About the Author
Having just had one of those milestone birthdays with a zero on the end of it, with questions at work, I was reminded to think about the trajectory of my life so far. Normally I don't remember how old I am. I'm too busy thinking about the next task at hand, the next bit of tricky detail, the next appointment or repair or researching the next bit of equipment I need to get. So you find me here more inclined to glance back in time at shorter range than is typical of my usual mental habits. I'm generally impatient with nostalgia and retro, although I can understand a search for excellence of design or function. I also find it curiously hard to give descriptions or summaries of myself.
I find it equally difficult to give a summation on the novels I do, as I don't tend to think about my stories like so many jellyfish with a plain outward shape obvious to anyone, so I can better describe their bounds in an advertising blurb. I tend to focus more on crawling round inside them with one of those endoscopes with a camera, peering at their internal organs. Descriptions of liver texture doesn't lend itself easily to three back cover paragraphs, I'm afraid.
Of course some folks would puff up like a blowfish and declare they are full of multitudes in one, so why should they be restricted to some one particularly boring modern lifeline shoveling around paper in a cube farm, when they can at will call upon the splendors of Cordoba before the Christians, the Caliphate of Jerusalem, the street merchants of Constantinople, the battlefields of Flanders, or the terrors of the Sun King's Court long before the guillotine was invented?
Well, that's all very nice, and it certainly sounds nice when uttered resoundingly in a Conan Doyle Victorian-style seance, says that cool skeptical scientist commenting in the back of my head, but it doesn't really help pay the bills this month, does it?
It's also a wee bit twee, to, isn't it--just a little too pompous for a back cover blurb, too, says the snarky ad agency critic in my head.
Ahem. Well, I do wish these interior critics would just get together and come up with something useful for those back covers, instead of smirking at everybody else's wimpy efforts. C'mon, we could use some heavy lifting here, right? At any rate, enough avoidance twaddle. My younger sister was kind enough to come up with suggestions to get me booted along to it. Sort of like getting the cat to decide which side of the door they want to be on.
I was born at the end of the 1950's and raised all over Southern California. We shared a father with a wandering soul and a mother with a longing for deep roots. We lived everywhere from the high desert to the heart of urban LA. The longest time we spent in one place was in San Diego, while I was in high school and college.
I have two sisters, who have become an artist and a costumier/seamstress. I have quite an adorable significant other who is a wonderful cook and widely-read as well as sf-minded, but he lives in another zip code, which is a quite amazingly boring pain. As one of those bluestocking maiden aunts with a 'tude, I live with my mother who sews quilts, my sister the costumier, and my sister's partner, who is learning how to sew quite well. I am only basically competent with a sewing machine. I am quite hopelessly outnumbered on the pointy-object score, and I know it. I settle for egging on five-year-old nephews with descriptions of bearded dragons as pets. Well, when I was five, *I* would have loved having a bearded dragon for a pet. I was that kind of kid.
Like most artists, my father was always hunting for a real job. After my dad got back from active combat Naval service in the Pacific during WWII, he got an art college degree in ceramics. For a living, he drew exploded engine parts and airplane wing components, the kind of obsessive-compulsive detailed work that drives most artists completely batshit in two days. Companies were always hiring and firing the people who can do that. Hey, if Grumman is laying off, maybe Lockheed will be hiring--or one of the subcontractors. So I grew up as a subcontract 's brat. This is not quite the same as an Army or Navy brat, where there is a sort of community or support in the service, some resources. In that age, those folks in aerospace who went where popup companies appeared and disappeared were more like gypsy software programmers these days. When they got treated badly, they would walk off the job and find another, the only recourse when you totally lack any local community support. He was always a nut for the design lines of airplanes and race cars. When he was younger, he used to work with the guys who did point-to-point racing, helping them rebuild engines and do maintenance.
In spite of how his situation and temperament should have him a burning liberal, he always wanted to belong to the thin white prince Republican end of the spectrum. He had far more respect for status and appearance than I do, he could be a snob to the point of foolishness. I have no clue how much of this was unthinking habit and how much family imprinting and how much a reflection of peer pressure. We had some terrific arguments about it as I got older, and it would only be worse now, if he was still alive. To put his politics in better perspective, Goldwater struck him as a little bit on the conservative side. After the shift of the national party platforms so sharply to the right, in the current era, these days such an opinion *would* make him a burning liberal. He had a house of tomboys, and in spite of his otherwise reactionary politics, he could get pretty fierce on his daughters' rights to do any job they wanted. He enjoyed taking us kids to museums and ghost towns. He really wanted us to be intellectuals, doctors, scientists, using our obvious brains, but not in a couch-potato body. Because couch-inhabitant *is* actually the natural morphic shape of all his daughters, sloth was something to be fought. We learned how to swim, we went to kid's camps in the mountains, we got western-style horseback lessons as much as limited budget allowed.
