beehammer

So, my sideline in original fiction is one of those almost but not quite things where I get just enough success to keep gamely plowing along with it but never enough to feel like I'm exactly making progress.  Which is fine, because that's, I mean, not precisely what you'd expect from a personal decision to write whatever the fuck you want and try to sell it after the fact instead of trying to cater to the current market, but pretty fucking close to what you'd expect from that philosophy. 

But it also means I get a lot of emails back from editors that boil down to "Your writing is tits but I asked myself 'what the fuuuuuuuuuuck' three separate times while reading this, so just, you know, keep us in mind if you ever feel like writing something another human being could relate to without being high on something."

All of which is a really long-winded way of saying that Jo Walton's writing feels like this personally-tailored punishment for all the times I've looked at a piece and said, "Fuck it, the slush readers've seen worse."

Walton writes really well, and the craft is there, and the structure is there, and then everything about the characters and the plot leaves me going "Surely something has to happen soon, right?"

Almost 200 pages into Lent.  That's when something finally fucking happens.  I keep getting sucked in with the prose and the promise of more and then it's like, "Nope!  This is a 340-page treatise about obscure Platonic philosophy, which you loathe with a passion, roughly disguised as a novel!" and I fall for it every. fucking. time.

So basically I regret every minute I spent reading Lent and also recognize that it's some spitefully profound commentary on both my entire relationship to Walton's body of work as well as my entire relationship with the genre-lit world, which manages to bump the regret into active resentment.  It's like the novel as performance art piece, and I don't know what to do with it except yell "What the fuuuuuuuuuuck?" at the heavens.

So Godzilla was a monster movie.

I'm not entirely sure where the "no plot" criticisms are coming from, though, since it actually maybe had a little too much plot for a monster movie?  Like typically, monster movies answer the questions "What is the monster?," "What does the monster want?," and "How do we stop the monster?" without needing to wade into too much else. 

Usually those three questions aren't all that distinct, with the first leading into the second which then leads into the third as organically as possible to form the meat of the plot.  If you want something a little more political, you make the whole thing a functional allegory for a social problem or a festering injustice.  If you want something with more pathos, you tie it into some relatable B-plot the non-monster characters are going through or a common human flaw. 

Some sub-genres are so well-established that most of the run-time will be spent on either the first question (the serial killer is actually a vampire; the 'accidents' plaguing the ship are the work of a rogue AI) or the last (how do we escape the zombies; what do we use to banish the ghost), but Godzilla movies tend to really like spending time with the second question.  It probably helps when your monster is a moon-sized fire-breathing crankypants, and every reasonable person's response to figuring out what he wants is "Well for fuck's sake, give it to him."

And I'm certainly not going to complain that Godzilla: King of the Monsters found a way to cram three warring political factions, thirty recognizable supporting characters, and a kitchen-sink family drama into its 130-minute runtime.  I mean, they fucking delivered on the monsters; they get to have Kyle Chandler chase Millie Bobby Brown to yet another location, if they really want.

But the thing about monster movies of the kaiju stripe is that there's not really any room for mundane concerns around them.  There's a reason old whalers called a sperm whale's tail the hand of god--when that fucker was coming down on you, you suddenly understood very viscerally that you were small and impotent and mortal and most likely going to die. 

When something the size of a skyscraper and capable of breathing lightning swims up and glares at you from ten feet away, there's no "my kid is dead" in team.  The top ten most important things in a Godzilla movie are, uh, the monsters.  Like, if you had a tsunami bearing down on you, only the tsunami could be manipulated and maybe talked into fucking off, suddenly the only thing on anyone's minds is going to be, "How do we get the tsunami to fuck off?" There's pretty much no chance anyone's going to stop and have a long, sad monologue about their kid who drowned in a rip current, which means that it's conspicuous and a little awkward when people stop and have sad exchanges about their dead kids or their failures as a parent and spouse when the question of the moment is "How do we save the world?".

