The past few days have been exhilarating – drinks, sharing stories, memories and anger with friends, playing appropriate music on youtube well into the night. I’ve been walking round with a ridiculous grin plastered on my face ever since. Even now, it still doesn’t seem quite real. It’s symbolic, of course, but it feels like that awful time is finally over.

It isn’t. Things are fucking awful in many respects. But we fight, and we survived. We’ll fight again.

There are many stories I won’t tell. Stories that, though they have deeply impacted my life, are not mine to share, and I respect the privacy of those involved. But I’ll tell you one.

I knew, of course, that at some point the adrenaline would give way to the memories, to the deep raw pain of what she left us to live with, to try desperately to pick up the sharp, dirty pieces of. That came when I read this blog post. Warnings for homophobia and suicide (as there are for this post also), and borderline on the worksafe front, but if you can I very strongly urge you to read it. It tells a story similar to mine in many respects, written a thousand times better than I ever could.

I was born in Yorkshire when her destruction was in full force. Largely as a result, most most of my childhood was spend on the Isle of Man. I tend to fudge questions about where I grew up because the most common response is along the lines of “haha isn’t being gay still illegal there?” and frankly the last thing I want to do is laugh about that with a casual acquaintance.

Male homosexuality was partially legalised in the early nineties – the age of consent finally being equalised about six years ago. Even now, though, there are some offences still on the statute that specifically relate to gay male sex. Legalisation was a horrible process, as were the times that followed, though many things have changed dramatically for the better in recent years.

Section 28 is reasonably well known. It was the law in England, Scotland and Wales which prohibited the “promotion” (whatever the hell that means) of homosexuality or to “promote the teaching…of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. What this meant in practice was that libraries hid their queer-related collections. It meant that teachers were too terrified to offer any kind of acceptance or hope to queer pupils. It meant a lot of kids killed themselves.

Less well known is that S28 had a mutant, evil, spawn on the IoM – Section 38. I’ve tried to find the text of it without success – I believe it treated “promotion” by teachers as criminal activity punishable with jail time. Having found no corroboration of this, all I can say with certainty was that this was the understanding held by myself, and a number of teachers and others who worked in education at the time.

When I was ~12, I borrowed In the Tent (it didn’t have that cover, I hasten to add) from the school library. It didn’t make much of an impact on me, probably because it related exclusively to a male experience, but what did have an impact was to see the librarian pick it out of the returns pile, shake her head and take it away. One of our GCSE English Literature essays was to be a comparison of a theme across two books. One on the list to pick from was The Color Purple. I wasn’t even aware of the queer dimension, but I had been reading about feminism and had seen it mentioned, so I selected that. The teacher in question asked for a note from my parents – which fortunately for me was not hard to attain – my parents were neither homophobes nor tended to restrict my reading (watching was another issue entirely…). I realise in retrospect that she was actually doing her best to be actively supportive whilst trying to minimise the risk to herself. I left school with lots on information on how to avoid pregnancy, absolutely zero on what safe sex might constitute without a penis involved. I didn’t even grasp that I might need to think about any safety precautions at all.

And you know what? This shit fucking ground me down. I was lucky in that I had some excellent teachers and accepting parents, and my tendency to get A grades all over the place let me get away with a lot. But I was also an extremely vulnerable kid for multiple reasons, and the pervasive message I was getting was that people like me were wrong, that they shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t the only factor in the periodic suicidality that plagued me throughout my teens, but it played a fucking massive part.

I think I was 14 when another teacher approached me, said she was looking to start a debating club and suggested I’d want to be involved. She was right. I was about as awkward as you’d expect a queer teen on the autistic spectrum with associated learning difficulties to be. My self-confidence was appalling. My interests were politics and words. With somewhere I could get recognition for that, even be praised for my abilities by some of my peers, I started to flourish. And I enjoyed it, loved it. I learned about different debating styles. I was always ready to fill in if they were short a debater, including on positions I didn’t agree with (I once gave an anti-abortion speech with such passion that I confused a heap of people – but I just enjoyed the challenge). I became less self-conscious about my residual speech issues. I made friends, something I never found easy. I dreamed about university debating teams.

The teacher in question found we were running low on topic ideas, asked myself and another active member to try coming up with some more. It was just before we went on a trip to France, and on the ferry back we scribbled – with input from our classmates – a long list of possible ideas from the boring stock standards to the ridiculous. I don’t think I even took particular notice of the fact gay rights was on there until it was selected as a topic and teams were chosen. Until someone’s parents complained and the debate was canned.

