Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Why do I go to ICFA every year?

Because it’s the only place I’ve ever been where I can spend a weekend talking about makeup in SF/F fandom, adulthood in modern America, Albanian sworn virgins, a myriad of foreign languages, my honeymoon, copyright law, medieval cathedrals, oral-formulaic theory, the Oxford English Dictionary, the perils of caretaking for capuchin monkeys, and Scurrilous Industry Gossip, and do most of it while lounging around a poolside in the sunshine.

There’s really no downside to this.

Except that I’m now five days behind on what the Internet’s been doing in my absence, and there’s no way I’ll be catching up. So if you did something interesting on the Internet since Wednesday morning and you want me to know about it, please link it in comments; otherwise, I’m just declaring Livejournal bankruptcy, and moving forward from here. (E-mail, I will be catching up with.)

Tonight’s packing-induced revelation

I am somehow taken by surprise every time I notice something is wearing out.

What, you mean I can’t wear a pair of pants, or a shirt, or shoes, for eight or ten years and have them still be in good condition? You mean these things are less durable than, say, the Pyramids of Giza?

Somehow this both startles and offends me, as if it is not the natural order of things.

Well, at least I get my money’s worth out of what I own. But it’s very annoying to me when something falls apart after less than a decade of constant wear. I mean, really.

File Under “Sad But True”

Conventions have become my major reason for cutting my hair.

For those of you who don’t know: it’s down to somewhere in my waist-to-butt range, depending on when I last got it cut. It got that long because in high school I fell into a pattern where I’d forget to get it cut for, oh, a year at a time? I’m better now, but I still regularly go six months or more without thinking about it. And when I do think of it . . . yeah, it’s often because I’m about to go to a con and decide I should clean up the ends a bit.

Which is a wordy way of saying I got three inches whacked off today, and ICFA was the occasion. I head out on Wednesday, and am looking forward to poolside conviviality that legitimately doubles as work.

Between now and then, though — time for some work-work.

Today on Flycon

3 p.m. Pacific time — Gaming and Fiction

7 p.m. Pacific time — Reactionary Fantasy

All panels are message threads, so check that page for the appropriate posts shortly before the panel starts. You don’t need to register to participate.

ETA: Er, I’m going to stop pretending I know how the panels are being sorted out; it appears the gaming one is actually over on SFF Net, while the later one is over here.

Flycon!

Man, what is it with 2009 and me forgetting about upcoming cons? My excuse for this one is that it involves no plane tickets, no hotel rooms — in fact, I don’t even have to leave my house.

And neither do you.

Flycon, hosted this weekend by SFF Net, is a serious attempt at an international online convention — complete with panels (via message threads), author chats, and more. The schedule is jam-packed with events, literally at all hours of the day; with participants all around the globe, you don’t have to worry about being in the wrong time zone to join in on the fun.

If you want to catch my part of the fun, here’s the rundown:

Saturday, 6 p.m. EDT/3 p.m. PDT, “Fantasy and History” — how much history do we need to make historical sf and fantasy work, and for what types of readers?

Saturday, 8 p.m./5 p.m., author chat — come hang out with yours truly, and ask whatever questions you like.

Sunday, 3 a.m./midnight, “Historical Fantasy” — er, I’m not sure if we’re actually doing this one, given the overlap of topic with my first panel, and there’s only two of us signed up for this one. (The process of creating panels produced a little redundancy here and there.)

Sunday, 6 p.m./3 p.m., “Gaming to Fiction, Fiction to Gaming” — how do the two modes feed one another?

Sunday, 10 p.m./7 p.m., “Fantasy and Reaction” — It’s often said that because fantasy so often relies on monarchy, the writers want to go back to the glory days of yore. Is that true? What fantasy is reactionary, and what fantasy is subversive of traditional cultural assumption?

You don’t need to be an SFF.Net member to post (though you do have to give a name and an e-mail address). More info can be found on the LJ community, or just ask here and I’ll try to answer. Hope to see some of you (or at least your posts) there . . . .

Ninety days . . .

. . . and counting.

Since I’m aiming to spread the exciting content (i.e. the excerpts) out a bit, this time you get something a bit more dull. Unless you’re one of the people who apparently loves hearing me geek about the historical research, in which case, my research bibliography may count as very exciting indeed.

If the Midnight Never Come bibliography is any example, that list will continue to grow as I keep remembering other books that should be on it. But at least it’s something to start with.

terminology question

Is there a standard term in fantasy (or for that matter, science fiction) for secondary worlds that are distinctly based on a specific primary-world culture? I mean things like the Not-Japan of Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, etc — settings where the author has lifted an entire culture en masse, rather than just taking elements of it. Is there a word for that?

a worthy cause

I know that now isn’t a great time for lots of people to be donating their money to a cause, but I have to give a shout-out to , an LJ community dedicated to launching a new small press, one focused on minority characters. So far there’s just a comm (I think), but you can donate money to help cover their startup costs, including website design and all the rest. Yes, they’ve blown past their initial fundraising goal, but I don’t imagine more money will go amiss, as it will help them attract attention and hit the ground running.

learning to walk all over again

I’m currently test-driving a Kinesis keyboard, and man, it’s like having to learn to walk again after being in a wheelchair or something. The basics are okay, but so far we’ve discovered that somewhere in between my earliest typing lessons and now I started hitting the C key with my index finger instead of my middle finger — which doesn’t work at all well on this; I keep getting V instead — and also that I’ve become very habituated to certain habits of motion when it comes to things like Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, and other such keyboard shortcuts, which do not work at all the same with this layout. The placement of Space and Backspace, on the other hand, has been surprisingly easy to adjust to.

