Making the Most of Cons (and ArmadilloCon)

It’s Women’s History Month, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of thing, it’s a topic that’s certainly worthy. I didn’t know a lot about the women’s suffrage movement in America until I was hired to teach an Intro to Women’s Studies class at Towson State University one year, having seen a flyer up at JHU where I was in grad school at the time. I frantically crammed a whole lot of reading in that summer, prepping to teach a class that covered what seemed to be everything: linguistics, biology, anthropology, literature, and more than anything else, history, history, history.

And in it I met one of the great loves of my life: a movement whose history continues to fascinate and inspire me, the American suffrage movement and the fascinating characters that moved it forward: Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull…and more, a cast of hundreds in a period that was turbulent and changeable and crammed full of social movements, including abolition, free love, spiritualism, temperance, women’s suffrage and a myriad others.

If you’re interested in it, a great place to start is Stanton’s own memoir, EIGHTY YEARS AND MORE: REMINISCENCES 1815-1897, which is free on the Kindle as well as on Project Gutenberg (as is everything I mention for free on the Kindle). Or the books she, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage authored, also available free on the Kindle, Volumes I, II, and III of HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE as well as the three later volumes penned by Ida Husted Harper, Volumes IV, V, and VI. Harper also wrote THE LIFE AND WORK OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Volumes I and II. (Note: I don’t see Volume II in a free version on the Kindle; if you don’t want to pay, I suggest going to look on Project Gutenberg and maybe kicking them a buck or two as a thank you.)

Or go to one of the documents that started it all, Mary Wollstonecraft’s VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN or her lesser known book MARIA, OR THE WRONGS OF WOMAN. Other Wollstonecraft available, should you cultivate a taste for her, includes LETTERS ON SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK, her short stories, and her novel MARY.

Skip ahead one generation to what Wollstonecraft’s daughter writes (and the wonder of e-books is that all of this is out there for free, which frankly to me makes the Internet the marvel that it is) and you’ll find FRANKENSTEIN, THE LAST MAN, MATILDA, and PROSERPINE AND MIDAS.

I’ll try to post some more of these throughout the month – there’s a TON of free reading out there in this area and the only problem is its discoverability. I welcome recommendations!

I have a couple of stories that were requested, so I’m picking away at those. One’s a military fantasy piece that I’m setting at Hadrian’s Wall, right around the time it was built. Another’s for the Glitter and Madness anthology, and it’s a fun structure I’m playing with, through which a murder gets told, revolving around a lesbian were-seal. Im finishing the revision of “The Threadbare Magician,” which is a novelette I’d like to get sent off this week. I’ve also got some nonfiction stuff.

I’m also finishing up (hopefully today) the dark mermaid story. Here’s an excerpt:

When she got home, she went to the tanks, curious to see what progress had occurred. She’d put the coral seeds in them late last night. The seeds were globes now, made of a glossy gray material, almost two and a half inches in diameter. She could see something moving inside the globe. Its sides flexed and bulged as the thing inside it shifted. Even as she watched, it shuddered and wobbled. Whatever inside — presumably a mermaid — was eager to escape. Should she help it, perhaps poke a small hole in the side so it had something to work at? She consulted the pamphlet but it said nothing about the hatching process.

But by the time she came back to the tank, the question had resolved itself. A rent in the side was rapidly widening. Through it Petra glimpsed orange scales and pale flesh.

She checked the second tank. There the same thing was happening, although the scales were turquoise rather than reddish orange.

The globe convulsed and collapsed. In a flurry of scales the turquoise mermaid emerged.

Petra stared. She had expected Sea Monkeys.

This was very different.

The mermaid was tiny and perfect as one of the elaborate little fish that school in coral reefs, colored parrot bright. Her upper half was a tiny woman, complete with blue sea shell bra hiding the faint swells of her torso.

She called Leonid. “What are these? Are they intelligent?”

“Of course not!” he crowed, pleased at his creation having deceived her sharp eye.

“But it’s wearing clothing.”

“Look closer,” he said. “All natural coloration. Or engineered, to be more precise.”

Her fingers were tight on the cell phone as she leaned down to look into the tank. The mermaid coiled, long tail writhing in the water. It nosed among the plastic seaweed in the tank, perched atop an arch of rocks and groomed itself, running fingers through its long blonde hair.

“You’re sure?”

“They’re not even animals, really,” he said. “Think of them as little flesh machines.”

The flesh machines floated in their tanks. Petra pulled her eyes away from them.

“Very well,” she said.

That night she set two more seeds into their starting buds, one white, the other purple. It amused her to think that these were Suffragist colors, the same colors banner wearers of the 19th century had sported. She wondered what a suffragist mermaid would look like.

(As a side note, if you’re interested in the editing class that starts today, 4-6 PM PST and runs today and two additional Sundays, drop me an e-mail or a comment, because I’ve still got openings. It’s a class that’s useful not just to editors, but to writers wanting to enhance their own self-editing skills.)