Learning to Thread

January 3, 2022| cometary| 0 Comment | 5:33 pm

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A screen grab from a twitter posting: text is within blog post.

For my New Year’s Day new learning, I worked out how to create a thread (properly) in Twitter, in order to post my very first awards eligibility thread.

I know, I know, none of these are going to win any awards, though one has already been nominated (by the editor of the anthology) for a majorly major award. Nominations count; just being nominated is a huge, huge thrill.

But not everyone likes to hang out on social media. Facebook is broken. Twitter has deep wells of toxicity, Instagram is all about being pretty (and owned by Facebook), and Tik-Tok is … out of my league.

So in this blog post, I’ll try to recreate the Twitter post. I have two 2021 stories that are Hugos-eligible (the science-fiction ones). What awards do you know about that you’re eligible to nominate for? You might be surprised!

Let’s jump ahead now, and make this Not About Me. It’s readers who nominate for Hugos, and readers don’t care if the author is famous, made a bucket of money, or only managed to sell one story. Sure, the list of finalists is short, but consider–what did you read last year? What moved you? If you’re a 2021 or 2022 WorldCon member, you can nominate the things you liked. You can nominate up to five things in EVERY category. They don’t have to be the movies, stories, novels, or magazines that your friends liked, that your social-media leaders went on and on about. You can voice your own preferences.

So, pitch made. GO forth, write reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, nominate all your favorites for awards, and then enjoy all the new (and not-so-new) stories out there in 2022.

Here, then, is my Twitter thread. Do ya love or hate my cartoony profile pic? I’ll only put it in for the opening tweet; otherwise, it gets annoying in blog format.

The official awards-eligibility thread. In 2021, I had three short stories published:

1. a #scifi story about stolen land

2. a light #scifi #romance featuring a favorite 20th-century artist

3. an upbeat piece of literary fiction grown from #autism, #depression, and #optimism.

2/7 “Heart’s Delight,” anthologized in Fault Zone: Reverse, edited by @LaurelAnneHill and published by Sand Hill Review Press. An intelligent ecosystem repels those whose ancestors took the land unjustly, returning custody to its true caretakers. #SFF

3/7 For the record, I live on Tamien Nation Territory, bordering Popeloutchum (Amah Mutsun) land, connected to the territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area. These people are all, right now, working to protect this land, e.g.: http://amahmutsun.org/history

4/7 “Parrish Blue,” published by Water Dragon Publishing (Dragon Gems short fiction). In an elite restaurant on a climate-ravaged Earth, under the glow of a recreated artwork, a young woman rediscovers a dream of life immersed in wonder—and finds one who shares that dream. #SFF

5/7 I’m dropping in an image of the piece of art these two fall in love under (Romance, by Maxfield Parrish). Just because.

A fairy-tale castle stands on a hill, with peaks risin gin the distance, and people in old-time fantasy clothes gazing on the scene from a collonade — (Note: on Twitter, alt-text includes artist attribution: this is a photograph of a public-domain artwork. The photograph came from Plum Leaves at Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eoskins/5841870848).

6/7 “Reunion,” anthologized in Fault Zone: Reverse, edited by @LaurelAnneHill and published by Sand Hill Review Press. Two young people, separated in childhood by separate traumatic events, renew a friendship forged through shared suffering.

8/7 These are all findable via my linktree.

Glowy orange sunset clouds float over a cluster of treetops at lower left. With text linktr.ee @Vanessa_MacLarenWray | Linktree. Character-drive literary speculative fiction. Science-y stuff. Cats. Ponies.

7/7 If this story resonates for you, consider further research at https://autisticadvocacy.org or connect with mental-health resources in your community. Also, remember to reconnect with friends in 2022.

It’s surprising hard to recreate a Twitter posting in a blog! Go follow me on Twitter, OK?

Thursday at BayCon 2013Thursday at BayCon 2013

There’s a theory about attending a science fiction convention. It starts with studying the program, noting who the guests are, and planning out a strategy to participate every day and not get too worn out.

Then there’s the practice of being immersed in a con.

There is some similarity. One can see the relationship between theory and practice. But they are by no means the same.

What is important to remember is that this is just fine.

Take, for example, BayCon 2013, the San Francisco Bay Area annual convention. This year is dubbed Triskaidekaphobicon. Largely because this event houses the highest concentration of people who already know what that means.

For an eager preregistered participant, the event began the day before, on Thursday night. Last Thursday night, to be precise. So, for starters, consider plan and execution for this simple task.

Time Frame	What the Plan was	What really happened

Thursday night	Go to Hyatt on the way home from softball, at around 8:30, and pick up badge	A phone call delayed departure for my weekly session of cheering for the NASA Ames softball teams. By the time Great America Parkway was my next freeway interchange, it was just about 6 o’clock. So took a detour & stopped off at the Hyatt, which is sort of on the way to softball. Was the TENTH person to pick up my badge. Cool. They planned to put the first thirteen in the newsletter, and asked if that would be OK. “Of course,” I said. Double-cool. Asked if they needed “gofers” still, but the pick-up team didn’t know & couldn’t locate the Head Gofer person. (Hint about future: never did get signed up, and that was all for the best for Baycon and for the family Wray.)

BayCon participants embellished the welcome sign profusely.

Eclipsed Moon With Spica

A few weeks ago, we had a beautiful lunar eclipse visible in North America. It was well worth sitting out to watch the Earth’s shadow advance until the Moon was completely covered and glowing with a warm red hue, then retreat until the Moon shone bright once again. Here is a combination of a poem written for a workshop many years back, inspired by another lunar eclipse, with a few photos from this year’s event. Multitudes of astrophotographers caught fine images of that eclipse. This time, my equipment on hand was my hardy little point-and-shoot Lumix, which yielded many images suitable for artistic manipulation, especially with effects added by the drifting fog that interrupted our clear view. Mars was in view as well, so I’ll include one image with Mars. Can you spot it?

