I had to think about this for a second. Or, more accurately, I had to re-enter the headspace I inhabited when I wrote early drafts of vN. The female characters who had inspired me to write Amy, like Motoko Kusanagi and Rei Ayanami, were unquestionably female. Not because they were chromosomally female (both are, although each has altered DNA). Not because they menstruated (neither did). Not because they reproduced (neither did, although there are multiple copies of Rei floating around, and you could make an argument for Kusanagi and the Puppet Master). Not because they had female sex organs (we’re not really sure they do). But they do look like conventionally-attractive women, and they have traditionally feminine names. And, more importantly, everyone around them treats them like women, and they accept that treatment.

You’re a woman when the world treats you like a woman. You’re a woman when you accept and continue that narrative about yourself.

I mention this because it was the same thought process I went through regarding the perception of sentience, sapience, and “humanity” for the vN. You would be a person when other people treated you like one. You would be considered self-aware when others’ theory-of-mind allowed you to be. It was entirely discursive, because the only other alternative was proving a negative. This is why I mentioned The Velveteen Rabbit in interviews, and referenced it in iD. Because it’s another’s love and respect and regard that makes you “real.” It’s another’s treatment of you that shapes you as a subject. You’re not a human being until the culture allows you to be one.

Maybe I just took this little Heritage Minute too much to heart:

It’s hard to imagine a time when women were not considered, legally, to be “people.” But just as there was once a “Oh, look, it thinks it’s people!” attitude to women (and other minorities), it’s not hard to imagine a similar time for humanoids — where no matter how good they were, how incapable of harm, how well they performed humanity, they’d still be regarded and treated as other, as uncanny, as unreal.

You know. Until the uprising.

Yes.

Next month.

The launch party is July 6.

In a lot of ways, iD was very hard to write. vN was far more successful than I could reasonably hope for, and I felt a lot of pressure to make lightning strike twice. On the other hand, I felt as though I had taken Amy as far as she could go, in terms of perspective. She had always been more interesting to me as a conversation between two people, and now that her duality was resolved I wanted to give someone else a turn.

When I made the choice to write from Javier’s perspective, I knew I would be writing a darker, sadder, weirder book. When Amy sees something unjust, she reacts with righteous indignation. When Javier sees it, he shrugs and moves on. He’s a different guy, with a different history. So his approach is a bit more jaded. On the other hand, Javier’s failsafe is intact. He loves humans even when they don’t deserve it — even when he knows they don’t deserve it. So while he’s cynical about them, he’s easily taken in by them. I’m sure you’ve felt this way about at least one person you’ve slept with.

Javier’s journey through the book takes him from Amy’s island (which he refers to as the Great Elder Bot) to his birthplace of Costa Rica, to a patented winter wonderland, to Las Vegas, and to Mecha, the only “safe” place for vN to live. But before all that happens, this happens first:

 

Together, they closed the distance between his garden and the nearest arterial in a single leap. They didn’t even bother running. They bounded. Three feet, five feet, until the dark trees became one black blur. As they ran, the trees grew. Javier heard their leaves rustle as they expanded, thinning, creating cover. They jumped, and Javier saw the diamond tree straight ahead, far at the other end of the thoroughfare.  They were running straight for home. All over the island, a mist began to rise.

“Hey, is this shit explosive, too?”

Amy didn’t answer. She pounded down the thoroughfare, running faster and faster, her hands like blades, her knees at a perfect right angle to her hips. She tucked her them into her stomach as they sailed over the heads of the other vN. As they cleared the canopy of mist, two other figures joined them.

“Go back to your treehouse, Xavier,” Amy said.

“Sorry, lady,” his oldest, Ignacio, said, “but you’re not our mother and you don’t tell us what to do.”
They dropped into the mist. They jumped again, and Ricci was there, with Gabriel and Léon.

“Hi, Dad,” Léon said.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re iterating.”

“Never stopped you, did it?”

Léon took to the air. Javier followed. Beneath his feet, beneath the mist, the island was changing shape. The arteries folded down onto each other, forming a single black arrowhead. It was the basic defensive posture the island assumed whenever it or Amy perceived a possible threat. The diamond tree loomed large in his vision. Amy sprinted forward. He and the boys stopped short at the beach, but she ran straight across the water. Her feet barely disturbed its surface. She leapt into the tree and landed in its fork, arms raised. Her skin was full of rainbows.

Beneath his feet, the island shuddered.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em,” Ignacio said.

