Good news, everyone! My publication dry-spell is over!

It seems that the best way to get published is to give in to your excessive nerdom. The wonderful Margaret Bashaar has accepted a poem for publication in her 2011 anthology, Make It So. That’s right–it’s an anthology of Star Trek: TNG poetry. The moment I heard about it, I got to work.

Here’s a little tease, of the first two lines:

A Proposition

Geordi, even I knew the shiver
of Tasha’s bare thighs around my waist . . .

If you’re not excited by that then you might be an android.

(If you are excited by that then you might be an android.)

In other news, I recently finished Diana Peterfreund’s Ascendant, which was amazing (review will be posted tomorrow). But now I’m reading I am Number Four and . . . well . . .

I’m not sure if perhaps it’s just looking bad by comparison. But so far, it’s not looking very good. It’s what I typically think of as “idiot sci-fi.” Take, for example, this explanation of the premise, which comes not far into the novel’s first chapter:

[. . .] we protect ourselves because of the charm that was placed upon us when we left, a charm guaranteeing that we can only be killed in the order of our numbers, so long as we stay apart. If we come together, then the charm is broken. When one of us is found and killed, a circular scar wraps around the right ankle of those still alive. And residing on our left ankle, formed when the Loric charm was first cast, is a small scar identical to the amulet each of us wears. The circular scars are another part of the charm. A warning system so that we know where we stand with each other, and so that we know when they’ll be coming for us next.

Is it just me, or is that sort of unbelievable gibberish? And really kind of silly, even by, say, high-fantasy standards, much less science fictional ones?

Of course, there’s been a rash of science fiction books for young adults out lately, all advertised as “sci-fi but not for sci-fi fans!” As a sci-fi fan, I find that depressing. I know that SF isn’t a terribly popular genre right now, and I realize that the lingo and the nerdiness can be kind of off-putting. But it’s not as if I like my sci-fi particularly hard–I prefer character-driven stories just like the rest of you. But I also like a universe that’s cohesive and fairly believable, one that isn’t somewhat fundamentally silly but at least attempts to follow some sort of rules. And I’d love to read some science fiction that seems to come out of a deep love of the genre, rather than as a result of trend-chasing (dystopians are over! aliens must be next!).

I suppose if I want to read it, I’ll have to write it.

and soon, I begin a new adventure. D.C. Cherry blossoms. Winter and autumn and spring. And everything that’s been missing in Florida, even if I will miss many things there.

I wrote this:

This is what happens over time: you become afraid to make leaps, however small, as if your routine of sleep coffee work coffee dinner wine sleep could really ever satisfy, you become convinced that the cycle of buying sensible shoes and selling yourself and buying atom-powered netbooks and selling yourself and drinking dirty martinis on date nights and selling yourself is inescapable because how else will you buy buy buy but to diminish your true soul.

Eventually what was inside you a sunset is scraped away to a mass of pastel colors and fading lights: heliotrope and cerulean and you tell yourself that if not today, tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, well then it wasn’t really meant to be or to be me. One day, at a picnic, you meet a girl who is bright and shining as a new copper penny and she tells you something: her plans. And you no longer burn and rage inside but think oh, that’s nice.

You think: house. You think: babies. And you think within the skeleton of house and babies, think of building a legacy this way, not that. Think that it doesn’t matter that the only true telepathy is art. Think that it’s irrelevant that once you’re gone you lose those small silent moments: alone in your car on the highway, the radio stuttering in and out, the noise inside you louder than any truck that rattles on without you. You convince yourself that it’s okay to lose those moments. That everyone loses those moments. That we all must resign ourselves to becoming irrelevant. Because you have.

This is how the light inside you might change without your ever really realizing. This is how you unbecome yourself. This is how you forget to talk about what the hallway looked like at night when you were young. This is how you forget to speak for those who have gone before. For Chuck, and for Frank, and for Francis, and for Frank, and for Louise and for Richard and for Freddie and for all of those dogs and lizards and guinea pigs gone. You forget. And you are silent as they are, even as you breathe. Worse, you are reticent.

This is the story of getting out. But it’s not a simple story. We will not talk about the shoulders that you stepped on to step high and over. We will not talk about how easy it is to fall back. Health insurance. Ballet flats. Comfortable. We will talk about what happens inside you when your argue, when you write. When the people inside your head start to breathe and get insistent: make time for me. No one else will.

He said it better: It’s living in and writing your own story, and yes, yes, you nod, that’s why you married him and if it’s possible for you to do that, you should.

Before I post today’s teaser, I want to talk a little bit about the structure of my current manuscript. Seas Run Dry takes place over the course of a single week. This is true for several reasons–for one, I wanted to try to create a densely packed narrative. For another, I wanted to highly the brevity of the summer romance contained within–and the romance of many teenagers, really. Things change and evolve so quickly when you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, and thanks to the intensity of adolescent emotion (one of the things I love about writing for and about this age group), it’s completely realistic to have a pair of characters fall head over heels for each other over the course of a handful of days.

Lord knows it happened to me when I was eighteen!

To highlight the brief course of action, Seas Run Dry doesn’t have chapter breaks. It has scene breaks, and also “day breaks”–the larger section headings are named “Thursday,” “Friday,” “Saturday,” and so on. I feel like this structure is a little risky; I’ve learned how to place tension at the end of chapters in my other manuscripts to propel the reading forward, and I can’t really do that here. But it’s fun to try something new, and it gives me an opportunity to shift tone a bit in the middle of the night. At first, I was worried about this; would it seem abrupt or unrealistic? But so far, I’ve found that it really just feels accurate. In the words of my favorite Ferlinghetti poem, we think differently at night.

So, here we are. Loril, in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, thinking differently:

(Teaser removed)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Doctor

I

Among twenty snowy planets,
The only moving thing
Was the heart of the TARDIS.

II

I was of thirteen minds,
Like a body
In which there are thirteen Doctors.

III

The Time Lord waltzes at the end of the world.
It is like a metaphor, thinly veiled.

IV

A Doctor and his companion
Are one.
A Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor and a Doctor
Are one.

V

I know that I prefer
The beauty of innuendos,
The milky-white discharge of bio-energy,
And the Doctor sleeping
just after.

VI

Naked branches filled my long window
With barbaric cracks.
The shadow of my future self
Crossed it, back and forth.
The potential
Found in the shadow
To become someone else.

VII

O thin men of Gallifrey,
Why do you tell your children
To look into the Time Vortex through
The Untempered Schism
Or the Eye of Harmony
Or whatever it’s called?
Do you not see how that shit
Is crazy?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the TARDIS
Has telepathic translation circuits.

IX

When the Time Lords flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of the Doctor
Flying in his TARDIS,
Even the Dalek Emperor
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He flew over London
In a blue box.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of coral
For blackbirds.

XII

Mutter’s Spiral is turning.
The Doctor must be traveling.

XIII

It was today all tomorrow.
It was snowing
But it wasn’t snow.
The Doctor watched
From a box in a scrapyard.