Madeline Ashby's Blog, page 4

 

ARC’s (pictured above, with a delightful blurb by none other than Mira Grant) went out a little while ago, and now the first review is in. This is great, because I’ve been having those moments when I wake up at four am and wonder if the book is actually terrible, and I was deluding myself all along. But, Publisher’s Weekly seems not to think so:

Hwa does pretty well for herself as a bodyguard for the sex workers who populate a self-contained community/oil rig off the eastern coast of Canada. She wants cybernetic enhancements, but her uncaring mother won’t let her get them. When an obscenely rich family with unusual views buys the entire town, Hwa’s brought into their family affairs, which include multiple murders. Hwa is an immediately likable protagonist who isn’t afraid to shatter rules—or bones. The world is an updated version of Raymond Chandler’s, with gray morals and broken characters, and Hwa’s internal monologue has just the right balance of introspection and wit.

The review is more balanced than that — it mentions some plot stuff that wasn’t quite cleaned up by the time print ARCs went out. But, discussing those elements further would mean giving out spoilers, and well, no can do. (Also, Raymond Chandler had some wild and crazy plot twists, too.) By and large I’m delighted with this review, and once again, impressed at how reviewers are better able to summarize my own plots than I am.

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I imagine that elsewhere, this is described as a link round-up. Or, if it were more thoughtfully and intentionally curated, it would go into a newsletter (which I don’t have the time or focus to create; remembering to blog is hard enough). One of my bad productivity habits is keeping a bunch of tabs open, thinking that I’ll blog about them individually. Naturally, I don’t. Then I feel bad about not doing so, but the moment has passed, so I feel worse, and it turns into this very Catholic shame spiral, and eventually Firefox crashes under the weight of my good intentions. So really, I’m attempting to clear my tabs in an effort to clear my head. As Chuck Palahniuk once said at a reading of his that I attended: “I like this for the same reason I like sex. It’s all about me.”

I may be paraphrasing. But only a little.

Keanu Achilles: John Wick and Modern Anger If I wind up with a tattoo that reads “????? ?????, ???,” it will be Adam Roberts’ fault. My favourite bit: “The appeal here is of a dangerous kind, I think. It flatters that sense we have, on whatever level, that because ????? is divine, pursuing our own anger with ?????-level implacability will in some sense make us godlike. Ours, after all, is not any old anger: no, no, it is righteous, justified and magnificent. Except that it’s actually none of those things. Except that it doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. We will only wear ourselves down. We are not gods. You, and I, are not invulnerable as John Wick. And though I can’t speak for you, I know that I am not as beautiful as Keanu Reeves.”
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt It is very hard to live in a world that no longer has Umberto Eco in it. This is just one reason why.
Notes Towards a Feminist Futurist Manifesto “The apparent downsizing of contemporary science and technology from claims to artifice (machines that can think and live) to those of ambience and augmentation are deeply disingenuous and, in as far as they extend the reach of biopower through i.e. gendered visions of the smart home, servile agents and avatars embodying female stereotypes etc, they require a gendered form of biopolitics. Even within the short life span of Ambient Intelligence, the iconic agent of servility has shifted from that of the butler to that of the nurse. Ambient intelligent nurses, designed to manage and regulate an ageing population @home rather than in the care of the state, would know when they were needed, come when they were called and cost next to nothing compared with the flesh and blood variety who are already ever more precariously employed.”
The Real Horror At The Heart Of “The Witch” “You can see how this created a deep and abiding pathology around objects of abjection. But in order to express that pathology, you need something more expansive and flexible than static biblical texts. Thus: the sermon, the fairy tale, the nursery rhyme, all of which coalesce into the second and equally potent form of maintaining the status quo. Call it folklore, call it storytelling, but it takes on the guise of being “just a story” while performing necessary ideological policing.”
Dine Out Like a Hollywood Legend at These Retro L.A. Hot Spots I’m really just making note of this for the next time I’m in LA. Which I hope is very soon. Having been born there, I occasionally crave the city.
Designed to Fail “So being in a dense urban location turns out to be the optimal design solution: relying as it does on the healthiest, least expensive, lowest carbon and most fully deployed transport technology in human history: walking. IDEO already knows this: that’s why they pay premium rents for their tidy, exposed-brick office space in the West Loop.”
Sail (Far) Away: At Sea with America’s Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists Umberto Eco, author of Foucault’s Pendulum, the best novel ever written about conspiracy theorists, just died. Why isn’t this being shared everywhere?
How the Flint River got so toxic Surprise! It took over a century, but you can do a lot in a century.
Burnout, creativity, and the tyranny of production schedules Bear is really brave to talk about this, and she does so with plainspoken grace. Christ knows I’ve felt this worn out before, and I don’t have half the track record she does. Bear’s also an awesome person who bought me a salad for breakfast on the morning of an early flight, during the Hieroglyph tour, after listening to me prattle on about Atkins during a walk along the National Mall. (Also her Hieroglyph story is way cooler than mine and you should read it.)

Finally, here’s this:

Like Hannibal Lecter, I also listen to the Goldberg Variations when I’m gathering my wits. I particularly like this version.

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The other day, after watching Crimson Peak for the first time, I woke up with a fully-fleshed idea for a Gothic horror story about experience design. And while the story would take place in the past, it would really be about the future. Why? Because the future itself is Gothic.

First, what is Gothic? Gothic (or “the Gothic” if you’re in academia) is a Romantic mode of literature and art. It’s a backlash against the Enlightenment obsession with order and taxonomy. It’s a radical imposition of mystery on an increasingly mundane landscape. It’s the anticipatory dread of irrational behaviour in a seemingly rational world. But it’s also a mode that places significant weight on secrets — which, in an era of diminished privacy and ubiquitous surveillance, resonates ever more strongly.

