I’m done (for the time being, at least) with the series of posts on writing female characters, so instead this month’s SF Novelists post is about my first experience as a Guest of Honor.
Comment over there, no registration required, though if you’re a first-time commenter I’ll have to fish your comment out of the moderation queue. So don’t worry if it takes a little while to appear.
My friends-list is full of posts about bullying, or more precisely the experience of being bullied, because I am friends with a lot of geeks and nerds and other such target types. They’re heart-wrenching to read, but not because they call up echoes of my own past. You see, I was never bullied. And to all the adults who tell the victims “It’s your fault, you must have done something to provoke them,” I have this to say:
The sole reason I didn’t get bullied is that I was lucky.
It’s the only explanation I can find. I was freakishly skinny — seriously, I look at pictures of myself and wonder how I didn’t snap in half — I wore thick glasses all the way through elementary school, I was an unabashed smart kid and book nerd. I was in the band. I had a weird name. There was an abudance of reasons to pick on me . . . but to the best of my recollection, nobody really did.
See, I went to school in the kind of affluent area where parents generally drove their kids to school (as mine did), so I never experienced the rolling hyena cage that is the school bus. During my early years, the only time I rode one of those was when a group of us were bussed to the once-a-week gifted program, held in another school — a program that was large enough, and included enough like-minded kids, that I had plenty of friends. We had honors and AP classes as I got to junior high and high school, so that I never even saw a whole subset of the student body, the subset that might have thought being smart was something to mock you for. The band in my high school was roughly 150 students out of 1500 — ten percent, and a large enough block that we could (and did) just socialize with each other, filling up entire lunch tables, going to practice after school, storing our things in the extra lockers we got by the band hall. Hell, our head drum major was voted homecoming king one year, because the drill team thought he was the cutest thing ever, and that plus the band was enough to lift him above the various football players who were his competitors. Our solidarity protected us.
Not a single piece of that was my own doing. I didn’t conform, didn’t scare the bullies off, didn’t do any of the things adults might advise to prevent the crimes of others. I was lucky.
But even luck may not save you. One of my classmates — a guy I’d known since elementary school, who’d gone through the same system I had, who was in the band — committed suicide during high school. I don’t know if he was bullied, but I know the football team talked some appallingly ugly shit about him afterward. He left behind a community, though; the entire band was devastated, and a posse very nearly went after the football players who were saying those things. That’s a lot more than most bullied kids have. But he didn’t have it because he did anything, other than being himself; he had it because the circumstances made it possible.
The kids who get picked on do not have power over their situations. Telling them it’s their responsibility to make change happen isn’t just unfair, it’s adding to the problem. It’s like grabbing the kid’s hand and smacking him with it while saying, “stop hitting yourself.” We need to not blame the victims. We need authority to step in, the same way we ask authority to step in when adults get stalked or assaulted or harassed. And for the love of god, we need to remember that our instincts are animal ones, and that altruism and compassion and so on don’t happen because a fairy waves a wand, they’re things that need to be fostered — that children need to be taught how not to act like beasts. We need to improve our math scores and everything else, too, at least here in the U.S., but I think I’d happily trade that for a school system that raises kids to be human beings, rather than hyenas.
I don’t know how to do that. But I know it needs to happen, because not everybody is lucky, and even luck can’t save everyone.
I’m starting to buckle down to work again, but interested parties might like to know that Jim Hines is giving away a copy of A Star Shall Fall (and also one of Tanya Huff’s The Enchantment Emporium). Details at the link; you have until the 20th to enter.
I’ve picked up quite a few new blog readers since the last post in this series, so to recap: I’m going back through the Wheel of Time, partly as a reader (so I can read the ending and know what the heck is going on), but partly as a writer, to look at it with a professional eye and see what works and what doesn’t. This has particularly meant looking at the structure, to see what really happened to the narrative pacing as the books went along, but there are some content-level bits of analysis going on as well. I stopped reading after Crossroads of Twilight, so please, no spoilers for Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm. If you’d like to see and/or comment on previous posts, just follow the Wheel of Time tag.
So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.
By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan’s decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We’re skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.
Let’s step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.
By popular request, my keynote from Sirens. The actual speech I delivered was a little different — for one thing, this version doesn’t have the comments about Helen Mirren as Prospera in Julie Taymor’s upcoming film of The Tempest — but the gist of it followed this pretty closely. I’m debating whether to post it to my website as-is, or update it based on the comments and feedback I got at the con; thoughts?
I have a lot to say about Sirens. Con reports aren’t something I usually do in detail, but this was my first experience with the con, my first con of that particular sort, and my first time being a Guest of Honor; unsurprisingly, this produces Thoughts. I’ll put them behind the cut, but for those who don’t want to read the whole shebang, here’s the short form:
It was amazing.
