For yet another explanation of why this might matter, here’s Deborah Copaken Kogan talking about her experiences as a female writer. And for those confused about why talking about what a woman does is more important than what she looks, here’s this.
I’ve blogged elsewhere about the Night Shade Books convulsions. I wait to see what happens, as do a number of people with a lot more at stake.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.
Talking in the Night
It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.
After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.
“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”
“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”
He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.
Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.
One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.
He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.
It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.
But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.
She answered.
She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.
And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.
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If you’re interested in my online writing classes, you can find out more about the live ones here or the new on-demand content here.
In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
If you’re in Baltimore at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend, please stop by the SFWA booth and say hi!
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Hey, congrats to everyone on the list, particularly Ken Liu, who is just smoking up the awards lists lately. I am just tickled pink to be on the ballot.
If you’re checking my site out because you haven’t heard of me before, let me make sure you notice two parts of the site.
1) Here’s a list of all my fiction, with links to the online versions.
2) Here’s a list of the online classes I teach. Sign up by Feb 28 for a special deal.
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