A song for bones

It’s funny, what scares you sometimes.

When I started working on the poems required for The Resurrectionist’s Song, I was absolutely terrified. I knew I wasn’t a very good poet—I once served on the editorial board of a literary journal and discovered that I couldn’t even understand most of the poetry submitted for publication, let alone tell good from bad. If I couldn’t even figure out the rules of the genre, how was I supposed to write anything in it above the level of “There once was a girl from Nantucket”?

But the book demanded poems, and I try to give stories what they need, so I scribbled the best I could do and cautiously emailed them off to a friend from graduate school, a real live poet who has probably never used the word “Nantucket” with a straight face. Then I ducked and covered and waited for the explosion.

Shockingly, he tells me my poems do not suck. So here’s one for you on this sunny Monday morning, the first poem I wrote for The Resurrectionist’s Song. It’s repeated a couple of times in the story, most notably chanted over a set of old bones and over the body of a character at the point of death.

There is no mention of Nantucket.

LAMENT

Bone to ash and soul to sky,

One to scatter, one to fly;

Tooth for tooth and eye for eye,

Marching, marching home to die

Hands we held and mouths we fed,

Shadow cast on marriage-bed,

Some who followed, some who led,

Now the army of the dead.

Skeletons at victory-feast,

Voices stilled and laughter ceased;

There, from mightiest to least,

Watching, patient as some beast.

Ancient grudge and honeyed lie,

Warring-song and battle-cry,

Bone to ash and soul to sky,

Marching, marching, you and I.

"Why is there a coyote on your head?"

While walking around Comic-Con this year, I got more people than usual asking me why I had Pocket Coyote riding on top of my head. Some people tried to guess what character I was cosplaying; others assumed it was some kind of inside joke; one person thought I was doing it to amuse a baby being carried by a man ahead of me in line. And when they realized I wasn’t in character, or kidding with nearby friends, or in any way related to that baby, I got the same question:

“Why is that thing on your head?”

For the first few hours, I could get away with saying something flippant: “He’s navigating for me,” or “He’s more comfortable up there,” or (my favorite) “He’s the brains of this outfit.” But eventually those replies began to sound more snarky and irritated than I meant them to, and I resorted to the real answer:

“Because there’s a hole in my head.”

I hadn’t gotten so many looks of astonishment and/or horror since I started styling my hair to cover the scars as a teenager. Usually the only people who find out about my little abnormality are hairstylists and anybody trying too hard to sell me a hat. But at Comic-Con, it’s sort of okay to be weird, even if you didn’t get up that morning planning to be weird. It’s a place that tolerates and even encourages some kinds of weirdness. I thought more people would be okay with mine.

But it turns out that saying “I have a hole in my head” makes con-goers freak out just as much as it does normal people. It’s probably the surprise that does it. Here, then, is my all-purpose explanation for the mysterious medical condition I’ve been hinting about in this blog, phrased in FAQ form. I hope this entry will act as a reference when I’m too tired to explain yet again why I have X, Y, or Z wrong with me. It’s not that I mind explaining, most of the time; it’s just that I don’t want to bore everyone unnecessarily with multiple explanations. Fair warning—there are some icky details ahead. Now, to the questions …

Healthy fontanelles. I don't have these.
Source: Gray's Anatomy

Why do you have a hole in your head?

I was born with a semi-rare disorder called craniosynostosis (actually, it was called cephalic synostosis when I was born, and now it’s just CS for short). Normal babies have soft spots called fontanelles—squishy seams connecting the plates of their skulls—which enable their heads to change shape as they’re pushed through the birth canal and as their brains develop. In a normal infant, those seams harden by the third birthday; in an infant with CS, one or more of those seams will harden much earlier, perhaps before birth. And if your skull is the wrong shape for your brain when that happens, you’re screwed. I had just one seam harden—the one that controls the final width of my skull—and my mother tells me that my head actually came to a point in the back. The pain was so intense that I spent every waking moment screaming.

Until the late 1970s and early 1980s, babies born with CS usually died in horrible agony before they could start kindergarten. The lucky ones lived with severe brain damage and/or blindness due to the fact that their skulls didn’t play nice with their optic nerves. But around the time I was born, surgeons began experimenting with reshaping the skulls of young infants with CS. At the time, the disorder was poorly understood, and parents were told that the surgery was their children’s only chance of survival—and even then, it was a crapshoot. Some parents opted out. Mine didn’t.

