I didn’t expect to get so much feedback on my first amendment post yesterday. Here’s one from Phil Brewer. His opinion is representative of others I heard from. And while I very much understand that point of view, I don’t think what I had to say would have been even slightly controversial twenty years ago, when it was very popular for people to cite the quotation popularly attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

The internet tells me that this is not a direct quote of Voltaire, but variations of it have been used to describe his beliefs about freedom of expression.

So often now, though, especially on the internet, discussions of freedom of speech are framed in terms of limitations. The sentiment is not “I will defend to death your right to say it,” but “You have the legal right to say it, but I will silence you by any other means that I possibly can.”

This makes me sad, because freedom of speech or expression is not a legal technicality of the US Constitution, but a globally recognized human right and probably THE key differentiator between an open society and a closed society. When Voltaire formulated his ideas, he was not talking about the U.S. constitution. He was born in 1694 in France. He knew nothing about the U.S. constitution. He was not describing a legal idea, but a moral practice.

The philosophy of freedom of expression is so much more than a single sentence in our constitution, to be interpreted in narrowist possible fashion, but an entire philosphy developed by thinkers of the enlightenment period including John Milton, John Locke, Denis Diderot. (I am cherry-picking heavily from the wikipedia article on freedom of speech because I am lazy and because all of my history and philosophy texts are in boxes in a storage unit.)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

In order to protect not only our American constitutional right to free speech, but a global value of freedom of expression as a human right, it is incumbent on every citizen to “buy in” to the spirit of the law, not in a grudging way, but in an open-hearted embrace. I know that people point to Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church as some kind of failure of freedom of speech, but we shouldn’t think of it that way. Much as I despise his idea, his message, his very existence, every time he pulls out his protest signs, he proves that we truly live in a free and open society. Phelps has offended everyone. If we didn’t live a free and open society, he and his whole family would be dead.

I like this quote by former UM President Lee Bollinger:

“the free speech principle involves a special act of carving out one area of social interaction for extraordinary self-restraint, the purpose of which is to develop and demonstrate a social capacity to control feelings evoked by a host of social encounters.”

In the discussions around this subject on the internet, the overwhelming message I get is that words are not enough anymore. Countering poisonous or harmful ideas with words is no good because no one is listening and people will believe what they want to believe, so ignoring or debating ideas you don’t like is never going to work. Instead, you have to use economic leverage, intimidation, “shouting down,” google bombing, DNS attacks, hacking, or any number of other means to silence those words.

I blame the internet, partially. The internet gives everyone with the bare rudiments of language and access to electricity and a phone line the ability to “publish” their ideas. And unlike Voltaire’s words, those hastily concocted essays are often barely literate and filled with hatred. When faced with that kind of avalanche of ignorance, trying to make a moderate, rational argument can feel like yelling into a gale force wind.

A blog post by author Alex Bledsoe, serendipitously published today, touches on this subject by discussing the phenomenon of the “internet pile on,” which he aptly describes as a form of bullying. Bledso writes:

And this leads directly to the pile-on, as these fans, followers and commentators rush to join the bloggers in being the most offended by whatever (or whoever) the topic at hand might be. Often, the people most offended have, as they say, no dog in the fight. They simply enjoy being part of the pile.

Over the years, I’ve noticed how the phenomenon of piling on has discouraged people from engaging in debate or presenting dissenting opinions in blogs. Bloggers who write about controversial subjects may congratulate themselves on having “civilized” discourse in their blog comments, without realizing that dissenters have literally been bullied out of the discussion. Some of those dissenters retreat to their own echo chambers, where they can have safe “civilized” discussions with people who agree with them. Others have simply given up engaging in any kind of debate on controversial subjects.

But it makes me sad, because words are as powerful as they ever were. In the hands of the ignorant and semi-literate, those words of hate lack any power.

In contrast, a thoughtful essay by a skilled writer shines like a beacon. Every single person who dissented with me on this subject is a person I respect, listen to, and am influenced by. They are people whose words matter. They are people who can make a difference in this world by telling the truth.

I also blame the culture war. And this is kind of ironic, because Rush Limbaugh has been one of the most prominent and long-lasting culture warriors of the political right. I think he has possibly been more influential than any single conservative politician. A lot of people aren’t familiar with Limbaugh or his radio show. Last I knew, he was on the air two or three hours a day, every week day, and almost all of his airtime is dedicated to warning and illustrating how the liberals are conspiring to take away all of our rights, including free speech. Especially free speech. Limbaugh has been an innovator of the “words are not enough” school of political advocacy.

