The Focus of Sunshine

The day outside is lovely. Cold, but starkly grounding and bright. My desk window faces southeast so I get a nice (sometimes blinding) dose of sunshine through it. This morning, it is most welcome.

My new SFSignal column is up. I was not prepared for it to be a difficult piece to write. The writing was made more difficult by a (rare) two-day headache and pain from my arthritic hip. I found myself wanting to write it more boldly, more interstitially, but I stuck to my purpose, to meditate about the idea. I think it turned out well.

When I considering being all interstitial in my presentation I wrote a few odd things, like this snippet of poetry:

So, how many conventions

or concatenations

does it take

for an interstice

to collapse and break?

How big are the spaces

between western and romance

space opera, horror

seven different fantasies

and a Gothic post-punk roarer?

But given the poverty of my poetry, I stuck with a more straightforward approach.

There are a lot of great pieces on mythpunk that have come out in the last week or so. I read a number of them for my SFsignal column but realized that talking about it would lead me too far afield. It was educational to read them, and today Paul Jessup has a blog post about the label, with links to a few other pieces, including Theodora Goss' excellent meditation. The energy that animates how they and others describe mythpunk demonstrates for me how genre/movement designations can create vitality in the literary field of production. The social and conceptual utility of such categories emerges quite strongly in these discussions, and I am eager to read and hear more about it.

But now, the sun is in my eyes and the curtains are poor protection from it.