When I was five months old, someone cut my skull open along the fused suture, from just behind my hairline to just above the nape of my neck. The doctors placed a plastic plate in the gap that would, in theory, make my head approximately the right shape to contain a normal human brain. But they screwed something up. According to one family story, they used a plate that was too small to fill the gap; according to another, they put it in the wrong place; a third story claims that it just slid around after they closed up. Whatever the real story is (the records of the surgery were lost years ago), my skull is part bone, part plastic, and part nothing; there’s a place where the plate stops and my skull does not begin. It’s a dent in my head, about the size of a quarter at the top and a dime at the bottom, and when I tap on it there’s a muffled thoomp-thoomp that echoes inside my head, like a drumbeat.

Why can’t I see the hole in your head?

Because it’s under my scalp, which is under my hair. You can’t see the scar from the surgery, either; when I was a kid I used to part my hair along it, because it was easy and no hair grew in that spot, but the exposed scar tissue would sunburn, crack, and bleed, which would really freak people out. I now style my hair to cover the scar and the hole, so the only visual evidence left is the white hair that started growing out of the scar when I was in college. If you see glimmers of silver in my hair in photographs, it’s not because I’m old, or prematurely gray; it’s because I’m too lazy to dye each white hair individually back to my natural color.

Can I feel the hole?

Can you? Probably, if I let you. Will I let you? Probably not. While I sometimes allow people to gently touch the spot, I insist on guiding their hands so they don’t press too hard, and I long ago started insisting that I get to touch their heads afterward in trade (you have no idea how freaky your normal round heads feel to someone who’s lived her whole life with something different, and I’m just as intrigued as you are). Kids are usually curious enough that they’re okay with that deal, and they’re very gentle; adults are weirded out by all the touching, and they’re less gentle. Thus, very few adults get to touch my head. For what it’s worth, though, everyone who is allowed to touch the hole notices it immediately; it really is there, obvious to the fingers of the casual observer.

Does it hurt?

Not much, and not anymore. The bleeding scar hurt when I was a child, but not so much that I wouldn’t scratch the scabs. It’s possible that my migraine headaches are related to this (just as it’s possible that my vision problems in late childhood and my fifty-plus ear infections before the age of five had something to do with a misaligned skull), but there’s no way of knowing. I am part of the first generation of adult CS survivors; they’re still studying us, when there’s funding for it, and either way nobody knows exactly how CS will affect our lives in the future. On the plus side, I can cure a headache by putting something cold on top of the hole, so if you ever see me walking around with a frosty can of Coke on my head, be nice and use your indoor voice, because I’m probably fighting a migraine.

Does the hole in your head make you … (smarter, dumber, prone to seizures, etc.)?

I don’t have seizures or obvious neurological symptoms, but there’s no way to tell whether the shape of my skull is affecting my brain functions in some subtle way. I have an IQ that’s been measured at just north of the genius line, but so do most of my relatives, including one sibling who has very mild CS symptoms (never treated) and one who shows no symptoms whatsoever. My intelligence is considered below average for my family, though, so some people think I might really have mild brain damage. (I tell the kids in my writing classes that I’m a “dumb genius”.) My schoolmates used to complain that the hole in my head somehow made me smarter, which gave me an unfair advantage in classes, but I don’t put much stock in the scientific theories of third-graders.

Are you going to have surgery to correct it?

I have no such plans. It would be painful and expensive, and there’s no way of knowing whether it would do me any good. Like most people, I try to avoid unnecessary neurosurgery. My condition has been pretty stable for more than 20 years; I don’t want to screw it up.

Is this going to affect your long-term health?

There’s no way of knowing. Scientists are still studying CS, and there are so many forms of it that they probably won’t find any answers to my case in my lifetime. Right now they’re pretty sure that the disorder is genetic, but they’ve only identified the genes responsible for about 10% of known cases. The answer to almost every question about CS itself is “we just don’t know.”

Is it dangerous?

Yes and no. I have a hole in my head where humans are supposed to have armor protecting their brains; that’s never a good thing. A blow to the wrong part of my head could be fatal—I’d be dead before I hit the ground—but it’s not like I’m made of glass. The rest of me is fine. I just have to be careful when I’m around anything that might bop me on the head. Which leads me to …

So why do you have a coyote on your head?

Because of you normal people! Normal humans live their lives with a bony layer of protection around their brains; they don’t think to watch out for people who don’t. In my everyday life, I have to be careful of open cupboard doors and books falling off high shelves. I wore a hardhat last time I helped a friend with home renovations (there were bits of wood and metal flying). Most of the time, though, I just pay close attention to my surroundings and I’m fine.