As it tends to with me, adrenaline kicked in. I felt like I was facing this unimaginable wall, and I couldn’t tease it out, couldn’t tease out what I knew somehow affected me personally but didn’t dare to explore how. Couldn’t tease out the obvious, logical way in which this was so obviously unjust. I couldn’t see any kind of way through this. All I could see was this wall was pressing in on me, suffocating me, and all I could do was fight in a near-instinctive way.

And, of course, I fought back with all the maturity and restraint and consideration of a sixteen year-old fighting for her life. I organised a meeting, a petition, wrote to the local newspaper. Though many kids supported me, most were not prepared to get involved to the extent I was. I pushed on anyway.

The petition was confiscated, my parents were called in. I’ll leave it to your imagination what might have happened had my parents been the type who would disown or even murder their child for being queer. That was fortunately not the case. I suspect in some schools, in some places, it was.

It was brought home to me the risk I was exposing others to. Suddenly everything deflated. I couldn’t fight any more. I was utterly crushed. My desperate attempt to fight back had come to nothing.

It was right, of course, that I had put others at risk who did not deserve it. It was right that I had not considered the wider issues. I’ve learned a lesson from that which I’ve applied to future activism. But no-one, none of us, should have been put in that position. I should not have been put in a position where to assert that people like me were not something awful that couldn’t be talked about was to endanger others.

I apologised to the teacher. I told her I wasn’t sorry for my opinions, but I was for the way I had gone about it and any impact it had had on her. I meant every word of it but I should not have been put in that fucking position. She accepted my apology and said she knew why I did it.

She might have done. I didn’t. I was drowning under waves of repression and suicidality. People like me were not ok.

Another teacher told my parents that they should be proud of me. They told me this much later, fearful of the impact his support could have on his job. I really needed support when I was sixteen.

We had a few more debates, but the debating society basically died after that. I missed it. Multiple times over my three years at university, I walked almost to the room where the debating group met, and then turned away, feeling absolutely sick to the stomach.

The teacher in question – who was an excellent, supportive teacher who encouraged me in multiple ways – left teaching, and the country, the same time I finished high school. I do not know for sure if this incident had any impact on that decision, but I’ve heard from multiple people that it did.

I moved as far away as I could. The last time I visited the place which is still where I lived longer than anywhere else was 2006. The year Section 38 was finally repealed.

I’ve told people this story, but never written it in this level of detail. This seemed the right time.

This is but one example of the shit legacy we were left with. Too fucking right I’m celebrating this week. I’m celebrating survival. I’m celebrating resistance.

I just wish there were a whole heap of people still alive to celebrate too.

Day two of Camp Nanowrimo. I’m taking advantage of the holiday and getting a head start – currently on 2275, which is a good chunk ahead of where I need to be at this point. I’m on known territory, territory I’ve been thinking my way through for weeks. And feeling pretty positive – I love my viewpoint character and writing in first person – which I had reservations about – seems to be working out.

My only worry is whether I have enough story to sustain me to novel length. It’s not that I’d mind writing another novella – the last one worked out well, after all – but I really want to get a novel under my belt this year. Hopefully the more I write, the more the plot will develop.

Here’s an extract:

A brown tentacle pokes its way around the entrance to the cockpit, then another. Slowly, testing the atmosphere. I roll my eyes, and stare straight ahead.

“Thanks for all your help back there, Zek.”

“No need to be sarcastic. I was checking on the cargo. Wouldn’t want to find it that wasn’t properly secured and you lost all of it. Wow, you’d lose business and have to pay some handsome bribes to get the tunnel cleaned up. And what if one of your rivals had hidden a bomb on your craft? We’d both be dead without me to check – and more importantly your precious ship would be shards of metal rusting at the bottom of a tunnel.”

“Oh don’t be so melodramatic. Take the controls – I need a piss.”

“Surprised you didn’t do it in your seat,” Zek taunts, but he takes the shotgun seat anyway, one tentacle after another finding its way into the well in front until his body moves with them and rests on the seat. I disappear into the tiny bathroom and try not to miss Roselle, my former co-pilot and a lot more besides.

On the way back, I grab a handful of crackers and a bottle of apple flavoured sugar syrup diluted in water. The view from the cockpit window is never-ending, swirling, brown. We float.

Today’s journey is taking us to the skyport. I haven’t been for several years and avoid it when I can – too many memories. But work has been short this season, and I’ve taken what we can. I switch the controls over to my side as Zek pecks at some pungent dried, smoked fish.

I’ve taken this tunnel often enough to know there are some pockets, some irregularities, but not enough to have a sense of where they are. So when we shudder to a halt along an indentation jutting from the tunnel wall, it’s still a shock to the system. I groan.

“Don’t know what you’re making that noise for,” mutters Zek, his consonants clacking hard against each other. “Not you who’s going to get your nice suit all stained and calluses along your tentacles.”

A tech-savvy private investigator stalks organ traffickers across a toxic cityscape.

