Nebula nominations are out, which means it’s time to do some serious award reading. If you’re a member of SFWA and you don’t normally vote for awards, consider this your call to action. Instead of being cynical or apathetic, consider the awards as a promotional opportunity for our whole genre. When people hear that a book or an author is a Nebula winner, they will view that work or individual as a representative of the genre. Back when I was a reader of the genre, and not a writer, I read a lot of Nebula anthologies. At times, I liked many stories, but thought some weren’t really that great. Too bad. I didn’t get a vote.

But now I do! And we all do. Every member can take part in choosing the works that represent our genre to the outside world. And if we choose well, we can attract new readers for the genre, helping not only the award-winning authors, but the whole genre.

Nebula 801 will walk you through reading the entire ballot. We only have about five weeks. Voting opens March 1 and closes March 30. This program only requires that you read a portion of each work–hopefully enough to decide whether you like it or not. Of course, I would hope that if you’re enjoying a book enough to potentially give it your award vote that you would read it through to the end, but that’s up to you.

If you’d like to play along, here’s your assignment for this week:

Novels (read at least the first three chapters):

Among Others, by Joe Walton
Embassytown, by China Mieville

Novella (read at least ten pages):
“Kiss Me Twice,” by Mary Robinette Kowal, Asimov’s 2011
“Silently and Very Fast,” by Catherynne Valente, Clarkesworld, Oct. 2011

Novelette (read at least five pages):

“Fields of Gold,” by Rachel Swirsky, Eclipse 4, Nightshade Books
“Ray of Light,” by Brad Torgerson, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dec. 2011

Short Story:
“Her Husband’s Hands,” by Adam-Troy Castro, Lightspeed, Oct. 2011

Ray Bradbury Award:
Attack the Block
Captain America: The First Avenger

Norton (read at least three chapters):
Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor

Courage and I are on the front page of the paper edition of Annarbor.com today. (Since the Ann Arbor News went under, Annarbor.com is filling the niche, but it only publishes in paper on Thursday and Sunday.) I’ve been getting comments and sympathy from friends and acquaintances about town due to my brush with death. It’s weird.

At the same time, I just turned down an interview with a major media outlet regarding my rather immoderate blog post from last fall on peanut allergy. When I say major, I mean really major. Like audience in the multi-millions. However, not every media exposure is right for every blogger. This one had consequences for relationships, including for my son, who did not sign up to be Mama’s little crusader for truth.

However, I am excited to see how the production turns out. They sound like they’ve really done their homework and have some interesting folks lined up to comment.

When taking a position on peanut allergy hysteria, there’s a very fine line between protesting overboard policy and picking on individual children and families who are trying to do the best they can with a dangerous medical condition. The scientific theory is one thing, but living with the objective reality is another. It’s worth noting that a panic-induced psychosomatic reaction to a food allergen is just as real and almost as dangerous as an actual anaphylactic reaction. Taking away protections that families have come to believe are keeping their children safe is not going to help with allaying anxiety and quelling panic. If there is a de-escalation, it needs to be gentle, gradual, and non-threatening.

It is very important to prevent accidental ingestion of peanut by people who are allergic to them. It is impossible to predict which peanut-allergic person will have a severe reaction and which will not. No history of previous exposure or medical test can tell us that.

However, it is my firm position that nut-free schools are impractical, counterproductive, and not necessary for safety. I know for a fact at our peanut and tree nut-free school that people are violating the nut bans on a regular basis. Some people don’t believe in these allergies to begin with. Another set of people do not accept that their child’s lunch is a danger to others and they ignore the rules. Yet another set of parents–probably the vast majority–simply can’t maintain the day-in, day-out vigilance necessary to fully comply. If you eat foods with nuts and nut-derived ingredients in the home, those foods have a way of finding their way into lunch boxes, whether you intend it or not.

Recently, my husband found half a shelled peanut on the floor at the peanut-free school. If that can happen at a school which has been flogging the nut-free message for all of these years, it can happen anywhere.

