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Help Haiti

Once again, LJ fandom is organizing a charity auction, this time to raise money for organizations responding to the earthquake in Haiti. The community is , and there are many offers for original fiction, fanfiction, art, music, editing services, and more.

I’ve decided to try something new with my own contribution: a kind of fanfiction of my own work. If you give me an event or individual in English history, I will tell you how the fae of the Onyx Court were involved. Not a full short story, but at least a couple of paragraphs about Blacktooth Meg and the Great Stink of London, or the time Charles Darwin almost wrote a book on the evolution of faeries. (Or whatever.)

Depending on what you pick, I may end up liking the result enough that I’ll ask your permission to make it canon. 🙂

Bid here; read the post for details on how the auction is being run. And look through the rest of the community for other things you might be interested in. The money is going to a very critical cause, after all.

allowance for period

It is not fair of me to want to punch the author of English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century in the throat. After all, one must remember, it was 1937 when he wrote:

The distinctive feature of a woman’s shape is the disproportionate width of the hip-line, producing an inward slope to the legs, so that in the erect posture the outline of the body is wide at the middle and tapering toward the extremities. Such a shape imparts to the eye a sense of unbalance. Indeed, if the bias of sex-attraction could be set aside, such a shape would be unpleasing, because we have an instinctive dislike of objects that look top-heavy. Instinctively woman is conscious of this, and from the earliest times has attempted to conceal her hip-line. We are told that her first effort was by an apron of fig leaves, applied, no doubt, for that reason. Since then the main function of woman’s dress has been to conceal the bad proportions of her body. (emphasis added)

That’s right, ladies — you know, deep down, by instinct alone, that your body is Shaped Wrong. Your hips are disproportionate, because of course the right proportion is that of a man. Eve knew that in the Garden, without the benefit a mirror to look in! (Maybe Adam told her she had a fat ass.) And human beings hate top-heavy things, which is why, of course, we find it so unattractive when a man has well-muscled shoulders, right?

It is also not fair of me to want to punch him in the throat for the brief mention, in passing, that all the line drawings of hats and hairstyles, and all the notations for them, were done by his wife — who doesn’t get her name on or in the book, nosirree. He’s the only one who did any real work, after all.

1937. This was written in 1937. I have to bear that in mind. <breathes>

Things to make you chew on the walls

Back in September of last year, I wrote a post for SF Novelists about the Bechdel Test. Well, a few days ago I came across a post — don’t remember how I found it — from Jennifer Kesler, written in 2008, about why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass that test.

Short form: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”

(Which is a direct quote from either a film-school professor or an industry professional — it’s not clear from the context who said it.)

There’s a lot more where that came from; follow the links in the posts, and the “related articles” links at the bottom. Like this one, in which Ms. Kesler relates how her screenwriting classes instructed her that “The real reason […] to put women in a script was to reveal things about the men.” For example, the female characters have to be attracted to the male lead in order to communicate that he is a babe magnet and therefore worthy of being admired by the target audience, which is of course male (and straight).

Ms. Kesler eventually quit screenwriting, not because nobody around her wanted to do anything other than straight white men’s stories, but because the machine is so finely tuned to crush any attempts to do otherwise. Criticize Joss Whedon’s gender depiction all you like — there’s plenty to chew on in his work — but never forget that Buffy was seven seasons of a show with multiple interesting female characters, who regularly talked to one another about something other than men (or shoes). How many other creators have managed to get anything comparable through the industry meat-grinder? And apparently one of the rationales behind canceling Firefly was that it rated too highly with women. You see, advertising slots aimed at women go for cheaper than those aimed at men, which meant Firefly brought in less revenue for Fox. So off it goes.