But conventions are different. I’m in a huge crowd of people, many of them taller than I am and not looking where they’re going, many of them wearing costumes with huge artificial wings or spiky armor or giant anime swords slung over their shoulders. There are approximately one zillion ridiculous ways I could die in a typical convention crowd, and I can’t very well demand that 125,000 people stop flying their freak flags just because it might kill me. At a certain point, I have to either live my life in a bubble or accept that I might die in a stupid accident. Carrying a bean-bag toy on my head splits the difference.

It works like this: because of the shape of my skull and my slightly wavy hair, I have an unusually easy time balancing objects on my head. Bean bags are especially skull-friendly. I long ago got into the habit of temporarily storing objects on my head when I needed my hands free, which is how I discovered Pocket Coyote’s effect when he rides around up there. He looks a little weird up on top of my head, which draws just enough attention to make me visible. A typical con-goer is not going to hit me in the head by accident if Pocket Coyote’s riding cranial shotgun; they’ll worry too much about knocking off part of my “costume”. If I do get bonked on the head, Pocket Coyote takes most of the impact, and in a worst-case scenario falls off. I say something to the effect of “Oh, no! My navigator!” and the offending person turns around, realizes what’s happened, feels just a bit guilty, and is more careful in the future. The best part about this is that nobody has to know they almost gave me brain damage. It’s not a perfect solution, but it works well in environments where people have a sense of humor about whimsical headgear … and luckily for me, those environments also happen to be where people are most likely to brain me with a papier-mâché zanbatou.

So … is your life different because of this?

How would I know? What would I compare it to? I don’t remember a time before it. But there are some obvious differences—having to watch out for cupboard doors, for example, and having to explain to self-defense instructors that I need to wear protective gear when we’re practicing head shots.

Probably the most important difference, though, is the perspective I’ve gained from being the only known land-dwelling mammal with a blowhole. I have a medical condition that could kill me stone dead in the next 30 seconds or let me live to be a hundred years old. Growing up with that knowledge forced me to focus on what was really important in my life, and to make my peace with incompletion. I went to school because I loved it and because it was necessary for the foundation of a career, but I also acknowledged that I might not live to graduate. I finally decided that I was okay with dying in the middle of my education, if that happened, because the education itself was worth part of my life, whether I finished it or not. I wouldn’t consider that a waste of a life, because the intrinsic value was there, with or without the diploma.

Besides, I couldn’t avoid making long-term plans just because I might not live to see them through; I just had to make plans that would create a life worth living, no matter how long or short it was. Of course, anyone on earth could say the same—any one of us could die at any moment by accident, violence, or disease. It’s just that most of us don’t think about it very often. The hole in my head makes me think.

In some ways, I write stories because I have a hole in my head. A good book lives on long after its author is dead, so writing gives me a fighting chance at the longevity others take for granted. If I write a good story at age 30 and die the day it’s published, the book can speak for me for years to come. It helps me make peace with incompletion.

More importantly, though, telling stories is the single most worthwhile thing I can think of to do with whatever time I have. I was born with precious few advantages in life—hell, I didn’t even have a functioning cranium—but I’ve always had a head stuffed with stories. If you believe that people are made for certain purposes, that form follows function, then my function probably has something to do with storytelling, somehow. Stories let me share joy and sorrow, wisdom and folly, pain and perseverance. Stories change lives, raise dreams, build and topple empires. Maybe no story of mine will ever rise to that level—but if I live my life in trying, I can die content. It’s the quest that matters to me. I’ve got that little spring inside me that never seems to wind down, and it says: keep telling stories, whether people read them or not. So I keep practicing, keep writing, keep trying. And every once in a while, I write something that comes to life, that says something true, that reminds me why I’m doing this … for however long I can do this.

The hole in my head makes me think about what’s really worth my life. Right now and for the foreseeable future, that’s writing. So if you’re at a con someday and see a woman with silver threads in her hair and a bean-bag coyote on her head, say hi to us both.

And then maybe take a moment to think about what you’d do with a hole in your skull. You never know where the answer will take you … 

Chelsea

Written on the evening of June 22, 2013. I typed until my eyes wouldn’t stop leaking.

I took a wrong turn a few hours ago and found out my friend was dead.

I was out running errands with my mom. She turned the car down a random side street near her home and was having a little trouble finding her way back. I knew the area—I used to bike those streets, and my mentor lived there—so I was directing her … and then we noticed a little makeshift memorial on a corner. A woman was just stepping out of a car to lay a bouquet of flowers against a street sign. There was a white cutout of a bicycle leaning against the pole, with flowers and candles around it.