Like the twenty-first century surveillance apparatus, the Gothic mode is preoccupied with that which is unseen. Hidden feelings, hidden histories, hidden staircases. Unspoken truths, secret plans, desires which dare not speak their own name. Gothic literature finds evidence of power or emotion sublimated “three hops” from the source. Rochester asks Jane to marry him, and lightning strikes a tree. Jane is sad, and the rain begins. It’s an inventory of emotional meta-data as evidenced by pathetic fallacy, presentiments of doom, inexplicable fevers, and twisted ankles.

So, how do we know the future is going in this direction?

I had my first inklings of this idea while reading the Institute for the Future’s anthology for the Age of Networked Matter project. I was part of it, but I didn’t get to read everybody else’s stories until they were all collated and I was on a flight to San Francisco to take part in an event related to them. Upon reading them, I emailed one of the authors and said: “Hey, I really liked all of these! Did you notice we all wrote horror stories?”

Because by and large, we had. With a couple of exceptions, all the stories in the anthology are haunted house stories. They were also science fiction prototypes. But they were haunted house stories. Why? Because the haunted house is how we will understand our homes, once the Internet takes over all our domestic touchpoints.

Consider the disappearance of the interface. As our devices become smaller and more intuitive, our need to see how they work in order to work them goes away. Buttons have transformed into icons, and icons into gestures. Soon gestures will likely transform into thoughts, with brainwave-triggers and implants quietly automating certain functions in the background of our lives. Once upon a time, we valued big hulking chunks of technology: rockets, cars, huge brushed-steel hi-fis set in ornate wood cabinets, thrumming computers whose output could heat an office, even odd little single-purpose kitchen widgets. Now what we want is to be Beauty in the Beast’s castle: making our wishes known to the household gods, and watching as the “automagic” takes care of us. From Siri to Cortana to Alexa, we are allowing our lives and livelihoods to become haunted by ghosts without shells.

Now, I’m not at all the only person to notice this particular trend (or, more accurately, to read the trend through this particular lens). It’s central to David Rose’s book Enchanted Objects, which you all should read. This is also why FutureEverything’s Haunted Machines symposium exists. Natalie Kane summarized it recently (and brilliantly) at the Lift 2016 conference in Geneva:

Now, it would be easy to characterize this particular future as simply “magical” or “animist.” A world in which everything is alive is a fairytale world, a world from myth or legend, wherein the careless treatment of a magic mirror (or a poisoned Apple) can alter the course of our lives. And a world of household spirits has deep roots in cultures outside the West. Is a “smart” home populated by multiple intelligences — some of them human — really so different from a home theoretically inhabited by yokai? Consider the nurikabe, a demon that is a sentient wall that refuses to budge. Or the mokumokuren, the haunted paper screen whose un-repaired holes and tears become eyes — one of our earliest models of in-home surveillance. Or, perhaps more familiarly, consider the kobolds and brownies and domovoi of Europe, the ambient household spirits who are mischievous or protective by turns, much like an insecure baby monitor.

So, what makes this future Gothic, as opposed to simply fantastical, or magical?

Infrastructure is crumbling. Gothic literature is replete with strange locations at the intersection of time periods. In Gothic films, this manifests as crumbling manses, broken tombstones, and — consistently — the eradication of out-dated structures by fire. In an increasingly and invisibly connected world, this looks like the Internet of Shit. Quinn Norton put it best: everything is broken. Our infrastucture is decaying, vulnerable, and spooky.
The position of women in society is changing. As Ellen Ledoux notes in this piece on the resurgence of Gothic tropes in cinema, “Where a young innocent women is in this large gothic space, threatened with things like rape and extortion or taking away property — you have Jane Eyre in 19th century, then Rebecca in the 20th century. These narratives seem to resonate even though women’s situations are different. They always track at moments women are pushing for change.” It is no accident that abortion clinics are closing all over the US just as Hillary Clinton is (vertiginously) poised to take the Democratic nomination, or that The Witch has us talking about the monstrous feminine again.
That which has been repressed is returning. Freud spoke of the return of the repressed in his essay on the uncanny, in which a long-kept secret bursts forth like Madeline Usher clawing her way out of the tomb. But the idea of repression was core to his entire psychoanalytic approach. That approach has long since been debunked at the level of everyday psychoanalysis and therapy, but the ideas remain resonant at the level of literature and culture. (Freud was simply a better analyst of literature than of patients. Also, the patients paid better.) In any case, one of his ideas is that we are constantly battling against our primitive (by which he means childish, or formative) impulses, be they sexual or merely spiteful, in order to create and maintain the social fabric. But occasionally these impulses, long repressed, erupt into our daily lives with even greater force. I am, of course, speaking of Donald Trump, and how the GOP’s Southern Strategy made him possible. America has refused to deal with its legacy of plunder or make meaningful change to repair it — there are reams of Southern Gothic literature about this — and now one figure has harnessed the power of decades of unspoken hate and resentment, fuelling a rise to popularity so fast it would impress Randall Flagg.

Gothic literature is at the roots of the skeptical Scooby-Doo story, wherein events that might be supernatural are explained by, as Stephen King once called it, “pure human fuckery.” The Castle of Otranto is a classic example, and so is Jane Eyre. Crimson Peak, for all its howling spectres, is still closer to this tradition — one character is experiencing the narrative as a ghost story, while the others are living their lives in a late-Victorian noir worthy of Cornell Woolrich or Anthony Berkeley. It is, as the protagonist says of her own manuscript, “a story with ghosts in it.” The ghosts, while real, play a supporting role in helping the protagonist actualize herself, much in the same way that weak AI and algorithms help us become different versions of ourselves.

