Dept. of Hypotheticals I Don’t Have the Time to Write

Last night, in a discussion of Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet, I brought up the fact that many astrologers have decided to disregard science’s classification and go on treating Pluto as a regular planet(1). And then I said it would be interesting if some pioneering astrologer retooled the system to account for all of the dwarf planets in a new and interesting way, and as a result astrology suddenly started being so laboratory-accurate that even the most defiant of skeptics had to admit that it only didn’t work before because the math wasn’t quite right yet.

IANAAstrologer, and I don’t feel like putting in the research necessary to write the story. But the idea amuses me.

(1) I am told the State of New Mexico has done the same, owing to how the guy who discovered Pluto was New Mexican — though he was in Arizona at the time of the discovery.

a star in the sky

Can anybody tell me what planet I’ve been seeing in the sky lately? I keep noticing it in the vicinity of the moon, in the western part of the sky, and it’s quite bright. Is that Venus, or something else?

a view from another world

I confess to having said a negative thing or three about MFAs in my time, so in the interests of fairness, I link to this defense.

What do I think? I think that Ms. Harding sounds believably correct . . . as far as it goes. I also think she’s writing from a foreign country, the one frequently called Literary Fiction. In the last few paras, where she talks about how writers are supposed to go about getting better, I think of the fairly vibrant network that exists over here in SF/F. It isn’t a perfect network by any stretch of the imagination; for everyone who can afford the time and money to go to Clarion (which we might as well label a short-term genre MFA program), there are a bunch of writers who can’t or have never even heard of it. But Clarion isn’t the only workshop. There are online critique networks. There are mentoring programs. There are conventions and other social gatherings, in person and online, in which you might find yourself becoming friends with a writer further along the path than you, who may very well pause on the trail to give you a helping hand upward. It’s usually not Ursula K. Le Guin descending from on high to help out a young woman who just finished her first novel, but the SF/F writing world is full of communal bootstrapping, a continuum stretching from established pros all the way down to newbies, and bit by bit we all haul each other and ourselves upwards.

I also think that the criticisms she’s responding to are not, for the most part, the ones I’ve leveled in the past. These days you can find a small number of MFA programs that are willing to let you write genre fiction, an even smaller number who employ professional SF/F writers who know something about your genre. Those programs? May well be great, for all the reasons Ms. Harding describes. But to quote two of the motifs she brings up — “Creative Writing Programs Foster Mediocrity” and “Real Writers Don’t Need No Skool” — I do think creative writing programs as a whole foster a particular kind of writing that is not what most SF/F folk are engaged in or would even benefit from, and while I wouldn’t say real writers don’t need no skool, I would say you don’t necessarily need school to become a real writer. Exhibits A through We Need A Bigger Alphabet: very nearly every professional SF/F writer I know. In fact, I stand by my conviction that if you can get your craft lessons by some other route — which in many cases you can — then you’re better off majoring in something that will feed your brain material, like biology or history or whatever suits the kinds of stories you’re telling.

Mind you, were a certain kind of literary type to wander by and read this (unlikely), they’d probably hit the second half of that paragraph and conclude that’s what’s wrong with genre fiction anyway.

But let me state for the record: I don’t think MFA programs are encouraging hordes of mediocre writers, for the reasons Ms. Harding describes. And it sounds like they serve a very necessary purpose in the corner of publishing she’s talking about. I do, however, stand by my belief that while they may do good for the occasional SF/F writer (especially the ones who make it into, say, James Patrick Kelly’s program), they’re not necessary — sometimes not even beneficial — for those of us over here in genre.

Yes, they really did all of these.

“The 10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History.”

Reading that reminded me of one of the unexpectedly difficult things about writing Ashes: dealing with Jack as a doctor. The character is an intelligent, inquisitive man absolutely dedicated to practicing the best medicine he possibly can — but let’s face it, the guy lives in the second half of the seventeenth century. His idea of cutting-edge medical science is using Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood to improve bloodletting techniques.

Jack is probably my favorite character in the whole book, but I wouldn’t let him within a hundred feet of me if I were sick. And yet I had to write lines describing how he’s trying to save somebody’s life by way of techniques that probably made things worse.

