To all my fellow Americans (of the sort who live in the USA, and not those who are Americans of the Mexican, Central, South, or Canadian types, through I hope their days are happy as well) happy Independence Day!  To the rest of you, you poor things, you miss the fireworks.  I'm sad to say my computer is fried, and I'm typing this on my mother's less than youthful machine, so while you, reader mine, will get your usual dose of Children of Mars on time, and perhaps another "Parchment Underground" story, I will not be posting my usual volume of blog posts and book reviews.  I lost my data, and while I have most of my novel backed up, and all of my fanfiction, I have some salvage work to do on the last week or so's worth of work.  awww.

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Harry Potter universe, and am not affiliated with anyone who does. However, J. K. Rowling and her affiliates leave me (and those like me) alone because I don't make any money off these and provide free, if relatively ineffective, advertising.

Summary: Despite James Potter's heroism, Severus Snape does not escape the Shrieking Shack unscathed. When Remus Lupin bites him, Severus has to face a full share in Lupin's secret while whispers of a new Dark Lord grow louder every day.

( Chapter Nine: Whispers Around the School )

Author's note: This 200 word drabble is part of the Parchment Underground universe and makes no sense unless you have read the other stories in that universe, Blurring and Spectacles.

Disclaimer: In case you were wondering, JKR was never this horrible to everybody.

Safe

James' knees bent and he slid the binder onto the bottom shelf.  A shadow fell across his back, and he froze, his hand trapped in the air.  "So Potter, what are you doing at Hogwarts in the middle of the Holiday?"

James pushed himself to his feet.  "More than you, Avery."

The Death Eater smiled painfully.  "Where's your master?  I have paperwork for him."

"It's Christmas, where do you think?" James snapped, "He's home with his son."

"And yet you're here."  Avery raised his wand and flicked away a piece of lint before pointing it at James.

James backed up quickly, slamming into the bookcase.  "I'll take him the paperwork; just leave it."

"I'd love to know how you smuggled out that ledger." The wand flicked up and the air around James' throat and chest hardened.  He opened his mouth to suck in breath, but nothing would get past it pressing against him.

"I couldn't have! he gasped, "Bloody hell, how would I have?"

"Keep hoping I won't find out."

The air tightened around him, and he thought he was imagining it when he heard his name from the earring.

As he vanished, he kept his eyes on Avery.  Safe.

You know, I probably should weigh in on the situation in Iran, given that my chosen field of study is Near Eastern Studies (the reason I'm taking Political Science as my undergraduate degree is because that's what my first choice university wants its Near Eastern Studies PhD students to have as an undergraduate degree) but really, I've been afraid of two things.  The first is an entirely selfish fear that I'll get it wrong and anyone who wants to hire me later on will read my errors and decide I can't really know what I'm talking about.  The second fear is a bit more global, and a bit more important.  You see, the charges the Iranian government is most prone to throw at dissidents is that they're anti-Islam and pro-West.  As an American Jew, I don't want to give the Ayatollahs any more ammunition for that particular charge by making plain the support I so desperately give for the protesters.

I have to think about this for a minute.

Ever since just before the election day, I saw Western people online posting about how we in the West have to remember that Iran has a functioning democracy.  Every time I read it, a little bit of steam gathered deep inside my ears, waiting until there was enough pressure to send jets of it hissing around my head.  That is a gross mischaracterization of the Iranian governmental system.  Yes, Iran has elections, and yes, Iranians get to vote for their president, but most of the power rests not with the voters or their elected officials, but with the Ayatollahs and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who is not elected by the people, but by the Assembly of Experts, a secretive panel of religious scholars whose members must be approved by the government.  Whatever you want to call that, please don't call it democracy.

Also, Iran does not have freedom of the press or freedom of religion, or right to criticize the Ayatollahs.  Lacking as it is in the free exchange of ideas, and holding women hostage, the way it does through religious edicts nominally for their own good, Iran is no free society, a precondition for any functional democracy.  No matter how many elections are held in such a society, it remains tyrannical.  Without freedom of the press and the right to criticize the whole government, no voting public can gather information on the office seekers independently.  The pick of the Ayatollahs is given preferential treatment.  When women are held hostage, any man who cares about any woman, be it wife, mother, daughter, or sister is held hostage through her.  This is not to say that Iran can't become a functioning democracy on its own without Western intervention.  At its inception, the United States had slavery, laws that gave women as much power as children, and forbid men without property from voting, and places where one could be arrested for not attending church.  Iran can overcome this.