The important thing to remember about most Gothic stories, as we tiptoe down the darkened hallways of our Gothic future, is that they often have happy endings. Justice is served. The heroine survives, her eyes opened and her agency confirmed.

But first, the house must burn down.

 

 

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One of our favourite activities in this house — at least, one I can comfortably describe in greatest detail — is talking about how Trump could win the Presidency.

This isn’t because I want Trump to win. I just see how he can. Papa Bear O’Reilly is right: Trump and Sanders are two sides of the same coin. Both are tapping into feelings of rage and despair in a populace experiencing the ever-widening wealth gap as precarity, hopelessness, and a lack of faith in government:

It’s not an accident that these men are frontrunners. They’re both charismatic campaigners, one with a definite brand and the other with years of media experience. Even Trump has acknowledged this. After their respective wins in the New Hampshire primary, Trump said: “We’re being ripped off by everybody. And I guess that’s the thing that Bernie Sanders and myself have in common. We know about the trade.” (He then went on to claim that Sanders had no idea how to fix the problem, and that only he did. The man has more stumps than Paul Bunyan.)

But picture, if you will, a Trump nomination. What happens next?

What happens next is that Trump immediately moderates. He pulls not left but centrist, depending on who his opponent is. Did he say all Mexicans were rapists? Oh, that’s not what he meant. Did he say Megyn Kelly was nothing more than a bleeding hole? Oh, that’s not what he meant. He pulls to the centre, forcing his opponent ever leftward, while talking about his business experience and using it as a way to explain that yes, Bush lied, and people died.

The Iraq War has been a key talking point in the DNC since before 2008. Barack Obama won that election in part because he promised a draw-down in that conflict. But it’s one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest weaknesses. She voted for the war, in which the US wasted trillions of dollars and invaluable scores of human potential, and now Trump (and Sanders) can both say she was wrong to do so. (Because she was wrong to do so. Everyone who voted for that war should feel profound shame. I feel exactly the same way about it now as I did when I marched against it in 2003.) But Trump has a business case. He can speak of the Iraq War(s) as a bad investment, as he did during the recent debate in South Carolina. “We didn’t secure the oil,” he kept saying. “We didn’t get anything out of it.” By changing the conversation to discuss the flow of capital, he’s lifted it from any moral framework. In an openly capitalist discussion of the Iraq Wars, it doesn’t matter if Iraqis are human beings, or that we tortured innocent people to get faulty intelligence, or that we’ve eviscerated the liberties of the Americans and poisoned the very notion of freedom. What matters is that we didn’t turn a profit in doing so. It’s a non-partisan sentiment. And that’s why it’s a winner.

So what if Trump doubled down on his statements, and proposed a draw-down in all land-based conflicts that the US is currently embroiled in?

What if he promised America the stars, instead?

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about how to finance space exploration, related to a story I’m working on. I’ve talked to some scientists about it, and they all agree that the science is in place, and the ideas are there. What’s lacking is money. Or rather, what’s lacking is a significant financial commitment that lasts longer than a single administration. Kennedy’s promise that we would get to Luna was, in part, fulfilled because his death created an opportunity for a political legacy. Granted, there was a Space Race on. And even then, NASA didn’t get full popular support at the time, as even a visit to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum will confirm. (Seriously, you should go.)

But what if Trump promised to be Kennedy and Reagan, at the same time?

Think about it. What better way to win over Silicon Valley money, idealistic Democrats frustrated by a lack of investment in infrastructure and science, future-fearful Tea Partiers, non-partisan libertarians, and others in desperate need of hope, than to promise the stars? Can’t you just hear this speech?

We’ve been the world’s policeman for way too long. We’ve been doing everybody else’s job. And what have we gotten for it? Nothing. So when I’m elected, the first thing I’m doing is pulling back our forces. I’ll still build the wall. And I still feel how I do about torture. But we’re wasting money that we could be spending on building the future. Trillions of dollars. Huge amount of money. Huge. And still, ISIS is growing. So, what do we do?

We go to space. That’s what we do. We let all these other people fight their wars down here in the dirt, and we build our dreams up there, in the stars.

Could you resist?

I’ve seen how otherwise-reasonable people talk about space. It’s a magical place, for them. They forget all the side effects: the thinning bones, the early Alzheimer’s, the fingernails falling off. Do you know that every astronaut works on holding her head up, when she returns home? Under the gravity she was born to, she suddenly becomes an infant again, working hard to look her comrades in the eye. That’s space. It’s not just that no one can hear you scream. It’s that you might be too weak to do so. And yet. And still. The desire is there. No matter that there are real problems to solve down here, that the people breathing our air and toiling under our gravity are just as worthy of innovation. There will always be people who think we should leave it all behind, start somewhere else, leave behind all the bottom-feeders and their Earthly woes.

And wouldn’t Trump, the candidate of luxury and class, the one who swears up and down that he knows how to work with the private sector, wouldn’t he be the one to announce such an initiative? To look at the issues at play in this election and bring up something entirely different? Screw the wealth gap. Screw abortion. Screw gun control. Screw green energy. Screw ISIS. Bring me that horizon. Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning.

Some candidates have the threat of the Rapture. They warn of tribulation, of end times, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. But what’s far more seductive — and far more successful — is to promise something good. Something hopeful. Something optimistic.