If your idea of a good con is one where you can spend pretty much your whole weekend in really good conversations about books, or hang out without feeling there’s a divide between the Authors and the Attendees, or get actual face time with the Guests of Honor, you should take a look at Sirens. I’m going to try to go back next year if I can, which should tell you something right there.
Also, Vail is pretty stunning in early October.
For more detail, follow me behind the cuts.
OH HOLY GOD THE OTHER THING WORKED, TOO.
(The other thing, in this case, being my costume. Pictures will follow. Only the crown bit was the subject of the Boggan Deathmatch a while ago; the rest, I paid someone to make, because sewing it myself while also finishing With Fate Conspire would have required paying a lot more money in psychiatrist bills.)
Early breakfast tomorrow, then shuttle back to Denver, flight back to home. This has been fabulous, and there will be a detailed report.
OH HOLY GOD IT WORKED.
(The stunt I alluded to before? I read a selection from With Fate Conspire . . . complete with RP and cockney accents. One attendee with a British mother said that if she hadn’t heard me speak in my natural voice, she wouldn’t have known I was American. This is pretty much the best seal of approval I could hope for.)
(I still don’t know that I’ll try that stunt in public again, though.)
Popping in briefly from Sirens (so far: it’s fabulous) to say that it’s the second anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which they’re celebrating with a double issue. (And some really lovely artwork, too.)
Anybody who’s read this journal for a while knows my love for BCS. They publish my kind of fantasy, the kind that has richly developed or evocative secondary worlds, ranging in style and content from the American frontier to Mesoamerica to Enlightenment France to India to Japan. And they do podcasts, too. From my personal experience, I can say the editor, Scott Andrews, is great to work with, and I’d go on with the praise but I haven’t eaten yet and I should probably fix that before I fall over.
So instead let me just nudge you in the direction of the site, encouraging you to read, and to support BCS if you enjoy what you find. Bringing you this kind of fiction ain’t cheap, and while they’re a non-profit, they do need money to function. So if you like what they’re doing, and want to see it go on for another two years or more, think about helping out.
Back to Sirens I go . . . .
I turned in a novel, and then my sister left for Japan, and then I had a house-guest, and now I’m heading off for Sirens. So the lack of posting is likely to continue for a few days yet; I may post updates during the con, but in all likelihood you’ll get the story after the fact. (Among other things, I have a keynote address to finish writing, a reading to practice that requires a certain stunt, and a workshop to plan out. So that will have me busy in my off moments.)
I am nervous and very excited. This is my first time as a Guest of Honor; I can only hope I do justice to the role.
After much hiatus-ing along the way, I’ve finally seen the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (TV series, natch — not the Shyamalan film. Though I laughed and laughed at how the episode “The Ember Island Players” seemed to presage the movie’s awfulness.)
I very much enjoyed the show: the characters, and most especially the world it takes place in, which has all kinds of nifty little details squirreled away in the corners. Apparently Nickelodeon is planning a new twelve-episode series to air next year — set seventy-five years later, focusing on Korra, a Water Tribe girl who’s the new Avatar — and I am very much looking forward to that.
It was interesting, though, watching a show which fundamentally was written for a kid audience. I read a decent amount of YA, but this was aimed at a demographic aged 6-11 (according to Wikipedia), and they play in a whole different ballpark. I could feel the difference: the show still grapped with interesting and sometimes difficult ideas, but the way it did so was . . . simpler.
Which feels like a criticism, maybe even a dismissal, and that’s the part I find interesting. I can’t find any words to describe what I’m thinking of that don’t sound like pejoratives. It’s simpler. The answers come more easily. They aren’t explored in as much depth.
But that isn’t a bad thing. How many adults got hooked on that series? I’m nowhere near the only one. Just because we weren’t the intended audience didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it. If it didn’t reach quite the same depths of grief and heights of joy as, say, Dorothy Dunnett, that’s okay; I was shouting at the TV screen anyway, which is a good sign that I cared. The story may have been simpler, but it wasn’t lesser.
So I’m left wondering, what makes that trick happen? What’s the secret technique that makes a nice, simple story for children (Avatar, Harry Potter) into something hordes of adults enjoy? Was it the characterization? Again, that didn’t have the depth I might expect from an adult show — but it was compelling; I giggled and cheered and wailed at the characters not to do the stupid thing I knew they were about to do. Was it the world? Maybe we were all just starving for a full-blown setting that wasn’t the usual familiar medieval Eurofantasy. I’d be curious to hear from people who loved the show: what was it that drew you to it?
(Be spoiler-free, if you can.)
Draft of With Fate Conspire is off to the editor. I have formally decided I don’t have to look at it again until after Sirens is over, which means I’m on vacation (from this book, at least) until October 11th.
I go fall down now.
Through random bloody chance and the favor of the gods of procrastination, the Victorian book, my assembled ladies and gentlemen, HAS A TITLE.
