’tis the season for charity

The news is filled with one bleak story after another, but sometimes it hits closer to home.

Vera Nazarian, the woman behind Norilana Books (which publishes, among other things, Clockwork Phoenix), is on the verge of losing her house. The story behind this crisis makes it abundantly clear that she has not ended up in this situation through foolishness or mismanagement, but rather from a streak of appalling luck, any one component of which would be bad enough on its own. Taken all together, they’re devastating.

Fortunately, sf/f fandom turns out to be really really good at mobilizing its social networks for a good cause. The community is taking donations, and also organizing an auction along the lines of . If you can’t spare the money for straight charity, look through the auctions and see if there’s something that can double as a holiday gift for someone else, or offer some item or service of your own for auction.

Vera needs a little over $11K by the 20th to keep her home; as of last night, the comm has already raised nearly $3800. The goal is too much for one person, but for fandom as a whole, it’s very much within reach. Every little bit helps.

My connection, of course, is through Clockwork Phoenix; Mike Allen, the editor, has posted about Vera here, speaking in praise of her as a wonderfully professional publisher. It’s worth keeping people like that on their feet. If you can spare even a little, head on over to the community and pitch in.

the food of Christmas

Tonight I’m going to make winter soup.

There’s nothing particularly special about it; to the unfamiliar eye, it’s just your standard beef-and-vegetables deal. But it’s not a beef-and-vegetable soup; it’s winter soup. It’s something my mother has made for as long as I can remember, and it is one of the infallible markers of the season in my mind, along with things made with wild rice. (Which is in the other soup.)

I’m going to try to make a series of posts this month about my personal Christmas traditions and where they come from. Christmas dinner itself will get its own post, I imagine, but since tonight there will be winter soup, it seemed a good way to start.

Funny story: the first time I made the soup for myself, I assembled the requisite ingredients, chopped the things that needed to be chopped, browned the things that needed to be browned, chucked it all in a pot, and thought, it just doesn’t look right. Because that happens, you know; it’s never the same when you do it yourself, never quite like how Mom made it. But I went ahead and put it on to simmer and wandered off, and an hour later I came back and there was winter soup in the pot.

Soups are like alchemy, as far as I’m concerned. They magically stop being their ingredients and become something else while you’re not looking.

Just as soon as I finish tidying this place up, we’ll get started on the alchemy.

another open letter

Dear Brain,

When I said I was going to work on short stories, I meant I was going to try and reduce the backlog of half-started ideas. That was not an open invitation to half-start something new.

Especially something that of all things in the world kind of resembles “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”

Especially when that means I’ll go to bed with that song stuck in my head.

Cut it out, and go back to developing the sacrilicious idea. Even better, stop being so finicky about working on “Chrysalis.” STOP ADDING TO THE LIST.

Love and kisses,
Swan

Catching up with a few more book recommendations:

To Say Nothing of the Dog, with which I have begun to mend my ignorance of Connie Willis’ novels, and

Uglies, in which Scott Westerfeld has fun with semi-dystopic near future SF YA.

If you have read either book, feel free to discuss in the comments.

Dell Award

I have no idea how many current or recent undergraduates read this journal, but if you were enrolled full-time in college for any semester since fall 2007, check out the Dell Magazines Award, a short story competition aimed specifically at undergrads. I won in 2003 (back when it was the Isaac Asimov Award), so I’m speaking from first-hand experience when I say they’re a great group of people, and the conference is especially fabulous to attend if you live in a place that’s cold and dreary come March.

I should have saved the egotism link for a little while longer, so I could pair it with this news: Rick Horton, editor of a Year’s Best antho series, is doing his year-end roundup of magazines, and in the post for IGMS he singles out “A Heretic by Degrees” as one of two stand-out short stories they published this year. Woot! Go, Driftwood, go!

linky

Three totally unrelated links make a post, right?

THE SELF-CENTERED LINK: a mini-essay about my story “A Heretic by Degrees.” Me musing about Driftwood and how I created it.

THE INTERNETS ARE FULL OF WEIRD LINK: since this is only photos, not video, it might be rigged, but the “action shots” make it look pretty real. Paintings created by an elephant. And here I thought creating art was the last bastion of “things humans do that other animals don’t” . . . .