Because the female audience doesn’t matter. We’re talking about an industry where a WB executive can say that he isn’t going to make movies with female leads anymore, because they just aren’t profitable enough. (Sorry, I lost the link for that quote. Mea culpa.) An industry where they can write off Terminator and Alien as non-replicable flukes. Where they look at the droves of women who flocked to The Matrix and conclude, not that women like action movies too, or that Trinity appealed to them, or even that they wanted to look at Keanu Reeves, but that they were accompanying their boyfriends or husbands. Where they look at the failure of, say, Catwoman, and instead of swearing off Halle Berry or the director or the committee of six people who wrote the script — instead of saying, “hey, maybe we should try to make a movie that doesn’t suck” — they swear off superheroines. Because clearly that’s where the error lies.

There’s no particular point I’m trying to arrive at, here; the topic is a kraken, and all I can do is hack away at a tentacle here, a tentacle there. And try to feel good about the fact that at least the situation in fiction isn’t a tenth so dire as it is in Hollywood. (One of the most valuable things that came out of the intersection of my anthro background, my interest in media, and my professional writing is that I became much more aware of how texts are shaped by the process of their production. I wish more criticism, of the academic variety, took that into account.) Anyway, read ’em and weep, and then look for ways to make it better, I guess.

since I’ve been given the all-clear . . . .

“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” — aka the Fake Werewolf Paper — will be in Ekaterina Sedia’s upcoming anthology Running with the Pack, coming out from Prime Books. I don’t have a full ToC yet, but the cover here lists Laura Anne Gilman, Carrie Vaughn, and C.E. Murphy, and Erzebet Yellowboy just announced her own sale, so that’s a total of five authors you can expect.

This was so totally not the story I intended to write when I sat down, but it’s the story that came out, and I’m very glad that it hit the target anyway.

and so the help requests begin

This one perhaps goes out to my British readers more than others, but in theory anybody’s capable of answering it for me.

What authors — ideally spec fic, just because of my reading preferences, but not necessarily — have done a good job of representing cockney speech? I need authors, not media sources, because I’m curious about the methods people have used for showing it on the page. Like any dialect or accent, it’s really easy to fall into the territory of “really annoying and borderline unreadable,” and I’m keen to avoid that, while still conveying the distinct flavor of the pattern. Probably I’ll rely more on phrasing and quirks of word choice than phonetic representation, but I’d like to see how other people have tackled this issue.

So who’s writing good cockey-centric fiction? Bonus points if it’s Victorian, but since my concern is on the sound more than the vagaries of rhyming slang, modern-day stories are also acceptable.

talk about misplaced effort

Dear Brain,

Did we really need to run upstairs so as to type out 563 words belonging to the third book of a trilogy for which we have not yet written the first book?

Did we really?

I mean, what you interrupted was the cleaning of the living room, so it’s no big loss, but still. Devoting that energy in a slightly more productive direction would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Swan

things the human body can do

For matociquala and anybody else with a rock-climbing hobby: I think somebody flipped the gravity for a moment.

For any gamers wondering what “Quick Draw” looks like in reality: Even in slow motion, you can hardly see him fire. (Skip the first minute or so; it’s just them talking, and the guy’s kind of full of himself.)

For anybody who thinks old people can’t run races: The Legend of Cliff Young. (Reminds me of the article I read about the Tarahumara in northern Mexico — specifically the line about how they regularly run ultramarathoners into the ground, and do it in rope sandals while stopping for smoke breaks.)

And then one that has nothing to do with athletic feats, for anybody who’s a fan of Monty Python, Star Trek, or both: CamelotTrek.

there’s always more you don’t know

These two threads on Making Light?

Are why I have my “help me o internets” posts.

Because some of the bad books can be spotted a mile off — but not all. Some of them you’ve got to look at to identify. Some of them have to be read through. And some of them you can read through and still not know they’re untrustworthy resources, because you don’t know that field well enough to spot where the facts are wrong or there’s evidence being overlooked or whatever.

And at that point, you have two choices. You can either read a lot about the topic, so you become well-informed enough to spot the bad stuff on your own; or you can ask around and get the benefit of other people’s wisdom.

Since I have this terrible habit of being interested in lots of different things, rather than sticking with one and making it my stomping ground, I’m dependent on the assistance of others. So thank you all for your suggestions, and stay tuned for more cries for help. For this next book, I’m going to need to research topics ranging from the history of the London Underground to Chinese folklore, and many other things besides.

