IZ FICTION:
Woe, three stories be upon ye! Like a rainstorm after a drought, enjoy 18,000ish words of Fiction By IJK, because everyone simply decided to publish me all at once.
Freediver, in Reactor
- I wrote this story because I was inspired by an article about undersea telecommunications cables and someone’s blog post about living on a boat in close quarters. Honestly, I just love it when two guys are stuck in a situation and when that situation includes being trapped in a boat-spaceship and also there are meteors.
Human Voices, in Lightspeed (This ones a novelette!! Wow!!)
- I wrote this story mostly on a cruise ship while on vacation with my parents, which is not at all what the vibe of the story is. But something about cruise ships always makes me write things that are…dark. This is a fairytale subversion about three siblings and also keeping a siren captive in your bathtub. Reviews from my friends include “this is the favorite thing you’ve written!!” so you know it’s good.
Wire Mother, in Clarkesworld
- I hope it makes everyone mad, and I will not spoil it further other than to say there’s an instance of what you could either call vague sexual assault or teenagers not understanding consent. I’ve been trying to write a story about AI for a couple of years, and I’m happy this finally gelled. It’s about a future after the AI hype bros get everything they want.
IZ BOOK UPDATES:
Ok now that you’ve read 18,000 words I’ve written, how about reading 100,000 more? No seriously preorder SUBLIMATION please and thank you I promise it’s good. If we all work together really hard and preorder SUBLIMATION then as a community we can prevent the failstate of “Isabel Goes Back to the Law Firm.”
And by way of updates: I have seen covers and they are glorious. I’m very excited to share these, but for now all I can say is….. :3c they’re good. I have also seen interiors and they are less exciting but no less glorious, and it’s remarkable to see my book as like. A book. All the other stuff I’ve been working on isn’t particularly glamorous but is deeply necessary, like “making sure there are no typos” and “continuity.”
I’m working on book two now (unrelated to Sublimation, a standalone set in a very different universe) and Oh My God Its Like Pulling Teeth. I don’t want to talk about it. We’re in what I like to call the “pit” which is the part of revising the novel where everything is terrible all the time.
IZ A TRAIN:
This is sort of a “what Isabel did over summer vacation” post, but hopefully an interesting one, AKA the one where I talk about taking a cross-country Amtrak ride to and from Seattle Worldcon. Why did I do that? It’s simple. I watch too much travel youtube and I hate flying. On the other hand, I love trains. The problem with trains, in the states, is that we don’t have high speed rail, and our train system is old, and yet…I was very curious, and the timing worked out kind of perfectly. I can write anywhere. J’s remote. We’re young and mobile and don’t have any children or pets (yet!!). I need to be in Seattle, we have friends in Chicago, and the train stops at Glacier National Park. Fuck it. Let’s take a train! Let’s take a bunch of trains.
scroll to the end to watch a landscape video of a bunch of the continental united states : )
We boarded at NY Penn station (specifically the new Moynihan terminal) on the Lake Shore Limited, and transferred at Chicago to the Empire Builder which we rode all the way to Seattle. On the way back, we did the same thing in reverse, except that we stopped at Glacier National Park and Chicago for a few days each—I’ll spare you the details on that, since those are really just “what Isabel did on summer vacation” posts. It was basically a three day trip there and a three day trip back, which is way more ridiculous than just flying for six hours.
Taking Amtrak cross-country is like experiencing the last relic of the once-great American empire. Which is to say: the trains were almost always obscenely late, the interiors of the trains are from the late 80’s and look like it, and the scenery is shockingly beautiful and the experience was worth doing once. On the train, you gain a sense of America’s great vastness in a way that flying doesn’t impart. America’s big, and a lot of it is very beautiful, and a lot of it is also very flat. Weird country. Lots of biomes. Incredibly nice to be lying down in bed and watching the world fly by. For that alone, I recommend it as a once in a lifetime thing.
