I Like Making New Friends

Happy MLK, Jr. day.

I liked something else about All Tomorrow's Parties that I forgot to mention-- the bits about "lateral thinking." The notion that sometimes the only way to escape pursuit or avoid danger is to do something completely unexpected, something bizarre. To behave in a way that cannot be foreseen, even by yourself.

Ted Sturgeon wrote about something similar. He wrote about how sometimes people do bizarre, irrational things, by instinct. His example was someone fleeing a burning house, and later looking down outside and realizing they'd grabbed hold of an alarm clock as they fled. Sturgeon's idea was that the human mind, when faced by a situation in which rational thought can be of no help, instead does irrational things. 99 times out of 100 that irrational thing will be useless... but sometimes, maybe, it will be exactly the right thing to do.

I like that idea. It makes me feel better about all the irrational stuff I do.

*

I went to meet the writing group last night. I've been vague about who the members of this group are, because I wanted to make sure they didn't mind being written about here. The members are Tim Cooper (editor of Speculon) and Marissa Lingen (she won an Asimov's award for her story "In the Gardens and the Graves.") There's a third member of the group who I didn't have a chance to meet.

Tim and Marissa are lovely people. I suspected they were, from our e-mail correspondence, but they're even better in person (a marked contrast to me-- I'm much less interesting in person, especially with new acquaintances). They took me to a coffee shop, and to Marissa's apartment (which is filled filled filled with books! It made me very much miss all my books, which are packed in boxes in my mother's house).They fed me. We talked about books, and writers, and writing. I did a cold-crit of one of Marissa's stories. My comments probably didn't make much sense. I'm much better at criticism when I have a little while to look a story over and think about it.

I like these people, a lot. I don't usually warm to strangers so easily-- I even felt comfortable teasing them a little, and making jokes, when usually it's an effort for me to even talk much around new people. This is a good sign, neh?

They are talented. They are dedicated. They are very smart. We had good discussions. Lots of insight and interesting disagreements. It's so nice to have people who are familiar with the whole wide world of sf to talk to again!

Definitely a positive experience. Due to this and that, it'll be a while before we can get together again (though I'll see both of them in two weeks at a little RumorCon in Berkeley).

*

On the way home last night I drove over a pothole, hard. After that my car started making funny noises, sort of like the sound a spring makes when you bend it-- a metal squeak, if that makes any sense. It didn't seem to affect the car's performance at all, though, so I tried not to worry too much about it.

When I got home, I had to parallel park. When I backed up, the car made more noises, and it felt weird. Something mechanically strange, I'm not sure how to describe it. So now I'm worried. My car is old, and she's served me well... but I don't want her to be broken. I can't afford to buy a new car, and even an expensive repair bill would be a significant hardship. Just when I was starting to get back on stable financial ground! I'm going to nose around underneath her tomorrow, in the daylight, and see if I can perceive what the problem is. As if I can do anything about any car problem. My auto-repair ignorance is nearly total.