THE ARMING FOR INTERNET SLAPFIGHTS LINK: might be of particular interest to jaylake. Pursuant to a discussion elsewhere, regarding whether the Mumbai attacks would have been stopped faster if India had an armed civilian populace, the abstract for an article on American gun ownership. Money quote: “For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” That’s twenty-two injuries or deaths for every one incident of defense. Mind you, that doesn’t factor in possible cases where the gun acted as a successful deterrent without anyone being hurt, but I rather doubt there are twenty instances of that for every one of the other. I wouldn’t say I want to see guns completely outlawed in the U.S., but these numbers make a good counter-argument to the “but I need to defend my home from burglars!” justification, as well as the “an armed society is a civil society” idiocy you get from some corners.

pronoun update

Tied for first in the poll are “they” and “yehuatl,” which I find interesting. “Sie” is in second place. But I think the winner will be a candidate not in the original poll: aliettedb‘s fabulous suggestion of “ome,” which is the Nahuatl word for “two.” This is both short and easily pronounceable; also, it carries a benefit for my hindbrain, which is that it evokes Ometeotl, the (mostly abstract) Aztec deity of duality. Since I already had it in mind to port Ometeotl into the setting as the patron deity of the xera — particularly those xera in this character’s condition — that looks like a win all around.

And I think I even have a name. Cenquiztli may not be the world’s most user-friendly set of phonemes, but phonetic friendliness has never been a real priority in this setting. (One of the reasons I doubt I will ever write a novel there. I rarely even bother telling anybody the setting is called Xochitlicacan.)

So my thanks to Aliette, and to all of you who pitched in on the problem. Now I go back to renaming Matzoloa, and trying to figure out where I got vay zodtz from in the first place.

pronoun problems

Finishing “Once a Goddess” reminds me of the great appeal of short story writing: instant gratification. Instant from the point of view of novel-writing, anyway; I cranked out the bulk of that story in a single evening, and it’s a rare story that requires more than three days of me sitting down and adding words to it. So I’m going to see if I can’t finish two more before the end of the year.

One is the sacrilicious story, provisionally titled “The Gospel of Nachash.” I figure I’ll save that for closer to Christmas. ^_~ I need to figure out a name for one of the characters, and then I need to figure out what happens to him; everything around that is more or less in place.

With that one on the second burner, the immediate project is “Chrysalis.” And here, gentle readers, I need your help.

See, to make the structure work, I’m pretty sure I need an additional character at the midpoint of the story. I know who that character is; what I don’t know is what to call him/her/it/them. Said entity is a character perfectly balanced between male and female — which might mean perfectly androgynous or perfectly hermaphroditic, I’m not sure which. Anyway, this being English, where we’ve jettisoned grammatical gender pretty much everywhere except our pronouns, I’m not sure which one to use.

My preferred gender-neutral default in speech is singular “they,” which has been in use for centuries and has the advantage of being a solution people actually use. But in a story situation like this, it can leave the reader thinking I mean more than one person, and generally undermines the sense of unity I want the character to have. “It” would work if I decide on androgyny, but I’m not sure I like the way that renders an individual into an object. (There’s a reason I had the witches call a doppelganger “it” instead of “she.”) Beyond that, I’m looking at a bunch of neologisms like “sie,” all of which I fear would kick the reader out of the fantasy-Mesoamerican setting and into the twenty-first century. My final option — thanks to Wikipedia — is to go the other direction and dig in the dusty corners of English past, which gives me three possibilities: “heo,” which was replaced by “she” because it started to sound too much like “he;” and “ou” and “a,” both of which were used in Middle English. (Is the latter what we see when Ophelia sings “And will ‘a not come again?”)

Or I could use the Nahuatl third-person pronoun yehwatl. Or the K’iche Mayan are. (Sorry, had to repost the poll to add those.)

Anyway. I have options; I just don’t know which one I like. So we have a poll. Check all that you like, and feel free to present your case in the comments.

(Edited again to add: okay, it looks like “yehuatl” might be shortenable to “ye” or “yehua.” If I go with that option, I will very much need to consult with someone who knows Classical Nahuatl, since the way it handles pronouns is very alien to English, and I don’t trust myself to make up the appropriate substitutions without help. But if the length of that word is keeping you from voting for it, there may be shorter alternatives.)

