Nancy's Blog

Still Beginning a Story

2012-01-29T13:59:00.000-08:00

An idea has begun to form for my projected story. Still no actual words keyed in, since I don't yet have the characters. I know what characters the story needs (some of them anyway), but the individuals aren't there yet, and I never start writing until I can feel them in my mind, hear their voices, see their mannerisms.

What I have thus far is an idea for a specific problem aboard a specific kind of ship. The problem interests me. I also have a tentative solution, and have been doing research to see if the solution is feasible. Then I hit a snag: I just don't have enough engineering smarts to know if what I want to do is plausible, ridiculous, or just in need of support from fresh scientific advances, conveyed through the science fiction obfuscation known as "hand waving." Further research on the Internet only confuses me more.

So I do what I always do when stuck on technical issues: I send out a begging, pleading, groveling email to Mike Flynn.

He responds with two dense pages of information and diagrams. My savior! I read through them one, twice, three times. Yes, I can understand this. Barely.

Then all work on the story stops for the weekend, while I devote my writing hours to the student manuscripts for my Tuesday night class at Hugo House, plus reading two more submissions for Taos Toolbox this summer. Tomorrow -- creating characters and voice. I hope.

Beginning a Story

2012-01-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

How does one begin a story? Not the opening paragraphs but the concept, the idea, the situation?

I am doing this now. I owe a story to a theme anthology, and all I have is the theme given to me by the editor (interstellar flight, done realistically). So far, these are the steps I've taken:

Find information about proposed interstellar craft. It turns out a whole raft of scientists have workable ideas on this (no STAR TREK dilithium crystals). The editor sent me some articles. Some I got from the Internet. That led me to order the book ENTERING SPACE (Robert Zubin), which arrived yesterday and constitutes today's reading. Do I usually do this much research for a short story? No. But I really want to be in this anthology, and anyway the topic interests me.
Read the material and mark up everything. Underlining for facts, notes in the margin for possible story ideas. This morning I waded through a technical article on lighting for agriculture aboard a long-term ship. Fortunately, I don't need to understand all the math.
If any ideas strike a genuine spark, stop research, write it down, and continue research in light of that idea. So far, this has not happened.
Go through a file I keep of interesting character sketches to see if any of them seem to mesh with my notes-for-an-idea-that-isn't-really-there-yet. Nope, nothing strikes me.

That's as far as I've gotten in the process. Let's hope a few more days produces a usable story idea. It has in the past, so I'm optimistic. They key criterion: I must be excited about the idea. Stay tuned.

Baffled At the Movies

2012-01-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

In the last week or so I saw two more movies, and both confused me -- although for different reasons.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY features the always wonderful Gary Oldman as George Smiley of British Intelligence. A mole has invaded the highest reaches of MI-5. It can only be one of five men, and Smiley is charged by Control, who has been forced out unfairly from the organization, with finding out which one. Complicated intrigues ensue. They were so complicated, in fact, that I had trouble following them all, and I'm still not sure I understand exactly what went on. My movie companion, Elizabeth Stephan, understood more than I did and kindly explained it to me, but she was fuzzy on a few points, too. It didn't help that these Brits, including Smiley, are so low-key and emotionally controlled that they are barely breathing. Still, the movie is interesting and very atmospheric, and I did enjoy it.

What to say about THE ARTIST? It won the Golden Globe for Best Picture; it will certainly be nominated for an Oscar; everyone loves it. Except me.

The film is both a silent movie and an homage to the silents. It's entertaining, well made, and in parts, fun. But the story, that of a silent film star who cannot make the transition to talkies, is simple and simply handled (unlike the wonderful 1950 Billy Wilder movie SUNSET BOULEVARD). It mixes what purports to be real anguish of identity with cartoonish solutions, such as Oldman's dog running blocks to get a policeman when Oldman sets his house afire ("What, Lassie -- Timmy fell down the well?!") The movie feels too long. But mostly it's a cute gimmick, going back to an earlier form -- sort of like driving an ox cart to the Apple store. I just cannot see this as the best movie of the year. I am baffled as to why the audience clapped so enthusiastically at the end.