I watch the Mother walk my night, spreading her darkness through my shadows. She turns to me as the night turns, and I watch, I gaze, rapt in the music of her light.
Wrapped round and full in the stillness of this, my night, she draws in light and darkness from the sky, and sets them in my hands and at my feet, until the whole land is an image of sky, until I am full, full round and whole, wholly wrapped in the music within my darkness.
She waxes as the night wanes, and I gaze, gaze, until I dream I am a fish which has never before known water, and now, for the first time, breathes … until I dream I am a child who has never known her name, and now, for the first time, dreams …
dreams she stands with a woman, a stranger, in a land which bears an image of sky. The other, the stranger, is silent beside her, while she speaks to the mother as a favored daughter. As she speaks, I give back through my hands the light and darkness which is the sky until the land rests again beneath my shadows, until the child knows me for herself.
Even as we greet and join each other, the Mother steps over the edge of the world. Even as the stars first claim the sky, I breathe the mist of my first morning.

Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand CanyonSecrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon

So, for the next month and more, this blog, or at least most of its available posting space, has been claimed by a fan of the Grand Canyon. Yes, a fan of a really big hole in the ground. It’s not as big as Valles Marinaris, but there is still a river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which greatly facilitates travel by river raft. The goal is to take you along on a fourteen-day expedition, from Kaibab Sandstone to Vishnu Schist, through rapids, slot canyons, waterfalls, and thunderstorms, and along the way reveal a few of the deep dark secrets of these trips so few of us take. We’ll cover over 180 miles on the river plus many miles afoot on canyon trailways. Why use up a month to take you on a two-week trip? Because that’s what it feels like. You forget what day it is, how long you’ve been gone, how much time is left. If you don’t keep a journal, you’re lost.

I kept a journal.

I also took about 3,000 photographs and an hour of video.

Yes, there will be a fair amount of “what we did”, but I also want to share the background information the guides (and other travelers) shared with us, the additional tidbits I’ve gleaned from research (the addiction of the Ph.D.), and perhaps even paint the picture well enough that if you can’t go on this trip you can claim you did and provide your friends with a verisimilitudinous description. Just pick one of the falsified names in the diary segments & say “yeah, that’s me”. Also, if you’re a well-heeled adventure traveler planning your own expedition, I’d hope you’ll come away with enough information to know where you should not take short-cuts—and with some clues about how to find experienced, capable guides to get you through safely.

In the meantime, I don’t want to wear out your eyeballs with more than a few photos and a thousand words of gushing per post. There will be directions to see more photos, but, I promise, this won’t be a session of “Watch my Vacation Slideshow”.

Time for the first installment of Secrets of Grand Canyon River Rafting.

Deep, dark secret #1. Not everyone wants to go on this trip. Three husbands who could have joined their wives refused the chance to walk away from work, television, and electronic connectedness for a week. A young backbacker—who had completed the climb of Mount Whitney with his mother just a few months previously—turned down a free ticket and sent his retirement-age Mom on her own. She said he didn’t like the idea of not being in control on the trip. Another traveller’s wife sent him off with a (female) friend he’d recently reconnected with after a thirty-year hiatus, because the wife just can’t stand camping. His son, a golf enthusiast, only agreed to chaperone them if they took the shorter trip, to be sure he’d be home in time to watch the Master’s. Me? No, actually, I didn’t want to go on this trip. The only person who couldn’t tell was my husband, he was so excited about going. Why would this nature/science/ancient-peoples-loving photographer want to sit this out?

First of all, it’s frightfully expensive—if you want to travel the Canyon and not spend a fortune, you need to be able to work there. I am not the correct age or physical type to start a new career as a river guide. Nor do I have the right background or training to get hired by (or even volunteer for) the Park Service or any of the scientific research teams with feet on the water down there. So when my husband Clark declared that it had “always” been his wish to make this trip and that he had, after all, a big landmark birthday coming up, I made him pay for it out of his IRA. That was the only place we had enough money set by.

Second, Clark got the idea from a friend of his, a childhood friend who’s facing the same landmark birthday this year. When these two get together, they tend to devote a significant amount of our time to recalling those good-old-days. Days I did not share. Oh, great, my jealous heart predicted: two weeks of traipsing along behind while they play “remember when.” Well, I did end up trailing along behind, but not quite the way predicted. You’ll see.

And the third and most sensible reason: I broke my shoulder in January and my orthopedist’s solid opinion about my going river-rafting in April was: “I wouldn’t recommend doing that.” The bone knitted on schedule, but shoulders are complicated messes of tendons and muscles that don’t take kindly to the whole process. I was told it would be a year or more before I’d be back from this injury. My physical therapist did what he could to get some of my range-of-motion restored and added a couple of exercises to build back a little strength, but I went off with one arm fully-qualified to hang on tight and one that complained bitterly about any extension beyond a basic stretch while it simply refused to raise my hand beyond about 80 degrees. One upside was that Clark got to haul all my gearbags, because I just couldn’t handle them.

The other upside is that I would not want to have missed out on this trip. Even though we couldn’t afford it, it was worth it. Does that make any sense at all? Well, it will.

So, all right already, let’s go. For a teasing sneak-peek, here is a picture from Day 5. Oh, aye, it’s the Grand Canyon.

Learning to Thread

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Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand CanyonSecrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon