All Eyes on Me

I just remembered something that kind of made me laugh.

Years ago, I was writing a small, short, funny larp that was supposed to capture the feel of the Blandings stories of P.G. Wodehouse. None of his characters, but that kind of silly rich people in that kind of Interwar British country world. In that vein, I wrote a character kind of like the Honorable Freddie Threepwood, a good-natured but stupid posh ne'er-do-well, whom I named Gavin Alaric Post II-- in honor of his mother's beloved late bichon frisé, whose portrait still hung on the manor wall, to remind the second Gavin of all he could never live up to.

(That is, in my opinion, the second best joke in the game. The first is, of course, the reason why the earl's prize show pig Persephone is currently unable to compete, having come down with a case of porcine ennui.)

Anyway, one of Gavin's current problems, as shiftless Wodehouse gentlemen of his station are wont, is that he has fallen in love with a chorus girl, but already has a history of romantic entanglement with her sister. I decided to name his current lady love Bonnie Day as a bit of a cute pun, "bonne ideé" being the French for "good idea." It struck me then, that it might be equally amusing to call his former paramour "Molly Day," as my schoolgirl French led me to remember that "mal" is often the word for "bad".

I was feeling quite pleased with myself until, out of an abundance of prudence, I happen to actually look up how you say "bad idea" in French-- which as it turns out, is not "mal ideé" but actually "mauvais ideé". Yet again, I fail my many, many years of French education! I was quite put out, since I was feeling so smug in my own cleverness.

I can't remember if I used it anyway. Heh, I probably did. Even if it may have made me look dumb rather than clever! But I just laughed so much at the idea, I don't know if I could resist...

For the first time as an adult and after many, many years, I have made my favorite dessert as a child— a chocolate dream pie in an Oreo crust.

My mother wouldn’t make a lot of processed desserts when we were growing up, but this is the one. Dream whip mixed with pudding mix and milk, beaten to a fluffy consistency and chilled, in a crust made out of Oreo cookies. My favorite thing to eat in the world as a little kid.

My tastes as an adult don’t run as a sweet as they did when I was a kid, so I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll like it anymore. But it’s chilling in the fridge now, and I’m excited to try.



I have sampled it now. It’s a LOT, so I can’t exactly inhale it the way I used to when I was little. But it’s very tasty, and even though I’m not a person with a lot of sensory memories, I took a bite and it tasted like a dozen Christmases. 🙂 That made me smile.

There's a writer whose work I really loved by the name of Christine Morgan.

She's not famous, or at least not more than Internet-famous, and only back in the early days of the concept. I came upon her when I was in high school or so, when I was rediscovering my love for the 90s Disney animated show "Gargoyles." She was known as basically THE premier writer of Gargoyles fan fiction. She wrote over a hundred stories, including multi-installment spinoffs, building upon the existing narrative to make her own decades-spanning cosmology, and it was wonderful. Beautifully written, evocative, cohesive, engaging, and often sexy— her stories were the first erotica I ever read. I followed her obsessively for years, and she never disappointed, even when she brought her massive series to a conclusion to focus on original work. She captured the tone of the show so effectively, she used words so masterfully, she carried out character arcs so powerfully. The way she wrote Goliath and Elisa had a profound impact on the way I think of romance to this day.

When she transitioned to mostly original work, I followed her into that as well. She was an old-school roleplay gamer, and published novels that took place in a campaign setting she'd made. Generally I dislike "game fiction" for the way it tends to sacrifice literary merit for gratifying its creator, but she even made that work. I even bought horror novels— which at the time I was a little ooky about —because she wrote them. As time went by, I kind of lost track of her, but to this day I truly believe she is a great writer.

But even though she's still writing to this day, it strikes me that she never really... made it. Most if not all of her novels, including those early ones that I read, are self-published. She seems to fairly regularly get stories in fantasy, horror, or erotica anthologies, but they all appear to be what could charitably be described as "indie press." I mean no disrespect, as God knows what a rough game writing is, but I kind of expected more. She genuinely has the skill. And she could get shit DONE; she always wrote so fast, and generated an incredible amount of work. Why did she never manage to get published— at least, by any entity that seems at all serious, or at least not incredibly niche?

