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And boy, if the state capitol wrapped in scaffolding isn’t a metaphor for something, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, hello, here I am in Indianapolis for GenCon, where I am a Guest of Honor for the convention’s writers symposium. For the next several days I will be on panels, dispensing what passes as my wisdom on the subject of writing and publishing. Oh boy! If you’re here, come say hello. If you’re not here, maybe wait to say hello until I am in your vicinity.
— JS
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When I went to Chicago last week, it was just for one day and one night, and then the ol’ five hour drive back to Ohio. So, I needed a place to stay for just one night, and specifically not downtown. My mom was actually the one who found Ray’s Bucktown Bed & Breakfast, an eleven bird-named-bedroom bed and breakfast with the most eclectic decor this side of the Mississippi.
My mom and I had a great stay, and I wanted to share the avian affiliated B&B with y’all in case you’re ever in Chicago and need a totally bomb dot com place to stay.
We stayed in the Cuckoo Room, which is one of the only rooms where the bathroom is not attached, and is actually right across the hall from the bedroom portion. They make sure to put up a sign on your bathroom that says it is specifically for the Cuckoo Room, and not for public use, and your room key is also the key to the bathroom if you want to lock it just in case. The bathroom being separate actually did not bother us at all, even when I went to shower and whatnot I wasn’t concerned about it not being attached to the bedroom area.
I was really impressed how clean the bedroom and bathroom were, and especially the shower looked really nice and clean.
I liked that there were plenty of towels, a bath mat you could lay out, and the shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower for you to use. There were also robes and sandals in the room for you to use.
As for the rest of the wild, maze-like estate, there were multiple communal spaces with couches, comfy chairs, books, board games, and even a rooftop patio with tons of plants if you needed a bit of sunshine and fresh air. Plus, so much cool art on the walls. And a little library!
Apparently, there’s even an orange cat that is sometimes on the patio. I did not see him, but I wish I had! The patio is also 420 friendly, if that’s your vibe.
Aside from the communal space to sit and relax, you’re also free to go into the kitchen anytime and fill the carafe from your room with filtered water, get a cup o’ joe, or grab a free snack from the snack station. I actually appreciated that they had some pretty decent snacks and not just like, one type of granola bar.
As you can see, I wasn’t kidding about the exorbitant amount of art and knick-knacks. Here’s some particularly interesting pieces I took note of:
(I thought it was covered in teeth when I saw it from across the room.)
(I wanted to touch these sooo bad but I looked with my eyes and not my hands.)
(What is keeping them up there??)
(This piece is actually HUGE.)
And finally, this blackboard menu from a restaurant that closed down in 1997.
You can’t beat those pre-00’s prices.
So, now that you’ve seen the “bed” part of the B&B experience, let’s talk about the “breakfast” part.
Breakfast is made to order, with a real lil’ menu!
Everything on the menu is included in the cost of your stay, so no need to bring your wallet down from your room. Aside from what you see on the menu, there’s also pastries and fresh fruit in the kitchen you can help yourself to.
I ordered the herbed goat omelette, with a chicken apple gouda sausage.
(I know it looks like there’s a hair on my orange slice, but it was absolutely not a hair, I promise.)
The omelette was totally stuffed with goat cheese and herbs and was super yummy, and the chicken apple gouda sausage was quite possibly the best sausage I’ve ever had. It was so flavorful and juicy and had chunks of apple in it, it was seriously so good.
Aside from the hot food cooked for me, I also had some cantaloupe, pineapple, grapes, and a pastry.
My mom got the B&B pancakes, which are blueberry and banana pancakes with real maple syrup, and they were flippin’ delicious. They were packed full of blueberries, and the bananas were actually caramelized. I had more than my fair share of her pancakes, plus I tried a bite of her overnight oats which I also really enjoyed.
Aside from the breakfast, there’s plenty of other great amenities that make staying here really worth it. You can request a garage parking spot so you don’t have to use the street parking, there’s a steam room and a sauna, and the place is dog friendly (extra twenty bucks for a dog)!
The management and staff were all super friendly, and even referred to me by name.
Honestly, I think the thing I liked most about this place was just the awesome amount of little details, like when you’re about to leave, there’s a basket with SPF options for you to help yourself to. Out front, there’s a doggy water bowl, jar of treats, and bags to clean up after your dog with in case you forgot one. There’s chocolates waiting for you in your room upon arrival, and make up wipes and Q-tips in the bathroom. It just really feels like an actual home away from home, and my mom and I really enjoyed our stay.
If you’re in the Bucktown/Wicker Park/Logan Square area, I highly recommend staying at Ray’s.
