...of rain. Everlasting, blasted rain. Welcome to New Hampshire this year. Welcome to Odyssey.

It rains. A lot. So much rain. We have had three days without rain since I arrived on June 6th.

It's the morning of July 3, 2009, and I'm writing this while wearing flannel pajama pants, fleece socks, and a heavy sweatshirt because my window fan registers the temperature at 59 degrees. Have I mentioned that we have no heating in the dorms where we're living? It is July and I'm dressed like this.

I'd almost imagine that I'm in some sort of post-apocalyptic world, but I'm told that other parts of the country have sun. Seattle, for instance. And NYC seems to be in a rare tropical period, where it's sunny and humid, then pouring rain, then sunny again. But at least it's warmer than it is here. It gets to 75 or 80 degrees some days, but only for a few hours at a time. I may freeze to death before this workshop is done.

And how is the weather by you guys? Do you have summer, yet?

(Yes, really, I just wrote an entire blog post complaining about the weather, but it is seriously putrid here most days.)

There will probably be countless debate, tribute, and vilification of Michael Jackson, now that he's dead. Cherie Priest has a great, short post that expresses my feelings.

For me, he will always be Captain Eo from the movie they showed at Epcot when I visited in 1988. Enjoy!

Part One:


Part Two:

I have my third story due on Wednesday morning at 7:30am, so I'm only popping in really briefly here...

I wanted to let you know about a wonderful thing that my friend, James Maxey, is doing to support breast cancer. He lost his partner, Laura, to the disease in 2005, and has been a passionate supporter of breast cancer research ever since. Now, he's offering a signed copy of his latest book, DRAGONSEED (Solaris, 2009), to anyone who donates to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation through "Team Dragon", which is the fundraising team he's set up.

Many more details can be found here, at his blog post about Books for Breasts.

If you have a little bit to spare, it's well worth it. One of our good family friends had breast cancer, and my husband's grandmother died of it two years ago. It affects everyone, in every walk of life. Almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who's lost a relative or a friend to this disease. Now you know me. Please go read James' post.

Just a quick note that THE KING'S DAUGHTERS by Nathalie Mallet is now available at Amazon.

Orders being filled now! =)

Have I mentioned yet that Odyssey is everything I hoped it would be and more? It is exhilarating and stimulating, at the same time that it is fatiguing, and I'm learning a million and one things about writing. Melissa Scott is coming as this week's lecturer guest, and we're rolling along on writing new things and discussing our strengths and weaknesses with Jeanne Cavelos (who runs Odyssey).

Plot is one of my weaknesses, which I knew before I came here, and she is so good at helping me with it that I want to put her in a box and take her home with me. =)

The best part of Odyssey though is that I'm surrounded by wordnerds. There are sixteen of us, all passionate about writing, and wanting to talk about it all the time. We have conversations at lunch, in class during our break, walking back and forth from the dorms, and even in the car on the way to dinner (we had a 21st birthday to celebrate today). I can't tell you how much I enjoy being around people who I find intellectually stimulatng, and who are also funny and kind. I would post pictures and names, but I don't want to do that without asking people first. There will eventually probably be a picture of us in Locus at some point, since there usually is of the class as a whole.

Everything has been lovely here, with the exception of the rain and the unseasonable coolness (down to 50-55 degrees at night!). It's supposed to rain the rest of the week, so we've been making a point of going outside to eat our lunches, and then sitting and soaking up the sunshine on the lawn by the dorms, while we read stories for critiques.

I think you can say I'm having fun, and I'm going to come back with a bunch of stories to revise and submit. If you can, seriously think about applying next year. =)

While I remember, I'd like to mention that we have the first review in of BY BLOOD WE LIVE, which is the new vampire anthology edited by John Joseph Adams--it's out in August!

From the review: In By Blood We Live, John Joseph Adams has put together a collection of vampire stories that not only flows well together but shows off the best and worst aspects of our favorite creature of the night.