memery for a Sunday morning

I expected jet lag to wake me up at about 9 a.m., since I’d been sleeping until noon in Boston. Instead, I woke up at about noon. Now there is Christmas music on the stereo (since the day after Thanksgiving is when the Christmas season begins for me), and in a little while I will clean this place up so I can think about decorating it, and in the meantime I will do a meme that practically every writer on my friends list is doing. I think it originated somewhere in the vicinity of autopope, but I could be wrong.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: Certainly by 9 or so. Maybe sooner; I have a crap memory for my childhood. I remember a turning point at that age, though.
* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter and taught myself to use it: Typewriter? I was using a computer by the age of 9, and never looked back.
* Age when I wrote my first short story: This is tough because I have to decide what to count as a short story. I know I wrote something for school when I was in second grade, and other things after that which I completed at a word count that would probably qualify them. I was 18 when I first wrote something I recognized as a short story.
* Age when I wrote my first novel: mostly 18; it was completed shortly after my 19th birthday.
* Novels written between age 30 and age 39: 0. This is where I grin and say “ask me again in twelve years,” and other writers of my acquaintance throw things at me. ^_^
* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 20.
* Number of rejections prior to first story sale: Eg. Counting this up is slightly inconvenient. Call it 150 or so.
* Lifetime number of rejections: Over 700.
* Age when I sold my first short story: 23.
* Age when I wrote a saleable novel: 19. I believe that first one was saleable, even before I rewrote it; I’ve said before that completing things was the last basic skill I acquired. But if that one doesn’t count, I also finished Doppelganger that year.
* Age when I sold that novel: 24. Submissions are sloooooooow.
* Novels written since age 40: Ask me again in — <ducks>
* Total novels written: 10.
* Age now: 28.
* Age when the money coming in exceeded my statuory employment: 27. This was one of a number of factors contributing to the decision to leave graduate school. They say don’t quit your day job until [insert equation here], but when your day job is providing you with an annual income in the four-digit range, the equation changes.
* Number of books sold: 4.
* Number of short stories sold: 24.
* Number of titles in print: 3.
* Number of titles in production or pre-production: 1. Though I’m working to get myself on a schedule of more than one book a year.

Black Friday

There’s something truly grotesque about pairing Thanksgiving — the ideals of which, if not the political history, are worthwhile — with the annual nadir of American culture.

I’m serious. This is a day that makes me disgusted to call myself American. Sure, not all of us participate; most of the people I know hide indoors the day after Thanksgiving rather than face the savage, feral hordes desperate to buybuyBUY at the lowest price possible, and nevermind the cost paid in other ways. It isn’t just the people who die on Black Friday; it’s the circumstances that make those low prices possible, and the vomitous commercialism that convinces people the only way to show their love for their darlng offspring is to buy them whatever this year’s hot-ticket item is. That makes them willing to stand outside a Wal-Mart at 5 or 4 or 3 a.m. on Black Friday and join the mindless mob that will break the doors off their hinges in their rush to get inside. And then knock down a pregnant woman, trample a man to death, and ignore the emergency workers as they try to resuscitate him, because hey! Somebody else might beat you to the last XBox!

This is the ugly face of American capitalism. This is our consumer society at its absolute worst.

This happens, year after year, and we treat it like it’s normal.

along with that

Can anyone tell me how to make the Biblical Hebrew noun rwkb — transliterated in my source as “b@kowr” — into a plural? (Alternatively, tell me if Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have plurals.)

Edited to add: Okay, I suspect this word is more often transliterated as bekhor, which makes the plural either bekhorot (the form generally used when talking about the Passover slaughter) or bekhorim (if we’re talking classical Hebrew, which apparently flings around masculine and feminine plurals without much concern for the gender of the original noun). Interesting. This is what happens when it’s two a.m. the night before Thanksgiving: I wander off on impromptu lessons in Hebrew grammar.

Now I need a way to turn the feminine noun chereb into something that could pass for a man’s name.

yay redundancy!

The “Chrysalis” notes I know are scribbled on two or three small yellow sheets of notepad paper somewhere on my desk have never made it into electronic format (and therefore are not on my laptop), but it turns out enough of their content ended up in the notebook I have with me for me to at least get by. Which is to say, I know the character names.

This has led to me holing up in the guest bedroom with a handful of pocket change, trying to diagram the story’s weird structural tricks, and wishing I were in Britain because those tuppence coins sure would come in handy right now.

But I’m going to put that aside for a while and see what I think of “Once a Goddess,” now that I’ve slept on the ending and hopefully have some perspective.

first lines meme

With “Once a Goddess” finally moved from the “unfinished” folder to the “finished” one, it’s time for another roundup of story fragments.

[untitled fairy tale story]

“Two crowns says he doesn’t make it past the blackberries.”

[untitled quasi-superhero story]

They didn’t call John in until the bullets had finished flying, until everyone who was going to surrender had surrendered and everyone who was going to die had died.

