Adding comments about your story from friends and friend’s moms in your ‘reviews’ page. But they are so wonderful!
Brief interview on my short story “Belly”
Posted online here, if you’re curious about a bit of the back story of this particular piece.
Charlie Finlay, guest editor of F&SF, interviewed me about my story currently out in the Jul/August issue of the magazine.
If you don’t have a subscription and would like to get one, or if you’d like a copy of this month’s issue, you can find e-copies of either/both here. If you don’t have a Kindle, there are free Kindle apps available for pretty much any device you can name.
Batgirl’s new kicks
Yeah, it’s great and all that Barbara Gordon gets sensible shoes. And the accessories are nifty. Forgive me if I contain my squee and wonder why I have to pick between being disabled and being a woman when I want to feel represented.
#oraclewasbadass
Comments on ’37 Reasons I’m Having Trouble Embracing The Moment’
Which is over here.
It’s funny, true, wonderful. Well, not ENTIRELY true. Because ’embrace the moment’ is never actually good advice. It ISN’T. Some moments are not worth embracing. Mopping up the vomit and diarrhea your child just deposited all over the bathroom, for instance. Nope. Not embracing it. I won’t. You can’t make me.
Realizing with horror that your kid just bullied someone. Nope!
I certainly won’t embrace the moment my braid fell with a plop into a kid’s shitty diaper.
Have you ever noticed it’s older parents who say this? They are remembering, misty-eyed, all the fond memories that they can. Not the ones they repressed because they were so goddamned traumatic or they just can’t remember because they were sleep deprived for seven entire years.
They are looking back on a highlight reel. Oh, his little fits used to be so charming, they convince themselves. Now he’s working in the commercial workout division of a bank and I’m realizing I should have been embracing the moments he wasn’t screwing over farmers and contractors so he could drive a BMW.
Or: he moved away and I’m sad and bored and it’s been so long since a howling child kept me up all night or a gradeschooler peed the bed for the 17th night in a row or a perseverating Aspergian tween angrily demanded to know WHY WE ALWAYS TAKE HIM CAMPING HE HATES CAMPING IT IS ITCHY AND HOT AND HE NEVER HAS FUN AND THERE ARE BUGS AND TENTS ARE GROSS AND HOW DARE WE DO SUCH A TERRIBLE THING for about an hour straight, that all I can now remember are the fuzzy cheerful images of when he caught his first fish on that bitterly disputed camping trip.
I love my kids. I would kill for them, stab armies in the eyes. I would lie and steal and charm and ass-kiss and do all the things I’ve already done and will continue to do: smiling at condescending administrators who want to deny them services. Patiently explaining to people you’d rather punch in the nuts what Tourette’s or autism is. Working long hours at jobs that bored the fuck out of me to pay the mortgage and feed the little stinkers. Fighting with them about homework I don’t actually care about because they need to have DISCIPLINE so they can have a FUTURE and then not hitting them when they begin their impromptu auditions for the lifetime role of Veruca Salt because some of their clothes are bought at Savers. Playing Twosquare again. And again. and again and againandagainandagainandagain.
Don’t you dare try to even hint that because I am not smiling delightedly when my kid brings home a horrific mid-semester evaluation after his parents have doggedly sat with him over his homework every single night that he refuses to turn in for some reason that I love him any less than you love yours.
‘Cause that’s what you’re saying when someone complains about parenting and you tell them to ‘enjoy the moment.’ You’re saying: you don’t have enough love for them. Enough patience. You are doing parenting wrong. YOU’RE DOING IT ALL WRONG.
And that’s not okay. Not even a little bit. Quit it.
Is this the stupidest-looking swimsuit ever made?
Please discuss. Use examples. Show your work.
Validity Of CDC Autism Rates Questioned
Interesting. From Disability Scoop (please note they show a POSITIVE depiction of a kid with autism rather than a child cowering in the corner, hands over his face. Kudos.):
With autism numbers rising every few years, some researchers in the field are sharply questioning the reliability of the government statistics.
An editorial published this month in the journal Autism is taking the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to task for the methods they use to assess prevalence of the developmental disorder. Read more.
Tourette’s is not a punchline
Dear woman at CONvergence who sat through a movie next to to my ticcing son, simply plugging her ear when the tics got too loud, never complaining, never asking him to shush: THANK YOU.
Dear UK press and football fans who mocked Tim Howard: you are horrible people.
July/August Issue of F&SF is on the shelves!
I forgot to mention that the issue of F&SF that I’m in (along with my darling dear Will Alexander) is now on shelves! You should prolly buy one at your local bookseller or in Kindle version (just this issue or a year’s subscription). I mean, I humbly suggest.