The stuff in King of Monsters where everyone's arguing about how to save the world feels very natural.  The military remains, of course, of the strong opinion that the only way to save the world is to bomb the everliving fuck out of it, because the titans can't kill you if you're already dead.  The pro-titan contingent has a long list of shit humanity has fucked up and continues to fuck up with no sign of slowing down in spite of knowing that it's going to kill them.  Monarch would just like everyone to stop trying to blow up the world for five seconds.  There are philosophical discussions that revolve around humanity's place in the world, the titans' place in the world, and humanity's and the titans' relationship to each other--again, perfectly natural.  Explaining to someone why you and your wife split up after the loss of one of your children, not so much.

Pacific Rim got around the problem of personal loss and failings taking a back seat to the survival of humanity by making dealing with those losses contingent on being able to fight the monsters effectively.  King of Monsters could probably have stood to take a page from that book, but that doesn't mean the plot was absent, just a bit clunky on the delivery in some respects.

But you know what?  At the end of the day, the one thing no one can ever take away from them is that they absolutely weren't a Transformers movie.

It was inevitable, I suppose, and now I know what to do for next year, but they've bolted.  Most of it got turned into rabbit food, and I harvested it in such a way that I could experiment with whether or not the second-crop cut actually works (it seems to), but after a bit I went ahead and left the flowers as-is.  They certainly weren't hurting anything, after all, and I used an heirloom variety when I planted.  If it goes to seed, that'll hardly be the worst thing in the world.

So I have a planter that the passion flower vine has completely taken over, impolite thing that it is, studded with the dogged tropical sage which doesn't care that it has to grow sideways through this thicket and the tiny yellow flowers on four-foot stalks that the mustard greens have turned into.  One of the mustard flowers is now home to a little flower crab spider.

I noticed her because she was a staggeringly bright white against the yellow when she first moved in.  Almost a week later, she's successfully shifted her color to a pale yellow, and might even make it all the way to a matching color by the end of the week.  Not that it matters to the pollinators she's hoping to catch--her skin reflects UV light in a way that makes her flower more attractive to them no matter how she looks to people.  But it should help her hide from predators hoping to eat her.

I went a bit overboard planting blanket flower back in December.  It was cool and dry, and the plants weren't very big, and I had no real expectations of them bulking out as much as they did once things warmed back up.

Blanket flower is very pretty, and very showy, and I've wound up with a big fucking essentially contiguous stand of it in my front yard.  This basically means that every bee and bee-adjacent bug in a half-mile radius cannot get enough of it.  I was out watering at the correct time for bees this afternoon, and honey bees?  Check.  Solitary bees?  Check.  Solitary wasps?  Check.  Flies pretending to be bees?  Check.  It was just a buzzing mess of activity, and all the different sorts of bees had their own priorities.

The mustard greens have finally bolted, which means a sea of pretty little yellow flowers, which means tiny little wasps and butterflies visiting them.

O frabjous day, it rained.  It really, really rained.  I only had to water a handful of things in containers or otherwise situated so that they didn't get quite as much as they needed from the rain, which left me time to spread some fertilizer and reclip all my baby beans that haven't gotten the hang of wrapping around stuff yet and plant a bunch of seeds and re-pot all my roselle seedlings.

If it hadn't started raining again while I was doing that, I could have knocked out planting the parsley I bought in case either I or any black swallowtail caterpillars want to eat it--it's going in a little patch between the okra and the swamp milkweed.

So, Us was... muddled.  Gorgeous, great, a shitload of fun, fucking terrifying, etc.  Gorgeously acted.  Winston Duke playing Jordan goddamned Peele for an entire movie was just great.  Lupita Nyong'o was amazing.  But muddled.

I've spent a couple of days since seeing it gnawing on what was bugging me about it, and I think one of the primary problems is that horror is, at its core, a reactionary genre.  When you're making progressive horror, you're fighting an uphill battle against the genre's base tendencies.  It can be done, obviously, and it can be done very well, but it means that the messaging and conceit have to be much more focused.  Get Out* and Assassination Nation were two good examples of that in action.  Us was a lot farther out there than Get Out, and a lot more ambitious.  There's a lot more going on there, and it asks the audience to follow it a lot farther down the rabbit hole.  I don't know that it necessarily works.  I'm also not sure where the twist leaves the main characters.

( Spoilers behind the cut )

It's muddled.  It's a small price to pay for a significantly more ambitious film, but it blunts some of its bite.