Isn’t hope the most seductive notion of all?

This isn’t to say hope is bad. Often it’s the thing that frames your vision of a better life, a better world. In foresight, it’s called backcasting: you envision the future you want, and you work back from there to see what could make that vision a reality. Envisioning a hopeful (or hoped-for) future is a great way to start the process toward change. That’s why I’ve participated in anthologies like Shine and Hieroglyph, and why I’ve worked with organizations like the World Bank and Engineers Without Borders. I understand the need for hope. It’s what gets some people moving.

It’s also what gets some people voting.

And it’s just as easy to exploit as the emotions we don’t like admitting to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I used to think that I would open this post with bikini shots. You know the ones: flabby and pale and lumpy on one side, tight and tanned and toned on the other. But that would require someone to photograph me in a bikini, or a bathing suit, or my underwear, or nude, or what have you. And that requires a degree of confidence I’ve rarely possessed.

I didn’t lose my sense of self-love after gaining weight. That would imply that I’d had some to lose, in the first place. (Pride? Sure. Self-respect? Definitely. Love? Pass.) When I was a size 2 and 98 pounds in high school, I felt my body was plain and uncompelling. When I was a size 16 and 174 pounds at age 31, I felt my body was still plain, but now objectively worthless in society. How other people felt about my body was different; I got laid at both weights, and at all weights in between. I’ve never understood their perspective. I’ve always felt they were being charitable. The only thing that changed between weights was my experience of physical pain. It was this that convinced me to make a change.

Between September 2014 and September 2015, I lost forty pounds. It didn’t make me ready to get naked on camera. It didn’t make me feel much more desirable. But it did make me feel better living my everyday life.

Here’s how I did it.

During the summer of 2014, I was in pain. The pain was constant, but it migrated. Sometimes it lived in my lower back. Sometimes it lived in my neck. Sometimes it lived in my heels. It made walking difficult. It made sweeping the floor difficult. It made everything difficult. I was five feet tall, and carrying an extra fifty or so pounds. My frame, the same one doctors had once x-ray’d and tutted over and diagnosed with scoliosis when I was eleven, could not carry that weight. My joints had swollen in protest. My digestive tract was in full rebellion: one night some friends made us meatballs in a red sauce with polenta, and hours later I was in the emergency room, opening my shirt for an electrocardiogram, trying to determine if the black specks in my vomit were blood.

I needed to lose weight.

Luckily, that same month my future husband and I had a dinner with a dear friend who had gone on the same journey. We met him at his club in London around LonCon 2014, and watched him eat plate after plate of delicious food: a double scotch, a steak with vegetables, a cheese plate minus the crostini or honey. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he said, pushing the bread course across the table to us and our chubby fingers.

Thus prompted, we asked him about his diet. Meat and vegetables, he told us. Occasional fruit. All the full-fat Greek yogurt and cheese he could ever want. Handfuls of almonds and pistachios and peanuts. Tofu and broth and black coffee and unsweetened tea. Atkins, basically.

“You’re not done?” I asked, gesturing at his trim waistline.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I have five more pounds to go. I gained some in Honduras. All the plaintains.”

That night, on the way back to Liverpool Station, Dave said to me: “I want to try his diet.” And thinking it likely wouldn’t last, I said: “Sure. Okay. Let’s give it a try.”

A month later, I was two weeks into Atkins, trapped in an Ottawa shopping mall restroom, writhing in pain, already five pounds lighter. Never start Atkins, or any weight loss regime, in the last two weeks of your cycle. PMS, blood loss, and cramping will always trump low blood sugar. I went to the nearest pharmacy and ordered some acetaminophen + caffeine + codeine pills. Then, at a Perkin’s, I ordered pancakes, eggs, and bacon. I broke my diet, that day. I was back on the horse, the next day: meat, vegetables, nuts, cheese, broth, coffee, tea, seltzer. No sugar, no rice, no pasta, no potatoes, no flour, no bread, no juice, no wine, no beer, no fruit.

That was the last time I had menstrual cramps.

Ever.

My weight loss didn’t proceed as quickly as my partner’s. He had more muscle mass to help him along — muscle tissue burns calories faster than other tissues do, and this is why men usually burn fat faster than women. But I kept a closer eye on mine, charting my 1,200-calorie-a-day diet with MyFitnessPal and meticulously adding my meals and subtracting my time on the rowing machine. I said no to indulgences. I said no to celebratory wine, and beer, and cake, and crackers with cheese, and popcorn at movies. I got used to saying no. I got used to the power in saying no, in refusing, in saying I was just fine, thank you. Soon I got used to being just fine, thank you. I got used to living inside my own head, without the benefit of sugar highs or lager lows. For the first time in a long time, I entered my thoughts and heard my own voice. It clearly identified what — and who — was toxic. Old hurts and old losses fell away. Just when my body became more socially acceptable, I stopped caring who accepted me.

Three months into Atkins my weight was in free-fall: I went to my tailor and had a dress cut to accomodate the inches I’d lost. I wore it to my engagement party.

This is not to say it was easy. It was hard. It was hard to say no. It was frequently awkward. While on book tour for the Hieroglyph anthology, I ate salads from the Au Bon Pain near our hotel for breakfast. Thanks are due to Elizabeth Bear who scored me one, the morning of a flight to Ottawa, and who walked me the length of the National Mall, and listened to my prattling on about my diet. When attending a dinner presentation with the editors of Slate Future Tense and members of the New America Foundation, I ate only meat and creamed spinach — no rolls, no whipped potatoes, no wine, no dessert. “I have fifty pounds to lose,” I told one of my fellow panelists, when he asked what was wrong. “And I have about fifty weeks to do it.” That night I sat across from Neal Stephenson, who watched me shivering under the stiff breeze of DC air conditioning and eyed my barren plate and asked me if I was cold. When I said I was fine, and that my jacket was too casual for our surroundings, he instructed me in no uncertain terms to put it on. Ten pounds earlier, I wouldn’t have been cold. I’d have been sweating.

