In Translation (also, baking)

So, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands got picked up for Turkish foreign rights, and lo, this arrived in my mailbox this week. 

I love the cover art. It's kind of strange/cool to see your story in words you can't read, except for the proper names. While this isn't my first foreign rights sale, it is the first time I've gotten a copy. Pretty cool.

I would love to have more to report, but it is February. It's not even an especially dark month here (it should be raining. It isn't. That will change at the end of the week.), but it's a drag on the spirit. Nothing major, just many littles coming together to make a much. 

Thank the gods for steady D&D games and the friends that make them possible. 

And because I am (not so) low-key D&D obsessed, I took yesterday, Presidents' Day, to spend mostly in the kitchen, making D&D associated recipies. I've made Lord Eshteross's Maple Ginger Cookies with Turmeric (from Exquisite Exandria: The Official Cookbook of Critical Role) before, and they turned out splendidly this time as well. I don't actually own that cookbook yet, mind, so I can't speak to the rest. 

I do own Heroes' Feast, the official D&D cookbook (Shan, who is not Icelandic in any way, practices the Icelandic tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve. She figures cookbook and gaming is just doubling up on the awesome, and she is not wrong.) I did a test run of the vedbread (the D&D name in the book, and I have no idea what its real name might be).  It's a sort of savory not-at-all-cinnamon roll, where the dough is instead rolled around a combination of mushrooms, shallots, and cheese, and the dough itself has a fair bit of cheese worked into it as well. Tasty. A little more substantial  than "bread that accompanies soup" and more like "light lunch." They seem like a thing that may come with me to events where someone says "bring something savory, not a main dish, not a salad."  

And because I spent the day making dishes for my long-suffering husband to wash up, I feel better about the multiverse today. Also, I have tasty things to eat for lunches and snacks. 

And February is almost over.

what I have been doing instead of writing

Please be advised: the iPhone's camera is fine, but I may have been asking too much, and also I am not an especially gifted photographer. Don't judge.

This summer I spent mostly outside on the deck, binging Dimension 20 and, appropriately, painting D&D miniatures. Because it is monster season, aka October, aka Halloween Month, I share with you the biggest and finest of my monsters. 

Behold the beholder! He's an obnoxiously colorful fellow. I don't see why beholders need to be grim and dark (the one I am painting for my godson is, but this one is a celebration of neon). The beholder is an iconic D&D monster, right up there with the mimic, and one of my favorites. But not my very favorite....

 

This is my favorite, both in D&D and personally: the red dragon. 

Of the D&D dragons, I like the look of the red and the green best, and but if I have to choose between acid and fire, well. Fire. Obviously. 

scattershot

Y'all, I am not a super fast writer of nonfiction, and sometimes I take a couple days to think about how I want to address a particular topic. Except the breakneck idiocy of ::waving hands:: all this is such that the topics pile up until I don't write at all because other more eloquent, and speedy, people already have.

But let us be clear:

Black Lives Matter. Transwomen are women and transmen are men. Science is real. Wear your fucking masks. And this Portland thing? Armed and unidentified federal troops grabbing people in "proactive" arrests? That's straight up authoritarian toadshit. Gods both small and large, vote in November.

...Thus has passed July.

I had a birthday early in the month, in which I turned a firm corner into my late 40s.  It was an odd birthday, in that we went nowhere and did nothing and I cooked (sure, Nous would've cooked for me, but I wanted chili verde and I like making chili verde and so). I even made my own cake, which actually a blueberry buckle (I didn't even know buckle was the legit name of a fruit-pastry thing, but it is). It was in fact a day like most other days around here, which have been divided into D&D night(s), and Borderlands 3 nights, depending on the number of participants.

The Patchwork Terror, 1 year old

The Patchwork Terror also had a birthday. He is north of 12 lbs and still growing. He is as soft and plushy to touch as he looks, and also, that tail clearly belongs to a different cat.

I made yogurt for the first time, which was easy. I have acquired a very tiny ice cream maker, and made good matcha ice cream and fantastic strawberry frozen yogurt and an okay sorbet. Next up, coffee ice cream. I have not had this much full-fat dairy in my fridge in, like, ever. I don't care. I gave up beer except on D&D nights and I will have whipped cream and ice cream and full-fat yogurt if I want to.

I wrote the first fifty pages for one of the books we're going to pitch to my editor at DAW, and I think it's pretty good. We'll see if my agent agrees.

