For a week in July I get to speed off to other climes for what I hope will be a rejuvenating writing experience. You can bet I’m over the moon about this one.

In other news, I had a phone interview on that same day for a dream job (aside from being a writer, this is perhaps one of the only other things I can imagine doing for the rest of my life). I don’t know how it went exactly–I lean between it went well and I destroyed my chances by babbling about it being a ‘dream job’ at the end. Sheesh. In any case, if I somehow am able to wow the forces that be and I actually get the job, it will be life changing. That’s about all I can say about it right now without freaking myself out again.

In less than three weeks now, we’re packing our bags and will be driving to Seattle. Most people reading this blog will know we decided to move, but just in case you didn’t, come Feb. 1, this girl will have evacuated the concrete land that is Dallas for a greener (literally) world. I really can’t wait. We’re leaving almost all our possessions behind and are starting over. A good friend of ours is renting us the bottom floor of her house. We’re ready to begin again, in the right place for both of us.

I’m also working on a story right now that must be finished before I go. I’d started it several weeks back, but now more than ever I have an impetus to finish it. On New Year’s Eve, a young woman who was very dear to several of my friends was murdered near her home in Austin. I didn’t really know her, but I knew who she was, and to know that violence is so close, so easy to ignore but always trembling beneath the surface, keeps working at me. So I’m writing this story, knowing she was murdered, trying to pull shards out of death and put them into some meaningful order. Very rarely can anything come of a death like this but pain and grief. I’m not sure what I expect to find in this story that says differently. The story is only trying to offer companionship to the ones who lose their lives, to ones who don’t get to speak back, who don’t get to smile or laugh and share with us again. Even if the words are only a whisper, I hope they can channel a reprieve from the chaos this loss brings.

Full site.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi

I have regrets. The ways my life has unfolded are both beautiful and fraught. We’re never completely one thing or another. We’re multiple, never-ending, scintillating beasts that enrapture and enrage. We frustrate, we devour, we bleed upon one another and ask for more.

I would give all of myself if I had it to give, but that’s just the way–I don’t know what all of anything is. Will never know. In each moment I change, burst into a ray of colors ill defined and misunderstood. I will be kind, as kind as I can be, and still be capable of causing pain. I could be angry, as mean as I could be, and still be capable of grace. I will love, as much as I can, and still break because love always comes in its own way. The only thing I accept about myself is contradiction.

So, yes, regrets, because the self, as far as it extends into the future, is unknowable, uncontrollable, despite our need, our desire to shape it to our current existence.

So much I want in this world, so many moments I let wrap through and around me, that make me ache for the real, the now, the forever. And in my mind worlds expand, unravel, pull me through a million scenes, both real and imagined, all saying, “You, you are multiple, full of possibility and inevitability and everything you do, forever, will bring you to one single point, always, always, and then you’ll move forward again, into a new era, a new life that is both you and not you, forever changing.”

But that only lasts so long–life ends eventually. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scribbled on pages, hoping someone somewhere understands, who pieces together the lives we lived and did not live, discovers something hidden to ourselves, something we always wanted known but could never say. This is the writer inside, the one who is whole and broken and always a contradiction. Because this is to be human. This is to love and be loved and to give and to take and to sit inside the world with intention and with presence and to try to tell our stories however they come, ever shambling, beautifully incomplete.

And speaking of World Fantasy Con, I’ve written another post in that vein, but have decided not to publish it just yet. We’ll see. It has something to do with my reluctance to write, of fear of exposure, of letting others know too much. I never thought I’d be so self-absorbed as to worry about that problem. But it has appeared and I’ll have to overcome that issue if I want to succeed.

I have to find my way back.

Dallas is a blur. It helps that it rained and is overcast today, and that I live in a fairly lush, walkable section of an otherwise vast land of concrete and infrastructure. But I know my time here must surely take me back there. It helps that I saw friends–real friends–people who write, who think, who understand, and who take me for what I am. My group here is slowly dispersing–with lives to be lived in California, North Carolina, Michigan…yet my feet tap in the muddy puddles of Dallas and wait, wait, wait, trying to avoid the cracks that would swallow me if I stopped long enough.