Which funky art piece is your favorite? Have you heard of Ray’s B&B before? Let me know in the comments, be sure to follow them on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
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Memory is a funny thing. We all have them, and yet, even when we all have the general same set of memories, each of them is different from the memories of others. Author Mia Tsai has been thinking about memory a lot, and how they come to inform her novel, the very appropriately-named The Memory Hunters.
MIA TSAI:
“You can’t prove [historical event] didn’t happen. Were you there?”
What if we could say yeah, actually, I was? And then we could share the memory of being in that place and time with anyone we chose? What if there were people who could slip back into the genealogical record, pull memories from centuries past, and show definitively that something happened? And then, how would we deal with the fact that memories are not as reliable as we believe them to be, especially eyewitness accounts?
I’ve been fascinated with memory for decades. When it comes to music, I memorize repertoire quickly, and the few times I’ve had trouble with memorization have turned into crisis-inducing moments. I wondered what predisposed me and others like me to memorization and what made it difficult for others to know a piece by heart. Still, we work to memorize deeply in classical music, which means memorizing not just notes on the page, what the hands look like as they play, or what the music sounds like, but the theoretical analysis of the music and the feel of the piece in your body.
I took that fascination with me to college, where I jumped into psychology and cognitive neuroscience and learned how fallible human memory is. The brain is incredibly suggestive, and mistakes happen at every stage of the memorization process, from information gathering to memory retrieval (the infamous selective attention test, also called the invisible gorilla test, wasn’t created to test memory, but it serves as a good example of how someone can be an eyewitness yet not remember critical aspects of the situation).
So, with that knowledge as a foundation, I imagined how retrieving someone else’s memories would work. My own memories aren’t fully realized scenes from a movie; the same holds true for many people. How could someone truly understand someone else’s memories?
And if those memories could be understood, how would they be reframed and shaped as exhibits in a museum?
About ten years ago, I watched a video on Janet Stephens, the hairdresser-turned-archaeologist who now specializes in ancient Roman hairstyles. She’d interpreted the word acus not to mean a hairpin, as others thought, but a needle and thread, and it broke open her understanding of how the hairstyles were created.
In the future, with no real documentation on how to use our everyday items, like self-sticking wall hooks or decorative toothpicks (or 8-tracks, floppy disks, and manual transmissions) we might need our own Janet Stephens. How would anthropologists and archaeologists write about us in museums? This cast-iron hook I had, which was supposed to be drilled into a post and used to hang pots, an object I thought was simple enough that it could not be misconstrued as anything else—would it get misinterpreted two hundred years into the future? Would its placard in the museum read like this? OBJECT OF UNKNOWN FUNCTION, EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. CAST IRON. Wouldn’t it make research easier if, say, an anthropologist with the ability to pull memories from DNA fragments could take specimens off said hook hundreds of years later, say yes, I was there, then write more accurately about it?
But it’s not enough to magically pull a memory and present it. Our lives are rooted in culture and context at increasingly micro levels thanks to social fragmentation, and so the people doing the memory work would also need to be well versed in the historical context of the memory. Much like how “acus” mystified archaeologists until a hairdresser came along with the right knowledge set, the memories gathered by my fantasy anthropologists would need someone to interpret them—perhaps someone living who would have a tangible, contextual connection to the memory, someone who might be looking for lost ancestral knowledge or needed a reference to how things used to be done.
None of that personal connection would have a place in a museum. Thus, I created the memory temple as well as a system of ancestor worship for the everyday things that have great personal impact but much less impact when weighed against the rest of public history. I took inspiration from Taiwanese ancestor worship as well as the practice of people going to the cemetery to speak to their loved ones. And The Memory Hunters continued to grow.
There wasn’t a part of society diving didn’t touch. In effect, the characters in the book would always be beside their ancestors except for those who had been sundered from family heirlooms or relatives. I turned that over for a bit, not really able to get my jaws around it, until one day I heard someone say she’d love to sit with her ancestors for five minutes. Suddenly, it crystallized for me so many of the book’s issues that had been hovering just out of reach. It put me back in first grade, living half a world away from the rest of my family, when we were tasked with bringing in a family tree (I could not).
The Memory Hunters takes place in a world where distance and lost knowledge can be overcome, and I think that’s the biggest speculative aspect of it.
The Memory Hunters: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
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When Krissy and I went to Venice, one of the trips we had scheduled was going to the nearby island of Murano and watching some of the artisans engage in their centuries-long tradition of glass-making. That in itself was quite interesting, and when it was done we were taken into the actual shops, just in case we wanted to buy, say, a $50,000 chandelier or an arty blown-glass head of Medusa going for $25,000. In fact we did not — the mere thought of owning something both that expensive and that fragile fills me with an almost holy terror — but as we wandered about both Krissy and I found (relatively) more modest-priced items we decided to take home as 30th anniversary gifts to each other. Krissy’s was a glass rum decanter, which she will get excellent use from. Mine is the item you see above.