It was hard to think up new meals: zucchini noodles and whipped cauliflower and spicy tea in place of chocolate. Lettuce wraps without rice. Goulash over spaghetti squash. Sashimi, not sushi. Pork chops with braised cabbage, no potatoes, as my Irish ancestors spun in their graves. It was odd, drinking gin and seltzer with lime instead of old vine zinfandel. It was strange, eating cheese on slices of cucumber and not crackers.

But oh, the cheese. So runny and fatty and glistening, redolent of farmyards and sunshine and life. Without the deafening extremes of sugar, my tongue finally tasted foods as they truly were. Tea: spicy and sweet and bitter and complex in a way I’d never noticed. Creamed kale: green and mineral and alive with garlic and onion and Parmesan. Borscht: tangy and hearty and loaded with iron, red as blood and just as nourishing. The occasional slice of melon: miraculous, rapturous, as ripe and pink and perfumed as a bride in the Song of Solomon. And bacon, no longer a comical hipster indulgence but a delightful and necessary evil, its curly smile a companion to the breakfasts I’d never before learned to eat.

Learning to eat breakfast was hard, at first. I’d wake up feeling dead and sick. I numbly chewed what my future husband made for me because I loved him, goddamn it. When I was a child I picked at a bowl Frosted Mini-Wheats with a glass of milk on the side before school as I read whatever book I was buried in. My mother begged me to eat, to eat anything, to please gain some weight. (As a pre-schooler I eschewed most meat, and ate only carrots with yogurt. This had less to do with me than my pediatrician, who had prescribed me so many adult-dose antibiotics that the product rep sent us free gifts; I had no appetite for anything. When I write my memoir, remind me to call it Failure to Thrive.) Now, at thirty-two, I need at least one scrambled egg with bacon on the side, or no writing gets done at all. Emile Zola once compared novelists to blood-drinkers; he wasn’t wrong.

It was also difficult for the people who served us meals, both friends and waitstaff. We were extremely lucky in how accomodating and understanding both were. Friends asked us what we could eat. They didn’t pester us to eat more. After the results became more visible, they stopped asking us if we were sure about our choices. They started asking us how it worked.

Roughly twenty pounds over my goal weight, my weight hit a plateau. Nothing seemed to work. I had outgrown the rowing machine; I could bang out an hour on the thing without breaking a sweat. So we joined a local gym during a fitness challenge. We were weighed and measured and we learned how to get up early to go to bootcamp. Our blood pressure dropped. Our waistlines shrank. I dropped maybe three pounds. I lost another cup size. I lost three cup sizes, that year.

Almost a year after our weight loss process started, this was how I looked:

Not especially sexy. Not especially desirable. My skin looked good because my makeup was good, and because I worshipped in the temple of Sephora at the altar of Clarisonic. My hair looked good because my stylist is the only woman in my neighbourhood who knows how to cut and style curls. My gown looked good because it was a Tadashi Shoji and because my tailor insisted on two fittings. The images came to life because our photographer is a genius. Those elements had nothing to do with my weight loss. They had nothing to do with my diet or exercise regimes.

I had lost the weight, but not the baggage. I still found myself just as unremarkable to look at as I had when I was ten and fourteen and seventeen and twenty and twenty-five. Too often, weight loss is considered a panacea, a cure-all for the spirit as well as the body. And it can alleviate a lot of pressures and improve health outcomes. That doesn’t mean it fixes everything.

But the spring in my step? The lightness I felt? The ability to perform exercise, to stand up all night, to travel to Scotland and Sweden and Iceland with my spouse without feeling sore, and without feeling stuffed into an airplane seat like a wedge of pimento into an olive? That was the weight loss. I won’t pretend that I didn’t feel ugly next to those other women in those other lands: Sweden is populated almost entirely by tall, blonde, willowy goddesses, and I’m an oily-skinned Hobbit with frizzy hair. But I could go on walking for hours without rest. I could do more, lift more, run harder, and keep going — all without getting sick. My yearly cold? Gone. Fevers? Gone. Cramps? Gone. I had one case of food poisoning, as I lost weight. That was all. Moreover, I had made a discovery about my own body, and how far I could push it. I knew myself better. I was healthier and happier than I had ever been.

All it required was a massive sacrifice of diet and time.

I say this because I know some of you might be contemplating just such a change, as the year turns. This is the season for such things: new calendars, new goals, new visions. And I am here to tell you not to trust anyone who says it’s easy. I’m here to tell you it’s hard.

It’s hard. But it’s also easier than you think.

I used to think of my weight as an inevitability. I would grow older and then I would get fatter and then whoever I might be with would stop loving me. (“Will you love me even I get fat?” I used to ask my boyfriend, in high school, as we made out in my parents’ driveway. I knew that whatever he answered, the real answer had to be no.) Then I really did grow older, and I really did get fatter, and I discovered that my partner still loved me anyway, and my weight was actually under my control. I had agency. It was my body. I could do with it what I wanted. I could harden it or soften it. I could build it or break it. I could neglect it, like so much infrastructure, or I could invest in it. I chose to invest.

