We have a winner!

Kasi Spyker wins the tuckerization contest, having sent me the following picture:

I think I’ll have to make her one of the senators or representatives that’s on the less shady side; “Spyker” as an antagonist’s name just wouldn’t be subtle. 🙂

For posterity, I will note that hers was not the first picture I received, but I told Kurayami-hime that family were disqualified. Nonetheless, it’s good to see that there are quite a few copies on the shelf in this store, and even one of Doppelganger:

Send me more pictures! I’d love to know where the book has already made it into the wild.

more excerpt, and a contest

One week to go until the official street date for Warrior and Witch. You can now read a sample of Chapter Two online. (Sorry for cutting off where I do, but my contract limits me in how much I can post.)

Also, we return to the land of tuckerizing! The deal is the same as it was with Doppelganger: be the first person to e-mail me a picture of Warrior and Witch in a store, and I’ll name a character after you in the urban fantasy I’m working on. (You’ll probably be a senator or representative.) And even if you’re not the first, I very much appreciate reports (with or without pictures) of sightings in different places. Go forth, and find my book!

call for paper help

Looking for some help here. The conference topic for the next ICFA is “Representing Self and Other: Gender and Sexuality in the Fantastic,” and I’ve been trying to think of a paper that would fit in. (You’re not limited to the topic, but I’d like to give it a shot this year, instead of ignoring it entirely.) Gender and sexuality aren’t my usual stomping grounds, though, so it’s been a little tough. In fact, for a while the only thing I could think up was “Drow: The Black Hole of Otherness,” which is not so much a paper as an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, and dead fish at that.

But I think I’ve found a way to develop that into a paper, by looking at the original appearance of the drow in a game module, and then their development since then in game materials and fiction — specifically, what work certain writers have done to try and rehabilitate them as something other than a horrible, horrible stereotype of Otherness. (I’ve gotten some indications that there have been some moves in that direction — enough to persuade me that reading a dozen or so new Forgotten Realms novels won’t be a complete waste of time that leaves me with nothing to talk about when I’m done.) So I’m halfway to being able to write an abstract. What I need now are academic references.

Y’see, I really haven’t taken any classes on this topic, and so I barely know where to begin. Who should I read if my focus is on the process of de-Othering a black-skinned, matriarchal, subterranean, racist, slave-owning, rigidly stratified, back-stabbing, religiously twisted and sexually perverted race of chaotic evil people? I think I can talk well enough about why it’s happening, but I need more on the how.

beet pulp, Russian countertenors, and election theft

I have a handful of links to get rid of. Don’t expect anything resembling a coherent theme to the topics of this post.

First and most serious: mounting proof that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. It’s long. Read it all. Cringe at the number of federal laws that were broken, let alone the rest of the shady, non-kosher polling practices.

Now, to cheer you up: the hazards of beet pulp. Don’t drink anything while you’re reading it.

Brave New Words. The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction has a publication date, at last.

Hey, Khet? I think you have some competition.

And, in conclusion, I give you Vitas. Watch a smirking little girly-man jump three octaves as if he hasn’t noticed that men aren’t supposed to be sopranos. (Countertenors weird me out a little.) If the smirk doesn’t entertain you enough — or if it does — then try the music video version, where in he’s a smirking little fish-boy instead. Then go watch him sing “Lucia di Lammermoor” — you know, that piece the female opera singer performs in The Fifth Element. Cracktastical, I tell you, and I’ve only watched a few of the videos so far.

That will do for now.

excerpt and other goodies

If you’ve read Doppelganger already, then check out the page on my site for Warrior and Witch, newly updated with all kinds of goodies — including the first chapter of the novel! It’s the revised version of what got printed in the back of the first book, and next week (one week from street date!) I’ll be adding a section from the second chapter.

If you haven’t read Doppelganger already, then please don’t follow either of those links, as they lead to spoilers that make Baby Jesus cry. Go read the first book instead.

they giveth, and they taketh away

What an appalling offense to archaic grammar. But that doesn’t stop me from titling the entry thusly.

I have on my desk a letter from Delia Sherman that would have me bouncing in happiness if it didn’t happen to reject “La Molejera” for Interfictions along the way. She and Dora Goss seem to have put a lot of effort into writing the rejection letters, which is above and beyond the call of duty for editors. So yay, but at the same time boo.

