Day in the Life of an Idiot

I'm stuck at the clinic right now. Before you panic overly-much, it's not anything SUPER serious. Shawn's been having these horrible stomach pains and we've discovered that at least one of the problems is gallbladder. The docs say the gallbladder has to come out. Her surgery is scheduled for Friday.

I'm here at the moment, because Shawn is having her pre-surgery physical, like you do.

Shawn is not having an easy time of this. A lot of it, I think, is the severe amount of pain she's been in. She hasn't slept well in days and it oscillates from mild discomfort to doubled-over cramping pains. So everything that's going on around all this seems more MORE, if you know what I mean.

But we're coping. We've already had a ton of well wishes and offers of assistance from friends. I'm taking advantage of one offer, because it'd be nice for Mason to have a place to go this weekend while I work and a friend of mine has boys who play Munchkin. I can't imagine Mason would ever say no to Munchkin under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, both she and I are stocking up on books. It'll be a long wait for me in the waiting room on Friday, so I'm going to bring the Kindle which has THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE on it, as well as the book I finally got from Inter-Library Loan yesterday, Jennifer Marie Brissett's ELYSIUM. I actually set aside the UNNAMED MIDWIFE for the moment because I have that one for longer and started ELYSIUM yesterday. I can already tell that one is going to be a mind-bender.

In connection to conversation I've been having here and elsewhere, it's a very... shall we say, 'interesting' fact that two out of the six books up for the Philip K. Dick Award are from smaller presses.  I'd never heard of Sybaritic Press, who published BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE. I also could NOT get that book through any kind of library.  I ended up signing up for a Kindle deal in order to get my hands on it.  

Aqueduct Press published ELYSIUM and the Hennepin Library system had it, for which I wonder if I have fandom to thank.  I know there are a lot of us who are librarians and circulation staff, etc.  

At any rate, here are two women who are writing science fiction (not fantasy) and not being published by traditional big New York publishers up for one of the most prodigious science fiction awards.  To be fair, as a former judge of the PKD, I can tell you that we literally read EVERYTHING that met the criteria in that year.  I still have a ton of paperback books that are from very, very small presses thanks to that year as a judge. So, the PKD has always casts a wide net--though now I wonder if that then also contributes to the fact that its percentage of women nominees is significantly higher than, say, the Nebulas, which were just announced.

One of the things that eventually came out in the Facebook conversation is that many women who wrote science fiction when I was first publishing are now out of the writing business.  This is, it seems to me, one of those self-fulfilling prophecies.  People don't expect women to be writing SF, so they don't look for SF books by women, women's sales figures tank, women are pushed out of publishing SF.  A vicious, vicious circle and one of the many reasons, of course, we still need feminism.