Was that not her goal? Did she not submit to more mainstream publishers? Was she bad at querying and couldn't get attention? Was the nature of her work— often kind of grindhouse-y in subject matter, like extreme horror or straight-up pornographic — prohibitive to that? Or did she just never get picked up, despite the fact that she really could put a story together? How could someone so talented have stayed so... small time?

I don't know. Maybe to her, she's exactly where she wants to be, with exactly the career she aimed for. But I guess, with my toxic level of ambition, I couldn't help but expect more. It kind of haunts me. If she couldn't really make it— someone with talent, creativity, and an incredible work ethic —what chance do the rest of us have?

Every time I see the cultural impact the film The Princess Bride has had, at least in the nerd community, I think of a kid I went to high school with. His name, if I remember correctly, was Jared Miller, and he said Princess Bride was his favorite movie. But most of the other kids didn't really know it, or at least didn't get it. They I think judged it mostly from the title, and thought it was either too girly or else a kiddie movie, so he always got a lot of shit for it. Nothing that intense, as I recall, but nobody understood why that would be the favorite movie of a teenaged boy. I remember respecting him because he didn't back down from his professed liking of the film just because other kids made fun of him for it.

It wasn't until I got to college that I met a lot of people who appreciated The Princess Bride. I always wondered if it was the same for him, and if he ever eventually met people who realized that he was ahead of that particular cultural curve. I didn't know Jared Miller that well. I don't remember much else about him. But I think of him sometimes because of that movie. And I hope that when he moved on in life, he encountered people who got it, and it validated him.

Today would have been my mother's sixty-third birthday. My dad took this picture of a page of one of her journals and sent it today:



She was a big fan of Dune and said that a lot. We put it on her prayer card at her funeral. I always think of her when I hear it.

I haven't actually read Dune. Weird, since I'm the only real nerd in my family, but all the others love it. I should get to it someday, if only because it meant so much to my mom and I'd like to see what she saw.

I did an experiment this year where you write down everything good that happens to you and put it in a jar, then look at it all at the end of the year. Here's what I wrote down:

1. I debuted Mrs. Hawking at Arisia 2015.
2. I got an audience of 135 people in a difficult timeslot for Mrs. Hawking at Arisia 2015.
3. I got Adonis into the top ten percent of the 2015 BlueCat Screenwriting Contest.
4. I got to put up Mrs. Hawking a second time at the Watch City Steampunk Festival 2015.
5. I got an audience of 136 people at the Watch City Steampunk Festival 2015.
6. I got Adonis requested for reading by a producer I pitched to.
7. I got hired to teach at Lesley University.
8. I got hired to teach at North Shore Community College.
9. I got Adonis requested for reading by a producer a second time.
10. I got Adonis requested for reading by a producer a third time.
11. I completed 31 Plays in 31 Days for the fourth time.
12. I finished writing Base Instruments, completing the first Mrs. Hawking trilogy.
13. My face is clearer than it's been in years.
14. I got into the best and most beautiful shape of my life.
15. I helped launch Game Wrap Magazine and contributed content to it.
16. I got Mrs. Hawking and Vivat Regina accepted for performance at Arisia 2016.
17. Most of the Mrs. Hawking cast wanted to come back for the Arisia 2016 production.
18. Some friends stepped up with interest to be in Mrs. Hawking and Vivat Regina.
19. I made more money this year than I ever have in the past with my new jobs.
20. A producer liked my Adonis script and recommended it to a company that might want to make it.
21. I got a good evaluation of my teaching for my first semester at Lesley.
22. Bernie successfully defended his thesis and earned his doctorate.
23. I got Adonis requested for reading by a producer for a fourth time.

I thought this would be a good exercise for me as a way to focus on gratitude and positivity. And there's some real successes in this. This was a good year for me. I need to focus on how far I've come, because it will help me believe in myself for how far I need to go.

My favorite Christmas memory, possibly my favorite memory of my childhood-- of which I honestly don't have many --was from this one Christmas Eve party my parents threw when I was small. It wasn't from the party itself, but from the preparation during the day preceeding.

