Journal - Page 164 of 209

catching up post-con

VeriCon was lovely as always, with a smattering of enjoyable panels and many fine meals with many fine friends. I could, however, have done without the precipitous drop in temperature halfway through; I remember our discussions back in the day about whether to hold the con during intersession or spring break, and I still think the arguments for intersession are good ones . . . but man, late January is a brutal time to hold a con, especially in a building like Sever, where (despite years of our best efforts) people blithely ignore the “airlock” signs on the front doors and pass through them in such a fashion as to release gusts of freezing air upon the reg desk.

But I am, after all, a delicate southern flower.

I got to read “The Last Wendy” at Milk and Cookies, though, which pleased me immensely. I do so love stomping on people’s childhoods . . . .

***

While I was away, the ninja editors of Abyss & Apex put up their new issue, which includes the most melodramatic (and melodramatically-titled) story I have ever written: “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” It’s posted in its entirety for free, so enjoy.

things I have not missed about living in Boston

#2 — freezing to death.

Jesus H. Christ on an ice floe, it got cold today.

things I have not missed about living in Boston

#1 — all the static electricity that makes my hair almost impossible to brush. (Even with an anti-static brush.)

But I’m here, and I haven’t frozen to death yet, and my first panel is at 6 tonight, with Elizabeth Bear (matociquala, Catherynne Valente (yuki_onna), and Kim Stanley Robinson (is he on LJ? I doubt it).

Also, I’m signing tomorrow, at the Harvard Bookstore, at 1:45. And then another panel at 3.

Assuming I don’t freeze to death.

Sometimes you have to write a bad draft.

I’ve been working on “Chrysalis,” though forgetting to meter my progress, and I hate the fact that it’s a bad draft.

Other writers have experienced this before. You have to get what’s in your head out on the page, however broken it may be, before you can make it better; you can’t fix it in your head, so that the draft is better on the first try. In the case of this story, the twin challenges of researching setting details and making the covert structure come out right have pretty much crowded all other considerations from my mind. Prose? Is whatever words will pin the narrative down enough for the time being. Actual artistry need not apply, not yet. Same goes for characterization. And description. And all those other nice things that make the story not suck.

The problem is that I’m an idiot for writing this story right now. The sum total of fiction that exists in this setting at present is: “A Mask of Flesh,” four-fifths of a draft of “Chrysalis,” and 1070 words of a so-far-plotless story about Tlacuilo. And it’s a complicated setting, where nobody is human and all the castes are different kinds of creatures and oh yeah Mesoamerica isn’t exactly familiar material for most readers. So what in the name of all that is sensible am I doing writing a story that has to blitz through five different castes in (ideally) less than six thousand words? What am I doing dropping a xera motherfather into the middle of it, when I haven’t ever mentioned the motherfather thing before and it’s extra complicated with the xera because of that thing where they can be either male or female? How am I supposed to make this work when the back half of the story is trying to grow a political context to justify what Matzoloa’s doing and why? Just when do I think I’m going to explain that political context?

All that, and a philosophical lesson, too.

This is the kind of story that works best when you’ve got a dozen other pieces out there that establish all the different bits of the setting, so maybe you can get away with just presenting those bits in passing and hoping your readers remember enough to fill it in. It is not the kind of story you want to write when 95% of the material is new even to readers who read “A Mask of Flesh” five minutes ago, and 3% of the remainder isn’t like they expect because not all xera are crazy like Neniza was.

Yeah, I know, whine whine whine. Tonight I’ll make myself figure out what Matzoloa is doing, and then I’ll write her scene, and then I’ll have my bad draft. Then I can go away to VeriCon and let it compost, and when I come back I’ll decide whether I can polish it enough to inflict on my crit croup, or whether it needs to sit for six months while I do something else with my life.

Blerg. I’m going to go read The Three Musketeers.

where I stand on the appropriation debate, in a nutshell

As I mentioned the other day, there’s been another round on the Internet of the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, regarding what it means for white writers (or writers of color, for that matter) to to include or not include characters of color in their stories, and all the difficulties thereof. (Depending on your location on the social map, your friends list may have consisted of nothing but this debate for the last several days, or you may have missed it entirely.)

I came to a realization because of all of this. On the one hand, if you write CoC, you may be accused of getting it wrong, of presuming to speak from a subject position you have no right to occupy, and various other sins. On the other hand, if you don’t write CoC, you may be accused of ethnocentrism, of contributing to their erasure from the discourse, and various other sins. Either way you go, you will offend somebody; there’s no “safe” path, much as we wish there were.

This has led many people to conclude, not without justification, that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In which case, I choose Door Number One: I would rather be damned for doing, than for not.

