Looks Like We’re In it for the Long Haul

This post is an edited version of a recent Twitter thread of mine.

I feel a rant coming on. Brace yourselves.

I was 33 years old. I was quite fit and active. And then, in a heartbeat, I wasn’t.

Continue reading Looks Like We’re In it for the Long Haul

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A New Year’s Farewell to Casa Mixon+Gould

This pandemic has left few people’s lives untouched, and  Steve and I are no exception. The pandemic’s stresses made my chronic illness much worse (I’ve tweeted a bit about it here and here). Then the last straw broke in 2020 when Quibi, the company Doug Liman’s development team had just sold Steve’s latest work to, went out of business.

We’d been muddling along as best we could since, but we’ve drifted into an unsustainable situation. This past summer we hit the wall. We could no longer afford our mortgage. My loss of income due of chronic illness had caused debt to pile up for medical bills over the past several years, and we still had two kids (at that time) in college. So we’ve decided to sell our house and use the equity to pay off that debt.

Continue reading A New Year’s Farewell to Casa Mixon+Gould

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On the Record: An Archive of Harm Done by One Individual Under Many Names

Almost seven years have passed since I published an investigative report on SFF writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a/k/a/ the rage-blogger Requires Hate, and her years-long track record of engaging in abusive, harassing behavior toward other science fiction, fantasy, and gaming writers and fans online. The report was titled “A Report of Harm Done by One Individual Under Many Names,” and came out on November 6, 2014 on laurajmixon.com, my former author website. That report has since become known as “the Mixon Report.”

The report and the events surrounding it still come up at times in online discourse, and I’ve had people reach out to me, asking for a link to the full version. Unfortunately, the version I published on laurajmixon.com is no longer online, and the most recent web-archived version lacks the critically-important Appendix B, which contained a description of methodology and many evidentiary links. It also lacks the post’s 440 user comments. In the weeks after the report went up, WordPress repeatedly choked on Appendix B’s table sizes, complex formatting, and large number of links. Each time, it rendered the entire report inaccessible, forcing me to repost and reformat the entire report over and over. This was all occurring during the initial period after its release, when many people in the community were trying to access it.

I was never able to resolve the technical issues, so eventually I posted an abridged version instead, with a PDF of the full version available on request. In 2017, laurajmixon.com fell into a web-hosting oubliette—the result of a verification foul-up during a handoff between two hosting services. I lost control of the domain. The official version of the report disappeared down the rabbit hole of bygone bits and botheration.

I think it’s important for people to have access to an official public record of the full report so they can form their own opinions, based on its content. Therefore, I’ve attached below a PDF copy of the report, which includes Appendix B and a link to the web-archived comments. I’ve made a couple of minor edits to the main text and reformatted the tables to improve consistency of terminology and increase readability. Also attached is a separate document containing a brief overview of events leading up to the writing of the report, created recently by some of the report’s contributors.

(Requires Hate Report – Nov, 2014)      (Requires Hate Redux – 2021 team write-up)

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A final note. As I mentioned above, while the report has become known as “The Mixon Report,” it’s not about me. It’s about the community. It’s about trying to help keep people safe in their online spaces, during a tumultuous, deeply divided time, when trust between white and BIPOC fans, writers, and publishers was at a nadir, and white supremacist, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic trolling and baiting was on the rise (see GamerGate and the Sad and Rabid Puppies Hugo hijackings, et seq.).

The investigation and preparation of the report was a massive, unpaid effort made by many. I estimate I spent about 300 hours on the effort, all told: including investigating claims; interviewing potential targets; organizing links, screencaps, and other evidence; analyzing data; writing the report; and moderating user comments. But more importantly, an international team of 30 or more SFF writers, fans, and editors gathered around me as I began to collect people’s stories, and made their own substantial contributions to the project.

Without the efforts of those individuals, scattered across the globe—a multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-orientation group; initially most of them strangers to each other, who stepped up to do extensive outreach among their own peers; investigate and validate claims; shape analytical criteria; review and comment on multiple drafts; and wrestle with numerous extremely painful, difficult questions about how best to proceed along the way (not to mention the courage of the dozens more who were willing to share their stories of trauma and distress)—the report could not have been written.

That Hugo the SFF community awarded the report may have my name on it, and it may sit on my shelf, but it has never belonged to me. It belongs to all those who donated their time, their courage, and lived experiences to the report. And it belongs to all those who took a chance on me and rallied around the work we did together, in a difficult and divided time. You know who you are, and I haven’t forgotten you.