The reason given for the rejection, incidentally, was that it was too identifiably a genre story to fit the anthology. This confirms my suspicion that, provided they do manage to put out a second Interfictions antho, and provided I have not sold it by then, “The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” may be my best prospect with them. (Of course, this also requires the provision that I get off my ass and do something with that first draft. It won’t sell to anybody sitting on my hard drive.)

more than the sum of its parts

I don’t recall where I picked up this link, but it’s a discussion of media (all media) and its future. The major point is, presented in analogy, that a music album (frex) is a molecule, and songs are atoms, and we as a society are increasingly interested in atomic rather than molecular content; we download individual songs, make our own mix CDs, and even get to sub-atomic levels in creating mashups. Nor does this apply only to music.

Here are some of the issues I have with the post and its comment threads (one of which says, “Most consumers are just playing with the atoms and discarding them, and any art form that expects the consumer to understand a complex molecular structure, whether created from whole cloth or from other atoms, is in trouble”). First of all, I don’t think this trend is inherently going to keep on as it has been. Personal experience prompts this feeling; I like listening to my music on shuffle, but after a while of doing that I found myself craving whole albums again. Now, I can’t assume everybody’s like me, of course, but I have a gut feeling that playing around with atomic content is something we’re doing a lot of because suddenly technology’s making it easier; the novelty, however, may well wear off, and then the atomic approach will become one of many ways we interact with media, instead of the Tsunami of the Future that will wipe out all others.

Second, it sort of carries the assumption that the molecules are no more than the sum of their parts. “They don’t want to buy a whole album just for that catchy radio single” — true enough, but the fault then lies with the way we market music, promoting one good song on the radio while the rest of the album may be mediocre crap. I wouldn’t want to buy the album then, either. But a good album is well worth buying, because not only does it have more worth listening to than that one catchy song, it has more than its entire collection of songs; it is an artistic work in its own right, with carefully chosen beginning and ending tunes, a flow from one song to another, a journey that lasts more than four minutes. Atomic media can only offer you small experiences — powerful ones, perhaps, but limited in their complexity. And I think we enjoy complexity enough for molecular media to still have their place.

Finally, look at this on a more extreme level. The quarks of writing, if you will, are letters and punctuation, or words if you don’t want to go that far. Anybody can mix and match them to their heart’s content. But not everybody can do it well, and so we pay writers (and musicians, and TV show creators, and so on) to put them together for us, to present us with something compelling. I make characters soundtracks (i.e. themed mix CDs), but I don’t listen to them as often as I do to professional albums, and I sure as hell don’t write my own music. I could be vaguely interested in the notion of a “mix anthology,” collecting my favorite short stories in one place, but a professional editor can probably do a better job of that than I can. A mix anthology from a friend would interest me more as an expression of my friend and/or our relationship, but a professional anthology would interest me more as literature. I don’t mean that to slam my friends, of course; could well be that one or more would manifest a heretofore unsuspected talent for that sort of thing, and produce a work of sheer brilliance. But on the whole, I consume anthologies (books, albums, movies, etc) looking for someone else, someone who has spent a lot of time learning how to do it well, to present me with an experience. The more I chop up their media, the more I’m undoing their work, losing the crafted connections that made the whole more than the sum of its parts. That can be fun, and it can produce amazing new works, but I don’t think we’re going to forswear molecules for atoms any time soon.

I

And I <3 <3 <3 stunting.

I commented the other night that combat in Exalted isn’t all that quick (when I can blow a relatively cheap charm to get six actions in a round, or the bad guy can attack five times as often as I do, things get slowed down real good) . . . but despite that, I find it far more interesting than combat in most other games. Why? Because the system actively rewards you for being exciting. Say “I run up and stab him” in a normal game, and you roll your normal dice. Say that in Exalted, and you roll your normal dice. Say “I run up his enormous daiklave, feinting with my blade to all sides, then leap into the air, turn three backflips, and stab him in the back” in a normal game, and you have to make a crap-ton of difficult athletics rolls, then roll your normal dice (if you’re lucky; if not, then you’re at a penalty.) Say that in Exalted, and you get bonus dice and some of your magic juice back to boot, just for being awesome.

What’s not to love?

Obviously this approach wouldn’t work for all genres, and probably wouldn’t quite work in an Exalted game that wasn’t deliberately starting in the last chapter of an epic story. But I like the way it rewards you for describing what you’re doing, and doesn’t penalize you for trying the exciting and difficult thing over the safe and boring one. Seems to me that could be incorporated, on a less insanely over-the-top level, into more games.