I would rather try (and get it wrong) than not try (and get it wrong). Because the former has at least some chance of getting it somewhat right, for some readers. It will also, in the manner of a lightning rod, attract more criticism — even folks who are aware of these things are more likely to be aware of, and vocally critical of, that which is executed badly than that which is not executed at all — but that’s no reason to give up.

Fringe reaction

Spoilers ahoy

a followup to that safety thing

I don’t know if all the details on this are right (I’m confident there’s more we aren’t being told about), but this diagram of the new presidential limo is eye-opening.

Sure, its mileage is in Hummer territory, and it won’t be winning any races — but this thing could eat Hummers for breakfast and keep on rolling.

And the bottles of blood are a nice touch, if more than a little creepy.

more inaugural thoughts, in no particular order

Probably my oddest thought of the morning, brought on by the (for me) early hour and the kind of research I’ve done these past few years: I find it interesting that while there were about five padded wooden seats for the key participants of the ceremony, everybody else up there was on plastic folding chairs of a type you might find anywhere. It’s a marked contrast with the physical splendor once considered de rigeur for, say, coronations. There’s no sense that the rest of the First Family are now too special for plastic folding chairs, and no particular glitz for the President himself.

In general, I know there was a lot of pomp and celebration leading up to and following the event, but fundamentally speaking, the inauguration itself is remarkably simple (in its performance as well as its furniture). As I said to kniedzw, the oath felt almost like an anticlimax: the handover of power had slipped by a couple of minutes previously, when the clock struck noon. The quartet finished playing, Obama stood up, and a couple of sentences later it’s done. As rituals go, that’s not much.

Rick Warren: I’m still not happy with that. But I am happy with Joseph Lowery (a civil rights activist whose take on gay marriage apparently boils down to “what in God’s name are you doing wasting your time on the private behavior of loving adults when there are starving children who need your help?”), and also with Gene Robinson, a gay bishop whose invocation on Sunday struck me as very poignant:

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president. …

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. …

That’s a radical sort of prayer — by which I mean it makes me think, not of Christianity, but of Christ, and the pretty radical message he preached, which has been sanded down and made more comfortable over the centuries. Anyway, yes: Warren is something to be angry and disappointed about. But he shouldn’t be allowed to eclipse all the other clerical choices; their voices deserve to be heard, too.

Can anybody tell me what happened to Cheney? I caught some comment about an accident, that’s put him temporarily in a wheelchair.

And finally, the speech. If I were given it to critique, I could find things I would have done a little differently, but overall it was beautiful in both form and content. I love the rhetorical devices that elevate Obama’s words to a kind of poetry, and I love the fact that the hope he preaches isn’t an empty thing of “let’s cross our fingers and hope things get better,” but a call to arms, to roll up our sleeves and make it reality. He managed to criticize past action while maintaining a positive tone, which is a pretty deft trick, and one that I think will serve him well.

The only dark note: I breathed a sigh of relief once it was over, that everything went off safely. I’m going to spend the next four (or eight) years perpetually afraid for that man’s life, and the lives of those around him — sad, but also true. Pray to any divine power you think might be listening, and also to the good men and women of the Secret Service, that this historic change doesn’t end in tragedy.

Ladies, gentlemen, and others . . . .

. . . we give you the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

Ye gods is that man a good speaker.

I hauled my sorry self out of bed way before my usual hour just to watch the inauguration live. That’s how much I love our new President. (Heck, if I’d still been living in Indiana, I would have strongly considered driving to D.C. for the day — though hearing the weather report this morning made me kind of glad it was out of the question.) I have a couple of thoughts about the inauguration ceremony, but as I also have a dentist appointment this morning, for which I should get out the door, I’ll save them until later.

But yeah. Happy day.

this one goes out to all the cooks on my flist

This Christmas, kniedzw and I were the happy recipients of a new slow cooker. I expect it will be particularly useful on karate nights, when I come home at 9:15 ravenously hungry and wanting food NOW NOW NOW — but only if I know what to put in it before I leave.

So I turn to you, O Internets, for slow-cooker recipes. Please note the following constraints:

Spiciness is discouraged. If your attitude is, “it’s only a little spicy,” it will probably be too much for my poor weak palate.
I also don’t tend to eat mushrooms, or beans in large quantities. Yes, I’m aware my life would be easier if I could get over this whole picky-eater thing.
Bonus points for recipes that involve meat, veggies, and carbohydrates, all in one tasty dish. Exercise makes me crave an actual balanced diet.

Suggestions? This is a pretty small cooker — I think it’s maybe five or five and a half quarts — so we’re looking more for two-person-sized recipes with maybe some leftovers, not things that can feed a whole family.

belated linky

This month on SF Novelists, I really really wish I could go back to writing short stories that don’t require a metric ton of research.

yet more linky!

I don’t know why I’m accumulating weblinks like dust bunnies lately, but I really, really am. so have some more.