I resigned at the HS. I am sad as hell because I love those students, but I need more time to write. The pandemic has only reinforced my decision, because boy howdy, the reopening of schools is a scary prospect, and also, I cannot take another moment of Zoom.

I have a merit review file due right about the time school starts. Not difficult, but time intensive.

I have decided to teach the zombie apocalypse as my theme for the fall quarter, partly because it's relevant again, and partly because if I have to do a whole new syllabus and prep for a fully remote class, I might as well at least use texts I am familiar with, especially since I have that aforementioned merit review.

I refuse to start either of those last two things until August (although, truth, I have started them both. Just a little.)

ghosting

Ha ha yes clearly doing well at this "post more regularly" business.

I have things I want to say, but prudence dictates otherwise, so I will instead tell you that:

a) the HS class of budding D&Ders survived their first dungeon, having bypassed one whole segment of it with a Clever Plan(tm) that would've gotten them killed if someone hadn't been a little free with the rules and also they hadn't had some crazy-amazing ideas. My ranger(s) got to kiss The Princess (like The Doctor, really). The wizard was reunited with her beloved Bryce. All ended reasonably well. Now they have to write their own adventures (collectively, in small groups) to run for another small group.

b) I have been invited to give a talk about gender, politics, and power in HOW RORY THORNE DESTROYED THE MULTIVERSE at UC-Riverside on April 9 to grad students in English (I am imagining these are mostly creative writers, because I am long past the days of writing and delivering academic papers on any subject, please and thank you). I am responsible for 90 minutes of content, and while I am sure I can read very slowly, I am reasonably sure I'll have to come up with Stuff(tm) to say to round out that time. Which I will. Somehow. Magically. Perhaps by sacrificing to the gods of academic discourse.

c) HOW THE MULTIVERSE GOT ITS REVENGE is scheduled to come out Oct. 6. Cover art forthcoming when it's finalized, but I can say--it's super awesome.

d) because my weekend isn't going to spent doing the thing I had set aside all the time to do, and I hope/pray/exhort the gods that I will be busy with it next weekend instead, I sent a last minute text to the Rat and said "let's game this weekend instead of next!" and she is currently moving heaven and earth to make that happen (she, and her patient and wonderful wife, on whom the burden of childcare falls when the Rat is down here slaying monsters). We're all kinda looking forward to this session--the end of the first major arc, the beginning of the second, and the time we acquire a new character (so that everyone's gonna be playing 2, but that is what happens with tiny groups and big-ass campaigns, and Nous and the Rat are pros) so that we survive what comes next. I feel a little like a cheat running pre-written adventures, but it frees up the bandwidth for book proposals, where I actually do have to know wtf is going to happen in advance.

e) Kaiju-kitten has matured enough that I can spin again without having him attacking the wheel and ransacking the fiber, and so this is happening. The bag of fiber is a bunch of different dye lots and fiber combos (wools only, all from the amazing dye pots of M. at Blarney Yarn) all torn up into little bits, to be spun at random, like a grab-bag of colorful goodness. The results are...double-ply hanks of colorful goodness, that will all probably end up being a throw rug.

So yes. Happy Leap Year. I have a game to prep.

the trials of one's teens

Tinycat will be 13 in February. Since her check-up in June, she's lost almost a pound. That makes her Extra-Tinycat, now, at a mere 6.8 lbs. She's eating (as well as ever, which is to say not enough, but she's also a scarf-and-barfer, so we'd rather less that stays down than more that comes back up). She loves her treats. She's sassy and takes no nonsense from either of the boys. Coat quality is good. Eyes are bright. She's just...shrinking. 

Tinycat has no time for you

Obviously there is something not right, though we have no idea what. We took her in this weekend, because in the last two weeks she'd developed these big red bumps on her chin that seemed to be oozing. At first I thought Kaiju-kitten had popped her in one of their spats, but the proliferating bumps suggested something else. She's had autoimmune problems in the past, and coupled with her weight loss, we expected something dire. 