It also makes me ponder something I’ve pondered before, namely, how one could go about trying to write Final Fantasy/wuxia/anime/etc-type-stuff as prose fiction. One difficulty is that the appeal of such sources is heavily visual, with both the flow of movement and the aesthetic arrangement of bodies; conveying those kinetic and spatial qualities in prose is hard. Another difficulty is simply that we’re not used to such things in our prose, and so a level of over-the-top-ness that you can swallow off a screen is much harder to digest off a page. I gradually toned down the martial arts in Doppelganger over the course of submitting it around, taking out some of the stupider wire-fu that had been in there; I wanted Mirage to be badass, but not so much so that she defied the laws of physics utterly. It might fit into another story, though, and so I ponder how it could be done.

my lunatic friends

Imagine, if you will, that you are in another city, wherein there is a chocolatier who sells the most divine hot chocolate you have ever tasted — thick and rich and beautifully bitter as the best dark chocolate can be. And you intended, while there, to go and buy more of their mix, so that you can continue to enjoy this divinity while at home . . . but alas, you planned poorly, and you will not have an opportunity to go there and buy.

Imagine that you mention this to your friends while sitting around and packing picnic baskets for that afternoon’s wedding.

Imagine — if you can — that not only will one of your friends take the time to go by that chocolatier before the wedding, but that the one who will take the time to arrange this is the groom himself, who really ought to have other things on his mind.

And then — because we’re not done yet! — imagine that you mentioned, during that conversation, the exorbitant price charged by the chocolatier if you order the five-pound bag of mix online (some of the exorbitancy stemming from the chocolate, some from the shipping charges), and that said groom friend gets it into his head that you intended to buy a five-pound bag (instead of the rather more reasonable two-pound bag), and therefore, during the picnic following his wedding, presents you with a sack containing two two-pound bags and one one-pound bag (owing to a lack of five-pound bags in the store), accompanied by the words “Happy Birthday.”

Thus did I acquire an absurd amount of Burdick’s hot chocolate, from a friend whose mind really really ought to have been on things closer to home. But I’m grateful to him anyway, and am now equipped to hand out samples of this divinity to all and sundry, for about the next three years.

The Egotism Post

Long-time readers of this journal will be familiar with today’s exercise, but for those who are new, an introduction in three points:

1) Today is my birthday.

2) So long as I continue to be involved in academia, my birthday will fall during a rather hectic and stressful period of the year.

3) I am perhaps a little too skilled for my own good at pointing the flaws in my accomplishments, how I’ve done this thing but not that other one, etc.

So, for several years now, to counteract my tendency to be in a bad mood on my birthday (for reasons that have nothing to do with my age) and my habit of denigrating my own achievements, I’ve made a practice of
posting, on this day, a listing of all the cool stuff I’ve done in the previous year. And I’m utterly forbidden to qualify my statements or include anything that isn’t positive (and you have no idea how much self-editing it takes to obey that rule).

So. I’m twenty-six today. What do I have to show for it?

This.

tabula rasa

It’s an incredibly tedious process, but I have to admit, there are some benefits to biting the bullet and reinstalling Windows on one’s machine. And I don’t just mean things like “Adobe no longer gives the system a hairball” or “it’s stopped hanging whenever I try to delete something through Windows Exploror;” I mean that it’s faster than it’s been in years, and has also provoked me into doing a lot of digital housecleaning that I’ve been avoiding for a while.

Mind you, there are other ways I would have preferred to spend the day, but it could have been a lot worse. Many thanks to the boy for his assistance.

Now, having spent most of the day with my eyes glazing over as one program after another installs itself, I think I’ll go watch the rest of Batman Begins.

In Spanish. Because in theory I’m going to take the proficiency test next week. (On my birthday. Won’t that be fun.) Watching films subtitled is not a bad way to study, honestly. And it’s surprising, how quickly ten years of dust can be brushed away from one’s language skills. (At least with Spanish, which has always worked better for me than any of the other ones, with the possible and backhanded exception of Old Norse.)

Vámonos.

Grant Morrison on Batman

It’s a little odd, reading these things when I’m not actually a follower of most comic books, let alone Batman and the rest of the superhero crowd, but Grant Morrison has some fascinating things to say about his current work on that title. Even when I don’t know half of what he’s talking about, it’s very intriguing, seeing how he approaches the task of integrating his ideas into the existing material while doing something new. Anyway, I figured the comics fans among my readers who hadn’t already come across this article . . . okay, are probably few in number, but for them, I wanted to provide the link.

lengthy thoughts on fanfic

If you aren’t aware of the Great Cassandra Claire Fandom Implosion, I won’t inflict my own summary on you. This post will be sufficiently prefaced by saying that the million and one analyses and responses to that situation have sparked me to lay out my own thoughts on fanfiction. This will take a while, so you might want to get a snack first.

