Sheila's LiveJournal

The Press-Telegram reported to day that Lucky has been adopted by a local nurse. And there will be a memorial service on Thursday for Joe at the Lutheran church that gave him shelter. I'm usually at a Treatment Team meeting at the hospice on Thursday mornings, but I think I'll slip out and attend, then return to the hospice later.

I'm very relieved to learn about Lucky's happy ending to an otherwise sad story.

Thanks to Diane Turnshek, I've just learned that a short story of mine is aboard the International Space Station, part of the recreational reading library.

It's "Ceremony After a Raid," first published way back when Patrick Price was editing AMAZING STORIES. Here's the URL:

http://www.governmentattic.org/docs/ISS_Media_2008.pdf

I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it fit as I went along, with too many occasions where I found myself thinking, Oh no! I didn’t say that in a previous story, did I? How on earth am I going to get around it?

The novel that came to be called Triad (1986) started as notes on South African native cultures that quickly morphed into notes about an alien one. I was at UCLA for a quarter on a fellowship, studying South African literature, crafts and (dabbling in) language. It wasn’t the first novel that I’d written (actually it was the fifth – or sixth if we count a perfectly ghastly one that eventually went into the trash can) but it was published as my second. But somewhere in the writing the word xenolinguist appeared, and a Guild that trained them. The author hardly noticed.

“Babel Interface” was supposed to be a one-off story about alien communication (which I’d been convinced for many years wasn’t going to be as easy as Star Trek portrayed it). It’s a story whose birth pangs I don’t even remember – that’s how casually I dropped in details about the “Guild” back on Earth that Tomas worked for, or the fact that such communicators were called “lingsters,” or the field pack of interface drugs they relied on. But there they were.

I didn’t sell that story right away (several editors disliked it thoroughly), and I went on to write other stories. Meanwhile, I continued reading books about language, a major passion of mine. And somewhere along the line I started wondering what Whorf and Chomsky, Pinker – and all the other linguistic scholars whose books I bought as soon as they were published – might have to say about talking to aliens. I began noodling around with an article on how we might eventually approach the problem. I’m not even certain that I took the matter too seriously even then, judging from the title: “Berlitz in Outer Space.” But I had fun dreaming up the first class in Xenolinguistics 101.

An editor finally bought “Babel,” and wanted to see “Berlitz” too. He finally printed both in the same edition of Amazing Stories in 1988. But even then I didn’t seem to understand the trap I’d laid for myself. “A World Waiting” was under construction about that time, and I was thoroughly distracted by the marvelous experience I’d just had of hearing my unborn granddaughter’s heart beat and seeing her ultrasound picture which I knew was going into the story somehow. Then one morning I realized that my lingster (the term had stuck) was dragging her luggage into a tent and that the luggage had a logo on it – and the Guild of Xenolinguists finally made it into the author’s consciousness.

The rest is history, or maybe bibliography. There are now two novels and eleven stories about the lingsters, not to mention a couple of borderline stories where the lingsters themselves never appear.

What would I have done differently if somebody had warned me at the beginning what I was doing? Well, for one thing I wouldn’t have founded the Mother House of the Guild in Geneva. I had to do some hand-waving in “First Was the Word,” last written but first in the timeline, to explain that. And, if the reader notices, Triad is apparently set in a female-dominated world which had to be conveniently ignored in later stories. The role of Artificial Intelligence changed over the years too, from Earth’s warm and fuzzy CenCom to the Venatixi AI that acknowledges no loyalties. Little details like that. About midway through, I stopped and wrote myself a “bible” of the Guild and its teachings; I wish I’d had it from the beginning.

So do I now know all there is to know about the Guild and the lingsters? Heavens no! At least, not consciously. I’m currently working on a longer story – maybe a novella – set at the very end of the cycle, and I’m constantly surprising myself with things my unconscious mind apparently knew that I didn’t. Such as why Humans and Venatixi fought a war in “Out of the Mouths,” or who the Sagittans were whose presence Gia experienced in Triad.