Probably the only realistic way to have a nut-free school is for the school to have its own food service and not allow any outside foods. That kind of environment would be the best way to ensure that allergic kids don’t accidentally eat anything dangerous.

Personally, I have not yet seen any scientific proof that airborne peanut or any other food allergen can cause a fatal anaphylactic reaction. I could be wrong. I have certainly not done an exhaustive survey of the scientific literature. If you have references for cohort or case studies proving that people have gone into anaphylaxis from the “smell” of peanuts or from being in the same room with a small amount of peanut, please share them with me.

Many parents have stories about how their child had an “airborne” reaction. Those experiences are powerful to those that go through them, but they are also anecdotes. If those anecdotes are documenting a real phenomenon, it should also show up in controlled scientific studies.

As a refresher, here’s what it looks like when Chewie gets in bad trouble:

In contrast, Courage gets into even worse trouble, and he’s a star!

This is a photo from the Annarbor.com story about Skunkpocalypse. Things got interesting yesterday when I got a call from the public health department informing me that the skunk Courage killed Thursday tested positive for rabies.

This put our family into RABIES THREAT LEVEL RED mode, when we had only been at perhaps yellow previously. In fact, I was confused for a minute as to why the health department was calling me. I had forgotten we were waiting on test results. I had filed the whole incident away as useless, vastly time consuming crap you do because it’s the right thing to do, not really because there’s a danger.

But there was a danger! A bad one. That skunk was actually rabid. It actually really was.

We took a couple of new steps in light of the new information. We got Chewie a rabies booster, as well. And in consultation with the health department and the rabies experts at MSU, I decided to start the rabies post-exposure prophylaxis. The reason is that immediately after the incident, I was worried about Courage’s mouth. (He had just ripped a piece of the fence out with his teeth.) I found cuts and abrasions in his mouth, and touched them with my fingers.

The health department told me that unless I was 100 percent sure I had no cuts or scratches on my own hands at the time, there was a remote possibility that I could have contacted the virus from the skunk saliva. So off to the hospital I went.

In Washtenaw County, there are only about five places that are stocked for rabies PEP. I ended up choosing the UM emergency room. I ran over there and sat in the ER for five hours so I could get my shots. The ER was a madhouse. People were leaving because they weren’t getting in fast enough to suit them.

The PEP first set consists of one shot of rabies vaccine (the exact same one the dogs get) plus three huge syringes full of rabies immunoglobulin. The latter is like an instant immune-response-in-a-bottle to attack any rabies virus that may be present. The reason it comes in three shots is that there’s such a large volume of liquid they have to inject into you.

The shots were not really that horribly painful, but it was a bit much getting so many in a row. (Arm, both butt cheeks, and thigh.) I got light headed after the third one, which alarmed the nurse. Then she made me lay down and wanted to wait until I felt better to give me the last shot. Meanwhile, I wanted her to just do it and get it over with.

In a situation like that, the nurse always wins. Ice water was consumed. Crackers were dispensed.

I get to go back for three more vaccine boosters. No more immunoglobulin. Unfortunately, I have to go back to the ER for each one. My doctor said that they used to do those boosters in the office, but they had too many no-shows, and then the vaccine expired and went to waste.

I’ve learned now that Channel 4 6 o’clock news picked up the story, albeit without specifics about my family or Courage. That’s fine with me. Courage’s ego is too big already.

In the meantime, we’ve confirmed there’s a second skunk living under the shed. I’ve talked to local animal control, the Michigan Dept. of Agriculture, and the USDA about that skunk. The next step is Navy Seal Team Six.

Last night I read and enjoyed “Some of Them Closer,” by Marissa Lingen in the Jan/Feb issue of Analog.

The deadline for Nebula Noms is approaching fast, and I’m afraid my reading effort this award season has been wholly inadequate. Still, if you’re cramming to fill your ballot, I have a couple more pieces to add to my “like” list.

