SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates most Fridays.
My interview with the French Canadian Legacy Podcast is now live! With Jesse, I discuss “Glâcehouse”, No Time: The First Hour, and life in California, China, and the future.
(for a bonus, I got a bit more off-the-cuff about the Lady Washington and my time in the slaughterhouse for the preview…)
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
Winston Churchill
Everyone’s heard of a masterpiece – some great tour de force of art or craft. Fewer folks, but some, have heard of an apprenticepiece – now a miniature work of cabinetry, originally a kind of final project to prove the apprentice was ready to graduate to journeyman. Today, I’m going to talk about what I call a mistresspiece.
I call it a mistresspiece partly for the wordplay, and partly because the writer friend I was talking to and I could not for the life of us think of a masculine or gender-neutral term for “mistress,” as in a dedicated long-term lover, even though she thought it was mainly straight women writers that cultivate mistresspieces.
As for me: I love Doña Ana Lucía, I do. She’s been my main project for the better part of three years. I love the sheer, silly, solarpulp joy. I love the prose and the two-fisted action and the excuse to pull out another Cool Thing because that’s half the point. I look forward to many years and many books with her. But at this point, I also detest Doña Ana Lucía. Three years is a long time with one book, even a fun one. You get tired, you get bored, you get stifled. You need something different.
And your eye starts to wander. Ideas drift in front of you, one catches your eye, and it’s an idea that can work, and idea you like, an idea that likes you. It’s exciting. It feels illicit. And you promise you’ll just take a couple notes now and dutifully return to your current project, maybe call the idea back when you’re done…
…and then you wake up one morning with a chapter of the other project drafted, and it was the most fun you’ve had writing in months.
It always starts out fun, but slowly becomes more serious as you become more committed to the other project, almost as much as you are to your main project. Suddenly, you have two parallel serious writing projects: your masterpiece and your mistresspiece.
Here’s where the metaphor splits, because while cheating on your flesh-and-blood partner(s) is never not going to hurt them, cheating on your book is sometimes the best thing that could happen to it. I came back to Doña Ana Lucía after writing “Glâcehouse” renewed, and produced one of the best scenes of the novel. That was a short story, a winter fling, a stolen kiss of sweet prose. The effect goes double for mistresspieces – Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and Marybeth Delilah Potter influence and rejuvenate each other, although the two heroines and their two books could not be more different.
So if you’re getting tired of your current book, you might take a break, work on something else for awhile…even if it feels naughty. Just be sure to keep giving your main project love and care. And if that something else turns into something serious, too, you’ve found yourself a mistresspiece.
Tomorrow is the first day of the Nebula Conference.
When I signed up, I thought I’d be getting on a train today bound for Woodland Hills after requesting time off from work. I don’t have to tell you how much can change in two months. Now I’m testing audio equipment and my internet connection and teasing my friends about going to John Scalzi’s virtual dance party.
It took me some time to decide whether or not I still wanted to go. Especially when I couldn’t write for weeks, it made little sense to go to an SF/F writing convention. And while I am sad I can’t walk into the ballroom with a completed draft of Doña Ana Lucía Serrano …To The Future! in hand, I have started making progress again and made it to the place in my notes marked [CLIMACTIC BIG ENCHILADA BATTLE ROYALE WITH CHEESE].
So why go?
Because at heart, it’s still a convention. There’s still a lot to learn from the panels and discussions, and you never know who you’re going to meet in the common areas. The focus on small groups in the common areas means we’ll be able to hear each other talk (at least, once I have my mike set up). And cons keep me in touch with what’s happening in SF/F publishing, and usually spurs me into action.
And if you’re coming too, come say hi to me! I’ll be at the following panels all weekend. If I’m not at one of these, I’m probably hanging out in the Vorkosigan Suite. See you there!