I am ridiculously pleased with this sale: first, because I am in such fine, fine, company. Second, because this is my biggest sale evAR. Third, because this issue was guest-edited by the lovely, kind, generous and much-beloved C. C. Finlay, who actually gave up his editorial (which you can read here) in order to fit in one more story. He is a heckuva guy, I gotta say. I am so honored to be in the first issue he is guest-editing (he did such a great job that there are more to come).
My story is “Belly,” and so far has been reviewed thusly:
“. . . it’s the best witch story I’ve read in a long time. And it takes the theme of nature versus nurture to a whole new, psychotic level. I highly recommend it.”
— Reflections of a Rational Republican
“. . . Gross stuff, an original take on the material. Aside from the yuckkk factor, this is a story about survival, and retaining the essence of yourself when you do it.”
— Lois Tilton, Locus Online
“. . . ‘Belly’ is a coming-of-age story set within a community of monstrous cannibal witches. It’s also an allegory about overcoming abuse, mistreatment, and family expectations to become a decent person.”
— C.D. Lewis, Tangent Online
Cosplay. Writers. Sewing. CONvergence.
Just got back from CONvergence: the largest fan con in the Minneapolis area. It was delightful fun. One of the panels I was on was about author websites. I insisted that if you keep a blog, you need to update it.
ha ha ha ha ha.
So I’m going to start doing a bit of crossposting from FB, where I’m very active, to follow my own advice. And what I just did at FB was post a ton of gorgeous cosplay.
I love it when people cosplay. I love it when I recognize something that I thought only I cared about anymore (like Xena). I love it when people pour hours and hours of heart and thought into their costumes and into the fallout from those costumes.
I can’t thank the passionate, hardworking cosplayers enough who come to cons in their finery. You are all magnificent. I adore you.
I especially loved all of the crossplay people were doing: Aquawoman. Slave Prince Leo (not pictured; my photo came out too blurry) (who wrote a really short, compelling post on getting groped at cons a while back).
My panels were all Writer McWriterson panels: Disability in Fiction, Gender in fiction, Suspension of Disbelief in Urban Fantasy, Sci Fi as a Mirror into current society. And none of us dressed up. Writers generally don’t seem to, at cons. Is it because we don’t have the time to lovingly hand-sew a victorian crossplay Doctor costume? Probably not; I spend hours hand-sewing the stripes down the side of a certain Lex Luthor. Is it because we don’t think it’s ‘professional?’ Is it because we’re snobs?
Mary Rickert’s THE MEMORY GARDEN
I got The Memory Garden delivered on my yoga night, and despite the fact that Mary and I first bonded over our mutual love of yoga I could not put down the book and go.
It is an all-encompassing book. It enfolds you, like the garden (the garden is its own character in this novel: strong and heady and sweet and a little dangerous). You forget you are not Nan, the main character.
I read this book while staying home, nursing a cold. I was puffy and horrible-looking, my hair sticking up at wild angles, circles under my eyes.
But each time I got up from the book to go to the bathroom (which was a lot; I was pushing fluids), I would first be surprised by how easily and fluidly my ill, stiff and disabled body moved. But compared to Nan, whom I thought I was, it was like I’d gained superpowers. I would catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I washed my hands, I was astounded by how young I looked: my skin so fresh, my body so round and firm. Each time, I would laugh. I am 43 years old, I would tell myself. I am Haddayr. I am living in the inner city, not out in the country surrounded by a wild and riotous and beautiful garden.
But Mary’s power of place, and character, and voice, would soon suck me in again, and again I would be 79-year-old Nan, raising a teenage girl, hiding my secrets from everyone including, sometimes, myself — every move I made all at once precious and doomed as I waited for death or for the sheriff to come and arrest me for a long-ago crime, or for my daughter to stop loving me when she knew the truth. Vague, confused at times. Losing track of present and past. Bewildered by the profusion of old friends I thought I’d lost long ago, suddenly filling my home.
Although I was an old woman, I was reading as I had when a child: completely immersed, no longer myself.
What a gift! What a glorious, eerie, dark and confusing gift this book is, if only just for that.
But of course, it is much more than that. It is about being women and girls together. And about being weird, and about history and the power of women. It is about old shoes and destruction and beautiful friendships. Ghosts, of course (this is Mary Rickert, after all) and attempted murder. And the terrible things people do. And the wonderful ways in which they love each other.
When this book was finished, I cried and clasped it tightly to my chest so it could be nearer to my heart. And then I wept some more.
Haddayr Copley-Woods 
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