Note to time-travellers: if you ever get thrown back into European history prior to, say, the twentieth century, you’re better off refusing a physician entirely than letting one of them treat you. The body has this lovely thing called the immune system, and it stands a better chance of saving your life than any of them do.

now that “Chrysalis” is out of my way

I’m trying (again) for the one-story-a-month thing, which means I’m gearing up for February. This one is going to be a bigger project, and involves at least one piece of directed research. So:

Can anyone recommend to me a good biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham? I’m particularly interested in the last five years or so of his life; I could care less what he got up to in childhood.

(Oddly, this is completely unrelated to me reading The Three Musketeers. THAT book, I picked up because I’m trying to figure out what “The Three Hackbutters” should be about, other than its title.)

With it, not on it.

5063 words of crappy draft. Or rather, 5063 words of some admixture or good and bad; I know there are bits in it that work just fine. Unfortunately, they’re nowhere near a majority.

Doesn’t matter. 5063 words = done. I’ve finished “Chrysalis,” and before the end of the month, too.

Now it’s out of the way, and I can decide later what to do with it.

Much later.

with my draft or on it

Okay.

I have about three hours — a little less — until I need to be somewhere else.

I have a story that still lacks only one scene for completion . . . which is where it’s been for well over a week.

I have contacted my crit group to tell them not to expect this story any time soon, because it is a bad enough draft that there’s no point asking other people to tell me what’s wrong with it until after I’ve fixed the most glaring problems. I’ve also given myself permission to stash the bad draft on my hard drive and not come back to it until months or even years from now, because I’m pretty sure this really is a story that will work better once I’ve written (and published) more things in that setting.

I will finish this bloody story today or die trying. I don’t care if it sucks, I don’t care how long or short it ends up being, I don’t care about anything except finishing the stupid draft.

Because in Not Finishing this, I’ve been Not Working on a whole lot of other things, too. So it’s past time “Chrysalis” got out of my way and went somewhere it won’t bother me anymore.

holy colonial langauge, Batman!

From the cover copy of The Serpent and the Rainbow:

Drawn into a netherworld or rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture.

In other words, the Rational Masculine West encountered the Mystical Feminine Other, and then had sex with it.

I haven’t tried to read the book itself, so I don’t know if this is the fault of the marketing department or Wade Davis. But jeebus. It’s like a whole game of Colonialism Bingo, all in one sentence.

‘puter! ‘puter! ‘puter!!!

New computer arrived today, replacing the 6-year-old box that could no longer maintain a wireless connection, and saving my laptop from the kind of continual usage it really isn’t built for.

It’s white. I don’t remember the last time I had a white computer.

Transferring files over from Puck now. Most of my programs are installed. Next I get the fun of re-setting various preferences and suchlike. Ah, the fun of a new computer. It’s blazingly fast, though, and I get to use all the pretty Vista features I disabled on Puck so as to maximize battery life. (Vista is pretty, though I’m still learning my way around its actual functioning.)

New ‘puter! <bounce>

faskinating

“Never Say Please to Mother.”

I adore things like this, little tidbits of cultural behavior that run directly counter to patterns ingrained so deeply in me they predate my memories of being taught them. It’s rude to say “please” and “excuse me” to family members? Like, they’ll be offended by it? That’s awesome! I had never thought about viewing familial intimacy through that kind of lens, and it’s kind of like trying to put something in a box by looking in a mirror. I can understand the rules that govern what I’m seeing, and they totally make sense — but man, if I stop thinking actively about it every second, my brain tries to revert to what it knows is “right.”

I usually talk about cultural relativism in the context of extreme things like human sacrifice. This is a nice, small-scale example that doesn’t jump up and down on top of the ethics and squick buttons. It may look like Opposite World from your perspective, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

for something completely different

O internets, I could also use someone who can spot-check me on matters of London vocabulary — specifically, the insults that would be used by a pre-adolescent girl who’s spent a fair bit of time on the streets. (E.g.: does “crackhead” sound too American?) Also derogatory terms for a police officer: what other than “copper” and “pig”?

I ask because “The Last Wendy” is being copyedited right now, and this is my last chance to catch any glaring regionalisms. I’m not looking for full-bore cockney rhyming slang here, but I don’t want the words to sound out of place.

graphical help needed

Sadly, while I can get around in Paint, there are a great many things that program can’t do. And I still have not figured out the first blessed thing about working in the GIMP, which may be a great open-source alternative to Photoshop, but is about the least user-friendly program I have ever seen, at least where new users are concerned. And I don’t own Photoshop.