When my dad moved out to the desert for work, he fell in love with the rocks and animals and open space, he drove for miles on back-country roads, he became involved with gliders that were towed up by airplanes and stayed up there on the desert's thermal air currents. He helped the guys who built gliders of fiberglass on the weekends. He was usually in a state of greater nervous tension than most people tolerate, but it was there that he learned how wide-open space and quiet calmed him down. He was also a cat person, as local cats would adopt him and then move along with us. Looking back on what I know of his character and work and the time period, I have enormous respect for his struggle to survive to fight another day. Medically he was cut up and banged about and badly treated, from the war onward, and he was frequently in pain. Smoking, in spite of quitting as a fairly young man, made him vulnerable to esophageal cancer later in life. I'm not sure if it was that, or just an accumulated lifetime of stress, which finally killed him in his seventies.
My mother's mother was the first in their farm family to get through high school, and get a good government job. My mother started off working in high school for Hallmark on the factory floor, and rapidly got work as a stenotypist for the Social Security Administration. She followed my dad out to California and set about finding new jobs for herself at every change of location. She has always been the one who reads the user's manuals on new equipment, the one who insisted that kids needed a regular schedule, who sewed everyone's clothes to save the budget, and the one who pulled the disorganized wreckage of a department or an office back into order. Perhaps because she does have interior organization, oddly enough, it turns out she was also the main kid in her family who was always off in cloudland imaginary fantasy worlds, reading fairytales, and she was the one who liked science fiction and fantasy. She says she was reading Fritz Leiber while she was pregnant with me, so she blames me on him. (Telling that to the Grandmaster when she met him put a most peculiar look on his face, I will say that.) Over the years she shifted into working for government agencies, as they paid better, offered benefits, and allowed her to transfer well to a new job. My parents got divorced back east just after I got out of college. A year later, when that house sold, she moved back out to live with her daughters in California. Here, she shifted into working as a paralegal for a domestic law attorney, and then into working for various offices in the state Senate. She did temp work for some years after her retirement, but it was not good for her psyche or her joints, and by then I was able to take on the extra salary demands on the household instead.
While we do go to local SF & F conventions as we can afford it, we are not very active compared to some folks. So my mother surprised everyone when she did a breast cancer awareness performance for the World Science Fiction Convention masquerade in San Jose, appearing as an Amazon Elder while voice-overs gave information about the disease. She has always had an acute seamstresses's eye along with the eye-hand coordination for the craft, and quilting has only sharpened it. My father's eye for aerodynamics and fondness for brightly colored landscapes was quite a complement to her acute eye for color. Recently she became active in the local Quilt Guild. She quilted a breast cancer survival quilt from fabrics whose sales benefit the Komen Foundation, and at a hospital event to encourage staff improvements in customer service, she gave it to her surgeon of nine years ago as a reminder that the work is well worth doing. That's what I call a survivor.
Folks who know me might agree that explains some of the gnarly bits about me. Like my mother, I rapidly shot through most of the YA level books and went straight to SF & F. I found Andre Norton's books were reliable comforts in most of the school libraries I got to know as we moved. I suspect that writer saved the psyches of a lot of young people with books like X-Factor and Time Agents and Beastmaster. (Yes, I think that book would make a terrific movie, if it was ever actually *made*. The nekkid-thews embarrassment of a film made under that name is quite a hoot for MST3K nights, but never got near Norton's story.) I was delighted to be able to meet that Grandmaster as well, and embarrass her by saying she saved the lives of a lot of despairing middle-school kids.
Yes, I was one of the nerd girls in the terrible glasses who irritated everybody with having all the answers and a dogeared textbook in the first week, although I had no idea what to do with potential status as teacher's pet, and wouldn't know a social norm if it came up and bit me on the ass. It rarely did, since I usually stared at the social situation with interest, completely oblivious to the fine degrees of status they conferred upon one another, and colorblind to the rules involved. It was probably rather like being stared at by a lizard, now that I think about it. A large one. There's more than one reason that Leonard Nimoy was so popular as Spock on Star Trek. I did get to see that show. Part of my social ineptness at the time was lack of knowledge on pop culture. I rarely got to see any other shows, my parents didn't have one for a long time, and then strictly limited what we saw, and for how long. This pushed us back to getting homework done and then to reading books and imagination, which is not a bad thing, but it does create problems in peer group conversations.