“Chrysalis” [same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

The new ground of the milpa showed like a scar in the forest it had been torn from.

[untitled story, same setting as “Such as Dreams Are Made Of”]

By day their scales glitter in the sun, winding sinuously through the cities of the world.

“The Unquiet Grave” [ballad-based]

Fever took my love from me.

“How They Fall”

He runs as fast as he can, until his lungs feel like lava and the impact of each step jolts him to his skull, until he is blind with exhaustion and terrified hope, but still he is too late.

[untitled Driftwood story, same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees”]

Only idiots bother trying to make maps of Driftwood.

“Mad Maudlin” [ballad-based]

Peter found her slippers just inside the room.

“Ink, Like Blood” [same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

I’ve seen the look on your face, when your granny starts telling the old stories.

“Xie Meng Lu Goes on Pilgrimage”

Treasured wife — By now you will have heard the sorry tale of my disgrace at court.

[untitled Xochitlicacan story, same setting as “A Mask of Flesh”]

The tap of the workmen’s chisels was a distant, dreamlike thing to Tlacuilo’s ears, as if it came from another world.

[untitled Nine Lands story]

Having ink on your skin was an offense punishable by death.

[untitled Tam Lin story]

Faerie trouble never really goes away.

[untitled Driftwood story, same setting as “A Heretic by Degrees”]

Time’s one of the most untrustworthy and useless concepts in all of Driftwood.

“Even in Decline”

The boar charged along the forest floor, feet pounding out a furious beat, tusks slicing at the air.

[untitled JB story, ballad-based]

Let me tell a tale of my father’s kin, for his blood runs in me, and so to me falls this duty: to keep the knowledge, the past-thought, the shape of how it began, as my father gave it to me.

Aaaand I don’t appear to have any copies of “Prince of the Stone” here with me, so no snippet from that one.

That’s everything that has at least a bit written. Most of my titles, oddly enough, belong to stories I haven’t started; most of my started stories have no titles. Of them all, I think I’m the most motivated to play with “Chrysalis” — but the notes I have with me don’t include the character names, so that may be problematic. We’ll see. I know Konil, and I might be able to remember a few more. Or get by with placeholders.

Any preferences from the peanut gallery?

Brain!

That’s an excited cry of “brain!” — not a zombie mumble of “braaaaaains.”

The distinction is important. Those of you reading this who have written novels know whereof I speak; others may know it from similarly intensive mental endeavours. When you finish, it feels like a steamroller has come through and pasted every single potential thought into a pancake. It’s possible, sometimes, to get something done soon after, but mostly you turn into the next stage of Mr Earbrass.

Which is why it’s exciting that last night I finished a short story! And not just any short story: this is “Once a Goddess,” which probably holds the record for longest time spent sitting around refusing to turn from an idea into a proper story. There are four abortive drafts on my hard drive, not counting the one that got finished, and the earliest of them dates back to the summer of 2001 — which I know because the idea came from an article I read while indexing for Anthropological Literature.

Last night, I regrew enough brain to finish it. Yay me!

It’s nice for other reasons, too. I haven’t finished a short story since — Jesus. Just went to look at my notes, and that would be “Kingspeaker,” in March of last year. How’s that for pathetic? Sure, I’ve written three novels in the interim, and that’s not bad, but the other nice thing here is that “Once a Goddess” is secondary-world fantasy, which has been lacking in my life of late. I love writing the Onyx Court books and all, but it’s been a while since I scratched the worldbuilding itch.

Brain! It’s working again!

Maybe I’ll try finishing something else, too.

thoughts on Match Point

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of trusting Jonathan Rhys Meyers in any role he plays. I just keep seeing Steerpike. (This is especially ironic when you consider that JRM is my casting for one of the protagonists in an unpublished novel. Apparently I don’t trust Julian?)

Anyway, I want to talk about Match Point (which has him in it), but There Will Be Spoilers, so don’t read past the cut if you don’t want to know.

For the record, my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about being spoiled, as the movie is not that great.

Here’s why.

Fringe update

  1. Peter got to be useful and showed signs of character development.
  2. And the preview for next week promises even more.
  3. Maybe even something other than a random piece of the so-called Pattern!

Dude, it’s like Christmas on Fringe.

(Though did anybody else say “saw that coming” when the thing with Walter happened?)

NOTE: I’ve kept this post spoiler-free, but the comments are unlikely to stay that way.