Trip to Las Vegas…feeling put together
This one’s stupid long. The trip to Vegas, mostly.
I don’t even know where to start, which is a good sign that…starting anywhere is fine? I guess?
Side note: some people plan out, or sort of plan out what they want to say before they start typing. For me, it’s more that I have this swirling mess in my head and a need to clear it out, combined with years of freehand-written journals and blogging experience. I’m learning to trust the mess. Outlining doesn’t help me. I think I used to try to outline my non-fiction because it helped me feel less scared of not knowing what to say next, or in being too rambling in what I did say.
My one-year anniversary of writing these things is coming up (August 3, 2022). It’s been a weird ride, but I’m trusting my own voice more, that’s for sure–as a nonfiction and as a fiction writer.
I’m not sure what that means yet.
I’m more secure in myself, my relationships with others, my own mental landscape and sense of mental health. It’s been a lot of work, but none of it wasted or regretted.
I have a “day where the gods can’t see me” coming up, August 1st (Lughnasadh, or Harvest Festival), where I’ll pull out all the mental stops and review plans and make decisions that affect the next quarter. So I have a few more days to sort things out, gather information, *think* about things. Come the day, though, I’ll be doing something else, working out what I want to do without filters or reason. It’s always a weird experience, liminal, irrational. But also beautiful.–I think inasmuch as I can call myself some kind of artist, it’s staying in touch with that part of me that is the source of it. I’m looking forward to it.
…
I just got back from a trip to Las Vegas, a stay at Resorts World. I went to a class (Fantasy Thriller Craft Workshop) with Kris Rusch and Dean Smith; I wasn’t supposed to talk about the class while I was there. Which, fair. It always takes me a bit to process these things, and also I just don’t have the damn time. We wrote a short story before the class started and two more while we were there. Plus more stuff. Busy-busy.
The trip:
I took Ray with me. She did great this time, didn’t fritz out once. We were both exhausted by the time we got back and had to pre-apologize to each other (as in, “My apologies if I do something stupid, I’m tired, it’s not you…”) on Sunday. I highly recommend this as a technique for living. Some people will use it to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, but they were going to do that anyway. For everyone else, it’s a good way to clear the air when you’re tired/hangry/sick/devastated, but before you actually lose your temper. I’m a minimalist packer, so I just had the one backpack to drag around, and I replaced the clonker laptop recently with a lighter one, which made even THAT easier to handle. I’m always caught between the desire to be strong (grah!) and carry all the things, and the desire not to be exhausted and cranky on a trip. The new laptop and I aren’t used to each other yet; you may see a bunch of extra spaces in this post. I’m trying to catch them, but the laptop is space-happy. To the extreme.
The hotel:
Resorts World is a mall with a casino attached, quite dull. This worked in our favor; Ray and I went to the actual casinos on the strip and…it was a LOT more people. A lot a lot.
On one of our Uber rides (because it was too hot to spend more than a couple of minutes outside, as I discovered), the driver told us about the original plans for Resorts World, which were supposed to include an additional entire other tower, a bamboo garden with a koi pond, and more stuff that wouldn’t make the place money directly but that would just be “cool stuff.” Apparently this plan is not going so well, reflected in both the lower attendance as well as some legal problems involving some agreement about Resort World’s silhouette versus another, similar hotel that was part of the original agreement before Mariott took over.
(On other Uber rides we discussed human trafficking–it’s illegal to transport prostitutes in an Uber, by the way, even if you don’t already know they’re prostitutes–coming to the U.S. from Afghanistan–Vegas is hotter than most places in Afghanistan, and one guy who amusingly had the same powers that I do, spent most of the trip in perfect silence, as did we, and spewed out a fortune-teller’s worth of facts about Ray and I two minutes before we got out of the car, just to figure out which door we wanted at the hotel.)
Resorts World has a ton of pocket-sized Asian restaurants and no fourth or fortieth through forty-ninth floors (or thirteenth floor), which facts I didn’t figure out until after I’d included them in a short story. The elevators required you to swipe your room card to use them. The shopping mall area had a bunch of fake storefronts, and none of them that weren’t food-related were actually busy. There was a “sexual wellness” store there, very posh, only a few discreet vibrators tucked nearly out of sight.–It felt like a weird loop-around for Vegas, from Sin City to family fun and testing out how to pull off “discreetly naughty” or something. Didn’t look fun, though, the same way a designer fashion store doesn’t look nearly as fun as street fashion–or a runway.
As the week wore on and I tried to face the heat a few times, though, I developed more appreciation for our weird fake corporate backwater. Being in Vegas in July is just as miserable and deadly as being in South Dakota during blizzard season. Screw it. It was *safe.*
There’s a speakeasy called “Kitty Kitty” in the food court area. It’s quite fun, if expensive. I have pictures but haven’t posted them yet.
The city: After several visits, I’m becoming inured to Las Vegas, at least the parts I’ve been in. I always like things that are *not* the Strip more than I like the Strip. Once you get past the froth surrounding the Strip, the city becomes more like Albuquerque or Santa Fe, a flavor of desert community. I tend to like desert towns, but I don’t think I can survive one.
Jamie Ferguson, a dear friend and fellow writer, and I went with Ray to Omega Mart by Meow Wolf, which is one of those things that if you know, you know, and if you don’t, you don’t. Call it a combination of haunted house, giant art project, and escape room, and you won’t be too far off. One of our Uber drivers–I forgot to mention him above; he was the one who told us about aliens landing in Vegas a couple of weeks ago–asked me what it was about, and I said it was about the change from an older style of corporate exploitation, of farms and immigrants and natural resources, to a newer style of corporate exploitation, with TED talks and shit jobs and New Age guru-ism. Or something like that.
It’s overwhelming; whenever I walk into a Meow Wolf or something similar, I vibrate at a different frequency. My ADHD LOVES it, though, because all the different pieces come from the same sort of place, so it’s all information that fits together, instead of information that I have to work to reconcile. I do eventually get tired, but mostly it’s my body that gives out: feet tired, neck cramps, hungry, thirsty. I’ve always gone with at least Ray; I almost want to go by myself just to see if I can flow through the rooms with more ease. She’s gotten pretty good at moving through crowds, but I still have to keep track of her and can’t fully immerse. Maybe later.
After class, Ray and Jamie and I went to the Mob Museum off Fremont Street. Highly recommended; I’ve been before but still had to be dragged out. The Uber drivers kept asking what I thought about it. I told them it was good. They said a lot of their rides said the same thing. I eventually just took to saying, “If you like history, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you just won’t care.” They’d nod, and then they’d start telling me weird stuff about Las Vegas that had me internally going, “THIS IS HISTORY DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT HISTORY IS???” I think most people around my age are used to thinking of history in terms of the dullest, most irrelevant shit imaginable. A mark of having been brainwashed: you think, or at one point thought, that history is boring.
The Mob Museum is great. I love the 1920s and there’s a whole floor dedicated to it. All the Florida references popped out at me, now that I live here. I live a few miles from a big mafia center, Ybor City. Which makes sense but I wasn’t expecting it.
There’s another speakeasy downstairs at the Mob Museum; we all went there and had drinks. Mine came in a mini bathtub. I bought one from the souvenir shop and brought it home, getting rid of several other things in order to pack it in the backpack. I keep looking at it, going, “What should I make first?!?” It’s delightfully ridiculous.
The heat meant that I missed going to a writers’ lunch at a restaurant down Fremont Street, which I bitterly regret, but I was feeling sick and terrible (I think we all were), and sadly had to give it up. Much internal whining.
The class:
Last year at this time, I went to a Romance Spies class. I try to go to in-person craft genre classes that I think I’ll suck at, and I thought I’d hate writing romance. (Spies, I like.) So far, of all the craft classes that I’ve taken, I’ve only truly bombed on a Mystery-Caper class. I just don’t have the kind of brain I need to pull one off, I suspect. (I’ll probably never be able to write a truly on-the-nose cozy mystery, either, unless I’m writing for a client.)
I was not expecting to love writing Romance that ran off the rails quite as much as I did. The WIP (Blind Date with Death) is a romance-spies story that went too long for class. MUCH too long. I adore writing it; I adored writing all the stories in that class.
This year, with Fantasy Thriller, I feel like I’ve expanded outward from romance to love; all three stories had love of some type at their core. “Black Box Theater” has angels versus a love of humanity; “Ding!” has a father’s love for his daughter versus a mermaid-killing witch; “The Kitty Kitty Smoke Drink Club” (note title) has a woman’s love for an ex versus her desire to save the universe from her.
All three are excellent stories, if all a bit bittersweet. It’s interesting to me, how much the romance class has carried over into everything I write.
THIS class wasn’t as revolutionary for me, but it did unpick a bunch of things I’d been wrapped around the axle about:
–Pacing. I thought I didn’t know how to write a thriller. I know how to pull off thriller pacing just fine.
–Fantasy setting. I thought I’d struggle with establishing fantasy setting, particularly since I fucking LOATHE sitting down and doing the usual exercises that people suggest for building fantasy worlds. (Because I tend not to take classes where I think I’ll succeed, I haven’t taken fantasy or SF classes.) There was a world-building exercise for the built-world fantasy story; I didn’t do it. (Ran out of time and spoons.) It was fine. I told myself the story I was writing could expand into a new series, or world, or whatever, if it needed to–but that I had to complete an actual story to start exploring the world, in lieu of the exercise I hadn’t done. Worked well. I might do that again.
–Rewriting. Dean recommends something called “cycling” where you only allow yourself to do edits on the last 400 words or something. I’d stopped doing the kinds of edits that other people tend to do a long while ago, but I wasn’t doing it Dean’s way, either. I was still pushing forward as I wrote, deliberately rushing through to the end, then making “polishing” runs through stories before sending them out. During Killing Critical Voice, I started limiting myself to allowing change for only the last 250 words or so, with the addition of doubling back further if I needed to change/add a detail. People disagreed with me that this was substantively different than what they were doing (which was the rush/polish format), but I saw the difference in my own stories, which popped. It made a difference.
–Side note on process, I know Dean says not to talk about your process in public, or to lie about how you do it, but then talks about his actual process in public all the time. I think I’ll explode if I don’t talk about process; I’d rather deal with the backlash of being open about it. Probably I’ll do it differently than Dean does, though; confrontation wears me out. During the workshop I ended up saying what I was doing once, then not arguing with people about it.
–I ran into more critical voice things that popped out because I wasn’t suffering enough from my usual ones, and had to stop and clear THOSE out, too. I have forgotten exactly what they were, but I stopped to wrestle with them rather than push past. It’s annoying to me that I found something I can’t remember from the class; I thought at the time that I had managed to escape periods or aspects of not forming long-term memories, but whatever those new things were is a complete blank, so I must be missing SOMETHING, possibly more. Annoying. But I know that I know how to get around critical voice things at this point, even if I don’t remember exactly how I did it.
–Oh, the last one had something to do with “fast writing isn’t good writing,” although I don’t think that was the whole of it. I ended up writing the last 700 words of the story in a coffee shop away from the room, getting to the class late so I could type “the end” in what I was convinced was a placeholder for the “real” draft that I could do later. Turned out what I wrote was fine; I just needed to answer a couple of questions.
–Kris gave me shit on that story, the fun kind. It was one of the Gene Wolfe stories that I occasionally try to write. I don’t intend to write them so much as my subconscious cracks its knuckles and says, “It’s time.” Gene Wolfe was one of Kris’s mentors, so she gets it, sort of. She was trying to explain to me that Gene had no social skills, giving an example of him sitting down in the midst of an intense writer argument and going, “How’s everyone?” I just laughed, and she said she’d be scared of putting Gene Wolfe and me in the same room. SUCH a compliment I have never yet received!
