on time to be worn to school and tonight as they besiege the neighborhood for candy.
And not one bag of Butterfingers has been consumed, or PBS employed.

In fact, considering the price of fabric on some of those overly elaborate creations of mine, these pre-fab costumes were cheap, and our daughter's top and pants will come in handy for other, non-holiday occasions, even if they are eye-popping, as are many teenage garments these days.

Our son decided to be Spock. Kind of last minute. But I was proud of him for forging his own idea of what to be. He'd had "Link" from The Legend of Zelda urged upon him, and a borrowed costume was coming our way, when he changed his mind. He thought Spock was cooler.

I have to agree.

By the time the costume arrived, with Amazon's free 2-business day shipping, he'd learned how to hold his fingers in the correct posture and say, "Live Long and Prosper."

And our daughter looked devastatingly hot in her outfit, even if she was as modestly attired as usual in terms of flesh covered. Texture matters. She was happy.

So it is Halloween morning and no costumes were made in this household except for the one gathered by our oldest son for his Post-Apocalyptic Survivor guise: breathing mask with dual filters, German goggles, my leather motorcycle jacket from 1984. With his long hair in a pony tail, he looked pretty awesome, too.

I'm liking this Internet stuff. From six year-old to Spock in two day's time. Gotta love it.

“Sisters Take Care of Sisters”

It gave me chills when I first heard it, that line sung by Izquierda Ensemble, when I was fifteen. I was visiting my sister during her first year at Reed College in 1979, having a little vacation in academia.

The other night, I heard that voice again.

It was at TIME OUT: The Mother of all Comedy Shows, on Saturday at the Q Center Portland, where I was among three performers joining comedienne Jacki Kane onstage, to talk about “Mom, Meet My Same-Sex Partner! We’re Having a Family!”

It was a natural venue for my work, and I got to read a spiced-up version of a chapter in my book, The Brides of March, which elicited laughs to my delight. The three other times I’ve gotten onstage, to read about dropping my thong on the second grade classroom floor, being a stoner slut in high school, and the vast menagerie that has passed through our home in the name of our kids, I was the only lesbian. So this was a nice change.

I went last. Plenty of time to get good and nervous before standing in front of the mike, taking a big breath, and knowing it was only ten minutes of my life and I would survive even if I completely bombed.

Myra Lavenue was before me, a fellow Curve and Technodyke.com writer, but first on the line-up after Jacki’s gut-busting (and I mean it, my epigastric hernia just about burst) monologue, was writer/musician Naomi Morena.

When I met her on arriving at Q Center, to get oriented before things started, I felt a stirring of recognition. And while she did her piece, which included a stirring imitation of Johnny Mathis singing, I was more and more sure it was her. Sadly, she skipped out after Myra’s piece to take care of her little boy, so I didn’t get the chance to ask her, but Google affirmed my suspicions when I got home.

Naomi Morena was formerly Naomi Littlebear Martinez of Izquierda Ensemble, that feminist band I’d seen while visiting my sister at Reed. And that concert and visit were important influences on my voyage out of the closet. My eighteen-year-old sister and her female friends were radical women with unshaven legs, some of them L.U.G.s, and so at the concert I was surrounded by lots of wonderful, hairy, allegedly gay women and sweet song. My heart leapt. I was on an estrogen high.

I’d identified as “aesthetically bisexual” from around eleven, because obviously women were prettier than men and pleasanter to look at, and was self-identifying as bi by the time I was visiting Reed and my sister. But when I reached out to touch the long hairs on my sister’s good friend Jo’s ankle, she recoiled like she’d been bitten by a snake. Was I too much jailbait, I wondered? And then, back at the dorm, my sister’s friends lit into me about my makeup, my clothes, my fifteen-year-old curling-ironed hair, and it seemed crystal clear that no lesbians would like me back. Bang went the closet door for another four years.

What, I wonder, would have happened if I hadn’t become convinced no woman would love me the way I was? Would I have hooked up (in the romantic or any other sense) with any of the dozen or so lesbians who, I discovered later, attended my high school at that time? Would they have looked me up and down and scratched me off their list due to my looks, since femmes were highly suspicious in the late seventies and it would take discovering a seriously androgynous jock in my Women in Literature course at the UW to lure me out of the closet at nineteen?

Though that didn’t last and I was lost in a sea of Doublemint dykes, scholarly lesbians, crunchy granolas, a butch/femme leather crowd and radicalesbian feminists who didn’t actually get around to having sex with their partners. It was a troubled time.

Lucky for me I met another seriously androgynous jock at twenty-two (even if she did occasionally wear pink), latched on and never let go. She was there, listening to Naomi Morena, formerly Naomi Littlebear, and enjoying her tale. Again, lucky for me.

The Wolves of Vancouver Island

An urban myth that might be real.

Okay, not urban exactly. A town with fifteen thousand humans can hardly be described as urban, but you know what I mean. I'd come to believe it was a myth, and now I know it might be true.

You see, when I was about eight, my family was given a dog by our neighbor Harley, a scary sort of guy who killed our own dog with his car. His way of atoning was to give us his dog Sentinel, a medium-sized, gray-ish, brownish, blonde-ish dog. Sentinel came with a story--he was supposed to be the offspring of a Pekingese and a wolf. At the time, I thought this perfectly plausible and fascinating, though my mind often reverted to problem of a Pekingese giving birth to puppies that would be twice her size.

