"Only in silence the word, only in Dark the Light, only in Dying Life: Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." -Ursula K. Le GuinTwo more voices from my youth left the earth plane this week. Ursula K. Le Guin and her Wizard of Earthsea trilogy have faded into the mists, but not before having made a profound impression on my growing up self. Her writing style, in my mind, is almost high journalism: It tells layered stories in details and makes the reader consider for themselves what the ambivalence in the world means. And she was a forthright individual who wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself, her sex, or her genre.

On the opposite end of my youthful entertainment spectrum, Mort Walker, who I remember most for Beetle Bailey, but also for coining the term grawlix, passed soon after.

The eulogies for both spoke about how prolific they were. Somehow that jostled something loose in me: For the first time since September, I made progress on my edits. I still have more work to do for my day job than can be comfortably handled in the standard forty-hour work week, but this week I started leaving my laptop at the office and was able to switch gears when I got home. It’s a good start. As you might have noticed from the progress bar in the right side-bar, I’m creeping up on the 20% percent mark. If I can keep up with my ten pages per day rate, I might even make a deadline that’s floating in my brain: Release book three of the Red Slaves trilogy on the sixth anniversary of the release of book one.

That puts me outside of meeting my Round One goals (Round One ends March 21), but doesn’t feel as frenetic or stressful as sticking to my first impulse.

While I consider the implications of that, a few other thoughts stuck with me from this week’s reading. Memories of stories and related entertainment apparently fade faster than I’d ever thought. The idea of a tapestry of influences reinforces what I was pondering last week–that our acculturation is subtle and difficult to pin to individual words and phrases and stories. And may be why I’ve embarrassed myself a few times by buying the same book as I’d read years before without intending to stock duplicates in my personal library. On the topic of conversation and collaboration, then, Psychology Today posted about the death knell of the Yabut.

Further evolution in the #metoo story telling this week led to the publication of a profound article titled “The female price of male pleasure.”  One of the bits of information in that story that I knew, but hadn’t really processed: the definition of bad sex is vastly different for men and women. Women experience pain with intercourse on a regular basis, putting their definition of bad down at that level. (Medically, dyspareunia, vaginismus, and vulvodynia, painful dysfunctions of female reproductive systems, have only merited a collective 446 clinical trials, while erectile dysfunction, which is merely embarrassing as opposed to painful, has had 1,954 clinical trials.) Men, on the other hand, define bad sex as being “a passive partner or a boring experience.” The world that lives between those two perspectives goes a long way to explaining the current state of the conversation about inequality.

Similarly, one of the people I follow on Twitter posted a query about women who enjoy scifi. At latest count, her post has been liked 14,000 times, retweeted 2,500 times, and responded to 3,600 times. There are a lot of us out there, and it’s always useful to remember that Mary Shelley can be considered the progenitor of the genre with her story, Frankenstein. The oddly ubiquitous perception that geeking out on science and imagining some of the logical extensions it might bring into a future daily life, is limited to the male purview, really needs some reality injected into it.

As for my other goals, hubs and I stayed current with Star Trek: Discovery for our date night, and my phone says I averaged 4,565 steps per day–up significantly from last week now that we’ve had some nicer temperatures. We still haven’t figured out the yoga thing, and that might be a stretch goal at this point, if you’ll forgive the pun.

Otherwise, we’ll see whether I can build on the editing habit this week. There will be family visiting who I haven’t seen in probably twenty-five years, so the perennial distractions will be pulling me the other direction, but if I’m to ever reach the descriptor “prolific” I need to refocus my priorities. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping an eye on my ROW80 buddies and will report back next week on my progress.

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2 thoughts on “Another Passing

  1. I would have commented earlier, but with this cray-cray week, I was all to happy to allow myself to be distracted by all the cool links you posted Tonya. You are delightfully evil that way.

    Glad to see you’re finding a bit of a way to work on the progress bar. Sorry it had to be during a week of loss in the writing community… Still, it strikes me as odd that the greatest thing that could be said about these people was that they were… prolific.

    I mean, so is ragweed and dandelions, and a lot of people would say that is a bad thing about them.

    So it does strike me that these wonderful people need a better one-word catch phrase…. as soon as I think of it. ;-/

    Have a great writing week.

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