Aspettate e Odiate

The Wall of Storms, by Ken Liu

2016-10-04T05:29:51Z

Review copy provided by the author.

When Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings came out in 2015, I found myself unable to review it objectively. Objectivity was impossible. The stories I'd heard as a child about the fall of the Qin dynasty and the rise of the Han had been incorporated into a Polynesian-themed wuxia fantasy, blending elements made familiar by Final Fantasy and steampunk--airships and tunneling machines!--with others that I'd rarely, if ever, seen in others' work. Here were shark-toothed swords and feather capes like those I'd seen when my mother worked at Bishop Museum; here were tales of sworn brothers, secret books, and cunning stratagems like those I'd heard on my great-aunt's knee.

I will not pretend to be an objective judge of The Wall of Storms. I suspect, however, that it improves on its predecessor.

Where The Grace of Kings took the Chu-Han contention and applied a fantasy gloss to history--or, if you prefer, the mythologized folk stories that make up most accounts of classical Chinese history--The Wall of Storms takes the period of consolidation following Liu Bang's unification of the former Warring States and puts it in a blender with two millennia of invasions, civil strife, cunning strategies, Beijing opera, and pingshu scripts. There are airships, fire attacks, rebel plots, and treachery; barbarians riding terrible beasts that dominate the battlefield; and hidden research labs developing secret weapons. All the elements, in short, needed to build on the foundation Liu established in his previous book.

The first half of The Wall of Storms follows history more closely than the second. Forces in the imperial palace move to undermine and compromise the Emperor Kuni Garu's companions and former generals, so the threat to centralized rule which they pose can be removed. As tragedy seems inevitable, however, an incursion into Dara by a foreign power shifts the course of events, refocusing the plot on military matters and the fate of several voyages of exploration which predated the invasion.

As allegiances shift and major characters meet their ends, it becomes apparent that the principal actors (and survivors) of The Wall of Storms are largely women. Empress Jia's agenda drives the first half of the book, while Gin Mazoti remains Dara's greatest general and tactician. Princess Thera proves the most effective of the Emperor's heirs, particularly when aided by Zomi Kidosu, the protégé of the Emperor's onetime strategist. And Princess Vadyu Roatan, the daughter and heir of the invading force's leader, proves her ruthlessness on both the battlefield and in her personal life. If The Grace of Kings had an outstanding flaw, it was the paucity of important female characters. This is not an issue in The Wall of Storms.

The Wall of Storms is also an exemplar of what I like to call "hard fantasy"--that is, fantasy which plays within the bounds of its own rules; (many of) the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; and our best understanding of history. Key plot points hinge on the physics of light, the construction of electrical cells, and the properties of methane. Our world is full of cool and interesting things; it would be folly for a fantasy author to not take advantage of that. And Ken Liu is no fool.

The Wall of Storms is not a short book. (My ARC is slight more than 850 pages long.) Nonetheless, I devoured it in three days. While The Grace of Kings is still the best place to start with this series, I heartily recommend The Wall of Storms to all serious readers of epic fantasy.

All Our Differences and All Our Stories

2016-06-27T04:01:19Z

Hey, all.

So in my last post, I mentioned that there's a Kickstarter up for the Hidden Youth anthology, which I'll have a story in if it gets funded.

I know not everyone has money spare to support the anthology directly, so if you could help spread the word about the Kickstarter, and maybe link to this essay if you think it's worth sharing, I would appreciate that.

--

In high school, both my girlfriend and my best friend lived in multi-generational households in Nu'uanu valley. My best friend lived up towards the Pali (the vertiginous mountain pass from which King Kamehameha reportedly pushed over 700 enemy soldiers to their deaths) in a multi-story building renovated to allow his parents and grandparents to live separately. My girlfriend lived at the bottom of Nu'uanu in a four bedroom bungalow, and her grandmother was a constant presence when I visited.

I don't think I ever exchanged more than two sentences with her at a time.

My girlfriend was Hakka, while I was half-Hunanese. To a lot of people, that would've meant we were both Han Chinese. But it didn't mean that to my girlfriend's grandmother, who didn't speak Mandarin. (I took Mandarin in high school. My girlfriend took Latin.) It wasn't invisible to my father, who told me my girlfriend was Hakka before I knew what that meant; before I learned about the centuries of ethnic tension between the Hakka, Punti, Manchus, Miao, and other ethnic groups that helped motivate the Taiping uprising and innumerable other revolts and conflicts. At this remove, I can't say my heritage was the reason my girlfriend's grandma treated me like a non-person. (Maybe she just didn't like me. I was kind of obnoxious as a teenager.) But it easily could have been.

Most historically literate people in the West have heard of the Boxer Rebellion. Far fewer have heard about the Taiping Rebellion, which preceded the Boxer Rebellion by five decades, and lasted much longer. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, led by Hong Xiu Quan--the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus--was an uprising against the Qing which began in 1851 and was finally suppressed in 1864. The earliest Taiping rebels were predominantly Hakka, recruited from the villages where Hong and his adherents took shelter and preached their message that Hong was the second son of the Christian God. After capturing Nanjing, threatening the Manchu capital of Beijing, and trying (and failing) to muster Western support based on their shared religion, the Taiping rebels were ultimately crushed by the Xiang army, which was recruited from Hunan and included a fair number of my forebears. (See Jonathan Spence's excellent God's Chinese Son for more details.)

Now, do I really think my girlfriend's grandmother was nursing an ethnic grudge dating back to the Taiping Rebellion? Probably not. My point is simply that history--particularly imperial, ethnic, and religious history--is dense and twisty and complicated, and ramifies into the present. We often paper over these twists with simplified narratives and labels, but that doesn't make history's richness and complexity go away.

It just means we've chosen to close our eyes.

This is why I feel anthologies like Long Hidden and its sequel, Hidden Youth, are so important. By telling the stories of marginalized groups and pushing back against dominant narratives, they help highlight the incredible richness of personal and cultural diversity, and how it's been present throughout human history. That doesn't just mean the half-Hakka exorcist heroine of my story, mind you. It means the people I grew up with who spent their whole childhood living under the same roof as their grandparents, or pounding mochi at the Bon festival. It means all the hapa and biracial people who grew up in places where no one gave them or their parents side-eye, as well as the ones who weren't so lucky. It means everyone who grew up hearing stories about the Ali'i using their relatives as human chairs, and King Kamehameha pushing people off the Pali. It means me, and it means you, with all the food and traditions and family stories you have which are just how things are and are not weird at all, no sir.

The world is wide enough for all our differences and all our stories.

Let's try not to close our eyes any more.

--

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider sharing it on social media, and backing Hidden Youth on Kickstarter.

Fiction update

2016-06-17T04:42:56Z

Hey, all. It's been a while since I last posted here, and it turns out I have some news.

1) I have a story--"Blood Reckonings"--up in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #201.

2) Hidden Youth, the follow-up to the anthology Long Hidden, is running a Kickstarter. If it's funded, my story about a half-Hakka female Taoist exorcist banishing ghosts at the end of the Taiping uprising will appear in its pages. Just saying.