I really am deranged.

I’ve composed many an odd research query for the Onyx Court books, but the one I just sent off takes the cake.

No, you don’t get to know what it is. Not yet. (Aside from the fact that has to do with the Victorian period — duh.) I’ll let you know once it succeeds or fails, either way.

Chat time

Apropos of the Sirens Conference I’ll be at this fall — they’re having an online chat this Saturday at 2 p.m. Eastern. Details here. The book for discussion, inasmuch as there’s a topic for the chat, is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, but it should also be a good time to talk about the conference (especially ideas for programming).

The Inscrutable Box

I have a Thing on my desk.

I’m a little afraid of it.

Courtesy of my brother, I have finally joined the twenty-first century, replacing my printer (pair of printers, actually) with an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax machine. With document feeder, even. It has doors in odd places and buttons all over, and I’ve dealt with printers for many years now but I’m not entirely sure where to stick the paper in this Thing, let alone do anything else.

(Yes, I’m exaggerating a little bit. But I keep looking at this Thing, and my brain keeps refusing to recognize it as a printer, because it doesn’t look like Printers Should Look. It’s going to take a while to adjust.)

Off to read the manual, I guess . . . .

Done.

Copy-edited manuscript is on its way back to Tor.

Ima go fall over now. (Where by “fall over” I mean “play Dragon Age.”)

Indian epic question

Which translation of the Mahabharata should I read?

(Not Buck’s abridgement/retelling. Read that already, and appreciated it as a Cliff Notes introduction to what I understand is a very complicated story, but now I need to look at the actual text.)

Three things

1) I’ve made two additions to the previous post, for interested parties to read.

2) Congratulations to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which has been vetted as a SFWA pro market! (This means they have been publishing long enough, and regularly enough, and pay their authors enough money, for SFWA to accept sales to them as qualifications for SFWA pro status. Doesn’t matter much to readers, but it’s a nice touch of certification for the magazine.)

3) Since I know I have some aspiring writers in my readership: Nalo Hopkinson is offering mentorships this spring. She is a lovely woman and an excellent writer; I’ve never worked with her in a professional capacity, nor gotten any critiques from her, but what I know is enough to make me recommend this wholeheartedly to folks looking for some guidance and feedback. I’m sure she’ll put you through boot camp, but you’ll come out the other side much better for it. (And unlike Clarion et al, this is novel-focused, and you don’t have to leave home for six weeks.)

Poll time!

I am debating a small point of spelling in my copy-edits, brought about by the change in English spelling standards over the centuries*. In this particular case, it is the variation between faerie and fairy (and also faery and fairie, but those are less common and I haven’t messed with them). The possibility on the table is that, as belief in the aforementioned creatures declines, I’ll use the “fairy” spelling when the speaker is talking about them as superstition, and “faerie” when talking about the real thing. But I can’t make up my mind whether I want to do that or not, and so you get a poll.

This will also have relevance for the Victorian book, by which point “fairy” had far surpassed “faerie” as the most commonly-used spelling for the word (and belief had also sharply declined, at least in urban areas).

*This has been an unexpected problem for me, in the Onyx Court books. For example, the general pattern is to spell the surname of the Queen of Scots as Stewart, but the surname of her grandson Charles as Stuart. Etc. And nobody, so far as I’m aware, formally changed the name of Candlewick Street to Cannon Street; it just kind of cruised along being one but occasionally the other until eventually it was the other all the time. Which are issues I didn’t consider when I wrote what I thought was going to be a standalone Elizabethan book.

Edit: So I’m leaning toward deferring the problem. The poll results so far have “pleased” winning by a noticeable margin, but a lot of “confused” votes as well, with a good discussion down in the comments of how this could be resolved by drawing attention to the difference up front. Unfortunately, there’s no graceful way to do that in my narrative as it stands — I’d have to a) horribly interrupt the first relevant scene or b) stick an out-of-narrative note at the front of the book. Neither of which sits well with me. But it doesn’t become a real issue until the Victorian period, when their rampant fairy obsession makes the use of a decidedly non-Victorian form distracting, and so I think for now I’ll stick with my usual spelling. Then, once I start drafting the next book, I’ll see if I can’t build in something that addresses the difference properly.

