Mea culpa. The Dog ate my Homework. I will be right on time next Tuesday, scout’s honor.

Despite my children’s opinions, I am not a neurotic neat freak. Any normal person coming to my house would realize this. I was brought up in a house that was, essentially, my parents’ shared artistic project, and when I left anything lying around the family rooms, I heard about it. Thus, my room–up a ladder from the other living areas, and rarely visited by my parents–was messy. My first college room-mate found me annoyingly untidy. It really wasn’t until I got my own room at college that I started practicing a certain amount of order, because I had no other space that represented me.

As I got older and the jobs I did became more complex, I found that I needed to keep my environment at least minimally tidy, not so much because it was easier to find things, but because I found it easier to focus in an environment that was not too chaotic. I’m fine with a fair amount of disorder, but go over the line and I start to feel oppressed by it. I know where the line between acceptable and oppressive lies–but I don’t live alone. I live with three people (and a dog) who have different setpoints than mine for organizational squalor.

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The kind folks over at The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas PodCast have done a podcast on my first novel Jumper (Tor 1992). Their mission is the discussion of “Old School” Science Fiction and Fantasy, both good and bad. It’s a weird thing that 1992 qualifies as “old” SF nowadays.

I just listened to it and had to blog about it. It’s like one of those (rare) times when you’re about to walk around a corner and you hear people talking about you so instead of scuffing your feet and clearing your throat, you stop, lean nonchalantly against the wall, and shamelessly evesdrop.

Of course when you do this in the real world, the next line is, “Too bad he’s such an asshole.” Fortunately, they mostly loved it.

I did know this was coming up as one of the ‘casters, Summer Brooks, introduced herself to my editor at World Fantasy (and then Beth dragged her over to me) and talked about it. Sometime later, we may do an interview.

They also discuss the upcoming movie staring Samuel Jackson, Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson, Jamie Bell, and Diane Lane, though you can learn a lot more about that here.

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in the podcast so if you haven’t read the book yet, wait until you have. OTHER WARNING: It’s 30 minutes long.

We live, historically speaking, very private lives. The first world may be the first place where, for example, almost all children sleep in different rooms than their parents. Before, say, 1700, most extended families slept in the same room. (In some cultures, along with some of the livestock.) In the 100,000 years since, as a species, we walked out of Africa, we have lived most of our intimate lives in each other’s presence. But now, one’s closest friends do not really know things about us that everyone would have known three hundred years ago, and that in rural India or Central Africa, everyone knows about each other now.

I came to understand a little more about the Asian concept of face when I began to see it as linked to privacy. My Chinese students lived eight to a dorm room and so had, as most of their families did, very little privacy. Which means that there is a lot of etiquette of eye-averting. When everyone lives together, there are things you look away from. ‘Privacy’ is a Western concept. Chinese history is about 6000 years old, but they had no word for privacy until is was introduced from the West about 100 years ago. I asked a student one time where one could be private. After a long moment wrestling with the idea, she pointed to her forehead. In her head. So when someone loses face, it often resembles the feeling we get when someone inadvertently walks into the bathroom on you.

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