3) On top of all that, "The Resurrectionists" (the oldest of my stories still in circulation) was accepted by Fireside Magazine. So that's cool.

I'm going to be at Fourth Street for the next few days here, but I did want to mention cool things happening in one of the places where people who care would see it. So there we are.

Some Thoughts on Reviews, Comprehensiveness, and 'best' short stories

2015-09-12T08:32:05Z

So let's talk a little bit about short fiction reviews, the rhetoric of 'best', and stuff like that.

Neil Clarke had an editorial recently in which he argued that short fiction reviews don't have much value - his proxy for 'value' being whether they drive readership, in terms of measurable impact on incoming web traffic. With some exceptions - he stipulates that reviews on high-traffic sites, Amazon, and reviews that focused on a single story instead of multiples can be significant - individual recommendations ("read this!") on twitter or other social media appear to motivate reading more than your average review.

This reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately, which is that I think it is unreasonable for any individual to attempt to read and review all or even most of the short fiction being published in the field right now.

I think this for several reasons, the first of which is holy shit have you seen how many stories are out there? Even if you ignore anthologies - which you'd have to, there are only so many hours in the day - there are literally dozens of professional-quality markets publishing short science fiction and fantasy at present. I have my favorites; if you read short fiction at all, you probably have yours; and there isn't necessarily any overlap between them.

This brings me to my second reason, which is that "the field" of SFF is probably better understood as several overlapping fields, which each share (some of) their readers. If a reader's taste is not notably catholic, and they try to read "everything", even for fairly curated values of everything, they are going to be reading a lot of stories that they don't like, not because the story fails to do what it sets out to do, but because they are not the audience for that story, or the story next to it, or basically anything published in those three magazines over there ever.

(As a brief illustration of these divisions within a single magazine, consider that Brad Torgersen, davidlevine, and mrissa - as well as your humble correspondent - are all multiply published in Analog. There are significant generational, rhetorical, and political fault lines you can draw there, which I feel produce highly diverse aesthetic results. Remember, this is within one magazine, and the subgenre of hard SF. I would argue that the field as a whole is even more fractured.)

Returning to our reader of "everything", not only is reading lots of things they don't like probably going to make them cranky and resentful, but it's not particularly fair to the venues or authors whose work will end up being held to standards they were never trying to meet in the first place. Yes, this Chinese-inflected military SF story *is* a remarkably bad science-fantasy romp. What a useful and actionable observation, hypothetical reviewer!

Furthermore, anyone who sets themselves such an overwhelming task is likely to become frustrated, burn out, and/or develop a jaded palette (or, slightly more generously, neophilia) along the way-- and when they do, one can expect it to spill over into their evaluations. How it does will vary: perhaps a rant about how X group with Y politics is doing Z to ruin [genre]; perhaps highly capricious recommendations and recommendation criteria; perhaps something else entirely. Point being, based on both thought experiments and recent evidence, reviewing "everything" doesn't seem like a particularly healthy behavior for people to adopt.

But how will we know which stories are the absolute best of the year, an interlocutor might cry? Well, if your standard is which of the thousands of published stories you would enjoy or admire or appreciate the most if you read them, you probably won't, and that's fine. "Best", when applied to fiction (or anything else without rigorous, unambiguous evaluation criteria) is an inherently contingent claim. The frequency with which it pops up in hashtags, award names, and anthology titles just speaks to our society's desire for rankings, lists, and certainty. The claim of bestness has rhetorical force and marketing value, but when we let the tyranny of total orderings prevent us from recommending good things to our friends, or nominating works we enjoyed for awards because they might not reach some imagined bar of quality... that too is unhealthy, I think. There's a whole literature on maximizers versus satisficers that's relevant here.

The field has grown a lot since it was - I'm told - feasible for a serious reader to be familiar with all the stories published in a year. This is a gift. Read however many stories you want, wherever you want. Don't read stories you don't want to, and don't finish stories you don't want to. Recommend and share things you like, and as mrissa says here, don't sweat whether something will be your absolute favorite or just in your top 27 at some later date. I mean, what a failure state. 27 favorites! Oh, the humanity!

I feel like I'm about to start repeating myself, so why don't we just leave it at that.

New story in BCS

2015-08-20T21:32:16Z

So my story "Fire Rises" is in this week's Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

There's a lot of stuff going on in there, like satellite magic (with actual artificial satellites), entire tomb complexes conjured out of myth, and Kung Fu/wuxia battles fought on top of a moon that's rising into the sky. There are also !Phoenician communists with artificially created great destinies, !Manchu imperialists, !Russian death cultists, and more. It has some of my favorite lines I've written in a while in it.

Anyway. New story. I hope that you'll read and enjoy it.

Putting the Fun back in Fungus

2015-07-15T02:47:09Z

So in addition to today being release day for Last First Snow, mrissa has a new story up on Strange Horizons: "It Brought Us All Together".

As I've said elsewhere, I'm particular fond of this one, because I feel that it gets many things about the performance of grief and the ways compassion is and isn't extended in the wake of tragedy exactly right. Plus, y'know, administrative freakouts in school contexts. It pretty much nails that part too.

Anyway. Highly recommended. Go check it out.

ETA: Apparently today is the day for two mrissa stories! Her Gnome Genomics story just came out. It has a very long title, and is very funny. So go read that too.

Premise vs. Structure vs. Text

2015-07-11T18:59:52Z

So this year I was on the pre-convention Seminar before Fourth Street. Despite covering professionalism, voice, and critique in 3 separate discussions, we barely got through half of the things we had notes for, which is about par for the course. So here are some notes on one of the topics we didn't get to.

Premise problems vs. structure problems vs. text problems

Critiques often focus on specific textual issues, because specific textual issues can be fixed. "I didn't get this bit." "This line made me hate the character." Etc.

Sometimes, of course, a specific textual issue is a symptom of a structural problem. You didn't get that bit because the author didn't make a key bit of information available earlier, or the line is fine but it needs to be delivered earlier, or later, for the reader's emotional response to it to work.

Other problems are deeper-rooted, though. Sometimes, a story's premise is the problem.

You can see examples of this in the lists of premises certain editors don't (or didn't) want to see. It's worth noting that there are several kinds of issues on display, in addition to the ones that are clearly personal taste:

1) The premise is reductionist, tedious, preachy, and/or morally reprehensible.

Revenge fantasies against your ex join "All members of group X are evil!" or "If only we did Y, everything would be great!" in this category. Even if X actually is evil, or Y would make everything great (doubtful), premises of this kind make for bad and boring stories.

2) The premise is one we've seen a hundred times before, sans interesting variation.

You are the chosen one! Our bold heroes will vanquish the evil hordes of [whoever]! What if reality was actually virtual reality? And their names were Adam and Eve! You get the idea.

3) The premise doesn't go anywhere.

So there was a cool thing, and then the author described the cool thing, and it was cool, and then the story ended without anything happening or the reader being given any reason to care. Or maybe the author just reversed one of the premises from 2) and waited for applause. Either way: Bleh.