You can preorder the book here.

I have spent the better part of this day quietly contemplating in my head what Twitter should do about the situation in Iran. If you're just joining us, they're killing students in Tehran and there seems to be a mini-revolution going on because of the election. It's bloody and it's bad, and the only way a lot of news is getting out is THROUGH Twitter.

But the students and other Iranian citizen journalists are starting to have a hard time getting through to the proxy servers they've been using to access Twitter. The Iranian government is actively working to censor them and to shut down any news getting out of the country. There are a lot of good people out there who are trying to run proxy servers to help the Iranians access Twitter to get the news out; there's one guy in LA who says he has up to 750 people hitting his server every minute, according to the NY Times. But as soon as the proxies go up, the Iranian government is working to shut them down.

There's little that we can do as private citizens. I have no way to march to Iran and tell them to stop killing their citizens. But I think that a public company, such as Twitter, has a bit more responsibility, especially since their service has become practically the only news source for the entire rest of the civilized world. Even major newspapers are pulling stories off of it. It's a revolution in journalism that shouldn't be stopped by a government that attempts to govern through violence.

I think that Twitter has a moral responsibility to help the people getting killed in Iran. I know it's a difficult thing for a private entity to act against a foreign nation, but there are extra servers they can set up. There are ways they can help provide more proxies. There are ways that they can globally fuck with the Iranian government's censorship. I think they should do it. I think they have a responsibility as a business that has unwittingly gotten embroiled into politics; I think they must act or they will regret doing so. Even now, the United States State Department is urging Twitter to once again delay system maintenance, so as to keep the posts from Iran flowing.

I have great faith in the hivemind of the Internet. I have great faith in the power of the people. I have great faith that if enough of its users demand that Twitter do something, then they will be forced to do so via the will of the people. So please retweet this blog post. Please leave comments, as I'm eager to hear your opinions; comments are moderated, but I release them quickly. Please link to it and spread the word. If we say nothing, if we try to do nothing, then we are just as guilty in those deaths.

In the meantime, here's some other stuff that you can do, via Scott Westerfeld.

In the books read department, when I couldn't sleep on Saturday night...

25. FIRE by Kristin Cashore
I was incredibly lucky to snag a copy of this at this year's BEA and I adored it. I think it touched on a number of themes that are very close to my heart, and at the end, I wanted more. I know it's a prequel to GRACELING, but it's really Fire's own story, which is great. If you liked GRACELING, you'll love FIRE. I eagerly await BITTERBLUE.

And it also has one of the most simply perfect last lines I've ever read in a novel.

I'm at Odyssey now, without a TV, but as far as I can tell that's a good thing. Since the 24 hour news networks don't seem to be covering what's happening in Iran very well, my husband tells me, and I'm literally getting my news from people Twittering from Iran, including pictures.

And they are horrible pictures.

These are the not-so-horrible-pictures.

There are others that are excessively graphic. They have blood. They have conceivably dead students, judging from the blood. I thought hard and long about putting up the link to them because they are so graphic and so horrifying. And then I thought that I needed to put the link up because as terrible as they are and as much as I want to cry from them... people need to see what the Iranian government is doing to its students.

THE FOLLOWING LINK CONTAINS PICTURES THAT ARE NSFW AND MAY BE UPSETTING TO MANY PEOPLE. PLEASE BE WARNED OF THIS, IF YOU CHOOSE TO CLICK ON THE LINK. THEY ARE MOST DEFINITELY NOT FOR CHILDREN.

These are the horrible pictures from the University of Esfahan.

I sit here, in my safe little dorm room in New Hampshire, and I am utterly horror-struck that they are killing students. Or attempting to kill students. I'm not very sure on the details right now. I just see the pictures and it hurts.

There are monsters out there. And they are killing people.
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FYI: Two of the most informational twitter feeds at the moment are @Change_For_Iran and @persiankiwi. Hooray for citizen journalism.