Novel

Fuzzy Nation, by John Scalzi

Short Story

Forever Sixteen, by Amy Sundberg

I still haven’t read and liked any novellas. Keeping up with the field is really challenging. Must do better in 2012.

(Note, I am not sure that everything on my “like” list will end up on my ballot. Like is not necessarily equivalent to like-like or love. But I do think these things are worth looking at, especially if you’re a fan of plot-driven fiction, as I am.)

My next appointment isn’t until March 3, so I have to chill out until then. I’ve been observing some interesting changes this week following session two. I was very interested in the results for my feet. The early sessions are superficial, and not meant to stand on their own in terms of results. Still, I’m tracking some intriguing trends.

Immediately after the session, my feet felt pleasantly tingly and “softer.” I went to yoga the next day and was pretty wiped out. It’s amazing how tired you can be after laying on a table for 90 minutes having someone push on your muscles. At this point, I’d say all of my yoga postures are “worse.” It feels like starting over in some ways, especially with certain postures.

The yoga class starts with standing straight with toes and heels together. Immediately I realized that my legs felt closer together. That was head trippy like whoa. They hadn’t seemed far apart or bowed in any way before. Previously, I would have sworn they were perfectly straight, but the rolfing clearly made them straighter. There’s also some odd rotation stuff going on. Now that my legs are straighter, my right foot wants to turn out slightly. Obviously, a work in progress.

She also adjusted my out-of-alignment right hip using a PT method in addition to the rolfing. I noticed a big difference in that hip in camel pose. Previously, I had felt the tension in the right hip when I bent backward in camel. That day, no tension. Both hips felt even and moved freely. Sweet!

Throughout the week, my feet have been changing each day. For the first couple of days, they were a bit sore, especially the right foot. At first, it worried me, because it was a sort of soreness I had associated with injury. But it passed quickly, and I’ve concluded it’s more the type of soreness you get in muscles when you are working hard.

After that, my feet went through a period of a couple of days where they were popping constantly. Especially–you guessed it–the right foot! I even demonstrated to Brent by walking across the room with my ankle popping every single step. Weird! The next morning, no popping.

I’ve had weird energy spikes and urges to get up and move around more, as well. One night, I dragged Brent and the dogs out for a late-night walk. Something I never do. My feet did not hurt. I’ve become very walking-aversive in recent years, perhaps more than I even realized.

Today, my feet were feeling quite good, so I purposely took a 15 minute walk around a school building we were visiting for an activity. No pain in my arches or the bottom of the feet. Yay! However, I did develop soreness in the back of my right heel. Interesting! Again, I worry about injury, because I’ve had so much foot pain in the past. I am certainly not going to overdo it with these little experiments.

My theory as to what’s been wrong with my feet is I think that over the years as I accumulated minor injuries related to flatness, aggravated by attempts at running, that they “froze up” and lost their natural springiness that is supposed to work like a shock absorber (even for flat feet). That would explain why I’ve been so exquisitely sensitive to concrete and stone floors. Those surfaces are very hard and your feet take a beating walking or running on them under the best of circumstances. Freeze up the shocks, and you get damage very quickly. Each time, the healing process would tend to gum up the works even more.

So I think I’m onto a real solution, here. I suspect also that my overall walking stride is causing unnecessarily high impact force on my feet, as well, and I feel optimistic that the rolfing can address that by opening stuff in the lower back, hips, and thighs. I know for a fact that I’ve got plenty of tight fascia in there.

Well, that’s a lot of self-indulgent navel gazing. Does anyone really care about my foot fascia this much? I hope you’re feeling entertained and informed!

Annarbor.com reports that University of Michigan officials knew that child pornography was present on a hospital computer for six months before the incident was finally reported to police. I am absolutely livid over this appalling failure of the University and the hospital to comply with the law and to protect patients. My son was treated in the pediatric emergency room where the doctor who is accused of the crime worked in Aug. of 2010. I don’t remember the names of all of the doctors who saw him, but he spent the night and may have been in the care of this doctor. To think that he continued to work and “play” in that hospital for another six months is absolutely enraging.