This should all of course be prerequisite knowledge for this current situation, and all of it must be taken into account when discussing the protests.  It helps explain why aiding the protesters as outsiders is not the best of ideas.

On a scholarly level, I'm thrilled.  I'm over the moon to have the chance to watch this unfold.  A few weeks ago, if anyone had asked me if Iran were ripe for revolution, I would have explained how it was less likely to rebel than other states in similar situations because it was a revolution against a horrible repressive government (the Shah was friendly to the West, but he was absolutely brutal towards his own people) that brought the Ayatollahs to power in the first place.  I would have told you that that this fact created a sense of helplessness among many Iranians, because they fought the good fight to get rid of their tyrannical government, and look, something just as bad took its place.  But right now, I watch as just such a revolution may just be ready to begin.  I'm fascinated.

On another level, the level that cares that politics control people's lives, I'm terrified, and anxious, and exalting all at once.  Certainly as an American, I would like to see the least of the protesters' potential effects come to pass, that is the ascension of Mousavi to the presidency, because he supports beginning a dialogue with President Obama, and since he supports the founding of privately owned news stations and the lessening of women's' inequality, the lives of many Iranians would become better as well.  However, I'm afraid that this is all just a flash in the pan, that the protesting will soon stop, that the protesters, Mousavi, or the reformist impulse will be discredited as a foreign ploy, or that the Iranian government will crack down and tighten its grip over the country.  I'm almost as afraid that the protesting will accomplish nothing more than Mousavi's rise to power.  That would do nothing about the underlying problems in Iran with the Ayatollahs.  Likewise, I'm anxious that perhaps the protests might become full scale revolution and that it will either be crushed and make the Ayatollahs more controlling and harsher, or that it will help bring to power another authoritarian regime, thus renewing the sense of hopelessness I wrote of above.

More than all of that, however, I'm hopeful.  I'm anxious, I'm eager, and I'm hopeful that the Iran I get to talk about next year or in grad school might be a very different Iran I have been learning about until today.

However, as excited and hopeful as I am, and I really hate to say this, in the final analysis, non-Iranians, especially Westerners, especially Americans need to stay out of this and not offer the protesters too much support, not because it isn't our business, or because it's the Iranians' problem, but because our support can damage the protesters' cause within Iran.  No, I don't think the Ayatollahs read my blog (though for all I know Ayatollah Khamenei has a super special addiction to English-language Harry Potter fanfiction that he just can't kick) but I'm pretty sure the accumulated noise of the western blogosphere filters into their consciousness, as well as that of the rest of Iran, and I don't want the level of support we're all showing to be interpreted as somehow proof that the protesters are following an American agenda, so yes it's great that they're protesting, (yes it's really really really great!) but I'm really leery of non-Iranian attempts to help the protesters, lest we give the Ayatollahs more excuses to say that it's all an American plot to overthrow them in our perceived war on Islam.

I hate sitting back and not doing anything as I watch this unfold, but I want to give the protesters every chance of success, and in this case, that means, frustrating as it is, staying out of the fray.

There was a half off sale on speculative YA fiction at my local independent book store.  After I stopped caressing book spines saying, "come home with me baby and I'll read you all night long like you've never been read before," I came home with a few new friends and a few old favorites, and I ordered a few more.

I have a very bad habit of reading at the bottom of the steps where I'm perfectly positioned as an obstacle to be tripped over.  So, when my mom came downstairs, she pulled one of my new prizes, The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan (carrie_ryan  here on livejournal) out of my hands to get me to move and asked a question she really knows better to ask.  "What's the book about?"  I can't really manage anything coherent about a book until I finish, but that doesn't stop me from trying...