What precisely is it? I mean, technically I think it qualifies as a bowl; you can put fruit in it, or possibly keys when you come home, or maybe those marbles you use to fill up clear vases in houses where you’re not actually supposed to touch things. But I confess I didn’t buy it to be functional; I bought it because it was pretty, and green (which is my favorite color) and because all the little square elements you can see have their reflective layer at different depths in the glass, giving the piece in real life an almost startling sense of texture. When we were wandering about the shop, I kept coming back to it, which meant this was the piece I wanted (it also happened this way several years ago when I bought a painting from an aboriginal artist while I was in Perth). For me, it’s art, not necessarily functional (Krissy’s is also art, it’s just art you can store rum in).
Again, it was not a $50K chandelier (which is what the one in the picture above was going for), but it also was easily the most I’ve been on a single piece of glasswork — I paid more when we had the windows in the house replaced a couple years back, but that was, like, all the windows. So I was naturally apprehensive about whether the thing would make it to the house in one piece. Fortunately, the folks we bought from have some experience with shipping glass, and work with a courier service here in the US that knows how to expedite object d’art coming from abroad. Both the bowl and decanter arrived without a scratch.
(And yes, we had to pay a tariff. I’m pretty sure we would have had to before the current administration as well, but the thing about the current administration is one can never quite tell what the tariff will be on any particular day, which is a really not great way to do things. As it turned out, we paid the tariff before this administration and the EU decided on a 15% general tariff on everything coming out of Europe, so we got a lower rate, but regardless, this is no way to run a trade relationship.)
If you go to Venice I do recommend a side trip to Murano to look at the glass and such, because it was fascinating, and also, I will warn you not to go if you’re not willing to end up spending more than you ever expected to in your life on glasswork. Is it worth it? In my case, yes; this piece is lovely and I think I will get years of enjoyment out of just simply looking at it. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy any more of it. One piece (plus a rum decanter) is enough, thank you.
— JS
scalziwhatever_feedHave you ever wished you could just pay someone to scratch your back and play with your hair? Like a massage but lighter and softer? Well, it turns out you can, and I totally did it.
A little known fact about me is that I love ASMR. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, and it basically means that when you hear or see certain things, you get a pleasant tingling sensation in the back of your brain that can even give you chills. If you’re not well versed in ASMR, you probably just think of it as that weird whispering thing people do into a microphone, or worse than that you associate it with unpleasant mouth or eating sounds.
Well, I’m happy to report not all ASMR is like that. Certainly not the kind I like, anyway. For me, I have always liked the ASMR videos of people pretending to do your makeup or skincare, where they dote on you and give you a pampering session and are a comforting presence. But I also like the ones where they actually use a real person and do things like scratch their back, tickle their arms, play with their hair, trace their face. It sounds like a strange thing to watch, but it’s really easy to imagine yourself as that person, and it’s weirdly relaxing.
And I’m certainly not alone in this, because if you look at the comments of these videos, you’ll see so many people saying things like, “I wish that were me,” “how do I get someone to do this to me,” “I wish I could just pay someone to do this for an hour.” It turns out a lot of people would love to have someone touch them nicely in a soft, comforting way! Who knew?
So, there I was, watching one of these videos on Tik Tok from Soft Touch ASMR, when I noticed that the caption of the video said that you could book an appointment with her. Someone was finally doing the thing everyone had been asking for for so long! Where in the world could this possibly be located?! California. Of course it’d be across the country from me. Tragic.
@soft.touch.asmr.spa it’s your turn to be the girl in your fave ASMR vids – book in bio to feel the tingles IRL at Soft Touch ASMR Spa
(based in LA & poppin’ up all over!) #asmrmassage #asmrspa #softtouch #asmrtok #fyp #inpersonasmr #asmrtreatment #asmrrelax #asmrbackscratching #asmrtracing #asmrhairplay #asmr #asmrtingles #asmrsleep
Then, I saw that she travels and does pop up events in other major cities. And she had one coming up in Chicago. Well, now there’s a drive I can do. Is it five hours? Yeah. Did I book an appointment anyways? Oh yeah.