***

I go to all the trouble of figuring out how the Nebula rules work, and then they go changing them on me. But I applaud the move — and it doesn’t invalidate my previous effort, since I believe 2008 works are still operating under the old rules. Anyway, the argument in favor of rolling eligibility has always been to avoid disadvantaging works published late in the year; the argument against it has always been that 1) it’s utterly byzantine to figure out and 2) it makes the Nebulas hit too late to be relevant. (As in, the majority of the works in the running for the 2009 award were published in 2007.) Me, I’m in favor of the change. The Oscars make it work; so can we.

***

The science of fiction — namely, what effect reading fiction has on our minds. I’ve heard these ideas before, but this is a good presentation of them, especially since the scientists acknowledge at the end that they should go on to look at tv and movies and games and so on.

***

Jesus Christ that cat is huge.

***

Cat Valente’s advice to single male programmer types, re: housekeeping. So very, very true, even without the focus on getting laid.

***

Interesting thoughts on core animal emotions, and how they might apply to the 2008 American presidential election and the proselytizing efforts of atheists.

***

Now to deal with e-mail.

first sale of the year!

There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.

***

The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.

Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.

Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.

BSG, Mrissa-style

This is for ninja_turbo especially, but also anybody who’s ever wondered about a certain lack in Battlestar Galactica.

The Sandbaggers

It’s come to my attention that there are people on my flist who have never seen or even heard of The Sandbaggers. I must do what I can to remedy this.

The show ran for three seasons on the BBC around 1978-1980. This being the BBC, that means there are only twenty episodes, all told. Almost every one is brilliant; the few that aren’t, were not written by the usual guy, and even then they don’t suck.

This is a spy show, but as the main character points out in the first ep, “if you want James Bond, go to your library. If you want to run an intelligence service, sit at your desk and think, and then think again.” 90% of most eps covers the planning, the piecing together of information, and most especially the politicking necessary to make the missions happen (or to stop them from going through). The fieldwork, when it happens, usually looks a bit cheap, partly because it isn’t the slick flashiness Bond has conditioned you to expect, and partly because it’s the BBC in the late seventies, and the production wasn’t exactly rolling in cash.

“Sandbaggers” is a nickname for a three-man special section in the Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6. The main character, Neil Burnside, is the Director of Operations for SIS, but the show focuses particularly on the deployment of the Sandbaggers for particularly delicate or difficult missions. In practice, this means the plots often involve Burnside ricocheting back and forth between the offices of C (the head of SIS), the deputy chief, and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, as he tries to get clearance for or obstruct various operations. Also, thanks to a “special relationship” of information-sharing between SIS and the CIA, he’s usually wheeling and dealing with the head of their London station. Burnside, being a character somewhat of a type with Francis Crawford of Lymond and Dr. Gregory House, is very very good at what he does, but not remotely afraid to be a manipulative bastard in pursuit of that end.

I mentioned that a few of the eps are less good. This is because much of the show’s awesomeness derives from its scripts, written by a guy named Ian Mackintosh, about whom there is much mysteriousness. It’s widely speculated, even by people who worked on the show, that Mackintosh was ex-naval intelligence himself. The scripts certainly came close enough to realism that one of them was censored under the Official Secrets Act; that’s why there are only six episodes in the second season.

And why didn’t he write all of the third season? Because he disappeared. Without a trace. He was flying in Alaska with a friend who was (I believe) an ex-RAF pilot, and they radioed in a call for help just before flying into the one zone that wasn’t covered by US or Soviet radar. Nothing was ever seen of them again. It’s possible they crashed into the ocean and the wreckage all sank, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder; some of the people involved in the show honestly thought Mackintosh had defected to the USSR. They found no sign of him after the Iron Curtain fell, though, so it remains a complete mystery to this day.

So that’s why you get only twenty episodes. They hired people to fill out the remainder of the third season, but understood that nobody was up to Mackintosh’s standard, and decided to stop there.

You can get the show on DVD these days. The image and sound quality are bad enough that the disc puts up a disclaimer/apology while it’s loading, but the scripts and the acting are fantastic, full of twisty plot and authorial ruthlessness.

. . . and now I want to go watch more, instead of doing the work I should do. Siiiiiiigh.

dramatic thoughts

Re-watching some season two Sandbaggers tonight, I figured out Yet Another Reason why drama more often floats my boat than comedy does.

(The first set of reasons, btw, involved me figuring out which kinds of humour I do and do not find funny — the latter category mapping with unfortunate closeness to the kinds of humour generally seen in modern American comedies.)

I really like watching characters do the thing they do well. I like competence. Whether it’s Burnside planning a mission or House diagnosing an illness or whatever, I can be happy just watching the clockwork go. Some of my favorite X-Files episodes were the ones where Mulder — who, after all, came out of the Behavioral Science Unit — dusted off his profiling skills to figure out what the bad guy was doing. Massive character drama is good, too, of course, but competence can be fun to watch.

