Surprises

[mrissa]

I am going to get this rewrite done this week, dammit, and that's the long and short of it. Mostly the short of it: it's a short story. I am bigger than it. When I was drafting Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain, there was some question as to whether I was bigger, stronger, and/or tougher than those books (or, for the delusional part of the process, that book). But I am. This week. Really. Even though jmeadows sent me to my room for my characters breaking the Russian Empire.

I am also writing space opera, though, because: zapzapBOOM! P'chiew p'chiew p'chiew! I mean. I hardly ever get to do stuff like this, and it has the dialog as well as the swashing, buckling, and laser weaponry. (Get to do = allowed by brain. No one else is stopping me.) And it's got running jokes about the translation of poetry. And, like I said, Alexandre Dumas and Patrick O'Brian and Woody Guthrie and Buddy Holly. (By influence, not appearance.) And biochemistry and neuropsychology and revenge and underground resistance and spies and long-lost relatives.

Umm. Well, that transition snuck up on me as much as it did on you, actually: I was wondering when to mention this, and I guess now burbling about my fiction has given me the moment. I have a long-lost relative who has come into my life this year. Nothing so close nor dramatic as a sibling, which is what my character has got. A step-aunt, whose absence from my life is not her fault nor the fault of anyone important to me, but...it's a curious thing, thinking about meeting new people one of these days and thinking of the alternate history in which the full-fledged teenage people you are supposed to meet one of these days were babies you hauled around on your hip at family gatherings when you were half-grown yourself. (I was definitely the kind of 9-year-old and even more the kind of 11-year-old who hauled babies around on one hip telling them about the world as she understands it so far. I explained about non-Euclidian cosmologies to my cousin Joe when I was in high school and he was in diapers. Most babies, if you give them a chance, incline definitely towards either the Big Crunch or the heat death of the universe. It's just most people don't give them a chance. Joe was a heat death sort of kid.) So...yeah. We haven't figured out a time for that meeting yet, but it sounds like it'll be fun and remarkably free of dire prophecies, enchanted objects, stolen birthrights, and all the other sorts of things that make long-lost relatives entertaining in fiction and a bit fraught in real life.

So, in honor of the space opera that fell on my head and the step-aunt who found us, tell me about surprises. Tell me what would have surprised your 10-year-old self about your life right now, or what surprises your current self, or just about a good surprise you had once.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Travel is another big part of the lack of adventurous grown-ups in my early life. Someone a decade and a half younger was telling me the other day that she thought we had a lot in common and that she envied my travels because she hadn't gotten to do much yet. That got me thinking about the traveling I've done, and how comparatively late in my life it was.

My immediate family didn't travel much. I probably got out of state before I was a year old, but only because the next state is maybe 20 min. max from my parents' house. I did not get out of the mid-Atlantic states until I was 13 (my uncle took me to Nag's Head, NC); did not get on a plane until the week I turned 21; did not cross the Mississippi until I took my first full-time job on the other side of it at 22. Did not get to Canada and Mexico until somewhere in my midtwenties, got to my first noncontiguous country on my honeymoon at 26, first got to Europe at 30.

We did go on lots of educational trips in our own city, at least - and there's pkenty to see there. We just never traveled anywhere else. In comparison, my husband traveled in a car from the Pacific NW all the way to Florida when he was 7 or less.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I had been to all of the contiguous 48 states by the time I entered college, plus parts of Canada and some European countries. My first plane ride was before I was verbal, and I was verbal early.

This was simplified not just by being an only child but by being the only child of an only child. Logistics are simpler, cost is lower, money was less likely to have been spread out on a bunch of people earlier, on and on. And this was part of what my parents considered when they decided to have just one: they wanted to be able to travel with me and to keep doing certain things they enjoyed, and to share those things with me. It wasn't the only thing that made the decision for them, of course.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Had I decided to have a kid at all (not anti, just ambivalent - and ambivalent is not enough, I think) I would want only one, for exactly those reasons.