*I feel like Get Out is one of those films where you almost can't compare it to anything else, because it's... It's a literal perfect film.  I mean, there are literally no missed steps, sour notes, self-indulgent flourishes, or untaken opportunities.  It hits every mark it addresses.  Especially for a first-time feature director, that pretty much does not happen.

I spent the vast majority of March feeling like I'd been kicked right in the brain by a donkey.  No rain + incredibly high pollen counts = about three goddamned weeks of dropping just about every ball I had access to.  We're talking extreme difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time, letting things get really out of hand due to lack of emotional and cognitive bandwidth to keep anything tacked down, that sort of thing. 

I didn't even break 8,500 words, and most of that was correspondence and various other writerly housekeeping stuff.

In spite of which, I did manage to complete one project, to finish the revisions a publisher had asked for, and to absolutely fucking nail an author interview I nabbed with a featured fiction slot.  I even managed to post the fic from last month on AO3, though coming up with the title, tags, description, etc. was the fucking worst--just pulling teeth the whole damn way.  So kind of really shitty, but not a total waste as far as things go.

I racked up 4 rejections for one incredibly enthusiastic acceptance, 1 completed revision request and zero new ones, 1 completed new project, and news that my chapbook sold out its first run and will be reprinted.

Could have been better, but all things considered, it was still pretty good.

I went to see it last night, and I think probably the thing I most appreciated is that they never took the idea of Carol being "too powerful" seriously.  Because this shows up so frequently in comic properties, and it's coming back again with the Dark Phoenix bullshit, and I really, really fucking hate it.

The thing about male heroes is that they get to basically be gods, and nobody looks at that character and thinks "But what if--hear me out, here--what if he couldn't handle being so powerful?  What if being so powerful and being able to do anything broke his brain?  What if being so powerful is secretly terrible and all he wants, deep down, is to not have that power anymore?" is a super-interesting, subversive, clever storytelling move that anyone wants to see.  If you have a male character whose awesome, godlike power comes at a terrible price, or is something that gets dumped on them before they're ready to handle it, or is really a pretty big burden, the story that gets told almost always revolves around finding solutions to those problems that let the character keep wielding those godlike, awesome powers.

Pretty much every time we get a female hero that's basically a god and her title gets any sort of readership, or she gets any sort of fanbase, some dickhole inevitably comes along and proposes this shocking storyline to end all storylines where all that power is just too much for her.  And then enough people that this keeps happening sit back and applaud like this is a great artistic contribution instead of a loud fart during a lull in conversation on a conference call. 

Thor's just Thor, but when Jane Foster takes up the mantle, using her awesome godlike powers makes her breast cancer (because of fucking course it was) worse.  She-Hulk suffers emotional trauma and now she's too afraid to use her own amazing powers.  Emma Frost gets too powerful for a hot second, and when that gets taken away it turns out her hubris in thinking she could use all that power has cost her pretty much all the power she started out with.

Jean Grey gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies. 

Scarlet Witch gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies.

We keep seeing these things presented as deep, moving storylines when they're the same old tired bullshit.  Male characters get to work through their problems without anyone seriously suggesting that there's something inherently and fundamentally wrong with them having them in the first place, that the character's mental disintegration or struggles with their powers are the inevitable result of having too much power or being too awesome.  Female characters are perpetually in need of being knocked down a rung or two, because apparently that struggle with the incompatibility between their humanity and their powers is "interesting." It's sexist, and it's fucking lazy.

So Captain Marvel not indulging in it is a huge relief.  All the lines about how she needs to learn to control her powers, how when she can control her temper and not use the full range of her powers at the drop of a hat she'll be ready, how she needs a hierarchy and external controls on her powers--it's all self-serving shit being shoveled by the bad guys. 

When she finally breaks free of the limits that have been placed on her, accesses her full strength, and attains godlike, awesome powers--that's when she's at her best self.  That's when she saves the day.  That's her natural state.  And at no point in time does the film act like Carol coming into her own and figuring out the full breadth and depth of what she's really capable of is anything other than fucking awesome.

So this is the planter.