(And this is hard to write because I have loved ones in my life who are fans of his show and read this blog, but twenty years of living among liberals has convinced me that liberals are not interested in dismantling our constitutional rights, and are in fact equally worried that conservatives want to do so. We need to stop being afraid of each other.)

Silencing him is not the answer. In fact, any minimally successful attempt to silence Limbaugh, or force him to find another outlet would absolutely set fire to his fan base, confirming every fear in them that Limbaugh has spent decades stoking.

Getting back to the title of this post, what if we decide we don’t want a culture war? What if we refuse to wage it? What if, when faced with paranoid, hateful, intolerant speech, we turn and walk away? Or instead of concentrating all of our energy battling over rare, irreconcilable questions such as what is the beginning of life, we focus on the great many goals and values we all share, like how are we going to build sustainable prosperity for all? or how are we going to take care of all the sick elderly baby boomers we’re going to have on our hands in twenty years? What if we decide we CAN be a multicultural society, with all of the abundance of tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness that implies?

I worry a lot about indirect boycotts–boycotts of advertisers associated with offensive media, boycotts of publishers that produce offensive material. You don’t have to follow that trend very far to realize the outcome is an increasingly balkanized media. One source of entertainment and information for right wingers. Another for left wingers. Never mind if we all like vacuum cleaners, the manufacturer will have to choose whether to sell it to a liberal or a conservative audience. Would you like to sell vacuum cleaners to fans of the Daily Show, or of Bill O’Reilly? And don’t say you want to sell to both, because they each have economically active fanbases who will stage a boycott if you “support” offensive material by purchasing advertising time from the other side.

I can’t tell people what to do with their money, but I would suggest that love of a good vacuum cleaner is something we can all share regardless of our religious and political affiliations, and that it might be good, after having heated discussions of politics on the internet or with friends and families, to maintain a politically neutral marketplace where we can focus on quality, customer service, and fair trade practices, and allow advertisers to follow their audience rather than signing on to one or another platform.

I’ve enjoyed the dialogue on this subject, and I appreciate that there are still places on the internet where people can discuss difficult subjects openly without resorting to least-common-denominator insults and name-calling. It keeps me glad, every day, that I, unlike Voltaire, was born into a free and open society.

A lot of my friends are talking about free speech lately, specifically in relation to the oft-heard defense of people who object to criticism by saying, “I have the right to free speech.” To which the answer is, quite reasonably, “Of course you do, and so do your critics.”

But there is something that bothers me. It’s become fashionable in recent years to protest or criticize offensive speech by figures on radio and television by putting pressure on their advertising sponsors. The idea is to shame the sponsors so they will pull their ads, depriving the offender of funding and possibly forcing him or her off the air.

I’ve had difficulty articulating why I think this is wrong, so I’m glad to have found this piece by First Amendment attorney Mark Randazza (via Jay Lake) that explains it much better than I could, myself. He uses the recent Rush Limbaugh scandal as a jumping off point for his essay. Randazza very aptly highlights the difference between legality and morality, and why both are important:

Another way to get Limbaugh off the air is to try and pressure his syndicator or his advertisers — gathering people of like mind to use their collective economic power to force Limbaugh off the air. This is constitutionally tolerable, but morally wrong. If you disagree with someone who is on stage, it is wrong to stand up and yell to drown out his voice. This improperly interferes with your fellow citizens’ right to receive information.

 

I agree with this completely. When I hear offensive speech, I either exercise my own right to free speech by responding, or I exercise my right not to listen to the offensive speech and (if applicable) not to buy products related to the speech. But I won’t join a campaign to silence someone by putting economic pressure on their advertisers. If the advertisers themselves are offended and want to pull their support, that’s great. Good for them. That’s free speech in action right there. But an actual or implied threat of boycott is over the line in my opinion, and could be equally used by the “good guys” or the “bad guys” to silence any speech that might offend anyone.

And, in fact, you don’t have to look very far to find a case where the good guys lose to this sort of action. The TLC reality program American Muslim was recently canceled after a successful campaign to lobby advertisers to pull ads from the show, I guess because people are offended by the existence of muslims. Some big advertisers, including Lowe’s, caved to the pressure and pulled funding. The putative reason for the cancellation was low ratings, but it’s hard to believe that the loss of ad dollars didn’t play a role. Do we really want to castrate our media by forcing it to pull off the air anything that offends any group of sufficient size to make a sponsor nervous? I surely don’t.