Javier bolted for home. He jumped from the beach and landed awkwardly in the water. The membrane caught him and he waded the rest of the way. The water was frustratingly heavy; he felt more tired than he should have by the time he made it to their little island. Amy had slid down the tree by then, and she stood with her back to him. Her fingers twitched angrily at her sides. She and the island were deep in damage control mode.

“What’s going on?” Javier asked.

She answered him with a question: “Above or below?”

“Huh?”

“Above, or below. Pick one. We can go down, or we can bring it up. Where would you like to go?”

His mind simulated several outcomes to both choices. He thought of a hole opening in the island’s flesh and himself sliding down into it. He thought of the weakness of human flesh, and the pressure, and the bends. “How far below was it?”

“Not that far.”

He insinuated himself into her field of vision. “Are there humans on that sub?”

She blinked. “I’m not sure.”

“You could kill them, if you bring them up too fast. If they’ve been too deep for too long. The p-pressure c-could-”

Now it was her turn to kiss him. It was very light and very quick, but it shut him and the failsafe down completely. When his eyes opened, Amy’s smile was all too bright. Her eyes were all too sad. He recognized the expression. She wore it when all the other vN on the island manifested their failsafe. It was pity.

“It’s probably automated,” she was saying. “It’s navigating by algorithm. That’s why I didn’t catch it, sooner.”

He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “You’re sure?”

He watched her pity turn to frustration. It displayed as a slight crinkling at corners of her eyes, an almost imperceptible line between her brows that, unlike those of human women, would never become permanent.

“I would never show you something that might trigger you. You know that.”

Beyond them, the ocean bubbled and foamed. Her expression changed again: anticipation. Whatever Amy had trapped down there, it was coming up. She raised one hand, waved slightly, and a murmuration of botflies swarmed above them.

“I’ll prove it,” she said. “I’m hacking the flies. That way, everybody can watch.”

She hopped out of the tree, and he followed. The flies shadowed them high above as they crossed the island. The bubbling had turned to an active churn. Whatever was coming was big. Big enough, he suspected, to sustain human life.

“Put it back,” he said.

“I know what I’m doing.” She looked over her shoulder at him. Then she looked up at the botflies. Her gaze rested on him again, and she spoke loudly and clearly enough for the flies to hear. “It came here, not the other way around. It’s an intruder. We have every right to investigate.”

“There are people in there-”

“You don’t know that, Javier.” She turned back to the sea, and the thing she’d raised from its depths.
It had a shape: long and tubular, but not rigid, not a perfect cylinder. Jointed. Serpentine. Organic. And as Amy raised her hands and lifted it from the water, it twitched and thrashed like a living thing. Something pallid and glistening dimpled and puckered across its surface as it writhed. Skin. Maybe even vN skin, Javier thought. They could use it like leather, these days. Rigid lines of scaffold beneath its surface popped into relief at it twisted, creating a series of random triangles under the skin. A dazzle pattern, Javier realized. Anti-sonar.

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Amy murmured.

“What in the fucking fuck?”

Javier turned. Ignacio and his brothers were there, lips pulled back in identical expressions of disgust.

“Que bicho feo,” Xavier said, and jumped five feet high to get a better view. His brothers followed, and Javier joined them. From the air, the thing did look a bit like an uncut dick, or maybe like a fifty-foot dick-shaped toy from some enterprising silicone fabber. The dazzle pattern reminded him of something else, though. Old wireframe animation, he realized, upon landing. How quaint.

Then one of its frames popped open. A wet, stale smell permeated the beach. vN started pouring out. He could tell by the way they moved: smooth and perfect and uniform. They wore wetsuits. They carried guns. Javier smelled puke rounds.

“¡Levántate!” His boys followed him into the air at maximum leap. Amy stood her ground, head cocked, staring at the invaders.

“Amy! Move!”

She leapt, but her gaze never left the other vN. They were an Asian-styled male model, probably all clademates, a pretty bishounen-type with long hands and long hair and the same full lips most all vN had no matter their other characteristics. DSL, a prison warden had once told Javier. Dick Sucking Lips.

Those same lips squished back pleasantly when Javier’s feet landed on them from ten feet up. It was satisfying, being able to hit back for once.

The vN dropped his gun, covered his ruined face, and crumpled to the ground. Javier grabbed the gun, primed it, and shot him between the shoulder blades. Glittering black smoke rose from the widening hole in his back. His hands left his face and he rushed Javier. Javier swung the gun like a baton, but the other vN caught it and then they were wrestling for it, pushing and pulling across the cool, wet sand. Javier dug his toes in and jumped. He slammed the other vN up against the bicho. Behind him, he heard Xavier yelp with surprise. He wanted to turn and look, but didn’t.