May 29
8:00-9:00 Crowdfunding for Authors
9:30-10:30 Being a Creative in 2020
10:30-11:30 Mentorship Meeting
2:00-3:00 Blades and Badasses
3:30-4:30 Managing Choice in Games and Interactive FictionMay 30
8:00-9:00 Urban Development
11:00-12:00 Writing Multiply Marginalized Characters in SFF
2:00-3:00 Making Video for Authors
3:30-4:30 Spending Money to Make Money as an Indie Author
5:00-8:00 55th Annual Nebula AwardsMay 31
8:00-9:00 The Landscape of Audiobook Production for Authors
9:30-10:30 Who and Where I Am
11:00-12:00 The Second Life of Stories
2:00-3:00 Moving the Line
3:30-4:30 Forming and Sustaining a Successful Writing or Critique Group
Doña Ana Lucía’s Prithvi Empanadas
I have never been able to make empanadas quite so perfect as my mother’s, even with all those long monsoon afternoons helping her make batches on batches of them. However, I perfected a recipe of my own as a college apprentice that serves me in good stead now as a professor myself. I like to gather a small group of people interested in Latin culture together in my kitchen to make a whole batch together, with enough for everyone to take home.
My favorite filling involves some of the best of three separate worlds, with a nice tail of slig and golden Buddha-potato from Prithvi, lagoon-olives and sea vegetables from Parvati, and spices and velociraptor eggs from my native Sati. However, I have adapted it to what I believe the original Serrano recipe was on Earth, with Earth ingredients only.
Ingredients:
Pastry
Filling
Instructions
Mix together flour, salt, and baking powder, then mix in oil and milk until dough forms a ball. Knead on cornmeal, then let stand 30 minutes. Open can of olives, drain, transfer olives to rice bowl. Boil potatoes.
Fry the beef with the garlic and onions in a little olive oil until onions translucent, then add potatoes, cumin, chili, achiote, red and green peppers, and enough potato water to cover. Cook, covered, until the meat is tender. Take off heat and add parsley, olives, and chopped hard-boiled eggs.
Roll out dough with pin until 5mm thick, then cut out circles with wide-mouth olives can. If too large, cut into working pieces first. Preheat your oven for 180*C. Take each circle, ladle a generous helping of filling in the middle, fold over and fold it repulgue-style with your fingers. Brush with the egg to help seal and set a shiny finish, then lay on a cornmeal-lined baking sheet. Repeat until you run out of either filling, dough, or baking sheets.
Bake at 180*C for 15 minutes or so, or until the scent drives your blood to unspeakable things. Enjoy with crisp dry rice lager or sips of good rum.
Today, I did the hat trick.
A hat trick, according to The Guardian, was when the cricket club would present a member a new hat upon completing three wickets in one game. I originally heard it in terms of hockey, when a player scored three goals in a row. But my hat trick has nothing to do with sports.
I don’t remember when I started calling it that, but I’ve been calling it that ever since. For me, a hat trick is a day with three, very different, accomplishments in it:
If you’re a little confounded by these, let me break them down.
10 Minutes of Waiting Worship
As a (Liberal) Quaker, my worship of God and awareness of the Presence do not involve set prayers, or songs, or pew aerobics. Some folks, even some Friends, find these things bring them closer to the Light, and I’ve sung for joy or repeated a mantra before. But the beating heart of my religious life is sitting in silence among Friends on Sunday morning, praying stillness into my soul so that I can hear, and heed, the still, small voice of God. Outsiders call it silent worship, but among Friends, we call it waiting worship. It’s not so much that we are silent, as that we are waiting for God and waiting on the Presence of God among and between us.
The early Quakers had a practice of retiring daily, or as often as possible, which I understand to be a Friends’ Meeting “in good order” that happens to have only one Friend in it. Each Friend sits down, settles down, and centers down, letting God’s Light illuminate them and enlighten them. Not quite meditation, not quite prayer, it seems to be the Quaker experience par excellence. And I do not retire nearly often enough.
1,000 New Words
Jack London (my problematic patron saint) called it his stint. Ray Bradbury sat down on Monday and wrote a few thousand words of new story, editing Tuesday and submitting Wednesday, every week for most of the 1950s. Stephen King cruises on about 1,200 a day.
And like these working-men before me, I lay down 1,000 more words on my latest project (or blog post) before I can rest for the day. Edits don’t count, research don’t count, revisions only count if I add a scene or a character. It’s laying down raw first-draft wordcount, the most sacred of writerly tasks, the holiest of holies. Everything else is just publishing.
It started out as a minimum bar to keep my production up. It’s become so much more. I used to think of the words of my stint as like rail, something we lay down and leave behind, always moving forward. Now I think of the thousand as ballast, weight laid by my keel that makes me more stable and better able to weather high seas and sudden storms. I am happier and healthier each day I meet my stint, and exactly the reverse the days that I don’t.
