That's me! I'm Tank Girl!

The flash fiction that follows was driven into existence by American right-wing extremist attempts to terrorize the rest of us. I refuse to be terrified. I will never surrender to their demented world view. If someone like me can emerge from an upbringing deep inside that culture of hatred, then maybe there are other decent people still hidden among the wingnuts. And maybe all those lost heroes need is a map out of Crazytown...

( Cut for those sensitive to implied violence. )

There is still a lot wrong with 2009, but I can never say that I've felt unappreciated this year. Or that nobody listened to me.

When I posted last night, I didn't hold my breath and wait for a response. I went to bed as usual. When I woke up and checked my email and twitter @mentions... It seemed like everyone I knew - and a bunch of people I didn't - was talking about something I'd done, and they all had something nice to say. I got to feel like a star (until I had my tea and went back to work).

People are listening, and people care enough to move when I say 'please'. This is a VERY BIG DEAL to me.

The town I grew up in had a population under 4000 when I finally ran away to college. Everyone knew me. I was the little girl driving the big tractor. I was the dictionary kid. I was in big trouble.

I didn't fully realize it at the time, but when I started Crossed Genres with metafrantic, I also got a new hometown. Around here, I have 'great taste in art'. I'm 'an unusually probing interviewer'. And when I geek out, people cheer me on.

Today, dozens of people shared CG with hundreds of other people, and in so doing, profoundly altered my perspective. Our little magazine may not survive 2010, but Crossed Genres has changed my life forever. Thanks to you.

Six Degrees of Grossed Genres
Crossed Genres is in trouble: money and other numbers
'Crossed Genres' on Twitter
'crossedgenres' on Twitter
'@sandykidd' on Twitter

Crossed Genres is in trouble. It’s not ‘end of the world’ trouble, but it’s building to that.

Bart and I have been paying for it out of pocket for a year and in that time, the magazine has taken in less than 35% of what we paid into it. And that’s not including the value of our labor because we don’t pay ourselves for running Crossed Genres. ‘Pay the contributors first,’ is one of our foundational principles. And you know what? Our contributors are grateful. They’ve bought more copies of the magazine than everyone else combined. Which is a great sign of the relationships we’re building with our writers and artists, but a very bad omen for the business as a whole.

We’re not looking to get rich off CG. Someday we’d like to be able to pay our contributors pro rates, but even at the very respectable pace we’re growing, we’re years away from that. Frankly, if CG doesn’t start growing like an irradiated lizard, it will never reach that point. Because if Crossed Genres doesn’t start breaking even soon, we’ll have to shut it down.

Crossed Genres is the best thing Bart and I have built together, besides our son, and we’re not done with it yet. As I said, we’d like to start paying pro rates. We’d like to have daily Flash Fiction and a weekly webcomic in the subscribers’ area of our site. We’d like to start a quarterly magazine on the side; one that’s just for our adult readers, if you know what I mean. Someday, we’d even like to have a game developed for Crossed Genres.

Ambition, we’ve got. Momentum is what we need.

By every measure except sales, Crossed Genres has had a successful first year. The magazine has surpassed every other goal we set for 2009. We’ve also put a lot more work into it than we originally intended, but that happens when you love what you do. But we can’t do everything on our own.

Crossed Genres needs you. Yes, all of you.

There’s a little game we used to play in college called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. Most of you recognize that game as the Hollywood adaptation of the original idea that any two strangers on Earth are only separated from each other by at most six other relationships (each relationship is a degree of separation). In the game, movie trivia buffs challenge each other to link other actors to Kevin Bacon in as few degrees as possible. Bruce Willis was in Pulp Fiction with Uma Thurman, who was in Henry & June with Fred Ward, who was in Tremors with Kevin Bacon. Voila! From Bruce Willis to Kevin Bacon in only two degrees.

Some of you have already figured out where I’m going with this, and that’s fine. Use that head start to go tell Bruce Willis that Crossed Genres exists. Or Patrick Stewart, or Peter Jackson, or Lucy Lawless, or Neil Patrick Harris. Go tell Kevin Bacon, for goodness sake! He might like the magazine, and he might tell someone else that he likes it. And since he’s Kevin Bacon, the whole world might hear about CG as a result.