I’m with Randazzo. Let the crazies and wingnuts have their say. Then we get to have ours.

 

I arrived at Rolfing session 3 burbling with the news that my foot pain had disappeared following Session 2–the “foot” session. My Rolfer was very pleased and opined that the sudden improvement was unusual, but good. As of a couple weeks later, my feet are still pain-free. This seems to be a permanent change. (My husband’s Rolfer is much more of an evangelist for Rolfing, but my Rolfer is very modest and always pleasantly surprised by good results, although she believes in it no less.)

I don’t remember that much of Session 3, because it’s been a while, now. She worked on the sides of my body, including ribs, shoulder area, under arms, and hips. A recurring theme is appearing. “Boy that hip is tight.” My right hip is very tight and tender, and some of the most intense moments are when she works on it.

I figure this results from the birth of my son. It was a long and difficult labor. At the end, I had an epidural, but it only “took” on the left side, resulting in full sensation on the right. And oh what sensation that was!

As I recall, Rolfing kitty was off duty for Session 3, and Rolfing dog had gotten into something nasty, so his belly was rumbling like crazy through the whole thing, until, at the very end, he began to vent the pressure.

I didn’t notice any big changes after session 3. Yoga is my “test run” and mostly in yoga that week I just felt like I was starting over with everything, which I was because I hadn’t been to yoga in several weeks.

Session 4 is the beginning of the internal/core work. As the rolfer says, it’s not necessarily deeper pressure, but directed toward fascia in the core of the body, in a line starting at the instep of the foot, going all the way up to the roof of the mouth.

She focused on the lower half in Session 4, mostly, working up from the instep through the insides of the legs, to the hips and abdomen. Part of this session involved some very personal areas, and I was glad for the rolfer’s professionalism. They work the muscle attachment points at the groin and the sit bones. Not my favorite thing, but I can see how it was necessary.

She also did some hamstring work. This was an area I knew was big trouble for me. My hamstrings are tight tight tight. And when she started working on them, she definitely noticed. “Your hamstring is like wood,” she said.

Because they were so tight, it was extremely painful to have them worked over. Often she’ll back off a bit if she’s working on an area that’s tender, but this was a case where the job needed to be done. She apologized, but did not back off. I felt my hamstrings releasing as she worked on them, and there was improved flexibility right away that has been sustained.

For my yoga “test drive” today, I noticed the difference in the hamstrings right away. I don’t think this is even the big hamstring session. I think that is around session 6. But it does seem like a big improvement.

I also feel like the hip and groin area has been reset to “factory defaults” finally, thirteen years after the birth of my son. It’s not that I had any particular problems in that area, or none that I was aware of. But now in retrospect I think there may have been some general tightness that affected functioning of all of the stuff “downstairs.” ‘Nuff said.

For Session 4, the Rolfers Other Kitty made an appearance. Then Regular Rolfing Kitty joned us, and Rolfing dog is always in the room, so we had a full complement of animal helpers.

I continue to feel like the $1000 cost of the whole program was a worthwhile investment just for the changes in my feet. But it’s also funny how quickly I’ve come to take it for granted. When something *doesn’t* hurt, you don’t think about it. How often do you think, “Gosh, it’s so awesome that my left elbow isn’t sore right now!” So it’s a bit hard to hold onto the feeling that Rolfing has made this huge change in my life, when the change has been a return to normalcy. I keep thinking about the expense and the discomfort and the “You want me to sit on your hand? And I’m paying you how much?” and I have to remind myself, “Two months ago like a ninety year old woman you couldn’t go shopping at Ikea without pain, silly.”

So I got way off my carefully planned schedule of reading for the Nebula awards. For anyone who may be playing along at home, I didn’t give you assignments for the second and third weeks of the five week program. Sorry! But, this makes it like real grad school. You know the place where they give you an impossible reading load and you can’t face it so you go to the bar instead. For ten weeks? And then you have to read it all anyway?

Well, this is like that, except instead of dry academic monographs, or scientific journal articles, you get to read science fiction and fantasy.

And let’s be honest. Some of my friends have not been reading along at all. Have you? HMMM? Now is not too late to start. The good news is you can eliminate what you don’t like fairly quickly. Read three chapters of a book and then decide whether you need to read the rest. If you don’t feel a compulsion to finish the book after three chapters, can it possibly be your Nebula pick?

