#greenjudy travels

[greenjudy]

greenjudy takes the train

This is my first trip in three years. Anywhere (with the exception of a handful of medical/optical appointments). I mean, I have remained in my remote Buddhist retreat center home without so much as a trip to the shops.

And I have just traveled in an Amtrak roomette from the Bay Area up to Seattle. 

The roomette is... not cheap, although prices definitely vary by season. But for my purposes, at this moment, the roomette was just right: the weirdest, coolest way to do this. 

My train was hours late, and by the time we got underway it was after 11 PM. I crashed shortly after taking this video, sleeping very fitfully indeed in my clothes. (Newbie error. Just draw your damn curtains and put your jammies on.)  When I woke up, it was just before dawn; we were north of Redding, traveling through a burn scar. 

Fury Road; Mordor. Black branches of trees against a white sky, no color anywhere. It was a terrible reminder of the fires we've endured here in California for the last several years. But it was also strangely beautiful, with thousands of tiny dougie firs growing, trying to come back. 

As the train rolled north, the snow that had lain in scattered patches on the ground grew deeper. Enormous banks of it pocked with footmarks: creatures making their own paths. I saw a deer on a ridge nearly at eye level with me, bedded down in a snow nest, watching the train, not 30 feet away. 

Wondrous trees.

After tunnels and travels through mountains and waterfalls and conifers, we had an enchanting passage through part of the Willamette National Forest; then the scenery grew more domesticated, bleak little farms giving way to industry and then city sprawl.

You can sense the energies of a unique culture, on the train. The Amtrak staff have a camaraderie and a sly humor that comes across in the announcements. (They held a union meeting for employees right after dinner!) The train staff take no shit and will not wait for you if you linger during the smoke break: get the fuck back on the train, or get left at Chemult to wait 24 hours for the next train, it's your call. The staff know their own worth, and I sure hope they are getting paid commensurate with what they give. 

Dining cars are communal, which is part of the peculiar charm of train travel. Very Agatha Christie; get to know your neighbors. Sadly, we are still in a pandemic, and so I (vaccinated; boosted; covalent boosted) took all my meals in the roomette. This seemed safer from a Covid standpoint, and after all I am scheduled to visit a baby. 

This is definitely a grueling way to travel, especially during Covid time. I stayed in my compartment the entire time, except bathroom breaks (and the tiny Amtrak toilets are most entertaining. Do you have contamination OCD? Most entertaining!). The allotted space in a roomette is Smol. If you are not Smol, you may find it confining. I would also urge you to bring a great deal of water along. Even though there is a constant fresh air exchange with the outside world, the filters make the air dry and crunchy. Bring water. (Newbie error #2: I forgot to do this.)

The rocking motion of the train; the melancholy jokes of the dining car attendant, with secret, in-joke layers directed at the room attendants.

And the wild country where the tracks were laid, more than a hundred years ago.

[razziecat]

Dear Fellow Traveller

@greenjudy , this song somehow reminds me of your Ignoct fic....

[greenjudy]

seattle II: greenlake guest house

Welcome to the nicest room I've ever stayed in.

I'm upstairs in a Craftsman mansion in what I did not previously realize is a very fucking fancy part of town. Out the window over there is a lake; I'll show you later. They bake here; I just ate delicious Christmas cookies out of my little guest basket. There's some kind of crazy breakfast I can order and have delivered to my room every morning. I'll be here until the 29th. 

This kind of travel is generally beyond my personal means. The entire trip has been made possible thanks to my boss, the elderly Tibetan lama to whose work I have dedicated most of my time and energy. I have no idea why he wanted to help fund this, but I am truly grateful.  

More pictures later, I'm still pretty delaminated from my travels. 

In a few hours I take a rapid test, and then, god willing, I head back downtown to meet my baby niece and see a bunch of family for the first time in years. 

[greenjudy]

seattle I: CitizenM

I came up by train, on the Amtrak Coast Starlight, in a roomette (more on that journey later). 

Arrived in Seattle after 29 hours of traveling and voila:

It's hard to explain the cuteness of this room. It's very small indeed, with ensuite bath and shower, everything immaculate. The whole back half of the room is bed, bumped up against a picture window with Seattle right out there. 

The bed is great, not just big. The pillows are surprisingly good. This hotel Understands that my dearest wish is to lie in this bed with my laptop, looking out that lovely window there and checking in with you in this lovely window here. I ordered breakfast (a buffet: decent for hotel fare, but not extraordinary) and late check-out (2 PM). 