Yes, friends of Crossed Genres, I want you to play ‘Six Degrees’ with me. In a way, it’s just a grown-up version of the playground classic, ‘Post Office’. You tell everyone you know that Crossed Genres is great and affordable, and you tell them to pass it on. They tell everyone they know about CG and tell them to pass is on. And so on, and before you know it, the Crossed Genres website crashes because Neil Gaiman absentmindedly mentions it to his 1.3 million Twitter followers (purple monkey dishwasher).

That highly desirable problem is called a ‘NeilWebFail’, and for the record, if only 1/100th of 1% (~one out of every 8,700) of his followers preordered the Crossed Genres Anthology, we would reach our minimum goal overnight.

The internet is practically built for memes like this.

I can hear you thinking to yourself, “But I don’t know anyone famous.” Me neither. I think of all my friends as rockstars, but I know that most of you have friends like me; people who are too busy barely getting by to actually accomplish anything very far-reaching. That’s okay. In the long run, we’re all still just a few degrees away from Kevin Bacon (and my mom once met Bruce Willis in a sporting goods store).

Before you start telling me that it’s tacky to beg for celebrity endorsement, be assured that’s not what I’m doing. If you know a celebrity, of course I want you to tell them about Crossed Genres. But I really want you to tell everybody you know about CG. It’s called word of mouth advertising, and it’s three or four times as effective as the flashy stuff you see all over the internet and plastered across every marketable flat surface in the real world.

Your help could mean the difference between Crossed Genres celebrating a second anniversary or disappearing within the next year.

Will you play ‘Six Degrees’ with me?

( It's miserable, but you seem to like it... )

( Me in a bee suit, Bart as a mad scientist, and Bastian wins at dancing... )

As writers, would you rather be rejected with the phrase, "Your submission does not meet our needs at this time"? Or the phrase, "Your writing is too poor for publication in our magazine"? Or how about the ugliest truth: "I've had better."

I got an email from a disgruntled author today vowing to never submit to us again. I won't name names or anything, but suffice it to say that the writer will actually be doing us a favor by not sending us the same weak storytelling month after month.

I don't want to be a jerk. I don't want to scare off writers who might submit to Crossed Genres in the future. But if your response to, "Your submission does not meet our needs at this time," is to send an email telling the editors they don't know what the hell they're doing, then please just keep your writing to yourself.

However, if you have a more appropriate response to rejection, then please continue sending us your stories.

Thank you and good luck!

ETA: Bart posts the details here so you can see for yourselves why I'm sitting here chuckling. Some people can handle rejection and some can't. We got a bit of both this month, but thank goodness those authors with grace so far outnumber those without, in our meager experience.

Nearly every Saturday night, I get together with some friends for a group chat and youtube clip session. We've been known to scour the internet for the world's smartest condom commercials and ukulele orchestra performances. We're an irreverent bunch.

Last night I went on a bit of a lesbian spree and came across a movie clip that absolutely turned my guts to mush.

Now, everyone who knows me in real life is aware of how sad my dance prowess is. They know this because even though I dance lamely, I do it all the time. It's fun to shake my booty, even if I really. Really. Shouldn't.

Not everyone knows that I've actually studied ballet, tap, and ballroom dancing. I can dance well given enough of a warm-up, I just have more fun dancing like Goofy.

However, I might seriously reconsider my stance on dancing if every time I danced, it felt like the dance scene from the movie Out at the Wedding.

ETA: Robot dancing is really more my style. (The dancing doesn't start until ~2:06 into the clip)

For those who don't already know, tha amazing supergee is offering to fund a scholarship for a POC to attend ICFA. Most excellent.

Pass it on!

Now showing at Crossed Genres Magazine: Issue 12 LGBTQ Science Fiction and Fantasy!

-If you want the most intense job in outer space, sign up with this salvage crew.
-What if you find more comfort out in the cold than in the cold comfort you’re given at home?
-When you live on the edges of space, the law, and gender, you’ll forge surprising alliances.
-In a small town like this, it takes only a little magic to transform an entire generation.
-Even artificial life is…complicated.
-Warning: Objects of obsession may captivate. Investigate at your peril.
-Being a hero sometimes has devastating consequences. Will you survive your best intentions?
-You never know where you’ll find love, so be sure to dust thoroughly.
-Remake yourself into the savior you require. Justice has poetry.
-It’s been said that 90% of romance is in the mind. For some lovers, it’s definitely all in their heads.