My mom said, “I think this is the corner where that girl died.”

I said, “I guess so. That would explain the ghost bike and the flowers. What girl?”

Mom: “I don’t know. It made the news. She was riding her bike and a truck hit her.”

We rolled closer to the makeshift memorial. The girl’s name was written on the bike, along with her date of death and the words “Watch For Bicyclists”. Her first name was Chelsea.

Me: “I hope it’s not that Chelsea. I know it’s horrible, but I hope it’s not the Chelsea I know. Did the news say whether she had long red hair?”

Mom: “No. They just said she was 20, and not in school.”

Me: “Well, that’s good. Chelsea’s older than that, and she went to college.”

I went home, reasonably sure I hadn’t just passed a memorial to a friend. But now, as I Google the name on the bike and the limited number of accidents involving bikes and trucks in that town, it looks like my mom was wrong about her age and I was wrong about her still being alive. It was that Chelsea. My Chelsea, although she was never anybody’s but her own.

I’ve lived pretty much my entire life under the threat of imminent death. (Short version for those late to the party: I have a medical condition that is either going to kill me so dead one day that I won’t live long enough to hit the floor breathing, or going to let me live a hundred years.) I know that I walk around every day with the Grim Reaper for a shadow. But I forget sometimes—often, really—that everyone else does too. All you normallish people, you die too.

I didn’t know Chelsea well. We were in a study group together; I attended regularly, and she came when her schedule allowed. It’s easy to remember when Chelsea was there and when she wasn’t; she had long curly red hair that trailed behind her wherever she went, like the tail of a comet. I’d see her walking through the neighborhood sometimes, or riding her bike to class, with that hair whipping in the breeze behind her. I still can’t imagine that the truck driver didn’t see her. It seemed to me that everyone, everywhere she went, always saw her. Sometimes they saw nothing else.

Chelsea was studious and serious, with a streak of wicked wit that showed itself in bright flashes. She was slow to talk about her personal life, from what I remember, but when she did speak, she always had something worthwhile to say. She was several years younger than I, and I kept forgetting it because she was so solemn, and so wise. She was a fantastically talented musician; she played jazz clarinet in local combos under the terribly appropriate name Chelsea Joy. Even in college, she was a regular performer in demand at the town’s one and only good jazz club, which was why she couldn’t always make the meetings. I imagine she said things through that clarinet that she didn’t feel like saying in words. I regret that I don’t understand music well enough to have heard them.

The group broke up a few years ago, but I met her by chance in the library on March 17, 2012. I was up to my eyeballs in a manuscript, but I caught a flash of copper in my peripheral vision and looked up. I ran halfway across the reading room to catch her, because Chelsea was worth running after, and we chatted. She talked about graduating from college, about future plans. I don’t remember a lot of it. She had to leave after only a few minutes; her mother was waiting. I only know the date now because I turned around after she said goodbye, saw something striking on the cover of a magazine, and snapped a picture of it with my cellphone. The picture’s still in the phone’s memory, and so I have a picture of a magazine cover instead of a picture of Chelsea.

I don’t yet know how I’m supposed to feel about this. Obviously I wasn’t in Chelsea’s immediate social circle; I hadn’t even seen her in over a year, and didn’t find out about her death until two days after it happened. But I feel like the world is missing a piece I didn’t even know was there. A few notes have fallen out of the symphony when nobody was looking, and now it just sounds … wrong.

I avoid discussing religion in this blog; my beliefs are my own, I want readers of all faiths (including None of the Above) to feel welcome here, and I’m not interested in having theological debates with the internet. Chelsea believed in an afterlife, though—not loudly or fervently, but with a bone-deep conviction, quiet and solid as granite. I’m fairly sure she’s there now, in the finest heaven in creation, probably in an endless, fantastical jam session with a thousand brilliant musicians and every eye in the place secretly on her. She was like that when she played on earth; the ultimate transformation would change that but little. But she isn’t playing here, where I can hear her. I won’t hear her again for a good long while … unless, of course, I do.

I am writing a book about death. The Resurrectionist’s Song has a lot of death in it, though it doesn’t always take. I have thought about death from every possible angle, from the point of view of everyone involved. But this is different. This is Chelsea.

That’s how it always is. It’s always different.

Selfishly, stupidly, I want to hear a jazz clarinet.