Fish: It has Zombies and Puritans.
Mom: What?  That's an unholy duo that should never see the light of day!
Fish: It's good really, It's like The Village only actually good.  It's like Night of the Living Dead meets The Scarlet Letter.
Mom: I couldn't read it.  I'd be too scared.
Fish: I don't blame you, those zombies are really really really-
Mom: *Twitch* Puritans.  I hate Puritans.  I would have nightmares for years.

I'll try again.

Mary's world extends only to the fence around her village, for outside is the forest where the Unconsecrated howl and moan, eager to eat and infect the living.  The Sisterhood do their best to keep everyone within the fences pure, sure that only their strict adherence to God's words will protect them from the fate that must have befallen the rest of the world.  But Mary's mother has told her stories of the world beyond the village, and when her mother is infected and expelled from the village and Mary is sent to join the Sisterhood, she can't get her mother's story out of her head.  When an outsider arrives from another village, and soon becomes a very strange Unconsecrated, Mary must discover what the sisterhood has been hiding.

( There is a world out there, out beyond us. And now we are part of that world. It is terrifying and wonderful. )

If all goes as planned, there's going to be a movie made of this book.  I will absolutely not go see it.  *Shudder*  I don't need any more nightmares full of shuffling, sprinting dead.  Actually, (or so I've heard) the movie's supposed to do for zombies what Twilight did for vampires.  Umm, the zombies in The Forest of Hands and Teeth weren't sexy!

A few days ago, I woke up an hour later than normal and hobbled down stairs to my mother's furious accusations of neglecting the animals and burst into tears right there in the kitchen.  My mom examined me and calmed me down, and watched me like a hawk as I listed around the kitchen, and I yelled that the whole left side of my face felt really weird and hurt, and I couldn't think, and would she please not bother me, Mom did what I have carefully conditioned her to do.

Mom: What did you eat?
Fish: Nothing!
Mom: You had to have eaten something, unless you've developed and eating disorder.  Have you developed an eating disorder?
Fish: What now!?

We pretty quickly came to the conclusion that I hadn't eaten anything out of the ordinary, and there weren't any new environmental triggers, so I started panicking and thinking maybe I sensitized to something new (remember how I said I couldn't think?) and then I sniffled and said my ear hurt really bad.

Mom: *Presses ear"
Fish: *squeaks like a chew toy* ow.
Mom: Congratulations, you have a swimmers' ear and you're allergic to it.  Dry your hair better.
Fish's Immune System: We are so pissed about being invaded, we will attack ourselves!
Fish: *Relays the immune system's interjection*
Mom: I am very worried about this self destructive behavior.  It has to stop.

Now, contrary to the title of this blog post, I know perfectly well my ear mold's hyphae aren't slowly making their way through the flesh of my face to pop out my eyeballs, but a girl can dream, you know.

The best thing for a fungal ear infection are drops of one part rubbing alcohol one part white vinegar, so in my hazy state of mind, I mixed up enough of the stuff for every high school swim team in the city.  It isn't fun stuff to drop on top of raw infected ear, but oh well.  The fungus likes it even less than I do even if I am allergic to rubbing alcohol.  Also I smell like a pickle in a first aid kit, but such is life.

Fish: *Drops her concoction into the infected ear*
Fungus: Gah, no!  Gather up the spores, this is no place to raise children!

A half an hour later:

Fish: The burning pain from the drops has subsided.  I must need more.
Fungus: Ow, ow, OW.  I will not go down!  You will pay for that!  *Twists hyphae deeper into my poor battered ear*
Fish: Ow.

And I had to go out to buy shoes for an interview because my sensible black shoes are really more like brown, and we got them in the little girls' section because it's summer and there weren't any in the women's section, and I have frighteningly tiny feet.  So I listed around and said some very strange things (yes, stranger than normal, and no I shan't  relate them here, for my ability to withstand humiliation on the web is great, but not that great) while my mom handed me shoes and I dropped them a few times before I could get them on.  I feel better now.  Anyway, along with kind of odd black shoes, I came home with some very cute red shoes, and I have no idea how this happened.