And if you do feel a compulsion to finish the book after just three chapters, Congratulations! You’ve found a good book. Enjoy it.

Hopefully you began the voting period having read at least some of the works on the ballot. If not, consider reading more new fiction in 2012 so you can have a head start next year.

As I’ve said before, I am trying to encourage people to read and vote on the Nebulas, because the more that people participate by reading, nominating, and voting, the more meaningful and special the award is for everyone. The more it represents the best of our genre.

I’m dividing the remaining works into two batches. One is for this week. One is for next week. Then vote!

Novels (read at least three chapters):

• Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

Novella:

• “The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy andScience Fiction, November/December 2011)
• “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2011)

 

Due to being sick, overworked, and out of country for most of February, I am now behind on quite a bit of stuff and working to catch up. If I owe you email, a letter (lettermo!), money, time, attention, or anything else, please be assured I am working on it in earnest this week. Taxes are just about done, and I’m dealing with bookkeeping and summer plans right now.

We’re planning a pretty big home improvement project which will be fun to blog. I’ve enjoyed the blogs of other adventurous folk who have taken on the financial terror, total life disruption, and loss of free time and discretionary cash involved in a major renovation, and now it will be our turn! Already, though, it is starting to take a lot of time, and we haven’t turned over one shovel full of dirt, yet.

I also am aware I’ve fallen down on the Nebula reading challenge. Look for a catch up post soon. (It will be like REAL grad school.) Cheers!

Yesterday I convinced myself that I had Alzheimer’s, or maybe a stroke. In doing my taxes, I couldn’t find a record of my estimated state and federal payments for June 15 last year. Unable to find a check record anywhere, in despair I made a note in my tax organizer for the accountant reading something like this, “NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPEN NO ESTIMATED FOR JUNE.”

Later, I found that I had made the payments. Hallelujah. I found the payments in my bank statement–two withdrawals to the US Treasury and State of Michigan in the requisite amounts. Apparently, I had authorized an electronic funds transfer. But I had no memory of doing it! How did I do this, and why? I COULDN’T REMEMBER.

When he stopped by to pick up my forms (yes, my accountant makes housecalls–you may be jealous, now), I questioned him. “Did you set this up for me? Is there some reason I would have done this?

My poor accountant had no idea what was going on, and I felt like I was losing my mind, because I could not remember doing this thing. And yet I am the only person who WOULD do it.

Finally, understanding dawned. I looked at the transactions more closely. They were cashier’s checks. And I remembered! I had run out of personal checks on June 14, and had not reordered checks. Unable to write a personal check, I went to the bank and asked them to cut me two cashier’s checks. Mystery solved!

People, if you are a victim of a violent crime or something, please don’t count on me as a witness in court. Apparently I do not have Alzheimer’s disease, but I am a total ninny.

Along similar lines, I’ve been squinting at my computer monitor for a week, and had started to believe it was Bifocal Time. Today, however, I decided to try switching my contact lenses. Amazingly, my whole vision problem was that I was wearing my contacts in the wrong eyes. Ninny!

My husband saw my recent posts on housework and housekeeping, and he has challenged my domestic goddesshood. So, in the interests of being totally honest, I have to confess that while I use all of the tips I posted (except a couple noted as exceptions), my house is not actually clean. It is not clean today. It was not clean when I made that post. It won’t be clean tomorrow.

It is, however, well under control compared to what I grew up with, which resembled a house from the TV show Hoarders (though not as unsanitary and not as extreme). If you want to keep your house hotel-clean, I am not the guru for you. If you want to keep up with the dishes better, or need to know how to get rid of a couch your dogs trashed without paying the city’s $20 disposal fee, I could maybe help you.

I am enjoying a bit of a diversion from my normal work rhythm. I have one full time contract that keeps me busy four days a week. I’ve also been taking in feature assignments to fill that extra day. In theory, the time works out perfectly, and there is plenty of time on Monday to do my feature work.

In reality, the making contacts and communicating with sources is a cat-herding task that refuses to confine itself to Mondays, so each feature assignment involves putting in time on evenings and weekends, often with an inevitable last-minute time crunch.

Because of those intermittent feature deadlines, I have a lot of trouble keeping to a daily routine that includes fiction writing, exercise, and family time.

