R.I.P.

What follows is sad, about the death of my dog, Pip, on October 16. I didn’t post anything earlier because honestly I couldn’t bear it. I pretended I was fine and threw myself into finalizing my new book for upload. It helped while it lasted, but that’s over now, and I realized I was kidding myself.

I wrote this because my younger son was worried about me and thought it might help to write something. He liked the idea of paying tribute to Pip. So here it is: for my beloved dog who died, and for my family, and really for anyone who has ever maxed out a credit card trying to save a dying pet, or ordered a burial plot in that first rush of grief, or had to face this thing which was simply fucking unbearable.


I got the call at Comic-con. It was October 9, a Thursday,  the first day of the Jewish holiday Sukkot so my son had the day off from school. He and his friend and 50,000 people were packed into the Javitz Center. I could barely hear the vet over the noise of cosplaying nerds, but the news somehow came through with stunning, terrifying clarity.

I’d taken Pip in the day before because he wasn’t eating and didn’t have the energy for his usual walk. He’d lost weight but there wasn’t anything obvious. They’d done some blood work and she was calling to give me the results.

I hate when people say things like this, because it sounds phony and egotistical, but it’s true all the same: there are times when I really, really hate that I am good at reading between the lines of what people are saying to me, that I tend to listen to subtext instead of text. My mother died of lung cancer in 1997. She was 54. I mention it because during the six months between her diagnosis and her death, I got a lot of practice listening for what the doctors were really saying. Their actual words don’t mean much—medical jargon that they know their patients don’t understand but they share anyway because they’re humoring you, or they’re trying to cover their asses, or because they think it gives you some illusion of control, something to focus on. They’re human and they don’t like giving bad news, but I got good at hearing what they were really saying, at their techniques for blunting unbearable truths.

I got the refresher course with Pip. I knew with that first call, the one at Comic-con, that it was hopeless. That my dog was dying. The vet, who was wonderful, talked vaguely about 4-6 months, which I immediately translated to 4-6 weeks. She knew he was very loved, and I honestly think she and her staff fell in love with him a little too. She didn’t want to give up hope. I refused to go on the internet like my husband did or look up anything about canine Leukemia. I made no effort to keep track of details about platelet counts or white blood cells. But every time we talked, that number got revised down like I knew it would, though I hated myself for being right.

We adopted Pip from a no-kill shelter as a puppy on October 10, 2009. That’s me holding him as we drove home for the first time:



We called him a corgeranian—for corgi-pomeranian—but that was just a guess. I picked the name, from Great Expectations, and it really did fit his personality. He was incredibly cheerful and playful. He liked to lounge on his back in the hallway, wagging his tail at anyone who walked by, hoping they’d rub his stomach. He didn’t like closed doors. Every time I went to the bathroom, he nosed the door open and went to lie down at a favorite spot underneath the sink. His fur was incredibly soft for a dog. He looked like he was wearing eyeliner and had a really fluffy tail that little kids especially loved. I read once that corgis with his coloring are described as “red.” We all thought he looked a little like a fox. I didn’t want to post personal stuff about my kids so I posted pictures of him pretty often. My husband loves photography, so we have thousands of him. This is a good shot I've posted before of him as a full-grown dog.





In the end, it wasn’t four months, or four weeks. It was one week. The following Thursday was another Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, so my younger son was off from school again. It felt a little like a TV show when the phone rang around 9am. A kind voice that told you everything you needed to know, even without the actual words, “Could you come down to the hospital to talk to us about how to proceed.”

My husband couldn’t bear to go. I promised my younger son I’d say goodbye to Pip for him. I sent an email to my older son’s adviser at his boarding school warning that this was coming, because we all knew he was going to have an impossibly hard time with this. He was passionately fond of the dog, and idiotically, unforgivably, we’d held off from telling him how sick Pip was because we didn’t want him to worry helplessly, and we’d been thinking in terms of a few weeks or months, not seven days.

I drove to the hospital, took five minutes just to hold him, whisper goodbye from everyone, and the incredibly kind doctor did it.

I couldn’t get hold of my older son until that afternoon. After the first crash of the news, he just sobbed into the phone, “I don’t know what to do,” over and over again. It was exactly how I’d felt when I got home from Comic-con the week before. I think it was the hardest moment I’ve had in my 16 years as a parent.

I haven’t put his bowl or his bed away, though I threw away the six different meds he’d been prescribed. I tried not to be angry at them for not working. I keep hearing sounds that should be him but aren’t, like he’s a little ghost curled up in his favorite spots. On Thursday, I had to tell his friend, Jerry, at the Farmer’s Market why Pip wasn’t with me to dump our compost. He cried a little. Pip was a favorite in the neighborhood.