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Avatars Dance:

My Feminist Cyberpunk Trilogy, Back in Print

This is a mirror of my post at my other blog, laurajmixon.com, for fans of my work who don’t follow me there. A bit of fun news. 🙂

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Cybernetic proxy-jocks! Space stations and gas giants! Women—queers—people on the margins—build tech, steal starships, drive mechs!

Readers can now buy copies of my feminist cyberpunk trilogy. Glass Houses, Proxies, and Burning the Ice—Books I-III of AVATARS DANCEare out in electronic and audiobook formats. These exciting stories, peopled with diverse characters, are mystery-thrillers set in a high-tech, broken-down, climate-altered future.

Links and descriptions follow. An omnibus edition of all three books is available at a deep discount, for $9.99.

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Avatars Dance (Omnibus edition: all three books)

Kindle   |   iBook   |   Nook

AvatarsDance2In the 22nd century, the world is beset by savage storms, unbearable heat, rising oceans, and environmental devastation as climate change inexorably overwhelms humanity’s ability to adapt. Sophisticated robotics and other technology have enabled some people—those with the means—to avoid the worst impacts.

Three women living in the margins coopt that technology to adapt and survive. An impoverished waldo-jock attempts a good deed that gets her into trouble with the law and the wealthy elite—a brilliant scientist whose world-altering technology was stolen by a major corporation is hunted by a secret group trying to steal a starship—a clone socially isolated from her peers in a struggling off-world settlement makes a huge discovery deep beneath the icy moon’s ocean. They each find their place and leave their mark on the world, in unique and surprising ways.

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Glass Houses

Kindle   |   iBook   |   Nook   |   Audiobook

AD1Ruby Kubick runs her own waldo business from her living room. She bean-jacks into her big machines to roam the dirty, heat-drenched, water-soaked streets of New York City and look for work. Construction, security, no job too big or too small. But when she tries and fails to save a wealthy Egyptian in a collapsing skyscraper during a hurricane, she attracts unwanted attention. You want justice on tomorrow’s mean streets; it’s going to cost you. Particularly if you’re guilty.

The 1992 feminist cyberpunk classic is back in print with an introduction by two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Pat Cadigan and an afterword by Lydia LeBlanc on genre and gender in cyberpunk fiction.

“One of the strongest debuts I’ve read in ages. READ THIS BOOK. And watch Laura Mixon. She’s going to be one of the stars.”

–George R.R. Martin

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Proxies

Kindle     |     iBook     |     Nook     |     Audiobook

AD2The new millennium has been born in fire. Warring factions strive for supremacy. And a secret cadre has unleashed a powerful new weapon—proxies: remotely operated humanoid bodies—to seize control of humanity’s first mission to the stars.

Can Carli D’Auber, the scientist whose instantaneous communication tech made it possible, avoid capture and stop them in time?

“Proxies is as fast and wicked as cyberpunk, but it has characters who are more than fashion statements and outlaws. This one will keep you up reading past your bedtime.” —Maureen McHugh, author of China Mountain Zhang

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Burning the Ice

Kindle     |     iBook     |     Nook     |     Audiobook

AD3Over a century after the starship Exodus left Earth, their cloned descendants have settled on an icy moon of a gas giant and must work together to survive in extremely harsh conditions. Isolated and traumatized when her clone twin died at birth, Manda isn’t cut out to get along well with others, and makes herself and everyone around her miserable.

But her self-imposed semi-exile leads her to make a world-shattering discovery that will change everything—if she can get out with the news alive. For it turns out there are political plots and counter-plots tracing back to Earth itself—and outward to the stars.

“In the midst of what is quite a ride, Mixon places vital and intense characters. Splendidly realized.”   —Booklist (starred review)

“Tense, complex, and spellbinding.”   —Kirkus (starred review)

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Thrilling Stevie Tales! Extended Version, Part 1: The Enhanced Intro

Friends! Bubonicon 46ers! Gentlefen! Lend me your eyes! (Eeeew!)

As I mentioned in Steve Gould’s Toastmaster introduction for this year’s BuboniCon, I sent out a request for anecdotes of teh Stevester from his many friends, frenemies, enemies, minions, body-snatchers, evil clones, etc. I was swamped—swamped, I tell you—with far more GREAT material than I could use in the intro.

(Oh, for those of you who don’t know, I’m Laura J. Mixon, a/k/a/ M. J. Locke, a/k/a/ @MorganJLocke, and Steve and I have been spousal units since WeddingCon in 1989 [Ed Bryant officiated! Woot!]. Welcome to my blog.)

