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It's Tuesday and there's a joke/not joke/tradition in my family that Tuesday are actually worse than Mondays, because with Monday's you're EXPECTING things to suck. Tuesdays always blindside you.
Today is not much of an exception.
I woke up this morning sometime around 3 am and I probably lie awake for a half-hour, which doesn't seem that bad, except it was punctuated by two cat fights and Shawn having several wake-up gasping nightmares. (Apparently, one of them involved wrestling someone to death on a highway. "Mason, too" she said, in that sleepy way that meant she was falling back to dreamland, and I wanted to say, "Wait, what? Were you wrestling Mason to death or was it that Mason also had to wrestle someone to death? And... why was it on the highway???" But, you know, nightmares aren't nightmares because they make sense. They're often the most terrifying because they DON'T.)
Because we are aware that Tuesdays have sneaking-suckage, we've written it into the fabric of our family life that we try to lighten the load by going to Bruegger's for bagels on Tuesday mornings. EVEN THOUGH we know that the Breugger's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is chronically understaffed and has fairly poor customer service. I think we do this partly to ENSURE Tuesday will kind of suck, but also because even though it's a kind of a hassle the bagels are REALLY good.... so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but with bonus tastiness.
But, before we even left for Bruegger's I opened up my email and checked in on social media and discovered that on a my Facebook feed there was a couple of guys who decided they needed to jump in and comment on something I'd re-blogged. It was just a funny little poke at the Sad Puppies that said, "Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron." Which, admittedly is a very HARD poke at certain people, but yet, somehow, I didn't expect that what these guys were going to argue and get in a snit about was whether or not Mary Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.
As I said in response to their malarky, this is not a debate I usually see. Mary Shelley is fairly well recognized as the first science fiction novelist and thus its "inventor." (In fact, when I linked to the Wikipedia article entitled "the history of science fiction" her picture showed up! I didn't even know it would!)
There may be, as I said, other people who dabbled in writing science into their fiction, but who the f*ck has heard of them? Frankenstein is a book that EVERYONE knows, to the point that they think that's the name of the monster. Therefore, Shelley is the default inventor. I mean, if we want to quibble then people need to stop saying that Eddison invented... well, pretty much anything people think he did, because what he did was PATENT things. To the victor go the spoils. This is, after all the argument women have to put up with all the time when there were women in the shadows or as support.
One of the commenters seemed to want to discount Shelley because he wasn't fond of Frankenstein. That's not how it works.
So, yeah, that rilled me up. Then I got stuck in about six different traffic jams due to construction I didn't know about, including one on Maryland Avenue where I swear to god the "go/stop" sign guys were just randomly assigning which lane of traffic got to go by some arbitrary means rather than looking at the HUGE LINE OF CARS in my direction and the fact that there WERE NO CARS COMING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION.
It was, quite frankly maddening, the lot of it. The people on my Facebook feed reminded me of climate change deniers. They were denying something that every one else finds REALLY F*CKING OBVIOUS and not able to come up with an answer to "Okay, who then? Who else wrote something this influential BEFORE Shelley?" And, that's really the key. I mean, it's a matter of influence as well.
AARRRRRGGGGH.
Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. In preparation of our once-every-other-year (bi-annual?) trip to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail, I took my car into Dave's. So, I'm stuck hanging out at the Dunn Bros. coffee shop in Roseville. Again, none of these things that happened this morning were THAT big of a deal, but I kind of feel like I'm suffering from a thousand pinpricks, you know?
And... screw you deniers, Mary Shelley invented SF. Full stop.
Oh, but I was going to say, I have a couple of things I should tell folks about. 1) I will be signing books at the Mall of America's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11 as part of their B-Fest Teen Book Festival. (Here are a few more details: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780061787270-0) 2) I was gathering up things to DO while up in the land of no Internet and I discovered that I've nearly finished the PLOT part of UnJust Cause, the book I was posting as a work-in-progress on Wattpad. So, I cut and pasted all the chapters into a Google Doc and then printed it out. My plan is to revise the book while we're up North so that I can have a really good start on finishing it and turning it into an e-book. So, if you've been patiently waiting for the sequel to Precinct 13, it's coming very, very soon!