However, for the next little while, my contract employer has picked me up for five days a week, and I’ve treated myself to a sabbatical from feature assignments. I’ll be turning down those offers for the duration. After so many years hustling for feature assignments, it feels horribly wrong to turn away assignments.

And yet I am giddy with relief that for the short term future I will be able to have unprecedented control of my time. I am already getting a lot more done in terms of fiction writing and exercise.

The lesson I am learning from this is that it’s important to constantly be aware of process and schedule, and constantly evaluate “Is this working for me?” What worked before may be stressing you out more than you know now.

I will likely go back to features, unless and until I have a book contract. But it’s fun to sample life on the other side.

(For any editors who may be reading this, feel free to drop me an email to talk about availability.)

 

I was raised in the proverbial barn by a single father. My father himself had grown up in a very traditional family where Mom did all of the housework and cooking, and so he didn’t learn very many useful housekeeping skills. It’s probably also fair to say that by inclination he wasn’t very motivated to learn or master those skills on his own. He has many fine qualities, but being keen on housework has never been one of them.

What ensued when he ended up raising two little girls on his own is the makings of probably a very humorous future memoir written by me filled with appalling housekeeping disasters. There were large meals prepared and put in the garage to cool, only to be rediscovered months later. There were meals eaten with unusual utensils, including a pair of tongs, because all of the regular utensils were in a tremendous dirty pile in the sink. There was novel decor, such as the astroturf area rug in the dining room and the great pile of clean (or mostly clean) laundry that dominated our living room for a few months. And there was the hallowed family tradition of throwing away the dried, brown Christmas tree in the spring time.

These are actually mostly happy memories for me, because above all we were loved and taken care of. But everyone would agree that our lives would have been easier and more peaceful if we’d lived in a clean and organized home.

It’s been a long-term project for me in my adulthood to learn how to live in such a home. I am not naturally disinclined to housework. I probably take after my mother more. She was an extreme neat freak. However, like my father, I grew up almost wholly without housekeeping skills. My experience of cleaning and organizing mostly involved exhausting weekend cleaning marathons that never quite got to the finish line, leaving me demoralized and falling back into bad habits almost immediately.

I’ve had much success in my life in learning new and better habits, and living like the proverbial grownup, in that dishes get done, laundry gets done, things are mostly put away, and the business of the house mostly gets done in an orderly fashion. I could give you a hundred tips and tricks for cleaning and organizing a home, but the real change has been in certain wrong ideas and patterns of thought that I grew up with and had to deprogram in myself. I believe that changing from a cluttered and dirty home to a clean and organized one is less a matter of learning the best way to get whiter whites, and more a matter of changing these incorrect thought patterns.

Here, in no particular order, are the ways in which I had to change my thinking in order to live more like a grownup.

Clean it now, not later. Ninety-nine percent of clutter arises from a clean it later mentality. This is probably the single most important change you can make in your thinking if you are living with a constantly dirty home. It is very easy and seductive to set the dishes in the sink and promise to clean them before you go to bed. I still struggle with this, but it is never actually easier to do those dishes than right after you’ve dirtied them. Never. Same thing with throwing away your dirty kleenexes, or picking up your used popcans, or hanging up your wet towel. These things never become easier to do after they’ve sat around for a while. On the contrary, instead the little chores add up to the point that you need to set aside an hour or two to run around and get them all done, when you could have easily taken care of them one-by-one without noticing in the course of your daily activities. Moreover, the problem most people have with clutter could also be cured by a clean-it-now mentality. If you are accustomed to picking up and putting things away as soon as you bring them into the house, you are going to be very aware when you don’t have enough space to store them.

Penny-wise, pound foolish. I find that much cluttering and disorganization actually stems from inappropriate frugality. You want to stock up on items bought cheaply in bulk, and you’d rather tackle repair and improvement projects yourself than hiring an expensive expert. You waste money collecting supplies for all of those projects, and because you don’t really have time for them, they languish. Now, not only do you have, say, one bathroom out of commission in your house because you want to do the plumbing yourself, but it’s also filled to the rafters with bulk toiletpaper you couldn’t resist buying. The supplies and tools you bought for the plumbing are sitting around on the floor. Forever.