International hostilities on an alien planet turn a human architect into a dogged emissary for peace.

Enslaved by a monstrous lord, a sage seeks answers in the stars and finds more… desirable problems.

Older women take center stage in these four novellas. They may be wives, mothers, wise women or healers, but those archetypes are not their defining characteristics. Their motivations are their own, and they’re not interested in living in the background of someone else’s epic yarn.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
M. Fenn – “To The Edges”
Minerva Zimmerman – “Copper”
Anna Caro – “This Other World”
Marissa James – “The Second Wife”

Cover art copyright © 1985 “Self Portrait Age 90″ by Judith Mason (public domain)

Winter Well will be released on 24 May 2013

2. I think I’m finally back into the swing of editing, working my way through Regeneration. Fair way to go, but hopefully I can get through a chunk this long weekend. I’ve just had a look at the cover-art-in-progress and it’s coming along very nicely.

3. For the year that’s meant to be Year of the Novel, novel writing has been rather neglected. In an attempt to fix that, I’ve signed up for Camp Nanowrimo. As you set your own goal, I’m aiming for 20k – significantly below the chaos that is Nanowrimo, but enough to get a significant chunk of Liquid City written. At least that’s the plan – I mean, I know I can easily write that much in a month, but I want these to be good words.

4. SpecFicNZ has a write-up of Words on the Wind. I read extracts from This Other Worlds and The Barrier – in retrospect I wish I’d read the whole of The Barrier, because it was much more suited to reading aloud, but that’s the sort of thing you learn from this event. Anyway, it went well and it was great to hear what some fellow writers had been working on. Added moment of awesome: someone I’d never met approaching me at a completely different event to tell me she liked my work

5. In less productive life-news, I seem to have got back into gaming. After close on a decade of resistance, I spent the bulk of yesterday playing Neverwinter Nights. Lots of fun, but the impact on my productivity may be… concerning.

6. Some conservative Christians held a “prayer vigil” against the marriage equality bill this week. It was all pretty bizarre really. But we showed up with flags and signs and sung and chanted and hung out in the sun. It’s quite strange to think that in another month this particular issue will likely all be over:

7. Sadly the actual writing has fallen by the wayside a bit this month, but I’ve been chipping away at Growth and the untitled dragon slaying story, and hope to do more of that in April in between working on Liquid City.

2. My short story, ‘Built in a Day‘ is now live in Issue 13 of Luna Station Quarterly. It’s joined by some great speculative fiction by female writers, and it’s great to see my first publication of 2013. Hopefully there’ll be plenty more.

3. Speaking of, I’ve just finished the final proofread of my novella, ‘This Other World’. It’s going to be published, along with three other novellas, in Winter Well: Speculative Novellas of Older Women, due for release in May. For someone who tends to write short pieces, this is a big step, if a slightly scary one. Oooh, and the cover art’s out too, take a look:

4. I’ve been neglecting Regeneration slightly (see 1) but there’s still been heaps of things happening. Our stories are confirmed and our cover artist is finalised – I have a good idea how the cover’s going to look and I think it’s going to be pretty awesome. A good tie-in with A Foreign Country yet still very different. I’ve got some editing scheduled for this weekend, so will hopefully be back on track with it then. Oh, and this isn’t the cover, but part of me wishes it was

5. I got interviewed! Read what Catherine Mede asked me – and what I had to say. Part of a series of interviews and posts she’s doing for NZ Book Month, because she’s heaps more organised than me, so don’t just stop at the one interview.

6. Last weekend I saw The Tempest on Matiu-Somes Island. The tempest! On an island! (If a not-very-stormy one…) That was pretty winning.

7. Lastly, a reminder about Words on the Wind, speculative fiction readings by local authors in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch – including yours truly at the Wellington event. Guess I’d better decide what to read.

The protagonists (or in some cases antagonists) in these stories are outlaws because their bodies are controlled, sanctioned or licensed in some way, because they don’t fit or they need to be made to fit social norms, or because they have decisions made about their bodies that are outside of their control. They are androids, models, women, disabled, queer, monsters, kinky, unhappy, mutants or artificial intelligences. They are all recognisable, either as echoes of or as metaphors for our world, ourselves, our bodies.

Outlaw Bodies is available for purchase in paperback and ebook formats.

2. Despite declaring this the year of the novel, I keep spotting calls for submissions I know I have to write something for. Having finished with ‘Splintering’, I’m now working on a new story, ‘Growth’ and picking up a semi-abandoned effort from last year, ‘No Future’. I’ve also been going through the publisher-suggested edits for ‘This Other World’.

3. The novel will start soon. Soon!

4. I’ll be reading at Words on the Wind, a reading by local specfic authors, on March 20th. I’ll post more nearer the time – for now, I need to decide what to read.

