After reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and realizing that reading novels feels different to me now, I pulled my very yellowed copy of C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel off the shelf just to see what I thought of it now.
I feel emotions now, on estrogen, in a way I never did before in my life, so that’s one thing that makes reading stories feel very different from before. Also, it’s been probably near 35 years since I’d read Gate of Ivrel and it’s interesting how while I remember the general concept of the series I remember very very little of the specifics after all these years! And now I’m part way into Well of Shiuan.
I remember liking the Morgaine stories, but I think now I’m realizing why in a way I did not understand as a teen.
Vanye did not exactly have a happy childhood, did not get along well with people generally, and ends up forced out entirely alone, where he meets Morgaine, who is completely alone. They end up setting off together and barely talk to each other, and Morgaine pretty well never explains anything to him, he can only obey whatever scattered instructions she gives him. Along the way here and there they’ll meet someone whose life is going downhill so fast they feel that joining this pair is their best option, going on some painful, frightening mission that they don’t understand.
That is to say, it felt very realistic! Just like real life! The usual stories always had all these people constantly talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff. Totally unlike how real life worked for me. I assumed it was a story-telling thing, you have this very unrealistic thing of everyone talking to the main character constantly, and maybe all the characters always talking to each other, so that the reader has something to read.
Now, as a woman, people actually do talk to me, tell me what’s going on. It’s very strange to suddenly realize that maybe the part of the story where people are telling each other what’s going on was not meant to be basically like the part of the story with the dragons, as far as how similar to the reader’s real life it is.
A long time ago, when I was still a kid of some age I don’t remember with any accuracy, but it had to have been before high school, as part of some sort of organized program that was probably a summer sciencey thing of some kind, our class went to Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicagoland (not far from my home at the time) and we got to see a research reactor there.
Now and then I remember this and wonder which reactor that was exactly.
I was looking at some Argonne history recently and tried to figure it out, and I think it had to have been Juggernaut. It was built in 1962 and shut down in 1970, and I wasn’t even born yet then, but it wasn’t dismantled until 2004. It would have had to have been idle for something over a decade if it was what I saw. My hazy memory is that they said it wasn’t being used anymore. They also said it contained graphite blocks reused from the very first (human made!) nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1. Juggernaut, indeed, contained graphite from CP-1. Memory is hazy after all these years, but I think this photo looks about right. I remember our teacher went up to the upper level to take a look at the top, but we could not because although the radiation level up there was very low the rules for exposing children to radiation for no good reason are very strict.
December should not be the month for talking about “X of the year” or “Y wrapped” or anything like that. All those discussions and summaries should happen in January. The year is not over yet. Get your act together
It’s even worse than that, I feel that it’s like Christmas, gradually creeping earlier and earlier in the year! I saw end-of-the-year-wrap-ups back in November! Soon, like Christmas, the end of the year will be co-existing with Halloween!
Last week I drove around an hour and a half into the suburbs of the city just over the state line for a work thing. Back pre-COVID I drove into and through that area all the time, but since early 2020 I’ve only been around there once in summer and this second time now. It’s funny driving the very very familiar highways again after all this time.
The last time I did a work trip of this sort was pre-COVID, something like six plus years ago, and it’s interesting to think about how things have changed. I was well into transition then, but I had not done any sort of body modification so I had a weird honorary-woman status that went really well for me but was always a bit unpredictable and I was always nervous about how people might react to me. So I remember deciding what to wear for one event, wanting to be nicely dressed up like some sort of serious professional, but also wanting to be careful to not be too weirdly visible, avoid attracting too much attention. I was never very good at estimating how that might work out. I certainly could see how women dress for such things, but there were not exactly examples of professional dress, feminine version, but for people with beards. That was just me.
So I decided that I’m not obligated to be maximally bold at all times, I wore pants instead of a dress, tried to be a little less visible. And then in typical fashion for trying to be less conspicuous, had a relatively baffling encounter with the cleaning guy apparently being very surprised to see me washing my hands in the men’s room. And then two women organizing the event would be on stage wearing bright floral-print dresses and I felt like maybe I was drabber than I needed to be, although again aware that it worked differently for them.
These days picking out clothes feels a lot easier. It feels amazing to be able to just do the usual things other people do and have that seen as just totally ordinary.
I’m also gradually unlearning the lifetime of social anxiety now that interacting with people goes so nicely and so easily. Everything is nicer but traveling to some event and meeting people is just so much easier now. I’m also starting to understand how now as a woman I’m usually much more an actual part of a group discussion, get real turns to speak, am no longer trying to slip in a few words here and there in gaps hoping I won’t be too disruptive but trying to at least participate in some way.
Have to wonder what it would have been like to live all these last decades like this.
I finished reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and it’s a heck of book, loved it, can’t recommend it enough.
I think this is the first novel I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got shelves full of the usual fantasy and sci-fi novels I read in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, quite a few written by women, for some reason (some reason) I guess their books appealed to me back then.