Maybe I had to hide the fact I was creating a series from myself in order not to scare myself off from writing?

The three of us spent a couple of hours at the hospice today, the dogs performing their roles as therapy dogs. I really could hardly spare the time as I'm working hard on a story with an August 1st deadline, but the dogs hadn't visited the patients since before July 4th when I was away. And last week I had a nasty bout of sciatica that made me not want to walk dogs anywhere. The residents were beginning to complain that we were abandoning them. (Very often, the first words I'm greeted with when I go in alone the rest of the week are, "Where are Jack and Annie?")

For Jack and Annie it was as if there'd been no break. They waltzed right in like the pros they are and began lavishing affection on people who wanted it -- or in some cases, didn't know they wanted it, but the dogs saw they *needed* it and persuaded them. They have an instinct for that.

The house's two cats came out of hiding and glowered at the greyhounds, but my dogs have been put in their place by our own resident cat, and as a result they wouldn't dream of offending any cats anywhere, any time.

Now we're home, they've had dinner and are snoozing, and as soon as I sign off here I'm going right back to that story.

Last night I went with friends to an old-fashioned tent revival/folk festival/sacred Eucharist held in a Hilton Hotel ballroom at the Anaheim Convention Center. It was one of the most moving and inspiring ceremonies I’ve ever attended. It didn’t hurt that Bishop Gene Robinson presided, or that Retired Bishop Suffragan Barbara Harris preached the sermon, or that the ceremony included Afro-American spirituals, breathtaking singing from the choirs of All Saints Church, Pasadena, traditional South-African and Kenyan chants, Teresa of Avila’s words set to music composed by the Taize Community of France, and Spanish and Latin responses.

All that and incense too!

By now (especially if you’re Episcopalian) you’ve figured out that I went to an event at the General Convention, hosted and presented by Integrity USA to be an inclusive celebration of the LGBT community in the Episcopal church. My friend estimated there were at least a thousand people attending, and when they all got carried away by Bishop Barbara’s firebrand words and yelled “Amen!” (Or, “You tell it, Sister!”) the rafters shook. What a fantastic speaker she is! I wish I had a transcript of her words. And such a tiny woman too. Hearing her, joining the singing of beautiful music, and being in the presence of Bishop Gene (one of my heroes), was almost overwhelming for me.

Episcopalians (at least most of them) have come a long way from the stuffy Country Club image I remember from when I first encountered the church over here (I was “C of E” at home, naturally). And it didn’t hurt that the ceremony was preceded by a no-host cocktail party. One glass of wine does wonders loosening up the stiffest Episcopal joints and voices! But sadly, the church does have dissension in its ranks over issues such as the ordination of an openly gay bishop (Bishop Gene), the ordination of women, and – of course – the biggie: Gay marriage.

I think last night’s joyous celebration was a portent of the future where all nationalities, all creeds, all genders and sexual orientations, must come together if the Human family is to survive.

Back to the computer shop tomorrow. Grrr. The refurbished machine shows some of the signs of the old one, so I now have no idea where the problem lies. But I know one thing: I'm getting mighty tired of this.

I managed with great difficulty to do some revision work on a story for an anthology due soon (like having to hold down the F3 stop instead of being able to use "save". And it still required shutting off the power in order to exit the program. Sigh.

The guys at the shop who keep my computer running finally gave up. They switched the (new) hard drive -- which we'd loaded with all my programs and links before we knew the Old Grey Dell she ain't what she used to be -- to a refurbished IBM. They didn't charge me for it. I'm going to use it only for writing and keep the laptop for surfing the web. Except for emergencies on one or other of them, of course. Shouldn't be any on the desktop for a while now. Keeping my fingers crossed! I'm so far behind in my writing, I can't afford any more downtime.

I haven't posted lately because I'm having to use the laptop and I don't like working at length on it. But the desktop has been in the shop for repairs twice in the last two weeks, and if today's performance is anything to go by, it'll be going back on Monday.

First of all, it suddenly died -- hard drive collapsed. Luckily I had all my writing files saved on a thumb drive -- thanks to my granddaughter's good advice (and nagging!) The hard drive was replaced in good time and I got the computer back, only to have it start freezing up in the middle of work after a few minutes. I couldn't even turn it off without turning off the power. So back it went, and four days later they told me they'd worked on the mother board and had kept it for a couple extra days to test it out. Five minutes after I got it hooked back up at home and logged on, it started doing the same thing.

Time for a new one? I didn't think it was that old. I've forgotten exactly when I got it, but I was still teaching -- and I've been retired for almost five years. I don't really have the extra money to replace it right now.

Do you think Obama will send me a bail-out package?

I spent the weekend out in the Hemet Valley with family to celebrate a grandson's graduation and twelfth birthday. Saturday evening some of us went to Temecula for the annual wine-tasting and hot-air balloon festival. The web site advertised the entry price as $5; at the gate they demanded $22 per person. Since we were arriving at 8pm, just before the balloon glow and about an hour before the festival closed down,we thought that was outrageous. Luckily, a young friend who was volunteering with the balloons all weekend scored us some free passes.

Then, once inside, we learned they were shutting down the wine-tasting in about five minutes, and they refused to sell any more vouchers. As these would have cost another outrageous amount of money in any case, we came up with our own solution. We bought a couple of hand-decorated wine glasses at an artist's booth and took those to the winery stalls. I was much happier supporting an artist than feeding a greedy festival committee's coffers.

The "glow" was beautiful to see! I'd hoped to go up in a balloon this weekend, but the weather didn't cooperate -- overcast, blustery, with the threat of occasional thunderstorms. Later this summer, definitely!

Today's the day for some personal grumbling. The problems of the world can go to the back of the queue for a while. I'm tired of allergies.

A couple of years ago, I found out I was allergic to wheat – Wow! That explains why I had never been able to eat breakfast (toast, muffins, cereal, french toast, pancakes....) Okay, I adjusted; I could manage a very little bit of gluten (a small buttered crust of San Francisco Sourdough, hot from the oven, with the soft part pulled out, yum!) once in a while. But last night, the small amount of flour in the batter of my fish and chips just about did me in. I was up for two hours with nasty stomach pain that antacids can't touch (of course, since it isn't indigestion).

Several years ago while I was still teaching, I discovered I was allergic to chalk dust, and naturally the administration was very slow in replacing the chalk boards with the dry eraser kind. I think the money had to go to recarpeting the prez's office or something crucial like that. I wasn't too surprised because I'd also just recently found out that I was developing hay fever and dust allergies. Smoke from forest fires miles away give my lungs such a problem the docs suspect pneumonia until the X-rays come in.

Well that wasn't too much of a surprise because before *that* I'd found out I was allergic to bee and wasp venom (and also Greek mosquitoes – don't ask).

Looking back, there were other episodes of allergic reactions: I broke out in hives the first time I ate strawberries as a kid; I couldn't dab perfume behind my ears as a teenager going on a date because I had what seemed to be permanent red patches as a result; I developed a nasty skin rash on my hands from agricultural pesticides while working on the conveyor belt one summer in a Birds Eye Frozen Foods factory as a student. But I didn't put it all together until the wheat problem was diagnosed.

Now I'm the kind of person who believes in the religion of Modern Medicine, and I'm not a happy camper when the docs don't come up with the pill that fixes everything once and for all. And I'm also the kind of person who believes in learning valuable lessons from everything life throws at me.

So, I've learned already! What, you think I'm a slow learner? Come up with the pill!

Memorial Day always brings back a specific childhood memory for me. I grew up in London during World War II, and as the war progressed, the city increasingly came under attack from the German Luftwaffe. Night after night, waves of enemy planes flew over London and dropped their bombs. At one point, my mother and grandmother got tired of the nightly rush for the (not terribly safe) bomb shelters, and they decided to go to the Essex countryside and stay with my grandmother's sister. My great-aunt lived in a cottage with a thatched roof in a tiny village called Boreham.

There was very little to distinguish this quiet village except for one thing: In 1941, America came into the war on the side of Britain and the Allies, and after a while they began to build airbases in the English countryside. One was a mile or so outside of Boreham. The American servicemen at this base had a big effect on country life in Essex. We called them all "Yanks" even if perhaps they were Westerners or Southerners. And we kids did our best to copy their slang – much to the horror of our proper British mothers. There are many stories I could tell about the airmen – young boys really, but they seemed old to eight and nine year-old me – but there's one particular event I'm thinking of today.

These young men were very good to the English kids. Whenever they had a pass to come into the village, we followed them around chanting, "Got any gum, chum?" and they'd almost always find sticks of chewing gum in their pockets for us, and maybe chocolate. Because of the sad and dangerous conditions during the war, and with my father being away with the British army – and of course food rationing – we don't seem to have celebrated Christmas much. I suppose my family must've given small presents on those wartime Christmases, especially to the younger members, but money was tight and few shops were open to sell things other than food and necessities. Anything beyond the very basic was out of the question “for the duration.” as the adults used to say. The one Christmas I do have a memory of was from that time in Boreham.

The young American airmen gave a Christmas party on the base for the village children. They decorated the mess hut with streamers and served us foods we hadn't seen for a very long time, like Jell-O, and cake and ice-cream. We sang Christmas carols together, and I seem to remember we were each given a small gift to take home. Those airmen were almost all of them in their early twenties, and they probably missed their own families at home in America. Yet they gave their time and paid for everything out of their own pockets so some English kids could have a few moments of peaceful celebration in the midst of war.

What I came to understand once I was an adult was the terrible mathematics of war which ate up young pilots at a horrific rate. How many of those boys who helped the village kids have a semblance of normal Christmas joy never returned to make families of their own?
Today, I don't doubt there are young servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who find time to pause in the midst of their own danger to be kind to kids who have little to be joyous about. I think about them all on Memorial Day.

Peace in our time, O Lord.

It's an eerie feeling, sitting in a darkened theatre, watching various parts of Rome explode or erupt in flame ("Angels and Demons") when an earthquake hits.

Wow, those Illuminati sure are still powerful!

I liked the movie, but I see several reviewers were disappointed. I thought "Angels and Demons" was a better novel than "The Da Vinci Code." Easier to follow, in any case. I really admired the fact that Dan Brown observed Aristotle's rule (and the movie followed it too): the action should take place in a 24-hour time span; it makes for a tight drama. If nothing else pleases the viewer, then at least the shots of Rome are spectacular, all the more so when you consider that the Vatican wasn't cooperative (surprise!), and a lot of footage was filmed in England.

(And Ewan McGregor is great eye-candy.)

As for the earthquake (which we felt), I arrived home to find a lot of stuff on the floor and pictures hanging crazily on the wall, but no real damage.

The latest one, "Old Man River," is up:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/old_man_river/

When I bought my condo in Long Beach almost a decade ago, I knew it was on the fourth floor and had a balcony with an unobstructed view of distant mountains, both features that pleased me. I moved in just before Thanksgiving, and was busy emptying and stashing boxes, and then – exhausted and frazzled (I won't describe how I almost killed my dog on our first trip in the elevator) – I set out to drive almost a hundred miles to spend Thanksgiving in Riverside County farm country with the family.

LosCon followed in Los Angeles on the heels of the family feast, and by the time I got back to the new condo I was really not into astronomical discoveries. Plus, the weather was cloudy for several days. And I was going to bed early and sleeping late, trying to make up for a serious sleep deficit.

Then one evening as Christmas approached, I went out onto the balcony for some reason and couldn't help but see the huge full moon rising in the east – directly in front of me. I was enchanted. If my balcony faced due east (as it did) could I also see the rising sun? Luckily for me, the sun rises late in December. I first saw the sunrise on the solstice, December 21st, and happened to notice which dark silhouette of buildings it seemed to rise over.

Okay, you're ahead of me. For the following year, I noted where the sun appeared to be rising in its journey as it moved (apparently) further and further north in the sky, then back again. And for the following years it has given me a certain shiver of connection with ancient ancestors to know I too can make marks to show the passing of time as reflected in the sun's passage, even though my marks are on a wooden balcony rail in a Southern California city and not in the arrangement of stones at Stonehenge.

I'm off to UC Riverside today for the Eaton Conference. I was at the very first one in 1979, courtesy of a dean who gave conference info and travel money to a part-time teacher. This was the same dean who let me teach creative writing and the literature of science fiction, both when I was still part-time. He believed in the right person for the job, not seniority or tenure or full time status. (He later hired me full-time.) Not many deans like him, alas.

This year, they asked me to judge the fiction writing contest for UC undergraduates, and they';re actually going to pick up my hotel room! That's a first, even though I have presented papers to the conference before and was keynote speaker one time. I also get to autograph and sell a few books on Saturday, I hope!

I'm looking forward to seeing old friends in Riverside, including Samantha Henderson -- who I haven't seen since we shared a room last weekend at the Nebs! {g}

I'm home, and ready for a nap. I spent Thursday and Sunday nights with family, and the two in between at the Nebula Hotel in Brentwood (anybody remember OJ?) on Sunset. Samantha Henderson and I had the air conditioner (not) from hell in our room; the hotel "maintenance" (I use the term advisedly) couldn't fix it, and the only way not to roast to death in our sleep was to turn it off altogether. But then we had no fresh air, being on the first floor, with a walkway passing our sliding door -- and no way to lock it into a safe open position.

Other than that, and a few other "interesting" problems with the hotel, the affair was very enjoyable. It's always great to see old friends and talk business. I had the additional pleasure of meeting up with some former students of mine that I hadn't seen in years. And the Festival of Books was comfortably warm, but breezy, nowhere near the oven conditions that prevailed last year. Sold books, talked to more friends, and generally had a good time.

And when I came home, with the dogs, Nickie ignored me -- as I'd expected he would. However, when I went into the study to turn on the desktop and get email, I found he'd expressed his disapproval of being left at home. There, on one of the dog's beds, was a little pile of cat poop.

I'm off tomorrow to the Nebula Conference and Awards Banquet in Los Angeles. Although the hotel is only about fifty miles away from where I live, I'll have to make close to a two hundred mile round trip because I have to take the greyhounds out to my daughter's house in San Jacinto in the Moreno Valley to stay. Actually, that's not too bad because it will give me a chance to take them out to dinner tomorrow night, before heading to LA Friday morning, and then spend Sunday evening with them on my return as well. I haven't seen this daughter and family since Christmas, so it will be a pleasant visit.

The Nebs are being held at the same time as the LA Times Festival of Books, and SFWAns will be signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Booth (#614) on the UCLA campus. My slot is Sunday at 10am for an hour, and I'll be signing THE GUILD OF XENOLINGUISTS. (I have a few copies of the newly reprinted backlist, so I may take them along too and see if anyone wants to buy them.)

Oh – Nicky the cat wants it noted that he will stay bravely at home by himself and keep an eye on the marauding sparrows and hummingbirds who infest our balcony. (Actually, a neighbor will look in on him once a day, so he won't be totally alone, but don't tell him I told you!)

I've mentioned before that since I retired from full-time college teaching I've been volunteering three mornings a week at a local hospice. Once morning a week, I take the dogs in too. I love doing this work; the house is a warm, friendly place, full of laughter and music and good talk and two resident cats. I learn a lot in the time I spend there. But this morning, I suddenly realized something that I think is important: Hospice is a place where we get to tell all our stories once again for the last time.

Everybody has a story to tell, but over the course of a lifetime we've probably worn out our listeners – family, close friends – from the repetition.Yet the stories remain important and powerful for us, and we yearn to tell them one more time. Or else there are family tensions that prevent the stories from being received – or received without blame and recrimination. Sometimes, a lonely soul will not have any one who ever wanted to hear the stories, or else everyone who matters has passed on already. What a burden it is to the soul to have life stories that have to go untold!

But in hospice there are loving people taking care of us and listening to us. And above all, there are volunteers whose sole job is to do whatever we need, and if that means listen to stories, they'll listen willingly. One of my favorite hospice patients was a ninety year-old gentleman who frequently said, “Oh, you wouldn't want to hear my boring stories!” But when he was assured I did, he gave me hours of wonderful yarns of growing up on a poor Illinois farm, living in a rooming house with other unmarried young men in Chicago and shyly courting the young ladies at social dances in the Roaring Twenties, running errands for the local Mafia, riding the rails like a hobo out to California to work in the (now non-existent) beanfields of Orange County, serving in the Navy during World War II. He seemed to have a need to put his whole life in perspective one last time, and I was happy to give him the permission, as it were, to do that.

I've heard stories about being a female impersonator in night clubs, a gay prostitute in Hollywood, the first Black, female mathematics teacher in her school district, a collector of semi-precious gems. I've seen photos of beloved pets and heard their stories. I've heard family anecdotes and family traditions, funny and sad. I've heard family ghost stories and strange experiences. Every day, it's something different.

And I see a great peace settle over people when they've had the chance to tell these stories they've been keeping inside their hearts, just one more time, or maybe for the first time ever.

If humans are language making animals, as Lewis Thomas calls us, then I would add that we are story-telling animals before anything else. It's a great privilege for me to share some of the vast stream of human experience through these stories.

I recently had a frustrating few days. I made phone calls that landed me on hold for ten minutes. I left messages that weren't returned. I couldn't log on to Facebook because I'd accidentally minimized the typeface beyond the ability of my eyes to read and didn't know how to fix it. Sff.net wouldn't let me log on at all. No new ideas for Guest Blogs on the Nebula Awards site presented themselves. Everything I tried to do went wrong, was delayed, or vanished. I guess the universe was trying to tell me something. As in: Write the story, damn it!

Any time I'm asked to contribute a story to an anthology, or anything and anywhere else for that matter, I always says yes. I have my heart attack later. (How on earth am I going to do THAT?) This time, I'd put myself in the hock for two stories to two different anthologies within the space of one week. Sure, they both have fairly distant deadlines, but time has a way of creeping up. I started stewing over the fix I'd landed myself in. No ideas presented themselves – or at least, no workable ones. I had that dreaded disease, writers block.

Then one day last week I dreamed a first line for one of the stories. Great! No second or third lines were forthcoming. Back to depressionville. But last night was different. I dreamed the whole plot – in living color, as they say, dialogue and all. I was excited to walk the dogs and get to the computer to start work. Of course, by the time I came to actually write the story, most of the dream had slipped away. But you know, it was actually comforting to know my subconscious had worked the whole thing out. So even when I stumbled to a halt, I could trust my brain to come up with a way to solve the problem. And it did. Three thousand words in one sitting today. A whole first draft. Not perfect, but a good start – and I *love* to re-write!

This afternoon I drove thirty minutes down the coast to Huntington Beach (self-proclaimed “Surf City”) to meet up with a friend for lunch. We first met in Rwanda a couple of years ago on a People to People trip (we were roommates), then went to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon together last year. Yolanda lives in Chicago, so when she called to say she was bringing her granddaughter out to California for Spring break, and could we meet, I immediately said yes. I figured the beach in Huntington would be a better attraction for a fourteen year-old girl than our staid Long Beach sands (no surf because of the breakwater).

We ate a good seafood salad at the restaurant at the base of the pier, then Yolanda and I walked out on the pier to enjoy the view while her granddaughter checked out the beach action. Not a good day for surf, but there were still lots of people in the water, all in wetsuits because the Pacific is still cold even though it was a beautiful day. Then suddenly we spotted a dolphin, playing in the small waves right by the surfers. And soon we saw at least a dozen more. It made me remember student essays I was given when I was teaching freshman composition, about surfing in the early hours of the morning and looking over your shoulder to find a dolphin surfing right along with you. What a magical experience that must be! Just seeing them from the pier was wonderful for me.