So. I need assistance from someone who is good at placing text on an image. The aforementioned text needs to follow the contours of certain features on the image, which is what I can’t manage on my own. It shouldn’t be a huge amount of work — maybe thirteen words all told. And it needs to be done quickly. Any volunteers?

The Three Musketeers

I think I missed the ideal window in my life for reading The Three Musketeers.

The first time I tried it, I was too young; I was confused by Gascons and pistoles and lots of other things I’d never heard of, and the plot, it does not really get around to swashing bucklers and buckling swashes until a bit further in. So I quit. This month I picked it up again, but now I’m critical enough of a reader to be annoyed by things I would have zoomed right over when I was younger.

Like, for example, the way Dumas sings paeans to his characters, most especially Athos, who aside from drinking too much is in every way a paragon of blah blah blah. He’s my favorite of the three, but jeez, Dumas lays it on with a trowel. Or, to pick something more mundane: the sheer idiocy of the main characters’ spending habits. Assuming 1625 France was anything like 1625 England, I have every faith that Dumas’ portrayal is fair — but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to bash them over the head with a bench every time they piss away a fortune and end up penniless Yet Again. Then there’s the (equally period) over-eagerness to pick fights, which I find not charming but childish. And, of course, the treatment of women, most especially Constance Bonacieux, Madame dans Réfrigérateur.

And Milady, about whom I have a great deal to say.

Since she was not what I expected.

I must become all things to all people . . . .

Many of you are probably tired of reading about the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, at least for this round; you can only take it for so long before your brain gives up. But this post is less about the debate’s focus than its execution: namely, one possible source for the difficulty of communication that I think we can all agree plagues any attempt to move forward. Based on my peripheral encounters with theories of communication, I think tablesaw is right about the ways in which the conduit metaphor shuts down the possibility of effective progress, and Reddy’s alternate metaphor of the toolmakers with their blueprints and the evil magician coming along to mess with them sounds like a pretty apt description of the situation we find ourselves in. (Not just here, either; just poke your nose into politics and watch it play out.)

But I have one big question for the “Becoming Toolmakers” portion of the essay. To quote:

In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better one-on-one communicator, I must learn more about the person with whom I wish to communicate and communicate to that person in mind. In the toolmakers paradigm, to become a better writer and address a universal audience, I must learn more about everyone by learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own, and I must write with all of them in mind.

On the one hand, this is more or less how I think about communication: that you must always bear your audience in mind, and try to craft your ideas into a shape that will work within that audience’s context. On the other hand — sweet Pentecost on a pita cracker, how am I supposed to speak mindfully to everyone at once? I don’t even know who all my readers ARE! Even if we agree to leave out everybody who isn’t moderately fluent in English, according to this “solution,” in order to communicate effectively, I must learn about inner-city Chicago blacks and Pakistani immigrants in London and American-born Israeli Jews and nisei Japanese college students at Stanford and affluent Hispanic teens in Dallas and everybody else I haven’t named and then write with ALL OF THEM IN MIND.

And that’s before we even get to the possibility that the communication strategy which is effective with one group may be actively detrimental with another, and vice versa.

Dude. There is little in the world I love more than learning about multiple, intersecting cultural contexts different from my own. I spent ten years in school majoring in just that, and I’ll keep doing it on my own from now until you pry my library out of my cold, dead fingers. But the “solution” as framed above is not a solution; it’s a godlike ideal no human will ever be able to live up to. Is it sufficient if I try? Or if I decide, okay, there’s a black character in this story, so I will focus my efforts on trying to speak to the myriad of possible black perspectives (because there is no single “black perspective”) and not worry about what the Hispanics or Asians or whoever think? How do I account for all the perspectives in the world that aren’t mine, and speak to all of them at once?

I don’t have an answer to that. I think tablesaw raised some great points in that post, but I hit that bit at the end and my eyes bugged out of my head. It’s kind of like the rule we kept returning to, during the panel discussions at VeriCon: how do you do [thing X]? Be a genius! It’s the solution to everything. Except that I can’t just wave a magic wand and turn myself into a genius. I can take little baby steps toward this utopia, but will they be enough?

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

#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.