I didn’t get to talk to people a lot earlier in life. It was hard to pretend to be a boy, and I wasn’t very good at it. (I had no idea how bad at it I was until now looking back!) I suppose I always sort of assumed the novel thing where everyone is always talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff, was just a writing trope. Gives the reader something to read. It’s how you write a story. But really the part of the fantasy novel where the protagonist is talking to other people was similar to the part with the dragons or the time travel gates or whatever, depending on the story.
Now, as a woman, I actually talk with people. All the time. It’s weirdly easy. People at work keep me informed, tell me stuff, seek out my input, credit me for my contributions, and just hang out and chat with me sometimes. Women just…say things to me these days, since I’m a woman too. And I can just…respond, it’s weirdly easy now that I can just relax and ‘be myself’ and somehow as a girl being myself goes over well.
So, that part of the story feels so much more realistic now! Like maybe that talking to each other thing wasn’t really meant to be part of the “fantasy” part of the fantasy novel!
Also, I have emotions now, on estrogen. Like, yeah, I always had emotions, to a degree, sometimes. I could sure as hell feel anger and people made goddamn sure I felt fear sometimes. But I wasn’t reading a novel, or looking at a painting at the art museum, and feeling strong emotions. If I was feeling strong emotions it was because something fucking bad was happening to me. It is such a different experience. I had all these feelings reading this book. And now curious, I found my old, very yellowing copy of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and now forty-odd pages into rereading it I’m pretty sure it did not fucking feel like this reading it the first time decades ago. Did cis people feel emotions reading novels when they were teens?
The general concept of Wrath Goddess Sing is it is a story set in the world of the Iliad, the Trojan War. Our protagonist, Achilles, is a trans woman in this story. For me, as a trans woman, this is an extremely interesting story, and Maya Deane is a trans woman, this was written by one of us. And wow does it show.
And so Odysseus tracks her down and finds out she’s a girl now, and drags her off to war as in the older story. Honestly the reactions people have to her being a girl now in the book feel so much like the reactions I get, people vary, but, mostly, people have heard of this, oh, one of those people.
She meets a ton of people in the run-up to the war, and, again, now that I talk to people, feels pretty realistic. And, yes, the thing where she’s trans and meets so many people who knew her in the old days, I am old and have a long history full of people who knew me in my old days, and her meetings feel not just possible but entirely realistic, relatable, even familiar. There’s the people who were terrible to her. A lot of us, we were bad a pretending to be boys, and there were guys around us who were downright eager to volunteer to take on the task of making sure we knew, good and hard, that we were not doing it right. And others who were not terrible. Maybe you wish they could have actually defended you, but at least they didn’t join in on calling you slurs, better than the rest anyway. People who didn’t know her. People who didn’t know her back in the old days and honestly she’s not sure if anyone at some point mentioned her past to them or not. That’s an interesting situation, when you don’t know if someone you are getting to know better knows. Should you mention it? Is it better not to? It’s not at all clear what the best choice is sometimes. There’s the guy who fucking wants to talk about genitals. I’m going to remember her response to that, I might use it someday. Make them regret bringing it up! Somewhere in there was a scene in which someone said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, ’that thing,’ to her, I’ve been there, someone said exactly that thing to me, I too had to decide what to say in response, and now the demigoddess Achilles also has to pick from the range of possible responses! The fun knowing jokes with real friends, about how you somehow happen to know certain things, or your abilities as a shape-shifter. (Back at one time I was not much of a shape-shifter at all, and then, somehow, I suddenly became a very good one, I have no idea how to express how weird and amazing that is. Achilles had a goddess help her out in the story, I mostly had my electrologist, it’s not the same magic but it’s magic all the same.)
This novel is very fantasy, very supernatural. It is not at all a sort of lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in Joliet, Illinois in the late nineteen-eighties. And yet, for all the gods and goddesses showing up in this story, it’s the first one I’ve ever read where I’ve been thinking, oh, I’ve been there! I know what that fucking feels like! I’ve had to come up with a response to that, what response is our protagonist going to have! It’s genuinely weird for such a very fantasy story to be by far the most specifically familiar, relatable one I’ve ever read in my life.
We had a power failure the other day (car crashed into the pole!) and the five-year-old APC UPS on my computer only had a couple minutes of battery. The sealed lead-acid batteries aren’t really expected to last any longer than 3-5 years so that’s not unreasonable. I ordered a replacement and installed it today, seems to be working fine again. I decided to just order the “official” replacement pair of 12V batteries linked together into a 24V pair with connectors and straps to lift them out of the well in the UPS and so on for $100 instead of trying to be creative because it’s just not worth it to me. For the Linux people like me, you want to then stop the apcupsd service and run apctest as root to reset the date on the battery and run the battery calibration and the the self-test, then restart the daemon.
I just saw another Facebook “memory” from literally a month before what I later came to think of as my “coming out” as some sort of trans, in which I was saying something like “as a man, (I identify as a man, seriously I do) I just don’t understand…” and like, sweetie, dear, really, you’re a girl. Really you are.