I can’t seem to read anything but Teen Wolf fanfics right now. I felt bad because a lot of my friends had books come out this month, amazing books that I was really excited about. But the Sterek helps so I’m sticking with it for now, some kind of fictional comfort food.

This is it, my tribute, and once it's up I'm going to have another cry and I'm not going to write anything sad again. Later tonight when I post something funny or filthy about Sterek, it won't be fake, it just won't be everything. 

At different points both my sons confessed that they felt guilty that they’d not always paid enough attention to Pip, not played with him as much as they could have. I thought that too of course. And I told myself what I told them: if ever there was a happy dog it was Pip. And horrible as this is, and it is really and truly fucking horrible, I am incredibly grateful for the five years we had with him, and I wouldn’t have given it up for anything.

New Release: College Bound

I am totally psyched to announced my new release, College Bound, an erotic contemporary romance. Here is the cover by the amazing Kim Killion of the Killion Group, who also did the cover for The Heartwood Box.   

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the original title for the story was Convenience Store Sex Slave: A Memoir, which hopefully should give a hint of what the subject matter is like. And just to be clear, since I have actually been asked this an astounding number of times, this book is NOT a memoir in any way shape or form. It is completely and totally fictional. 

To give a fuller idea of the story, here is the blurb:

“I think you would be right for a position with quite specific requirements that would be hard to fill otherwise.”

After a vicious fight with her stepbrother and guardian, Natalie storms out of the family McMansion, never imagining that would be the last time she’d be allowed in the house. A string of truly rotten decisions follows, until she finds herself suspended from school, friendless, broke, and camping out at the convenience store where she works. Worst of all, her college applications are due!

Thanks to a helpful teacher and her own stupendous brilliance she manages to get into her top choice college. Unfortunately, dealing with the financial aid forms proves to be too much for her supersmarts and she is about to lose her spot because she cannot get the money together to pay the deposit.

Enter Gareth Boyd, an old family friend with an indecent proposal that will pay for everything—if she can meet his price.

Believe it or not, I do daydream occasionally that I might someday release a title that does not require a content warning. TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY. So here it is:

Warning: This story features an eighteen-year-old heroine with a foul mouth and horrible judgment, a criminally unscrupulous man intent on taking advantage of her, and multiple scenes of bondage, spanking, ménage, and one potentially triggering scene of attempted rape. The novel is an erotic fantasy in which characters manipulate or disregard notions of proper consent in ways that would never be acceptable in real life. Adult Readers Only.

The only part of the story that might vaguely be called "autobiographical" is that the heroine, Natalie, is a music lover, so I put together a spotify playlist of songs mentioned in the book or that I just imagine the characters listening to. It is named for the New Order song, "Bizarre Love Triangle," which frankly could have been the book's title, so yeah, PERFECT.  The video for that song is surprisingly awesome considering the song was released in 1986.

The playlist as a whole can be found on my website, and also includes New Order's synth masterpiece, "Blue Monday," some Creedence, Cure, and "Oye Come Va" by Tito Puente. 

So that about sums up this announcement.  College Bound is currently available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for $2.99.  It should also be available in the future at Kobo, Apple, and in print, at which time I will likely make another announcement. Until then, hope you enjoy!

Queer Romance Month

So we're half way through Queer Romance Month, and I strongly urge you to go over and check out the posts.  There's a huge range of topics, from the pressure to produce happy endings, to the dangers of bi-erasure, to whether there's a market for F/F (Yes, here, please!)  A lot of pieces have given rise to some intense but always constructive comment debates as well.

I am proud to announce that my own contribution, "Outside In," is also up.  I plan to repost it here after the event is over, especially since it fits in with my article series on emerging genres, but in the meantime click on over.

And of course there are still two weeks left, which means two more weeks of provocative, moving, joyous tributes to this amazing genre.

http://www.queerromancemonth.com/

#Diversiverse: A Review of The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

So I was catching up on Booklikes last week and came across a post about an event taking place during the last two weeks of September entitled #Diversiverse hosted by Aarti Chapati’s blog, BookLust, inviting participants to read and review one book by a person of color during the event period. Generally, I don’t pay much attention to the author’s bio unless I’ve interacted with them or if something about the text makes their background or nationality seem relevant.

Still, I couldn’t help but be struck by Chapati’s points, first about the general need to immerse yourself in a variety of perspectives—national, religious, ethnic, racial—and second about the importance of making an active, deliberate choice to do so through your reading. As she puts it,

“Reading diversely may require you to change your book-finding habits. It ABSOLUTELY does not require you to change your book reading habits.” 