Staff are all young and adorably kind and friendly. Loads of books in the lobby. Extremely stylish, Kubrick colors: arctic white with pops of vermillion and cyan. You control your room settings via iPad; you can change the color of the mood lighting.

I opted for turquoise.

[greenjudy]

CitM, redux

Another day, another city: here is San Francisco. 

Gotta confess that this CitM doesn’t feel quite as clean and oasis-like as the one in Seattle did. But the room is still great, the hoteliers adorable (all tiny Youngs with bomb-ass customer service), and the Vibe is pretty close to pristine once you’re up here in your little Kubrick cubicle. 

It was great to see (some of) my family--some got their flights canceled and couldn’t come. I’m relieved that I somehow eluded some extremely rough weather on both ends of my journey. 

And now I am bushed. 

Pending a negative Covid test, I return tomorrow, via ferry, train, and car, to my undisclosed location in the wilderness. 

[greenjudy]

[greenjudy]

:D Maybe 1, 5, 7, and 31 from the fic writers meme please?

Here I am, very, very late to my own party. Forgive me - too many lightning strikes out here right now.

Thanks so much for these cool questions. 

1: Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

Noir. Spies? Noir, with spies. And food. Pavements shiny with rain. Conversations saturated with unspoken longing: the text is all business, the subtext is the light off the street playing across his cheekbones.

5: Share one of your strengths.

I think I write pretty good dialogue. I feel, at least for some characters, that I hear pretty clear, consistent voices in my head. Um. Yeah. Not what I meant. 

7: Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“Stay safe,” Tseng tells Reno, and puts his phone away.

He waves the server over, who refills his cup.

He drinks, watching the cars pass, their tires kicking up water off the shiny street. He watches their lights, like tracers in the rainy darkness.

Tseng and his cold sake and the air, and the night.

I’m still proud of the ending to Answer Man. (Note the shiny pavement.) I think there’s pretty good economy here, and I think it successfully reminds me of nights I myself have seen. 

31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?

To misquote a certain Altus from Tevinter, we didn’t so much travel through canon as punch a hole in it and drop it in the privy.

I’ve ranted about this before: I take extraordinary liberties with canon. The heart and soul of the work I do in FF7, the relationship between Reno and Tseng, is not even a gleam in canon’s eye. (If anyone thinks they’ve found a vestige of canonical evidence of that kind of bond, message me, dudes.)

I build my stuff in the suggestive interstices of canon. I’m obsessed with the world of FF7 after Meteorfall. I take what suits me from Advent Children and even from Dirge of Cerberus; I don’t feel obligated to take orders from them. 

That said, I really respect people who commit themselves to maintaining the strictures and structures that canon imposes. In my favorite writers these are the necessary constraints that foster creativity. 

When it comes to ‘greenjudy canon,’ on the other hand, I do have a sort of... I try not to violate my own sense of the universe. Most of my works for FF7 (except a few very early ones, and my recent gift for the Exchange!) are part of a coherent world and can more or less map onto the same timeline. 

[greenjudy]

a slightly prophetic greenjudy

Over the Noyo the trucks come, and under the harbor noises I hear the sound of their wheels, relentless. 

Back in 1996, I began writing a novel.

It never got finished; I ran aground on technical challenges and issues around the plot. Also, alcoholism. There were some good sentences up in that thing, though. It rotated between two protagonists, one young gay man who worked at a printing operation in Oakland, and a young girl who traveled and slept rough, driven and protected by her own implacable will to live. She was accompanied by the ghost of an eighteenth-century pirate, a fugitive slave who’d fled a ravaged plantation on Martinique. 

This pirate-ghost called the girl “Tiger.”

Terrible and sad things had happened to Tiger, who did not use the “I” pronoun during her segments of the novel. But she had prevailed. The energy of her life had been converted. She was longer afraid, even of the dead. 

The nameless young man had discovered evidence of some of the terrible things that had happened to the girl. It unhooked him from his precarious life. Despite suffering from an unnamed, besetting illness, despite feeling as if he might disappear, despite having no resources, despite his own devastating childhood, he set out to find her, if he could. 

Baby!me, in 1996, writing to her compatriots on Usenet (in alt.cyberpunk if you want to know), kept telling her pals, “In the future, we are all going to be sick. We’re going to forge our bonds on the basis of this constant, chronic illness. It’s partly due to airplanes. We’re all connected. We’ll all get sick.”

The working title of my novel was “Flu Vector.” 

Most of the action was set in a city called Corona.