Two social things I have come to appreciate about ICFA

1) Don Morse makes a point every year of not just thanking the wait-staff who herd us through the luncheons and banquet, but thanking them by name. Which pleases me more than I can say, because I believe very strongly in greeting and smiling at and making eye contact with maids and doormen and other service personnel. They’re people, and they aren’t invisible. They should be treated accordingly. (In fact, I almost wish our room ninja steward on the cruise had been less ninja-like, because I almost never saw him to thank him. But it took only one day on board the ship before I grokked why cruises include substantial recommended tips for the staff. Those people earn them.) And it’s triply important when you keep coming back to the same place year after year.

2) On the whole, the poolside contingent is very good about doing introductions. If I pull up a chair next to someone I know who’s sitting with someone I don’t know, our common denominator will often take a moment to acquaint the strangers with one another before the conversation proceeds. I’m not as good about doing that myself as I should be, actually — I blame a pervasive self-doubt as to whether I have people’s names right, even though I know that self-doubt is groundless 99% of the time. But I appreciate other people doing it, since it helps smooth over the uncertainty of joining a group composed largely of people you don’t know.

It isn’t just the sunshine and the poolside and the random fascinating conversational topics. Those first two would be lonely, and that last one wouldn’t happen, if people weren’t conscientiously friendly to their fellow attendees.

gathering data

I was going to post this myself, but Mindy Klasky has done a good job translating the survey into an LJ poll, and it’s easier to have all the data in one place anyway. Therefore, I encourage everybody to head over to her journal and answer a few questions about your preferences in cover art.

The survey in question was started by Elizabeth Moon, and is part of an attempt by some SF/F authors to suss out the decisions made by publishers’ art departments, and how those fit/do not fit with reader preferences.

Speaking of short stories

The Story That Is Not Allowed to Call Itself “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” No Matter What It Thinks:

The Zokutou site is down. Sadness.

Anyway, this is not the story I thought I’d be writing this month. It was going to be the ghost-prince story. But that one has grown Significance that I’m not quite sure what to do with, so it’s composting a while longer, and in the meantime I’m writing something I forgot to include on the previous list: a piece that I think is my first attempt at a genuinely humorous story.

(Short form is, it’s a silly take on D&D-style fantasy. It has nothing to do with summer camp, but like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” it belongs to the micro-genre of Distressing Letters From Your Wayward Offspring.)

(Oddly enough, the quickest way to make D&D-style fantasy funny is to take it seriously.)

I’m very much making this one up as it goes along. Though I should figure out soon what was up with the temple roof thing, and also where the rest of it is trying to go.

I have a week to figure it out.

A day late

I meant to post this after getting home from ICFA last night, but got distracted. Eighty days seventy-nine days to the publication of In Ashes Lie, and today’s bit of added content . . . comes from Midnight Never Come, actually.

Long-time readers of this journal may recall that back when I drafted that book, I had to re-write a substantial chunk of Act One — basically Deven’s chunk of it, almost in its entirety. Therefore, in the spirit of the “deleted scenes” they put on some DVDs, you can read the original draft, complete with some notes about why it got replaced (and what I wish I could have kept).

There’s mild spoilers for MNC in the discussion of those scenes, so if you want to say and/or ask anything about them, I direct you to the spoiler thread for the novel; comment there instead of here.

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.)