Birds Before The Storm

A bit of my molar came out just now while I was eating a waffle. Doesn’t hurt, not yet. I feel like, somehow, this makes me a little closer to Poltics Is Not A Banana with its constant references to “our rotting teeth.”

I’ve been traveling with my anarcho-sibling Micah Killjoy, who is another wandering soul and photographer. Anyhow, she took some lovely pictures of us (that’s me, then Calamus, then Enola, who, in addition to Micah, made up our crew down to New Orleans) along the way on the book tour. And she puts stuff online at her blog: The Forest Loved The Sea.

So… it’s already like a week into 2010, but I figured I’d do that fun year-in-review thing.

• I released my first book, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers.
• I released a photo book, Being the Adventures of One Fine Summer.
• I edited an issue of the Earth First! Journal.
• I played a bunch of music shows, though I also kind of got sick of what I sing and have been working on changing that.
• I did a mini speaking tour about MMLB that included Ithaca, Philly, Baltimore, Asheville, and Chapel Hill.
• I got over massive heartbreak and came out happier than I’ve been in years.
• I bought a minivan to live and travel in.
• I learned how to shoot.
• I started going to goth clubs again, and not just cause I was in the band or roadying.
• I finished my first novel-length fiction work, which will be released in 2010.
• Learned the basics of letterpress.
• probably some other stuff.

year in review? 2009 was awesome. Thanks, world. In 2010 my goals are to: use the computer less (make physical things again, yay!), get out of the country at some point, start a radical goth magazine, and get Colander Press off the ground.

Sorry, I don’t really design for the web. But that’s from a holiday card I made this year.

I’ve got a strange love/hate relationship with Christmas. For one thing, as I get older, it gets stranger and stranger, and is mostly the time when I watch my family changing. (I sort of see them in stop-animation, with one-year intervals). And of course, while I’ve got nothing against gift-giving (in fact, the economic system I advocate is based on this principle), the consumerist thing is obviously quite noxious.

I wish there were an easy way to reconnect to when Christmas (or, really, solstice), was a celebration against the dark… an attempt to bring joy into a family as it faces the winter, essentially a new years celebration. In its way, it’s even more doom-and-gloom and epic than Halloween. And I wish it didn’t involve tree farms (or cutting down trees at all) and buying a bunch of useless plastic crap.

This isn’t actually a video, just a song. And to folks in the goth scene, it’s mostly a played out one.

When I first got into goth, it was for the darker, heavier stuff by and large: the swans and skinny puppy. New Model Army, who aren’t as heavy but certainly aren’t electronic dance. I used to really begrudge EBM (electronic body music: the combination of industrial and electronica). I hated that goth music had “gone to shit”, had “just become techno with lyrics.” In short, I was a judgmental idiot.

And it was this song, Darkangel by VNV Nation, that eventually won me over. It’s just so damn catchy and danceable, but still all spooky and sad.

In the anarcho scene these days, punk is dead. Long live (shudder) Michael Jackson. The pop dance party is the thing. Most of my friends think I hate dancing, because if I end up at a party, unless I’m drunk I stand in the corner, maybe talk to people or something. My goth friends know me better: I love to dance. Hell, it’s the reason I wear skirts. (So much fun to dance in!)

This summer when I was in Portland, VNV Nation had some posters up on posts around town for a show they were playing. VNV Nation, in case you don’t know, uses futurist/german-expressionist images. Think of the movie metropolis. Lots of “into the bold future of humanity!” kind of images. Which is a lot of the same stuff that fascists adopted as well. So all the punks were in a mild uproar, trying to figure of if this was some nazi band. Fortunately, someone said “we should ask Magpie.” VNV Nation is not some nazi band. Goths just use different imagery than punks. VNV Nation is explicitly anti-war, anyhow. From their environmentalist song “Carbon”: “By our blindness and stupidity, we kill everything.”

Well, 40,00 words. According to the Science Fiction Writers of America, a novel is a fiction work of 40,000 words or more.

I’ve written a couple of novellas, plenty of short stories, and of course I edited a book, but today I crossed over the 40,000 word line in this fiction piece I’m working on. It’s not done yet, but I’m pretty stoked. I’ll be looking for first-readers in a bit, cause it’s almost done! I’ve been working on this damn book for almost two years now. About a year ago I scrapped a 25,000 word draft to start over again, which has been worth it, but of course quite frustrating. It’s like when you draw a really, really good eye, get all excited, and then realize you drew it in the wrong place and have to erase it. Only, you know, an eye that took you a year to draw.

image from apelad

Do you ever have those mornings where it’s quite clear that you are not exploring ravines beneath a town full of moorish castles? Nor are you in a temporary autonomous zone in the pacific northwest learning how to carve jade from an old hippy? And this is strongly contrary to what you were doing, just moments before, while asleep?

I think wanderlust keeps me going (no pun intended). No offense to Pittsburgh, mind you.

One downside of constantly traveling is that you don’t really have time to get a costume together for halloween. Or at least, I haven’t successfully in the past few years. But then I got to thinking about it. It’s halloween. I’m a goth. I’m allowed to just go as myself. One night a year where that isn’t weird. Might as well just be happy about it. Anyhow, this is my “costume”: more or less the same as usual, only with makeup.

As anyone who has heard me ramble in the past two months knows, I’ve been accepted by a writer-in-residency program in Pittsburgh at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse. While I’m here I’ll be polishing up my super-secret project that I’ll be talking about incessantly once I’ve got it done. I’m excited as hell to be in a house (well, two houses) full of radical writers, folks who can talk about plotting and printing while making dinner and drinking (or not drinking, of course!).

I quit myspace years ago when Fox bought it, and haven’t really looked back. Today I joined Goodreads. Anyhow, you can find me on there as “Margaret Killjoy.” Anyhow, it’s kinda neat, so hopefully I’ll keep up with it.