Of the three components of my hat trick, I easily hit 1,000 new words more often than I hit 10 minutes in waiting worship or 3 sanchin kata.
3 Sanchin Kata
If you practice Uechi-ryu karate, this is self-explanatory. If you don’t practice Uechi-ryu but practice karate, you might know what a kata is, but not know Sanchin. If you took one look at that and said “can you eat it?” then read on.
Kata (or, in other martial arts, forms) are the set solo practice exercises used to teach technique in East Asian martial arts. If you’ve ever seen old people in the park doing t’ai chi, they’re all doing the same form (probably Beijing 24-Step Form). Individual karate styles are strongly defined by their kata, which kata they teach and how they practice. My tradition, Uechi-ryu karate (Uechi family style), rests on a kata called sanchin or “the three battles.” Here is an Okinawan grandmaster showing us all how it’s done.
Sanchin has acquired a semi-mystical status and no small amount of superstition. Master Uechi himself often said “all is in sanchin.” At my dojo, growing up, we did one each of the other eight kata…
…and three sanchin.
To do three sanchin requires going through the other five Uechi-ryu kata that I know, stretching, probably also doing my daily core regimen. At the gym, I might even play with the kettlebells or dance or hit the heavy bag. But if I accomplish nothing else physically, all is in sanchin.
Bringing It All Back Home
Straightforward enough, but it’s become more over the years. I mentioned how writing ballasts me. Extending the nautical metaphor, writing is ballast, sanchin is maintenance, and waiting worship is trimming the sails. “I laid down a thousand words today” is so many pounds of ballast along my keel, weighing and centering me, allowing me to weather storms that should otherwise have tossed me over. But it’s ballast of grain or sawdust, and soon grows sodden and slips away, and I have to lay more down. Sanchin is maintenance, the bo’sun’s trade, tarring line, scraping barnacles, mending sails, making baggywinkles. In port, I can work deeper, but even out at sea, I can lean her over and scrape away all the barnacles that built up as long as there’s a sand drift that’ll hold her …but however I do, I need to keep ship-shape and Bristol-fashion. Waiting worship, though, is easiest to understand: it is to find the prevailing winds from God, and rather than fight it, adjust my sails to better work with wind and water to get where I need to be.
Days I do the hat trick, I feel balanced, well-kept, and agile. I feel the most R. Jean Mathieu I can be, like I’ve lived up to some inner standard. Do you have anything like that? Some task or series of tasks that make you feel the most yourself? Tell us about them in the comments!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to center down and listen for the still, small voice…
Over on the NaNoWriMo forums, we had a prompt to write a letter FROM one of our characters to us during quarantine. I chose everyone’s favorite aristocratic Latina space archaeologist, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, and here’s what she had to say…
M. Mathieu,
You and your peoples have built for us, your children, a utopia. Plagues here are contained within hours, tamed and woven into the ecosystem around them. Quarantine is a matter for ships and domes, in some tragic cases for cities. The worst I have seen in my life was the Crisis of Prithvi, and even then, mate could reach out to mate and clasp hand, shoulder, cheek, lip.
I suppose it would be declassé to ask for your experience and feelings, even for anthropological science.
These “are the days worth living for,” as your Edith Keeler says. And they are indeed coming, the days when the deserts bloom and the hungry are fed and their diseases cured, and all souls share hope and a common future. Even now, the people of Earth are clever and kind, and can solve their problems as long as they retain hope that problems can be solved.
And where human talent alone will not do, there is the bounty of nature…a partner with you, not an enemy. You know this: your sourdough bubbles on the table, your cabbage becomes sauerkraut, and your first instinct when cooped up at home was to plant a garden. To plant a garden, to raise seeds to be planted out of doors in a few short weeks! I do not need to spell out the metaphor for you, writer, or my admiration of the hope it suggests in you and all my ancestors. Fungus, plant, animal, and human are all family together, and they are more than willing to help us if we help them. We are earthclan, we all live in abundance together, or all die alone.
