Month: April 2018

For some reason, all of the fiction and poetry that I enjoyed most, this time around, was about love. Though not necessarily a romantic one!

Marissa Lingen, “Flow” (Fireside, March). This is about humans who have a special connection to naiads, and about acquiring a disability and learning to live with it, and it’s so good. I love the connection between the father and daughter, and I love the way it ends, full of hope.

Toby MacNutt, “Green Thumbs” (Liminality, March). This is just so full of smell and taste and touch and hesitance and tenderness and slow-building desire. I love it.

Arkady Martine, “Object-Oriented” (Fireside, March). A short, bittersweet tale about disaster workers who stay invested in their job with empathy pills. What I really like about this one is the thoughts it raises about affective empathy. So often empathy in SF is described like it’s just an emotion detector. In a small space, Martine focuses on another aspects of empathy – the *caring* aspect – and makes some very poignant points about both its purpose and its costs. (As a side note, I also like that the narrator feels empathy for inanimate objects and buildings – this is a common quirk of autistic people, though it’s not exclusive to us, and I don’t think the narrator is autistic, but it IS nice to see nonetheless.)

Emma Osborne, “Don’t Pack Hope” (Nightmare, Issue 67 April). I’m not normally one for zombie apocalypse stories, but this is one of the ones that does it really right. By focusing on a single scene – one of preparation and planning, not of violence – the story gets to really zero in on a study of its trans man protagonist. As he packs his bags to find his family and survive, we see in a unique way what he is attached to, what he hopes for, what he fears. Lots of feels are available here!

Hester J. Rook, “Across the anvil and burning” (Liminality, March). This came immediately after “Green Thumb” in the same issue, and they are a wonderful pair – both vividly sexy and sensual in the best ways. But where MacNutt’s poem is tender and exploratory, Rook’s contrasts it with a powerful undertone of dominance.

Fran Wilde, “The Sea Never Says It Loves You” (Uncanny, Issue Twenty-One, March). UggghHHHHhhh. Sometimes being in love is exactly like this, and makes you feel exactly this small.

(First published June 21, 2013. TW for sexual abuse/assault in this one.)

Today’s Book: “The Lark and the Wren” by Mercedes Lackey

The Plot: A young violinist named Rune runs away from home and has adventures.

Autistic Character(s): Maeve, a kitchen drudge at the inn where Rune lives and works at the beginning of the story.

Let me say one thing up front: I didn’t read this book for the autism. It wasn’t on my list of planned Autistic Book Party books. It was a book my partner lent me because he thought I’d like it. Maeve appears only peripherally and only in the first few chapters, before Rune runs away. She is so minor that, even if her character was handled wonderfully, I would hesitate to recommend the book just for the autism. It’s a very small part of what the book is.

Autistic Book Party isn’t just about recommending books, though. It’s also about “what not to do”. So here’s how not to write an autistic minor character:

Told to sweep out a room, she would do so. That room, and no more, leaving a huge pile of dirt on the threshold. Told to wash the dishes, she would wash the dishes all right, but not the pots, nor the silverware, and she wouldn’t rinse them afterwards. Of course, if anyone interrupted her in the middle of her task, she would drop what she was doing, follow the new instructions, and never return to the original job.

When Maeve follows instructions in this manner, instead of correcting Maeve and giving her better instructions next time, Stara (Rune’s mother) makes Rune pick up the slack. (Not that giving her better instructions occurs to Rune, either.)

Other characters describe Maeve various ways. “An innocent.” “A little simple.” “A great lump.” The word “autism” isn’t used because it would be anachronistic, but with the literalism, the inattention to others and apparent emotionlessness, the constant tuneless humming, and other stereotypes, autism is the best word I can think of. If she isn’t autistic, she has a related developmental disability, and the same “what not to do” arguments apply.