And it was an investment. I won’t pretend that this was cheap. Vegetables are expensive. Meat is more expensive. Carbs are cheap and plentiful and there’s an entire agricultural lobby whose sole project is to keep them that way. Worse, rapid weight loss means none of your clothes fit. I was constantly buying new things. Even when I bought on consignment or clearance, it added up. And gym memberships or personal training are even more costly. I was able to lose weight in this way because I had the opportunity to do so. A lot of people don’t. If wealthy countries really cared about healthcare, and its impact on the nation’s bottom line, they’d give away gym memberships and cooking classes for free. They’d include child-minding at both. They’d bring Home Ec back to high schools and they’d make it a requirement for students of all genders.

Moreover, I could not have done this without my husband’s participation. At every step, I had his full support and understanding. We go to bootcamp together. We eat the same meals. We drink the same drinks. He doesn’t whine, or complain, or quit. He’s never told me to lose weight. We want to be healthy so we can live together for as long — and as enjoyably — as possible. The moment he dies, I may very well eat my way into an early grave. I can’t imagine doing this without him. But I know there are folks out there doing this without any support at all.

I bring this up not only because I know other people think about this issue at this time of year, but because I’ll be re-investing soon. Since the wedding — which immediately preceded both the holiday season and the death of a friend — I’ve been far too indulgent. I want to remind myself of what I did to lose the weight. But I find it’s not that difficult to remember, because I remember what being healthier felt like. It felt like a clearer head. It felt like longer wordcounts. It felt like deeper sleep and deeper breaths and longer walks and bigger laughs. It felt like cutting out everything I didn’t truly need and finding out what was left. It felt like being strong.

I am not prettier. I am not more beautiful. I am still plain, and short, and oily-skinned, and frizzy-haired, with stubby fingers and no discernible waistline and eyes that are piggy and squinty and a forehead that’s Elizabethan in scale. But I am stronger. I am much, much stronger.

And you will be, too.

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Hey, would you be interested in reading a chapter from my forthcoming Tor Books novel Company Town? If so, you’re in luck, because VICE’s tech and SF blog Motherboard has posted it for your holiday reading pleasure. “Be Seeing You” is also part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pwning Tomorrow anthology, which features stories from (among others) Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Kameron Hurley, Ramez Naam, Charlie Jane Anders, and Annalee Newitz. In other words, I’m really lucky that the folks at Motherboard chose to feature my story!

Company Town is the story of Go Jung-hwa, a bodyguard for the United Sex Workers of Canada who gets hired to watch over the heir to the Lynch energy empire when the company buys the oil platform around which her city floats. This chapter takes place shortly after that hiring, when Hwa is wrestling with the realities of working for her new corporate overlords. It’s actually one of my favourite chapters, because it really feels (to me) like a near-future episode of Veronica Mars.

So check it out:

“How did you know my order?” Hwa asked.

Síofra rolled his neck. It crunched. He was avoiding the answer. Hwa already suspected what he would say. “I see the purchases you make with the corporate currency.”

She scowled. “I don’t always have the eggs baked in avocado, you know. Sometimes I have green juice.”

“Not since the cucumbers went out of season.”

Hwa stared. Síofra cocked his head. “You’re stalking me.”

“I’m not stalking you. This is just how Lynch does things. We know what all our people buy in the canteen at lunch, because they use our watches to do it. It helps us know what food to buy. That way everyone can have their favourite thing. The schools here do the same thing-it informs the farm floors what to grow. This is no different.”

Hwa sighed. “I miss being union.”

I’m also pretty pleased that Company Town has found its way onto two “Most Anticipated of 2016” lists, at Barnes & Noble and editor Jonathan Strahan’s blog. (Someone told me they also saw it mentioned in a list at Locus Magazine, but so far I haven’t been able to find a link to it. If you saw it, let me know!) It’s a lovely Christmas present, and I couldn’t be happier.

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Due to a quirk of deadlines and contracts, I have four new pieces of fiction out this month. Here they are:

“A Stopped Clock” in The Atlantic Council’s War Stories from the Future. This is about smart cities and the future of urban warfare, as narrated by a middle-aged street vendor in Korea with an unspoken crush on her co-worker. This story will also appear in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best 33, which is very flattering.
“Be Seeing You” in Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier, recently published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of their 25th anniversary celebration. I was beyond proud to be asked to participate in this, because the EFF does great work. For this anthology (which has a fucking killer table of contents, including Doctorow and Sterling and Hurley and Naam and Anders and Newitz and  probably everyone else you like) wrote a story set in the universe of my forthcoming novel Company Town, out next year from Tor. I liked the story so much I ended up including it as a chapter in the book. It’s sort of like Veronica Mars meets The Terminator meets High Rise.  (I also released another chapter in the Upgraded anthology, if you’re curious.)
“Memento Mori” in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan for Simon & Schuster. This is a cyberpunk fairy tale influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Also there is a poly marriage in it. Jonathan has done such great work with the Infinity anthologies; I was really pleased to be asked.
“Thieving Magpie” in After the Fall, edited by Jaym Gates for Posthuman Studios. Jaym pitched me this story by asking if I’d ever played Eclipse Phase, and although I hadn’t, I was intrigued enough by its world that I said yes. Then I got the game manual, and holy shit. I was really intimidated. That world was so rich and so fleshed-out (literally!), I wasn’t sure there was anything I could possibly add to it. But that intimidation really pushed me to my creative limits. I can say without a doubt that “Thieving Magpie” is the weirdest story I wrote all year.

And hey, if that’s not enough for you, you can always pre-order my novels Company Town and reV: The Third Machine Dynasty. Or you could pick up Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, the anthology which my husband David Nickle and I co-edited for ChiZine Publications this year. It came out a month after we were married.