4) The premise doesn't play to your medium's strengths.

Does your idea require you to describe every strike and shift of each character's balance in a 50-page martial arts fight? Are you trying to cram novel pacing into a short story, or vice versa? Does your central romance lean on the reader thinking of specific (hot) actors reading your lines and being broody on a nonexistent screen? Maybe you should reconsider that.

In the end, though, all of these issues (and nearly any other premise problem you can come up with) are just individual manifestations of a single meta-issue, which is the following:

Your story's premise can limit how good your story can ever be, and how hard it will be to make it better than the baseline for that kind of story.

When a story's premise is flawed, past a certain point, no amount of structural and textual fiddling is going to improve it. You may be able to make it into a competent piece-- but there are lots of competent stories out there. If you want to write good stories, you may need to rethink what your stories are about in order to make them work. Or you may need to abandon them and write something new.

I understand that it can be crazy difficult to tell people the latter, or be told it in a workshop setting. But seriously. Some stories are not worth revising. Some stories will never be good.

A key skill as a writer is being able to identify those story premises so you don't waste your time trying to write them in the first place, or failing that, being able to hear your colleagues when they tell you a particular piece is unworthy of further time and energy.

--

(A note regarding "There are no bad ideas". First, see Left Behind, The Turner Diaries, etc. Second, what people usually mean when they make this claim is that if you rethink and add complexity and depth to your initial premise, you can usually turn it into an idea that a reasonable story can be built on.

This is true.

Note that it doesn't imply the original premise was actually any good.)

Do not approve. Still not resigned.

2015-03-24T03:56:49Z

So I gather from twitter (of all the ways to find out) that irishninja died today. I only met him once in person, in San Francisco when he was in town for the weekend, but he was someone I could talk anime and symphonic metal with, and who seemed genuinely happy editing the website for Magic: the Gathering. I would say he had a good heart-- and he did, in the metaphorical sense-- but it was probably the organ which gave out on him.

I wish that I had the words and the focus to write something like this for him, but it was a long day and a long weekend and a long week before that. So instead I find myself bereft, and inarticulate, and full of rage, and wanting to kick something. And linking to poems, because that's all I have it in me to do at the moment.

(Title from "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like I said. Linking to poems. It's what I've got.)

ETA: I guess I have this, also.

A Cage of Eloquence

What words are there, when hearts betray
our mortal flesh, make still
our lips, empty our lungs, yield ground--
the field-- to gravity, and entropy, and time?

All words are dross; a cage
of eloquence, to gag
our lips, choke off our wails
of defiance and
our love.

The universe, implacable and deaf
to our small cries, grinds on, muttering
"All will be dust", its voice
a susurration on
the solar wind.

No matter. While we yet live
we howl, and rage, and weep.
Let no friend descend into the dark
unmourned, unsung,
unheralded.

Minicon panels

2015-03-17T07:01:42Z

So I'll be at Minicon 50 this year, and should you want to see me on panels (or at my reading with mrissa) here are the times and places and topics involved.

Friday, April 5, 1:00 PM - Anime and Manga for Speculative Fiction Fans: From the days of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy and its intelligent robots, manga and anime with science fiction and fantasy themes have been popular. Let's discuss some of the most interesting ones for speculative fiction fans, both current and vintage.

John Stanfield, Alec Austin, Ozgur K. Sahin, Scott K. Jamison

Saturday, April 6, 3:30 PM - Marissa Lingen & Alec Austin Reading: Mris and I will read things. Aloud, even.

Sunday, April 7, 2:30 PM - Middle Grade Optimism vs YA Dystopia: Magical wonder abounds in middle grade lit but seems to disappear once stories make the jump to the next age bracket. Does pessimism go hand in hand with the advent of hormones? Is middle grade more than it appears?(from both reader and writer perspective)

Donna Munro, Adam Stemple, Alec Austin, Brandon Sanderson, Jane Yolen, Marissa Lingen

...I know it's not nice to argue with panel descriptions before the actual panel, but srsly, lolwut? at the unexamined claims in the YA/MG panel description. We should be able to have an interesting conversation, at any rate.

Not a review: Foundational Narratives and the Grace of Kings

2015-02-25T17:28:15Z

So. Let's talk about foundational narratives.

There are stories that twine through a culture's literature, through its idioms, its metaphors, its self-image. It usually doesn't matter if they're true or not, because they're so deeply embedded. The tropes, structure, and incidents of these stories become the building blocks of future stories: not just direct retellings, but stories set centuries or millennia later, in dramatically different contexts.

The English-speaking West has lots of these foundational stories. You know what I'm talking about: Achilles. Odysseus. Julius Caesar. Jesus. The Fall of Rome. Arthur. The list goes on and on.

These stories and their derivatives have been told again and again through the years, recycled into mimetic literature (I see your protagonist's initials are J.C.-- how clever...) as well as genre. Quest fantasies have their roots in Arthurian legend, when they aren't explicitly modeled on it; the Hobbit drew on Beowulf in much the same way Game of Thrones draws on the Wars of the Roses.

Don't get me wrong. I love many of these stories. But they aren't mine in the same way as The Romance of Three Kingdoms, or the rise and fall of the Qin Empire, or the Chu/Han contention. (One exception is the story of Alexander the Great, because I was told the famous episodes-- Bucephalus, the Gordian Knot, his defeat of Darius-- very early, and in the same way I was told about Cao Cao.) The history of Sengoku Japan is in many ways more my story than that of Arthur, because the way it's told means it uses a lot of the same building blocks as the stories my great-aunt told me about Cao Cao and Guan Yu and Zhuge Liang. I mean, look at Koei's Musou (Warriors) games. Cao Cao and Nobunaga's character models look very similar, because they're drawing on the same narrative archetype.

A brief digression: Most Chinese immigrant narratives aren't my story, or the story of my family, either. I know there are lots of people for whom the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and/or Gene Luen Yang is powerful and resonant. But I (mostly) grew up in Hawaii, in a context where I was surrounded by Asian and hapa people. The fact that my high school girlfriend was Hakka and I was half Han meant more than the fact that we were both 'Chinese'.

This matters because, until now, I'd never really felt the shock of recognition-- of feeling like something that was one of my stories-- in English-language media which wasn't translated.

The closest I'd come to having that experience before was in reading Ken Liu's "The Man Who Ended History". I can't be objective about that story, because to me, the science fictional elements of it are the least compelling part of it. The parts about the Second Sino-Japanese war and the medical experimentation and war crimes of Unit 731, on the other hand, hit close to the bone. My family was nowhere near Manchuria during the war, but my grandfather built airstrips for the Flying Tigers, while my grandmother barely escaped cities before the Japanese captured them on several occasions. There's a lot to be said about Western narratives of World War II versus how things went in Asia, but this isn't the place for it. The point is, that story really worked for me, and it was clear that Ken Liu and I shared cultural reference points.

Now that I've read his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, it's clear that we share many foundational stories as well.