In other news, I have a shiny, new portable oxygen concentrator, which means that I don't have to ration oxygen.  I'm supposed to sleep with it on and drive with it on, and then use it otherwise as needed, and the hiss click sound you hear in the background is me obeying doctor's orders.  I actually feel a lot better this way, don't knock it.

Because I have a very cosy relationship with the people at the local independent bookstore, I got a call as soon as the shipment with Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon came in and I got to pick it up a few days early.  Rees Brennan, known online as sarahtales  (formerly mistful or maya), had already shown herself to be a master writer through her howlingly funny blog and her fanfiction, so I rushed right over.

Nick and his older brother Alan have been running ever since their father died.  Their mother, a former magician, stole a charm from her former lover, another powerful magician, and he and his followers have been chasing them ever since to steal it back and take their revenge.  When a girl Alan fancies comes to the brothers with her own brother, asking for their help in taking a demon's mark off her brother, the magicians close in, and Alan's lies lead them all into terrible peril.

( My life was going to flash before my eyes, but it decided to hide behind my eyes and quake in terror instead. )

Oh God, I'm tearing myself up waiting for the sequel, and as soon as that's out and read, I'll be going crazy for the last!  Today's the release date, buy it so I can squee in company!

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Harry Potter universe, and am not affiliated with anyone who does. However, J. K. Rowling and her affiliates leave me (and those like me) alone because I don't make any money off these and provide free, if relatively ineffective, advertising.

Summary: Despite James Potter's heroism, Severus Snape does not escape the Shrieking Shack unscathed. When Remus Lupin bites him, Severus has to face a full share in Lupin's secret while whispers of a new Dark Lord grow louder every day.

Author's Note: For this chapter, I have lifted dialogue directly from Chapter 33 (The Prince's Tale) of  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the US edition.


( Chapter Eight: Maggots and Malice )

When I saw that author Sarah Prineas was offering a signed copy of her most recent book, The Magic Thief: Lost to anyone willing to post a review of it on their blog and on the major book seller sites, I jumped at it, and besides which ran out to buy the first book.  After all, it's a Middle Grade secondary world fantasy with a steampunk slant.  Right there it pushes a lot of my favorite literary buttons.

Conn is a street smart thief from Wellmet's downtrodden Twilight district.  He knows he's lucky.  The Underlord may have put a word out on him and he might be poor as dirt, but he isn't dead yet, or crippled, or sick.  And he has Quick Hands.  So when a well dressed man walks close by, he reaches into his purse and grabs a whole mess of trouble, because the man is a wizard, and stealing from a wizard isn't something anyone wants to do unless they also want to die...

( All in all, not a bad system. If you live on the Sunrise side of the river. )

When Conn needs to find a new way to talk to the Magic, he takes on some of Nevery's bad habits and starts experimenting with Pyrotechnics.  People are turning to stone, and Wellmet's Magic is under attack.  But if he gets caught, he could be exiled, or worse...

( It sounded like somebody sighing, far, far away, alas, alas, alas. )

All told, I think I will probably contrive a way to get my hands on the last book.

Author's Note: While taking my Central American Politics class, I wanted to write something set in a world based on Guatemala at the height of the political oppression, but I never managed to get my plot to grow into anything longer than a 250 word drabble.  Guatemalan society for more than a hundred years was run by the coffee growing elite, who controlled the government and enforced a form of debt slavery on the rest of the country's population.  The military was almost entirely deployed internally, as an arm of political control to keep the peasents working on the coffee plantations.

Coffee Bean Ghosts

The first time Gnat stole something, it was a soldier's coat, into the belly of her dress.  She had been pregnant then, so it just looked like more bump.  After that, she pilfered a soldier's trousers from the laundry and a box of ammunition from the bed closest to the barracks door.  That night, a bayonet hung from a string around her leg.  She heard the whispers as she walked past the guards.  She's just Alvero's lover, no danger.

As soon as she made her way home, she kissed her husband and he dressed in the soldier's uniform.  He hefted the soldier's pack onto his shoulders, and at the rustling inside, Gnat hushed her daughter.  The jungle rose thick around them as they crept away, Javier's hand around her waist.  "Just looking for a little privacy," he called to the guards at the gate and they looked down at his uniform and the brown faced woman, and waved him through with a laugh.