The vet took one look and said "cat acne" and proceeded to pop them all. She's home with a shaved, scrubbed chin and an antibiotic shot. The cat bowls are all stainless steel, so it's not a plastic allergy. (Well. Maybe. She licks plastic--the laundry basket is not safe--but she's done that her whole life.) The vet didn't seem as concerned about figuring out why kitty-zits as he did in why so skinny, so he drew blood and urine and we await results this week. Last time her bloodwork was done--6 months ago--everything was fine. Maybe that's changed. If not, we may be looking at an ultrasound. Something isn't right in there. Pix was voracious when her thyroid went whack, and she got super gaunt, but Tinycat's not showing the hyperactivity that goes with a hyperthyroid. Could be kidneys, if those numbers have tanked, but they were good 6 months ago. So we don't know. In the meantime, the tiny tyrant has been granted her fondest wish: baby food mixed with her real food. 

But in other teen news... we started playing D&D in the HS this week. We're using the Stranger Things starter-set, so all the characters are premade, magic-using (jhfc WoC. So much fucking magic), 3rd level. Also all good alignments. The kids did some customizing (we have a pet cougar named Tim now), names, genders, sexes, bonds and ideals and flaws, oh my. The idea had been to let them play their characters while taking turns DMing for the group. But attendance in high school is spotty, and I was not at all confident that a designated DM would be in class on their day. Hell, I still have kids who have not chosen a character, much less worked out their spell books. 

So I improvised. 

I grouped them by class and I DMed for them collectively. All the players of a particular class had to agree on an action and a spokesperson, and though there were a couple bumps with the stronger personalities dominating, it went... well. Surprisingly. I did bad accents and funny voices and kept the story moving (it's a pregen adventure that I've test-run before, but it's also pretty skeletally supported). They got to see real-time what happens when a DM has no notes in front of her to cover a player request ("We want to go to the infirmary to interrogate the wounded!" You...okay. Right.)  They cheered when I made the captain of the guard a non-binary human with obvious half-orc heritage named Bryce. The Wizards(tm) rolled at the end of the conversation to kiss this half-orc as a thank you for their help (player made sure to get consent first) and busted out a natural 20. "Bryce is into you," I said, while praying none of the administration came into the room. "With that roll, you can... you know. Whatever."

...which kicked off a flurry of speculation about what Bryce looked like, gods defend poor Bryce. All I said was "Bryce is cut. They're a guard captain and of muscular build." 

I fear for the fanfics I may've inspired.  

Next week: collective combat, while the students absent this week get up to speed on their spells. I have promised everyone they can play their characters individually when the groups write their own adventures to run for other groups, so that DMing duty is spread among all the group members. I look forward to the moment that I can intone, Gauntlet -style, "Cleric is about to die!" even if I'm the only one to get the joke. 

fantasy

I've been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 17, and except for a brief period when we were in different states, I've played with the Rat the whole time. She was my first GM, and we played AD&D 2nd ed, and my first character was a fighter. And although I have played mages and priests and rogues and multi-classed and scads of other games besides AD&D...the straight up fighter is still my favorite.

See, my fantasy-self isn't the mage, with crazy powers and All the Brains. Or the priest, for that matter. I am the  priest/mage/magic-user in real life. Those are my stats.

No, see, my fantasy is the tank. The physically powerful and capable and don't fuck with me character. Deals damage. Takes damage. Deals a little more. The monsters come at the tank first, but that's okay! Because the tank's gonna kick their butts.

It's totally a power fantasy, but it's the power fantasy of control. To be safe. To keep others safe.

Being a woman in gaming is a lot like a old-school dungeon crawl. You never know where the monsters are, but you know they're there and you're gonna see combat. It's just a matter of when. You even know who they are.

So this:  "Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem" wasn't a surprise to me.

The Rat and I didn't do the gaming convention scene--in part because the one time we did go, to visit Nous and his then GF, we were Not Impressed with the crowd. (Nous  says he spent a lot of time at cons talking to "awkward" guys, trying to keep them away from the women at the gaming table.*) The other thing that prevented us from walking into that shitstorm was that we were, and are, wickedly introverted. The very idea of all those new people was exhausting and (for me) daunting as hell. Who the hell wants to play under those conditions? It's not fun! Let's go home and world-build.

The non/verbal shit, though.

The RPG club in college wouldn't even talk to us. I mean, we walked in to the first day meeting, the room of guys looked at us, the president wouldn't actually speak to us... it was amazing. Striking in its hostility. Like, put a sign on the door that says no gurlz and you'd have it.