Before I go any further, let's be clear about something: When you have different foundational stories, you get different derived narratives. The archetypes you draw on aren't the same. The tropes and set pieces you draw on aren't either. The story structures and forms which seem natural to you can vary drastically. And it's very easy for people to tell you you're doing it wrong, or that a choice you've made is somehow bad or that a character is unsympathetic, when you're just drawing on a different tradition than what they're used to.

These are all challenges that Ken Liu had to take on in writing The Grace of Kings, which retells, in the form of Polynesian-tinged fantasy, the fall of the Qin Dynasty and the Chu-Han contention. The source material here is literally epic, both in scope and in terms of the stories and mythic resonance that have accreted around its cast over the years. There are bandits turned generals; divinely inspired strategists; titanic construction projects; crushing taxes; decadent courts; and people threatening to make soup out of their rivals' relatives. To this, Liu adds an archipelago, helium-filled airships, sentient narwhal-whales, clubs studded with shark teeth, a brilliant female general, fighting kites, and the occasional steam engine.

As of this writing, I am utterly incapable of either being objective about The Grace of Kings or judging how someone who was not raised on stories about Qin Shi Huang Di (aka Emperor Mapidéré), Zhang Liang (Luan Zya), and Liu Bang (Kuni Garu)-- to say nothing of King Kamehameha and his conquest of Hawaii-- would respond to the book.

Personally, I loved it.

Moreover, I'm impressed with how Ken Liu dealt with the many, many challenges which crop up when trying to adapt classical Chinese narratives for a western fantasy audience. (Trust me, it ain't easy.) Pick a naming scheme that's too familiar, and people will mentally cast everyone in your book as white; pick one too true to the source material, and readers won't be able to tell your characters apart; or engage in literal translation and exoticize your characters by calling them things like "Little Blossom". The naming schemes which are used The Grace of Kings dodge many of these pitfalls (though I will confess the Japanese-inflected names sometimes threw me a little).

Similarly, there are challenges which arise when trying to convey the degree to which historical and classical allusions were used as both conversational gambits and to convey coded messages among bureaucrats and the literati. The frequency with which the sage Kon Fiji (an approximation of Confucius) is cited in the text, and the range of ways in which his works are interpreted go a long way towards achieving the right effect. So does the strategic use of adapted songs and poems, and the deliberate unpacking of the symbolism around the names of Kuni Garu's children. (The list of challenges goes on and on-- I've barely scratched the surface here.)

The Grace of Kings is, to my mind, a tremendously important book. I don't just want it to be successful; I want it to open the door for more books which are built on non-default foundational narratives. I mean, I would gladly write a novel that takes what The Grace of Kings does for the Chu/Han contention and transposes it to the Three Kingdoms period. But I also know what it feels like to never have your stories told, and to be told you should engage with stories that are built on another culture's assumptions, or aimed at an audience which is only superficially similar to you.

More than that, I want multiple versions of each story to be viable. It's not like we can only have one King Arthur novel, after all. The Grace of Kings shouldn't be the only version of the Liu Bang/Xiang Yu conflict on the shelves, any more than On a Red Station Drifting should be the only rendition of Dream of a Red Chamber.

Foundational narratives are just that, after all: platforms to build off of.

Let's get building.

--

(Author's note: I sat on this for a week and a half before posting it. There are so many caveats I want to give: yes, obviously I work in and use the Western narrative tradition; no, I know my experience-- that anyone's experience-- of being ethnic Chinese and/or hapa in America is far from universal. But it seems more important to get the words out there than to adhere to the conventions of this sort of essay, or to fret about people challenging my authenticity, or whatever. So I'm going to pretend that this post isn't about me, just long enough to hit 'post', and then go to work. Right then. Pretending real hard.)

Year in Review 2014

2015-01-02T17:42:53Z

So it's a new year, and I'm up early for no discernible reason. I suppose I should probably talk about last year in writing.

I had three original fiction publications and one translation/reprint in 2014:

The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Re-Capitation (co-written with Marissa Lingen), On Spec, Winter

Atonement, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February

Calm (co-written with Marissa Lingen), Analog, September

Atonement (Polish reprint), Nowa Fantastika, Special Edition

On top of that, my poem "Queen of Axes" was included in timprov's The Reader: War for the Oaks. So that was cool.

My submissions stats indicate that this was the first year since I started submitting stories seriously again (in 2011) when I didn't get even 100 responses. Part of that was having less new stuff to send out - if I'm doing the math right, I wrote 3 new stories this year, one of which was a collaboration with mrissa - which I attribute to a combination of work, moving back to LA (oh, hi, I moved back to LA in September) for work, and getting back into playing console games. Part of it was that a lot of markets were taking forever and a day to get back to me.

On the upside, all that deliberation seems to have resulted in a decent number of sales (one of this year's publications, plus 4 more stories which could plausibly come out next year), so I can't really complain too much.

I also spent a fair amount of 2014 slogging through the first half of a novel. The timestamps on my research photos tell me I've been working on this one, off and on, since 2012, but still: 40,000 consecutive words of smart-ass security cadets getting swept up in political intrigue and black operations, plus another 10k or so in notes towards later scenes. It would be nice to finish a draft of Coup de Grace (working title) sometime in 2015, but I've got a game to ship first, so... we'll see how that goes.

Let's see, what else... oh, I'm signed up to help lead the Fourth Street Beginning Writers' Seminar, along with mrissa and a bunch of other fine people. It's a little weird realizing that at this point I'm being published semi-regularly in BCS and Analog. I would never have expected the latter, but I just got another check from them, so... Yeah. Life. It doesn't always take you where you think.

Back to radio silence here for a while, I suspect. Though I may do a post about my 2014 reading at some point, if the spirit moves.

Cryptic Enthusiasm

2014-10-22T07:12:23Z

ETA: This was supposed to be a comment on Pamela Dean's post about her and Pat Wrede's forthcoming Liavek collection. Leaving it here to preserve the comment thread.

Hurrah! Looking forward to it.

Further McLaw updates

2014-09-04T02:32:34Z

Patrick McLaw speaks for himself.

The claim that the books had nothing to do with things appears to have been walked back, as well.

Patrick McLaw update

2014-09-02T23:20:57Z

In light of yesterday's post, it's worth noting that the LA Times claims that McLaw's books had nothing to do with his suspension.

It's not clear from the article if McLaw's lawyer had more to say than "he is receiving treatment", so take the news with whatever serving of skepticism/salt you prefer.

What all schoolchildren learn

2014-09-01T23:15:51Z

So I expect many of you have heard about the Patrick McLaw case, wherein a someone noticed that a (black, male) 8th grade language arts teacher had published a novel involving a horrific school shooting, and the usual engines of scholastic and police overreaction kicked into gear. At least, that's what it looks like given the facts we've been provided, wherein McLaw's only enumerated offense is having written and published a book describing a terrorist act under a pseudonym. (For a lot of people, I fear, that will seem entirely sufficient justification. But more about that anon.)