Perhaps they just appreciate, more than I, a simple and innocent tale with a happy ending. Or maybe the dancing. The dancing is terrific. But --

Adventures in Publishing

2012-01-18T07:17:00.000-08:00

Literary technology continues to advance, while those of us who are electronically challenged struggle to keep up. I have a bunch of my backlist books up for sale on the Kindle and Nook, but some are still missing (notably the PROBABILITY SERIES). Nonetheless, my next project leaps into the next stage of e-books. All right, I don't exactly leap: more like stumble after Greg Bear and the MONGOLIAD crowd. Sort of.

Subtext is a comparatively new company (as of last October) offering a free app for, so far, just the iPad, although more platforms are planned. The app "overlays" a book, and allows the reader to (1) notate anything he wants by pressing an icon in the margin, (2) see what every other user of the app has said in the margin, and comment on the comment, so that a genuine book-club conversation gets going, and (3) see what the author has put in the margin. That's where I come in. In April Tachyon is bringing out my stand-alone novella, AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL, and I will be annotating it.

With what? Well, FALL is a story about an unusual form of eco-terrorism. I did a lot of research, and some of that will be included. I can also comment on why I made the literary choices I did while writing the book -- and then get reader feedback. I (and anyone else) can link to websites, videos, anything pertinent.

I'm very excited about doing this. So far, Subtext has offered its app for only a few dozen books. Among them are DANCES WITH DRAGONS, annotated by George R.R. Martin's researcher; A RELIABLE WIFE, annotated by author Robert Goolrick; and the Nathaniel West classic MISS LONELY HEARTS, annotated by a literature professor.

Check out the app on its website, where a video gives details: www.subtext.com

Also electronic: I have a reprint story at www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/always-true-to-thee-in-my-fashion/ Future fashionistas!

Jonathan Franzen

2012-01-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Franzen, the darling of American literary circles, published his novel FREEDOM a year and a half ago. I didn't read it then, because I hadn't much liked his previous book, THE CORRECTIONS. That book's prose struck me as first lush and rich, and later as too rich, like being forced to consume dish after dish of baklava. Also, I found the characters pretty unlikeable.

None of this is true of FREEDOM. Franzen has restrained his prose, and his attitude toward his characters has changed. In THE CORRECTIONS he seemed to be examining them under a microscope, in order to watch them squirm in close-up. FREEDOM is warmer, with more empathy for every member of the Berglund family, all of whom (except one) possess a large, very human capacity to make wrong decisions as they try to balance passion, sense, and the reactions of their neighbors and relatives. There is a lot of sheer pain on display here, but also redemption. And in the end the book affirms the power of love -- even tattered, much-abused, time-worn love.

Frantzen also preserves what I thought of as a strength in THE CORRECTIONS: a concern for the world beyond the family. Walter Berglund is concerned with preserving endangered species (sort of). Joey Berglund gets involved in civilian contracts for the war effort in Iraq. The national economy goes bad, with real effects on everybody. Social mores change. Rock stars age, and their music, once cutting edge, becomes "old-fashioned." The great Victorian novels often covered decades of their protagonists' lives, but contemporary literature has tended more to focus on short term, within a closed circle. Franzen opens up the novel again.

In short, I recommend this book. Complex people in complex situations, many of which the characters often manage to make worse -- but sometimes better. Just like real people.

Travel, Good and Bad

2012-01-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

I have bad plane karma. Returning to Seattle from the East Coast, my flight was canceled: unrested pilots, or pilot unrest, or something. I was informed of this by a phone call from Orbitz at 3:00 a.m. Much drama in rebooking ("May I speak to your supervisor, please?"), much delay, but I finally got home. This happens to me all the time. It's a good thing I don't fly over the pole; I'd be stuck overnight on an ice floe. "We're sorry, but the next stage of your flight has been canceled due to insufficiently rested polar bears."

As for the good travel -- it's very good. Arc Manor, a rapidly growing small press, is offering a Bahama cruise "for the serious writer" next December. Faculty includes me, Mike Resnick, best-selling author Kevin J. Anderson, Jack Skillingstead, Paul Cook, Rebecca Moesta, editor Toni Weisskopf, and super-agent Eleanor Wood, who knows everything there is to know about publishing SF. Classes will be intense and useful, and after class there will be a lot of schmoozing both on-board and at the ports of call. There is a 40% discount for signing up before March 31. You can learn more at the cruise website, www.SailSuccess.com

Come get in one last working vacation before the Mayan calendar ends the world December 21!