I was not a good kid about attendance in school. I didn't stay home and sleep (instead of going to class) quite as much as some of the surfers or the jock cliques did, and certainly not for the same reasons. I was tired a lot, wanting 10 hours of sleep and never getting it. I really hated the transit situation involved in merely getting there to class in one piece. One outstanding example has remained vivid after many years. At the end of junior high, one year, some of the punks who came from the other, more expensive side of the 'burb development where I lived got ticked off by something or bored or both. They cut open the long seat from the back of the bus with switchblades, set the foam inside it on fire, and tossed it out an open window in front of the vice principal of the school, while the bus driver sat there in his place without moving a muscle. San Diego had some bad neighborhoods then, when the main transfer point was down off the harbor, right where the fleet sailors picked up prostitutes, so the driver probably knew exactly what he should be afraid of. This was in an era long before guns were confiscated from school lockers, too, believe it or not. This was purely punk biker-style rage. I can still recognize it now, when I see it on local transit to work, but I'm a little bit calmer about it.
While my parents were still living in San Diego, I read through their collection of paperback Sunset gardening books, and got badly, badly hooked by the pretty pictures. The little aquarium paperbacks did it for fish tanks, too. Yes, I am still a sucker for color. From conversations with other folks, the unusual part appears to be that I stuck with it stubbornly even when things died or disappointed me. Later on, I learned my mother's mother had a stubborn green thumb, too, of the sort who can stuff a twig in the ground and have it grow in defiance of all local soil conditions. I don't know about her, but I seem to have to work with it, read about it, experiment, try different things, to succeed at it--or else I'm trying to do more difficult or stupid things than she did.
I don't blame Sunset Books for the degree I finally decided to get. I do blame that delight in color, though. I did two years of general ed classes at UC San Diego, found out medical textbooks made me nauseous in the bookstore, and then left home when I transferred along with my middle sister upon her entry to UC Davis. I went there as a result of reading their catalog with all kinds of horticulture-based classes. I came out after three more years with a degree in Plant Science specializing in pomology, the study of fruit trees. Silly me, I thought this was fairly practical and job-oriented. I hadn't counted on the vast oversupply of such folks generated every year compared the number of available jobs, the alarming shrinkage of available ag land for development in this state, and the oversupply of experienced farm managers in the real world. A lack of experience in tinkering with engines such as spray rigs and mixing tanks on tractors is also a serious shortcoming.
It turns out that specializing in History or English would have been more practical orientation for work at nice clean indoor jobs with benefits and a retirement plan. However, I was good enough to get a job injecting elm trees against Dutch Elm disease for one memorable year, and to mow lawns, and eventually to work for an upscale nursery which sold roses, expensive specimens like cycads, and indoor plants such as orchids. That job taught me a lot about practical solutions to pest and disease issues--the most important one being that there is always more to learn.
Illness, total lack of health care, and increasing intolerance of triple-digit Central Valley heat drove me to find a job as a temp worker indoors. My science degree allowed me to get better-paid work doing computerized grading of those scanned, standardized tests that are given to kids in grade school up through high school. From there, I got regular office work as a temp at increasingly better offices, eventually getting to folks who encouraged me to get a permanent job with the State. After years of hiring freezes under various governors, done for budget reasons, I'd completely given up on the idea, but then the hiring freeze was over, and exams started being given. I started taking them, too.
In practical terms, getting on with a government agency worth the grief means getting hired on anywhere you can with some agency in their orbit, as this hiring process which can take some time. Eventually you work your way along to a better position at a nicer agency. A college degree is the current gateway between clerical support work that doesn't quite make enough for rent and food, versus staff work paid twice as much, which may give you rent plus some extra, and doing more interesting work. This is also why I always advise folks to stay in school long enough to get that bloody degree, no matter how badly burnt-out they're feeling. With state government in my area, you get trained in basic organization competence and you rarely have to wear a suit and tie until you get farther up, to more important, higher-level stuff. Usually I am answering questions and drafting letters and making some basic decisions.