“Who sent you?” Javier asked.

The other vN tried baring his teeth, but some of them were gone. He pushed hard against the gun like an old guy struggling with a chest press. The hole inside him was growing. Stinging smoke rose between them.

“Aw, fuck it,” the other vN spat, and dropped his grip on the gun. Javier fell forward, landing square on the other guy’s fist. He slumped into the sea monster, briefly tasting iron and fat as he slid down its warm, twitching surface. Jesus. It really was organic.

Then he heard a click behind his head. Then there was nothing.

Speaking of San Francisco, I’ll be there again next week, for The Coming Age of Networked Matter, a conference put on by The Institute for the Future. I wrote a story for their anthology related to the conference, and I’ll be on a panel with the other authors to discuss it. The other authors include Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, Ramez Naam, and Rudy Rucker, so I’m feeling the simultaneous desire to squee with pride and to hide under the covers because I’m so intimidated. (Actually, I’m really excited about meeting Rudy. He’s published a bunch of my stories at FLURB, and now I get to thank him in person.)

After that, I’ll be off to New Orleans for The Bram Stoker Awards® Weekend 2013 incorporating World Horror Convention. Yes, that’s a Registered mark you saw, next to the Bram Stoker Awards. I’m typing it exactly as it appears on the website. Personally, I think they should have taken things even further, and tried to register a trademark on the Bram Stoker Awards Weekend experience itself, from having issues with your nametag to shoveling homefries down your gullet in an effort to stave off your skull-crushing hangover. (Except that’s the experience of every convention ever, so they’d have to distinguish it somehow.) My Stoker weekend experience will distinguish itself by watching Dave launch The ‘Geisters, a novel about an angry young woman dissatisfied with her “safe” marriage, who may just be in love with someone else. Also, there are poltergeists.

In between, there is a launch party for iD on July 6. Given the themes of the novel, sandwiching the party between Independence Day and Bastille Day is completely appropriate.

At the end of June is the Locus Awards weekend in Seattle. I’m debating a trip there, since Seattle is where my parents and many of my friends live, and it’s also the city I destroyed in vN which is a finalist for the Locus Award in the First Novel category. It would be nice to be standing with them when the award inevitably goes to someone else. On the other hand, a ticket out there costs just slightly less than a month’s rent.

Either way, we’re headed off to Lone Star Con 3, AKA WorldCon 71, where with any luck I’ll be able to read to you from iD, and sign copies should you choose to pick up any. I haven’t been to Texas in a while, and never to San Antonio, so that should be fun. My plan for beating the heat is to unfurl a tarp, sprinkle it with baby powder, and roll across it like a jelly doughnut dusting itself in icing sugar. So if you say hello and I’m covered in streaks of white powder, you’ll know why. It’s not my rampaging coke problem. I’d have written more books by now, if I had one of those.

When I return to Toronto, I’ll be attending the Kingston Writers Fest, where I’ll be on a panel with Margaret Atwood and Corey Redekop. I’ll be doing some homework to prepare for that one.

All in all, it’s pretty daunting. Vainly, I wish I looked better for all these cool appearances. It’s a bit sad to have photos of yourself taken with really talented, amazing people and to not enjoy any of them. Then again, I’ve felt that way since childhood, so it’s nothing new. What is new is having a legitimate career doing what I do. I mean, the majority of these conventions are occasions I was actually invited to, which is a little weird. Like, someone actually thought I would be a worthwhile addition to the mix. It’s a little strange to think of someone thinking about me in that way. That’s half of what’s so intimidating; I worry I won’t live up to the version of me that other people have in their heads. Not that I begrudge it, at all. I’m really lucky to be in this position, and I know there are plenty of other people out there who would sell their teeth to get here. I just worry about being worthy of it.

It’s okay. I can wait. I don’t want to spoil you.

Have you watched it? Okay. I’m glad, because now we can talk about it. Wasn’t that a  great time at the movies? Did you see that whole thing with the Mandarin coming? What a great fakeout, right? And Pepper! I’m glad she got to punch the guy who kidnapped her in his big stupid face with her flaming fist. The closest I’ve ever come to doing that is twisting the nipple of a guy who grabbed my ass as I descended the front steps at a house party. He was too high to feel any pain, though, so it wasn’t really satisfying. (True story.)