Can I get a drumroll?
<rolllllllllllllll>
With Fate Conspire.
Unless you are my husband or moonandserpent, you do not know — and do not want to know — how much Victorian literature I read through in search of something I could use. This one was lovely but had the verb at the front (and therefore looked out of place with the rest of the series); this one had the verb at the end but the quote it came from only fit the book if I tilted my head at a particular angle and squinted; this one was gorgeous but didn’t fit no matter how hard I squinted; this one was out of period; this one fit the pattern but wasn’t a great title. (Children, learn from me: nevereverever constrain yourself to this kind of highly patterned titling scheme.) I kept on plowing through poet after poet after architecture writer after novelist, trying to find something.
And then I sat down yesterday to read Tim Powers for procrastination, and I found my title.
The funniest part is, the epigraph he used came from a source I’d already gone through, and gotten nothing from. I mentioned some random bloody chance, right? The edition Powers quotes is earlier than the one I’d read, and has a different phrasing. “With Him conspire” is not a line I would have used. But Powers used an earlier edition, and I stared at the epigraph thinking, could I . . .?
I could. I can. My editor has given it the thumbs-up. On this, my last day of revising before I send the draft off to him for comment, my quest has ended. The Novel Formerly Known As The Victorian Book is now With Fate Conspire.
. . . wait, the Heaviside Layer is a real thing?
I thought it was just something made up for the musical Cats.
(This epiphany has been brought to you by Tim Powers’ novel Declare, and the details on wireless telegraphy therein.)
If you’re interested in steampunk, Nader Elhefnawy has a well-thought-out article on it up on the SFWA site.
I particularly like the way he acknowledges the role of nostalgia without automatically dismissing nostalgia as something that must always be inherently bad. Yes, the steampunk vision of the past conveniently overlooks the less-attractive parts of the period, but the flip side of that coin is that it valorizes the attractive, selecting out qualities we may be losing/have lost in this day and age and trying to resurrect them. Plus, Elhefnawy puts the current era in context with the past in a way I found very eye-opening, characterizing this as the post-apocalypse of the Victorians, with WWI as the apocalypse.
Interesting stuff. I recommend reading it.
By the way, this is what I did for my thirtieth birthday:
It’s called “indoor skydiving,” and it is FABULOUS.
My understanding is that the setup was invented to help skydivers train. You can also do it for fun, though. A giant fan beneath the wire trampoline blows enough wind upward to lift a person who’s perpendicular to the flow, simulating the effect of free-fall. The trainer is there to catch and adjust you; it can be hard to stabilize if you’ve never done it before, so you sink down or drift into the wall. Once you get the hang of it, they may spin you, or (in the case of our guy) latch onto you at shoulder and hip, put themselves into free-fall, and then take you zooming up into the shaft above, dropping down until you almost hit the trampoline, zooming up again, down again, maybe spinning as you go . . . .
OMG.
SO. MUCH. FUN.
You may be put off when you find out what your money gets you. My husband bought a group package for me and some friends/family; we each were allotted two one-minute flights. Doesn’t sound like much — but trust me, that’s a lot of free-fall. One of our group fell sick and didn’t come, so I got his extra time, making for two two-minute flights, and holy god by the end my pecs were tired. It’s like lying on your back, holding a heavy weight juuuuuuust above your chest, for one (or two) minutes at a stretch. (Since I, for some ballet-related totally inexplicable reason, found it more natural to bend at the hip rather than the knee – as seen in this photo — I also ended up with sore glutes. I’m pretty sure I would have just traded those for sore quads instead, though, had I made the effort to drag my knees down.) By the time my second two minutes were up, I was more than ready to be done.
If you have any desire to fly, you should absolutely try this out. Especially if, like me, you’ve had enough ankle-and-knee problems that leaping out of a plane (or rather, landing after such a leap) is just asking for trouble. It will make you giddy with joy.
It’s boggling enough that for the first time since I started writing the Onyx Court series, there are photographs from (nearly) the period in which I’m writing.
Every so often, one of them hits me like a punch to the gut:
YOU USED TO BE ABLE TO SEE ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.
I knew this, of course. There are all kinds of references, and even paintings, to how the churches of the City used to soar over everything around them, rather than being lost in the cracks. But holy shit. Not just the dome, not just the western towers, but the body of the church. Visible. In more than glimpses caught between the buildings that crowd around it.
Obviously this photo was taken from the roof of a nearby building (or else something in the vicinity of Blackfriars was decidedly taller than everything else around it). You can get semi-decent shots of the cathedral even now, if you could persuade one of the places at the top of Ludgate Hill to let you onto their roof. But nothing with this kind of sight-line and openness, because these days, too many buildings rise higher than the top of the cathedral steps.