Diverse at the Movies

2012-01-04T05:53:00.000-08:00

I have been a bad blogger. My excuse is much holiday activity -- which included a lot of movies. Here is my take on three of them:

WAR HORSE: I didn't much like this. It's really two movies. One is a sentimental boy-and-his-horse story that could have used some of Harlan Ellison's tartness from "A Boy and His Dog" (although there is nobody here to feed to the horse, which is a herbivore anyway, so maybe not THAT much tartness.) The second, far more interesting movie is the trench warfare of World War I, here depicted in appalling, riveting detail. I wanted to see more of that story, with its human courage and cowardice. In fact, the best scene in the movie involves a German and a British soldier (not the horse's owner) who tentatively, carefully, both emerge from their trenches to join in freeing the horse from barbed wire. The tension shoots up as you wonder if anyone will shoot. In contrast, I could have done with fewer endless scenes of the horse cantering against a setting sun, a rising sun, or a noonday sun. This will undoubtedly be nominated for an Oscar, but let's hope it doesn't win.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN: This one pretty much lacks any substantial story, but I liked it for the performances. Kenneth Branaugh is Lawrence Olivier, immensely frustrated by trying to direct a movie with a female star who doesn't show up for work on time, doesn't show up at all, can't get her lines right, and nonetheless lights up the screen in a way that he knows he does not. Michelle Williams is a credible Marilyn Monroe, maybe not as voluptuous (my father was disappointed) but with all the ultra-feminine tricks down pat. Zoe Wannamaker plays Paula Strassberg, Marilyn's "method" coach, and she is a repulsive spider of a woman feeding off Marilyn, who in turn feeds desperately off whatever adoration she can create in anyone at all. My companion at the movies said that the film added nothing to his knowledge of Monroe, but I thought it at least brought that knowledge to life.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2: When you go to the movies in a clump of family, you don't always get to choose the movie. I fought against this choice, lost, and ended up glad to see it anyway. It is a movie without pretensions (unlike WAR HORSE). It's ridiculous and over-the-top and doesn't pretend to be anything else. That lets the viewer just laugh and gasp along: at the plot twists, the derring-do, the silly tech, the gorgeous and absurdly deadly actors. I was not bored. On the other hand, an hour after I left the theater, the plot had mostly vanished from my mind. What were they trying to do again? Why? But -- a lot of fun while it lasted.

Stuff

2011-12-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

I have been very negligent lately about blogging, as holiday preparations and parties consume my time. However, here is a random round-up of information, observations, and recommendations:

I just finished reading Jack McDevitt's novel FIREBIRD. Set in the far future, it concerns an art historian, space ships mysteriously disappearing in the space-time continuum, and AIs that may or may not be worth considering equal to humans. I enjoyed it a lot.

January 10 I start teaching a critique class in fiction at Hugo House in Seattle. This runs for ten Tuesday nights, along the lines of a mini-Clarion. If you're interested, you can find out more on-line at http://hugohouse.org/classes/hugo-classes

I have finished the second draft of my fantasy novel. Still untitled, it is also still too long (139,000 words). This is being written on spec, and my agent as yet does not even know I've been working on it (he will find out soon). One more draft, after the holidays are over.

Christmas Day, Jack and I fly East to visit my family. Last year we made it out of Newark Airport two hours before a massive snowstorm shut it down, stranding travelers for days. Send good thoughts my way that we don't get storms this year.

David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have taken my story "Eliot Wrote" for their Best of the Year volume.

Happy Holidays to All!

Placebos

2011-12-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

The December 12 NEW YORKER contains an astonishing article by Michael Specter, "The Power of Nothing." It is an overview of clinical studies of the placebo effect, including an interview with the world's foremost researcher into placebos, Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School. The article, carefully non-biased, nonetheless shows determined believers in "alternative medicine" chipping away at the medical establishment. Kaptchuk's presence at Harvard, as a full professor, is proof of that. He holds neither a Ph.D. nor an M.D., yet has published in the most respected journals in the world.