Probably the best example of this I can think of is the dog tent we made for our old dog Nala. We wanted a place for her to sleep at night, and we didn’t like the $150-$200 price tag on extra large dog crates. So we bought a bunch of PVC pipe and canvas and assembled a canvas dog tent. Now, this wasn’t a bad idea, as now you can find these things in pet catalogs and they are pretty cool. But it consumed a great deal of time, and in the end Nala was able to get out of it anyway. If I had it to do over, I would just buy a dog crate. And, in fact, I just did that very thing when I wanted a crate for Courage. I just bought one.

This is not to say that if you “live like a grownup” you can’t do projects or save money by doing work yourself if you have the skill. But if you’re not very disciplined and very realistic about the time you have, you can get in over your head and end up living with an unfinished project and a lot of supplies, and that adds a great deal of clutter and chaos to your home. In the end, would you rather save a couple hundred bucks doing a project yourself, or would you rather have that time to pursue your primary vocation or spend with your family?

This is the reason, by the way, that if you want to hire a contractor or a handyman, you should ask your middle-aged friends. Most people have figured out by the time they are fifty or so that it’s generally better to hire a pro and pay a premium than it is to interrupt your life and make 59 trips to the hardware store in a single weekend.

It’s never going to be perfect. As a child and young adult living in constant chaos and clutter, I imagined that people who lived in clean houses always had everything clean, organized, and put away. I now realize that most of those people with apparently immaculate homes actually ran around in a tizzy shoving things into closets as soon as they saw my car in the driveway. Moreover, speedbumps in life are going to set you back in the home organization department. So much so, in fact, that you may spend more time feeling like you’re trying to get back to your housekeeping routine than you actually spend in it.

That’s fine. That’s how most real grownups live. The frantic emergency closet-shoving is a part of normal adult life. Embrace it.

You need real furniture. Again, this is related to cheapness. Furniture is expensive, and in my early adult life, I wanted to find ways to avoid having to buy furniture. I picked things up that other people left on the curb and I improvised with found pieces that kinda sorta fit my needs and decor. The result was a lack of appropriate storage space and a lack of flow in the home. You may think you’re brilliant storing your tools in an old chest of drawers in the dining room, but the outcome of that kind of “out-of-the-box” cheapo storage strategy is that you have no china cabinet and therefore your china is either stored in boxes where you can’t use it, or it’s stored in an equally inappropriate place, under the bed, maybe. It becomes a daisy chain of inappropriate storage solutions all the way down.

For years we lived without nightstands. I didn’t want to spend money on cheap, particle-board-and-veneer furniture, and nightstands were a pretty low item on the priority list for furniture. So we just did without. We substituted other things, like the sides of desks, the floor, overturned laundry baskets, whatever. A few years ago, I bought two actual nightstands. They were cheap, particle-board-and-veneer pieces, but they look fine and they do the job.

The result? Total life-changing revelation OMG. Suddenly we each have a place for a LAMP. Our own lamps. And a book. And a pair of glasses. And also socks and underwear. The nightstands have made our life immeasurably better and corralled a large amount of stuff that otherwise would have been random clutter.

The lesson learned is that if you can’t afford the very best solid hardwood furniture from Ethan Allen or House of Denmark, it’s worth it to go to Target and get the cheap Sauder stuff. Really.

Get a handle on your stuff. My grandparents grew up in the depression, and the harsh deprivation they endured has carried down the generations. That includes odd attitudes toward belongings and food. In my family of origin, we often tried to keep everything, in case it was useful or in case it might become a valuable antique later. The result was awful clutter. In my own evolution as a tidier person, I began decluttering, tentatively at first, and later aggressively.

After getting rid of hundreds upon hundreds of items over the year, and becoming ever bolder about cutting to the bone, there are only a few items that I ever felt the slightest twinge of regret about getting rid of. For example, I had a cotton gauze nightgown that I decluttered back in the 90′s. It was handmade, and I had made it way too big, so I gave it away. Not long after, I had a notion to make a Halloween costume, and realized the nightgown would have been perfect. (I can’t remember what the costume was.) In the end, I think I didn’t even do the costume.

My point is that the regret over getting rid of the nightgown was exceedingly mild and short-lived. Almost everything we own can be replaced, and if it can’t be replaced, the twinge of loss is generally not as bad as we imagine in the anxiety of trying to keep everything. In other words, if in doubt, throw it out. Always. We live in a world flooded with cheap material goods. The only way to deal with it is to be ruthless about getting rid of stuff. The less stuff you have, the simpler and more peaceful your life will be.

