Settle and Seattle

I started the Road to Nowhere books in San Francisco because I knew the city. I had lived here a couple of years, gotten to know the beat of the streets and the smell of the alleys. I knew enough to tell it straight, I thought. I knew enough to peek through the gap in the curtains when nobody was home and describe the velvet unicorn paintings to an audience. 

That was five years ago. 

I know now that I didn't know the city well enough. I did not love her as hopelessly as I do now, and I didn't understand how hard she would work to make me feel unwanted. Mark Twain lived here during another period of her obnoxious prosperity, and called her a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. What he didn't mention is that you have to beg her to cuff you. I've been following this mean domme around for a long time now, trying to get her to punish me. I wrote her a book! The jaws of the cuff yawn open. 

And so I set my second book in Missouri. I remember Missouri in hazy ways from when I was a kid, and I incorporated what lives in memory still. Cicadas and humidity. The arch and the laziness of rivers cutting a width of green. After Etta came out, I returned to see a place separate from memory, and just as indifferent to my image of it. 

And so it was with Seattle. 
I wrote Seattle into the end of the Road to Nowhere, but I put Flora outside the city. I have learned that the souls of cities are not swayed by books made up of anything but accurate adoration. I did not expect Seattle to love me when I rolled in for Emerald City Comic Con, and she didn't. But she was friendly. That cuff is still open. Friendly cities can get my attention these days. 

Fourteen days until Flora is released. Thank you all so much for pre-ordering, for keeping me posted on your early reads, for cheering my good reviews. The time before a book is released is nerve-wracking and thrilling, all at once. It takes a constant soothing sense of self to get through it without self-destruction of one kind or another. 

So instead, I engage in endless self-creation. I'm appearing at a show tonight called Happy Endings, where I'm reading a new story. I'm hosting a reading on Friday for a new series called Parallel Lit, where I talk to science fiction and fantasy writers about what they write, what they read, and how this lit world works. I am always performing. I am always hoping to see you there. The Bay has an embarrassment of riches in its literary scene. It's made up of thousands of writers and poets, all of us making the sound of a handcuff that won't close, all of us fixing the other cuff to bars, to tech jobs, to each other. 

As long as this cuff is open, I'm seeing other cities. I'll be in LA for the Nebulas, in DC for Escape Velocity, in Madison for Wiscon. I'll be in Cleveland and St. Louis for regular scheduled maintenance on my heart. I'll be reading other writers as they try to capture place in the bell jar of their works, and trying to understand what it is they love that they're trying to show me. But I'll keep coming back to Oakland, who is understood best by the poet Nazelah Jamison. Oakland's not monogamous, and she doesn't like cuffs. She's always happy to see me, no matter how lavishly I have loved another. 

Homeward bound, 

Meg