Have I mentioned that I’m a little tired? And that I am already facing new deadlines? And that if you would like me to write a story for you this year, whether for an anthology or publication or as part of a foresight project, you should get in touch nowvia the Contact form up above?

 

 

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Oh hey, look! It’s a piece about Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond in The Toronto Star! And you can read it right here!

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Writers tend to get the same presents every year for holidays, birthdays, and other occasions. Those presents include notebooks, pens, lap desks, and coffee mugs. (Anything that’s in the impulse-buy section of a chain bookstore, really.) And those are good things! But you may have already gifted them last year. If you want to avoid repetition, try picking up things that writers (and the people who live with them) might actually need. These are all things that I already have and use, have used and enjoyed in the past. I’m not getting paid to shill any of this; I’m writing this list because I’ve already recommended these things to friends in passing, and thought I might share more widely as sales emerge.

Hamilton Beach Set n’Forget Slow Cooker People think that slow cookers are meant for cooking meals while you are at work. What they’re really for is making meals while you’re on a deadline. You chop the ingredients, nestle them in, season to taste, and then get to work. I’ve worked with multiple slow cookers. This one is the best. It has a built-in meat thermometer, allowing me to program the desired internal temperature for a brisket or picnic cut, set the heat, and walk away. When the meat reaches that temperature, the cooker kicks over to the “warm” setting. No more stringy, chalky, overdone meat. No more cold spots in the curry. And, best of all, no one whining about when dinner is, or when you’ll be done writing. “Dinner is in the slow cooker,” you can say. “And I have two thousand words to go.”
NutriBullet There are blenders, and then there are Bullets. The NutriBullet was responsible for my and David’s breakfasts for almost a year, and we still use it for quick sauces, dips and making instant nut flours. It’s powerful enough to make nut flours and nut butters, but also liquefies leafy greens, frozen fruit, bananas, and seeds into potent smoothies. Unlike a juicer, it maintains the fibre content of the fruit and vegetables. (Juice is delicious. It’s hydrating. It’s not the best way to get your vitamins and minerals. No, not even your cold-pressed organic juice. I’m sorry.) If you’re on a roll and you have to eat, but you don’t want to cook, this is the device for you.
Heys 21″ Carry-on Spinner Writers travel. We go to conventions. We go to literary festivals. Some of us have to fly just to meet with our agents. That means needing luggage that carries four days’ worth of clothes, but also won’t explode as you’re hastening between terminals at O’Hare. (And yes, you need a carry-on at O’Hare. Because under no circumstances should you ever check baggage through O’Hare.) It also means needing luggage that’s light enough to hoist onto innumberable TSA scanners. Hell, even if you don’t fly frequently, you still need good luggage that snugs into a car or onto a train platform without too much trouble. A good carry-on will see you through family trips, funerals, weddings, getaways, and all manner of escapades. For my thirtieth birthday, I bought myself luggage. It was one of the best gifts I’ve ever given myself.
Solid shampoo, conditioner, lotion, etc. I have oily skin and frizzy hair. So I travel with a lot of liquids. Too many liquids. The number of times my luggage has been rifled through because I traveled with too many liquids is embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as the horseshit “war on liquids” policy that is a recent trend in security theatre. Want to avoid this embarassment? Carry solids!
Lessons or classes with a Pilates or yoga instructor. Obviously this varies by location and availability, but the one invariance involved is how terrible for the body writing (or any desk job) is. It weakens the core, torques the lumbar region, encourages slouching, creates neck pain and carpal tunnel, and in general renders you inflexible and immobile for the important things in life, like sex. The way to counteract this is to get some fucking exercise, pun intended, and to target that exercise at the areas most diminished by desk work (the core and the lumbar spine). That means yoga and Pilates. Yes, gentlemen, that means you, too. “Oh, it’s just stretching,” I hear you say. No, it’s not. You’re only saying that because you haven’t tried it. If you had tried it, and you had made a sincere effort with a good instructor, you would know that a good Pilates class will leave you in a puddle of happy sweat on the mat. You will stand taller, sit straighter, and fuck harder than if you hadn’t done that matwork. (And yes, I’m aware that standing desks exist. Those really work for some people, which is awesome. But I don’t use one, and thus can’t recommend one. Also I used to work retail. I remember standing for hours at work. It’s not an experience I want to repeat.)
Cuisinart 12-Cup Grind & Brew Coffee Maker How do you think your novels get written? Armies march on their stomachs; writers march on their coffeemakers. Or something. Whatever. You know what I mean. This makes excellent coffee, keeps it in a thermal carafe that keeps coffee warm all day, and has a burr grinder included. It also features a timer that lets you program it to start making coffee before you’re even awake.
Tea Mugs with Infusers I don’t always drink tea, but when I do, I drink it from one of these.
Slippers If you’re a writer who works from home (or if you have any type of work-from-home job), then you probably don’t wear shoes all the time. Going barefoot is great. But stepping on errant cat litter crystals is bullshit. Solution: slippers. Try to gift a properly-sized pair with real tread on the bottom; slippers that are too slippery, or loose-fitting, can cause accidents on staircases, tile floors, etc.
Bathrobes (and more bathrobes) It’s really tempting for people who work from home just to wear pyjamas all day. (Occasionally you will see tweets about this.) And that’s all well and good, until a box of books arrives in the mail, and you have to run and sign for it, and you’re wearing a bamboo fibre slip and no bra and you tell the guy at the door “Yes, I’m Madeline Ashby,” and he looks you over and says, “Of course you are.” Get a robe. Give a robe.
Scrivener This is the best piece of word processing kit that I have ever used.
Apple TV Eventually you will stop writing and start catching up on other media. When you do, you will want one of these. It’s a hundred-dollar hockey puck that makes buying content (and thus paying other writers) almost too easy. I’ve tried other services and other devices. This is the best.
A subscription to The New Yorker David’s father gifted me with a subscription to the magazine when he was still alive. I still have back issues lurking about. With the digital subscription, you can enjoy all the back issues — including the fiction — and receive new content every month.
Buying everyone else on your list books by your favourite writer. I mean, obviously. This is the gift that keeps on giving.

These are expensive.

They won’t be as expensive on Black Friday. And you can find less expensive versions of some of these things elsewhere. If you think one of these items is the perfect gift, but you blanch at the price, set up a Google Alert and wait for the deals to appear in your inbox. There will be a sale on all of these items at least once between now and New Year’s Day.

These aren’t “writerly” enough.

A subscription to The New Yorker wasn’t writerly enough for you? Do you know any writers? Be honest.

Look. I love extravagant, impractical things. I love sparkly things. I love perfume and jewelry and lingerie and high-end boxed sets of blu-rays. But those are extremely personal gifts, and I can’t recommend them to a broader audience. If you want to buy something in that vein, you need to have a real conversation with the recipient of your gift. What the recipient of your gift probably wants, deep down, is to have that conversation with you, because it’s a conversation about things that are important to them that you are also showing an interest in.

Or you could just get a giftcard to a bookstore. That also works.

My writer friend has all of these and I have money to burn. Now what do I get?

Book him a massage.

My writer friend has all of these and I have no money at all. Now what do I get?

Help her clean up her environment. If she’s snowed in by deadlines, she is likely stewing in the funk of her own forgotten dishes, stray socks, and piled envelopes, not to mention whatever’s lurking between the counter and the refrigerator. This is a depressing place to live and work. Help her dig herself out. Doing that kind of drudgery is always easier and faster when a friend is involved, the music is on, and there is a promise of hanging out afterward.

 

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It’s here! It’s finally here! If you’re in Canada, you can now buy LICENCE EXPIRED: THE UNAUTHORIZED JAMES BOND.

Why only in Canada? Well, copyright is a funny thing. This year, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels entered Canadian public domain, because in Canada, and until the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ratified, copyright is death-plus-fifty years. In the US and the UK, copyright is death-plus-seventy years, because those countries have powerful media empires with the money to pay very good lobbyists to convince legislators of the importance of an author’s work after her death. (Note: this one reason why it’s important that you make a will, as an artist. Your intellectual property is just as much a part of your estate as your other property, and if you want to bequeath it, you should specify as much. Similarly, you can appoint a literary executor to handle the posthumous publication of your work. So if you want your work to be completely commons-licensed after your death, you can do that!)

So, now that we’re all feeling appropriately morbid, you probably have some questions.

I live outside Canada. Will Amazon.ca or Indigo.ca sell this book to me?

No. Believe me, some very eager readers who pre-ordered the book found this out the hard way.

Will there be an e-book?

ChiZine Publications has traditionally been DRM-free with its e-books (which is awesome). But the lack of DRM makes it hard for them to follow the law, here. There might one day be an e-book, but we can’t promise you one right now. Then again, you know what they say. Never say never.

What if I visit Canada, pick up the book, and bring it home with me?

Obviously how you spend your money is your own business, my good sir or madam.

I’m a rare book collector outside Canada. How many of these can I take over the border with me?

Why, I have no idea. What an interesting question.

But Canada is such a small market! You won’t make any money!

That may well be. We shall see. But:

LICENCE EXPIRED can actually tell us a lot about the Canadian market because of its limited reach. I think of it as a sonar ping for the Canadian publishing world. The sales data from this book will be extremely pure. I intend to write about it further, after we have a real data set to examine.
A big part of what makes Fleming’s work enjoyable is his exquisite description of rare things of great quality. The perfect cocktail. The perfect sushi. Even the perfect bath. I think this book, and its rarity, actually reflects that tradition.
It’s also unbelievably cool to have helped produce the most hipster James Bond anthology that ever was. (“Oh, ‘Two Graves’ is my favourite James Bond story. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s Canadian.”) Consider how people feel about recalled comic books, or vinyl records that got pulled. I would love for the contents of this book to become myths within the larger Bond mythos, the way the ghost of a rare B-side or bootleg can haunt a band’s legacy.

Who wrote the stories?

Oh, some people you might have heard of. Charles Stross. Laird Barron. Karl Schroeder. Jacqueline Baker. A.M. Dellamonica. Robert J. Wiersema. And more.

So, what kind of stories are in this anthology?

There’s a little something for everybody here. The only genre missing is a Mills & Boon-style romance, and a straight crime story. And a Viking epic poem. We could have used a good Viking epic poem.

James Bond is a racist, sexist, and homophobic character. He’s retrograde. Why even engage with him?

Because the public domain offers the opportunity to critique characters of that nature from within their own narrative, in a way that’s accessible to people outside established fan communities. That’s one of the things we lose when we extend copyright — the chance to re-write our own myths.

What happens if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) gets ratified? Will ChiZine Publications have to pulp this book?

We’ve spoken with attorneys, with copyright expert Michael Geist, and with activists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. All of them have indicated that LICENCE EXPIRED falls through a very narrow window, wherein anything entering public domain this year will remain so without reverting, even in the event of the TPP’s ratification.

So, where can I buy this, again?

If you have a Canadian address, you can buy it right here.

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