I don't remember how old I was, but less than ten years old. We lived in San Jose, California, which is near San Francisco. And I remember my dad and I went all around the city buying the supplies for the party. We went to the fish market on Race Street, crowded with people waving their number tickets, to pick up the seven fishes we needed for the Italian tradition. We went to the butcher shop, where we bought an actual prime rib for the centerpiece of the meal. We went to the wine store, where I thought the shopping carts were oddly child-sized for a place full of adult beverages. And we went to an artisanal chocolate shop, where there was a woman sitting in the window with a sheet of melted chocolate before her, rolling little chocolate candies by hand. Little Phoebe, then obsessed with chocolate, had her eyes bug out of her head at the thought that was somebody's job, and being in awe that she could resist licking her fingers.

That party was amazing. My parents went all out, with the food, the decorations, tons of people. My Mom wore her hair in waves and wore a green velvet dress. Some people remarked at the time that it was the best meal they'd ever eaten. But as fun as the party was, the part that stayed with me the most was that shopping trip, holding my dad's hand, going all over the city to get just the right stuff.

Someday I want to throw a holiday party like that. Where I do that level of decorating and cooking for my loved ones. Where going to all the different specialty shops is part of the celebrating.

Maybe someday with my own kid.

I have talked about my mother’s death here before. But today, on the one-year anniversary of her passing, I want to talk about the night she died. I don’t have much point to make. This is a very disjointed, stream-of-consciousness entry. But I’m ready to talk about it, and I want to have a record of what it was like.

Casey, Sarah, and I drove down together. We came home into a very clean house—partially, I think, for all the people who would be coming in, and partially as way for my dad to feel in control. He’s a strong man— believe me when I say almost impossibly so —but he channels stress into things like that. He had food waiting for us. And he took us upstairs to see Mom.

They had put a hospital bed next to the big bed in their bedroom. That was good, she hadn’t wanted to die in the hospital. She wasn’t conscious; she was on a sort of liquid morphine that basically knocked her out. They put her on oxygen, but it wasn’t doing much good, and she kept gasping, trying to breathe. She couldn’t, really, but her body would try to anyway.

Dad was so in tune with her condition, with everything he’d done to take care of her. He’d called the previous day and said it would happen very soon. And we went home the next day, because he was right.

He asked if we remembered the part in Harry Potter with the thestrals, which are only visible to you after you’ve seen someone die. “I think we’re going to see thestrals soon.” He’s not usually one to talk in literary references, so that one struck me.

A hospice nurse came and spoke to us. We were kind of normal and together, which I think surprised them a little. But we don’t act out in front of strangers. I was proud, though, when the nurse took a moment to tell my dad how impressed they all were with how my dad took care of her. She actually said she’d never seen anything like it. He is strong, and he loves her.

It was very surreal. How normal it was, while Mom was right there dying. Mostly it was waiting. We’d sit with her for a while, holding her hand, talking to her. My dad and my brother had a lot to say. How much they loved her, but how it was okay for her to go, that she didn’t need to hurt anymore. Neither of them have ever been afraid of or uncomfortable with their emotions, but their frankness and their verbosity impressed me. This process made my brother a lot softer. And my dad, well, he’s perceived by some to be a hard, intense man. But he loved my mother utterly. Reordered his whole life to be there for her in her illness. And damn certain he was going to tell her everything as she died.

Dad told us stories of how they met, when they were young. How they were friends for years before they ever dated. How after graduation they traveled cross country to Yellowstone National Park in a van with three other friends and a German Shepherd. How they were camping in the park, smoked some weed, and went swimming at the same time there happened to be an earthquake, but because they were high, they weren’t sure if they imagined it or not. How my mom said to my dad, “If you grow up a bit, you might be worth keeping.” It made me smile to hear all that. Funny to think of my straight laced parents being cooler and more adventurous than me.

I just cried a little, quietly. Weirdly, I found I didn’t know what to say, and felt too embarrassed to try. Words are supposed to be my thing, and I didn’t have any for my dying mother.

It’s okay. She knew how I felt, and she couldn’t hear anything anyway. But it was weird.

So we sat with her, listening to her try to breathe. Then we’d get hungry, or have something to do, so we’d wander off and do it. Dad had a little camera set up in the room, so we could watch her from the kitchen. In case it happened, we could rush up and be there.

