Black Swan

Black Swan was one of those films I didn’t really want to see, but felt obligated to because of the reception its getting. But as someone who isn’t a horror fan, is/was a dancer and has sex with women, it seemed like a recipe for stuff I don’t care about getting it wrong.

Having seen it today, I’m still pretty ambivalent about it — in fact, I am grateful for how little it spoke to me personally — but I can say this: it didn’t get it wrong. At all.

The necessary full disclosure before I continue this is as follows: I was never a ballet dancer. I was never training to be a ballet dancer, although I did study ballet and do pointe work. My main focus was modern dance, particularly Martha Graham technique, and I was one of those people whose technique and athleticism were not perfect, but oh, I could make you watch me.

Black Swan is a horror film in the tradition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. It’s about what’s real, external, supernatural horror, and what is a product of the mind. It’s a style of narrative that I understand both the appeal and horror of, but that has little interest for me. Everything I do is about the fine, fine line between fiction and non-fiction and to me what is interesting about liminal spaces isn’t confusion but overlap.

However, Black Swan is also a narrative about ambition, fear, mentorship, the rivalries of women, and what it means to be a dancer, a ballet dancer. And on those points, it nails the story its striving to tell.

The super, super weird thing about being a dancer is that you spend every, single second of the day making your body capable of extraordinary acts of beauty. It becomes a machine in serve to your art. And yet, it is never, ever yours. It is the dance’s, the teacher’s, the choreographer’s, the company’s, the director’s, and that of every single person who pushes you to do what it is a single hair from impossible.

Black Swan gets to that lack of self-ownership fast, and it’s not pleasant to watch. Because Black Swan isn’t about the beauty of submission or the (arguably) necessary brutalization of self in pursuit of high artistic success. It’s about abuse, debasement and the desire to disappear, not just into the work, but from the world. If you give up everything for the work, do you even exist without it?

The film is smart, stunningly so. As Nina seems to be slowly overtaken by the black swan, her skin ripples with goosebumps eager, it seems, to disgorge feathers. If you’ve ever been around a dancer as thin and spare as a ballerina must be, you know their flesh prickles like this easily at the cold — it’s damn hard to stay warm with virtually no body fat. The damage to legs, to feet; the issues of perfection versus desire; the self-abuse in the form of substances, sex, self-injury, and starvation; the acceptance of cycles of abuse, claiming, and disregard from others — if you’ve ever danced the way I danced, you’ve seen that stuff if you haven’t been involved in it yourself.

But here’s the thing — I don’t want to say that every dancer goes through this. I really, really don’t. And perhaps that’s why I’m so surprised that this film is such a success: why aren’t people angrier about this picture? Not of dancers, but of women? Can’t we have powerful female sexuality without it being the end of the world? Or mentors who use instead of elevate? Or women who are not starving, metaphorically or literally for love? Isn’t there any story of female ambition that isn’t about brutal, destructive, grade-school style rivalry? I get that good stories are all about anguish and extremes, but until stories about ambitious women have a narrative other than hate and self-hate, ambitious women are going to have to keep paying prices above and beyond the already terrible prices that the singular, monomaniacal focus that certain types of achievement nearly always require.

I liked this movie well enough. It showed and said true things and was well made. But one of those things is that achievement tends to cost women double. For me, that’s hard to watch.

But perhaps hardest for me to watch was the moment Nina locked herself in the bathroom to call her mother to tell her she’d gotten the part, and she’s whispering and sobbing because everything is different now. As someone who is still a performer and wants and wants and wants, I’ve pre-lived my own such moments in my head a million times. It was dead on. And even having gotten to the end of the film and being damn familiar with its truths, I’m writing this still wanting, still knowing, exactly what I’ll sound like the next time I get chosen.

I do a lot of stuff, in part, because “all I’ve ever wanted” is an idea that terrifies me, even if it’s an emotion I at least often think I feel. If it doesn’t already terrify you, Black Swan will probably fix that.

Really, really

A few days ago I linked to the story of Hadley Marie Nagel, a young woman who is about to come out at the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. I posted the link because Ms. Nagel is a part of the world I grew up in, and I spend a decent amount of my time both on-line and off trying to convince people that my childhood really happened.

Not that I was a debutante. I wasn’t. That best that can be said about my breeding is that during an argument during the eighth grade a girl in my class said to me, “You can’t talk to me that way, I’m a Daughter of the American Revolution.” In the world of my childhood, she was absolutely, positively typical, and also completely correct. I did it anyway, of course, but it only served to prove the point. Should you want a shorthand version of my childhood, run out and rent Metropolitan immediately.

