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Patreon Post: Aardvark Says Moo

photo of someone saying yeahAs part of recent updates at SFWA we recently revamped the Nebula Recommended Reading list to show up in alphabetical order. It’s a stopgap measure until the website gets re-designed, and to my mind has some of the same problems as presenting by order of number of recommendations. In musing that over, I mentioned to webmaster Jeremy Tolbert that I looked forward to the new school of aardvarkpunk we were inspiring. A half hour later this story appeared in my head.

This is a Patreon story, published thanks to the generous support of my patrons on there; they get access to the Chez Rambo Discord server, additional sponsor-only snippets and stories, plus sneak peeks at new drafts, discounts on Rambo Academy for Wayward Writer classes, and a chance to win my monthly giveaway. If you’d like to support indie publishing plus get stories, sign up to support me there!

Aardvark Says Moo

“Aardvark says moo,” says the clown, handing over the balloon animal.

My overly precocious kid squints her eyes. “No they don’t.” She folds her arms. No eight year old should be that definite about anything. Whatever happened to the idea of childish sense of wonder?

“I was being whimsical,” the clown explains. “Do you understand what that word means, little girl?”

Now he’s gone and done it. I could have warned him, but no one had consulted me since moment one of this interaction. The kid went up, the clown looked at her and started twisting a pink balloon around, and then he had to start being all whimsical.

“Whimsy,” my child says, “is playfully quaint or fanciful. A talking aardvark impersonating a cow is just dumb.”

At this point, a supernatural element enters my story. You may think it’d be something subtle, maybe the sort of knife edged was-it-real-or-not stratagem that Henry James could employ, but the fact of the matter was that it was a Valkyrie, walking up to look us over.

Maybe a woman dressed like a Valkyrie, you’re thinking. A costume party might have occurred to you, maybe, which means you’re going off on a total tangent, so lemme say this. Kid’s birthday party. Bouncy castle, hot dogs, cake. The only costume was the clown’s, and it wasn’t a particularly inspired one.

The Valkyrie moreover is real. Realer than real. Like a black hole of realness that made everything around her look like faded plastic. Her armor is made of golden scales. She smells like ozone and honey and looks like an angry supermodel with no makeup. She says, “Kyle Holiday, I have foretold that you die in the line of duty tonight but I will take you to Valhalla.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s been some mistake,” the clown says. “That’s my name, but I’m not going to die.”

“No one thinks they’re going to die,” the Valkyrie says significantly.

“Hang on,” my kid says. “This is my best friend’s birthday party and no one should die at it. She’s delicate. She’ll be traumatized for years. Take it elsewhere. What’s he supposed to die of, anyway?”

The Valkyrie listens to the air for a moment. “Peanut allergy.”

“I’m allergic to peanuts,” clown Kyle says cautiously, “but that’s why I don’t eat anything at these gigs.”

The Valkyrie shrugs.

“No, I mean it,” my kid says. “No one’s dying.” She grabs a napkin from the table and holds it out to the clown. “Maybe you breathe in some peanut particles. Tie this over your nose and face. Then get out. Better a flaky clown than a dead one.”

The Valkyrie says, “Who are you, to interfere with a hero’s death?”

“One, my name is Anna Louise Mayhew,” my kid says, her chin pointed at the Valkyrie, “and two, he’s at a kid’s birthday party.”

This Valkyrie listens to the air some more. This time it takes longer, and she gets a funny look on her face halfway through.

“Well,” she says, when she finally returns her attention to us, “he dies while working. There’s not that many clearly defined hero’s deaths around any more, but he faces down countless children.”

“And delights them,” she adds as an afterthought. She reaches out and tweaks the napkin off the clown’s face. “You don’t need that. You’ll like Valhalla.” She looks at my kid. “You’re Anna Louise Mayhew, huh?”

Something about the way she says it makes me step up and say, “Anna, why don’t you walk your friend to the gate?” I fold my arms, look the Valkyrie over. She’s about twice my size, could snap me like a twig, but she seems relaxed about it all. I say, “How do you know her name?”

“I take her, later on,” the Valkyrie said. “We always future-remember the important ones.”

I’m torn between pride and horror. “What? When?”

“Relax,” the Valkyrie says. She takes a piece of cake and it’s somehow reassuring, makes her seem a little less real and more like someone in a costume. “Not till long after you’re dead. They coax her out of retirement for it. She wins and saves humanity.”

I don’t really want to know anything more than that. I say, “So you’ll forgive her saving the clown?”

“It’s kinda pathetic, taking a clown to Valhalla,” she says. “Sometimes someone screws up the paperwork. This might be one of those times.”

Anna comes back and stands looking at the Valkyrie. I can’t tell if it’s fear or admiration or something else. I imagine her as a little old lady, facing down some unguessable enemy, that same solemn expression. The Valkyrie wanders off and vanishes into sparks that travel up into the sky. No one else seems to notice.

These sorts of things happen around my kid a lot, I’ve noticed. I say, “You were kinda hard on that clown about the moo thing.”

“Well, maybe,” she says. “I don’t like whimsy, though. Aardvark goes moo, how twee is that?”

I bet that Valkyrie’s looking forward to seeing her again.

14 Responses

  1. Nice. I actually like Valkyries (the opera, too) and this one was handled with respect. Kudos.

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Free Ebooks for Women's History Month

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony
One of my favorite pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony, late in their lives.
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!

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Putting Your Work Through the Mill: The Submissions Grinder

Screenshot from the Submissions GrinderAs a follow-up to Sylvia’s guest post about Submitomancy, I asked David Steffen, who’s working on a similar project for a Duotrope replacement, to write about his Submissions Grinder. Here’s David:

The announcement in late 2012 that Duotrope was going paid caused a (relative) uproar in the writing community. The problem wasn’t that they wanted money. It was that requiring a subscription fee to use
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Anthony Sullivan and I have created a replacement, called the Submission Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/), with the intent of milling your submissions into something useful… Because we’re hosting this new project as a subodmain of our zine Diabolical Plots (http://www.diabolicalplots.com/) we wanted the name to sound like something the mad scientist of our site art would invent and use.

We are starting out with the promise that we will never charge a compulsory fee for subscription. We think that’s the primary way where Duotrope has gone wrong, in driving away the data. We may open for donations at some point, and may run some kind of Kickstarter campaign. But rather than ask the world to donate to us for a theoretical product, we would rather provide a concrete product that people can use, soon enough after January 1st to allow a decent handoff, and then ask for donations from people who like what we have provided at a later time.

Phase One of our project is complete, in which the goal was to create something that could replace Duotrope’s functionality as close to January 1st as possible. And we’re there, with market listings, a submissions tracker, and compiled statistics. The site is in beta right now as we resolve some issues, but it gets better every day and there is daily development work being done on it. We are the first site aiming at the Duotrope userbase to become available for use.

The next phase involves adding new features that Duotrope has never provided, including new statistics based on only your own works, visualization of submissions data (rather than only numbers), and more!

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  1. Register on the site.
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