She looked like a scary troll. I feel awful about thinking that, but she did. Not like my mother at all. Her hair was gone, her face and body were bloated and stressed. She had tubes coming out of her all over. Horrifying. The picture of death.

We took a picture of her. Not sure why. I guess because it was real, it happened, and there’s no pretending that it didn’t. I have it and Casey has it, but my dad asked us not to show it to anyone. It’s private. It’s the last picture of my mother on this earth.

Casey’s girlfriend Sarah was with us. My family is private, intensely so, so it was a question as to whether or not she would come for this part of things. Bernie was working, so in deference to both of those things I had chosen not to bug him until there was actually a funeral. Dad probably would have been okay if Bernie came. Though in fairness he hasn’t known Bernie as long. Casey and Sarah had been together for like six years then, and he wanted her there, and Dad was fine with that.

Sarah was so good. The whole time I couldn’t imagine how awkward everything had to be for her. Being in the middle of other people’s uncomfortable, private, tragic moment. But she was perfect, being present and quietly, lovingly supporting my brother. I have so much respect for how she conducted herself in what had to be a deeply difficult situation. I already liked Sarah, but that was when she became family.

It was late when it happened. When the life finally slipped out of her. Her breath, already choppy, became more and more infrequent. She twitched for a while. Then she was still.

I posted on Livejournal when it happened. And Twitter, I think. That’s probably kind of sick that I even thought of it. But I wanted to mark the moment.

Dad called the hospice. They would send the right people. So we waited, there in the bedroom with the remains of Mom. I had been laying on my parents’ bed, right beside her hospital bed. I stayed there, staring at her as she went cold. Her skin became so gray, that weird troll that replaced my mother.

Nobody came for a long time. Everyone curled up someplace and slept. I don’t know where everyone ended up. I think Casey was on the floor. I slept there beside her. It didn’t seem strange. She was either a sack of dead disease, or she was my mother. I’m not afraid of either.

The hospice nurse came. I dragged myself up, sat in a chair and was polite. Same as I was with the nurse the previous day, be nice to the stranger, have good manners, even if you just lost the most important person. She asked for all mom’s medications and destroyed them. She was decent and said nice things, but I don't really remember what they were.

Two men in suits came from the funeral home. My dad remarked how weird it seemed to come ready to move a body dressed in a suit, but I guess it was supposed to be gesture of respect. They were very careful gathering her up, zipping her into the body bag. I watched them do it, which likely made them take extra pains, but honestly I didn’t care. In that gray shell there was more remaining of the cancer that killed her than there was of my mother. What did I care what happened to a dead sack of tumors, when the person who bore me, raised me, loved me, made me who I am, was already gone forever?

I went to my own room and slept. The next day, I stripped the hospital bed, washed the clothes, made up the guest bed. They were the only sheets we had that fit it. Bernie and I slept that night on the sheets my mother died on.

I mention all this because it feels like it should have been weird or creepy. But none of it was. At least not to me. I just love her, and miss her, and I still don’t quite believe she’s gone.

God, I haven't written in so long. Hate when I do that, but the holiday time with family and other assorted busy times got me. But now's the time I review my resolutions from the previous years and see how I did.

This year was hard for me as it saw the death of my mother, and the recurrence of my depression. Not to mention the tragedies happening in America and the larger world. But I believe I rose to my personal challenges and handled them with a level of grace I am proud of. Let's check out how that impacted the things I wanted to do in 2014:

1. Advance my career as a playwright somehow. That's a pretty ambitious resolution, and I'm not exactly sure how to go about that, so I will define it vaguely as that for now. But I want to do something that I can count as an advancement of my playwriting career.

I would say this happened! I finally found a way to get Mrs. Hawking produced in 2014, which is a very significant thing for me as a writer. I am proud to say resulted in the upcoming Arisia production of Mrs. Hawking to be seen as part of the con, at 6PM on Friday, January 16th at the Westin Boston Watefront.

2. Keep writing. Write more things of any kind. I've been on a hot streak when it comes to content creation lately, and I want to keep up my progress.