At any rate, I posted the article about Ms. Nagel not just to showcase the matter of the apparently secret to most people world of socialite culture, but also to make a drive-by statement about my own over-achieving ways, the hothouse of my childhood, and why I really do tend to feel like whatever I’m doing is not enough.

What absolutely shocked me was the responses — all no doubt well intentioned and sincere — my post received. Many people posited that Ms. Nagel must surely be miserable. Or that she has pursued the intellectual and creative activities she has solely due to parental pressure. People spoke snidely of the way the photographs were staged and told me I was surely happier than her.

And to me, it just seemed to weird, since there isn’t a single line in that article that implies Ms. Nagel is unhappy or is controlled by her mother. I’ve been dwelling on the matter for a few days, and have come to a few conclusions:

First, we never do see articles about the exceptional and varied achievements of young men. Ms. Nagel is, as the article presents it (I don’t know her or her family; I can take only the word of the The New York Times) exceptional, and arguably quite worthy of the relatively fluffy piece in question. However, surely young men like Ms. Nagel exist too. But as a culture we never seem to display them like show ponies, do we?

Second, while I have neither Ms. Nagel’s breeding or wealth, and therefore had somewhat less opportunity that her growing up (although I would argue I was more hampered by social awkwardness and not being P&G pretty because we are a “pretty girls are good girls” society), I’m not that different than Ms. Nagel. That’s sort of a weird thing for me to say, considering I first linked to her story as a way to tell people about how and why I feel inferior.

But the fact remains that I am a relatively successful overachiever. I’ve been in feature films, have a book out, have published essays, fiction and poetry in places of note. Have been and continue to be successful as a scholar despite a lack of training in that regard. Raised $6K to create a musical. Ran away to Australia to study acting. I have sampled and been reasonably competent at a wide range of somewhat obscure or rarefied activities. Let’s also not forget the travel all over the place all the time, often for professional reasons (and if not mine, then my partner’s whose adventures are even wider ranging than my own). Finally, let it be said, that even with its somewhat narrow appeal, I have a remarkable face.

The only reason the people in my journal think I’m different than Ms. Nagel is because in my journal I freak out about stuff and say fuck and worry about the crap anyone worries about. When I write about me, I write about my fear, a lot. When The New York Times wrote about Ms. Nagel, the thesis of the article was different, that’s all. I’m quite sure Ms. Nagel gets scared too; and that’s okay.

And to respond to articles about people who are Ms. Nagels with “Don’t forget she surely has all sorts of worries and insecurities and stresses that aren’t highlighted here” is entirely different from saying she’s miserable, not actually gifted, or controlled by her mother.

My point here is two-fold: Despite how I initially felt in response to the story about Ms. Nagel, I’m pretty awesome (that awesome, in fact, just in my own way), and it is time to stop cutting other people down. Specifically, stop punishing people for achieving more or differently than you and stop punishing women for being exceptional.

Because seriously? I’m sick of it. It doesn’t make people who have done exceptional things undo them. If it does make people who have done exceptional things stop doing them, then shame on you. And it doesn’t make you feel better. It doesn’t make you bigger. It doesn’t make you get the work done. On the list of things I want to be really good at, making other people feel poorly isn’t one of them, no matter how much I dig JK Rowling’s Severus Snape.

Yes, remembering that significant achievement can be the result of internal or external pressure and bring unhappiness is valuable. But some people do extraordinary things out of joy, boredom, or even reflex; there is a different between inquiring and judging, between cautioning and condemning.

When I was a kid, people bullied me a lot. I was funny-looking, awkward and had a terrible smile. I was too skinny and often assumed to be other than my biological gender. But my mother would always say that the other kids were just mean to me because they were jealous; I thought my mom was a liar.

But to a certain extent, she was right. It galled the other kids that I was good at stuff without effort. It galled the other kids that I’d work hard at some things just to be better than them out of spite. And it galled the other kids that despite all my not off the right menu traits, that I never quite felt sorry enough for myself to stop.

