I am neck-deep in writing. This is why I’m uncomfortable committing to more than two days of blogging. See this? It’s Wednesday afternoon already and I’ve only just turned up. If I was my blogging boss, I’d sack me.
In any case, we were out on the weekend, light shopping. And our expedition took us close to a roadside set of stalls, grandiosely described as a “food court”. I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it.
I’ll admit it, I’m grumpy, sarcastic and confrontational. As I’ve said in the past, stalwart reader, if you met me in person, you might not like me that much. But I think part of the reason I’m such a warped human being is because of the frequency of incidents akin to what J faced last week on the bus.
He came home shaking his head. “I just had the weirdest experience,” he told me, “and I don’t quite know how to categorise it in my brain. I’ll tell you about it and see if it resonates with you.”
And here’s what he told me:
There’s a guy who occasionally catches the same bus as I do. (Let’s call him Faisal. The ethnicity is irrelevant, I’m just trying to be all 1Malaysia and multi-cultural here. –kaz) Faisal is a really friendly guy. He always greets me when he sees me, is perennially cheerful and seems bent on offering me advice on everything to do with living in Malaysia.
This morning, he said that I just had to travel up to KL and spend some time there visiting various clubs. I told him that I wasn’t really into visiting any nightclubs and, besides, we have animals at home. Two of our dogs are still puppies (they’ll always be puppies to J, but that’s another discussion –kaz) and I’m not willing to kennel them on a whim just so I can go haring off to KL.
“Don’t be stupid,” he told me, “they’re only dogs. Just leave them at home and go.”
I stared at him. “They’re part of our family,” I said. “I can’t just leave them.”
“I’ll look after them,” he said.
“Do you own any dogs?” I asked. He said no. “Then how can I leave them with you?” I asked, adding, “They need food, walks, attention.”
“Tcha,” Faisal replied. “Just leave them with me. They’ll be fine.”
And there was nothing, J told me, that he could say to convince Faisal that (a) he wasn’t interested in visiting KL in the near future, and (b) pets need to be taken care of.
“I don’t understand. It was like he absolutely refused to listen to anything I had to say, no matter how many different ways I tried to explain it. Have you ever come across this kind of behaviour before?”
I made an equivalent non-verbal gesture to chewing up a wad of tobacco and spitting it out and said the following to him (feel free to follow along at home):
Let me encapsulate the last two plus decades of being a woman and a business owner for you.
I meet a guy called Fred. And Fred is bouncy and perky and says to me, “What do you do for a living?” And I say something like: “I’m an IT consultant.”
“Who have you worked for?”
I shrug. “I’ve worked for a variety of companies.”
“Have you worked for NASA?” he asks.
“No,” I shake my head.
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because I’m not a US citizen,” I reply, starting to get just a teeny bit tetchy because, really, is it any of his goddamned business? But I’m trying to be polite here, “and you have to be a US citizen to be employed by NASA.”
At this point, Fred laughs. “Oh that’s just bullshit. My friend, Pete, comes from Burkina Faso and he’s employed at NASA as a Senior Moon Crater Investigation Dude. He makes seven gazillion dollars a year doing that shit and they employed him six seconds after he cleared US Customs & Immigration in New York.”
Me, still trying to be nice and bringing my eyebrows back down to head level again: “Are you sure? Because I’ve spoken to NASA guys at job fairs and I even got into a conversation with them at Ames. They say they love my experience but, as I’m not a US citizen, they can’t employ me.”
“You just don’t know what you’re doing,” Fred replies, as chipper as ever. “That’s probably why you’ve been working for all these second-rate companies all these years. Let me get Pete to talk to you and he can show you what you’re doing wrong. You might even start to make some money. Wouldn’t that be nice? What say I come over tomorrow night with Pete and you can buy us pizza? And beer. I really like Duff Gold. What’s your address again?”
I tell him two words.
At this point in the narrative, I tell J, one of two accusations usually gets levelled at me. I’m either a frigid lesbian or a man-hating ballbuster.
It’s gratifying, but also sad, to see the dawning realisation on my husband’s face.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells me. “I would never have brought up the incident at all if I’d known you’d faced something like that even once.” Then he gets indignant. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about behaviour like this?”
I thought about that for a long second. “Seriously? Because it happens so often, it’s just part of life. It’s nothing special.”
I cannot tell you how much I love men. I love kidding around with them, swapping dirty jokes with them and generally shooting the breeze with them. (Curiously, considering my ideological stance, I get on best with ex-Army officers. Must be my background as an Army brat kicking in.) To me, men have an air of fun that women lack. I think that has to do with evolutionary biology, but that’s my opinion.
However, there’s one segment of the male population that I Cannot Stand and they are the Freds and Faisals of the world. That segment spans all races, colours and creeds and, unfortunately, they’re everywhere.
After this incident with Faisal, I think J is starting to realise exactly what kind of uphill battle our Little Dinosaur faces when she goes out into the big bad world. Through no fault of her own, she is going to get put down just because she’s a woman, and that’s not even counting the fact that she’ll be a migrant in whatever country we end up in, as well as having brown skin and an exotic-sounding name. And if she shows the least bit of ambition or is proud of her competence, well….
Over at GoodReads, I go through a bit on how Europa, Europa came into being. I’m still knee-deep in edits, so no product page on it yet, but it shouldn’t be too long coming.
Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.