There were two game stores in town. The one in the mall had a small RPG section and we went there most often for dice; the counter-help was blandly friendly. The guys lurking around the game section could be a little creeper-y. I learned not to make eye contact. Most of them wanted the Rat's attention (she was the more ideal physical type), but they'd make due with the short blonde sidekick. They'd get way too close and talk up in-game exploits like their characters were them. It was... awkward. And awful. I would have to physically leave to get the hell away from them.

The indie game store had a much bigger selection of books (and Magic cards), so we went there for those. Depending who was behind the counter... we could be ignored, or stink-eyed, or tolerated with barely-there courtesy. We didn't get as many no shit, there my 12th level necromancer half-elf was stories (I didn't); but the Rat got a lot more looks. I remember more than a couple oblique comments, too, about my unfuckability.**

Nothing to me. Certainly nothing to her. But we were meant to hear, and to understand where we fit. We certainly weren't gamers.

Which is not to say that it's all men who do this because duh. Lots of my gamer friends are, have been, men. White men, even. Not terrorists, but... well. Not exactly paladins, either.

So this: "For Good Men To See Nothing" didn't surprise me either. In fact, it rang even more true. Because I saw this a lot more. I saw my friends stfu rather than confront assholes, both in the game stores and not.

I once had a fight with an ex-boyfriend (and member of our gaming group) in which he tore apart the furniture while two other male friends (and members of our gaming group) sat in the back room, listening and doing nothing at all.

"We'd've come out if we heard anything, you know," one said later.

Any what? Screaming from me, instead of from him? Pain and fear instead of insensate rage? How exactly did they know the thumping was the chair's dismemberment and not me hitting the wall?  --I asked these questions.

"He wouldn't've hurt you," said the other, while not making eye contact. "He was upset."

This, this right here, is how men who don't act allow men who are trouble to get away with shit. This was all forgiven, by the way. When I expressed discomfort with being around this guy, well. You know. That was my problem. He apologized. He was sorry. I had to just, you know, let it go.

Right.***

So one official black belt and years of eclectic aikido and kendo and blade-training all around the edges ... I'd still run away from a physical fight if I could (because I'm not stupid) but I feel a little (little) safer in gaming environments where I'm getting the creeper-vibe.

Because I still do. Local-ish game store here, middle-aged dude wanted to talk to me, follow me around, gain my approval ("No shit, there my chaotic evil mage was, and..."). Other dude asked Nous how he could help him while pretending I wasn't actually the one picking through the bookshelf.  These were not teenagers. These were our contemporaries. And, as with most men, bigger than me. Heavier. Stronger. ****

So yeah, I still play tanks in D&D whatever-the-hell-edition we're on. Because, at least in my fantasy, I want to be the person in the room that no one will even think of fucking with.

The monsters are still out there.

---------
*He says awkward. I say poorly skilled predator.

**The Rat claims to remember none of this. She also can ignore people more completely than anyone I know, including my cats. I think it's her superpower.

***They weren't bad guys. But damn, did I learn a lesson.

****Thank all my various gods for online suppliers and the friendly comic book store across the street that has dice and understands why I need to try out every. Single. 20-sider to get the right one. 

The Month of Many Things, Both Sublime and Awful

...is damned near over, thank you my various gods. That's what I'm thankful for.

That, and my gaming group. We spent yesterday--The Rat, Nous, and I--playing D&D (5e, which is a shock for someone who learned on AD&D 2nd and never bothered to upgrade, because why?). Hours of it, the culmination of Latest Adventure which the Rat has been planning for weeks, because this weekend she'd be able to come down to our place and run without distraction. And indeed: she walked in, said hi, and when I asked how T-Day went, said 'Later! After game.'

Because etiquette and pretty manners and petty conversation can wait, people. There are players' plans to upend, saving throws to make (or not), a high-level necromancer cleric to defeat. And math, because even streamlined 5e D&D has modifiers to add and damage to subtract from the ever-dwindling hit points. There were several several saving throws and oh shit, I'm so dead...am I dead? moments. (I was not dead, as it happened, thanks to race and class bonuses* and one hit point.)

The only sign of our age was this: green tea and beer instead of Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew. Carrots and celery and hummus (oh my) instead of Doritos. Vegetarian chili for dinner instead of pizza. No dessert because we ate too much chili (and too many corn chips). Totally therapeutic.

*Half-orc templars** for the win.
** House-rules class, because we believe you can do good and be honorable without also being lawful.