glitter and mayhem

I’m headed to LoneStarCon3 at the end of August and here’s some of what I’m looking forward to:

• Participating in a couple of group readings
• The chance to pick up my copy of Beyond the Sun from Bryan Thomas Schmidt
• The Glitter and Mayhem party. I want to do something worthy of it, so I’ve decided to add a couple more colors to my usual pink (explained in The Pink Hair Manifesto) just for WorldCon and let YOU decide the color. Just vote in the comments. The top three colors will get at least a streak’s worth of hair. If you are supporting me in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, even by just a dollar (which also gets you a bonus stack of fine fiction), your vote counts ten times as much. Everyone who votes gets entered to win a copy of the book or a piece of the Near + Far jewelry.

Here’s your options, all Manic Panic colors:

After Midnight
Atomic Turquoise (currently at 4 votes)
Bad Boy Blue
Blue Moon (currently at 10 votes)
Electric Amethyst
Electric Banana
Electric Lava
Electric Lizard (currently at 1 vote)
Electric Tiger Lily (currently at 1.5 votes)
Enchanted Forest
Fuchsia Shock
Green Envy
Infra Red (currently at 10 votes)
Lie Locks
Mystic Heather (currently at 21 votes)
New Rose
Pillarbox Red
Pretty Flamingo (currently at .5 votes)
Psychedelic Sunset
Purple Haze (currently at 31 votes)
Raven
Red Passion
Rockabilly Blue
Rock and Roll Red
Shocking Blue (currently at .5 votes)
Sunshine
Ultra Violet
Vampire Red
Vampire’s Kiss
Venus Envy
Violet Knight (currently at .5 votes)
Voodoo Blue (currently at 12 votes)
Wildfire (currently at 1.5 votes)

Summer wound down, and we entered heat-mad August, days of sweat and sunshine, so hot you didn’t really want to move. But somehow, when evening started falling and the air cooled off a little, your energy would return.

And sometimes one of the places to burn some of that off was by driving up to the Michigan dunes, building a fire and getting drunk on the beach. I went up one evening with Anna, and a bunch of other friends from high school. I didn’t particularly like them or want to hang around with them, but Anna wanted it, and she made me promise to come.

It was what I had expected. A lot of beer and a couple of bottles of Jaeger getting passed around. We knew a spot that was technically private property, but the owners of the house far above were rarely there to disturb us. We sat on the soft sand around a fire made from the wood we’d brought and I watched the stars far out over the lake, wondering when I could gracefully excuse myself and slip away.

That was why I was the first person to see them. Somet, out in the water, coming towards our fire. At first I thought they were fish, or seals, or something, not people. But as the heads came up out of the water, I realize they were human. Women, three of them.

I’m finishing up a story for the Glitter and Mayhem anthology, involving the Midwestern town I grew up in and lesbian were-seals. Here’s what may be the opener.

Here’s Anna and I all through high school: a geeky Hispanic theater boy and a bushy-haired white girl whose geekery took the form of endless D&D games and scores of tattered lurid paperbacks.

Here’s us a few years later, both in the same community college. Still best friends, still sharing trials and tribulations, always with an unspoken question between us, all on Anna’s part, because I knew the answer.

And here’s when I finally answered it, and broke Anna’s heart.