Anyway, I’m writing today to clear up some things about what it’s really like when an adult has a panic attack, like Tony does in the movie. Sometimes, like Tony’s new friend Harley, you’ll be nearby when this happens. And, like Harley, you may be getting on the nearby adult’s nerves. But you should keep in mind that unlike Harley, you’re not the one to blame for the panic attack. The panic attack did not happen because you said the wrong word, like “New York,” or “wormhole,” or because you asked the wrong question, or because you asked too many questions too quickly. Doing those things is annoying, sure, but it’s no cause for a full-blown panic attack. Panic attacks are not your fault. They’re not anybody’s fault. They’re like thunderstorms. They’re a natural phenomenon that happens when all the right conditions are met inside the body and mind. Like how it has to be cold enough to snow, but not too cold, otherwise clouds won’t form. Like that. The reason Tony blames his panic attacks on Harley isn’t because Harley actually caused them, but because Tony has a bad habit of refusing to take responsibility for his feelings and actions. He’s blaming Harley because he knows, deep down, that his anxiety is his own problem to deal with, and he doesn’t know how to solve it yet. In fact, that’s really what the movie is about — how refusing to take responsibility for your actions only creates bigger problems down the road.

I’m telling all you this because some day, this may happen to you, and that it’s not your job to keep the panic attack from happening to the adult, or to talk the adult out of the panic attack, or figure out the right thing for the adult to do that will make the crying/shaking/hiding/panting stop. Now, it’s always your responsibility to help someone in need — if you see somebody drowning, or getting beat up, or whatever, it’s your job to call for help. (In fact, that’s what The Amazing Spider-Man is about.) But things like panic attacks are different. Someday your mom may not pick you up from school, and you think she’s forgotten so you wait a while even though she’s not answering her phone, so finally you walk home alone and find her huddled under the covers saying she’s about to die, but she can’t explain why or how, and she won’t let you call an ambulance, either. Or maybe your dad will just quietly drive to the shoulder of the road and start crying and not be able to stop, and won’t answer your questions, either, even though it’s getting dark and you’re supposed to be picking up a bucket of chicken. Understand that nothing you can do will make these moments better. Nothing you can do will make them worse, either, unless you decide to take this opportunity to set the drapes on fire or try that anti-freeze you’ve always been curious about. Basically, so long as you sit tight and don’t do anything stupid, your impact on the situation is negligible. And that’s fine, because it’s not your problem to solve. It’s not your broken machine to fix. Like Tony, every adult around you is lugging around the empty, shattered prototype version of themselves — one that didn’t work, or crashed, or burned out, or whatever. But unlike Tony, they can’t expect other people to help fix it. Only they can fix it, on their own. It’s not your job. It’s not anybody else’s job, either. You are your own mechanic.

Someday, you will be towing your own failed prototype behind you. And you will have to fix it on your own. And there will be help, if you need it, from the other adults that love you. And you will have a whole big toolbox full of tools to choose from. Like doctors. And therapists. And yoga teachers. And your friends. You probably noticed how Tony spends the first half of the movie building imaginary friends, but after he spends some time alone, he’s okay spending more time with his real friends, like Rhodes and Pepper and Bruce. That’s because real friends are the ones who can help you through that kind of thing. The imaginary ones can only go so far. And maybe, if you’re lucky, your parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins will be able to help you, too.

But for now, just remember: adults work to earn your love, and you work to earn their respect. You are not a tool in the adult toolbox. You are the one they are building from scratch.

“He thought I was a baby-raper,” he said. “I explained that we were just friends.”

“Rape?”

“When you fuck someone without their wanting it,” Ignacio said. “Sex is like a game. It takes two people – or more, I guess, if you want – to play, and both players have to agree to the rules ahead of time. Anything else is cheating.”

That’s a little snippet from iD, in case you were curious. Javier is having a flashback to his life in a Nicaraguan prison. I wrote those flashbacks to grant a better sense of the experiences that made Javier who he is, and to explain a bit (but not too much, as this book was already the cause of much drinking) about the role of vN in enclosed societies like prisons. Enclosed societies are a theme in the book, so it seemed relevant.