What's next for MASKS

 

Well, Masks is rapidly barreling toward a conclusion over on Pocket Coyote, I’m working on the ebook, and people are starting to come at me with that special glass-eyed stare and ask, “When is Volume 2 coming out?”

Yeah, okay, only two people have asked me that, but I hate conversation enough that I’m going to blog about it so I can refer people to this blog next time they ask. So this is a time-saver for me, and a sneak peek for you guys. Win-win, right?

(Don’t give me that hurt look. I like talking to all of you, I really do … it’s just that I have to curl up in a ball for an hour afterward. I used to get migraines from chocolate, too, and it didn’t stop me from loving it—or eating far too much.)

(There was going to be a point to that anecdote, I swear.)

So what’s next in the magical world of Masks? Well, without giving too much away, I can tell you that the current serial will end with Chapter 32, after seven months of weekly superheroic action. The main plot will be tied up at the end of the serial—we’ll find out Cobalt’s secret, the good will end happily and the bad unhappily (well, mostly; I have mentioned that I like to kill off characters, right?), and most of the trailing threads will be tied up. There will be a clearly identifiable ending, with just a bit of a teaser for future adventures. Then we’ll take a break. Just a short one.

No whining, now! How many TV shows produce 32 episodes in a single season? Or air one episode a week, without interruption, for seven months? This stuff takes time to produce, and I’m working three jobs, so there will be a little bit of a delay before the action picks up again. You’ll probably want a bit of a lie-down after Chapter 32 anyway, and if you’re absolutely desperate for more Masks, you can buy the Volume 1 paperback or the ebook (available soon!), each of which contains a previously unpublished 4,500-word short story, “The Missing,” that takes place after the end of the first serial and drops lovely little clues about the second one.

Oh, did I say second serial? Yes, there’s going to be one. I’m not getting as much traffic as I’d like (invite your friends, for God’s sake, it’s a free book!), but I’m getting some, so I’m planning a big Volume 2 launch. Just not yet.

I have to finish work on The Novel before I do anything else, and work on the ebook and a couple of videos, but I expect to start writing Volume 2 around the time Volume 1 wraps up on Pocket Coyote. To tide you over while you’re waiting (or recuperating), I’m planning my usual madness for Free Comic Book Day, a big free story that, er, doesn’t have a title yet but will be a complete rip-roaring adventure and also set up quite a bit of what happens in Volume 2. This story will expand the Masks universe by introducing three heroes who haven’t appeared in the series before—one of whom is the Black Mask. That’s right, the Black Mask will actually show up in person instead of in grainy video footage, he’ll bring two unlikely pals along with him, and you’ll get to find out at least one rather embarrassing secret of his. That story will hit the web—as a PDF, as a Pocket Coyote entry, and as a free download—on May 5, 2012. There will be pictures, although I’m not sure yet who will draw them.

Meanwhile on Pocket Coyote, there will be more news, regularly—the release of the ebook, at least two (maybe three!) videos, and lots of spoilers about Volume 2, which I hope to start up sometime in early July. I’ll be ramping up the advertising, too, and there will be opportunities for you guys to get involved in promoting the Masks universe.

Because I really do need your help, folks. Tell your friends and family, tell strangers, tell your Facebook buddies—this series is awesome, and you can read all of it (well, except the bonus features) for free! And because some of them will very sensibly point out that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and ask what I’m getting out of all this work, you can tell them that as long as they’re looking at the site, I’m getting exactly what I want—eyeballs. All I want is proof of concept; I want a bunch of people reading my stories each week so I can shove my raw traffic numbers in the faces of people who think nobody reads my stories. I want people to read my stories. You like to read my stories. You are people. Win-win.

As for what’s in Volume 2 … well, I can’t say too much without giving away the ending of Volume 1, but let me see how many hints I can drop. 

1. Dead people will turn up in unexpected places.

2. Romance will bloom in other, equally unexpected places.

3. Trevor’s foxhounds will catch up with him.

4. Rae will make a new friend and a new enemy, perhaps at the same time.

5. The secret cause of the superhero purge will be revealed.

6. There will be a truly ridiculous amount of running, punching, and stuff blowing up.

7. Trevor will get kissed and concussed again (probably in rapid succession).

8. Rae will wear leather pants, but not for the usual reasons.

9. The Masked Rider has a plan.

10. There will be a cute fuzzy animal in a prominent role. And Moon and Soleil will be in the story, too.

There, I think that’s enough spoiling for now, don’t you? I can’t wait to see what happens next …