Moreover, even the stuff you try to hold onto will be lost to you. Storing belongings for the long term requires careful packaging, adequate space, ventilation, and pest control. Most people who hoard possessions end up ruining them with inappropriate storage. The books, clothes, and toys you wanted to save for your grandkids or sell for thousands of dollars end up with water damage or contaminated with mouse poop, and you have to throw them out anyway. If you’re a serious collector, you have to invest in serious storage and constantly maintain the stuff in storage (checking, rotating, cleaning). It’s really much better to let it go.

Now, it’s time for me to go be a grownup and do my taxes. Next time, maybe I’ll tell you the secret to whiter whites. (Hint: throw it out and buy a new one.)

I took a long flight recently, and decided to do some novel writing on the flight. In order to maximize odds of this happening, I took no reading material. If I wanted to be entertained, I would have to write. No escape.

The scene I needed to write was one I’d been fretting over and dreading for a long time. The characters in my novel play the Mayan ball game. (Or a very ancient proto-version of it.) I had been glossing over details of the game in my draft, but I needed to write a scene where the details matter, very much, to the whole story. Everything hinges on that game, and I can’t gloss over it.

But I can’t write a detailed sports scene! I’m not sporty! I’m not one of those sports writing, sports talking kind of sporty mcsporterson types who have all of the jargon to lay down an exciting play-by-play. I’m science writer girl. I write funny and sometimes serious things about fuzzy octopoid aliens. I’m a nerd!

Before I can write that scene, I definitely would need to research the whole sportswriting thing. Find some books with similar scenes and study them. Dissect them.

So, on the plane, with nothing to do but write this scene and a four hour flight ahead of me, I spent about an hour and a half restlessly looking out the window. Then I finally wrote some words.

Might as well do some kind of summary of the troublesome scene, right? Since I can’t actually write it, I’ll just insert a fumbling placeholder kind of thing. I’ve got nothing better to do. Hey, are those clouds?

So, there I am. Writing a sentence here. A sentence there. And suddenly I could see it. I could see the game. I knew where the players were. I knew what was happenig.

1400 words later, my sporty mcsporterson scene was written. And you know what? I’m DAMN sporty. That’s why my book has a sporty theme. Because I LIKE it. Because I’ve sat through (and played) my share of baseball, basketball, football, soccer, water polo, kick the can, dodgeball, etc. and I wanted some of that in my book!

People, I forgot that I am not a nerd. In fact, I am a jock. Varsity letter three out of four years. But in my writer panic–in my brain’s DESPERATION to do anything other than write the actual scene, I psyched myself out. Convinced myself I couldn’t do it.

Aren’t you glad you don’t have to live inside my head? Aren’t you glad it’s not your job to motivate me to write?

Nebula nominations are out, which means it’s time to do some serious award reading. If you’re a member of SFWA and you don’t normally vote for awards, consider this your call to action. Instead of being cynical or apathetic, consider the awards as a promotional opportunity for our whole genre. When people hear that a book or an author is a Nebula winner, they will view that work or individual as a representative of the genre. Back when I was a reader of the genre, and not a writer, I read a lot of Nebula anthologies. At times, I liked many stories, but thought some weren’t really that great. Too bad. I didn’t get a vote.

But now I do! And we all do. Every member can take part in choosing the works that represent our genre to the outside world. And if we choose well, we can attract new readers for the genre, helping not only the award-winning authors, but the whole genre.

Nebula 801 will walk you through reading the entire ballot. We only have about five weeks. Voting opens March 1 and closes March 30. This program only requires that you read a portion of each work–hopefully enough to decide whether you like it or not. Of course, I would hope that if you’re enjoying a book enough to potentially give it your award vote that you would read it through to the end, but that’s up to you.

If you’d like to play along, here’s your assignment for this week:

Novels (read at least the first three chapters):

Among Others, by Joe Walton
Embassytown, by China Mieville

Novella (read at least ten pages):
“Kiss Me Twice,” by Mary Robinette Kowal, Asimov’s 2011
“Silently and Very Fast,” by Catherynne Valente, Clarkesworld, Oct. 2011

Novelette (read at least five pages):

“Fields of Gold,” by Rachel Swirsky, Eclipse 4, Nightshade Books
“Ray of Light,” by Brad Torgerson, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dec. 2011

Short Story:
“Her Husband’s Hands,” by Adam-Troy Castro, Lightspeed, Oct. 2011

Ray Bradbury Award:
Attack the Block
Captain America: The First Avenger

Norton (read at least three chapters):
Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor