Lucy Kemnitzer

Simple is good. Here's what I would do: I would make the letters less bold and consider reversing the text and background. The fat white letters are kind of hard on the eyes. The designs at Zen Garden are distracting and self-important, and if I were you I wouldn't lust after them. There are a couple that are simple enough to be nice, but if they're that simple you can do it with tables. (I am not an HTML or CSS expert: I have an obsolete version of dreamweaver and I know maybe ten or at the most fifteen HTML tags and that's all I need, thank you) Other than that. There's no link to "Busted:" did you take it down when you decided to revise it and submit it professionally?

Central Coast California seasons: "Will we ever see the sun?" season (April through June: summer fog season) Fire Season (July through October) "Will it ever rain?" season (October through early December) "Will it ever stop raining?" season (December through March) -- except in drought years, in which case it's "How can it still be Fire Season?" I came up with eight, once, but I used other criteria. Notice that temperature is not a factor at all in coastal California seasons. (oh, and as for the storm system: we lost our power for a bit over twenty four hours, which makes us kind of lucky, I guess)

There is no reason that you should not write it. There are very few plots, premises, tropes, or characters which you can think of which you cannot find some form of in earlier writing. It sounds like a stretch for you, anyway -- a good reason to write it!

I have to disagree about that having to go. Go back and read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories again. Those guys are getting caught up in sex all the time (though not with each other. I discover only one!!! one!!! slash story featuring them. that's okay, slash doesn't float my boat anyway). Heinlein, even: here he's most adored these days for his juveniles, but especially his later work is crowded with sex drive. And as for the boys being gay -- does the name Samuel Delany ring a bell? (I was a big Delany fan in my adolescence, but I was shocked, I tell you, by the book now known as Equinox and then known as Tides of Lust). Don't worry about the amazing revelation that young men in the midst of trying adventures feel surges of lust for their lovers. It does, as you say, tell you something about William. A similar tossed-off sentence somewhere will suffice to show Ben's relationship to sex and William . . . interesting if it's not completely in synch with William's, huh (lesser, greater, provoked at different times, under different circumstances)? Fodder for a hook to hang some action on, right?

But you know what? Your itch to make some damn thing just happen already in the first paragraph is exactly right on. We don't need to kniow that some guy drinks coffee, etc., we need to know what interrupts him. Now, I'm a slow starter. I want to take my own sweet time, and my idea of starting in medias res is to start with some slow-moving scene fairly late in the story. Then I realize I haven't started where the action is, and I go backwards, but then I'm telling this long boring thing. Fortunately I have a writing group nowadays who treat me with exactly the amount of toughness I need (I'm a tender flower, but I do not want to be told that I'm doing fine dear, and have this gold star for effort)and now, three years after I wrote the first draft, I'm rewriting my wishgranter story almost from scratch and I think I might finally have figured out how to do the thing you naturally want to do, so why don't you let up on yourself and just go with the UFO or whatever? (I'm less fond of the orcs, but there you go.)

Actually, you didn't ahve to ask that question. You never have to talk to him again. If you had just waited a while and had the followup test -- which you're supposed to do anyway, just in case -- you would have had your answer. I don't have the place to say this, but it's painful to see you prolonging your pain like this. You need to stop thinking about this guy. You needed to stop thinking about him a long time ago, but you especially need to stop thinking about him now. You're young, you ahve a whole life in front of you, and you just don't need this. I think you're elevating the STD testing to a metaphor for something, when it should be as simple as taking a car in for its 3000 mile checkup. And I think you're hurting yourself doing it.

Bringing a child to term cannot always be made a realistic option. For me, both times I had abortions, the being pregnant was the crisis. If a baby had materialized in our midst, it would not have been a terrible thing. (we love children: children are not difficult to live with: we already had children, so we were already doing children things: we wouldn't have needed to buy a lot of baby crap because we had what we thought was necessary and didn't believe in buying a lot of other stuff) But I was a necessary part of the picture, and there was a very real possibility that carrying a child to term would knock me out of the picture. I was not in immanent danger of dying either time I had an abortion, but my risk of ill health (bad enough to threaten my contribution to the economic life of the family, at least) or death was unacceptably elevated. Now, financial support would have helped somewhat, but it's cold comfort to replace mommy's wages when mommy's dead or ill. That's the thing nobody ever wants to talk about when they talk about the ethics of pregnancy. Normal, healthy women die of complications of pregnancy and childbirth. It's a significant risk, even in developed countries (and significantly more in the US compared to many other developed countries). An acquaintance of mine did. She was healthy, except for some oddments, and then she was pre-eclamptic (as was I), and then eclampsia took her. Her husband was left with a motherless newborn. In my first pregnancy there came a moment where my husband was confronted with the possibility that either or neither of us -- me and the baby -- might survive. He told the doctor that if there was a point where only one of us could be saved, he wanted me. (long story short, he got both of us. kid is all grown up now). To me, every time a woman gets an abortion, she is in that moment of mine, where she has to choose her life over the life of a potential person. I think risking your life for the life of a person who is not here yet is a choice which cannot be second-guessed by bystanders. Not even the men who provide the sperm to make the potential person. Mostly women don't die of pregnancy and childbirth, yes. But the risk is significant. And that is why I think fathers may get a voice, but they don't get a veto, on the subject of keeping the baby or having an abortion.

I've already said what I have to say on this subject.

These gray hairs are only there to give you a memento seniliti (made up word, in case it's not clear). You won't really turn gray until later. Anyway, that's what I did. A couple early on, then some more much later, and finally an acceleration till I finally bit the bullet and colored my hair red.

The last time I was carded I was in my forties. I don't think I look all that young, but there's always someone who thinks I do. I keep saying, "this is what it looks like!" -- at least if you don't smoke. On the other side of the card: when I was just twenty-one and selling beer at the Boardwalk, I carded what I thought was a guy in his early twenties (just to be sure). The person turned out to be a noted UC professor -- in her forties!

She turns different directions depending on which eye you're assigning to be dominant, not whether you're "left-brained" or "right-brained" or a genius. All three of those concepts are dubious, anyway. Personalities and abilities don't line up that way in any really consistent fashion. The reason she starts turning the other way is that one eye takes over from the other.

Maybe you don't really want to kill the monster and take its treasure, after all. Maybe you don't even want to be in the same place with the monster. Or maybe the monster isn't the monster. Or the treasure isn't the treasure. If a scene is really resistant to beign written, there's a possibility that it really doesn't want to be written. Or sometimes, maybe it's a scene before that that doesn't want to be writtern, at least the way it is being written. (I've been convinced by my writing group to change an entire first-person narrative, the whole novel worth, into third person, and to change some of the chronology. They want me to kill off a lot more bystanders, or hurt them seriously, and I went all around the landscape looking to do that, but now I'm changing some of the lethal events back to non-lethal ones because I realized that the way I had done it the threat level wasn't increasing as it should. To try to keep from producing gibberish, I am retyping every single word rather than cutting-and-pasting and replacing the pronouns. This means that the writing is changing more than I planned on. The other effect of this is that I've noticed much more starkly how certain things keep happening over and over again, so I'm looking at those things to see if they need to do that, and whether there's anything to be gained by stacking those repetitions like that, or anything to be gained by tearing them out and replacing them with something else)

Maybe Khayyam isn't doing for you what you think he is. Maybe it's something else. It may be that Khayyam allows you to do the world-weary sophisticate by being in the positions he's in. This is always problematic for us Californians, because we have a rural and wilderness backdrop for our cities, and an orientation to the outdoors that urbane people aren't supposed to have. We express our urbanity differently from sophisticates of other locales, though. "World-weary" is generally not it! Speaking of "there but for . . ." We're not burning up here, but we could be, and I'm certainly feeling for you guys. What astonishes me is the hatred being poured on Southern California instead of sympathy. The whole southern half of the state is being painted as the home of nobody but the super-rich and self-indulgent. Yes, most of the houses in Southern California ought not to have been built where and how they were built, but most of the houses on every coastline, riverbank, and the Great Plains ought not to have been built where and how they were built, and it doesn't make their residents villains unworthy of our sympathy. When you connect railroads and fire in my mind, it goes deep -- my dad worked on the railroad for a long time when I was a kid, and also we had fires where we lived regular as clockwork every summer.

There isn't always a moral, but if you look at something and it looks like it's disconnected from the rest, it probably is. Yes, this happens. The thing that happens to me is conversations take over and I can't figure out how to get back to the plot without axing most of the conversation. It can happen over and over!

I have a lot of confidence in that book. I think as it was it was pretty well close. If you want reactions, let me know.

You know, it's true in general of Iran. It's also true in a number of countries. I'm not excusing the thing at all: what I'm concerned about is that your attention is being focused on a particular country which is right now trying to stay out of an unprovoked war with the United States. Please don't fall into the Iraq trap and allow yourself to be caught up in the "Iran-is-the-enemy" fervor that will lead us into yet another disastrous failure. If you want to work for human rights in other countries, fine, do it, but don't allow the same mainstream media that persecutes you here to dictate your targets and your passion.

That's a good hook, especially considering Satar!

I don't see Khay as angsty. I see him as dour, yes, and grumpy, and possibly ambitious (he doesn't have time to fool around, so at the first note of complication he bugs out and goes back to -- studying!). He might be more interesting to you to take up when he's older. He's not going to change for a long time. But when he's out of college -- probably grad school for him, don't you think? something more intellectual than engineering, more practical than linguistics: maybe international relations, or agrarian policy, or something -- and firmly established on the first rungs of his career, it would be fun to zip the rug out from under him. "Rainy Day" really did not do it for me as a summer topic either. And it's much wetter up here than it is down there: we used to get one real storm every summer, but I don't know how much actual water that produced.

You don't seriously intend to retire Khayyam soon? The boy needs to have something nice happen to him. And an opportunity to do something proactive. "Earthquake weather," as I understand it, actually comes from Northern California -- from the 1906 Fire and Earthquake in San Francisco. The day (April 18, the birthday of both my kids)was preternaturally warm and sunny for the season. And still and muggy, I gather. So unseasonable weather, or unusually hot weather, got called "earthquake weather." I don't know the history of how it got applied down south, but you guys have enough temblors to build your own folklore on. There's always a little shaker somewhere nearby -- if you can't find one anywhere else, you can always check out Hollister!

Up where?

Harry Potter? oh dear.

When my mother died, it seemed to me like it was more --frightening, I think -- than my own death. It was just impossible to wrap my mind around it: how could I even exist without her? --I don't mean in terms of actual dependence, she was ill and more dependent on me than I was on her , but something else, something cognitive or logical or something. Like it was a paradox that she could stop being and I could go on. But that was thirteen years ago, and I'm still here. I don't know what that means. Anyway, all my sympathies.

I would like to see your take on the swishy kind of guy: mostly people write them as Icons and not as -- well, your guys. I have an especial interest in this. My circle of friends in high school (or rather, one fo the two circles I most ran in) included a bunch of these guys. It was almost a fad for a guy to at least try that persona on. I must admit this is 1967-1970, San Francisco, and one of the things we did for fun was to go down to the midnight movie at the Palace theater in Chinatown and watch the Cockettes do their drag thing (people somewhat younger than me would know one of those guys, Sylvester, as a disco singer: but man, could he sing the blues). One of the boys in my school became lovers with one of the Cockettes, a nice young man who dressed in motorcycle leathers and sang "Melancholy Baby" and loaned me a quarter when I came up short at the St. Vincent de Paul to buy the deep skillet I have to this day (my point, and I do have one, is that I had an onion on my belt . . .) No, the real point is that having known these guys, I almost never recognize them in their depictions in books and movies. They're either presented as these cartoons or as a bunch of iconic contradictions. They'd be much better off written the way you write guys -- sort of Joe Swish, I guess.Now, if the kid shows up on the doorstep at the age of 14, and has been out of dad's life for ten years, I'm thinking: Dad didn't throw away the kid. Dad was thrown away, maybe not by mom, but by mom and/or someone else in the family. I've just witnessed in my own circle a young couple who've uncoupled though remaining good friends, simply put, because he's gay and she's not a man. He wanted to give it a run in the first place, not just because he loves her dearly, but also because he wanted to be a father. (he's a sweetie and the only thing wrong with him is that he's young)Well -- what if? What if Dad had been a young man like that, only they gave it a longer run, got married, had a baby, and then -- well, maybe it wasn't his gayness that got him thrown out of his child's life. Maybe it was hers. Or something else. And what if there wasn't anybody throwing anybody away, but it was just really hard to keep the contact -- school, emigration, prison, enlistment, career things made it really hard, and it was only supposed to be temporary -- and suddenly it's ten years later and all Dad's been doing for the last few years is child support money and an annual letter.And what if Gabe's right and the reason the kid shows up is that he's somehow blown it back home, and he's built up this romantic idea about his dad from the annual letters, and he's thought that dad was some kind of paradigm of perfection, and that's such a delicate construct that it blows over real fast in the face of warty reality, and having Uncle Joe Swish on the premises is not immediately helpful. And if he's fourteen, he's really delicate about his own sexuality and it may be a problem to him to have a father who is clearly different in this way, because he really can't know these things about himself right now -- But it's your story.

The surgery in question is a discectomy, right? My daughter had that last year. It was a beautiful thing. She it took maybe three months for her to stop needing any pain meds and she could walk almost right after. But the protocol for disc problems hereabouts is: first you get phyiscal therapy -- did you do that? -- then they try injecting the area with stuff, and then they go for the surgery. This was with a clear MRI picture showing a truly messed up disc. The reason for the protocol is that some people get better with the "less invasive" procedures and some people don't get better with the surgery. Anyway, whichever route you choose, my best wishes!

I think your subconscious is setting you up for a good story, too. That's why I keep a notebook at my bedstead. Some of the dreams are seeds for stories and some of them are a bit revealing. I think some of my dreams this last year were telling me to get back into teaching reading.