The plans:
Jamie and I had a Borogrove Press meeting while we were both together, and tentatively made plans. “Now that we’re respectively not stuck back in divorce and/or abusive job-land…”
Fingers crossed. Good stuff coming.
…
Other thoughts. (I’m still clearing out my head, preparing for the day where the gods can’t see me.)
–Now that I’m not being actively controlled or bullied, I have a lot less fear and a lot more self-respect. This makes moving through new situations MUCH easier. I spend way more time talking to random people and making observations about the world around me than I did worrying about what could go wrong.
–I feel like getting information out of people is becoming a personal superpower. It’s funny. I literally talked to a former CIA agent about how to do this a couple of years ago, and mostly “we have ways of making you talk” is just active listening. I’ve always been fairly good at letting other people talk and being interested in what they have to say, but it’s starting to head towards superpower levels.
–Because I’m really three raccoons in a trench coat, part of me goes, “I need to learn how to do the fortune-telling thing that one Uber driver did to me; he was better at it than I am.” I’ll have to ponder it.
–A moment of grace hit me early during the trip, via letting go of an old misunderstanding. Still pleased.
–Found another spot over the last couple of days where I’d been throttling, mostly for other people’s sake. (I’m big and tall and fast, so I turn myself into De-Lite when I’m around groups of people so I don’t startle them.) Went to bed last night and woke up several times with a fever, weird dreams. Woke up this morning not feeling reset, but integrated, like all the good pieces and the bad and the ugly pieces of me were working together. For once, a whole person instead of whatever else I was. Still complex and fluid with my sense of self, but whole. The back of my neck hurts. No knot, though.
–I’ll have to ponder that more, but it’s been pretty cool so far. The thing that seems to be more or less immediately coming out of it is a sense of, I don’t know, “That’s someone else’s problem.” Where previously I’d bend over backwards to prevent other people from being bothered by my existence, I…just can’t feel the need to do it anymore. I’ll accept their limitations, more or less, where they don’t cross MY boundaries. (Ran into a couple of those during the workshop.) “You can’t do that!” “Bet?” But I don’t need to rewrite my own reality to make others more comfortable with their own egos or their fear of getting hurt/embarrassed/whatever. Sorry not sorry.
–I’ll probably struggle with this for a while. It feels weird to feel put together, almost like parts of me have disappeared. It’s probably like the thing when your house is clean and well-decorated, though, where the details disappear and “atmosphere” takes over. If my mind is working in harmony with itself, I don’t need to by hyper-vigilant about what I do and say and even feel. If something goes a way I don’t like, I don’t have to rewire my identity and personality out of fear of punishment or inconveniencing someone else. Not my problem. I am who I am; how others react to that is not my decision.
–Nevertheless I hope who I am is caring and kind, able to listen and defuse where others can’t, able to step into others’ shoes, able to be wrong, able to change, able to take in the world with wonder and humor, able to laugh at myself, able to take a second look at things even after jumping to conclusions, able to persist and endure. Able to channel hope and joy and grace.
Finally, it’s been weird missing people I don’t get to see in person, but I’ve been catching up on people’s social media and it’s been good. AHHHHHHHHH. My apologies if getting sixty likes on your plant/pet photos/memes bothers you…but I liked em. I still haven’t dug all the way down.
Missed you all. Take care of yourselves. Looking forward to the future.
I took better photos. But this is the one where everyone’s at least SOMEWHAT in the frame. It’s blurry because I was laughing too hard to hold the phone still. It was such a great moment. Imma leave it.
Midjourney’s depiction of the (fictional) Kitty Kitty Smoke Drink Club. Not accurate, but not wroooong, either.