Point #1: Fanfic is illegal. Got that? This is the opinion of several people whose legal knowledge I trust, though I’m interested in learning about it for myself, and hope to sit in on a class this semester that will cover those kinds of topics. But you’re borrowing someone’s intellectual property when you write fanfic, and even if you don’t make money from doing so, it’s still against the law. This point is often missed by people who can’t be bothered to pay attention.

Point #2: Having said that, any number of writers (both in print and media) are okay with you writing fanfic. It may be illegal, but it isn’t worth anybody’s time and money to sue you; a cease & desist letter tends to suffice when someone gets upset. And frankly, fanfic is a way for readers/viewers to engage more deeply with a story, and can even serve as a kind of grass-roots publicity, so just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. This point is often missed by people who feel persecuted when you tell them how the law works.

Point #3: The only thing that differentiates what we call fanfic from works such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is intellectual property law. Stop and think about it for a moment: they are the same thing. They just fall on one side or the other of the legal divide. In both cases, one writer is taking someone else’s story and doing something with it. Maybe the story’s a fairy tale and doesn’t have a specific author; maybe it was written four hundred years ago and the author’s long dead. Doesn’t matter. You’re still engaging in the same activity. The difference is your legal right to do it. Nothing prevents a work of fanfic from being as clever and witty as R&GAD, but the world tends to pass moral judgment on the former, and not on the latter. This point is often missed by those who want to claim that all fanfic is trash, but Stoppard’s okay.

Point #4: Moving into the realm of opinion, I feel that it’s good manners to respect the creator’s wishes with regards to their intellectual property. If they don’t mind fanfic, go for it. If they do mind, then be polite and stay away. If they don’t mind fanfic but they object to certain kinds (frex, their underage characters having sex), then write about other things. Is there any force that can stop you from writing whatever you want? The same forces that can stop you from writing fanfic at all, which is to say that it probably won’t happen (see point #2). But just because the author is willing to let you climb the fence and swim in her backyard pool doesn’t mean you should pee in it.

Point #5: There is also a difference between fanfiction and plagiarism. The categories are fuzzy ones, of course, existing on a continuum. The small amount of fanfiction I ever wrote was generally of the sort where it took place in a world created by someone else, but involved my own original characters, perhaps with cameos by canon characters. I tended to be more interested in the possibilities of the setting than anything else. Other people write mostly about canon characters, perhaps with a Mary Sue or less irritating original addition. Maybe they cross one fandom with another, producing a Buffy/Highlander crossfic about the two groups of Watchers being the same. Maybe they allude to other fics. Maybe they even quote things. You hit the “plagiarism” line when you’re Cassandra Claire, lifting not just characters, not just quotes, but extensive lines and scenes from other sources and not attributing them (then basking in the praise of people who say your ideas are so original and you write so well). I haven’t followed that whole debate in full (I’m not sure any human being can, and I’ve not really tried, though I’m anthropologically fascinated by it), but what I have read included enough side-by-side textual analysis to persuade me that she did indeed rip off Pamela Dean and other writers far above and beyond what gets winked at in the illegal activity called fanfiction.

Point #6: If you’re writing fanfiction to improve your craft, it will help you — up to a point. You can refine your prose, dialogue, pacing, etc. as much in a fanfic story as anywhere else (provided, of course, that your dialogue isn’t stolen wholesale). But it won’t do much to help you develop characters, settings, and other large-scale elements of the craft. Its inherent intertextuality may get in the way of you learning to write a story that stands on its own. If your eventual goal is a writing career, there’s nothing wrong with fanfic in principle, but there will come a time when you’ll be better served devoting that time and energy to original work. And fanfic publication probably won’t help you sell your own work, with two exceptions: one being work-for-hire media properties (where it may indeed net you a contract, if that’s what you really want to do), and the other being (again) Cassandra Claire, who has landed a novel deal, apparently at least in part on the strength of her fanfic writing. (This, as you might guess, is a source of much of the brouhaha, and I fully expect to see the blogosphere descend on her first book like a pack of rabid weasels, waiting to catch her if she’s plagiarized again.)

Point #7: How do I feel about this relative to my own position? As I said, I used to write a little fanfic, but not much; mostly I wanted to chase my own ideas. I haven’t written any in years, though my mind will occasionally play with it for amusement. If Doppelganger fanfic or something based on a later book of mine starts appearing on the web, I will be flattered by the attention, and I’ll probably let it go unless somebody tries to make money off it. I will not, however, read it, partially because I could subsequently stir up trouble if I later wrote something that resembled said fic, and partially because it would weird me out, watching someone else write about my characters. (No offense to y’all, but you’d probably get them wrong, relative to what’s in my head. It’s the nature of the beast. We don’t see them the same way.)