It really is a window into the past. The late Victorian period — this photo was published circa 1891 or 1892 — but also more than a hundred years before then, ever since Wren built the new cathedral, because the buildings would have been mostly about that height. Paste in an image of old St. Paul’s, with or without spire, and you’ve got a good idea of what the area looked like centuries ago.
For a London-history geek like me, this just blows the top of my head off.
The reading went swimmingly. Quite a good number of people in attendance, and the stories went over well. For the curious, my final choices were:
1) “The Wives of Paris” — even if nobody had voted for it, I might have read this one, just because I’ve been looking forward to doing so for ages. As it also got a goodly number of votes in the poll, my desire had some justification to back it up.
2) “A Heretic by Degrees” — lots of votes for the various Driftwood options. I didn’t get the new story revised, so opted for this one instead. Especially because Borderlands readings are about the only opportunity I get to read longer stories; usually time constraints prohibit it.
3) a selection from A Star Shall Fall — if you’ve read the book, I did the two scenes where Irrith goes hunting in what Ktistes claims is a bad patch but isn’t really, and finds the, er, special room. (Circumlocuting so as to avoid spoilers.)
Now, back to the revision mines.
Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let’s talk about usernames.
yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I’m on her side. But first, let’s talk about the original poster’s argument.
I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don’t have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up with a name that’s maybe shared by 7,142 other people. An improvement, or only a differently annoying issue? Also, he says you don’t have to use your real name, just a name — but hang on, isn’t that essentially the username thing all over again, except without the restriction that it must be unique? And maybe a requirement that your chosen name has to come in two parts (e.g. Pony McRainbow). If you can still use a made-up name, you still have the problem he describes, of realizing belatedly that somebody you know in person and somebody you know online are actually, y’know, the same person.
But that has an easy fix. If you want your legal name associated with your pseud, put it in your profile or wherever. If you want to keep them separate, you can.
Which is part of Cat’s point. Facebook wants you to use your real name (and other real information) so you can be more effectively tracked: pinned down, advertised to, your information sold to third-party vendors, linked up with things you never intended to touch. Oh, so you’re the Melanie Dunn whose grocery purchases swing erratically between Hostess snack cakes and green vegetables (better sell you some diet aids!), who’s a registered Democratic voter in Kansas (do your neighbors know?), whose medical history shows a procedure at a particular doctor’s office three years ago (and we can guess what that was). So when you go posting on your blog about how you think bigots should get over the whole Islamic community center thing, rest assured people will have an easy time connecting that with your weight and your political activities and the fact that maybe you had an abortion. Aren’t you glad they know who you are?
False names, whether unique usernames or non-unique pseudonyms, can protect people.
But you know, even if that were taken out of the equation, I’d still like usernames, and my reason is the other part of Cat’s point. Choosing a username is an act of identity creation — one we don’t often get to do in modern American society, or (so far as I’m aware) in other high-tech nations. Your parents pick your name, without any input from you, and changing it is a legal hassle. Nicknames are generally assigned by those around you, though you can try to show up to college or your job in a new city and sell people on the idea that while your name is William, usually you go by Bear. We have very few opportunities to choose something that reflects who and what we are, or want to be — or we did, until usernames came along and gave us a whole new field to play in.
The fantasy writer in me can’t help but think about the mystical power of names, and how the process of choice invests them once more with a whiff of that power. They have meaning. How is that not cool?
Is the meaning sometimes stupid? Of course. You may get to a point where you’re embarrassed to be known as shake_that_bootay. But unlike Aschlyee, who’s embarrassed by her parents’ enthusiastic leap onto the bandwagon of “let’s find a totally new way to spell this name!,” you can put it behind you pretty easily. You can escape your party-hard high school years, major in Classics, get involved in radical politics, and rename yourself alecto_reborn. Then, when you’re tired of being a Fury, go into the business world, and settle down as dahlia_blue.
There have been times and places in the world where that sort of change was normal and expected, where having six names by the time you died was nothing unusual. (Read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you don’t believe me.) We’ve reinvented a form of that here, and I for one like it.
Celebrate your username! Tell me the story of why you chose it, whether you’re tempted to change it, and if so, what to.
1) If a word or phrase isn’t in [square brackets], I should trust that means I’ve already looked up whether it’s in period or not.
2) Scenes are so much more exciting when your protagonist doesn’t play nice.
3) kniedzw gets a funny look on his face when I appear in the doorway of his office and say, “Can I get your help for a second? It’s spousal abuse for fun and profit.”
4) But he is then very good about dragging me across the living room floor so I can figure out where a flying elbow would connect under particular circumstances.
5) I’m still in draft-brain, rather than revision-brain; my subconscious is depressed that all my work has made the book about a thousand words shorter. (Thanks to my first bits of revision being the combination of two pairs of scenes that each really only needed to be one.) But I’m sure it will get longer again, soon enough.