The Jeffery Goldberg piece I linked to at the Atlantic is fairly good, overall, but I wanted to call out the rhetorical flourish he ends on, where he claims that this will be "teaching the children of their county something awful about the power of fear over reason." And I don't want to be a shit here, but seriously, Mr. Goldberg? The children of our country - especially the ones in junior high and up - already know.

Let me tell you something: When I was in high school, the administration thought I was one of the bad kids. I got in fights; I wore black all the time; I wrote bleak little stories about cannibalism; I regularly had teachers threatening me with punishment for making too much noise while being over a hundred feet from their classroom. The only reason I didn't get in more trouble than I did was that I was going to a private high school - the same school that Barack Obama went to - and the administration understood that they risked non-trivial losses of tuition, volunteer labor, and/or lawsuits if they exercised their authority over their pupils with the same enthusiasm that many public schools across the nation do.

Again, many of you are probably aware of the Florida school that banned Cory Doctorow's Little Brother from classrooms. It's worth noting that the principal did this by fiat, completely ignoring processes that were in place to handle complaints about the content of books.

Par for the fucking course.

In my personal experience (I've never been a teacher), school and school district administrators act autocratically not only towards their students, but often towards their teachers as well. This exercise of arbitrary authority frequently trickles down to the student/teacher level. Mouth off at the wrong time? Detention and/or a chat with the vice principal. Running in the hall/making too much noise/whatever? Detention, etc. And remember, this is *arbitrary* authority, because the students and the teachers all know who's likely to get away with bending (or even flagrantly breaking) rules because they're 'good kids', or because their parents are well-connected, and who'll have the hammer of discipline come down on them for the slightest misstep.

Back to Patrick McLaw. I mentioned a story I wrote in a creative writing class, about cannibalism. At one point, my mother described it to one of her friends, who expressed utter horror and a fervent desire to have me psychologically examined. As much as we want this kind of reaction to be an anomaly, look at the frequency with which parents challenge books and demand that they be banned from a school's curriculum. Fear of difference, of the grotesque, of anything that might tarnish our little darlings' precious (and probably non-existent) innocence is omnipresent in our society.

When that escalates to fear for children's lives (however unfounded), things get really ugly.

As you may have gathered by now, I did not have the best high school experience. After Clarion West, I channeled that into writing a black comedy-- working title: Casual Violence-- about a high school in Hawaii. There may have been explosions involved. I finished a round of revisions in August 2001. Then some planes crashed into some buildings.

That book never got sent to agents.

Look. As far as we know, Patrick McLaw did nothing wrong. But what we need to remember when we have these conversations about censorship and moral panic and Soviet-style discipline being imposed on educators is that for a significant portion of the population, this is the system working as intended. (See also: Sunil Dutta's vile argument for civilian subservience to cops.) In the day-to-day life of our schools, almost no one in a position of power is willing to argue for liberty instead of security, for fear of that age-old bleat: "Won't someone think of the chiiiiildren?" This is equally true in our media.

One last anecdote: When I was up for a National Merit scholarship, I walked into the room where the finalists were gathered with several of my friends, and the other students who were in the running-- and some of the teachers-- just stared at us. What the hell were we doing there? There had to be some kind of mistake. Never mind our test scores. We hadn't been properly anointed.

One National Merit Scholarship and an Master's degree from MIT later, it turns out all those things that my mom's friend and the administration thought about me were bullshit.

Whoever could have guessed?

(Title taken from W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939".)

Ten Random Songs

2014-08-30T22:02:56Z

Haven't posted in a while, huh? And I cannot brain, so this will be a meme rather than anything substantial.

10 random* songs taken off of "My Top Rated" iTunes playlist:

"Break Me Out", The Rescues, Let Loose the Horses
"Something for the Pain", Redlight King, Something for the Pain
"In So Many Ways", Bad Religion, No Substance
"Shot in the Dark", Within Temptation, The Unforgiving
"One Perfect Day", Lydia Denker, One Perfect Day
"Until Kingdom Come", Kamelot, The Fourth Legacy
"Vow", Garbage, Garbage
"Duck and Run", Three Doors Down, The Better Life
"Love Never Dies (Part I)", Apoptygma Berserk, 7
"Call Me (Instrumental)", In This Moment, The Dream (Bonus CD)

Observations:

- 4 of these songs (Bad Religion, Garbage, Three Doors Down, Apoptygma Berserk) predate the millennium, and are a fairly good snapshot of my musical taste in late high school and college.

- There's not as much of a clear line between the stuff from this decade and the '00s. Two songs which I thought were from the '10s actually came out in the '00s; what I was remembering was when I started listening to them, not when they were "from".

*: I did skip over some tracks that were in the playlist because of old metadata (i.e. I'd rated them at 4+ stars some time ago but don't like them that much any more). Still, it's a little surprising to me that only 2 of the tracks are metal in any appreciable way, given how hard my purchases have skewed in that direction over the last decade and a half. (One could argue for the In This Moment instrumental cover of Blondie, I guess.) Also of note: no anime or video game tracks.

Writing Process Blog Tour

2014-04-15T06:22:13Z

So several of my friends (most proximately mrissa) have been blogging about their current projects and writing process as a part of a Writing Process Blog Tour. The questions in the prompt were interesting enough that I figured it wouldn't be bad to join in. (You can find Marissa's post here.)

1) What am I working on?

My current project has the working title of Coup de Grace. It's a military science fiction novel set in a North America wracked by demographic transitions, climate change, and the after-effects of a coup that turned New York City and Washington DC into radioactive craters, triggered a continent-spanning civil war, and has led to the decades-long military occupation of much of the American South.

Carl Olson and his classmates are cadets at a military academy in Minneapolis which trains the security forces of the Pan-Columbian Republic (a state formed by the union of the US, Mexico, and Canada). They're sworn to defend the Constitution of the PCR-- which has been suspended as long as they've been alive-- against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But when the Commandant of the Academy has them rescue a dead Senator's heir from Separatist guerillas, it becomes clear to Carl and his friends that the line between patriotism and treason is a blurry one, and that hard-liners in the the Army and Senate regard them and their instructors as enemies of the state.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

The impetus that prompted me to write Coup de Grace was what I perceived as the cookie-cutter template of many dystopias. Take an oppressive central government, add in one or more young people who, through inclination or circumstance, are primed to rebel, and give them an external group of freedom fighters to join. Don't get me wrong: there are books which use that template that I've enjoyed. But it made me wonder what a differently-biased dystopia, which actually tried to address the complexities of politics and political violence, would look like.

As such, the Pan-Columbian Republic is more like present-day China or Russia than the Districts of the Hunger Games. The rebels fighting to overthrow it aren't noble freedom fighters-- they're largely neo-Confederates, Dominionists, and other reactionaries who feel they would be justified in killing large swaths of the (majority-Hispanic) population. Meanwhile, our protagonists are a part of the system, and have reasons to love their country as well as an acute awareness of its flaws and internal divisions.

While Coup isn't near-future SF, the PCR's long war and censorship regime have both slowed and maintained technology to the point where the tech permeating everyday life is recognizable, rather than being in decay, or so advanced it might as well be magic. Carl and his friends play for the Academy e-sports team, and wear headsets which function as cell phones and computers (as well as heads-up-displays in combat). People still drive cars, though they're all hybrid or electric, but everyone except cops, truckers, and the military takes buses and light rail to get places. The future is unevenly distributed, and it's left much of the PCR behind.

I'm also doing my best to take the military dimensions of the novel seriously, without letting the jargon and command structure overwhelm everything. Because Carl and his friends are both soldiers and cadets, they have to do PT, take classes, and have to practice and qualify with their weapons. They swear a lot, in both Spanish and English. They have a chain of command, rules of engagement, and have to follow orders. They practice muzzle and trigger discipline.

They also kill a lot of people, and have to live with the consequences.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I tend to joke about how upbeat and cheery my work is, but I don't set out to be dark. It's just that I'm hyper-aware of the conventions of (modern, popular, English language) narrative and how they tend to produce a very constrained range of content, characters, and points of sympathy. One of several ways I respond to these constraints is to twist things around; to interrogate the conventions that annoy me and follow through on the implications of what I find. (For example: the Braveheart trope, or all freedom fighters are good! Or raw jingoism, where anything Our Boys do is good! Yeah. About that...)

Another factor that motivates a lot of my narrative choices is compassion. I ask myself questions like, "What would drive someone to join the Nazgul?" and try not to stop at the first (read: glib) answer. People mostly aren't cardboard villains or cartoon heroes, and it doesn't add to our stories when we portray them that way. Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite creators for this reason. See his depictions of Princess Kushana in Nausicaa, Lady Eboshi and Jigo in Princess Mononoke, and Yubaba in Spirited Away. These are nuanced and comprehensible characters, even when they're being selfish, proud, or opposing the protagonists.

That doesn't mean they're always right, mind you. But how boring stories would be-- and how alien the characters in them would seem-- if they were always right!

4) How does your writing process work?

My writing process, such as it, is often kick-started by coming up with particularly vivid set-pieces. Once I've got one or two set-pieces to drive toward-- a magister who can turn his staff into an powerful electromagnet facing down a hallway full of crossbowmen, for example-- I start poking at the implications and consequences of a world where such things make sense. Often the initial phrase or image that inspired a book or story doesn't survive the development process. That's fine; ideas are cheap.

Once I feel like I have a clear idea of what happens first, I start writing. My process from there involves a lot of sitting around figuring out what needs to happen next. Some people can think on the page, throwing stuff at the wall during their early drafts and seeing what sticks, but that doesn't usually work very well for me. Doing my thinking before I start writing frees me up to improvise within constraints, rather than first being paralyzed by possibilities, and then paralyzed by the conviction that I've taken a wrong turn and won't be able to continue until I figure out how many of the pages I've just written need to be thrown away.

That said, while I often need to pause and think about what comes next (and sometimes research specific topics, like riverboats of the Yangtze, or political philosophy), I usually have a fairly clear notion of where I'm going. Especially with longer works, like books or novelettes-- I've never written a novella, and given how few places are looking to buy them, I don't mean to start-- I tend to have both a bunch of snippets from the end of the story written before I write the middle, and elaborate playlists and mixes made up of songs that will get my head in the right space and remind me of the emotional and dramatic beats I intend to hit. The typical result of this is that writing the middle of any story is the hard part-- by the time I get to the end, I tend to have a lot more clarity, as well as bits of prose that I can incorporate or discard in my wild rush to the finish.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on, and how I think about and do these sorts of things.

The standard way of doing this "tour" seem to have three people lined up to follow you next week, but I don't really like pushing chain letters or posts on my friends. So here is Marissa Lingen's process post (also linked to at the start of this post), and Michael Merriam's. If you feel like continuing things with a post of your own, indicate that in comments.

List of proposed 4th Street panels

2014-04-01T05:34:58Z

I just posted a list of panels over in the 4th_st_fantasy community, for those who are interested.

The Rhetoric of Blood

2014-02-24T08:12:53Z

So my guest post for the Book of Apex 4 - The Rhetoric of Blood - is up at Many a True Nerd. In it, I talk about the conflation of "realism" with darkness in fiction, why I write dark stuff, and how some topics are inherently dark while others get depicted that way for other reasons.

If that sounds at all interesting to you, go check it out.

Interview @ Many a True Nerd

2014-02-16T23:01:34Z

So as a part of the Book of Apex 4 blog tour, my story "Ironheart" (along with stories by swan_tower and matociquala) got reviewed over at Many a True Nerd.

Lizzie S. from Many a True Nerd also interviewed me about the genesis of "Ironheart", game systems, my writing process, and (indirectly) my fixation on Oda Nobunaga.

Lizzie and Claire will be hosting a guest post written by yours truly in a little less than a week as well, and I'll post a link here when that goes live.

Story up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

2014-02-06T16:31:15Z

So my story "Atonement" is up on BCS today. It's set in a fantasy Sogdia, and is full of female soldiers, hungry ghosts, eunuch exorcists, Buddhist monks, Zoroastrians, and daevas. Spread the word, if you're so inclined.

2013 in review

2014-01-04T04:41:09Z

...or parts of it, at any rate.

2013 was split pretty much exactly in half for me - before July 1st, when I was unemployed and looking for work, and after July 1st, when I started working at my current employer. Before July, I was reading and writing fairly prolifically, but was also a bit of an emotional wreck. Long-term unemployment, it turns out, is no cakewalk, especially when you're on your second unemployment extension, your benefit checks have shrunk because of the sequester, and you're starting to wonder whether you're secretly really bad at your job, because if you weren't, wouldn't someone have hired you already? So yeah. Fun times.

After I got my offer letter, I set my start date, went to 4th Street, and then came home and immediately plunged back into making games. The combination of work + commute means that if I leave home at ~8 AM, I'll usually get home at... 8 PM. Financial security and a steady paycheck are wonderful, but as a result, my reading and writing time took a pretty big hit in the second half of the year.

From what I can make of my notes, I finished 4 stories in collaboration with mrissa and 3 stories on my own last year. I sold 2 stories at the end of January, and another in September, while 4 of my stories saw print:

Novelette

"Matron Saint of Murder", in Crowded #1. (iOS only)

Short Stories

"Blood Remembers", in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #117.

"Milk Run" (written with mrissa), in Analog, July/August 2013.

"On the Weaponization of Flora and Fauna" (written with mrissa), in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #129.

"Weaponization..." was the one of the stories that sold in January.

My final sale percentage for the year was 2.75% (3 acceptances, 106 rejections). I also managed to write ~30,000 words towards a draft of a novel. (The working title is Coup de Grace. Dystopian SF about a military/secret police academy. Probably not marketable as YA.)