The point of Maeve existing, as far as I can see, is to add to a list of problems in Rune’s life before she runs away. She has to do chores all the time instead of playing her violin; people look down on her because she’s illegitimate; her mother bullies her; the local NT girls bully her; the local boys both bully her and try to sexually assault her; and her co-worker is a disabled girl who doesn’t pull her weight. Oh, noes. *eye roll*

How Maeve feels about her duties at the inn is never addressed. I don’t mean we never find out; I mean it never occurs to anyone that Maeve has feelings in the first place. She tends to be expressionless and not to speak (I’m not sure if she’s actually nonverbal, or just doesn’t talk much), so everyone assumes she doesn’t have any emotional reaction to anything. Including the following:

But no call came, only the sound of Stara scolding Maeve, and Maeve’s humming. Rune sighed with relief; Maeve never paid any attention to anything that wasn’t a direct order. Let Stara wear her tongue out on the girl; the scolding would roll right off the poor thing’s back – and maybe Stara would leave her own daughter alone, for once.

(Out of context, this can be read as Stara giving a relatively mild reprimand. But every time Stara criticizes Rune, she uses very harsh and unfriendly words and Rune whines in the narration about how mean Stara is, so I think we can assume that whatever she’s saying to Maeve is at least as bad.)

Two comments on that:

[1] You can’t be intelligent enough to understand specific instructions about household chores (even in a very literal way), yet not intelligent enough to notice when someone is chewing you out for doing your work wrong. Language understanding doesn’t work that way.

[2] Just because an autistic person has no clear facial expression doesn’t mean they’re not feeling anything. Our facial expressions and other nonverbal communication tend to be weird. In fact, NTs often have as much trouble reading autistic body language as autistic people do reading NTs.

[3] Most people feel bad when being chewed out for doing their work wrong. It doesn’t take a lot of psychological study to realize this. Knowing that you slacked off or misunderstood something and being called out for it feels bad. When you try your best, followed the instructions carefully, and still get yelled at for doing it wrong, even though you don’t understand what you did wrong? That feels even worse. Especially when it is something that happens again and again, and you can’t figure out how to fix it, and you clearly must be a bad and defective person because you can’t stop getting it wrong and being yelled at. Ask any autistic person about this feeling, seriously.

Lackey seems to assume, not only that Maeve’s lack of expression betrays a lack of thought, but also that she isn’t thinking or feeling anything even when she does what she is good at:

There wasn’t anyone in the common room but Maeve, who was sweeping the floor with a care that would have been meticulous in anyone but her.

But it gets worse.

Continue reading “Vintage Autistic Book Party, Episode 5: The Lark and the Wren”

On Wednesday, I performed a live reading of “An Operatic Tour of New Jersey, With Raptors” at ChiSeries Toronto. It was a lovely and unexpectedly musical event. I sung the sung parts in my opera-themed story; Charlene Challenger played several types of music including a traditional Maltese insult song; Kelly Robson sang a theme song for Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, to the tune of the music from “Gilligan’s Island”; and, of course, Kari Maaren was there to serenade us with filk. (It’s been final exam season lately. The academic-themed song was VERY RELATABLE.)

Bakka Phoenix Books was kind enough to bring copies of each reading author’s book for sale. I counted four copies of MONSTERS IN MY MIND on the table when I came in; by the end of the evening, all were sold, even though they were marked up to like 37 dollars. That made me happy.

Here’s some other fiction news:

• “I Sing Against the Silent Sun” – a novelette co-written by me and A. Merc Rustad, set in the Principality Suns universe – will appear in Lightspeed‘s June issue. I’ve seen mock-ups for the issue’s cover art, which is based on this story, and let me tell you, it is going to be FABULOUS.
• Another opera story of mine, called “Variations on a Theme from Turandot,” will appear in Strange Horizons at some point in the next few months (possibly also June). I am immensely proud of this one. More later.
• My story “Minor Heresies,” which appeared in Ride the Star Wind last fall, will be reprinted in Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction.