5. And I have my first acceptance of the year. ‘Built in a Day’, to be published in the next issue of Luna Station Quarterly. Will link when it’s up.

2. I have a novel idea! One of those ideas that becomes so overwhelming all you want to do is worldbuild, and it keeps you awake at night. It’s provisionally called ‘Liquid City’ and I’m planning it as a fun, slightly pulp-y story with elements of space opera and steampunk, amongst others. I have my main character, their backstory, the sidekick and large elements of the setting pretty well worked out. The plot is quite shaky, and feels too generic at this point, so I need to do some thinking on theme which I hope will move it along. But so far, it’s coming together nicely, and it’s taking all my energy to plan properly rather than launching in to writing, which I know from experience is a bad idea.

3. One effect of this has been a search for new planning tools. I work from multiple computers so web based software works far better for me, and I’ve found a couple that are really helping. The one I’ve been using most is MindMeister, which is a simple mindmapping tool. It’s pretty low on the features, but easy and fast to use and reasonably visually appealing, meaning I can easily get my initial thoughts and ideas down. Second is Hivemind. This functions more like the planning/scene sorting functions of Scrivener (it’s not really set up for the actual writing, though it isn’t impossible to make it work for that) and I’m using it to come up with a more linear, scene by scene plan.

4. With the start of work, I’ve got myself back to work on my thesis. At the moment, that involves reading multiple biographies of H G Wells. I have a feeling that’s going to get tiresome soon…

5. As planned, I’ve also been working on some writing exercises. Not quite one-a-day, but close. Some of them have been a lot of fun, but with the novel idea bouncing round my brain, I haven’t been able to give them the focus I’d like. Oh well, at least I’m doing something writerly…

I was struck by the importance of names in your story. Can you tell me  something about why this was so prominent in your story, and the links – or distinctions – between names and bodies?

Maria-Danae pretty obviously conceives Baby as an extension of her own ego, rather than seeing her as her own person. This is reflected all the way down to giving Baby the same name as herself. Effectively, Maria-Danae robs Baby of the chance to have her own identity–though Baby perseveres and finds her own path.

If you could modify your body in one way which is not currently scientifically possible, what would it be?

I would fix my health problems. Things like regrowing all my teeth from their original genetic blueprint are starting to look really good to me right now.

Have you ever made changes – temporary or permanent – to your body or > appearance that many people would consider unusual?

Guess where I’m pierced!

What’s in your emergency kit that most people wouldn’t think so store for the coming apocalypse?

Hey, I just re-did the bags this weekend. (My husband and I have a “go-bag” for each of us, and a “cache” for in-house supplies.) My emergency kits are designed to handle multiple situations: earthquake, storm, pandemic, and so on. So they enable us to either camp out in a sealed house for a few weeks, or escape the Bay Area quickly if we must. It should be noted that in survival situations, it’s possible to do everything right and still die–or do everything wrong and still survive. But preparing for multiple disaster situations will definitely increase your chances of making it out.
Among the best or more interesting features:
–I keep all current prescriptions in the bag so I have them pre-packed if I have to run out of the house.
–Anti-chafing stick. Very useful if I have to walk to Sacramento.
–Bleach. Very flexible and useful for water purification or sterilizing equipment. –Pencils and a little bit of paper. Leaving notes can be crucial.
–Off-site backup of all my files, in another state. If the Bay Area gets messed up in a quake, I may lose my computer, but not my writing. Very important for any writer to backup files in another location, for exactly this reason. If any disaster destroys both CA and WI where my files are, I’ve got bigger problems than saving my writing.
–The cache has lots of water, as do the bags. In many survival situations, you need “less food and more water” than you think you do. Well, having food doesn’t hurt–it’s just that water is so absolutely crucial, and you can get by on surprisingly little food.

Tell me a memorable convention experience.

I think one of my favorites of recent memory was a very special lunch at Reno Worldcon with the young con-runners of the future. These are the folks who are running science fiction conventions now and improving the events for the 21st century. At the time I went to this lunch, I was 35 and I was the oldest person at the table. This delighted me to no end. There are so many wonderful science fiction events to look forward to in the coming decades.

Your links page indicates you are owed around 18 months of pie throwing.  What’s your favourite flavour?

Oddly, I am not a fan of many pies! I don’t care for cooked fruit very much. All the pies I like are creamy and pudding style. Pumpkin, lemon cream, key lime, etc.

Thanks Vylar. Outlaw Bodies is an anthology of stories all about bodies that are trangressive, unexpected, disapproved of, repressed, attacked, degraded, upgraded, controlled, modified, neglected or traded-in for a better or less discomforting model, and is available for purchase in multiple formats.