Unfortunately, it makes a sound on the computer with every keystroke, and I’m not sure how to turn that off.

Not sure how I’m going to approach this experiment. I was warned that the learning curve on the Kinesis can be unpleasant (but brief), so the best thing to do is bull through, but on the other hand this is slowing me down distinctly, and now is maybe not the best time for me to interfere with my ability to type. Then again, is there ever a good time? When you make your living with your keyboard, probably not.

Anyway, I’ve annoyed myself with this for long enough right now; time to go do something that doesn’t feel like trying to untie a knot by looking in a mirror.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, afternoon edition

So, you all know me. You know my working hours: they are those of the night owl.

But apparently only when I’m writing fiction. Because I’m working on a largeish piece of nonfiction at the moment — something I’ll talk about more soon, I hope — and I’ve been happily sitting down to crank out several thousand words every day for the last several. And I do mean “day;” I’ve been known to start as early as 11 a.m. on this thing.

W. T. F.

I don’t remember if this was true when I was in grad school. I tended to have classes or teach in the afternoons, so work of any kind tended to get crammed into the evening and dead hours of the night. I know fiction doesn’t work so well during the day.

But apparently I can do nonfiction just fine.

It isn’t even *convenient.*

You know you’ve spent too much time coding HTML by hand and too much time writing things destined to be in Standard Manuscript Format when you reflexively type <i> instead of hitting Ctrl-I for italics.

(For those not familiar: SMF requires, among other things, the use of underlining instead of italics. So I almost never use italics except online, when I’m typing the HTML tags for it. Then I do it in Wordperfect and wonder what’s wrong with me.)

Hel is the best icon I have for this.

janni is the one who needs to read this, if she hasn’t already, but Vanity Fair has done an awesome piece on the collapse of the Icelandic financial market. And I say that as somebody who pretty much detests economics, so even if you don’t care about how Iceland turned itself into one giant (and now defunct) hedge fund, the article’s worth looking at.

If only for the bit about the elves. Seriously. Search for the phrase “smelt aluminum,” and go from there.

I am surprised.

I honestly expected the two fairy-tale options in the poll to come in somewhere near the bottom — I figured people would look at them, shrug at Yet Another Fairy Tale Retelling, and vote for something else. But I woke up this morning to find them in the lead, and they’re still #1 and #3 as of this posting.

Which is encouraging, because my brain has been giving off hints that the ghost-princes story (which is currently leading by a good margin) is about the speed it’s up to this month. I was going to try and save the non-researchy stories for later in the year, but I think now might be a dandy time to relax with one.

In the meantime, today has been pretty thoroughly productive, and the last couple hours of it has involved (work-related) reading in front of the fire. It’s one of the few points on which I have no interest in being all Californian and environmentally conscious: I don’t care if burning wood is bad for the environment, I like doing it. Fake fires are not the same; you need the crackle and the conscientious tending of the fuel, or else it doesn’t count. I’m very happy to be living in a townhouse with a working fireplace, and really should have made use of it before tonight.

Tree bad. Fire pretty. ^_^

Poll time, short story edition

Okay, Internets. I’m trying to do a short story a month (February’s oversized endeavour being an exception), but I’m having trouble deciding what to commit to for March. I don’t promise to take the poll’s advice, but:

There are other possibilities, but the rest of them are too far away from being ready to go for me to consider them now.

I love Jon Stewart

The Twitter thing on The Daily Show tonight?

Yeah. That’s pretty much my perspective, too. I know it’s famous last words and all to say you’ll never do something, but I have no intention of joining Twitter, and I have a hard time imagining myself developing such an intention. Thanks to the magic of cross-posting tweets to LJ, I’ve seen a fair sampling of the medium, and I . . . just don’t care. The character limit is so low that the messages end up being meaningless to me; either they’re too small or too cryptic to engage my attention. And I don’t mean any of this as a diatribe against the people who have fun with it, but the truth is that I don’t read anybody’s tweets*, except on the rare occasion that it’s a link, and even then I rarely click on it because I have no idea what it’s about.

Maybe if I’d ever gotten interested in text-messaging, the medium would appeal more. But I don’t do much of that, either.

Yah. I guess I’m getting old or something, and you damn kids with your newfangled things just confuse me. In that case: get the hell off my lawn!

*There’s been one exception to this so far, and that was an extraordinary (and not particularly happy) circumstance.

One Hundred Days . . .

. . . and counting.

As with last year, I’m going to dole out bits of stuff to keep you all interested between now and the release date of In Ashes Lie, on the tenth of June. Expect something every ten days, assuming I can keep myself organized enough to put everything together, and alert enough to post it when the appropriate day rolls around.

Today? You get your first taste of the book.

briefly —

I’m about to run off to Potlatch again, but: Paradox has purchased a flash piece from me, “Salt Feels No Pain.” This is the same editor who previously published “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe,” so I’m very pleased to be working with him again.

But man, I really need to get some replacement pieces into my submission queue . . . .