The half-wolf thing I bought completely; didn't we have a tenant in cabin number one, a Hell's Angel if I remember right, who tied his half-wolf, half-shepherd dog behind his cabin, where I would pet him a lot, ignorant of the fact that half-wolf dogs make dangerous pets. When the biker left, taking his big dog with him, he left behind a hunting dagger in a leather sheath I have to this day.

But the half-wolf thing I had abandoned. I mean, how likely is it that he really had a half-wolf? It probably made a good story. And how likely was it that our dog was a half-wolf, even if he started attacking the neighbor, took a chunk out of her ankle and left us one day accompanied by my father and a borrowed gun, never to return?

Then I started researching the wolves of Vancouver Island for a story, and discovered an article published just last month that described the complete and intentional decimation of the native wolf population in the early seventies, and the eight mainland wolves who swam over and glutted themselves on the abundant prey-species, but were so sex-starved they mated with domestic dogs, resulting in the current wild wolf population being, lo-and-behold, part dog.

So the story of the Pekingese (surely a part-Pekingese, please) hanging around a forest campfire and being impregnated by a wolf in the darkness might not have been urban myth or our neighbor Harley's rambling fiction after all. And that half-wolf behind the cabin, probably was. I'd come to believe they were all crying wolf.

Okay, so the next day he kicked the shit out of another kid and set in motion a panel of experts and a "Behavior Plan." But I'll still savor those smiles and his comments when home of, "I love it here."

Smile

One of the annoying things I'm told by parents of "typical" (read, non-special needs) kids or other well-meaning adults is that "you'll treasure every good moment and take no smile for granted." While it is less annoying than, "won't he grow out of it?" it is still something I don't want to hear after I've been kicked in the shins ten times and faced a flood of tears based on misinterpretation of innocent words from a teacher.

But it is also sometimes true.

Today was one of those days. Actually, there have been a string of them, maybe ten whole days when the smiles were blooming like rays of sun reaching over a cloud. Picking him up from school today I was greeted by a smiling boy, a boy who has been accepting compliments instead of twisting them into bad things, a boy who has made proud statements about his own abilities and even said nice things about his classmates.

Okay, he's a little stingy on the last one. Peers are not his strong suit. But any positive is a good positive.

Summer was hell. Is fall going to be heaven? My heart bursts with happiness and hope when his eyes light up and his teeth show in a spontaneous grin, instead of the usual awkward grimace he hauls out when he's supposed to be happy, he thinks, an approximation of what a smile should look like, maybe.

Tomorrow I could get kicked in the shin, but tonight, I'm smiling too.

I Pay My Six Year-old Son To Cut His Hair

No, wait, that doesn't sound right. I pay him so I can cut his hair. Twenty-five cents a snip. His haircuts generally come out under six dollars, so I think I'm getting a bargain, and he actually gets a haircut.

The proximity involved in getting a haircut began to be a problem for him around two. Along with many other symptoms of his place on the autism spectrum, an aversion to touch and certain noises came along and grew as he did. Getting his hair cut the first time was a breeze. We took photos. He got a balloon. Second time, so good. Third time, he wouldn't get near the chair and he won the fight. Let's not even discuss the successive efforts.

We let his hair grow for a long time. I like boys with long hair, don't mind a shaggy look, and it gave us time to evaluate the situation. Around four my wife bought a hair clipper set and decided she could just give him a buzz every six months (I voted for annually), and she showed incredible patience while they worked around the noise and touch for around two hours in the bathroom to arrive at a haircut without tears or blood.

Sometimes there were awkward stages, so I was determined to find a way to trim. About a year ago, after offering candy, movies and other incentives and distractions I tried money. Would it be worth it for him to endure the discomfort of the haircut experience for some cold hard cash that could be turned into durable goods? Surprisingly, it was. They aren't the best trims, but they'll do.

His own trim a week ago, when his bangs were bothering him and he grabbed some scissors at school and had at them, was not as smooth. His easily four-inch bangs were shorn across a couple inches of his forehead. His teacher grimaced apologetically when I picked him up from school. Not, probably, because he cut his own hair, but because he'd gotten hold of a pair of scissors unsupervised long enough to do the damage.

He was pretty proud of the results. Bang problem solved, as far as he was concerned. I told him I'd "clean it up a little" later. Today was later. In the parking lot of the Portland Public School building (while big bro' was taking a test), he played his DS and we counted the snips. I'd gotten a roll of quarters in advance but forgot a comb. I did the best I could. He came away richer and his bangs are all one length, if the total effect is a bit monkish.

But when we got home I had a thought: hair wax. Inviting him into the bathroom with me I asked if he'd like his hair spiked. He was intrigued. I showed him the bottle. He agreed to try it. The results were awesome and hair-raising, and he told me now he knew what it felt like to be a man and it was great. He looked pretty good. Hair wax covers a multitude of sins, and snips. He's going to get spiked before school tomorrow. His teacher will get a kick out of it, right before she hides the scissors.