I planted Florida heirloom broadleaf by scattering the seeds on the surface of the soil, watering vigorously, and hand-weeding any unwanted plants or weeds that cropped up.  The other plants are a mix of tropical sage, passionflower vine, violets, etc.--mostly native plants and selected to attract pollinators.  The planter's about four feet across and about 5-6 inches deep.  I used a whole packet of seed on this one patch of dirt, but it was an old packet so I really didn't expect much at all in terms of germination rate.



There are still tiny little mustard seedlings doing their thing and getting ready to grow once the bigger plants are harvested, too.



If your preferred method for harvest is to pull up the whole plant once it's fully mature, this isn't a great method--it's hard to pull out one plant without disturbing or damaging the ones close to it, at that proximity.  It probably also isn't a great bet for mustard types that get fairly sizeable before they're mature.  For Florida broadleaf, the plant seems to be pretty tolerant of the partial harvest method, where you trim off individual leaves as they get big enough to have that pepperiness and leave the rest of the plant alone, and most sources I've seen have recommended eating the leaves when they're 3-6 inches long, after which they get a bit tough and almost bitter. 

So far with a bed this size, I've gotten about a colander full of greens each time I've gone out to harvest.  They cook down aggressively, but it's enough for a side dish for one person or to spice up a main dish for everyone.  And the great thing about thinning greens, if your plants wind up too closely bunched to grow right, is that you just eat the greens you've thinned.

So it can't hurt to try, and seed packets are cheap enough to make it worth your while.  Even with the age of my seeds, this is about a month after sowing, after two rounds of harvesting.  In my case, I might not have enough cold weather left for the current seedlings to make it to eating-size without bolting, but they're an heirloom variety, so I should be able to save any seed the late bloomers produce for next winter.

One of the things I've found with raised bed gardening, and with spending a while gardening mostly for pollinators and wildlife, is that I now have a much healthier reservoir of insect predators hanging around waiting to spring into action if they spot an aphid or beetles.  Last time I tried food-gardening, the yard wasn't worth much of anything as habitat, and I had aphids and scale bugs and leafcutters and just about every other kind of gnarly insect you could wind up with crawling all up in my containers. 

I was also able to go hog-wild with coffee grounds earlier in the year, which help keep ants from colonizing the planters and upsetting the apple cart by guarding aphids against predation.  The ladybugs were out in force in this planter today cleaning off the passionflower vine, and the mild winter means that the paper wasps never quite went dormant, so stray caterpillars haven't been a problem either.  The feral lot next door even helps out by hosting hawks and owls that keep rabbits from being much of an issue.

There are definitely reasons you might want to go the neat, wide-spaced rows route when it comes to mustard greens--it certainly makes harvesting quicker and easier, especially if you're trying to feed a large number of people--but I'd say you don't really have to if you don't have high numbers of pests around waiting to wreck your whole crop.  Plus I've heard that mustard greens are hell on nematodes, so even if you don't get much yield for your seed, growing the mustard can help future crops you plant in that bed have a healthier time of it.

If you haven't already, it might be worth your while to check out David Goodman's Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening.  Most of his advice is more applicable to your section of Florida than mine, and I still found it to be a very helpful overview of possibilities and strategies.

Good luck, and happy growing! :D

Yesterday I wound up with a case of literary whiplash so bad I'm still feeling it.

I was reading an Ask Polly column, as one does, and off on the little sidebar were a few links.  Most-viewed stories.  It looked like a mix of gossip, literary essay, longform journalism.  The things you see in a normal digital clone of New Yorker.  One of them was titled "The Mom Who Has Sex With Her Husband Every Night."

Oh, I thought.  A short story.

It was odd.  The tone was perfect--very The Arrangements--as it explored the narrow confines of an alienated upper-class housewife, but none of the points it was making panned out, or if they did the critique was oblique at best.

I had, of course, missed the tastefully small "Sex Diaries" series breadcrumb at the top of the post.  It didn't drop until the end of the--unsatisfying! lacking in denouement! thematically muddied!--entry that this was an actual person's anonymously submitted account of their actual life.

A person had written this about themselves and then sent it in as nonfiction.  I'm still seesawing back and forth between "This person submitted a work of fiction in the hopes of getting it published and just lied about it." and "This person.  Exists?  At least one of them might have genuinely done this?".  My brain has fallen into a hole and can't get itself out.