Julie was so sweet and friendly, and I had an amazing experience with her. Before our session began, she asked me if there were any specific triggers I wanted her to focus on, and I mentioned I really wanted the back scratching with the claws I’ve seen in her videos:
@soft.touch.asmr.spa Could you handle the IRL tingles? Book a Soft Touch ASMR Massage & feel it yourself
(link in bio / softtouchasmr.com) Soft Touch is LA’s 1st & only ASMR Spa for gals, trans & non-binary pals
#softtouch #asmrmassage #fyp #asmrtok #asmrspa #asmrirl #asmr #asmrbackscratching
Julie gave me the most relaxing hour ever, with tons of light touches, tickly scratching all over my back, arms, and shoulders, combing my hair softly, I was seriously in heaven. I had to try really hard not to completely fall asleep and miss everything.
It was such a calming escape, I started to wish I had booked the 90 minute experience instead of the 50 minute. I really thought that by the end, I would be totally touched-out and that it maybe wouldn’t even feel good anymore, but I was completely wrong and I was dreading it being over. I also determined I needed this treatment like, every single day from here on out. It really was so nice.
So, even though it was definitely a splurge and a five hour drive away, I am so glad I went and had such a unique, relaxing, awesome experience. It was only after I went all the way to Chicago that I learned she was doing a pop-up in Indianapolis and Columbus later that week, but I wasn’t that upset about it since I love Chicago anyways and had a fun time visiting there regardless.
Would you enjoy this kind of experience? Do you like ASMR videos? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
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Doesn’t she look happy? Of course she does. Her life is pretty sweet, after all, lots of love and walks and rolls in the grass. It’s good to be a pup.
Also, for those who don’t know, yes, indeed, I do officiate weddings! It’s for friends and such. I mean, I was probably going to be at the wedding anyway. Why not make myself useful.
We’ll be back on Monday. Until then, have a fabulous weekend, and if you’re in part of the US currently under a heat dome, keep yourself cool and remember to hydrate, okay? Thank you.
— JS
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It may not be Halloween, but that shouldn’t stop you from learning about the history of depictions of witches throughout the decades in film and media. Author and witch-film-connoisseur Payton McCarty-Simas is here today to take you through a wild ride (on a broomstick) over feminism, horror, and women, in her new book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film.
PAYTON MCCARTY-SIMAS:
More than anything else, my book, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film, is the product of hundreds of hours spent watching movies. I started the project that eventually became this book in college–– or, more specifically, during COVID, revisiting some of my comfort movies during lockdown. As I worked my way through more recent favorites like The Witch and Color Out of Space and old standbys like Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero’s Season of the Witch, I started noticing visual and thematic patterns. Soon, I was hooked on witch films (though as my list of favorites might suggest I always have been), and I started watching in earnest.
The big idea of That Very Witch is that, by tracing how depictions of witches evolve and change in American horror cinema over time, we can learn about the state of feminism in a given moment, essentially taking the cultural temperature in the process. I trace specific threads through the decades––namely psychedelic imagery, counterculturalism, and feminine rage among others––but each and every smaller idea relied on a huge amount of cinematic data to really put my finger on. I watched over three hundred hours of film for this project, noting different patterns and shifts from decade to decade over hundreds of pages of notes, several Letterboxd lists, and a slightly unhinged-looking conspiracy board.
While all genres move in cycles that capitalize on trends––consider the YA dystopian romance boom that followed The Hunger Games––horror is particularly trenchant given the films’ consistent popularity, relatively low budgets, and quick turnarounds. Simply put, the industry makes a lot of horror movies looking for a quick buck, and, given that profit-motive, producers are always responding to popular demand for a given subject. The terrifying proto-viral success of The Blair Witch Project gives us an explosion of found footage horror, and eventually the runaway blockbuster that was Paranormal Activity, which in turn gives us a rash of suburban hauntings, and so on. As scholars like Robin Wood have long suggested, then, horror can be viewed as an extension of our collective unconscious (in his words our “collective nightmares”), our national fears made manifest at the intersection of broad commercial incentives, personal artistic impulses, and the zeitgeist.
When it comes to witches, I noticed that in moments of high-profile feminist activism, say, the 1960s or the 2010s, witches become more popular––and more frightening––on screen. That’s not to say that witches disappear in other eras, far from it. But the characters of those depictions take on different tones and valences depending on the politics and trends of the moment, and that’s just as indicative of the politics of the age. Witches can be mall goths or hippie chicks, old women in pointy hats or teenage girls in low-rise jeans and lip gloss (or all of the above!) depending on the decade. They can be frightening or funny or fierce. But it takes a lot of hours of films, not to mention countless hours of historical research, to understand what depictions are most common when, and why.
That Very Witch: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop |Kobo|Waterstones
Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Tumblr|Letterboxd
Read an excerpt.