Point #8: Hmmmm . . . I think I’ve hit everything I wanted to say for the moment, though I may return to this at a later date. Fanfic is a huge and complicated subject, with many byways I don’t find particularly intelligent or attractive, but I issue no blanket condemnations against it. Just the occasional specific one, against specific acts of idiocy.

Tuesdays are good

‘Twas on a Tuesday last month that Talebones bought “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?” from me, and behold: ’tis on another Tuesday, four weeks later, that Aberrant Dreams (who just published “Such as Dreams Are Made Of”) writes to me saying they’d like to buy “A Thousand Souls.” And both are me making a repeat sale to a market, which I take as an indicator of success.

I’m glad that story has found a home. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it.

retro entertainment

Tonight, the boy and I watched the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s movie of The Call of Cthulhu. For those not aware, it’s filmed in black and white, 1920s silent-film style, which lends it a certain campy panache.

Two things fascinated me while watching it. The first was the care and attention to detail the film-makers lavished on their work. It’s not on the scale of the Lord of the Rings movies, but then again, few things are. But knowing some of the challenges of amateur cinema, I was all the more impressed by their success at creating a 1920s setting (let alone the Louisiana swamp scene or, you know, R’lyeh). They did a good job at, not just costuming people, but getting props and sets and the like to look sufficiently period that I didn’t get jarred out of the story by anachronistic elements.

And it startled me, how well I felt the silent-film style worked for this. One of the special features (a hilarious making-of piece) detailed the corners it allowed them to cut; costume pieces didn’t have to match in color, for example, and the visual schtick means that when they represent with the ocean with some glitter-covered sheets being waved up and down, it looks appropriate. Beyond that, though, I think it might be the perfect way to film Lovecraft — as odd as that may sound. Not only is it the style of the period in which he was writing, but in a sideways manner, the very cheesiness of it keeps the horror elements from feeling as cheesy as they might have. Example: we never have to hear people swallowing their tongues trying to pronounce the unpronounceable. Example: when a character looks upon Cthulhu and dies of fright, his mind shattered, we don’t actually hear his scream (which could not possibly be as grotesque as it should be). Much like Lovecraft dodged descriptions of certain things by instead describing people’s reactions to them (thus leaving the things themselves up to our imaginations, which can make them scarier than words ever could), the silent style leaves more unsaid. No, Cthulhu isn’t as mind-shatteringly horrifying as he ought to be, and if you stop and look at him he’s a slightly jerky stop-motion figure, but I almost think it would work less effectively if he were some slick CGI creation. It’s easier for you to look at that figure as a signifier for the concept, and to fill in the requisite gaps.

It’s a short film (47 minutes), and certainly not perfect, but we enjoyed it quite a bit, and the making-of feature was fabulous. And you can watch it with the intertitles translated into twenty-four languages, including Euskara (better known as Basque)!

promotional news

I’ve been doing quite a bit of promotional work for Warrior and Witch recently. To begin with, there’s the somewhat unexpected venue of the Romantic Times Book Club; I discovered when they reviewed Doppelganger (and gave it a high rating!) that they apparently cover a far wider range of fiction than their name would suggest. I’ve been interviewed for their October issue, and they’ll also be running a short essay of mine on the website, regarding Warrior and Witch and my experiences writing it.

Separately from that, I’ve also been interviewed by one of the Culture Vultures at Sequential Tart; once again, I don’t fit into the mainstream of what they cover, but they’ve taken an interest in me nevertheless. That one really illustrated to me why Big Name Authors often have to turn down interview requests; answering the questions was a lengthy process, with me tackling a few, wandering away, coming back a few hours later and doing another one, etc. You have to think about, not just your answer, but how to make that answer interesting, and how to do so in a relatively concise manner. I imagine “interview answers” will prove to be its own micro-genre of writing, like “cover copy” and “author bio.”

Then there’s a bit of promotion I didn’t have to do the work for: a nice person named Joana Rodriguez has, with my permission, created a fanlisting for my writing. Fanlistings aren’t something I was aware of before, but they’re basically web-based networks of fans for particular writers/TV shows/whatever. Check out the above link to see the site she put together for it, and to sign up.

That’s it for the moment, I think, though I have a few other promotional schemes in the works. This is, I must admit, the part of the “being a writer” business I’m probably the worst at; I can get myself to conventions and on panels there, but aside from that, I’m not very good at pimping my work. I’m learning, but it’s a slow process.

Updates will, of course, be provided when the aforementioned interviews and such go live.