Brazen Hussies

October 15, 2000

On Saturday me and Meg went to the city to see the Brazen Hussies read-- that’s Pat Murphy, Michaela Roessner, and Lisa Goldstein, award-winning women science fiction writers and three-woman publicity machine. The reading went down at Borderdlands books, a really lovely SF bookstore. Naturally I bought stuff-- Mikey’s new book The Stars Compel, Pat’s Nadya, Joe Lansdale’s Writer of the Purple Rage. I’m a big fan of Michaela and Pat and Lisa, all of them have written books that deeply affected me, and of course Mikey was my second-week Clarion instructor. I think I gave her a moment of cognitive dissonance-- she didn’t expect to see me, but she seemed happy about it... we talked about books, about how my old classmates are doing, about sales. Really nice to see her again, more so even than I’d expected. I like Mikey a lot, she’s such a warm and funny and wise and talented person.

And in other happy Clarionish reunions, I met Karen there-- she’s round and lovely and I bounced up and down with delight to see her, and we talked and sat in Mama Tomi’s Revolutionary Art Café (which has the best mochas I’ve ever had-- over the course of the night me and Meg ordered three). I can’t believe it had been over a year since I’d seen her, and that I’d never seen her before in the “real” world... I got to sit next to Karen at a reading again, and it was both a lovely nostalgic thing and a beautiful present there-ness thing... I look forward to having the chance to talk to her at length some time...

The reading was quite nice-- Pat’s in the midst of this wonderful Discordian-Pataphysician-Written-Theater-of-the-Absurd project with multiple personalities and fractalling pseudonyms, it’s quite wild... and Lisa’s doing a book about golems and magicians... and Mikey’s finishing up the Stars trilogy and then moving on to different and cool projects... they had the Brazen Hussies blimp. Truly majestic. And there were lemon bars, thus assuring my active devourment. I briefly met Charlie Brown, editor of Locus, but didn’t mention that I’d passionately applied for a job as an editorial slave a couple of months ago... thought it might come off as wheedling, which it wouldn’t be... that would’ve been an interesting turn for my life to take, but it didn’t happen, and that’s okay. He was nice. He had toe rings.

I got to chat quite a bit with Mikey afterward, and I got some books signed, and just generally got really enthused about writing and about the community of sf writers. A fine time was had by me, and Meg didn’t seem too awfully bored. I should do stuff like that more often... go to cons and such. I like the people, I like the common ground, I like talking about things, art and markets and techniques and even gossip. I don’t think I’ll ever be good at networking, or selling the hell out of myself, though I suppose those are skills I should attempt to develop... but I really like these folks, these kind of folks. They’re my dissonant fragmented willy-nilly tribe.

And on the ride back me and Meg had really intense talk about really deep and varied stuff, it was great, she’s so fun to talk to, I think I shall shatter into shards when she leaves tomorrow...