Fortunately for me, the blogger Saturday in Books who'd let me know about the event kindly recommended several titles, in particular Karen Lord's The Best of All Worlds, which she described thus: “Jane Austen Star Trek is all you need to know. Jane. Austen. Star. Trek. People.”

Jane Austen (subject of roughly half my dissertation) and Star Trek (I’ve seen every episode of Next Gen. At least twice.) being two of my most enduring and influential cultural reference points, I was instantly sold. And I can’t really say enough in praise of the book. It’s an emotional read, as much for the subtlety and gentleness with which it allows its developing relationships to unfold as for any passion or drama. It also ended up being an excellent choice for this particular event, since this is a story about cultural difference, about the dangers of assimilation put against the urgent need for compromise and discovery of shared values.

Reading the story requires patience and attention. The blurb gives a rough—and crucial—background to the story since the narrative prefers to allow the key facts about characters and their world to come to light gradually without anything resembling an info-drop. But at its heart, this is very much a story about exile and resettlement and the ensuing clash of cultures, though “clash” suggests something far noisier and more obvious than what we have here. Instead we are immersed in a world of greys, of hard choices and competing values where questions of right and wrong can only rarely be settled without the sacrifice of an equally worthy principle.

The story begins only shortly after the Sadiri home planet has been viciously destroyed. A small group of males have been offered asylum on the planet Cygnus Beta, which has a markedly different culture--as if the survivors of Star Trek’s Planet Vulcan had been forced to settle in the old American west. The Sadiri are desperate to rebuild their lives and preserve their culture yet survival requires intermingling and intermarrying with the local women, which they quickly find is a far more fraught prospect than they’d expected.

Lord’s narration is extremely deft in managing the reader’s waffling reactions to the dilemma. There are aspects of the Sadiri culture that the Cygnians (and most readers) understandably find off-putting: their obsession with mental self-discipline, their emotional reserve, their sense of superiority, their inflexibility and obtuseness when faced with the emotional needs of other peoples.

As the heroine, Delarua, tries to explain, “we’re all descended from peoples who thought they were kings and gods, and who found themselves to almost nothing in the end. Don’t let that be you.”

And yet every time you want to scream and shake one of the Sadiri, you’re forced to pull back: are we really prepared to advise that the survivors of planetary genocide set aside their values, essentially all they have left, for the sake of practicality, or even survival? Especially when every compromise, every sacrifice, furthers the cause of the enemies that tried to exterminate them?

The novel uses two traditional devices, a romantic courtship and a physical journey, to document the psychological journey of how these differences are addressed, how through dialogue, introspection, and shared experiences members of these two cultures can find enough common ground to coexist and ultimately flourish.

My breakdown makes the narrative sound far more schematic than it is. In fact it proceeds with a remarkable absence of the usual melodrama, speechifying and point-hammering that you might expect to find in this kind of story. Instead the ideas and connections emerge almost invisibly through the sum of many encounters, many scenes, where the point is often not obvious.

It might make for a sleepy or dry read but for the remarkable voice of the first-person narrator, Delarua, in turns self-deprecating, professional, vulnerable, humane, heart-broken, insecure, mischievous, and endlessly curious. I’ll just give a few characteristic quotes:

If there’s one thing a Cygnian can’t bear, it’s the stench of superiority. Too often it has been the precursor to atrocity and rationale for oppression.

Warm tendrils untangled from my nervous system, withdrawing gently but swiftly like the leaf-brush of startled mimosa.

A faint smile curved his lips as he looked at me. For a moment, I saw… I don’t know how to explain it, but I saw just a man—not an offworlder, not a foreigner, nor even a colleague and a friend but just a man, relaxed, smiling, glad to be in my company. I felt an odd, fragmenting sensation of suddenly perceiving something differently and having the whole world change as a result.

I can’t help comparing this book to Lois Bujold’s Shards of Honor and offering both as evidence of why I like female-authored sci-fi so much. This is an extremely well-written book, with lovely poetic passages, subtle, insightful characterization and a deeply resonant theme; it is also refreshingly free of the ‘chosen one’ grandiosity and superhero antics so typical of sci-fi, and which too often feel designed to appeal to an audience of adolescent boys.

Finally, as someone who reads overwhelming in a single genre, M/M romance, Chapati’s event was a timely illustration of how much I've been missing by not forcing myself out of my comfy generic house. So my gratitude to both Chapati for organizing a terrific event and to Karen Lord, for writing a subtle, humorous, lovely and always challenging story about the gifts that come when you look beyond your familiar horizons.