pro rate and pumpkin pancakes
Good morning on the first of December!
The photo above shows my current knitting project and a piece of Advent calendar lemon chocolate. I realized, when I first started selling poetry, that the two things I use my PayPal account for are zine accounting and mutual aid, and if I didn't want rage at the state of society to detract from my sense of accomplishment, I needed to engage in some creative mental bookkeeping. Thus, I reserve part of every bit of fiction-and-poetry income for sheer frivolity--in this case, chocolate from a luxury chocolatier where each piece of candy looks like it could be a tiny planet.
I have some unanticipated writing news to share: my story The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers is being reprinted as part of the anthology Cossmass Infinities: The Second Year. You can buy an ebook at the publisher's page or from Amazon. There will be a print book at some point; if you want to read my story in print now, you can still buy the original magazine issue.
"Twelve Thousand Flowers" is a Nakharat story, set on the same continent of the same planet as "The Last Tutor" (which came out this year) or "The Fifteenth Saint" (which will be in Asimov's next year, and which funded my lemon chocolate!) I privately classify each of the Nakharat stories by social role or means of transportation. This is the one about ordinary people and bicycle-cabs:
That’s what kab drivers are for: to be responsible. A velokab can more or less pilot itself. But machines can’t make moral choices. Or strategic ones either, supposedly. That’s why, if a kab ever crashes, its driver is supposed to pay the price.
When people talk about humans taking responsibility, they always seem to mean somebody else.
This story was also my first professional science fiction publication. That's a technical definition: the Science Fiction Writers of America set a pro rate for short stories. A pro sale is, simultaneously, a little bit of serious money and an excuse to brag.
I didn't exactly brag about "Twelve Thousand Flowers." I was excited, I shared links in various places, and I wrote a little essay about my process, but I didn't shout "FIRST PRO SALE!" all over the world. That's partly because I already was a published writer, if you count math or poetry or historical short fiction, so explaining why SFWA pro rate is different would have involved an excess of inside baseball.
But the other thing that made this story tough to talk about is that it's about sex work. There's a scene involving one woman paying another for sex that is not only (I hope!) sexy, but integral to the plot. Selling this story to someone I didn't know was comparatively easy. Talking about it to people I have met in person proved much more difficult, and I think I failed to mention it to my parents entirely.
I wasn't concerned that my family would judge me for writing about sex. My mother tells a story about a graduate course where, assigned to write an excerpt from a fictitious early English novel, she decided to write pornography à la Fanny Hill, and then got so caught up in meticulously describing historical undergarments she failed to reach--if you will--the climax. In some ways the apple has not fallen very far from the tree!
I was a little bit worried that my mother would use my writing to form a theory about queer people of my generation. It's always unsettling to find oneself a symbol in someone else's system. But perhaps I was most worried that comparing and contrasting my protagonist Rauzanet's career with the details of real-world sex work would distract from the feelings I was using the story to reflect on, which were less about sex work specifically, and more about the pleasures and injustices of work. I like how proud Rauzanet is of all her friends' enterprises:
If you’re smart like Talga, you siphon power.
They told me about a lunch counter just on the other side of the river that sold high-mountain food, stacks of pancakes filled with onion and pumpkin and fried in lots of butter. The owner was obsessed with endurance bike racing. He probably made as much from bets as from his pancakes, no matter how crispy they were. The whole back wall of the restaurant was devoted to a race display, with mountain paths molded in real time and toy bikes creeping along. Except cliffs kept popping up, and disappearing. Talga debugged the display, and in return the owner let them park. Their velokab charged while the restaurant was closed.
And now that I've told you all about Cossmass Infinities, perhaps I should end with an image of Kosmas the cat:
--Ursula.