The trouble with alternative medicine, in my view, is that it's such a hodge-podge. It includes out-and-out nuts, serious practitioners of herbology, religious faith healers, good doctors, and evil scams (remember laetrile? I had a friend who died of cancer, refusing conventional treatment and instead going to Mexico for dosing with apricot pits.) How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

One way is by clinical trials. The article says that some of these have shown impressive results from placebos, especially in the areas of pain and chronic illness. Not so much with straightforward infection -- if you have bubonic plague, you need an antibiotic. But the whole basis of alternative medicine, that the mind can profoundly influence the body, has shown to be true in other types of disease.

These studies get very specific. Among the findings about placebos:

Conditioning techniques affect outcomes. People first given morphine and later a placebo have a different neurochemical response than those first given ibuprofen and later a placebo.

An injection of saline into a patient who has Parkinson's disease and has been told that the saline will help him, then produces more of the dopamine that his brain lacks.

As placebos, capsules produce a greater effect than tablets, and injections a greater effect still. Colored pills relieve pain better than white ones. Two pills produce more effect than one, even if both are no more than sugar.

Most astonishing of all: In some studies the placebo effect works even when the patients are TOLD it is a placebo, if the telling is done right. In the end, Ted Kaptchuk maintains, much comes down to the nature of the patient-doctor interaction. And this is where American medicine may often be lacking.

Party

2011-12-11T21:45:00.000-08:00

Saturday night Jack and I gave a Christmas party, at which we all played Charades using titles of science fiction movies, stories, and novels. Aside from some dissent on the fairness of including some difficult titles (how do you act out "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"?), a good time was had by all. The undisputed star at both performing charades and guessing them was Ted Chiang. Here is Ted performing, while Jack looks on, either bewildered or unimpressed:Vonda McIntyre and Eileen Gunn discuss possible titles:

Nancy Kress gives up guessing in favor of drinking, while John Berry protests having his picture taken:

What did any of this have to do with Christmas? Not much. But it was fun.

Divided at the Movies

2011-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I saw Martin Scorsese's new movie, HUGO, with Jack Skillingstead and Ted and Christine Kosmatka. Seldom have I been with such deeply divided movie goers.

HUGO flirts with science fiction but never truly gets in bed with it. There is an automaton, suggestions that the entire world functions as a giant clock-work mechanism, a few quasi-magical moments in which objects (such as drawings released from a box) do not behave as objects actually do. But for the most part, the movie sticks to a sort of heightened, highly-colored reality, which is appropriate because it is the world as seen through the eyes of a child. It's also, and primarily, a movie about making movies, specifically the early fantasy silents of Georges Melies, an actual person but now largely forgotten. Scorsese is fascinated by those early movies, and whether or not you like HUGO depends in part on whether you share that fascination.

Jack loved the movie; Ted and Christine hated it (see his blog for just why); I thought it has a certain pallid charm but is too long and self-conscious. Also, since I'm not interested in early silent movies, I was slightly bored. HUGO is visually arresting, something to which I'm only intermittently sensitive, but there is not much story. What there is, occasionally feels strained. Melies, for instance, does not maintain enough of a consistent character for me to believe in this version of him.

I prefer Scorsese's less sentimental movies: THE DEPARTED, TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS. But you may disagree.

Sleeping and Not

2011-11-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading the non-fiction book THE SIESTA AND THE MIDNIGHT SUN. Author Jessa Gamble sent me a copy because she had interviewed me for the book in connection with BEGGARS IN SPAIN. This is not, however, a book about SF; it's a well-written overview of the research connected with circadian rhythms, including sleep. Since I researched BEGGARS 20 years ago (and where does`all that time go?), much more has been discovered about sleep. Not, however, why we must do it. That remains unanswered.

The book is full of fascinating information about how all living things are governed by circadian rhythms, even in the absence of the light that triggers such rhythms in nature. Much of Gamble's research was carried out above the Arctic Circle, where night lasts six months. Humans often have a very hard time with this, unless genetically adapted to it over millennia (as the Inuit are, for instance). Some of the interesting things I learned about circadian rhythms:

If you remove crabs far from the ocean and put them in pens with sloping floors, they will still move up and down the slopes according to the tides on their home beach.