Ah, does it all seem so large? Yet the plague is so small, a microscopic machine that is almost alive. And in weight, it and its rancid cousins weigh half the beetles of the world, that’s all. But only remember your L’Engle, and her lights. Every small victory against the darkness is a victory for light. Every strike for human potential and earthclan harmony are strikes toward the future. Your worlds upon worlds of community gardens are not so far off. Only practice your hanzi, practice your karate, water your plants, ranch your yeast, love your wife, and ask “let me help” (as Allende de Mars so beautifully said).
Use this crucible to forge the things you could not before. Begin training at home, begin making cheese, begin a systemic course of reading. I care not what, only narrate it to me as you can.
Because out of such buds do blossom the days worth living for.
Je t’en prie…
Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y Veracruz
Wow.
Seriously, wow.
On January 1st, I did not expect to have 500 Twitter followers by the end of the year, much less by March 6th! But as of @svnsxvi Thank you all for your follows and for your attention.
And, in thanks, I’m offering everyone a present.
I’m giving away free copies of my Kindle short, “Hull Down”, from now until Thursday. All you need to do is head to Amazon, search for “R. Jean Mathieu” and grab your free Kindle edition.
(While you’re there, you could even follow me on Amazon!)
So what’s it about? I’ll tell you:
“The room pulsed around him, its fetid breath almost palpable even through the helmet. The bodies of Commander Wu Suzhen and Major Sam Harris were woven into the wall, a superimposed lovers’ embrace developed in resin and red light. Their shapes were fuzzy; the inside of Matt’s helmet sticky with condensation like his hair was sticky with sweat. His inner ear couldn’t find north or down, his eyes stung and he could taste something salty, but whether blood, sweat or tears, he couldn’t tell.
From “Hull Down”
Why did you live?”
Pvt. Matthew LeWald is surprised when a Navy officer leads his Marines on the Search and Rescue operation. He’s even more surprised to be the only survivor of a mission gone disastrously wrong, when better men than him died left and right. Why did he live? But there are stranger things afoot than war, things like love and things like enlightenment.
The reviewers are saying it’s “not your Dad’s military SF” and calling it “strange [and] haunting.”
Whether you’ve known me for years or just followed me yesterday, this is for you, and you have all the way until Thursday, March 12th to claim it.
Thank you again for the follows. Here’s to 500 more.
PS – If you still can’t get enough of my work (and yay!), there’s still time to become mon patron in time to see the teaser for “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)!” Just head over to Patreon and sign up for the price of a cup of coffee per month.
The three photos above are all of the same man.
Bayard Rustin was a multifaceted gem. A Quaker, a black American, a pacifist, a gay man who “ain’t never heard of no closet,” a Communist, a civil rights organizer, the eminence gris to Dr. King, a gay rights activist, a devoted boyfriend to his partner Walter Naegle, a singer, a writer. Most of those things got him jailed, ostracized, or beaten at least once in his long, long life.
God help me, I have tried to tell his story about six times here. I’ve not sat in as many Quaker meetings as Bayard Rustin, but I’ve sat in enough to know when vocal ministry isn’t mine to give. Guided by his inner Light, that of God in every soul born into this world, black, white, young, old, Anglo, franco, every soul, he tried to fuse the Quaker peace testimony, the socialism of A. Phillip Randolph, and the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi to resist oppression everywhere and for every soul.
Here’s a man who absolutely lived his truth, without compromises, and shows us how we can do likewise.
If you can’t get a hold of Lost Prophet or Time on Two Crosses, listen first to the man in his own words.
Then, let Christina Greer give you a sketch of his story.
Rest in Peace, Friend Bayard.
I apologize for the late update, but I promise it’s with good reason.
Yesterday, I sent off the manuscript of “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)” to Cantina Press’ Silk & Steel: An Adventure Anthology of Queer Ladies.
This particular story has been a bit of a journey. I have of course been working with Doña Ana Lucía in her debut novel, Doña Ana Lucía Serrano …To the Future!, for a year or two. At the end of NaNoWriMo, where I went on vacation to do a contemporary SF/mystery young adult novel about a blonde Southern hivemind of alien squid, I saw the call for submissions. I realized I could do a pretty good 6,000-word pulp story, Lester Dent style, with Doña Ana Lucía, both because it would be fun and because, as Dean Wesley Smith says, “short stories are marketing where they pay you.”
The call for submissions recommended up to 7,000 words. So, over the course of December and into the New Year, I wrote a first draft of seven…
…teen…
…thousand.