But I’m really writing today to talk about rape. Because what Javier’s roommate tells him about sex are what I wish more people heard, growing up. That’s it’s not okay to suddenly change the rules of play, in sex. That it’s okay to feel betrayed and frightened if the other person does. “Well, I know I told you I was wearing a condom, but I really wasn’t,” is about the same as “Well, I know y’all are wearing Nikes, but I thought I’d bring my cleats, so don’t, like, let me slide into you, or anything.” Obviously, cleats can’t give you HIV or get you pregnant, but it’s still unfair play, just like fucking someone (or stripping her, or photographing her, or sticking your fingers inside her) when she’s passed out is unfair play. Fair play requires an equal playing field. So does consent. That unconscious girl who was flirting with you may indeed have wanted to have sex with you. But that was an hour and three Cherry Comforts ago, and it is not now, and now you will never know, because the only thing you’re going to do with that girl is pull a blanket over her and get her some water and maybe a bucket, because you are a man, and not a monster.

I know that rape is not a game, and sex really isn’t, either. But what we learn about fair play — online, on the field, on the gaming table — has value in the bedroom, too. A long time ago, we pushed kids into sports not so they could lose weight, but so they could gain ethics. I know that’s hard to believe after Lance Armstrong, Jose Canseco, Pete Rose, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez, and the lot of them, but that’s how it used to be. Once upon a time, we wanted to teach kids not just how to win, but more importantly, how to lose. How hear “no.” How to take it on the chin and walk away. But now, schools protect accomplished student athletes from accusations of rape. Now, high school football players expect their coaches to take care of rape allegations. Now, football coaches can rape little boys and their universities will let them get away with it. So much for fair play. So much for “no.”

I bring this up because Christie Blatchford seems not to get it. Writing about the late Rehtaeh Parsons of Nova Scotia, who killed herself in response to the bullying that followed her sexual assault, Blatchford goes to great pains to explain that “there are two sides, even in this wrenching tale,” and explains, ever so delicately, that maybe Parsons was just asking for it. In so doing, Blatchford is taking advantage of Parsons’ absence of life in much the same way that the boys accused of raping her may have taken advantage of her absence of consciousness. She’s not awake. She can’t say no. She can’t push back. It’s possible that, as Blatchford asserts, the local RCMP would not have pursued a case. But Parsons didn’t kill herself because the RCMP didn’t make a case. She killed herself because she wanted to. Because it seemed like the best idea at the time.

Parsons is not the only woman to come to that conclusion. She’s part of a trend. Amanda Todd. Jessica Laney. Lizzy Seeberg. Samantha Kelly. Recently, it has become all too common for young women to choose suicide as their response to rape. And that’s dangerous, because suicide is viral, and those who know someone who has committed suicide or hear of someone committing suicide are 3.5 times more likely to attempt it themselves.

You know what else is viral in its epidemiology? Mass shootings. Mass shooters copy each other, possibly because they hear so much about each other on the news. Although research is ongoing, we do know that mass murderers also tend to kill themselves, either because they sincerely wish to die or because suicide is now part of the standard mass shooting process.

Inevitably, these two trends will converge.

Think about it.  What’s to stop a young woman whose accusations have been ignored by police to decide that killing herself, her rapists, and some of the victim-shaming bitches who made her life a living hell on Facebook? Certainly not the strength of America’s gun laws. Or how its media treats “promising” young rapists. At what point does someone decide that the rage, the pain, the betrayal, and the despair should be focused outward, not just inward? At what point does a victim decide that the world is better off without the people who victimized her, and that if the cops can’t keep him off the streets, maybe she should? Statistically, women are not rampage killers. But all it takes is one. One girl, and a family gun collection.

As a human being, I don’t endorse this course of action. But as a futurist? I think it’ll take an event like the one I’ve just described to get the majority of American public schools to start talking about consent, rape, and victim-blaming with any degree of nuance. In much the same way that Columbine galvanized the school security movement after 1999, a rape revenge murder at school could provoke a change in how we handle accusations of rape among students. I think that’s what it would take for educators and legislators to realize that rape isn’t a private problem, it’s a community problem. It’s sad that I think that’s what it would take. I would love to be wrong. Only time will tell.

That’s a true story, by the way. That really happened. We both loved Japrisot’s work. A lot. Later, that same teacher introduced me to Haruki Murakami’s books.

Anyway, the book that got me into the most trouble was obviously my own, so I had to read aloud to them from it. That was hard, as there are a lot of curse words in it, and also the chapter I chose to read has a bit about why robots have “all the right holes and such,” and I didn’t want anybody getting in trouble at home (cf. To Kill A Mockingbird). It being a library setting with some actual space, I was able to pace up and down the aisle while reading, which is always the best way to read or recite to a group. Good teachers do it. Good trial lawyers do it. Good stripmall preachers do it. That shit works. After that I ansswered some questions, so we talked more about books, and writing them, and then a little bit about manga, and why I like Bleach better than Naruto.