Edit 2: To give you an idea of why this issue sticks in my brain like a burr — the Onyx Court books are edited to American spelling, except in cases where I’m referencing something British. So ships are in the harbor but Henry Ware got murdered in Coldharbour, and the characters are looking at colors when talking about Newton’s essay “Of Colours.” Despite the fact that the entire thing is in Britain, with British characters. This annoys the snot out of me, but short of strong-arming my publisher into giving me a UK copy-edit (my preference), I can’t do much about it.

step by step, we’ll get there

While I was in Boston, I finally figured out what “And Blow Them at the Moon” wants to be about. The Gunpowder Plot, obviously; but that’s a long and complicated tale to fit into a short story, and could easily turn into a tedious history lesson instead of an interesting piece of fiction. Ideally, this will not be like Deeds of Men — i.e. not pitched primarily at people who have already read one or both novels, and please God not twenty-one thousand words long again — what I want is a short story I can try and sell to a proper market. Which means I need some frame I can put on the Gunpowder Plot, a frame that consists of a character and an engaging emotional arc for same.

While being an Onyx Court story. And it needs to explain some of the weirdnesses in the history, most notably the Monteagle Letter. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

So I think I found it, and my 599 words I had in December are now 1,105. Not a huge amount of progress, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of wrangling to make this thing happen; I suspect there will be a great deal of infodumping that later gets scrubbed out, as I sort through what actually matters to a) my protagonist and b) my reader. Which means my progress will likely remain slow. But I’m going to try to get this done soon; today I ordered a metric ton of research material for the next book, and I need to get my head out of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth asap.

And, y’know, it would be nice to get a story done in the first week or two of the year. Good omens and all.

begin as you mean to go on

So far today, I have eaten cinnamon rolls, done some leisurely prep for the game I’m going to run this year, visited with my brother and sister-in-law, watched TV with my husband, read (part of) a book, and taken a blissfully hot shower. In a few moments I’ll take some experimental pokes at “And Blow Them at the Moon,” which I was going to try to finish by the end of the year, until I noticed that having such a goal was really just a piece of self-imposed and unnecessary stress. So instead it will be the thing I start my year with — aside from the tail end of my copy-edits, which I’ll polish off this weekend.

As someone who firmly believes in the power of symbolic acts, I approve of the way my year has begun.

edit: AND I FOUND MY WATCH! Which has been missing since before Christmas. I’d stuffed it in the pocket of my bathrobe, which I haven’t worn in a while. Hallelujah!

resolving the argument

Ah, the perennial — or whatever word indicates "every decade" — debate about when the decade ends. Do you count 1-10, or 0-9?

Why not do both?

In Mesoamerican calendrical systems, there’s an interesting tendency to lap the edges of things. The last day of a month is also the "seating" of the next; the five leftover days in the solar calendar are the seating of the following year. So it seems to me that we can resolve this entire problem by agreeing that any given 0 year is the end of one decade (going by the math) and the seating of the next (going by the social construct).

Happy 2010, people, the end of the aughts and the seating of the upcoming teens. May it be better than what came before.

Yes, I’m copy-editing on Christmas Eve. (Don’t have much choice.) But at least I’m getting some entertainment out of it: discovering, for example, that I described someone’s manner as “both sheepless and helpless.”

Sheepish. Not sheepless. Though it’s true he has no sheep, it’s not really relevant to this scene.

FYI

I’m still pondering the icon issue, so feel free to go on adding suggestions to that post. (The problem is not with the pictures I’ve been given already, but rather with my subconscious, which just doesn’t want to play ball. I don’t know what it’s looking for — that it hasn’t been given already — or whether it’s just being cranky. Quite possibly the latter.)