And TV is a particularly good venue for it, since the episodic structure allows for repeated demonstrations of competence, instead of just the one big sequence a movie might have. But this, as I said, gives me another reason I don’t like sitcoms: they’re more likely to focus on the characters’ incompetence. I can find that fun, too, but only as a flavoring, not a main dish.

Should read about Mesoamerica tonight. Wanna watch more Sandbaggers. Whine whine whine.

there’s a bad joke to be made here

There’s something appallingly Orwellian about the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the abuses it is used to cover. But if you’ve ever wondered how our intelligence agencies can get useful information out of detainees without torturing them, here’s how.

Critics of J.K. Rowling may be tempted to joke that the Harry Potter books are torture, but the real point is down in that last block quote. All it takes to “break” some people is kindness. And the intelligence you get in return is more reliable, not less — while also creating allies instead of enemies, bettering your national image, and generally behaving like a moral human being.

***

As long as I’m talking politics, I might as well also link to this set of asinine arguments against early voting. Seriously, most of this boils down to: 1) it’s better to be seen voting by your fellow citizens, 2) you might make an impulsive decision based on personal preference, 3) omg what if in the last week it turns out the guy you voted for kicks puppies but you’ve already cast your vote, 4) early-voting polls might influence people who vote later, and 5) if you can’t take some time on Election Day to go vote, screw you.

Cause, y’know, all those people working three jobs to make ends meet ought to be able to spare a couple of hours to stand in line.

The closest he comes to a legitimate argument is when he talks about the possibilities of voter fraud and non-secret ballots. But voter fraud is far from the imminent danger threatening to devour our sacred democracy that some make it out to be, and there are ways of handling those problems. Oregon votes 100% by mail-in ballot, and I haven’t noticed that state collapsing in a wave of corruption. Early voting, whether by mail or at polling places, increases voter turnout; I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing.

I know my problem.

I keep throwing out every opening I write for this thing because what the story really wants to do is open with the protagonist waking up from a dream.

But unfortunately for me and the story, that is a cardinal sin I don’t think I’m allowed to commit. It doesn’t matter if I produce the most brilliantly effective waking-up-from-a-dream opening that’s been seen these last ten years; too many editors will roll their eyes and chuck the manuscript without reading onward. And then readers, if I make it past an editor. Starting with a dream or the protagonist waking up is an unforgiveable cliche.

Dammit.

G. R. A. R. G. H.

Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. I have managed to give myself enough of a mental hernia trying to leap a particular hurdle that I can’t even write this LJ post without stopping, starting, revising, deleting paragraphs, and generally replicating the exact problem I’m having with the aforementioned hurdle.

It’s like when you start paying attention to how you speak — whether you swear a lot or speak in sentence fragments or use “like” six times a second — and next thing you know, you can barely open your mouth for self-consciousness over what’s going to come out.

I am thinking too much about how first-person narration works, which is why I’ve managed to hamstring even my LJ-posting capabilities, let alone fiction. The usual remedy, which is to stop over-thinking it and just do it already, does not work in this case, because while the first-person narration I have is perfectly serviceable, I’m trying to kick it up another notch, and find this character’s distinctive voice. This is rendered difficult by the fact that the story in question is the Sekrit Revision Projekt, which has been around for a very long time. Convincing my brain the sentences need to go differently is like punching fog.

I’ve spent half this afternoon digging out every short story and novel in my library that uses first-person narration, in the hopes that beating my head against them will produce a breakthrough. So far, it’s produced nothing more than bruised brain-meats. It doesn’t help that the voice issue is tied up in how the story begins; I’ve more or less fixed the plot problems, but I still need a better beginning, and part of the bettering needs to be on the level of voice. But this isn’t the kind of first-person story where the narrator is self-consciously addressing the reader (or another character in the story), nor do I want it to be the kind of the tale where the beginning is framed in terms of hindsight — “When so-and-so first showed up, I didn’t know he’d be trouble,” or “The day my life changed forever, I was too busy playing with my cat to notice,” etc. It feels like a cheap and easy way to get the story in motion, and then you drop the hindsight effect after the first page or so. Lots of authors do that. I don’t want to. But I’m floundering around trying to figure out what I do want to do.

I recognize that, once I figure that out, and the voice, I will have dramatically improved this story, and probably my writing as a whole. This does not make flinging myself at the hurdle any more fun.

And we’ve reached a point where my brain is literally trying to stick squirrels into the opening paragraphs, as if they will somehow improve anything. Yes, details like squirrels are something this story needs, but they aren’t the key to the problem, O Subconscious. The squirrels can wait.