Did this in spades! I wrote so many things! I improved my Vivat Regina play to version 4 and The Tailor at Loring's End to version 7. New pieces included Puzzle House Blues to version 5, and of course my Adonis screenplay to version 5, which is quite possibly the best thing I've ever written. Plus two larps, Privy Council and Brockhurst, my Cabin Pressure fan fiction, and lots of scenes! Check out the complete list of everything I wrote in 2014 here.

3. Get my submission rate up to a good number at regular intervals. The more I submit my pieces, the better chance I have of having them performed.

Heh, this is funny. My submission rate never rose beyond mediocre, but the fact that I got Mrs. Hawking a venue for performance marks the biggest success I've had at this effort.

4. Keep up my fitness level. I love being so strong and fit and want to maintain, even improve upon it.

Hell, yeah. I dance ballet two to three times a week, plus had an intense circuit workout once a week. I look great and my physical health has probably never been better.

5. Get my finances in order. My budget was knocked out of whack because of my period of underemployment, so I want to get that back in a respectable state, as well as deal with my loans from graduate school.

Eh. Not so much. I've been in a tighter place financially in the past year despite making more money than I ever have, and I'm not exactly sure why. Funding Mrs. Hawking has definitely not helped. Still, I covered my bills and I'm not in debt other than school loans, so I guess it could be worse.

6. Improve my sewing skills. This means a lot to me and I haven't made a lot of time for it.

Completely fell by the wayside this year. Just wasn't time given all my other projects.

7. Improve my ballet skills. I want to get past this seeming plateau I've hit.

Definitely! I not only moved past my skill plateau, I have noticeably improved and I'm very proud of that.

8. Read more books. I've read almost no books in the last year due to difficulty focusing for long periods of time. I want to have full-length books in my brain again.

Hmmm, sort of! In the first third-to-half of the year, I read more book than I had in ages. Mostly P.G. Wodehouse, which I was introduced to at that time. But as the year went on, I broke the habit again. So, while I definitely improved my book consumption for the year, I did not retrain myself to consume books regularly.

9. Be good to my parents and spend as much time with them as possible. This gets more important every moment.

I did good with this, and I thank God that I did. My mother's illness finally took her from us in May of this year, and while it hurts and has changed my life in so many ways, I feel secure in the knowledge that I loved her as best I could while she was still with me. And that she knew just how much she meant to me.

10. Keep working on being a kinder person, keeping my temper, and being less judgmental. I can never let this one go.

Every little bit. I keep trying, and I like to think I am slowly improving. It's easier when you're not depressed all the time.

And a bonus one:

11. Keep working on learning how to be hopeful. It's all that carried me in the last few years, and I can't let that go now.

Again, every little bit. This one I can feel working.

So I would say that I fully accomplished seven of these and partially accomplished two. If I give myself a half-point for each of those, looks like I earned an eight out of eleven! Not too bad, eh? For such a rough year, that's something.

Was wandering around in a Michael’s killing time yesterday, and it reminded me powerfully of my mother. She was much more of a fine artist than a crafts person, but I remember many trips there to find things for her various projects— and my projects, which she always helped me on.

She was one of those people who was basically good at everything. She was a classically trained artist who had at least dabbled in most things— painting, drawing, set design, graphic design, sculpture, metalworking, printmaking, you name it. So whenever she needed to make something, she often had a grounding in the necessary skills, or at least something vaguely related. And she also had the natural advantages that help with that sort of thing, like steady hands, fine motor control, the ability to extrapolate how something might work based on something else she knew. So even if she had no familiarity with whatever artistic endeavor she needed to undertake, she could figure it out and somehow always manage to produce something that looked like she knew what she was doing. Like, when she made these fabulous masks for a production of Alice in Wonderland my brother was in, she did a little research, applied what she knew about stagecraft and sculpture, and did an amazing job.

And when I needed help with something, she would take my ramblings and incoherent descriptions and always make something that was exactly what I needed. When I needed big abstract castle banners that conveyed certain meanings for my production of Hamlet, she knocked them out. When I needed a gridded-off map of a cowboy town and the surrounding land with widows with secret information for my larp The Stand, she knocked that out too. She picked things up so easily, and always made such wonderful things. I’ve always envied her that. And admired her for it.