Biome Highlights included:
- Traveling through the Cascades and feeling very much like I was in an episode of Twin Peaks or Gravity Falls
- Winding around the edge of Glacier National Park and the mountains and the rivers and streams with clear glacier runoff.
- North Dakota in the middle of the night, where there were plumes of fire rising from fracking offgassing, which was….objectively terrible, but subjectively looked like a scene out of Mad Max Fury Road.
- Winding through swamp and wetlands-y areas and seeing rivers and riverboats.
- Fields of sunflowers in Montana.
- Cows! And horses!
- Everywhere the sky was reflected in the water.
An interesting facet of cross-country train trips in the USA is that Amtrak makes you sit with other people at lunch and dinner, which adds an element of enforced socialization that was at turns a lot of fun and a little exhausting.
Small snapshot of people we met while eating:
- Climate policy nonprofit people. One of them was British, had saved up Amtrak points for years, and was taking an insane cross country trip DC > Seattle > LA > NOLA > Chicago > DC again] with his points.
- Two older women who traveled together since their husbands had died, who earnestly asked us about why young people couldn’t hold conversations or look people in the eye, and that we seemed very good at these things.
- Brazilian lady who didn’t speak any English but did live in the same city we did, which was a surprise.
- Girl traveling with her great-uncle to go to Worldcon, who was asking everyone what they thought her relationship with her great uncle was (grandfather? Father? Sugar grandfather?), and who had rated every single Caesar salad she ate and sent the rating videos to her friends.
- I didn’t talk with any of them (no reason why, just didn’t end up sitting with them) but a bunch of Amish people. I saw a little Amish baby in a little baby-sized bonnet which for some reason cracked me up.
Travel Highlights included:
- The food was surprisingly good! Also, free coffee in the mornings. Free coffee + lying in bed + watching the scenery was pretty great.
- All of the aforementioned biome viewing and people watching was very interesting
- Working in the observation car and watching the scenery was excellent. There were a couple of days where being trapped in a small moving cabin was really excellent for my productivity.
- Stopping in Glacier National Park and being steps from our hotel was super convenient.
- Chicago’s metropolitan lounge includes access to a really incredible shower (It’s a pretty regular shower with excellent water pressure, but it hits different after being on the train).
- Bed was pretty comfy! No complaints there.
- The staff on the trains were usually very nice but very overworked. They still mostly did an excellent job, so I think this counts as a highlight.
But Travel Lowlights very much also included:
- Every single trip we had was delayed by at least thirty minutes, up to four hours. Most of the trips were delayed by about three hours. Not great. This isn’t really all Amtraks fault—on the west side of Chicago, the trains have to stop for freight trains, and don’t have right of way. Still, it’s annoying as hell. And stressful.
- Four hour bus ride from Seattle to Spokane, that Amtrak only let us know about the night before. Presumably something had happened that forced this to happen, but it was really like. Not what I wanted to experience. And trying to figure out which bus to take was also wildly confusing.
- All the rooms were pretty outdated, and one of them was a little gross. Nothing that some wipes couldn’t fix, but, yeesh.
- I found it hard to sleep on the train. J had an easier time, mostly, but it was a bit like rolling the dice on sleep quality every night.
- Some days I was very productive…Other days I really got nothing done. Maybe this isn’t the train’s fault. Maybe this is just a me problem.
- One of the guys we talked to at Amtrak was just DEEPLY unhelpful. Like. My god. Dude was truly so unhelpful and wasted so much of our time. Staff quality was so so so variable.
- Expensive!!!!!!!!!
So, tallying up everything: would I recommend it? Only if you don’t have a hard deadline, and if you sleep well on moving vehicles, and if you have the $ or points for a roomette or bedroom. This was a bucket list item for me that I’m glad I ticked off. I don’t think I’m going to do it again…although I’m tempted to do the Chicago-LA one through the American Southwest back from next year’s worldcon, because man, those rock formations.
Anyway, if you’ve gotten to the end, here, have a train landscape video: