Sitting By The Fire

It is still cold as Frosty’s balls here at the Dragon’s Roost. I’ve pretty much taken up a permanent perch in the living room with the fireplace. I have my laptop in my lap instead of on a desk or a table (although that may change in a week or two, more on that in a future post). It has gotten to the point where Tesla will sit by the fireplace and stare at me with her “Well? When are you going to do your job and make it warm?” look.

It’s so cold out that when Tess goes outside it takes 15 minutes for the carpet to warm back up again.

Other than that, what can I say? It’s been an awful week in terms of weather all over the country. It’s been a worse week for democracy in the US. The government has been handed over to people who only care if you are rich, white, and have a penis. It’s only been a few days and the amount of poison spewing from the capitol is astounding.

What else is in the news? I’m too old to be on TikTok, but I do feel for those whose lives and livliehoods are in limbo. The latest seems to be a push to have half of the control of the platform turned over to a US company. I fail to see how this will stop the half owned by China from data farming. It almost looks like those in charge just want to make sure that their friends who run social media empires get to dip their beaks in (and of course farm data for themselves). Maybe I just don’t know how espionage works.

What I do know is that if we are only referring to people by their dead names, than our new VP is Bowman. Also, if we all have to identify by the gender we were at conception, everyone is female.

At this time I am still processing the loss of David Lynch. I may write something in the future, but right now the loss is still too raw.

On a more personal level, I have been spending some time preparing for the panels that I will be on this weekend at Confusion. As I mentioned before, if you want to hang out, look for me on Friday or Sunday. I’m booked pretty solid on Saturday with panels, a reading, and a signing session (I’ll have books for sale!). I have to jet Saturday evening for a S00pe4 S3krit date night. Look for more on that next week.

In a not so strange turn of events, my phone is absolutely blowing up today with notifications of early ticket sales for haunted attractions that will be having special Valentine’s weekend shows.

Listening To: I needed something humorous this week, so I listened to the Audible Original Constituent Service: A Third District Story by John Scalzi. It was a fun romp about a government functionary who works as a liaison between aliens and humans. After that I started listening to Road of Bones: A Novel by Christopher Golden. Because when it’s this cold outside, why not listen to a book which takes place in Siberia?

Currently Reading: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix. I was right last week, absolutely loving this book so far.

Current Obsession: The fireplace. Seriously, I think I’m addicted. I think staring at the flames is way better than doom scrolling.

We are slowly but surely filling up our dance card for the year. Make sure to check the Dragon’s In The Wild page for all of the shows that we will be doing this year. Keep an eye on the News From the Roost blog for further announcements.

As mentioned above, this is Confusion weekend, the first official appearance of the year.

I’ve been working on this ramble for a couple of weeks now. It started out as a comparison between the dystopian fiction I grew up with and the YA fiction of the last few decades. Somewhere along the way it morphed into what follows. I think you will be able to figure out why.

When I was in junior high and high school I would try to beef up my literary knowledge by spending my summer reading “important” books. These included classics from American, English, and Russian literature among others. For example, one summer it was American Lit, one summer Russian, etc. The deal was that for every book I wanted to read I would read one that I felt like I should read.

[Since then I have decided that the book that I should read is the one that I want to read.]

I’m not sure exactly what I was doing in 1985, but I decided to read Orwell’s 1984, Shute’s On The Beach, and Huxley’s Brave New World back to back to back. This may have been part of my desire to improve myself, or I could have just being a moody, nihilistic teen. (I know that it was 1985 because I had borrowed On The Beach from the library. I always had a book with me so I had something to do whenever I had down time. Naturally, I took the book with me to the movie theater when I went to see Teen Wolf. Like an idiot, I left the book behind. Losing a book is a nightmare, but losing a library book? Let’s just say that the thought of that is so horrifying that it stuck with me for forty years. And yes, I was able to retrieve the book.)

Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of time reading dystopian fiction growing up.

This doesn’t even touch upon the nihilistic traits that my other reading material had. There were hard-boiled gumshoes who had seen too much and trusted no one. Sprawling sci-fi where the main characters were pitted against the unknown lurking in the darkness of deep space. Epic fantasy where bands of heroes went up against powerful, world shattering villains. Supernatural entities who saw humans as nothing more than food or things to torment. And of course the eldritch abominations for whom we were not even worth noticing.

Then there were the movies. I did a quick search for “80’s dystopian movie” and came up with a number of Top 50 lists. Top FIFTY. This implies that there were more than that. And that is just the stuff that was released in that one decade. Naturally I had access to all of the movies which came before. Looking over those lists, there were a lot of them that dealt with nuclear war and the fallout filled wastelands that would arise from them. This only makes sense to me, I recall the threat of nuclear war being ever present. I don’t know if this is just me looking back at it, but it does seem like something that was always in the back of my brain.

Of course, not all of the movies focused on the threat of atomic annihilation or driving suped up cars while running from creeps wearing leather in the desert. There were also a ton illustrating how the world will be once the corporations take over. To say nothing of the cyberpunk movement and the continuation of “machines/computers taking over” themes of science fiction. This was one of my favorite types of sci-fi growing up and I still love it.

As I look at today’s bleak political landscape and ponder what will happen in the latter half of this decade, at the tech millionaires who stand to profit from the new laws, I take solace in the knowledge that I’ve been studying for this my whole life.