Books read, from June-December 2013

June

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Company Man
Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Anthony Price, A New Kind of War
Mark Waid, Irredeemable v. 9
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

July

Megan Crewe, The Way We Fall
Warren Ellis, Thunderbolts
Warren Ellis, Stormwatch - A Finer World
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
Anthony Price, A Prospect of Vengeance

August

Dorothy Dunnett, Gemini
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Christopher Hibbert, The Borgias and their Enemies
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

September

Miles Cameron, The Red Knight
Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (reread for a panel)
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (reread for a panel)

October

R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet
Mike Carey, The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sank Twice
James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
Alastair Reynolds, Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

November

James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate
Dorothy Dunnett, King Hereafter
Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves
Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: a History of China to 1600
Masami Tsuda, Kare Kano Vols. 1-12 (re-read)

December

Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
Jonathan Hickman, Secret Warriors Omnibus
Ian Tregillis, Something more than night
Django Wexler, The Thousand Names

On top of everything else, I was sick as a dog through the holidays, which meant I basically did nothing but watch anime on Crunchyroll. While most of it wasn't from the last year, it led me to suspect that the reviewer who wrote Tor.com's "Ten best shows of 2013" and I don't see eye-to-eye on very much.

Anime shows finished in the last week and a half

* Another (12 episodes)
* Attack on Titan (25 episodes) - Some shocking moments, but has pacing issues. (Also, spent too much time explaining the obvious: i.e. "If you only have one chance at victory, take it.")
* Durarara (25 episodes) - I would strongly suggest people who're interested in urban fantasy watch this. It has some significant flaws, but does several things I found interesting.
* Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (12 episodes)
* Henneko (12 episodes) - Meh. Watched this for Tsukiko.
* I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Got a Job (12 episodes)
* Kokoro Connect (17 episodes) - Inaba is the best.
* My Little Monster (13 episodes)
* My Mental Choices are Completely Interfering with my School Romantic Comedy (10 episodes) - Double Meh. I watched this for Yukihira.
* The Pet Girl of Sakurasou (24 episodes) - Quite good, and far better than the title would suggest.
* Toradora (25 episodes) - Really liked this one.

Yes, I watched a fair amount of crap. I was sick and needed brain candy.

Farthing Party con report: III

2013-10-19T19:05:34Z

Been completely smashed by work. Wrote this earlier in the week but never got around to posting it due to the tired.

9/28 - 3:30 - John M. Ford
papersky moderating

This ended up being more a memorial panel than a discussion panel. As mrissa noted in her Con Report, this was probably inevitable - there is a great deal of chewy stuff that one could dig into in any given Mike Ford novel, and they are sufficiently different from each other that it would be challenging to generalize except at a very high level.

Relevant Points:

* JMF changed the rules of every form he worked in. For example, in Original Series Star Trek novels, Kirk & Spock must now appear as non-infants, and before page 120 or so.

* He had a horror of being obvious. If he had a fault as a writer, it was in the opposite direction. His work does not resemble itself particularly, and came out during a time period when this was more or less career suicide. These days, editors can tell their marketing staff things like, "Don't sweat that every one of her books is in a different subgenre - she's Gene Wolfe." This was not a viable option at the time.

* Mike did amazing work in gaming as well as SFF. He wrote the award-winning Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues for Paranoia, as well as GURPS Time Travel, in which he explained time travel's possibilities in depth for basically nothing. (That's a 100+ page sourcebook for ~$2,000. Writing RPG books is just not worth it economically unless you're writing for WotC, as I have grounds to know)

* Mike had a very strong moral sensibility - not the censorious kind, but the genuinely humane sort - both in private life and in his work. On hearing a story about foster children getting up from table before dessert and explaining it by saying "Ice cream is for your real children," his response was, "There's more of human evil in that than in all of Hannibal Lecter."

* Mike died intestate, which led to huge issues due to his (hostile) family getting the rights to his work and denying publication. If you're a writer, make a will that addresses your literary estate. (Also, get used - or new, where available - copies of Mike Ford's books and pass them around. They're brilliant.)

* Mike's unfinished novel, Aspects, will be released by Tor relatively soon. It's scaled-up continental fantasy w/ Trains, and Tooth & Claw was written in conversation with it. Multiple panelists felt strongly that it should have been a key part of the fantasy genre's conversation with itself for the last decade or so.

Good Quotes:

* (To JMF) "Mike, you've lost me here, and if you've lost me, then you've lost a lot of other people."

* "Mike was better at leaving me confused and being okay with it than anyone else."

* "Mike had this weird tendency to get bad copy edits, for some reason."

* JMF quote in response to copy edits: "I think someone is being stupid here and I don't think it's me."

* (Paraphrased) "Mike's work was proof that excellence is possible. It's right there, look!"

Farthing Party con report: II

2013-10-07T04:29:56Z

So the density of my notes trailed off a bit as the con went on, based on whether I was on the panel or not, and a variety of other factors. Later installments will probably be shorter.

9/28 - 12 PM - Black Wine
papersky moderating.

This panel was a discussion of Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine, which won multiple awards (The Tiptree, the Prix Aurora, and the Crawford) when it was released in 1996 and sank without a trace commercially. It's just been reprinted by Five Rivers Press.

Candas was one of my Clarion West instructors, way back in 2000, and I read the Hawaii State Library's copy of Black Wine before going to Clarion. I recall finding it disturbing and unsettling on several fronts, though apparently not as intense as some of the panelists and other audience members did.

Black Wine can be argued to be either SF or Fantasy because it never explains itself, and doesn't provide the reader clear cues as to how it should be read. In fact, large swaths of the setting aren't described in any detail, forcing the reader to fill in the other details for themselves. It's pretty clear that this was a deliberate choice; Black Wine absolutely doesn't straddle genres by accident. The gothic and horror elements contrast with the SFnal and fantastic ones in ways that refuse the reader clarity as to what sort of book they're reading.

The original Tor cover was black-on-black, minimalist, and a clear marketing failure. Of the people in the panel and in the audience who hadn't had the book recommended to them, a good number of them picked it up by mistake. (I read it because I wanted to read at least one thing by each of my instructors, a goal which I signally failed to meet. I also managed to read The Deep, which was possibly the least representative John Crowley novel I could've read.) Many thought it would be a classical or modern gothic novel - and, to be fair, it has a fairly gothic sensibility - but the consensus was that Black Wine undermines the Gothic's conventions by having the things behind the tapestry be *truly horrible*, and not providing last-minute saves for its POV characters.

Despite all this, the pacing of revelation in Black Wine is slow, and the narrative threads join up at a leisurely pace. This leaves readers with lots of room to try to piece together its world. 7 languages are mentioned, and the inability to express ideas in a particular language is used for character development. Differences in technology and resources across cultures cut in several ways; there are cultures of airship sailors and sea-bound merchanters who don't really like each other and have different traditions. The book is full of different cultures, spread across a wide variety of climactic zones - it's a whole planet. Men can have kids together; Women too; and who knows how it works? Not the reader. Lots of things like that are mentioned and left unexplained.

The perspective on slavery in Black Wine is much closer, more intimate, and less fetishized than (say) Sanderson's Mistborn, where the darkness is both abstracted and seen through the male gaze. Comparable works mentioned included the Le Guin's Voices and Gifts, and Carla Speed McNeill's Finder, less for the slavery and awfulness and more for the sense of a rich world with real cultural barriers dividing its people.

