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Some story and book things for the reading public:

Martha Well's The Serpent Sea, second in her Books of the Raksura series, is available for preorder on Barnes and Noble, Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon.ca. I read an early draft of this and it's a wonderful, exciting, satisfying read.

Martha also posted a new story to her website, set in the same universe as the series: The Almost Last Voyage of the Wind-ship Escarpment.

In nonficitive land, Seanan McGuire is smart and impassioned about ebooks, books, and the question of poverty in Across the digital divide. I love my ereader, but we still need books, we will need books--and libraries--for a long long time to come.
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Dayjob has been and continues v. busy, which is kind of sucking my soul--or at least my enjoyment of daily life--right out of me. Still eke-ing out a bit of fic in the form of story being written with the talented impatientape, and another I seem to have been dragooned into, both of which have actual deadlines.

Oh for that time dilation thingummy, so I can have more time for lounging, dreaming, writing, yoga, meditating, and the enjoyable bits of life... I seriously don't get paid enough at the dayjob for it to be soul suckingly busy.

My contrib to the dysfuntional family day convo...

So, over at Making Light, Abi Sutherland is hosting the annual Dysfunctional Families Day conversation.

I went...and I find I can't post there, so I'm posting here. All appreciation to those posting over there, but I can't. I feel like I'm an abandonment survivor, more than an abuse survivor. I guess abandonment is a kind of abuse, but insofar as abuse implies connection (of a horrible sort) it's not the same.

And I guess I sometimes self-exclude from conversations rather than try to engage and risk feeling unwanted and unappreciated. So here is my contribution to the conversation, over here in my little part of the forest.

Here's the thing. No one beat me as a kid. No one in my blood family was psychologically abusive (the two step mothers and first set of step siblings were, but that's another story). My family's dysfunction was that they just weren't there--physically, emotionally, any-ally. My mom left my dad, and us, when I was six and a half. She tried for custody, but she was a hippy freak who left a corporate lawyer to go live on a beach in Jamaica (in 1970, so basically, no way sister). My brother and sister were 12 and 13 at the time and made shift to be away summers, and generally present as little as possible from then on.

I'm thankful that I have a good relationship with my mom now, as an adult, and I love her, and I know why she left--she was very very unhappy with my father, he wasn't there emotionally and his particular pathologies were already in evidence. I also know she still feels horribly guilty about leaving me even now, at 79. I'm also incredibly thankful for my sister, who did try to be there for me, a little, as much as she, as a confused teenager, could be.

But knowing all that doesn't really impact a certain emotional "truth" of my life, which runs: no one cares about me enough to stay, no one loves and appreciates me, really; how could they, when my own mother couldn't? It didn't help that my dad wasn't emotionally present at all, and set about trying to find an alternate family immediately--or that both of the alternate families had little space or time for such as me, the ratty haired distaff child. (The first step mother said she was ashamed to be seen with me.)

When I start feeling just kind of sad, unloved, unimportant and pointless, when nothing else has happened to make me feel that way, it always comes back to that, the deep seated feeling that I'm just not important to anyone. It can make seeing couples tout each other's awesomeness, and parents doting on their kids, echo bitterly for me. (I hate feeling bitter!) Makes me think, I'm not the most important person in the world to anyone, and of course, I feel like it's because I don't deserve to be, if my own mother...etc.

The feeling of being left out, not appreciated or wanted, all comes back to these family of origin issues, along with not feeling safe or rooted in the world, because all sense of safety and belonging, of being part of anything, disintegrated early on.

I get so so tired of feeling that way.

I have a lot of happy in my life and have worked hard to have good friends and a healthy self, emotionally and psychologically. Friends, writing, animals, meditation, these  saved me, and continue to save me, and make life full of love and good bits--as it should be. How thankful am I for my friends? Baby, it's huge.

However, the sad sense of being unwanted, unappreciated, unsupported, unloved always, always comes back; that's just the way of it, I guess.