Cell division is circadian, even the out-of-control division of cancer cells. Certain lymphomas divide their cells between 9:00 and 10:00 at night. In contrast, the cells of the gut lining divide twenty-three times as much at 7:00 a.m. than they do in the evening. These sorts of finding have implications for the new field of chronotherapy: timing medical tests and treatment to take advantage of circadian rhythms. The book says that a British study showed that colon-cancer patients could tolerate up to 40% greater dosage of meds using chronotherapy -- and with fewer side effects.

People cannot last for more than a month or so on polyphasic sleep, which involves only short naps spread throughout 24 hours. But they do very well with biphasic sleep: a longish sleep starting late at night and a siesta in the afternoon. This was a successful program for traditional Mediterranean societies, plus Winston Churchill.

Herbivores sleep less than carnivores, which explains my dog.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Also -- I feel another story coming on.

The Joy of Reprints

2011-11-27T07:45:00.000-08:00

Reprints are wonderful for authors. You don't do any additional work, your story gets the chance to find more readers, and you get paid again. Two of my stories have recently been reprinted in big fat anthologies (the best kind). "Eliot Wrote" is included in LIGHTSPEED: YEAR ONE, along with stories by Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, and Bruce Sterling, among others. The anthology, perhaps self-evidently, features stories from the first year of the SF website Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams.

The other reprint is ALIEN CONTACT, edited by Marty Halpern, which are stories of... well, alien contact. Authors include Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Jack Skillingstead, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. Mine is "Laws of Survival," one of my favorites among my own work.

Finally, loosely in the "reprint" category -- very, very loosely -- is a hilarious play I saw last night: THE COMPLEAT WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The three-person cast did indeed cover all the works, presenting the history plays as a football game tossing around the throne of England, the sixteen comedies in a hilarious mish-mash, OTHELLO as an "African-Italian homeboy rap," and HAMLET as an audience-participation scholarly analysis of Ophelia by a Freudian drama critic. If you ever get a chance to see this play, do so. I bet even the Bard would have loved it.

Impressed At The Movies

2011-11-18T18:53:00.000-08:00

J EDGAR, the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie directed by Clint Eastwood, is impressive in two ways. It covers huge swaths of time, jumping back and forth from the beginning of J. Edgar Hoover's career to the end and several points between, trying to cram in everything, undaunted by the sheer scope of changes in the FBI and in the country between the 1930's and Hoover's death in 1972. More important (at least to me) is the detail and scope in the portrait of this contradictory man. Hoover was a genuine patriot who loved his country, a man of great courage, stubborn, independent, paranoid, and absolutely without any insight into himself or others. He was gay without (in the movie, anyway) acknowledging the fact to himself. His feelings for Clyde Tolson were tender, faithful, needy, and exploitative, without Hoover's understanding any of that. Ultimately he comes across as both sad and dangerous, but he also moves us. We watch as his youthful idealism hardens into rigidity, and in the final scene, as his aged body lies dead on the bedroom floor, the structure of the movie brings close to us what he was in the beginning.

Not many actors could pull all that off, but DiCaprio can. This is an Oscar-worthy performance.

My only real disappointment with the movie is that it does -- as it must, unless it had been a six-hour miniseries -- leave out so much. The anarchist bomb-throwing of the twenties and thirties is here, as are the "hero bank robbers"and the Lindbergh kidnapping that earned the FBI the right to carry weapons, but later eras are skipped through too quickly. The McCarthy witch-hunts of the 50's and the Vietnam-War FBI files on protesters are both given short shrift.

Still, this is an absorbing and subtle film. It's also -- astonishing in itself, considering the subject -- a fair one. Go see it.

Rewriting

2011-11-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I saw the Pacific Northwest Ballet dance "Love Stories," an program of five pas de deux including my very favorite short ballet, AFTERNOON OF A FAUN. They were wonderful. But even if I hadn't had this treat, ballet would have been on my mind because I was writing, and then rewriting, a story for an invitation anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, DANGEROUS WOMEN.

The story concerns ballet in a post-apocalyptic world. This choice of a subject matter was the result of a two things: (1) I love ballet and hadn't written about it for a while, and (2) I wanted to avoid the two (to me) most obvious kinds of dangerous women, armed warriors and men-destroying vamps. I was after something more subtle. I didn't achieve it, because Gardner and George rejected the story: My women weren't dangerous enough. Or hardly at all. But the story itself, they said, was a good read -- would I like to rewrite?

Yes. I would. Here is the process I went through:

Day 1: Brooding and feeling bad.

Day 2: I sat on the sofa, trusted clipboard with legal pad on my knees, and listed all the editors' objections. I stared at each of these until I thoroughly understood what each meant. Next, I listed all the characters in my story, including the minor ones. Often the best way to restructure a story while preserving its basic idea, tone, and plot is to shift the focus to another character. Did I have any secondary characters that I could make more dangerous? I stared at each of these names, running various plot ideas through my mind. Nothing struck, but I was preparing ground. I was also determined: I was going to be in this anthology if I had to arm my ballerinas with AK-47s.

Day 3: Took a long walk with the dog, ruminating on the world I had created for the story, thinking about it. The dog was no help with this. Later that evening, just before I drifted off to sleep, I saw which character I could use, and how.

Days 4, 5, and 6: Rewrote furiously. For new material I usually work three or four hours a day, but with an existing manuscript I can go far longer. Printed out the story, edited on paper, wrote new scenes longhand on the clipboard, typed it all in, repeated the entire procedure two more times.

Day 7: Jack proofread the story, made a few suggestions. Typed those in, and sent it off to Gardner.

Day 10: Gardner and George accepted "Second Arabesque, Very Slowly."

Does this procedure for rewriting work for everyone? I have no idea. But it's what I know how to do: Start with character and go on from there. And I think this version of the story, thanks to the editors, is stronger than my original.

Wanting More at the Movies

2011-11-09T17:55:00.000-08:00

ANONYMOUS is getting very mixed reviews, Critics hate it. They (1) cite an over-complicated and murky plot, or (2) get incensed at the idea behind the movie, which is that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays, which instead were composed by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

I don't get incensed about that. I think Shakespeare probably did write them, but certainly alternate history is a fair genre for movie makers. From what I remember from graduate school, Oxford is a perfectly viable candidate for authorship, assuming you can account for some of the plays being produced only after his death (which ANONYMOUS does).

The plot, on the other hand.... oh, dear. There are two problems here [SPOILER ALERTS]. First, unless you already know something about the relationship of the Cecils, father and son, to Elizabeth 1, to the religious turmoil in England, and to the claims of the Scottish James VI to the English throne, the movie does not do a good job of clarifying these. Second (and, to my mind, much worse) is the utterly ridiculous idea that Elizabeth, who didn't even get undressed for bed without multiple attendants, could have had several bastard sons without anyone knowing. This -- which could, I think, have been left out of the movie -- wrecks any chance of suspension of disbelief. It also moves the plot from melodramatic to penny-dreadful (incest!).

Still, despite all that, I have to say that I enjoyed the movie. I liked looking at sixteenth-century London, I liked the character of Ben Jonson (central to the plot). I liked the acting. Also -- an added bonus for SF fans! -- the Earl of Oxford is a dead ringer for Robert Silverberg. I even enjoyed the less ridiculous historical conjectures. But...

Why can't movie makers seem to grasp that sometimes less really is more?

Workshop

2011-11-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I taught an a six-hour workshop on "Your Opening Scene," part of Clarion West's new series of day-long workshops in the Seattle area. Twelve students, Clarion Director Leslie Howle, and I jammed ourselves into a small back room upstairs in the University Book Store. Amid the storage boxes, we had a productive session; this was a good group. Here we are during the critique part of the workshop:
Memorable lines from critiques:

"I feel that this is a block of granite and there's a David in there somewhere."

"This suffers from King Kong Syndrome -- Get to the monkey!"

I felt like you're telling me the truth, and I want to be lied to."

"I just wanted to bathe in this Prologue."

"The girl is the most interesting thing in the chapter, and she's dead."

November

2011-11-01T17:27:00.001-07:00

November marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first Jane Austen novel to see print, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. Celebrate by reading the book, or by renting one of the movie versions. I recommend either the one starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet (about two hours) or the six-hour BBC version. Jane still rocks!

November 3 is National Sandwich Day. This honors the Earl of Sandwich, who invented the convenient sandwich in 1718 so that he didn't have to leave the gambling table to eat. Celebrate by having a sandwich.