One of the most interesting points brought up by the book and the panel: You can run away from the place you're raised, but how much of your terrible culture are you going to carry with you?

9/28 - 1 PM - Lunch

We went and got lunch at a lovely little waffle and crepe place over on Saint-Denis. The operator put fruit into the waffle batter, and I had two! Mmm. Strawberry and appple.

9/28 - 2:30 PM - Maybe it's Sunspots
papersky moderating.

Lots of people, including papersky, mrissa, and autopope (not present) have been having unusually productive time writing of late, for values of "productive" that verge on compulsion. The discussion was on process, and what sorts of things seem correlated to this outpouring of words.

Notable Conversation threads:

* papersky wrote Farthing in 19 days. But when she went back to look, she wrote her other books in not too many more days of work (20-30 odd) - they were just spread out over months and years.

* Another panelist noted that you can grind & grind & grind for years, and then you can't cross the street without bits of books hailing down and waving flaming swords at you. Wrote a novella on an iPad in the middle of her mother's disassembled house.

* Hypothesis: Story can get backed up, but will often find its way out. Happiness (or at least the lack of pain/emotional distractions) is a causal factor, rather than the result of productivity.

* It can often be difficult to talk about this kind of productivity (Mike Ford called it "Finding the Spigot") in ways that won't produce hostility/envy from other writers, even though it's far from an unalloyed good thing. mrissa's rules for surviving this period:

1) No ruining her hands.
2) No ruining her health.
3) No ruining her relationships.

All three are real risks.

* Other things go by the wayside when a writer is in a compulsive high-productivity state. Reading, watching TV, other social or writing obligations, drinking tea, cooking dinner. While reading and researching can support your writing, *needing* to do so can derail this sort of thing.

* Music (especially when you get earwormed) can be either a spur to creativity or a huge impediment to it. Buying lots of food can make keeping up momentum easier. Having food stored up, the right word processor, and/or music for the story or book you're working on are all just different ways of greasing the skids.

* mrissa had never before finished a novel and then done other things and written a flash piece the same night. Upon papersky finishing Among Others, she stopped writing for months, and had to ask herself, "What do I do when I'm not writing?"

* mrissa described writing short stories as trying to fill shotglasses from a tap one after another, while writing novels was more like filling a barrel. Writing lots of short stories all at once is potentially a liability, not just because you have to scramble for new stories to finish, but because the limited # of publications spots most markets have means you end up competing with yourself.

* Intermittent reinforcement can drive animals to superstition - superstitious pigeons! Many writers are superstitious pigeons about writing, clinging to things that worked for them last time. Some writers get their bad habits linked to their writing; it's a good idea to making sure not to link your writing to that sort of thing, or to using a particular word processor, or a particular kind of stationery.

* mrissa is a superstitious pigeon the other way; taking Sunday off is insurance. She's also trunked more stories than usual lately, because when there's not enough story there even with the spigot on...

Good or memorable lines:

* mrissa, quoting me: "The hard part of writing is the thinking."

* "If all you care about is word count, no one is more productive than Mike Resnick."

* "Strawberries, Creme Fraiche, and Brown Sugar. Eat this, young writers!"

* papersky (paraphrased) - "I resent the Romantic notion of urgency in art."

More anon.

Farthing Party con report: I

2013-10-06T20:12:12Z

So last weekend was (the last) Farthing Party. Farthing is always a lovely time, and as some of our dear friends couldn't make it this year, I have extricated myself from uffish slumber in order to recount some of the discussions that were had. Food will probably get discussed also, though not in any great detail, since most of the time I would be making repetitive contented noises.

Any exclamation points and/or unnecessary capitalization in panel titles are my responsibility/fault, as are parenthetical comments.

9/28 - 10 AM - A Good Read

Slept through this one, alas.

9/28 - 11 AM - Mad SCIENCE!
mrissa moderating.

This one started out with a series of jokes about an attendee's 'one velociraptor per child program' T-shirt. No velociraptor left behind! A velociraptor in every pot, and pot in every velociraptor! Alas, it was made clear in sonorous tones that no mainstream candidate was likely to endorse any variation on this platform. (Apparently velociraptors are the 4th rail of politics.)

Notable conversation threads:

* Real science has human studies boards and lots of paperwork. One of the appeals of mad science these days is saying "screw the paperwork!" (though mrissa has a story about the credibility of planet-destroying threats sans experimental data...), but if you do that these days, people go "they're mad!" Dr. Chromedome in The Tick is a good example here - "The Mad Scientist does not wear the 'Hello My Name Is' badge! Warm fuzzy nice nice! What is the point of science if no one gets hurt?"

* Modern depictions of mad science often have sexual overtones. See Girl Genius's spark collaborations, Young Frankenstein, and the like.

* Wernher Von Braun as Gary Stu/ultimate 'fictional' mad scientist, despite being real. Apparently the Tom Lehrer song made Von Braun angry because he actually *was* learning Chinese.

* Dr. Frankenstein was an undergraduate, both in age and temperament. Not only do particular forms of hubris manifest themselves most often in young people (who imagine they can overthrow all previous knowledge), but undergrads tend to make bad parents as well.

* Cyteen has lots of parallels to Frankenstein. Ariane Emory was a terrible mom.

* Dr. Frankenstein was also a mad alchemist, of the sort that had to flee from city to city and inflate their claims massively in order to get patronage and funding. Part-time alchemists mostly concluded that alchemy was crap and didn't work.

* Mad science is visually striking, which is why it showed up so often in early film and (more recently) in comics, where the special effects budget isn't as much of a limiting factor as in film.

* We may not recognize mad science because the scale is wrong. Cell phones in your pocket aren't ginormous death rays. Counterpoint: Supercolliders and the National Ignition Facility aren't small in scale. (Counter-counterpoint: But how many nations have we ignited recently?)

* Mad Science narratives don't cope well with corporate science and teamwork. Single scientist narratives don't work well these days, even though no one person at Google understands the entirety of how Google Search works in detail.

* Also, corporations doing things tend to seem more normal and "sane", even when what they're doing would be psychopathic on a personal level. See fracking tainting water supplies, and the same crew of liars from Merchants of Doubt being the ones defending both the Tobacco industry and denying Global Warming.

* Geoengineering is deeply mad science. See people seeding the Pacific ocean with iron because "we've got to do something!" Also covered in Kim Stanley Robinson's 40 Signs of Rain and Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising.

* Stalinist science was plenty mad. See Lysenkoism, and the plans to build a dam across the Bering Straight to melt the Arctic. Which the US was cool with, apparently. (Man, the Cold War was nuts.)

Good or groan-worthy lines:

* "Crows have 5 primary flight feathers, while ravens have 4. The difference between these birds is literally a matter of a pinion."

* "I'm not a mad scientist, I'm a mildly deranged technologist."

* "Too mad scientists, not enough hunchbacks." (Apparently a saying at Tor.)

* All models are wrong, but some are useful. Computer modeling is not magic; believing the model is mad.

* "We’ve been good. We deserve to have pygmy mammoths."