Reading, Writing, Reeling, Writhing

Sacchi Green


This going to be a real cop-out. My brain is scrambled. I’ve been reading about 130 submissions for my Best Lesbian Erotica anthology, with 20 more to go, and then I’ll have to reread the 30 I’ve already put in a “Yes” file and some from the “Maybe file” to prune them down to the 15-17 I can actually fit into the book, depending on length. 60,000 words is all I’m allowed for the manuscript.

And I’ve been reading, for research, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (concise, my ass, but full of sometimes interesting detail) and Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan which does have some nice photos of women soldiers in the desert looking totally kick-ass. I’ve also been getting background information online about the Zagros mountain range in what is ethnically Kurdistan but politically parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, all of whom might be willing to let the Kurds have their own nation if there hadn’t turned out to be quite a lot of oil under those sandstone and salt dome mountains pushed high by the movement of the African-Arabian Tectonic Plate nudging under the Eurasian Tectonic Plate.

Other topics of my research for the same work-in-progress have been: casinos in Switzerland and Lebanon; the Sumerian goddess Ishtar; and Neanderthals, the latter just because I was already interested in them before I discovered that the archaeological site where Neanderthal remains were discovered, with evidence of ritual burial, is a cave in those very mountains where my superhero characters will be training for their massive rescue mission. I probably won’t be able to work the Neanderthal bits into the story, but you never know.

In something completely different but powerfully distracting, I’ve been reading complex hospital discharge papers and prescription information regarding my elderly father who has been having adventures with a recurrence of an antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus infection in his foot leading to cellulitis, now responding, slowly, to treatment, but requiring frequent doctor appointments and extra care for him.

AND I’ve been reading online weather forecasts. I intended, having finally arranged for a few days free while my brother takes on a couple of the doctor visits, a trip to my cabin in the New Hampshire mountains to see whether the water pipes froze there when the oil company accidentally skipped a delivery and let the furnace go out (it’s on again now, so if the pipes froze, they’ll have thawed and burst by now.) I’m all set to head north today (Monday), except that now the forecast is for snow and sleet and freezing rain on Tuesday, so if I got there, I’d probably be trapped in the cabin (with no wifi) for all of Tuesday and into Wednesday, which is when I planned to come home. AAARRGH!

So, that’s what I’ve been reading. Aren’t you glad you asked? Sigh.