But the next day, with another library’s youth advisory group, we talked about manga even more. The group was comprised primarily of Somalian and Chinese girls in the eighth or ninth grade, some of them Muslim, all of them geeks. Each girl had her own special fandom: one was into Doctor Who, another was into Dragonball Z (will no one rid us of those troublesome saiyans?), one read DC Comics exclusively, another exhorted me to start watching The Legend of Korra. “I’m waiting to see if they screw up the ending like they did on Avatar,” I told her. “I won’t get fooled again.” They all loved Fullmetal Alchemist and Batman: Under the Red Hood.

They all knew someone who had been shot.

They were very matter-of-fact about it. One girl had come home to find police tape in front of her building. Another girl’s neighbour was shot in the courtyard of her complex. A third girl’s sister was shot, when her family lived in Somalia. Some of them had a classmate who was shot. The shootings were scary, but what happened afterward was scarier: cops everywhere, gang members banging on doors telling people not to talk, witnesses hastily arranging a move to another building. They talked about these events in the same tone of voice that they discussed falling down the stairs in front of boys they liked, or that time somebody broke a toe while on a field trip. Nobody dissolved into tears. Nobody started shaking. These girls were just, for lack of a better term, shooting the shit. Their conversation reminded me of the conversations I used to have with my friends in middle school: planning birthday parties (shaving foam or water balloons? both?), how stupid ASB fees were, when Mulder and Scully would finally sleep together. These conversations had no point. That was their point. They were elliptical, and they made the boredom of adolescence feel like it meant something. The opening five minutes of Stand By Me? Girls do that, too. I had forgotten how much I missed it.

Then Boston happened. And Texas. And that bullshit ricin letter. And the floods. And then a bunch of Congressmen wussed out on gun control, which is part of why I’m writing this. I know, I know. I don’t live there, any more. It’s not my problem. But the majority of guns that cause deaths in Canada come from America, so yeah, I guess that makes it my problem. It’s certainly a problem for the girls I met the other week. These are bright, funny, geeky young women who are doing their best to stay positive in a world where Ann Coulter says women should go to jail for wearing hijab. The last thing they need is a steady steam of weapons crossing the border because Congress is hungry for lobbyist cock. As women of colour, some of them Muslim, the deck is already stacked against them — even when their community leaders do everything possible to stem the tide of violence. These girls have seen enough shit. They do not need to see more shit.

So I guess what I’m saying here is that you may run into these girls, or girls like them, at your next convention. If your mind is already blown by the fact that girls can be geeks, too, you may just pop an aneurysm at the idea of girls in hijab being geeks. But they are. And so if you do run into them, be nice. Be friendly. Not creepy. Not wussy. Not shitty. Because when we say that fandom is a “safe space,” we don’t just mean from “the jocks,” or from the ghosts of jocks past. We mean that the guns are props, and nobody’s trying to shoot you, and no one’s head covering is any weirder than anybody else’s. Sometimes we don’t get the communities we deserve. But if we’re lucky, we get the ones we need. Remember that.

Actually, I’m pretty proud of the things I’ve done before hitting 30. I’m not so proud of others. They include:

• Graduating from university (MCL; two Departmental Honors; Honors Program)
• Being turned away at the Canadian border.
• Getting married (I was 22).
• Immigrating to Canada.
• Writing my first master’s thesis.
• Writing my first novel (and watching it get published).
• Leaving my husband, five years later.
• Seeing a therapist regularly.
• Writing my second master’s thesis.
• Writing for BoingBoing (and io9, and Tor.com, and Creators Project, and ArcFinity)
• Living with Dave (something I’ve wanted to do since he first made me a steak dinner; in my memory his eyes light up as I wilt some spinach and garlic in steak drippings, and a moment later when my knife slides through the tender flesh I look at him and think “Why can’t it always be like this?”).
• Gaining epic amounts of weight (most of which can be attributed to eating my feelings, and also living with someone who knows how to cook for pleasure).
• Working for Strategic Innovation Lab, Gorbet Design, Intel Labs, The Institute for the Future, and Ideas in Flight (a tiny little social media firm run by the incomparable Jessica Langer, that allows me to work from home; many thanks are due to the equally-incomparable Tamu Townsend for introducing us). All of those gigs have happened since 2010. When my friends knew that I needed work to support myself (and distract myself, and save myself) , they provided it. As my grandfather used to say, I was “blessed with work.” Now my days are a lot fuller than they used to be, and I’m happier with them.
• Making friends (and losing friends).
• Losing my wallet (and making it back into the country anyway).
• Writing my second novel (and waiting for it to be published).
• Having my eyes checked for the first time since childhood (turns out I’m astigmatic and it’s very lucky I don’t drive).
• Starting a real savings plan, with a real RRSP and everything (my former husband used to handle all this; I was a stereotype on a lot of levels, and it’s nice to know I’m taking care of myself).
• Doing my first library appearances; one last year, two this year (these latter appearances warrant their own blog post).
• Meditating regularly (I prefer Jon Kabat-Zinn’s methods, AKA “mindfulness based stress reduction”).
• Drinking green shakes every morning (spinach, bananas, berries, flaxseed and soymilk, in a NutriBullet).