The original Stevie Chuck bio is below. Check back twice daily during the con; I plan to post additional tales of his adventures and misadventures in the morning and at night each day, Saturday and Sunday. You’ll come to know him as the fun-loving, anti-gravitational berserkazoid his long-time friends and family have come to know and tolerate…er, love. And if you have Stevie Chuck anecdotes (or even antidotes; Ghu knows we need ’em), share in the comments. His antics must be recorded for posterity! Or at least extortion purposes…

(Do scroll down to the end, even if you’ve already read the dead-trees version of the intro; there’s a little Easter egg for you.)

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Thrilling Stevie Tales

by Laura J. Mixon (M. J. Locke)

 Many know Steven Gould as the writer of the wildly popular Jumper science fiction series (including Exo, out in September), made into a major motion picture a while back; or as the guy that James Cameron recently tagged to write the AVATAR novels; or as the current president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Some know him as a fourth-dan Aikido black belt. But only a privileged few know his origin story[1].

As his wife, I’ve known him for 26 years, but even that isn’t far back enough to grok the fullness of Stevie. So I reached out to his Cepheid Variable/ AggieCon buddies, who knew him back when he was just getting started in SFF, at Texas A&M University in the early 70s.

I got so many great stories that there is no way I can fit them all into this brief bio[2],[3]. As their anecdotes trickled in, though, a series of themes emerged—along with a growing sense of wonder that he survived long enough to breed. I mean, holy crap! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Steve is King of the Nerds[4]. His primary superpower is Deadly 3D Tech Attack! This power manifests in the ability (and willingness) to get into spaces no one else would go near, and “fix” things that weren’t even broken. When we lived in New York in the early 90s, we had a tiny apartment: 350 ft2 for him, me, and our baby daughter. He had it done up with so many levels, pulleys, and levers, it was like living in a space station. Apparently, he had been honing this skill for years.

Back at A&M, he lived on campus as a student, but later he and his buddy Bill Page went in together to buy a house near campus. Et voilà, the Monkey House came to be[5]. Bill Page dishes dirt:

There was the time Steve bought a sword. A really neat old sword.

And while playing with it—um, putting on a skilled exhibition of its use—in the Monkey House back yard, he watched in horror as the sword flew into pieces.

The grass was tall.

Steve found all but one of the missing pieces.

After much searching, he devised a plan.

He got string—lots of string—and pegs, and laid off the entire backyard in a series of grids and methodically began sweeping the yard with a metal detector.

Time passed. Mountains rose and fell.

John Tim showed up and asked Steve what he was doing.

Steve explained about the missing piece.

John Tim looked down, bent over and picked up a piece of metal, saying, “You mean this?”

Robin Bailey tells of Stevie and him at ConQuest:

 In case you weren’t aware, he was once a male fashion model. David Hartwell was one of the major guests. David, in those days, was known for wearing really loud ties and clothes. Steve and I staged a “David Hartwell Memorial Fashion Show” at opening ceremonies. He came up early and we spent the better part of a day hopping around thrift shops for the worst outfits we could put together. We drafted a few other people, too, and strutted the stage like pros.

And I’ll finish with one from Brad Denton:

 Oh, I know! How about the time he tried to kill Robin Bailey? That in itself might not be worth mentioning—since who among us has not tried to kill Robin Bailey? But Stevie attempted to do so by dropping M&Ms from several floors up in a hotel atrium. Bailey tried to catch them in his mouth…but as we know, F=ma, and even the m of an M&M can impart considerable F under the a due to gravity when dropped from a great height. So although Bailey succeeded in orally catching at least one of the plunging M&Ms, it penetrated the roof of his mouth and entered his brain, which later resulted in his decision to run for President of SFWA.

So many more good stories, but I’m out of room! But you get the idea. Stevie Chuck is above all a badass storyteller, a mensch, and a fun guy to hang around. But if he picks up a tool or bag of M&Ms, run!

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PS- Yes, this is really him, hanging upside down from what appears to be a 3rd story balcony. Hence the “surprised he lived long enough to breed” remark. (h/t Bill Page)


[1] Every superhero needs an origin story.

[2] If I did, the program book editor would kill me.

[3] They’re just tooooo goooood not to share, though, so I invite you join me at my blog, FeralSapient.com, where I will post them and invite others to share their own thrilling Stevie tales. Heh heh heh… [How meta is this thing anyway? -ed.]

[4] I’m serious. Check out his Nerd Tiara.

[5] A popular—dare I say, notorious?—Texan slan shack.

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