Out of sight, Gnat pulled a handful of Coffee beans Alvero had given her to show her what she was growing out of her pocket and she tossed them to the ground behind her.  "Natalia Calderon y Ortega," she said to them, and as soon as she did, they rose up and followed where She walked.  In the darkness, the beans wore the face of her grandmother and stopped them each time they grew too close to soldiers.  They slipped into the pack to distract her granddaughter.

Author's Note: This fic is part of the Parchment Underground Universe, and although this is a prequel, I would strongly advise you read "Blurring" first.  Both are dystopian AU, however, they're gen or gennish het.

Disclaimer: In case you were wondering, JKR was never this horrible to everybody.

Summery: A Death Eater meeting brings into focus James Potter's place in Voldemort's new society.



( Spectacles )

The library is a dangerous place to do research, so many distractions.

Fish: *Studies like a studious student*
Books: We need you, we want you, take us with you!
Fish: No, no, I cannot!
Books: But we're free.
Fish: Well you can't argue with... No, I've read all of you already.  I am good, I can resist, I will not succumb!
Books: Awwww.
The Grounding of Group 6: Excuse me, um, Fish, you've never read me...
Fish: You poor thing!  I never meant to neglect you so horribly.

I can't resist the pitfalls of such powerful temptation, but I can delay it, checking out my prized finds and saving them for later.

Julian F. Thomson's The Grounding of Group 6 is about a class at a school for young delinquents, a last chance school, where parents send their children to shape up, or if necessary send them to be disposed of.  The five students who are slated to be killed, and their "teacher", the man intended to do the killing, head off into the woods for orienteering, but when he gets to know the kids, and he discovers he's to disappear too, their teacher can't go through with it, and they go on the run.

( It helps to think of them as cars... Sometimes a person gets a lemon, even if the name is Cadillac or Rolls... It simply can't be fixed. )

From now on, this book will be added to the pile of books I hold up and wave wildly whenever someone says I read nothing but Fantasy.  At least it's Young Adult.

Grammy paid me for taking care of her garden and feeding the birds, and you, my dear readers, know what that means.  I bought gas and headed to the local independent bookstore.  I love that place; the people there don't mind if I pull a book off the shelf and just start reading.  They even have convenient armchairs for people like me.  Even when I'm broke, I like to go there with my laptop, chat with the staff, and regale hapless visitors to the Young Adult section with what I think they should read (or buy for the young adults in their lives).

Lo and behold, Shadowed Summer by debut author and  member of debut2009  Saundra Mitchell sat miss-shelved under the R's, and it's just by chance I saw it while searching for The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Mitchell's fellow deb, Carrie Ryan, which was, alas, not to be found.

Anyway, the plot didn't really sound like my cup of tea, being a ghost story mystery, but it's Young Adult fantasy, and besides, it's Mitchell's first book and I like to support new authors, so I pulled it off the shelf and decided that if I was still reading by page fifty, I'd buy it.  Well, I read the whole way through without even looking at the pages, and rushed over to the counter to buy it.

Iris is a fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the supernatural.  To alleviate the boredom of living in a town without even a movie theater (and don't I know what that's like) she and her best friend make up ghost stories and spells, all written down in a pair of inconspicuous spiral notebooks.  But that year, Iris' partner in crime has new interests, a boy.  At the same time, ghosts become very real when Iris sees one in a graveyard, the subject of a local mystery from before she was born.  As he keeps haunting her, Iris decides to find the truth behind his disappearance.  And while she's at it, what do her parents have to do with it?

( It seems to me that if there were ghosts, the last place you'd find them is a cemetery. )

Shadowed Summer is a good old fashioned ghost story, sort, sweet, by turns spooky and sad, and absolutely hilarious.  In no other genre can a funeral be such a fulfilling, almost happy experience.  Besides, I have now discovered, I'm a sucker for repeated historic grave desecration... All in the name of a good cause, of course.

Saundra Mitchell can be found on Livejournal at anywherebeyond .

This fic was written for the Potions and Snitches 2009 Challenge Fest, in response to FoolishWishmaker's challenge: "A reversed Sevitus. Harry Snape grew up with his father. His mother, Lily, died to save him from Voldemort. At the same time as Harry is trying to deal with the awful knowledge that he is destined to face Voldemort and only one of them will survive the encounter, Harry also finds out the unthinkable -- Severus Snape is not his natural father!"

Disclaimer: In case you were wondering, JKR was never this horrible to everybody.

Summery: Severus Snape, high ranking Death Eater and Headmaster of Hogwarts, finds out that his son is not his own when the boy's glamour begins to break.

Author's Note: I intend this to be the first in a series of at least six one shots.  This fic contains a direct quote from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, US Edition, "Chapter Three: The Knight Bus".


( Blurring )

My mom was the outdoorsy type when she was a young woman.  She went on canoeing trips and camping trips, and generally made herself a dusty hippy wild child whenever she could.  She also spent most of these baked.

Once, when she was camping on top of a small ledge, the people who had camped below them didn't put out their fire very well.  A spark landed on the roots of a bush on the ledge above.  It traveled up the root like a fuse, burning slowly as the night wore on.  The next morning, mom sat next to the bush, and when the smoldering spark burned through to the oxygen, the bush went BOOM and the whole thing caught fire.  Now, my mom said what any good child of a secular Jewish Atheist mother, when confronted with a burning bush would say.

Mom: Jesus fucking Christ!
Fish: Ummm, how much weed had you smoked before this happened?
Mom: No more than usual.
Fish: Somehow I find your account stretches my credulity.

But Mom has witnesses to confirm her story.

Mom: Fish doesn't believe the burning bush story.
Annoying Uncle: Yeah, it happened your mom was so freaked out, she jumped about six feet-
Mom: I was not, I just said we had to put it out.
Annoying Uncle: No, you screamed it while you launched yourself over to the bucket.
Mom: Stop making me look bad in front of my children.

My Mom is the woman who pushed and prodded my teachers into complying with my 504 plan and IEP and made the parents of the children who bullied me make them stop, and that's at least as hard as parting the Red Sea.

Fish: Silly woman, don't you realize you should be leading your people to the promised land?
Mom: Just call me Mosesa.

So Passover is a very special time in my family.  The story resonates deeply here.  The quest for freedom, the breaking the chains of oppression, the quest for law and order, are all really cool, but what gets Mom every time is that she has complete sympathy for Moses.  Those burning bushes are something else.

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Harry Potter universe, and am not affiliated with anyone who does. However, J. K. Rowling and her affiliates leave me (and those like me) alone because I don't make any money off these and provide free, if relatively ineffective, advertising.

Summary: Despite James Potter's heroism, Severus Snape does not escape the Shrieking Shack unscathed. When Remus Lupin bites him, Severus has to face a full share in Lupin's secret while whispers of a new Dark Lord grow louder every day.


( Chapter Seven: Disillusionment Charms )

So I wasn't a domestic goddess so much this year, as I was feeling less ambitious, but I still managed to put two chickens, matzo ball soup, homemade strawberry ice cream, charoset, and all the stuff for the Sedar plate on the table.  It tasted good, we had leftovers... I did my job.  Plus, I led the ceremony, so...  Domestic demigoddess?

I won't mention the cilantro on the Seder plate instead of parsley.  Okay, yes I will.  We had cilantro on the Sedar Plate, because I'm an idiot and completely forgot about the parsley, and so had to run off to Trader Joe's to pick some up.  The thing is, they hadn't ordered extra for Passover, and couldn't figure out why they had a run on the stuff.

Fish: Do you have any parsley?  I see your rack is empty.
Store Clerk: No, I just don't get it, it's been selling like hotcakes.
Fish: It's Seder tonight.
Store Clerk: What now?
Fish: Grrr, the Passover meal.
Store Clerk: What does that have to do with parsley?
Rose, my Intrepid Fellow Traveler and Dinner Guest: Oh look at the billions and billions of white eggs in the dairy rack!