Thanks to people like Heather Massey of The Galaxy Express and the untiring crew at The SFR Brigade, SFR (or Science-Fiction Romance) is getting much more prominence than it did even two years ago.
Because I’m in a new SFR anthology due to be released in May, however, I have to mention a publisher you may not have heard about. Back in 2006, I was approached by a bright and energetic businesswoman called Claire Siemaszkiewicz who wanted to start up a digital press based in the UK. She wasn’t an author, she had extensive experience in business development and marketing, and she had skills in starting up businesses. And she wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing for her new business.
Intrigued, I submitted a short story and “On Bliss” became one of the launch titles for Total-E-Bound. That happened in early 2007. Since then, TEB (as I call it) has been quietly publishing all manner of SFR and they have been incredibly receptive to what, to my mind, still remains a niche genre.
Fast forward to now. In early May, TEB will be releasing an SFR anthology called “Seeing Stars”. I’ve always wanted to be in the same anthology as one of my fave writers, Lisabet Sarai, so this new release is special for me.
Isn’t the cover gorgeous? I’ll be going through the background of my included story over at GoodReads so if you want to find out any more, you’ll have to pop over there every Friday. In the meantime, I’m just basking in new cover yumminess. Sigh.
Happy International Women’s Day. It is a shame, but the habit is trying to get stamped out in Poland, due to the inference that it was a “communist” holiday. Ah those Slavs, how they like to assure their modern, squeaky clean capitalist bona fides by eschewing anything that smacks of socialism.
For the rest of the world that doesn’t have a chip on its shoulder, however, IWD is wonderful. I recall, with fondness, the celebrations in Australia. The seminars. The long lunches. The sparkling wine. The rest of the day off. Great times.
Because darling J is an old-time socialist boy, he nabbed The Wast to go do some shopping together and Little Dinosaur and I were presented with bouquets of chocolates, a lovely dinner, followed by cake and sparkling wine. (I also got a pair of speakers for our homeschool and shall describe the set-up in more detail in another post.) Hope you had fun as well.
Part of our IWD "loot"!
I mentioned on my GoodReads blog on Friday that Broad Universe released a recent podcast on romance in speculative fiction. Rae Lori was moderating. Cate Rowan, Heather Massey and myself were on the panel. To read all the details please go here.
And lastly, I’m very happy to announce that a novella of mine, called “Europa, Europa” has been accepted into Total-E-Bound‘s forthcoming “Seeing Stars” anthology, to be released this May. More details as they come to hand.
When I first came back to blogging, I had to think of a schedule I could keep with ease. I decided on twice a week. It’s not much, but I thought I could easily write two blog posts a week, incorporate appropriate research when need be, and still keep up with Life.
Then I discovered GoodReads. And I decided to blog there once a week. And it turned my delicate little blogging balance upside-down. The need to come up with three posts a week was too much for me. I had to go back to twice a week. And what I’ve decided is to blog once a week at this blog and on Fridays at GoodReads.
Of course there’ll be weeks when I blog more than once here but, as a general rule, you can expect something new every Wednesday. I’ve been told that, as a blogger, I have a DUTY to keep to a strict schedule, lest I disappoint you and you leave me, with disgust, in droves. I don’t believe that, not with most people using readers to catch up on their favourite blogs but, then again, who am I to argue with Those Who (Supposedly) Know?
So, on Wednesday, a bit of a round-up. And on Friday…I don’t know yet. Something will come to me.
I’m reading Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad at the moment. It is brilliant and hilarious. And just to show how influences come from places you’d least expect, I’ve used a couple of the concepts in The Cyberiad to teach Little Dinosaur how to do numeric rounding.
The Cyberiad chronicles the adventures of two marvellous robots, Constructor Klaupacius and Constructor Trurl. The two are capable of any feat in the universe and constantly try to one-up the other by creating something unique…usually a multi-storeyed robot. And usually with disastrous consequences.
Little Dinosaur loves robots. So, for rounding, I gave her a series of robots. The Model 10-RR (Ten Rounding Robot) can only count in tens, so it only understands the numbers 0, 10, 20, 30, and so on. And whenever you ask it about a number, it can only round to the numbers it understands. The Model 20-RR counts in twenties, and only understands the numbers 0, 20, 40, 60, 80 and so on. The Model 50-RR…well, you can see where this is going.
LD is the programmer who has to figure out what all these robots will answer, given a particular number. She has to have one more tool if she’s to successfully predict the outcome and that tool is calculation of the mid-point. In these cases, the mid-points are 5 (for rounding to ten), 10 (for rounding to twenty) and 25 (for rounding to fifty).
So, how will the 10-RR respond if LD gives it the number 14? What about the 20-RR? And what about the 50-RR? Using three numbers, we came up with the following table:
| - Number – | - 20-RR - | - 10-RR - | - 50-RR - |
| 14 | 20 | 10 | 0 |
| 49 | 40 | 50 | 50 |
| 34 | 40 | 30 | 50 |
“All the robots got into a huge argument,” I told her, “because they each thought their own numbers were right and the other two were wrong. So, who was right?”
And LD thought for a little while and said: “They’re all right. It just depends on what numbers they understand.”
This was also a subtle lesson in morality. Sometimes, everyone’s right and you just have to recognise that. But, for now, we’re just working through rounding so well done, sweetheart! And thank you, Mr. Lem.