Plus art, art and a lot more art. Issue 12 is art-packed!

As always, we offer a wide range of ways to show your support for Crossed Genres:
-Buy the current issue!
-Buy your favorite back issues!
-Preorder the Anthology and get a free e-subscription!
-Tell people about us!

( Read more... )

Boo!


( I somehow managed to not get pictures of everyone at the party - sorry if I left you out! )

My son is afraid of himself.

He doesn’t like to enter his bedroom alone. The Other Bastian will ‘get’ him.

The real problem is the mirror. It doesn’t hang flat against the wall and so it reflects a very slightly slanted view of the room. Bastian knows it’s just a mirror. He ignores it most of the time, but every now and then he talks about The Other Bastian as though his reflection is a real boy, and a spooky one. Yet he doesn’t want me to remove the mirror. He likes it, even though it scares him a little.

And thus a superstition is born.

But this is a post about biases, not superstitions. Right? Yes and no. In and out. Heads. Tails.

Superstition is any blindly accepted belief or notion

Bias is a particular tendency or inclination, esp. one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice

Bias and superstition both come from the same human drive: Fear. They both cause the same result, too: Distance from reality.

When we’re honest, we admit that much of living is putting up with shit we don’t like and that doesn’t like us. It’s a tale as old as time, but back before our creation myths were set in stone, it was simply a matter of survival. Fear is foundational stuff, and ‘fight or flight’ is going nowhere, even if we’ve outlived its usefulness on the grand scale.

‘If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.’

Ideally, my son should feel safest in his room. So why does The Other Bastian emerge there and bother him nowhere else? Because that’s where he feels safest. With no outside threat to perceive, he invents one to satisfy that deep-brain part of himself. That’s also why he won’t let me take away his mirror; the next fright he gives himself may not be as easy to appease as The Other Bastian (who disappears in the presence of laughter).

So… We need our fear? Indeed. Fear is called a ‘drive’ for good reason. It’s a damned effective motivator. And where we aren’t faced by clear and present danger in our everyday lives, we will invent threats to our identities in order to produce the reward our instincts demand: Self-preservation.

There, I said it. It’s all made up. We allow ourselves to be driven by fear of The Other. It is a completely selfish instinct we inherited from the ancient geniuses who also gave us the secret of fire.

You already knew that. At some point in your childhood you figured out that there’s a difference between reality and make-believe. After which you promptly ignored that inconvenient data and went on pretending about Santa Claus or [insert your favorite myth-of-choice here]. You did it for your younger sibling’s sake. You did it to manipulate your parents. You did it because it takes effort to be reasonable, and everyone else was doing it, anyway.

Here’s the news: Superstition isn’t bad and bias isn’t evil. They’re just dumb.

If you’re already arguing with me, I understand. I prefer to demonize the irrational, too. However, if I examine the matter closely enough, I must acknowledge that no survival impulse is a terrible thing in its own right. It’s just that we have few appropriate applications for them in present context. Nowadays, we shouldn’t be surprised if our superstitions get us laughed at. And we shouldn’t be shocked if someone jumps all over our shit any time we reveal our biases. That’s exactly what should happen, in fact, and we should pay close attention while we are getting schooled. How else will we learn?

What’s the difference? What makes superstitions laughable and biases actionable? Direction. Superstitions are rubber and biases are glue; we may do silly or stupid things under the influence of our superstitions, but our biases firmly locate responsibility for our identities outside ourselves. We may cling to superstitions in the face of reality, but it takes a lot of effort to make them stick when we apply them to other people. On the other hand, biases are all about sticking it to someone else.

Because it’s one thing to have a favorite food or to believe in a god. It’s another monster entirely when we start insisting that other people align themselves according the stories in our heads.

Ready to walk out of the abstract? I brought concrete.

