This weekend I journeyed back to Seattle, the city that isn’t my city, the city that does not belong to me, yet I somehow belong to it. Even in the drizzly rain, the soggy, mud-strewn flyers littering the streets of Capitol Hill made sense–signaled to me my relation to this land. I only stayed there for six weeks in 2010, but going back felt more like going home–a real home, one that belongs to me, one that is tied more to who I am than where I’ve come from–than anywhere I’ve ever been.

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.

Since I’m having such trouble with productivity lately, I figured I could use this webpage to motivate myself. I wrote this the other night, riffing on the book that lives beneath my fingertips, but this passage is unlikely to make it into my novel. It asked me to write it in this particular tense, with this particular focus. Two paragraphs, about a girl who just accidentally killed the boy she’s had the hots for. That’s my world right now. What follows below may not make much sense now, but that’s a good thing. I can’t always answer for my subconscious.

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.

Working steadily on the dissertation. That is to say, finding myself ever more disturbed at what ‘humanity’ seems to entail. I don’t know exactly what we are, despite all our posturing about what we would like ourselves to be. I wonder about morality and relativism and the boundaries we allow ourselves to cross daily, so long as we have a moral excuse for them. While this comment applies to literally every territory of human existence, I want to discuss our treatment of ‘other’ creatures. The usual line I hear is that opting out of factory farming, and choosing instead to purchase meat from local farms allows the animal a ‘happier’ life.

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.

Today I woke up at 6:30am to find an email from Scape e-zine, buying my story, “Double Dutch”! I’d been having a pretty terrible week/month, so to find this wonderful news in my inbox kicked me straight out of the doldrums and into writerly ecstasy. It’s my first actual sale, though I’ve placed plenty of work in other pubs (gratis). I’m so excited I could throw up.

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.