Thanks to the good graces and patience of my first readers (and thank you, all of you), I was able to carve down to about 10,500. But something else happened in early January.
That’s right, you found me. By statistical inference, you, right now, are probably someone who found me thanks to the “aristocratic Latina space archaeologist with a sword” comment, or its knock-on effects on Twitter. All of a sudden, I couldn’t name every person who visited RJeanMathieu.com. Claire-Marie Brisson contacted me about an interview over my previous story, “Glâcehouse.” Things began to happen. Apparently, some of you even contacted Silk & Steel on my behalf, without even reading the story, something I don’t think I’ve ever heard of before!
And all the while, I was still trying to carve down another thousand words.
This has been the first story I’ve written, even partially, in public. The first one with real emotional stakes if the market I wrote it for accepts it or not, and not just for me, but for all the people who know about the story and care about it. I’m gonna be honest: I’m still not sure how to handle that. But I’m glad you’re out there with me.
So, finally got it out the door as of yesterday, at 9,900 words. What next? Well, tonight’s Shabbat so my wife will chant her millennia-old Jewish prayers as I light the candles. Tomorrow, I’m seeing Call of the Wild with Pops and Grand-papa, since we’re all three such Jack London and Harrison Ford fans that there’ve been times that London’s books were all the civil words my father and I could speak to each other. And after that?
After that, it’s time for me to go back…
To The Future!
I first read this story after the furor and the fire, after it was taken down, after all the apologies. I read this story in the quietest corner of McCarthy’s Bar, as a cisgender bisexual man who, in my wife’s words, “butches pretty hard,” watching the drunken interplay of a cross-section of San Luis Obispo dance their dance of sex and gender at one another.
And as I sipped my Guinness, scrolling down my phone, I fell into Barb’s story.
Barb is one of the two biological components of a Boeing AH-70 Apache Mystic. “America names its helicopters for the people it destroyed,” says the career soldier, with only tarnished patriotism. Barb and Axis, the gunner, fly across a Mojave Desert occupied by a hostile credit union to blow up a school in the California valley. They’re spotted by enemy craft, and hunted across the desert. That’s the story.
The real story is in Barb’s asides, on gender, on patriotism, on how the war came and why we fight. As an attack helicopter, Barb’s views on gender, on her past life as high-femme Seo Ji Hee and on performing and being an attack helicopter, on where gender comes from and what functions it serves the individual and the human race as a whole…
…isn’t my place to say. It might be in fifty years, after I’ve been digesting this story long enough. But not today. I can’t speak to that condition.
Barb is wry about the United States, and about its war against the Pear Mesa Budget Committee, but ultimately believes in flawed human oversight and its official apparatus, democracy. Barb’s isn’t the full-throated patriotism of midnight rallies or even parade grounds, but it isn’t the time-serving “just to pay for dental school” enlistment soul either. Barb believes. But Barb does not believe unthinkingly. Barb accepted a gender reassignment, not a mind wipe.
Because Barb has things to say about Pear Mesa, too. About how the Pear Mesa actuarial algorithms identified American flags as the enemy and systemically removed every one of them. About how it plants pear orchards on pear orchards, for reasons not even Pear Mesa’s subjects understand. About how Pear Mesa stayed there as the waters rose and consumed the Mississippi Valley and the Feds fled for their northern fastnesses to hunker behind polders of new Amsterdam.
And all the while, Barb performs delicate, unstable flight maneuvers (“Did you know instability is one of the most vital traits of a combat aircraft?”) and conducts electronic warfare, the way I roll my shoulders and bellow my laugh and wear a broad snap-brim fedora just so.
This story is beautiful, and to me, that’s all the justification it needed to be published and see the light of day. It is beautiful, because it is sincere. This story took a sneer of a right-wing mockery, “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter!!!” from the mouth of some red-hatted miltech LARPer, and took it dead seriously. Barb is an attack helicopter, and quickly clarifies that that is a gender assignment rather than a sexuality. Isabel Fall is completely, utterly sincere with this story, sincere about Barb’s gender, sincere about her own gender, sincere about war, and patriotism, and uncertainty, and fluidity, and instability.
That’s why it works. That’s why it’s the best science fiction short story of the year, and still will be in December.
That’s why this story is beautiful.
And that’s why it deserves to be read.
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