Something about standing on a water taxi, the wind slashing through my hair and the waves knifing into frothy white possibility beneath us; something about hiking up a fairyland road with nothing but ferns and dripping green trees arching over my head; something about stepping off a train and stumbling into a mass protest, the dirt, the sweat, the people thronging together to demand fairness… A coffee shop on every corner, a city where vegan isn’t a dirty word, and books, oh, the sweet scent of books that carries on the air.

Seattle. I’ve left you but will find you again.

Excerpt, from Throwaways:

Lightning strikes as she closes her eyes. The bulging white light singes them, a musty smoke invading her mouth. We don’t stand close–she is suspect, dangerous. A being we cannot and will not know. Around her, rain drops freeze and shatter against the ground. The brick wall caves in and reveals bones–old bones–the lives left behind so that this world could plunder on. She unburies them. Unburies everything so that the cycle becomes clear. After a moment, with her closed eyes alight and still burning, the vision appears.

He is not dead, cannot be dead–his heart stopped, he floats in the ethers, between what is and what will not be. All her flames, lashing light that stopped his life from growing into the coming minutes, act as surrogates–the boundary between this world and that. But she does not embody death. It is only life her fingers twist and turn and touch into existence. On the other side, the realm of the in-between, he waits for permission to come back. And what he brings with him calls on the future, asks it to caress their bodies with some truth of what she is and cannot know.

We all suffer pain in our lifetimes. But we still visit pain upon these animals, despite their heretofore ‘happy’ existence. I wonder if cows learn to trust those who care for them, and if, at that final moment, when the cow/chicken/pig is still slaughtered despite all that ‘humane’ care, they feel a level of betrayal along with the physical pain that their particular death will bring. Chimpanzees are nothing like cows, but it’s clear they feel those kind of emotions (watch “Project Nim” if you don’t believe me). It’s not a hard stretch to find other animals who do have relationships of trust with humans, as well. And I don’t know about you, but I would prefer a much more peaceful death than having my throat sliced open or a bolt stabbing through my skull.

So tonight I am ambivalent about “who” we are. We are capable of inducing happiness and pain, of creating misery and kindness, of loving and hating. Our moral compass, if we have one at all, seems to come from what serves our existence best (and if I go all Darwin about it, it seems that helps us to survive–more about this quandary later). But we decide what best serves us. For me, I simply cannot swallow the excuse that the cow had a happier life until the moment the farmer took him out back and used a bolt gun to stab him through the skull.

I know this cow will die, someday. Or, if we didn’t practice the production of farming animals for slaughter, it might never be born at all and other varieties would be given the chance to evolve. So many varieties of animals have died or are dying out thanks to modern factory breeding techniques, as it is, that our lack of biodiversity is a serious worry. But, I do think there is a moral difference between forcing the animal to become my meal and allowing it to live a life unimpeded by our egotism.

In other writing news, I finished a new draft of a story about a sheela-na-gig, am at work on a YA fantasy novel about runaway teens, and in general brood every free second of my day. Nothing new here, except, perhaps, for my growing cynicism. I don’t want us to be horrible to each other or to our partners on this earth. The kind of pain we visit upon each other (both human-to-human and animal-to-animal) rattles me.

I wrote “Double Dutch” during week three of Clarion West, and it began a string of absolutely weird ideas I never thought myself capable of writing. This story taught me that I should never, ever let my internal censor tell me something was too weird to write. After “Double Dutch” came an absolutely frightening story that still hurts to think about. But “Double Dutch” kicked off a new way for me to explore fiction, so I couldn’t be more excited that this is the first story I’ve sold.

Please check out Scape and embrace all its glory:

Consider sponsoring me in the 2011 Clarion West Write-a-thon. I’m going for 1,000 words a day, five days a week, and I’ll smash your favorite color and bug into a terrifying monster in my current YA dark fantasy, Throwaways. C’mon! It’ll be like magic. And you know you want yourself immortalized in bug form.

Click here to access my page. Thanks! The money raised here goes to help new writers attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop, held in Seattle, Wash., every year.