THAT NIGHT

For the World Dream Bank, I work on Visions Upstairs, an epic dream about catgirls forming a band and transcending this world.

Hmm. If you're guiding your spiritual life by studying holy texts, seems like you could do better than "Josie and the Pussycats" cartoons, but my dreams are perverse that way...

Take a break. Read some of The Writer's Library. Interviews with mainstream writers (no fantasy or sf writers--well, maybe Jonathan Lethem) who speak of mastering a complex craft with many dimensions--style, person, character, setting, pace...

After an hour of hymns to craftsmanship, I feel uncouth. A crude outsider.

Then my sister Althea calls. In five caustic minutes she blasts away my fog of inferiority. "Your concerns aren't theirs! They're not original. Busy little bowerbirds with polished ritual patterns, working inside a room they call realism, when it's really just conventionalism."

She's just reminding me. I already know. At age fourteen I made up a rule of thumb: when my teachers said "Literature", I pictured it as "indoor fiction--locked in that room of what they call real." I didn't mind the room as such--big, with some well-built furniture. But that didn't mean I'd let them lock me in!

So I walked outdoors and never went back. Oh, I drop in now and then, to read nonfiction like this, or fiction set in interesting subcultures.

But I'm never tempted long. Cramped little room, where they worship style--with the blinds drawn, to keep out those scary far horizons.

I switch to the manga Negima by Ken Akamatsu. Not literature. Far horizons.

Negi's class fieldtrip steps through a magical portal into another world--and it goes horribly wrong. The class is scattered, lost in an alien culture.

But disasters can be fruitful. Negi's student Yue, concussed, finds herself amnesic--and in a magic school. Back on Earth she was gifted but bored with school. But this bizarre, difficult, quite dangerous curriculum really challenges her. Learn to fight dragons? Learn to fly? Yue wakes up. Lost herself to find herself!

The college is diverse. Really diverse. Her new roomie Collet and rival Emily Sevensheep (right) are both furries with dog ears and tails. And both cuter than no-tail, round-eared humans.

Echoes of my dream of that catgirl band...

THAT NIGHT

I'm a detective on a stake-out. I'm on a shop-lined street, sitting in a car with a big man I don't look at directly; I'm autistic, and see stares as threat displays, the way wild animals do. I know humans look you in the eye to show sincerity, but it's hard to buck my instincts and pretend to be a man. I barely know this guy--some near-stranger pushed on me. A tough guy. And tough to relate to. As they said in my childhood, "A man's man".

Huge, shaggy, leggy dogs roam the street. No, wait--are those wolves? But they eye the shop displays more like... customers.

There are some humans in the crowd. I'm attracted to one girl, going into a shop with two amigos. When they come out, I get a better look. She has a wolf head. And a shaggy tail. She's... really cute.

Okay, this is another world. Am I dreaming? So why not get out of the car and try to meet her? And see if the wolves here are people too. They shop. Do they talk? Wolfhead's existence shows they can interbreed with humans. Or shapeshift. Who knows who I can date here?

But I don't move. Feel conflicted and shy. Sit quietly--only my eyes follow my real interest--the canine people, not the humans.

Why so inhibited? I'm not afraid of the wolves on the street, or of Wolfhead. But that big tough all-human male beside me?

Now he makes me nervous.

• Attracted to a wolf girl: In Negima, sexy canine girl Emily Sevensheep is Yue's rival in school; mocks her constantly. But when it counts, Emily stands up for the truth--won't take credit for defeating a powerful dragon. "No, Yue led us."
• Tough human guy: that male norm I just can't be and just can't play with. I have a mutation causing Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome--my joints are too fragile to play boys' games--fighting, dominance, the whole stoic code. But I only figured out I had EDS four years ago--on my own, after decades of injuries, humiliation, and misdiagnoses from doctors who should have spotted it. Humans!
• Is he a side of me who keeps me from asking out women by judging me as defective & unworthy? Yet I mostly like girls with weird animal auras, like mine. Maybe they find humans as dull as I do. Maybe wolf-aura girls would like a creature like me, fragile or not.
• ACTION: Look hard at myself. Re-evaluate my attractiveness to the strange girls I like. Who cares what normal humans think?

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