I’m a good girl at last; I married a man. We even procreated together. What the fuck, but some days it seems like the whole world wants to give us a prize for the kind of sex we had four years ago while we were trying to conceive. It’s scary to crash a party like that. Who knows how the bigots will react when you drop the bisexual bomb? Will it end with the raising of eyebrows? After someone leers at me and calls my husband a ‘lucky guy’? Will it stop when someone crosses the ‘faggot’ line? Or will it quietly snowball until someday I’m brave enough to attend another family reunion and I once again find myself looking down the wrong end of a gun barrel?

Not concrete enough?

Go even further. Take the belief that color has inherent meaning. White good; black bad. It’s nonsense, of course, and if that was where it stopped, everyone who prefers fact over fantasy could safely ignore it and it would leave them alone. But no. Bias thrusts past the bounds of impolite superstition and into the rules of play. I can do no wrong because I’m white, and anyone black is bound to be a blemish on the otherwise flawless ass of civilization. I get validation where they get scorn. Furthermore, if they want to change the rules, they must remember this: the rules were created this way so that I could get away with murder.

People are that stupid and cruel on purpose. And, you know, just out of habit. We use biases to elevate and protect our identities. We do this even when we are at no disadvantage. Hell, if we’re facing no actual threat, we’ll invent a superstition and let that fear drive us. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not inherently evil. But it proves terminally counter-productive in the long run.

Meanwhile, everybody does it. You should see me react the first time I learn that a friend is a pot smoker. The cringe is noticeable and it ain’t pretty. I’m certainly not proud of the hypocrisy; my smoking days are a distant, hazy memory, but the truth is what it is. And yet my automatic internal response to finding out I’m friends with a toker is still, ‘Gross! I can’t believe they haven’t grown out of their idiot phase yet.’ That’s right. I think I’m better than all y’all mellow fools. Sorry, that’s just my bias showing.

No, no! Dig up, stupid!

We are all creatures full of myth, but we’re not all haters all the time. We can be reasonable. And this could be the point in the blog where I pretend I’ve got something to teach you about how to be a better person. Because I’m so enlightened, right? Instead, let’s just do like my son does when it’s time to give The Other Bastian a rest.

Laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Because in the end, we’re all children watching a crooked mirror in the dark.

(x-posted from the crossedgenres blog)

metafrantic and I will be broadcasting the release of our LGBTQ issue LIVE on U-stream at 11 PM EST. Come to the chat with questions, comments, suggestions and special requests. (I don't promise we'll fulfill any of them, but hey. Could make for an interesting evening.)

I just got published! I wrote a teeny-tiny piece of horror, and Tweet the Meat published it! It took 3rd place in their Halloween Jerky Tweet Contest!

*dances*

Gotta add this fun to all my user bios. XD

I am totally rocking the bed-head look lately.
( Photographic evidence of how I rock. )

Halloween party next week. Yes, I will be the busty chick wearing the child-sized Frankenstein mask. Tease if you want, but that green monster never looked so good. XP

If I'm ever going to write anything longer than tweet-length fiction again, I'm going to have to give something else up. I've done the math and there are just not enough hours in my life to accommodate all my little hobbies. I expect that gaming will get the cut again. WoW isn't exactly cooling my beans lately, anyway, and the rest is mostly garbage in shining armor designed to convince me that my artificial, in-game accomplishments are somehow on par with the frankly amazing mischief I get up to in real life.

However, if I have the game-slug surgically removed from my brain, what will be left to amputate in the name of making time for my art? I have art waaaay past due (I love you alalei and foojournal and all of metafrantic's birthday conspirators and the rest!), and not a week passes that someone doesn't ask me about the NotNormal Zombie EpochEllipse (webcomic).

Maybe I can convince Writing and Art to buy timeshares in my head. Trouble is, they plan their visits for the same days to spite each other, and their peak times always conflict with Sleep's schedule. It's one of those things where I can satisfy one at a time, or satisfy none all at once. My muses are bad company.

Aaaaand now I have that song stuck in my head.

Tag! You’re it!

It’s Action/Adventure month at Crossed Genres Magazine. Trigger our fight or flight responses, make our hearts race, raise our blood pressure, and take us on the ride of our lives!

Take care to read our submission guidelines, first.

Crossed Genres is also accepting submissions of completed novel-length fiction and novellas to be serialized on our website exclusively for subscribers, as well as "pitches" for a webcomic to run for a year in our ‘Subscribers-Only Area’. Upon completion, Crossed Genres will publish each novel/la and comic in its entirety.

