Anyway, I wanted to share with you my steampunk rifle project, created for Steampunk Week at the Southern California Renaissance Faire…

I found this toy rifle at a strange little shop on my way home from Las Vegas in April and immediately bought it because I knew the wooden stock would be perfect for steampunking! It had a nylon strap, but I cut that off and replaced it with an old military satchel strap I bought loose at an antique store.

Then I spent a long time browsing a few hardware stores and examining parts scrounged from my father and bought at Gaslight Gathering last year. I live in an apartment and don’t have much in the way of equipment, so I needed to do something with nothing but a drill, pliers, and glue.  Well, I did buy a small pipe cutting tool and learn how to cut through copper piping!

Curling the pipe, however, wasn’t easy. Finally I added a crystal doorknob from Anthropologie as some sort of arcane power source. I know, it would have been better to carry around a big gas tank on my back, too, but that was more work and weight than I was ready to handle. Maybe in the future, along with soldering the parts together….

And here I am with the rifle at Faire; it was a very warm day, so I left my duster in the car.

I do want to communicate to friends, family, and the occasional digital passer-by who may visit this blog.  But I don’t want to make it easy for data-miners to use my information.  So this is my compromise: editing out old posts. After all, is anyone really going to go back to read my “Happy New Year” post from January 1, 2007? I don’t think so. Off it goes, along with well over 200 other trivial updates and comments I’ve posted over the last four years. My goal will be to preserve posts that offer information or thoughts that may, possibly, have enduring interest to readers and to get rid of the rest … just as I edit my writing, my possessions, my activities, and my social network accounts.

Cheers!

Here’s a last little excerpt; as always, please keep in mind that it’s very rough, first-draft work:

Jay spun around and lunged forward, aiming low and holding his forearms braced over his head.

He rammed into the hips and groin of the man who’d opened the door, driving him backward and into the hallway.  Somebody swore and Jay threw himself to one side, kicking out. His heel hit something and he used it to push himself farther away, rolling over the floor and up to his feet.

Two men there, one he recognized from the autocarriage, one — the one on the ground — whom he’d never seen before.

He spun and ran off in the opposite direction.

A window, a window — he needed a window without bars, but all that lined the hallway were closed doors. The stairs he’d climbed up were behind him. He hoped this corridor wasn’t going to dead end; what kind of building would that be? There had to be another stairwell down at the other end of the wing.

He spun around a corner. Two men — he angled himself toward the wall and sprang up onto it, crouching low and running as fast as he can. Startled, both men jerked away in surprise as he ran across the wall and past them before kicking himself off and back to the floor again.

“Jay Whitsun!” one of them shouted. Jay faltered a second before catching himself.

It wasn’t Bishop’s voice or a member of his family’s, and he didn’t give a damn about anyone else.

“Stop!”

Not a chance. He careened left and spotted stairs. Perfect; the architect hadn’t let him down.

“Somebody — stop him!”

Up or down? Usually he preferred up — few men were willing to chase him onto the rooftops — but in a building with barred windows, he had no guarantee of finding easy access outside. On the other hand, down likely meant more guards and that damned glass-shard-covered wall again. But down meant doors, too.

He made up his mind and dashed down, only two see two large men running up with leather-wrapped clubs in their hands.  He jumped up onto the wooden handrailing and leaped foward over their heads, tucking his knees to his chest and allowing himself to spin once in midair before opening his eyes. Off — he braced — and landed, hard, dropping to one knee that slammed against the floor. He winced and stood. Pain in his hand, pain in his knee, pain in his ribs.

Then somebody tackled him from behind, arms wrapping around his midsection and throwing him forward. His injured knee gave out and he landed badly, hissing as he reached out to break his fall with his wounded hand and it slapped against the floor, leaving a smear of crimson from his blood-soaked bandages.  He started to squirm, but an expert arm wrapped around his neck and began applying pressure.  He struggled as his vision began to darken.

As always, my thanks to the good folks who put on National Novel Writing Month each year; it’s always inspiring to participate!

Jay abandoned his search and walked to the end of the row, turning to look up the next. Bishop was standing there, clutching his cane in one hand and his lamp in the other, not moving.  He looked up as Jay raised his lamp. His hair was a shock of white in the dim light; his expression, impossible to read. “You can’t close your heart for the rest of your life.”

At last Bishop moved, looking away from him, staring at the shelves as he started walking again.

“I can. I have. It works.”

“You’re ‘fine’?”