Sadly, I wasn’t just bullied as a kid. I’ve been bullied as an adult, and no where so much as online. I’ve heard I’m not really an actor because I’m an actor. I’ve heard I’m not really a writer, because I’m a writer. I’ve had my photos stolen and emblazoned with ugly model because I used to model for artists and even once appeared on a billboard in New York City. I’m told I’m not really a scholar, because I produce scholarship. I’ve been told I don’t really have a right to speak at conferences, because I speak at conferences. And that no one really likes my work, whatever it is, precisely because sometimes people do really, really like my work.

I am 38-years-old. I’m freakishly accomplished in non-traditional and varied ways. I have supportive friends and an utterly bizarre relationship with the Internet. I am ambitious both because I am still nursing childhood wounds and because I am skilled. Also, it is a reflex — I am bored if I am not.

Bullies are liars.

And parading accomplished girls around like show ponies is obnoxious.

But cutting people down to make yourself or your friends feel better is a societally-induced weakness that often has a remarkable amount to do with misogyny.

I’m going to try to knock that off. So should you.

Ms. Nagel, keep being excellent. You’re too busy for this nonsense. And so am I.

Tangled

Over the last several years, the week between Christmas and New Year’s has become an orgy of media consumption for me. A not insignificant part of the reason for this is that I usually spend the week visiting with my partner’s family in Ohio. Since she and I are both non-drivers, our activities here are usually governed by factors we can’t control, which means we spend a lot of time watching DVDs at the house and a decent amount of time going to movies that we — or at least I — wouldn’t ordinarily see.

Tangled was one such choice, although Patty had gotten me excited about it via her favorite movie blog (sorry, dude, I don’t actually know what it’s called, so no shout out) when we were in Cardiff in the fall. For me, even the faintest desire to go to this thing was pretty odd as I tend to go for wrenching drama over family fare and I claim, despite my parents being artists, not to have the receptor sites for animation.

So when I tell you that you should stop what you are doing and go see Tangled immediately, you should absolutely listen to me. If you’ve seen any marketing for it at all, you know it’s the Rapunzel story. And if you’ve paid any attention to that marketing you may have walked away with the sense that the boy is an idiot and the girl falls in love with him anyway and isn’t that just revolting?

Well, that’s not what happens. It’s more like Rapunzel is Buffy Summers. She’s super feminine, and she doesn’t want to make her mom sad (okay, her mom turns out to be evil, and Joyce was never evil except when she was a fake Joyce), but dammit, she wants to leave her tower, even though it seems scary, and see these lights that have been calling to her, her whole life. And how’s she going to do that? Well, a thief named Flynn Rider (odd and confusing after having seen Tron: Legacy a few days ago — who wants to write me that crossover?), who’s sort of super competent but complete crap at applying that competency, has just stumbled into her tower. She’ll get him to help, and so they set off on an adventure.

And this is where, despite entirely forgettable songs Tangled becomes completely awesome. Because it’s not a story about a scared girl in the big bad world. It’s a story about identity, and the gulf between who we are and who we want to be and how we get caught up in stories and use them to make and remake ourselves. It’s also a story that absolutely celebrates physicality, both in the slapstick way one expects from animation and in a simple, real, glorious and human way as Rapunzel sees the world outside of her tower. The dancing in this film, especially in the one musical number without words, really does feel like dancing, to the point that for someone like me it was hard not to be up on my feet in the theater.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the film, however, is how much the tyranny of Disney gender roles almost isn’t in play. And it’s not a simple reversal either. Both our lead characters have traditionally male and female traits. The boy isn’t weak for being gentle and liking stories. The girl can defend herself physically, but isn’t held up as, or worse, vilified as, a tomboy (hence the Buffy Summers comparison). And while other people keep framing Rapunzel and Flynn’s interactions in the context of relationship stuff, it’s really the B story.

At the end of the film, the two do live happily ever after, and for half a second, Disney does the most daring thing I could have possibly imagined in a Disney film, and it made me want to stand up and cheer. However, after a pause, the characters inform us it’s a good-natured joke. Weirdly, though, I still wanted to stand up and cheer, because for Disney it was a revolution.

I often walk out of films wanting to conquer the world. I don’t often walk out of films wanting to do it wearing a dress.

Run, don’t walk, to this one.

Tron: Legacy

I have just seen Tron: Legacy, and it’s like someone made a terrible, terrible movie just for me. Actually, let me amend that, it’s like someone made a terrible, terrible porntastic militaria movie just for me. And, despite those two sentences, there are multiple elements of the film which are not only exceptionally well-done, but actually merit significant analysis, which I probably won’t quite manage to get to here.

