Mind the Gap

So I spent some time last week lurking about the message boards for the newly-formed Interstitial Arts Foundation, and finally decided to introduce myself and hopefully join a conversation or two over there - the result of which was this week's moment of Fanboy Dorkgasm when I saw that Ellen Kushner had not only said "Hi" but had nice things to say about my RPG.net columns. (My intro post is here, with her response immediately following.)

Which is really quite cool - Swordspoint was a significant find for me back in the summer of '91 (!!), not only because it's such a beautifully-written novel and opened my eyes to the potential of fantasy (which it is, and did), but also because that was right about the same time I was getting serious about my coming-out process, and positive literary models for bisexual men seemed an unheard-of thing. (This was before we had Alan Cumming to make it all seem cool again; you young pups don't know how good you have it.) To read a novel that not only had a bi male hero presented as the most natural thing in the world, but a whole culture in which that was the norm... well, it was a Big Thing. And while it's certainly possible I might have turned out with a healthy attitude about my own ambiguous orientation without writers like Kushner, Gaiman, Barker et al creating works that didn't make me feel like a freak, that stuff sure didn't hurt. (And I think that there's probably a little seed of Jenny Haniver somewhere in all that, too. Jenny is infinite, she contains multitudes.)

So having one of my heroes open up her message to me with "it's an honor" was a real high point of my day.

And check out the IAF's site too - it's a very cool organization with some very interesting ideas. Makes me anxious to get to work with producing some properly interstitial work for Thing in a Jar, which you'll note Patrick has fiddled with so it's got a wee bit of content at last.

Much of the rest of my day was spent pounding the crap out of my thumb with a tack hammer in the interest of getting my new Ikea bookshelves assembled; I sit amidst them now as I write this, already laden with books (in various stages of organization) that I think were glad to be liberated at last from boxes. As am I, to have them be so.