“Yes.” He stopped and set the lamp on the floor. “Here it is.”

Jay pursed his lips and walked forward, setting his lamp next to Bishop’s. The inspector was right. There it was — a series of thin, cheaply printed, paper-covered rosters of the Royal Society for Scientific Inquiry’s membership.

Jay turned his back on them and laid a hand over Bishop’s metal hand, safely wrapped around the head of his cane.

“Your hand is still shaking. You’re not ‘fine.’”

“As fine as a cripple can be.” This time Bishop started to move away, pulling his hand to one side. Jay wrapped his fingers around Bishop’s metal wrist, grabbed Bishop’s coat lapel with his other hand, and leaned forward to brush his lips against the inspector’s.

Bishop’s head jerked back in surprise. Jay saw a flash of fear in the other man’s expression.

“Stop calling yourself a cripple,” Jay said, firmly. “And stop trying to push me away. It won’t work. I’ll keep coming back.”

“I don’t want you.”

“You’re lying. We both know you’re lying.”

“What the hell is this insane obsession you have with me?” Bishop burst out. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Why not? You’re ethical, brave, kind, handsome —” Jay moved his hand from Bishop’s lapel to his mouth, gently covering the sputtered protest the inspector was making. “And stubborn, but not as stubborn as I am.”

“You’re an idiot,” Bishop declared, as soon as Jay moved his hand.  “I have absolutely no intention —”  His words were broken off by the clatter of his cane against the stone floor. They both looked down to see his metal hand clutching Jay’s sleeve.

“Hell,” Bishop breathed, staring at it with a look of betrayal.

Anyway, an excerpt. You know the “it’s all raw” drill by now, right?

Jay studied Bishop’s profile, seeing the small, pale scars that criss-crossed the left side of his face, the glimmer of silver where the inspector’s eye used to be.  It wasn’t that Bishop was a handsome man.  Striking, but not handsome.  Not the kind whose face would spark romantic interest in most other men … well, or women. Jay had found himself drawn in by Bishop’s intensity, at first, and then of course he couldn’t fail to have been touched by Bishop trying to save all those innocent people in the Haulyard Riots and nearly losing his life in the effort.  The inspector had a good heart, although he tried his best to hide it, and the more Jay got to know him, the more he wanted to touch that heart.

“Here —” Bishop turned, holding a piece of paper, and then froze.

Jay’s heart thudded as he realized the inspector had caught him staring. Their eyes locked for a second that seemed to stretch on forever.

Bishop broke their gaze first, dropping his eyes to look down at the sheet of paper in his mechanical hand. The paper began to rattle as his prosthesis jittered. He’d sketched something on the sheet, but the image didn’t interest Jay. What interested Jay was the slow crawl of red moving up the inspector’s cheeks.

He’d provoked that flush twice before, once inadvertently when he’d been changing his clothes in this room and once intentionally when he’d been teasing Bishop in the coffeehouse.

But he wasn’t doing anything now that might embarrass the Stoic-minded inspector. Nothing but look at him.

“Dammit,” Bishop breathed, grabbing the paper out of his shaking metal hand. He thrust the sheet forward, still avoiding Jay’s eyes. “Look at this. Do you recognize it?”

Oh. He was embarrassed by his malfunctioning hand. Well, that wasn’t quite what Jay was hoping for, but it was a problem easily solved.

“Just a minute.” Jay leaned forward and grabbed Bishop’s hand, wrapping his fingers around the cold metal.  “All right. Take a deep breath and relax.”

“It’s not —” The inspector broke off whatever he was about to say with a frustrated hiss.

“I think it’s caused by the temperature change.  Your hands seems to twitch more whenever you move indoors or outdoors.”  Jay wrapped both of his hands around Bishop’s prosthesis to warm it.  “I noticed it back in the autocab the other day, and in the coffeehouse earlier, and now.”

“It’s not the temperature,” Bishop said, his voice tight. “The damn thing’s just broken.”

“Well, warming it up seems to help,” Jay said, feeling the metal shudder one last time before it stopped moving between his palms. “See?”

“Whitsun….”

“It’s all right.” Jay leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees while he clasped Bishop’s hand. “I don’t mind. The metal should be room temperature in another minute or two.”

Bishop fell silent. Jay didn’t want to look at him, afraid that doing so would trigger the older man’s defenses again.

Besides, it was nice just to sit here in the lamplight, their knees nearly touching, and hold his hand.