But before I can talk about the new Tron, I have to talk about the old Tron, or, at least, the fact that I saw it on the big screen when it was released. I was born in 1972, after all. I grew up playing pinball when it was five balls for a quarter, and one of the first places I was allowed to go on my myself was the arcade seven blocks from our apartment where I played Pac-Man and Galaga and Centipede and, yes, Tron, although that stopped after someone got beaten to death with a baseball bat there and the arcade closed down a few months later. In short, I am a child of the 80s who grew up dreaming of nightclubs in warehouses, apocalyptic futures, and world where every boy (and me!) dressed like Adam Ant.

Which, if you’ve already seen Tron: Legacy is really all the explanation you need as to why I loved it so much in spite of its truly awful and unnecessary dialogue and largely incomprehensible collage of a script. Honestly, if the entire film had been made without a word uttered once they were in the Grid, it would be equally, if not more effective, that what we received. The visuals and score do all the narrative lifting (the score is one of the best film scores you will ever encounter); without dialogue Tron: Legacy would go from exceptionally executed frippery around a crap core to deeply weird art. It’s not a transition that would work for everyone, but I’m pretty near sure it would work.

What’s perhaps the most remarkable about Tron: Legacy is the degree to which it is a love letter, not to video games, digital media, or the Internet (a concept wisely excluded from the history of the film’s world), but to the stories in which we might wish to dwell (this is not, on some level, dissimilar to Inception which tells us the most about what it’s really about in the difference between how Arthur dresses in the dream and outside of the dream). Flynn, at all costs, at every cost finds a way to take himself into the machine — the world he most adores. And in that world we are treated to the visual DNA of dozens of stories we have loved, or feared.

I’m not sure how intentional it all is — after all us SF/F fans and creators know our stuff — and it’s nearly obligation that we reference our passions consciously or unconsciously. But off the top of my head, here’s what I found lurking in this film:

  • Torchwood and Angel – broody man pain on the roof.
  • Doctor Who – the eye-stalk here doesn’t just disintegrate, but reintegrates onto the grid; the girls that strip Sam Flynn and redress him (think Jack on the Game Station).
  • Blade Runner – the opening cityscape, Gem in her clear raincoat and parasol, and a chunk of dialogue that put me in mind of the “I’ve seen things you can’t even imagine” speech.
  • Star Trek – need I say Borg?
  • Star Wars – the robes, the meditation, the dual-bladed red light weapon, the gun-turret in the dogfight, and of course Star Wars‘s own tendency to visit Triumph of the Will.
  • The Last Starfighter – the video games, and again with the gun turret.
  • Cabaret – every single moment with Zuse.
  • The Giorgio Moroder cut of Metropolis – biplanes in the future! multi-level highways! Yoshiwara’s House of Sin! The electronica. It’s all hiding in here.
  • Apple’s 1984 commercial – which, again, owes an uncomfortable aesthetic debt to Riefenstahl
  • The Matrix – pretty much the whole movie, but The Matrix, if not smarter, is at least more philosophically interesting by being gnostic (especially the second one); Tron: Legacy is pretty much the opposite of that.
  • Babylon 5 – the ship that carries them to the army factory, some of the mythology.
  • Max Headroom – that boardroom was entirely “20 minutes into the future.”
  • Neuromancer – that chick was Molly Millions not just before she became a razor girl, but before she became a whore.
  • The Fifth Element – innocent perfect chick who can save the world; campy performer who winds up in the middle of the mess; weird partial face masks.

And I bet a bunch of you tracked on a whole ton of stuff I missed either because I don’t know the source, or because I was spending so much time being utterly turned on by this film that I feel as torn about praising as I do about trashing. If you did see stuff like the above, I hope you’ll share in comments.

But yow, this film was hot. Scorching, scorching hot. Which perhaps says more than any of us want to know about the impact my video game childhood had on my sexuality. But I loved the regimented quality of the film, the uniforms, the growling of the corrupted Tron, and a movement design (which was gorgeous — as a dancer, I knew the physical sensation of being each and every character because we saw the command to move before each move then executed through style and purpose) that seemed to say this is your flesh and it will be ferocious. Also, if you’ve got a thing for power-differentials, fetish-wear or mind control porn, this film will find your buttons and then sit on them for two hours, all without giving us so much as a kiss. Let’s say it again, all together now: Yow.

Finally, some of the most intriguing stuff in this film was the least explored, and ultimately was why it’s both compelling and irritating, even outside of the mostly awful dialogue. The re-writing of Tron (the program), will, no doubt, be a subject of fanfiction for months to come. Clu’s henchman who turns out to support Users — another great unexplored story. Zuse was amazing, and my vote for the man to be cosplaying at Dragon*Con 2011. And what was up with Alan? Because was it just me or were he and Sam’s dad totally doing it way back before Flynn, Sr. disappeared?

Anyway, it’s late. That was scorching hot and weird. And I only got four hours of sleep last night. So me? I’ll be in my bunk.

P.S. – I still hate 3D, but I am totally going to see that Carmen (yes, the opera!) in 3D thing. Because that? That is my life coming hilariously full circle.

romanticism and the DADT repeal

The DADT repeal got signed yesterday, and the rhetoric around it, which I mostly agree with, tells us this is a good thing. The hope, of course, is that a country willing to let me die for it, might soon be willing to let me live for it and so go on to pass things like ENDA and DoMA. On the other hand, getting excited about the opportunity to go to war – which, lest we forget, is generally an endeavor that involves killing people – is a fairly uncomfortable idea.

It’s also a romantic one, and as a people whose government arguably does not wish us to love and whose pop-culture paints us too often as weak or ugly, it’s pretty easy to see why queer people might be inclined to romanticize violence and uniforms.

Of course, romanticizing war isn’t something that’s limited to queer people in the throes of a civil rights victory. For a lot of writers, it’s practically a job requirement, which is what’s got me thinking about Arkady.

Arkady’s the main character in the novel Kali and I are writing. It doesn’t have a name yet, but we call it Unbanked in our work on it, due to our having realized that the best way we could solve a major world-building problem we were having was to use the European banking crisis as a metaphor.

It’s a difficult book. It’s about ambition, antiheroes and colonialism. It’s about people doing horrible things for what are really perfectly reasonable reasons. It’s also about love and war and magic. And it’s very, very queer.

In Arkady’s world, everything and everyone is a game of allies. And the rules of taking lovers, particularly of the same sex, are as complex and as formal as those for heterosexual marriage in this book. One doesn’t replace the other in Arkady’s world; in his world, families accumulate and extend through desire. Which isn’t a fantastic deal for a low-born, obscenely-talented scholarship boy with incredibly wealthy and dangerous friends who don’t make the best choices when it comes to self-preservation.

About 40% of the way through the book, after a precipitating hideous event about which I will not tell you at present, Arkady is forced to ask the people he loves most in the world to buy him a commission in the army so he can leave their sides and go on an adventure that may uncover the one piece of information that will allow them to extricate themselves from the political and magical morass in which they’ve embroiled themselves.

All of which means, Kali and I spend a lot of time talking about regiments of an army of a country that never existed stationed on a front at a colony that never was and how someone gifted and sharp grows into a man who is ruthless and calm by trying to hold things together at the muddy edge of his known world.

It’s a hard journey to write without romance, and it’s not one we’d want to write without romance. But it must be just the right sort of romance. As writers, we must be cautious where Arkady is not, where his lovers are not, where his charges are not, where the woman he effectively requisitions from her family to be his field secretary is not (and lest you think this is just a story about men, it is not; she is awesome and not the love interest).

It’s hard work. But it’s also pleasurable. It’s an indulgence. And sometimes, to be frank, that worries me. Other times, I feel like we’re getting it just right.

In the wake of the DADT repeal, I keep thinking about is something a Tumblr blogger who said the other day: “The military is full of poor people, and people of color. Now it gets to be full of queer people too. And you wonder why i’m sad today?”

That quote pulled me back down to a certain reality – as a queer person, as an activist, and as a writer. What will legalized open military service mean ultimately to LGB people (remember, no T here; trans people received no positive benefit from the DADT repeal) both individually and collectively? Will we use the military or will it use us?

Kali and I know everything about Arkady’s journey. We know what his service does to him. But we haven’t philosophically decided if that means he uses or is used.

Arkady’s a character I have a lot of love for, and the things he has to sacrifice are weighing heavily on my mind tonight. When other avenues of perspective fail me, Arkady has a habit of reminding me that stories are powerful, dangerous things, and that’s true of any through-line, assembled from fact or from fiction.

So the DADT repeal is great symbolism. It will also be a huge good in the lives of a great many LGB people who have served and continue to serve with honor, fortitude and courage and have suffered significantly and needlessly under the complete absurdity of DADT.

But I do wonder, I must wonder – simply because I make up stories to breathe – whether in the long term, in the balance of things, we will use this or be used by it.

The repeal of DADT deserves celebration. But it also deserves solemnity. And questioning.

the way onward

In January 2005 I was in Australia at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum when an announcement came over the PA system there to head to the auditorium if we wanted to see the first transmissions from Titan as they came in. I burst into tears.

Australia, where I had gone to study acting, was good but difficult for me. And Titan and I have always had a special relationship because of a film called Gattaca, which is about the highly stylized astronaut dreams of a guy named Eugene, born disadvantaged in a genetically engineered society because his parents decided to leave his form and function to chance and have a “faith birth.”

Eventually, through a business transaction and a subsequent friendship, Eugene is able to forge his identity as someone superiorly genetically engineered and so achieves his dream of going to Titan. His leaving scene at the end of the film, his secrets exposed to someone disinclined to stop him, always makes me sob. Because, while the film never tells us Titan is a one way trip, it’s quite clear that Eugene isn’t coming back. It’s in the music and the cinematography and the metaphor woven throughout of the way Eugene used to beat his genetically engineered younger brother at swimming races as a child; When asked how he did what he should not have been able to do, Eugene says, breathless and near drowning, “I never saved anything for the way back.”

For a lot of my life, I felt a lot like Eugene. There was all this stuff I wasn’t supposed to be good at — not with the funny teeth and awkward limbs, not with the heart murmur or the glasses or the wonky social skills. But I got wrathful in my ambition young, and the truth is, I’m actually pretty good at a lot of stuff. But that’s often been a hard thing for me to believe, and so Eugene and his borrowed identity of Jerome and the story of Gattaca has been a talisman to me since I saw it alone in a theater the night it came out. I have never saved anything for the way back — this is just one remark from the stories of men that’s become a tenet in the story of me. Eugene borrowed genetic material to be what he already was. Me? I suppose I borrow stories.

If you’re reading this now as I post it, you probably know me from Livejournal, and you’ve probably heard this story before. But this time part of the story is about why I’m choosing to tell it over here. Livejournal is, and has been, an awesome place for me. I’ve met friends there, and my partner, and done a hell of a lot of accidental networking that’s allowed me to parlay my obsessive interest in a whole bunch of pop-culture things (many of them of the SF/F variety, hence one of the reasons for the name of this blog) into professional work as an essayist, scholar, and con guest. In short: Livejournal is great for a lot of stuff.

Unfortunately, that’s somehow inspired a culture on Livejournal that’s often about excelling at things on Livejournal and cutting down people who excel at things off Livejournal. The first part of that’s not a terrible thing in and of itself — and not even relevant to the bulk of people who use LJ as a place to hang out with their friends, vent about their days, and connect with others who share common interests — but for me, lately, particularly in light of the second part, it’s become a little bit stifling. Being good at writing on Livejournal or excelling at social justice on Livejournal or having networking skills on Livejournal aren’t goalposts that are working for me right now. In some cases, because I’ve met those goals; in other cases, because I simply don’t know how to anymore if I ever did.

So, welcome to a new blog where I don’t do exciting link dumps (you’ll have to visit the LJ for that, as I doubt I could give my voracious reading and pasting a rest) or write fanfiction (again, something that’ll stay on LJ because that’s where the relevant community is), but where I do, do things like talk for more than three paragraphs at a time about politics and television and film and writing and making art and being queer and having a thing for custom tailoring and having grown up in a rapidly vanishing New York.

This place is named Letters from Titan because SF/F topics are both a professional and personal specialty of mine. And it’s named Letters from Titan because my life is more than a little bit My Life on the Geek List because of people I know, cons I go to, and speaking engagements I get to do. It’s also named Letters from Titan because I was once Eugene, because it’s colder closer to the stars, and because I am not ashamed of excellence any more than I am afraid of the terrible affair that seems to exist between those who are told they are nothing and ambition. It is not, however, named Letters from Titan because I am in any way related to a mythological giant who eats babies, but that can be a matter for debate if you’d like.

My name’s Racheline. My friends call me Rach. If you only know me from public online communications, you should probably call me RM. I do a lot of stuff. I’m pretty good at most of it. I’m also a slob and a procrastinator and full of self-doubt. But I believe in me and I believe in the future, all because I once burst into tears in the middle of a museum on the other side of the world.

I write these letters home to remind myself that I’m okay.

It’s nice to meet you.

Be grand.