The Tajji Diaries: Threshold Success

Tajji, our newly-adopted retired seeing eye dog, came to us with strong reactivity to pedestrians and especially to other dogs. She would bark and lunge as soon as she saw any “triggering” stimulus, and her vision is excellent. Sometimes, she would be triggered when the other dog or person was 1/8 mile away. This distance is called the threshold of arousal, meaning that stimuli farther away don’t cause the dog to “go ballistic.” Tajji’s threshold was so long, she basically didn’t have one. If she could see the dog, she reacted.

We’ve been working on decreasing her reactivity and giving her alternative, highly rewarded behaviors. These have included teaching her eye contact (“Look!”), hand targeting (“Touch!”), sniffing (a self-calming activity), and puppy zen, a calming exercise. We have also been as careful as we can to remove her from any situation where she is overwhelmed.

After a time of regular practice, we noticed that when we turned and walked her briskly away from the other dog, she calmed down in a shorter period of time. We were able to turn her back around to face the other dog, rewarding her for calm behavior. One of the lessons was that we would protect her, that she could trust us to not force her into a situation she couldn’t manage. Then we started to see her attempt to calm herself, mostly by sniffing, but occasionally using the non-threatening gesture “Look Away.”

A couple of weeks ago, we noticed that Tajji’s reactivity to pedestrians was markedly reduced. Using the calming techniques that were now familiar to her, we helped her to tolerate increasingly short distances from the folks walking in our neighborhood. Eventually, she was able to do a “pass by” without becoming reactive.

But would she ever be able to do that with dogs?

INTERVIEW: Rachel Manija Brown on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Rachel Manija Brown's post-apocalyptic YA novel "Stranger," co-written with Sherwood Smith, is forthcoming from Viking in 2014.  She is the author of the memoir "All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India," and also writes short stories, graphic novels, poetry, television, and plays. She is currently a graduate student at Antioch University, Los Angeles, in the MA program in clinical psychology, with a specialization in trauma.

­Deborah J. Ross: What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?

Rachel Manija Brown: My story, "The Fountain's Choice," was inspired by a brief scene in Stormqueen! which shows riyachiyas, who are genetically engineered to be living sex toys, always willing, always obedient. 

I wondered what would it be like if a person who had never had free will suddenly gained it. What would it be like to make a choice for the very first time? 

To play against that character, I wanted a character whose choices had also been constrained, and who had internalized that constraint: someone who could choose, but didn't know it. And since the female riyachiyas were designed be more stereotypically feminine than any ordinary woman could ever be, I wanted to set her against a character who didn't fit into ideas of masculine and feminine at all: an emmasca.

That plus some of my favorite Darkover tropes - delicious food, hurt-comfort, training sequences, interesting laran powers, Ages of Chaos decadence, the harrowing wilderness journey in bad weather - made a story.

INTERVIEW: Robin Wayne Bailey on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday

Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber inspired Swords Against The Shadowland.  His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross's Lace And Blade volumes.  His novelette, "The Children's Crusade" was a 2008 Nebula Award nominee.  Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes available from Yard Dog Press.  He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and co-founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, now located in Seattle, Washington.  He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career? What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?

Robin Wayne Bailey: Marion Zimmer Bradley was an early supporter of my writing.  I had just sold my first novel, Frost, when I saw an announcement that Marion was seeking stories for a new anthology called Sword And Sorceress.  I decided to take a shot at that and wrote a story called “Child of Orcus,” involving female gladiators in the Roman arenas during the reign of Caligula, which was a little-known or discussed historical fact at the time.

Marion loved the story and wrote an astonishingly complimentary introduction for it, stating, among other very nice things, that “I bought this story under the impression that this was a woman writing about a woman.  Only after deciding to purchase it did I discover that Robin Bailey was a man; but like all really good writers, gender is unimportant to the perceptive eye he brings to the study of his heroine.”  That’s a compliment I’ve always held closely.  “Child of Orcus” became my second professional genre sale and saw publication exactly one year after my first novel appeared.

I sold a good number of stories to Marion after that for further Sword And Sorceress volumes and for such anthologies as Spells Of Wonder.  Indeed, one of my favorite stories, “The Moon Who Loved the Man,” appeared in Spells.  I also sold to her magazine, too.  Marion was always very complimentary and supportive, even going so far as to provide a couple of nice blurbs for my subsequent novels.  But then came a very special anthology invitation.  Marion had decided to put together a special small-print hardback volume of stories by writers she considered “her literary children,” and it would be called Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Worlds.  That she considered me one of her children was immensely flattering, but by that time I was, I thought, leaving the kind of fantasy I had previously sold to her behind and exploring other directions. 

Nebula Awards Weekend 2014

The Nebula Awards Weekend, hosted by the Science Fiction/Fantasy* Writers of America, is a true feast for the writer (and lover) of the genre/s*. (There has been much debate about whether Science Fiction properly includes Fantasy, and indeed the name of the organization was changed to be inclusive, but pronouncing SFFWA led to so much inadvertent spitting that the earlier, simpler form is preferred.) One (extremely) notable writer put it this way: “I go to Worldcon or World Fantasy Con for my fans, but I go to the Nebs for myself.” This is where I, too, go to be among professional writers, many of the best living, to attend panels given by the top pros for other pro writers, and generally get a refreshed perspective on what an amazing community this is. You don’t have to be a SFWA member to attend, either.

My weekend started top-of-the-morning on Friday with working registration. I highly recommend this. It’s an excellent way to see your friends (and make new ones) as they check in. In fact, at times, my two stints resembled one prolonged, joyous, and occasionally chaotic reunion. I do not, however, recommend doing two two-hours stints back to back, and if I ever sign up to do that again, please whap me up the side of the head. Fortunately, my co-registrar for the second shift understood the symptoms of my crashing blood sugar, and agreed to hold the fort solo for the remaining quarter-hour, so I ran off to an impromptu lunch part with Beth Meacham, Ann Leckie (who subsequently won the Nebular for Best Novel), and Dave Smeds. I don’t usually drop a lot of Names of Famous Folk in my reports, but this is an example of the kind of hobnobbing, socializing, and in general feeling-of-one-tribe that goes on at the Nebs.

INTERVIEW: Janni Lee Simner on "Stars of Darkover"

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, in honor of Marion's 84th birthday.

Here is the first of a series of interviews with these fabulous authors.

Janni Lee Simner sold her first short story to the anthology Leroni of Darkover more than two decades ago. She's gone on to publish more than three dozen short stories and eight novels, including the post-apocalyptic Bones of Faerie trilogy and the Icelandic-saga-based Thief Eyes.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Janni Lee Simner: I'd been a long-time Darkover reader when I first came upon Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover anthologies. I was just beginning to try to write professionally at the time, so I decided to try to write a story for one of them. I sent off for writer's guidelines -- this was in the days of snail mail, and I didn't know to include a self-addressed stamped envelope, but Marion sent me guidelines anyway, along with a page of advice for new writers. (I wonder how she knew? :-)) So I wrote my story, rewrote it about a million times, sent it off -- and was stunned when it sold! Knowing I'd made that first professional sale helped me stick with it as I worked on becoming a better writer and selling more consistently.