Meanwhile, in our SciFi and Fantasy HORROR issue...

- Get caught in an infinite loop of your own design.
- Embrace your darker nature.
- Save the world and have your revenge, too.
- Create your heart out.
- Wonder, ‘If you have only nice things to say, then who are you and what have you done with yourself?’

Everybody wants me, apparently. I feel really good about that, while at the same time I feel terrible about it because it means that I inevitably disappoint...almost everyone, eventually. At least a little bit.

I know, woe is me, right? I can't seriously complain about such a desirable problem. But I do wish I was better at keeping personal track of each and every one of you dears. Social challenges. I have them.

Here's the deal: If you have my personal email, use it when you really want my ear and affection. I don't haunt Livejournal or Facebook the way I used to (for a number of reasons), but even though I get hundreds of emails every week, I read everything you email me. Even if I don't reply quickly, I read it.

Enough of this moody stuff! Now the News!

Bastian is almost reading. He's gathering sight words at a very respectable rate and I've given his teachers notice so they'll plan their one-on-one time with him accordingly. If the child is ready to read, help the child! Woo!

I've just seen the nearly-finished cover for Crossed Genres Issue 13. It's fabulous! Meanwhile, Issue 12 comes out in just fourteen days. Whoo, a whole year running CG. 2008-09 moved fast for us. (And hey, if you haven't read it yet, check out the current issue. The cover is spooky and the stories are...well, to die for!)

genrechallenge has a new moderator. jennafoo is great; a fine writer, a sharp editor, and a community member keen on improving the quality and quantity of participation at GC. She's also a dear friend, but that's not why I picked her for the gig. :)

I've had a bit of a roller coaster week as an editor. I had very pleasant dealings with the artists and potential artists for various future covers. I gleefully accepted a novel for publication, I sent another back for a light rewrite, and then...I sent out a stack of rejections. Accepting stories feels gooooood. Rejecting stories? Not so much. Especially when a rejection lands badly with an author. *shrug* There's nothing for it, just something that comes with the territory, but still not my favorite part of what I do.

My day-job is not the nightmare it was. I'm even busier lately because I'm covering my regular crazy position as well as some stray responsibilities left behind in the wake of the most recent round of layoffs. It ain't easy, but at least I still have a day-job and nobody's watching over my shoulder these days.

I did a little fan art based on rosalarian's cover for Issue 3 of Crossed Genres. Where she created something beautiful, I created this flirting monstrosity. I hope you like it.

It occurs to me that I have a lot of new friends. Friends who were not following this journal during the height of my Multiplex. You know, back when I had time to write my own stories...

You barely know me, but you've friended me anyway. Aw. I like that about you.

But just in case anyone is interested in getting to know me beyond my Tweets and what I do at Crossed Genres, a few fun links follow.

All the Pirate!Sandy stories live HERE.
All of Gina (the witch)'s Tale lives HERE.
I have a little fun with my Cintiq HERE.

I'll re-post the three installments of Voidlight later. They're part of an epic WIP... Like most of my projects, woe. ;)

Title: Pirate!Sandy and the Very Black Market
Genre: Fictional Autobiography with the slightest touch of Swashbuckler
Word Count: 5897
Rating: ~PG
Warning(s): Heavy on the sass, and completely unedited. Feedback appreciated.

( Pirate!Sandy and the Very Black Market )

I finally finished this request piece for wood_artist last night. The colors were a pain, but totally worth it, I think.

Horses are hard to draw. It is even harder to draw them in such a way that their backside appears to have been in a low-speed collision. Well, it's hard to do without making it look like the poor animal has flesh hanging off the bone...ew. I think I did alright, but as I was going along with the coloring, I accidentally discovered a color scheme that makes 'Crash' look like a zombie horse. I'll post that version closer to Halloween.

There's a story behind this drawing, but I think Poobah should tell it. :)

I did a new piece of Keyhole Girl-themed art while I should have been trying to get to sleep early. I just couldn't resist. Kind of like Keyhole Girl herself, I suppose. And now I will further emulate her by crawling to bed.

Play. Love. Rock.