This is actually backstory for the sequel to my first novel that I'm writing. But I really like it - it's not quite enough for a short story (and I don't think I'm good at short stories anyway) but I kind of like the way it feels. So here it is ... drafty and all...

Pkygy's Grandmother

    She sat in the kitchen, the hearth glowing bright colors, the day's cooking and cleaning done. Now she could indulge in one of her favorite activities. She had always wanted to write, spinning her imagination out into words, bringing new worlds and new ideas into being. It was also her most preciously kept secret. She had been told, all of her life, that the highest, most exalted role for women were to keep the homestead comfortable for her man, bring new Kinder into the world, and raise those children to understand what Kinder culture was, and why it must be preserved as it is. It was what the Kinder Exalted King had meant.  

She never actively questioned this role. She listened all her life to the priests and chiefs that told it. She watched other women, and some men, who chafed in their roles be punished, knowing she would not ever meet that fate. Yet, always, from when she was very young, and knew how to count the moons, she imagined different worlds, other ways of being. When she learned how to write, it was as if whole new vistas opened up for her. She would spend hours sitting at a table, or at her desk, writing on stolen sheafs of paper.

She could never have a comp – women weren't allowed to use them, except for the crippled comps that gave recipes, or solutions to household problems, or what to do when your baby had colic. And if she had used a comp, her husband would have known she was writing. This way, she could hide the sheets of paper in places that he would not look – in a chest in her closet, under the undergarments.

She had thousands of sheets of writing – many, many stories, and epics. She had created dozens of new worlds, and imagined many new cultures.

One day, about 5 years ago, she decided she wanted to explore the Breft. The Breft were the cursed people who had broken from the Kinder thousands of years ago. The Breft who disliked order. The Breft who scoffed at the Exalted King's wishes for them – who, in fact, did not even believe in the Exalted King.

She had wondered what life would be like without the strictures of Kinder life. What would it mean if she could operate the farm machines? Or spend her time looking at the stars? She poured all of her longing for a different life into the pages, creating new characters.

One character that she loved she called “Elfer.” Elfer was a woman who chose not to marry or have children. Elfer was a healer and teacher. She imagined Elfer's education, and Elfer's life. She wondered whether or not Elfer would ever take lovers. She imagined Elfer traveling from town to town, city to city, healing those who needed her help, and teaching more to heal as she did.

...

 

Pkygy walked into the bedroom, that had started to gather dust after his gamma died. He put his bag on the bed, which had been stripped of it's sheets. He loved to spend time with her, helping her bake bread, bringing in wood for her hearth when she could not. Her husband had died many years before she did, and she had only daughters, so all of her children left home to join the households of their husbands, and she was left alone. Pkygy's mother lived the closest – only a few houses away, and his mother was happy to have Pkyky take care of gamma. Pkygy had a brother, so gamma's house was now his.

Pkygy had been with her in the last days of her life, and she had told him of her secret writing. He promised to burn all of the writing, and never tell anyone about it. He opened the closet, and pulled out the chest that was shoved into the corner, and opened it. A few undergarments were laid on top, but underneath he could see thousands of sheets of paper, of all sorts. He picked up the chest, and brought it into the living room.

He gathered up a few loads of wood, and started a roaring fire, and sat down at the table next to the fire, and took a few sheafs of paper, and started to read.

Many hours later, the fire was still burning, as he kept feeding it wood, not paper. He had tears running down his face. He couldn't possibly burn these. But he could do nothing with them. His family would be shamed horribly if anyone knew that his gamma had written all of this.

The stories felt like the door he had always been looking for, the way to find somehow else to feel, somewhere else to be, something else to do. He felt that these stories had to be heard, and read. The only way he knew how to do that, was to tell people that he had written them.

He decided to start with one of the most innocuous seeming of stories. This was the story of a Second Chief, and his loyalty to his First Chief, and the sacrifices that he makes. It seemed innocuous on the surface, but if you scratched it, it was a deep questioning of the way things are. He got out his comp, and started typing.

...

"Pkygy Hostro Gnova” He heard his voice called. He had been arrested. He had finally published the story that was too obvious, too damning for his local Second Chief to tolerate.

He stood up, walked to the front of the room, where the Second Chief sat high above on a raised desk.

“Is this story, called “Elfer” yours?

Pkygy nodded.
“Are you sure? Are you taking the blame for someone else? There is no reason to take the punishment of, say, a woman you know who wrote this. And don't take credit  just because some of the silly teachers think it is a masterpiece.”
  Pkygy felt torn. Not that he wanted to escape punishment. He wanted his family to escape shame for his gamma's stories. But he also wanted his gamma to be known. It was a masterpiece, and he had been gratified, before he was arrested, to hear that from a number of respected writers. But in the end, it was the secret that he had promised to keep that swayed him.
    “I wrote it. I wrote all of the stories. Just me.”
    The Second Chief sighed. “Alright then. 5 years on Rostron, the asteroid mine.” He signed some papers, then signaled to two of his guards to take Pkygy away.

I felt like I wanted to check out what it was like to be a part of a critique community, so I joined Critters. I'm looking forward to reading the two stories I picked. It's a good thing that I feel like I'm not quite ready to have my work critiqued by people I don't know well. But I'm getting there. The Friday writing workshop at WisCon was really useful.

And I'm continuing to explore the electronic SFF landscape, and see what might work for me.

I had a blast at WisCon - my first WisCon, my first con, my first time sitting in a big room full of people who love to read and/or write science fiction and fantasy. What a blast.

I came home tired, but fired up to write. And I did. I added a few thousand words to my second novel, which feels great. I ordered a bunch of new fiction writing books from Amazon - mostly about character and dialog and such. I'm really good at plot, story arc, and world building - I seem to have a knack for that, but it's the detail stuff that I need a lot of work on.

And I also have to start thinking about how to find a place to publish the first novel (first in a series of ...?)

Lots to do, lots to learn.

After finding at WisCon that so many women and feminist science fiction writers were on LiveJournal, I realized that one way to connect with this community was to start a LJ blog. I've been a blogger for years, and although I'd certainly heard lots about LJ, I hadn't really known very many people in the communities that I was a part of who used it, so I started on a totally different blogging platform.

It feels like I am just beginning life as a science fiction writer, and it seemed fitting that I would start out a new blog - that seems to actually be the way I do things. I started a spirituality blog when I went to seminary, I started a technology blog when I re-entered the nonprofit technology field after seminary ... so here is my writing blog after my first (hopefully of many) WisCons.

I look forward to making connections here, and talking about writing.