Fireworks in February

Editorial

My husband and I won’t mark this Valentine’s Day with roses. We’ll probably omit the chocolates too. In fact, we might skip the whole February 14 thing altogether.

With any luck, we’ll pick out a bouquet of unfamiliar blooms with unpronounceable names at the Bird and Flower Market in Hong Kong. Instead of chocolates, we will eat squid and conch. Forget the champagne, we plan to raise glasses of vintage port to toast love, family and prosperity in old Macao. We may even do it as a threesome. My mother never saw the South China Sea stretching to infinity from the summit of Victoria Peak either.

I learned a long time ago that celebrations with Greg never follow anybody else’s agenda. He always gets sick on New Year’s Eve — before he takes a single drink. He always gets a headache on Christmas. In his vicinity, it will always rain on Memorial Day, Labor Day and Fourth of July, and don’t get me started on what he does to Easter.

But sometimes it works better that way. I need fireworks in February, especially after this cold January. And freeing yourself from expectations leaves you open to serendipity. Tee Morris and Lisa Lee never planned to write a book when they entered that role-playing chat room — much less collaborate with a writing partner half a world away. Rickey Mallory (our mid-month interview) never predicted that she would be designing book covers as well as writing the novels that fall between them. But they wouldn’t trade their experiences for a lifetime of the expected.

Neither would I.

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, was published by Samhain Publishing in 2007.