Even worse, when you read through the article, you find that the office of the attorney who had incorrectly appropriated the case and apparently instructed others not to file a police report seemed not to be going anywhere with it. Instead, a resident physician and an attending who knew about the incident had to come forward a second time, and at that point the hospital’s risk management office knew nothing about it.

The physicians were prompted to come forward a second time by the Pennsylvania State scandal. Even then, it took nearly a week before a police report was filed.

Not acceptable. Not okay. No. No. No!

But you know what really burns me up about this? Nobody is getting fired. Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Multiple people in multiple departments utterly fail for six months to report a serious crime to law enforcement, and nobody is losing their job? The overly grabby attorney is conveniently “not working there anymore” for reasons the University says are unrelated. Everyone else involved is going to get a good talking to in their annual performance review and a note in their personnel record.

Woopdee f-ing doo.

Some heads need to roll, people. This keeps happening over and over, where child predators are protected by the inaction of their peers, supervisors, and law enforcement. In many cases, the people who have failed to act are mandated reporters. Where are the teeth in the mandated reporting laws? I am waiting anxiously for some criminal non-reporting charges to be filed in that other Very Special child abuse case in California. Come on, let’s not be soft on the criminals who make it possible for other criminals to hurt children!

I’m a little bit afraid of the keyword search hits I’m going to get with this headline. But you know what, internet? Bring it on. Come here looking for something that’s not good for you, go away amused and enlightened, that’s my motto.

So Courage got really smelly yesterday, and tore his mouth up eating our back fence, and then got potentially-rabid skunk blood all over himself. Naturally, I decided this was a good day to break out his Xanax bottle and try again to get him to sleep in his crate, because otherwise his skunky, rabid self would be in bed with us all night. And that’s just too much. Honestly.

So here’s the rationale behind the Xanax. Courage is a creature of habit. His current habit is to go outside one last time before bed, pee, sit staring out into the woods for exactly one minute longer than it is convenient for me to wait for him, then go directly upstairs and hop into the master bed to wait for bedtime. Once everyone else is ready for bed, we throw him out of bed and show him the very nice dog bed on the floor. He lays down nearby on a blanket or a dog bed and pretends to sleep until he thinks we are asleep. That is approximately 90 seconds, in his estimation. Then he gets back in the bed, using stealth.

We then throw him out of the bed, and he repeats the process all night long until he is successful.

Have I mentioned I really admire Courage’s attitude towards life? We could all learn a thing or two from him. Especially writers. Writer friends, keep jumping in bed with that editor until he buys your story. Ummm, well you know what I mean.

Anyway, part of the problem with the crate is anxiety, and part is that sleeping all night in the crate is not his routine. So my plan with the Xanax was to quell his anxiety and have him sleep, tranquilized, two or three nights in a row in the crate. At that point, him being a dog of rather short memory, his routine will have changed. For as long as he will have been able to remember, his routine will have been to go outside, pee, sit and stare at the woods, go upstairs, go in his crate, and pass out until morning.

I figured then I could stop giving him the Xanax and he wouldn’t argue. The problem, however, is that each time I’ve not given him enough Xanax. The dosage on the bottle was 2-3 tablets. That’s 8 to 12 times a normal human dose. Surely just one tablet to take the edge off is all he needs? So we failed with one tablet. Then we failed with two tablets. Then we backburnered the whole project until Skunkzilla came along and forced the issue.

So last night I gave him his three tablets and led him up to his crate. I settled the crate-sized dog bed in it and prepared to shove him in there. Before I could do anything, he walked right in and lay down. Then he went to sleep.

So I still don’t know if the Xanax did anything. He did wake up several times in the night and cry to get out. But he didn’t seem anxious. Only like a routine-bound dog who is being prevented from doing the activity that gives meaning to his life. Who is he without the nightly sneak into the master bed? Is he the same Courage he was yesterday? Something greater, or less? whimper whimper whimper

So I think we’re over the hump with the crate thing. My only theory as to why he suddenly is not afraid of being put in the crate was that we’ve been using the bed from it outside the crate, and he had imprinted on the bed as an acceptable and safe place to be.

Brent thinks he now sees the crate as a sort of shark cage, protecting him from Skunkzilla, and perhaps from his own baser instincts. (Death! Blood! Moles!)

[Update: I was out back helping to spray the dogs with Nature's Miracle when two crows chased a huge hawk over our house. We looked up, and a raccoon was staring at us from the top of a skinny tree. The animals...they're planning something. Stocking up on canned goods and ammunition...]

The weather has been unseasonably warm, so we should have known this would happen. I smelled skunk earlier today in the back yard, but I didn’t pay much mind to it because it was full daylight. I figured the critters had been out and about in the night and left their mark. I let my dogs out and went back to my desk to work.

Well, soon I hear some mighty strange panicked barking. I look out the window and see them facing off a huge skunk through our wooden fence. The fence keeps each combatant on the right side, but I know it is already too late to save them from a spraying. I grab the Nature’s Miracle and a pair of shoes, and go out there. My dogs are thoroughly sprayed. They’ve been sprayed before. My other dog was sprayed several times. I am no stranger to the skunk/dog issue. But this spraying was a couple orders of magnitude beyond what I’d ever seen. It was like skunk aliens had invaded our planet and skunk-nuked our back yard.

I couldn’t let the dogs back in, and I couldn’t stop to properly wash them because today is a work day and I am on deadline, so I ignored them and waited for my husband to come home and deal with it.

Except the whole ordeal just went on and on. More strange barking happened, and I went out to look again. This time, I saw a baby skunk. The neighbor, on her back deck, ever so helpful, said, “There’s a skunk right there!”

Argh! It’s a family of skunks! Living in the burrow under our shed. I realize this barking and spraying is going to keep happening until the entire family of skunks had unloaded all of its ammunition on my dogs. Plus, I started thinking I might need to call someone out to get them out of there, and they wouldn’t be able to work with the frantic-skunk-sprayed dogs barking and running around.

I had an idea. I dragged the X-pen out of the basement. Oh, X-pen, you are so handy! I congratulate myself on thinking of the X-pen. I congratulate myself on owning an X-pen. I am awesome.

I set it up in the yard while Chewie looks on. I am smug. The dogs are going to jail and I am going back to work. The X-pen is ready. Now to put the dogs in.

The dogs are gone! While I was setting up the pen, they busted through the fence and went down in the ravine. They are staring at a skunk carcass.

There is swearing, and anger, and I scramble down the muddy hillside in my Merrill clogs, yelling “Bad dog!” I must have sounded scary, because they backed away from the thing. I dragged/chased/beat them back up the hill and into the yard. I had to disassemble the fence because Chewie was suddenly too big to get back in through the hole he had escaped through.

I don’t know if Courage killed the skunk, or just…tasted…it after it died naturally. The dead one was a small one, but I am quite sure I saw a gigantic skunk, so probably there are about 500 skunks still out there refilling their tanks, waiting to skunk-nuke us all in our sleep.

They are in the X-pen right now. I hate them.

Everything I try to write on this blog comes out angry, or self-righteous, or may get me in trouble some day. So instead, I want to share a story about my kid.

We were driving home from group violin class, and we heard a radio spot about the spread of religious ideas by viral Youtube videos. They played a couple of samples by a Christian evangelist type who thought he was being audacious by expressing horribly intolerant ideas. He stated that it was wrong to expect people not to use the word ‘gay’ in a negative way and he said that most muslims were ignorant and had never read the Koran.

Unprompted, my son yelled, “I hate that guy!”

I think we’re doing pretty good with him.