This is not half so bad as the fact that my local Whole Foods didn't carry kosher chicken this year because they had so many complaints last year from ladies having Christian Seder that it was too salty.  Erm...  You have to wash it and soak the salt out.  I managed.

The Haggadah we used this year was lovely, and full of quotes by Thomas Paine, and about remembering and helping the people throughout the world still in chains, feeling the yoke of political oppression. I have finally found my Haggadah.  For those interested, we sprawled in the chairs like overfull teenaged boys to meet the reclining requirement.

Rose: I'm going to fall out of my chair.
Ziggy: Oh look, there's a gap between her and the back of the chair.  No one will notice me if I slip in.
Rose: Dog pillow...
Ziggy: Chicken!
Chicken: *Disappears*
Fish: No, get down!
Ziggy: *Jumps up behind Mom*
Fish: Gahhh!

Kneidlach (Matzo Balls)

4 eggs (err, actually 4 egg whites, one egg yoke)
1/2 stick butter (there is no way that the chicken in my broth was the baby of the cow that gave me that milk, I don't care what your rabbi says) or 1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup matzo meal
salt

Separate the eggs and whip the whites until stiff.  Add one yoke to the oil (or melted butter), and blend thoroughly.  Add the matzo meal, yoke and oil mix, and salt and mix until of even consistency.  Dough should be fairly salty since a lot of the salt boils out.  Leave covered in the refrigerator for 30 minutes, make into small balls, and drop into salted boiling water.  Drain when fully cooked and soft and fluffy inside.  DON'T COOK THEM IN THE SOUP OR THEY WILL SUCK AWAY ALL OF YOUR BROTH.  Erm yes, that is experience talking, why do you ask?

How on earth did two of these end up packed away?  Had everything between my ears rotted away, leaving me an empty skull and a grayish puddle seeping into my chest cavity?  I was so misguided to pack away my fine YA friends and keep out my adult fantasy.  Before I cut open the boxes, I was so desperate to reread these books that I kept checking them out of the local library.  Ah, but those days are over.

Howl's Moving Castle takes place in Ingary, where being the oldest of three is a Very Bad Thing.  Unwilling to suffer the inevitable failure that would result if she tried, Sophie decides to leave fortune seeking to her younger sisters.  Instead, she works in the family hat shop and talks to the hats.  Trouble comes to her, however, when the feared Witch of the Waste comes into the shop and turns her into an old woman.  Afraid of being seen that way, she hobbles away and becomes the house keeper for Howl, a handsome wizard, famed for eating the hearts of young maidens.  In exchange for taking off the Witch of the Waste's curse, Sophie agrees to help Calcifer, Howl's fire demon break his bargain with Howl.  Not of course that he'll tell her what that bargain is, that would be too easy.  I should probably note for anyone worried, that the cuts hide content only about as spoilery as the novels' back covers.



In Castle in the Air, there is a lot of alliteration.  Abdullah, a carpet merchant from Rashpuht has been prophesied to be raised above all others in the land.  When he buys a magic carpet from a person of suspicious countenance, he rises literally above everyone else and flies over a palace wall and meets a princess with a prophesy of her own.



House of Many Ways, the third and most recent book in the series, and the only one I didn't pack away, seeing as it came out after I finished the packing, is about a young gently reared girl, sent to look after the house of a distant wizard relative.  Charmain though, doesn't know anything about magic, and really, she doesn't care.  She just wants to get back to her books.  When the wizard's apprentice shows up, she starts to wonder if she'll ever get back to her books at all.



Anyway, I get so annoyed that no one seems to realize that Howl's Moving Castle has two sequels.  According to Cass (also known as eatenbyfangirls) she once was supposed to be on a panel comparing the book and the movie, and none of the other panelists knew about the sequels.  Well, something just has to be done, because they rock!  And well, I only pick at them because I love them.

I have made these bits of silliness and froth, one each, for the ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, the wonders who managed to get me to read romance and enjoy it (but only the good stuff) as a congratulations for their successful google bombing of Amazon rank and for the release of their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. Excuse the purple prose, the anachronisms, and the fact that for the most part, bodice rippers went out in the mid 80's...

( For Smart Bitch Candy, Bodice Ripper: In which the lady and lord find a way to liven up the loving )

( For Smart Bitch Sarah, Secret Cabin Boy: In which I'm sad to say, the captain isn't wearing a dress or played by Robert DiNero )

Amazon.com has implemented a new ranking system in which books with LGBTQ themes or characters, no matter how mild the content as well as other books about alternate sexual situations such as sex with disabilities and certain feminist books have had their rank stripped from them.  This means that searches no longer show them.  I'm not just talking about fiction here.  Critiques of "don't ask don't tell" and other obviously non-erotic nonfiction fall under this.  Anti-suicide books fall under this.  This system is both capricious and reprehensible.  Incest, bestiality, and pedophilia are not yanked from the shelves, nor are books with homophobic themes.  As a side effect (or perhaps intended effect) of this, The first book that appears when one types "homosexuality" into the search box is A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.  I'm sad to say that you, my dear readers, shall have to wait a bit for tales of my Seder, though when they come, I assure you, they will be full of the usual amusement and igry.

Dear Amazon.com,

You have just lost a customer, because I don't support businesses who try to hide me away.  I am bisexual.  That's right, I am, and I'm ashamed that I've ever given you a single cent of my money.  I am ashamed because you have tried to make me ashamed, but I am not ashamed of what I am, but of what you have become.

I've always been more attracted to women than to men, and in middle school, I actually scraped up the courage to tell my very liberal supportive mother I thought I was a lesbian-

-Only to be told that it was very common for someone's sexuality to fluctuate during puberty, and I probably wasn't anything of the kind.  When in eighth grade, I had my first crush on a boy, I was deliriously happy, because it meant I was normal.  I could stop worrying.  I could go back to deluding myself until I made out with my best friend on a sleepover.  I will never share a bed or even a room with another woman again without remembering that it isn't so innocent anymore.

After that, there was no more denial.  I faced up to what I was, came out to my dad, my grandparents, and my friends, (not right away, it took me two years, and my family is liberal) and waited for the right moment to tell my mom.  I would have come out to her too, if my best friend, not realizing she didn't know, accidentally outed me.  The only reason I never came out online is that I'm not out to my siblings, and my sister reads my blog.  It is a mark of how appalled I am that I am coming out in this way right now.

I am not adult content.  Actually, my story is very very teenage.  I'm certainly less adult content than American Psycho or Playboy, neither of which have been deranked, and yet it is my story and stories like mine that you seek to protect your customers from even knowing the existence of.  Why must queer books be singled out this way?  Are you afraid?

I am.  I don't want queer kids searching for answers to see only A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, You Don't Have to be Gay and Can Homosexuality be Healed?.  For this is poison for people, kids, already struggling to figure out what they are.  These books tell them that they are sick and wrong, and sinful for the way they feel.

Books are and have always been friends.  When and even before I struggled with my sexuality, I had books full of characters struggling too.  I had comfort and hope, and people I understood, printed out on the page in front of me.  You seek to deny that comfort, that hope, that reassurance for the queer kids who come after me.

This hurts me.  You hurt me.  It hurts me that you deem me so shameful, so perverted, that I must be hidden away, locked tight so that no one need know that I exist, much less that I think and feel, and talk.  It hurts me that my parents barely cared when I told them what you did.  It hurts me.

This hurts me as a queer person, a woman, and a person with disabilities, because according to you, as a person with disabilities, I should be asexual.  I should be a poor little thing with an oxygen tank in a corner, not a bisexual woman with a healthy interest in sex.  I see, so I'm two things that don't exist, not just one.  If the idea of people with disabilities offends you, then your world is sadly small and shallow.

Whenever a child reads a book, they take their minds out of their parents' control and into their own.  With the information they find, they can make up their own minds about the world around them and the printed one in front of them.  Your measures will change no one's mind, but they will stifle.

You will not silence us.  Even as you try to hide us, we will still be there out in the open, on your televisions, your radios, in your bookstores, in your homes, and out on your streets.  We exist.  This is the truth, and you can't take it away.

So Amazon, rank you

Sincerely,
Attackfish