Today is not much of an exception.
I woke up this morning sometime around 3 am and I probably lie awake for a half-hour, which doesn't seem that bad, except it was punctuated by two cat fights and Shawn having several wake-up gasping nightmares. (Apparently, one of them involved wrestling someone to death on a highway. "Mason, too" she said, in that sleepy way that meant she was falling back to dreamland, and I wanted to say, "Wait, what? Were you wrestling Mason to death or was it that Mason also had to wrestle someone to death? And... why was it on the highway???" But, you know, nightmares aren't nightmares because they make sense. They're often the most terrifying because they DON'T.)
Because we are aware that Tuesdays have sneaking-suckage, we've written it into the fabric of our family life that we try to lighten the load by going to Bruegger's for bagels on Tuesday mornings. EVEN THOUGH we know that the Breugger's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is chronically understaffed and has fairly poor customer service. I think we do this partly to ENSURE Tuesday will kind of suck, but also because even though it's a kind of a hassle the bagels are REALLY good.... so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but with bonus tastiness.
But, before we even left for Bruegger's I opened up my email and checked in on social media and discovered that on a my Facebook feed there was a couple of guys who decided they needed to jump in and comment on something I'd re-blogged. It was just a funny little poke at the Sad Puppies that said, "Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron." Which, admittedly is a very HARD poke at certain people, but yet, somehow, I didn't expect that what these guys were going to argue and get in a snit about was whether or not Mary Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.
As I said in response to their malarky, this is not a debate I usually see. Mary Shelley is fairly well recognized as the first science fiction novelist and thus its "inventor." (In fact, when I linked to the Wikipedia article entitled "the history of science fiction" her picture showed up! I didn't even know it would!)
There may be, as I said, other people who dabbled in writing science into their fiction, but who the f*ck has heard of them? Frankenstein is a book that EVERYONE knows, to the point that they think that's the name of the monster. Therefore, Shelley is the default inventor. I mean, if we want to quibble then people need to stop saying that Eddison invented... well, pretty much anything people think he did, because what he did was PATENT things. To the victor go the spoils. This is, after all the argument women have to put up with all the time when there were women in the shadows or as support.
One of the commenters seemed to want to discount Shelley because he wasn't fond of Frankenstein. That's not how it works.
So, yeah, that rilled me up. Then I got stuck in about six different traffic jams due to construction I didn't know about, including one on Maryland Avenue where I swear to god the "go/stop" sign guys were just randomly assigning which lane of traffic got to go by some arbitrary means rather than looking at the HUGE LINE OF CARS in my direction and the fact that there WERE NO CARS COMING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION.
It was, quite frankly maddening, the lot of it. The people on my Facebook feed reminded me of climate change deniers. They were denying something that every one else finds REALLY F*CKING OBVIOUS and not able to come up with an answer to "Okay, who then? Who else wrote something this influential BEFORE Shelley?" And, that's really the key. I mean, it's a matter of influence as well.
AARRRRRGGGGH.
Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. In preparation of our once-every-other-year (bi-annual?) trip to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail, I took my car into Dave's. So, I'm stuck hanging out at the Dunn Bros. coffee shop in Roseville. Again, none of these things that happened this morning were THAT big of a deal, but I kind of feel like I'm suffering from a thousand pinpricks, you know?
And... screw you deniers, Mary Shelley invented SF. Full stop.
Oh, but I was going to say, I have a couple of things I should tell folks about. 1) I will be signing books at the Mall of America's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11 as part of their B-Fest Teen Book Festival. (Here are a few more details: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780061787270-0) 2) I was gathering up things to DO while up in the land of no Internet and I discovered that I've nearly finished the PLOT part of UnJust Cause, the book I was posting as a work-in-progress on Wattpad. So, I cut and pasted all the chapters into a Google Doc and then printed it out. My plan is to revise the book while we're up North so that I can have a really good start on finishing it and turning it into an e-book. So, if you've been patiently waiting for the sequel to Precinct 13, it's coming very, very soon!