These are some of the things that have happened in the past few years, most of them since 2010. They’ve been dense, full years. I’ve been extremely lucky, and privileged in terms of my friendships, my network, and my demographic position. I wouldn’t be here without all that.

Perhaps for that reason, today I’ve been feeling a nagging sense of Imposter Syndrome: the sense that I haven’t done enough, or that what I have done isn’t good enough, or that what success I’ve had isn’t truly deserved. I’ve been an overachiever my whole life — I was always “the smart girl,” if not the particularly pretty/funny/talented/coordinated/fashionable/organized/adventurous one. And that meant that the value I placed on myself was directly related to grades, awards, accomplishments, and other academic milestones. Exterior metrics. Other people’s judgments of me. In other words, Lisa Simpson Syndrome.

And on many levels, this persists today. When people ask me how I’m doing, I tell them about things I’m doing — gigs, projects, interviews, appearances, and so on. But that’s what I’m doing, not how I’m doing. Implicit in that conversation is the assumption that what’s most important in my life is what I’ve done, not how I’ve done it or why or how it makes me feel. This is toxic for two reasons: 1) it makes me sound like a self-aggrandizing bitch who can’t shut up about herself (cf the list above), and 2) it keeps me from regularly relating to people on an emotionally intimate level. I walk around with the assumption that nobody really wants to know how I feel, or that feelings are inherently lacklustre conversation material. Part of this is Canadian culture — there’s a lot of stiff upper lips left in the true north, strong and free. Part of it is junk code from my marriage. And I have no doubt that part of it is how I was raised; it wasn’t until later in their lives that either of my parents could honestly call themselves “happy,” so my understanding of what happiness looks like is a bit more skewed toward “getting things done,” than “finding peace.” But whatever my personal reasons for interacting with others this way, I suspect lots of other people do it, as well. If you’re one of them, please refer the special people in your life to this blog post by way of explanation.

All of this boils down to the fact that today when I woke up, I knew that I should be happier with where I am, but I couldn’t muster it. All I could think about were all the things I’ve done wrong, or the way I’ve hurt people, or the things I want for the future. Literally, I kept thinking about how I’m finally old enough to participate in the Ontario Breast Screening Program, and how I have to get myself tested for BRCA1 and BRCA2, and how no matter how much I might want a child it would be irresponsible to pass that mutation on to someone else if I knew I had it, and how I should finalize my divorce before even considering any of that, and what a terrible wife I was, and how I’m probably an equally terrible candidate for a second marriage.

Dave says that last bit is nonsense, but what this post tells me is that is I should probably blog more. I’ve been holding a lot of this stuff in, and there was really no reason to. So maybe this year, I’ll at least be a better blogger.

Jeez. Give away the whole plot, why don’t you?

…Moving on. Thursday night at 7:30, I’ll be introducing Ghost in the Shell at the Projection Booth, as part of the Monsters and Martians Film Fest. The festival is sponsored by AE Sci Fi, and other hosts include Rob Sawyer and my own David Nickle (who will be discussing The Manchurian Candidate). You can find the Projection Booth at 1035 Gerrard Street East. The Projection Booth is pursuing legal action against Jonathan Hblika, who is trying to call it “Big Picture Cinema.” The sign will say “Projection Booth.” Most of the press for the event says “Big Picture Cinema.” Resolve that how you will.

