So for the last week I’ve been in the remote mountain hamlet of Truchas, NM, for this year’s Rio Hondo Workshop. Attending were Oz Drummond, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Walter Jon Williams, Alex Jablokow, Michaela Roessner, Tara King, David D. Levine, Susan Forest, Rosemary Claire Smith, Alan Smale, Jen Volant, and Kim Zimring.
We read each other’s work, ate each other’s food, drank each other’s booze, and generally had a fine time. My favorite kind of vacation is the one where I come back more drained and exhausted than when I left, and this week fit the bill precisely.
The 9th issue of Nathan Toronto’s paperback magazine Bullet Points is now available, with a reprint story by yours truly (“Wolf Time”). Bullet Points “captures the complexity, tragedy, and hope of warfare and violence in human and nonhuman society,” and this issue has an AI theme.
Bullet Points is generously sized, and packs a lot of words between its covers. Feel free to check it out.
The process of settling into new quarters continues. The living room, pictured here, is almost ready for actual living. The Berlin Wall of cardboard boxes that once blocked access to the bookshelves is gone. In the foreground is our elliptical trainer, which has finally emerged from its container. As the container took up about as much space as a large dining table, it’s a relief to see it gone.
Most rooms are navigable and capable of functioning more or less as intended, with the single exception of my man cave/office/library. We’re tackling it last because it’s less important to daily living, which leaves me working with a laptop in the living room.
I’ll look forward to being able to cook. No pots or pans have so far surfaced. The microwave isn’t really a substitute for home cooking.
I’ll look forward to living in a home, and not something like a bus station.
It’s 2009, and I’m in Turkey to research my novel Deep State. Standing behind is Melinda Snodgrass, and Patricia Rogers is behind the camera.
I’m in the smog-swathed capital of Ankara, the city known to the Hittites as Ankuwash, to the Romans as Ancyra, and to the Ottomans as Angora. Ankara is a modern, largely secular city, with more than 20 universities, but looming above is the acropolis topped by its citadel, mostly Byzantine and Turkish but with foundations that go back to the Phrygians.
Walking through the citadel’s gates really is like walking into another, older world. There’s an entire city inside the walls. Men smoke in doorways or play backgammon, old women in headscarves walk up the steep paths carrying enormous bundles of Angora wool on their backs, and kids kick footballs around. Even little girls wear headscarves, which I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Groups of teenage girls in headscarves and ankle-length overcoats giggle and snap selfies of each other. People seem poorer than elsewhere in the city.
The citadel plays a part in Deep State, as the place where Dagmar and Ismet, her love interest, first connect, when he takes her hand and leads her along the top of a connecting wall to a bastion.
A little nervous, I walked to the bastion myself, but no one held my hand.
A storm swathes the Sandia mountains, as seen from our balcony.