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A starred review means the Library Journal found The Shattering Peace particularly noteworthy, which makes me happy. The review is here, but I’ll quote the last line: “Highly recommended for readers who love broad sweeping space operas and science fiction with a high quotient of dry humor and witty sarcasm.” I bet that’s you, isn’t it?
Also, a lovely review of When the Moon Hits Your Eye in the Seattle Times, in which the reviewer says that they admire me “for my impressive ability to make readers laugh out loud and then realize mid-chuckle that there are larger, deeper themes at play.” It’s nice when reviewers pick up on that.
— JS
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More important than writing for an audience, is writing for yourself. Author Jason Sanford has chosen to write true to himself above all else, not holding anything back in this Big Idea for his newest novel, We Who Hunt Alexanders. Come along and see how being neurodiverse helped shape this story, as well as his own story.
JASON SANFORD:
In fiction, the mask comes off.
Which, yeah, not a revelation for most authors and readers. After all, fiction has long lifted the veil on reality and explored topics, ideas, and dreams that are seen as too difficult, unsettling, or daring to discuss in our everyday lives. Fiction is also a window for seeing life from different perspectives – a way to escape from our individually limited viewpoints and experience the world through the eyes of other people.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that with fiction, the mask comes off. For me, that statement is instead extremely personal and extremely direct. Because as someone on the autistic spectrum, when I write my stories the mask I normally wear has indeed been removed.
If you’re not familiar with masking, it’s a strategy used by some people on the autistic spectrum as a survival mechanism. A way to live, work and be somewhat accepted in a world where how we see and experience life is not only not welcomed but frequently shunned.
I once discussed being on the spectrum during a convention panel. After the moderator listened to me describe how I masked, she retorted “It’s the science fiction genre – we’re all a little bit autistic.” She then added that masking was nothing more than learning to fit in with others, which everyone must do in life.
I wish it was that simple.
When I was young, well before I started kindergarten, my family knew there was something different about how I interacted with the world. I had trouble understanding what other people wanted. I preferred being alone. I’d hyperfocus on whatever caught my attention. And my words – well, instead of modeling my speech on how others spoke, I crafted my own words and ways of talking.
My parents put me through years of speech therapy to try and teach me to speak like the other kids. They also made the decision, based on the recommendation of a close relative who worked in special education, to hide that I was on the spectrum. We lived in rural Alabama and my relative feared if people found out I’d be redlined out of regular schools and classes. As my relative explained to my parents, in our state that outcome would be very bad for me.
My family also hid from me the knowledge that I was on the spectrum. I only learned about this long after I’d become an adult. I’d spent a lifetime wondering what was wrong with how I saw the world. And suddenly BAM!, it all made sense.
Because of all that, I was taught to heavily mask. To hide who I was inside. I basically underwent what is now called behavioral management therapy. And once I started school, I taught myself both consciously and unconsciously to mask even harder. After all, how many times does a kid need to be beat up or told there’s something wrong with them before they hide who they truly are?
My family made the best choices they could and I don’t blame them. But yeah, those years were rough. What saved me was the science fiction and fantasy genre. By reading fiction, I not only escaped from my day-to-day reality but also the pain of wondering what was wrong with me. And as an added bonus, fiction helped me understand the world and the people around me. I still remember reading certain stories and going, “Oh, that’s why people act like that.” Or realizing “That’s what normal people do in those situations.”
Eventually, that love of reading turned into a desire to write my own stories. And that’s when I discovered that by writing my own fiction, I could drop the mask. Through stories, I could show the world who I always was and always will be.
The SF/F stories I write have always been neurodiverse, even when I don’t blatantly write about being on the spectrum. Because of that I’ve been frequently called a writer of strange science fiction stories, or placed in the weird SF/F subgenre. So many times I wanted to tell people that one of my stories wasn’t weird – it was merely neurodiverse. But it’s hard to take off the mask in public even when I unmask with my writing.
But with my new novella We Who Hunt Alexanders, I decided to name it. To say, this is a story about neurodiversity. That this is a story about being on the spectrum.
Of course, that’s not all We Who Hunt Alexanders is about. It’s also a gothic dark fantasy focused on a young neurodiverse monster dealing with both her mom’s wrong expectations for her life and the religious extremists hunting them down. It’s a story about the anger and hatred we’re experiencing in today’s politics. It’s about the people harmed by the powerful fighting back to save those they love. It’s about having hope even when everyone wants you to forsake that emotion.
But for me, the story will always be about lifting my mask and saying, “This is my life. This is who I am.”
I write my stories so anyone can read them, including those who are not neurodiverse. But I also write them for myself.
My mask is always off when I write.
We Who Hunt Alexanders: Apex Book Company|Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s Books