As far as ambition for advancement goes, I'm a moderate compared to most folks at work. I do go to Toastmasters, which is supported as a good training tool in our agency. For one thing, you write all your own material, you are not doing rehearsals of somebody else's work. That's basic practice at composition tasks in English. I do advise folks to try it if they want practice to organize research work, structure writing in advance, organize what matters most on your points, learn to keep a session within the time frame given, and present evidence in a convincing manner--as well as lots of practice at speaking off the cuff. Most large organizations have a branch of Toastmasters, or know of someone in the area who does. Our bunch is not for stuffy old guys in salesman's ties, not at all, although you can find groups like that if you want. It's improved my sense of structure in my writing.
I would get even better pay if I made a commitment to learn databases, programming, or computer network expertise. Taking the classes would be a hard, deep dive, and might ask too much of my physical stamina. Although a knack for it and a burning interest helps, you have to want to do it enough to make mistakes and deal with frustration during life as a beginner. As with writing or art or other sorts of job skills, doing that takes practice, which takes motivation. "My paycheck" alone is not enough motivation for the anticipated level of inconvenience involved in going back to school, right now. For one thing, my memory is not as shiny and slick as it used to be in my college days, so I'd be slower at it. Merely taking a user's class in intermediate Access, a very basic database program, soaked up so much of my free time that I got no writing at all done that semester--and that's where my real commitment has been, for years now, in spite of the lack of published evidence for it.
I know I'm lucky in the kind of folks I work with. Some are writers or want to be, or know someone who is. They are supportive of my writing, they ask how the next book is going, and I'm going to have to answer to them when it's eventually published. Talk about being out and proud! I also talk about my writing efforts at Toastmasters, with the idea of demystifying the process for folks who might one day like to get things published themselves, or have someone in their families who might.
With plenty of plants inducing gardener's guilt at home, I find I really don't mind working in a nice clean well-lighted cube farm, learning how larger group hierarchies work. I didn't know that stuff before, so it's all grist to a writer's peppermill. Most of my non-routine time goes to figuring out how to make quirky things work more smoothly within the parameters of our agency's rules, and communicating that to the folks who are trying to do them. That's also a learning process for me. Where quirky things get jammed and create huge headaches, that's no fun. This is why I always advise people to ask questions, read the directions, fill out their forms one day and reread it the next, and then ask someone else to read it carefully before they actually send important documents to government agencies. Trust me. Read the back of the form, too.
It's hard for me to pin down when I started writing. I always drew pictures. My parents encouraged us to do our own original drawings and entered us in art contests very young. I drew things for my own satisfaction. It becomes an obsessive pursuit after awhile, realizing the marred imperfection of the image, and when another image like it visits, trying again, struggling to do it better, to be more realistic and accurate and convincing. My father had the greatest respect for realist art, in spite of art world trends heading away from it at the time. He owned art books on anatomy, one book had the best advice on proportion of the figure and the best pure drawing skill that I have seen since, in a lifetime of seeing art and art books. My dad was not a great figure artist himself, but he could often see what was wrong with other people's work. He might comment on the placement of an ear, or the slant of a horse hock, so daring to ask his opinion when I was struggling with a picture involved a certain amount of courage.
I know we were encouraged to write things for school, and that shifted into writing things for my own satisfaction. In early junior high I was writing bits of things, trying in a vague, hazy, way trying to capture events moving and people talking in my head which didn't lend itself to a static drawing within my limited skills. A Remington or a Wyeth can imply a lifetime of events in a picture, but I hadn't learned enough anatomy to structure different views, I didn't know how sub-level muscles became visible. It would be some years later before I could think of using twisting motions around a center of gravity to talk about what would happen next in the imaginary world. So I used prose.
Another person might have tried to shape their mental image into a movie script, but that never occurred to me. I was writing down bits and pieces of ideas, scraps of images, central scenes of stories for myself, nothing organized, nothing intended for anyone else. I didn't even regard it as practice work, although compositions for my English classes were certainly improved by this extra experience. I didn't know what it was for, it just made me happy to try to get it down, to get closer to the image in my head. Anybody who's been to science fiction conventions would see it as fan work, in the sense of a fan who does amateur-level work. It was very fannish in tone, although I was not basing it on characters from other people's ideas. This carried through college, although it was a struggle at that point to find enough time for it. The images pouring through my head made me resent having to stop to do homework instead. One summer I had plenty of time for thought, because I was landscaping the yard for my parent's house in one of those dry, treeless, tract-built suburbs of San Diego.