He heard the inspector sigh. Then the sheet of paper was placed on the bed next to him. The inspector tapped it with the hand that wasn’t being held.

“The design. Have you ever seen it before?”

He didn’t think Whitsun would lie to him [...]; not with the bruises from Harold’s fingers still dark around his neck.  Every once in a while, when the textjacker turned just right, Bishop glimpsed a flash of bruised flesh beneath the starched white collar of Whitsun’s shirt. He wondered how bad it was.

His hand twitched again.

“What do you do when you’re not working?” Whitsun asked. Bishop dragged his thoughts away from the suspect places they’d started to wander.

“I’m never not working,” he said, reaching for his coffee cup again. Almost gone.  The thought of getting up and leaving this bright, warm spot to go back out into the cold and dark was almost too much to bear. He wondered if he could order a second cup without Whitsun misunderstanding.

“Oh, come on.” Whitsun played with his fork, gazing up at Bishop from under lowered eyelashes. Bishop averted his gaze. Did the man have no shame? “Do you go to concerts? Ride? Belong to a club?”

What did he do when he wasn’t working? Before the riots, he used to enjoy  his days off. He’d never been a very social man, but at least he’d been able to go out with colleagues for a drink without feeling like a freak. In the last two years, though…

“I read,” he said at last, knowing that it was the wrong answer to give to a man who worked in illegal publishing.

“What?”

“Licensed works.”

“All right, all right.” Whitsun smiled. “What kind of licensed works?”

“Cla —” Hell, no, that was not the right thing to say, not to this man.  But Whitsun was already grinning, his brown eyes dancing as though Bishop had made a joke.

“Not your kind of classics!” he sputtered. “Respectable classics, dammit. Wars. Philosophy. Rhetoric.”

“Not romance? Pathos, logos, and ethos, but never any eros?”

Bishop flushed, surprised the textjacker knew his Greek.  No, on second thought, maybe he wasn’t.  Dammit!  That bloody book of poetry. He needed to stand up and leave before Whitsun twisted him into knots.

“Let me guess; you like the Stoics,” Whitsun continued.  Bishop drew in a deep breath.

“Yes,” he bit off. “I do.”

“Got any idea how many there were?” Bishop asked, prodding with his walking stick at a lump of something jammed between the sewer wall and the access ladder. It fell with a wet splat onto the walkway.

“It would be easier if we could find some heads,” Officer Cross said, holding the lantern a little higher.  Bishop used the metal tip of the stick to dissect the mud. Grass, leaves — no flesh. He grunted and stepped over it, moving to the next ladder.

“Estimate?”

“At least two. We found what look like three forearms.”

“Bite marks?”

“Yes, but they might just be rat bites. They’re too small to be human.”

“Let’s hope.” He spotted a lump pressed against the base of the next ladder and poked at it. The last storm had flooded the sewerage system and swept out several of the body parts that had apparently been dumped down the pipes into the river itself, through the spillage grates.  A mudlark looking for valuables had found a dismembered leg and told her friends. None of them had thought to go to the police, but a passer-by, curious to know what the children were doing, had seen the body part and alerted the nearest constable.

When the first forearm had been found, not far away, Bishop had been notified.  The Werewolf Murders were his other impossible-to-solve case.

He assumed that he was given all the strangest cases because his prostheses made him the strangest-looking man in the office. Maybe his superiors thought that their own officially constructed monster would have some kind of special insight into the minds of all of the unofficial monsters who were running around the city.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have any special insight at all. Just a general sense of weariness and disgust at the extremes to which human behavior could reach.

At any rate, I needed to hit the ground running, because November is going to be a busy month, and I’m quite sure I’m going to fall behind later.

I posted this, written yesterday, as my novel excerpt on NaNoWriMo. Remember, it’s all raw, first-draft stuff; don’t be too critical….

“This is it,” Whitsun said with a shiver. He reached out toward the door handle and faltered, pulling his hand back again. “Do you want — do you want to go in first?”

Exasperated, Bishop jammed the handkerchief into his coat pocket and held out the umbrella.

“You’re soaking,” he said, as Whitsun’s fingers closed over the ivory handle. “Should have stood closer.” He forced himself to wait until the textjacker stepped to one side before reaching out and opening the door.

Not so bad, he thought, taking in the scene. The smell of vomit, blood, and excrement was pungent in the small room, but after an initial twitch of distaste, he ignored it. An oil lamp burned on a table, casting its unsteady yellow light over an older man’s sprawled corpse. Blood covered the man’s head and eyeless face and was smeared over the wooden floor, but it was the bizarre set of metal plates screwed into his skull that drew Bishop’s eyes.

He walked into the room and crouched by the body, reaching out with his flesh hand to touch the blood-speckled metal. Cold. He examined the arrangements of plates, noting the scar tissue around them. Not a new job, this one. Work over the ear — that was one of the dangerous spots, Bishop knew from his studies. Secrecy, greed, and destruction, if he remembered correctly. And a plate he’d come to recognize now, clamped down tightly to deform the top of the head, where benevolence was controlled. Whoever the phrengineer was, he didn’t want his victims feeling compassion and altruism.

Bishop expected that the phrengineer’s own head must be as deformed by nature as his victims’ were by mechanical means.

Whitsun had been lucky. If he’d hit his attacker over one of those plates, he’d never have won the fight.

“Who was he?” Bishop asked, standing and looking around the rest of the room.

“Harold. I don’t know what his last name was.” Whitsun’s voice was faint. Bishop turned and saw him standing in the doorway, knuckles white around the umbrella’s handle. Rain blew in around his legs. “He was a carter. I’ve known him for years.”

“He delivered Imprimatur’s books?” Bishop picked up several of the cheaply printed books around them and flipped through the pages. Pornographic texts, mostly, a number of them illustrated. Standard fare, he was secretly relieved to see. He set the books back down and prowled through the room. Harold hadn’t been a wealthy man, although he’d accumulated more books than most poor people were wont to do. A perk of working for an underground publisher, Bishop assumed. The collection was limited to smut, though. The cheapest and most useless of all ‘jacked texts.

“Do you make money on this?” he asked, gesturing to the books as he opened a battered metal trunk. Old clothes. He moved them around with his metal hand to make sure nothing was hidden beneath. “I assume you don’t give it all away.”

“No. We have expenses, and donations don’t cover them all.” Whitsun finally took a step inside, lowering the umbrella and closing the door against the storm. “Pornography always sells well.”

“And it doesn’t bother you, printing trash like this?”

“You sound like — like someone else I know.” Whitsun stared resolutely down at his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s boring and repetitive, most of it, and not very well-written, but it doesn’t do any harm.”

“It’s sick and cultivates a disrespectful attitude toward women.”

“I don’t know,” the ‘jack countered. “I like reading pornography about men, and I don’t think it’s made me less respectful.”

Bishop gave a disbelieving laugh, closing the trunk’s lid.

“You don’t have an ounce of respect in your body, Whitsun. All I’ve ever seen out of you has been pranks and mockery. You seem to think life’s a joke.”

“I don’t think this is a joke,” the textjacker said, quietly.

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are “betwixt and between” standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called “transitional objects.” These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of “mind meld” when using software, saying things such as “When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen.” Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one “hears” psychodynamic issues, one “hears” family history, one “hears” a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not “just” tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

Because liminality fascinates me and because I pursue minimalism, I found Turkle’s comment on evocative objects to be, well, evocative. My dissertation was on clothing and the ways people used it to escape and to enforce categories of gender, of race, of social status. In the old days, clothing, like computational technologies today, allowed people to try on different selves, to exist (or imagine they existed) in some liminal space between categories. Clothes and computers are both, in other words, potential tools of transformation.  Other objects and behaviors hold the same magical transformational promise; I wrote in 2008 about magical possessions, magical ownership, and, in 2010, even about magical thinking about minimalism.

So, to turn to a different kind of technology … what is it about steampunk’s artefacts that’s so evocative?  Is it the transformative promise of steampunk cosplay and artefacts, suggesting that we can return to a time when clothing and objects were made to higher standards of material quality and aesthetic design?  Is it the promise of a return to some neo-Victorian form of ultra-polite social etiquette and interplay, a la Stephenson’s The Diamond Age? Is it the promise of a return to a simpler time, when technologies were controllable rather than controlling, as some steampunk scholars have suggested? (Of course, this wishful thinking ignores the dark side of the Victorian Empire; those wise in the ways of myth will remember that Cinderella’s slipper was stained with blood….) Is it just another form of technology promising to erase, or permit, or ease, liminal existences? (Click on the image and read artist Molly Friedrich’s description of the mechanical womb for a case of liminality & steampunk.)

I don’t know. I’m just throwing ideas out there right now, inspired by Turkle’s lovely phrase, “evocative objects.”