I’ve re-watched GITS in preparation for the event, and I’ve also dug up a chapter of my first Master’s thesis and re-read some articles of anime scholarship related to the film. A lot of work is published on GITS; it really sparked a fire among academics with film theory training who were tired of talking about final girls and male gazes. (Though to be honest, both of those elements are pretty prominent in the film.) This weekend was spent flipping open books I hadn’t cracked in years, and it was really fun. Once upon a time, I thought I was going to have a career doing this, and while I’m happy with how my life has turned out, I do occasionally yearn for an excuse to buy new clothes and stationery every September. Academia was how I found value for a long time, and in a lot of ways it still defines me. Last week I did a reading and improptu critique for students of the Digital Futures Initiative at OCADU, and it felt really good to be in an academic environment again. I have a tendency to lecture — I’ve had men say, “You’re lecturing,” whenever I happened to be discussing something I knew more about — and it was nice to scratch that itch. You won’t have to worry about that on Thursday, though. I have a presentation prepared, so I can’t ramble on. There are pictures and everything. I’m only supposed to go for twenty minutes, and I’ve timed out my frames to match that schedule.

In any case, GITS is a film that’s close to my heart for a lot of reasons. I first watched it in high school, in between copious makeout sessions with my then-boyfriend. (He later tried to claim responsibility for my being an anime nerd, as though he could take full custody of our joint hobbies.) I re-watched it fairly regularly after that, but I really fell hardest for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the tv anime series. I mean, how could I not?

There’s a lot of both in my books. I can safely say that having completed the second one. In fact, you can trace pretty similar plots through both; both vN and GITS feature a woman finding her identity through a merger with another, greater being, and both iD and Innocence feature a man yearning for connection and realizing his old way of doing things doesn’t work, any more. (Innocence is pretty special to me, too — I first saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival after waiting in a rush line with my best friend. It took my breath away, and I was so happy to have seen it on a big screen.) I hadn’t realized how deep the influence ran until I prepared this presentation, which is why I’m excited to watch the first film big, in person, with popcorn.

*Did you know that the Thursday before Easter is also called “Thursday of Mysteries”? I didn’t. I wish more days could be days of mysteries.

This cover was created by the talented Martin Bland, who also created the cover for vN. This time, we chose to focus on Javier, since he’s the protagonist of this book. I really love how warm and soft he seems in contrast to the machine elements on this cover, and how warm the colours are compared to the cooler tones on the cover for vN. Seen together, I’m sure they complement each other (just like Amy and Javier). I especially like how his eye seems to glimmer at you. It’s just sharply drawn, and it draws you in.

The imagery also hints at the contents of the book: Javier gets broken down and taken apart, piece by piece — literally, figuratively, emotionally. It’s a shattering of the self. (And yeah, that’s part of why the book has the title it does. The title itself is a play on a bunch of different ideas.) So I’m excited to see that represented here.

“Science fiction has the capability to illustrate alternative and alien subjectivities and for a lot of people – including myself – that’s by nature a feminist project.”

Ms. Ashby’s debut novel, entitled vN, came out last summer. While ostensibly sci-fi, it reads in part like a slice of real life.

“It’s about a self-replicating humanoid with a female chassis named Amy, who eats her grandmother alive at kindergarten graduation,” explains Ms. Ashby, a 30-year-old graduate of Seattle University.

“Thereafter, Amy’s on the run and she deals with a lot of things that human women have to deal with all the time: being underestimated, being groped and having to pretend like you enjoy it, and being treated like merchandise.”

(There’s also a video, here, wherein some slightly different questions are asked.)

This is a really proud moment, for me. I’ve never been profiled in a national print publication, and it was wonderful to have the opportunity to talk about why I choose to write what I choose to write, and how my experience of my gender informs those choices. (One answer that was cut from the interview is that I felt anxious about writing realistic female characters because for a long time, I struggled with feeling like a “real” woman.) This whole thing came out of the blue; I came home one afternoon to an email from Dierdre Kelly asking for my input. The feature is part of a series on women in science, which I strongly suggest you read.

Now, the real story is the fact that the Globe asked to interview me in my home before changing the location to a more awesome location, Bakka Phoenix Books. (Their new location is really beautiful. You should go.) What this means is that Dave and I spent some time cleaning house the preceding weekend, even though it was his birthday and Valentine’s Day. Since I couldn’t showcase the results in the interview, I thought I’d take you on a little tour.

This is our office. My desk is on the left.

This is the other place I do most of my work — on our couch. My mom quilted that quilt. Dave’s dad painted those paintings. He also painted this painting:

You’ll notice that everything is backward in that photo, because apparently the iPad camera (yes, yes, I know, I’m terrible) wants you to feel drunk all the time.

Luckily, our kitchen shares the same goal. We moved here just over a year ago after cramming ourselves into spaces that were either too small, too dark, or too damp, and I have to say I’m pleased with where we landed. It’s my first residence in Canada that has felt truly mine.