And poetry:

• My Patreon hit the $75 monthly goal, so I released a group of short computer-generated poems dedicated to my backers. You can find them here: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
• My poem, “Nightmare II,” will appear in Kaleidotrope sometime in 2019.
• I’ve also released a Twitter bot, @uwtwitsong, as part of my PhD research. It’s a computer program that generates (semi-coherent) quatrains based on the news. I’m going to continue posting @uwtwitsong’s poems for several more weeks before the project is complete, so please do check it out!

45. Miss Sprocket Tinkers

Round and round they went on the big brass wheel, up and down the ladders, in and out of little hidey holes. Sprocket wanted those mice.

This is a steampunk story from the point of view of a clever cat who gets a little too involved in her owner’s inventions. It appeared the first issue of the now-defunct magazine Comets and Criminals.

I hesitated to add this one to the collection. At a formative phase in my writing career, I heard people talking derisively about cat stories – as kitsch, or something; it wasn’t clear – and I felt ashamed of having written one. But I’ve also had people – especially people who don’t always like my darker, weirder fare – tell me it’s one of their favorites. So… shrug! I guess I have to remind myself that Ellen Datlow once edited an anthology of cat stories, so that gives them some pedigree. So to speak.

46. The Tooth Fairy Throws In the Towel

I was there when a fish invented teeth,
that was a real ornery fish believe you me

At some point in 2012, I had my wisdom teeth taken out, and my recovery was miserable and slow. No complications – it just hurt a lot for longer than it was supposed to (my dental surgeon didn’t believe in anything stronger than Advil) and I kept trying to tough it out and chew things I wasn’t ready for and just making it worse.

During this annoyingly long time, I couldn’t concentrate enough to write anything. I knew I was finally starting to recover properly when my creative words came back. The first thing I wrote was an intentionally absurd, badly spelled free-writing exercise as a present for A. Merc Rustad. (They’d asked for more Lovecraftian fairy tales, after “What Great Darkness.” I wrote something ridiculous about Ariel the Little Mermaid crossed with Elric of Melniboné.) The second was this poem, which is, appropriately, about a frustrating experience involving teeth. (And fairies. And Cthulhu… Maybe I wasn’t too far from Merc’s writing prompt, after all.)

“The Tooth Fairy Throws In the Towel” is one of the only intentionally humorous poems I’ve written. It appeared in Mythic Delirium 29, along with “The Siren of Mayberry Crescent” and one other poem.

49. The Chartreuse Monster

“That book saved my life,” said Indrani.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND comes full circle at the end with the very first short story I ever published for money. “The Chartreuse Monster,” published in Expanded Horizons in July 2010, is the story of a hyperempathic convention attendee who finds out their favorite author is dying.

“The Chartreuse Monster” is also the only story I ever successfully wrote based on a randomly generated prompt. I was a tiny baby writer and I was very aware, when I started the story, that my skill at creating settings needed work. I wanted to write something set at one of the only places I’d been in real life that I thought was “interesting enough” – a science fiction convention. But that didn’t give me a plot. So I rolled randomly on a table of George Polti’s 37 Dramatic Situations and ended up with element 1A3: “Appeals for a refuge in which to die.”

But who would want to spend their last days at a science fiction convention? I asked myself. And this story appeared, with all of its gentle overtones about grief and legacy and what books mean to people. I was as surprised as anyone. (Now that I am a slightly-less-tiny baby writer, there are some things about the premise that I’d approach differently – but I decided not to meddle.)

The editor of Expanded Horizons also said that the protagonist of this story reads as autistic to them, even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that at the time. We agreed it was ok to tag the story with “autism” – which makes this, unwittingly, also my first #ownvoices autism story. And makes an even better bookend to the collection, which now starts and ends with two very different stories about autistic girls and women at conventions. “You Have to Follow the Rules” is the tale of discovering a world for the first time. “The Chartreuse Monster,” at last, lets it go.

Song Pairing: The song for this one is In This Moment’s “Into the Light“.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.