Meanwhile, I am reading and critiquing manuscripts from students of my upcoming Sunday all-day workshop, Your First Scene. Participants were supposed to sent me the opening scene of a novel or story they are working on. I have discovered that this workshop is necessary because hardly anyone knows what a scene actually is. I have received submissions containing the summary of a scene, or half of a scene, or two scenes, or three, or (in one case) ten mini-scenes. I'm looking forward to teaching this workshop, however. Some of the non-scenes are well-written and promising. So celebrate November workshops by writing a .... No, never mind.

Everything Old Is New Again

2011-10-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

Does any of this sound familiar?

"Many, envious of the rich and noble, said among themselves that the country was badly governed, and that the nobility had seized all the gold and silver. [They] therefore began to assemble in parties, and to show signs of rebellion; they also invited all those who held like opinions in the adjoining counties to come to London, telling them that they would find the town open to them and the commonality of the same way of thinking as themselves, and that they would so press the King.... When these people first began their disturbances, all London, with the exception of those who favored them, was much alarmed. Mayor and rich citizens assembled in council and debated whether they should shut the gate and refuse to admit them; however, upon mature reflection they determined not to do so... The rebels fixed their quarters in a square, called St. Catherine's, before the Tower, declaring they would not depart until they had obtained from the King everything they wanted -- until the Chancellor of England had accounted to them, and shown how the great sums which were raised had been expended."

That was written in 1381, by sir John Froissart, about the Peasant's Revolt in response to the Statute of Labourers (1351), which fixed maximum wages during the labor shortage following the Black death. The peasants could not earn enough to live decently, while the rich flourished.

The 1381 revolt, which had 60,000 people doing Occupy London, ended in looting, rioting, heads on pikes, the slaying of stray Flemings -- and some reforms that helped the poor. Let's hope that this time we can do it with less violence.

Happy At The Movies

2011-10-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

MARGIN CALL, the new Wall Street movie, indirectly indicts Wall Street for our current economic mess, but that's not why I liked it. Starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Zachary Quinto, MARGIN CALL is in many ways similar to CONTAGION, which I also liked, and for the same reasons. Both films take on their subjects with quiet but deadly seriousness, avoiding swashbuckling and scenery-chewing. Both show professionals believably at work, although in CONTAGION these end up being (flawed) heroes, and in MARGIN CALL they end up losing what souls they possessed to start out with.

A margin call is a lender's demand on an investor who is using margin to deposit additional money or securities, because the broker is worried about the loan he made you to buy those securities in the first place. Margin calls are made when the lender thinks those securities you bought with borrowed money have decreased too much in value. Then you must either deposit more money in the account or to sell off some of your assets. If you can't do either very well, you are in deep shit.

The only weak point of this film is that unless you go into it knowing all that, you are likely to be lost for the entire first half. In a way, this is sort of admirable: the scriptwriters avoid artificial "As-you-know-Bob dialogue," in which characters tell each other things they already know. These characters do not. They look at graphs (which we cannot see) worked out by two junior members of the firm, and they get scared. We see the fear, but not the reason for it, unless you can relate the situation to the film's title.

What IS clear is the tension level of everybody involved throughout one long night while managers, CEO, and a few brokers decide what should be done. [SPOILER ALERT] The choices are bad: let the firm go under, or sell all the securities early the next day for whatever they can get, before word of the situation gets around, and knowing full well that they are unloading worthless assets onto unsuspecting customers. Guess which they choose?

All the actors are terrific, and Manhattan at night is visually arresting in an eerie and vaguely menacing way. See this movie. For anyone interested in character development, in finance, OR in ethics, it's a must.

Margaret Atwood

2011-10-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

This is my review of Margaret Atwood's new collection of essays about science fiction. The essays appeared earlier this month; the review appeared in the WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS, reprinted here is case you somehow missed it :)

Margaret Atwood’s new book of essays, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, is not very new. Most of it consists of previously published essays, book reviews, excerpts from Atwood’s own fiction and writing based on the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, which Atwood delivered at Emory University in 2010. There is nothing wrong with this, of course; scholars and fans alike will find it convenient to have the short pieces collected in one place.

However, the material is less than new in three other ways. First, some of the pieces have already been collected in Atwood’s previous volume, Writing With Intent, making these reprints of reprints.

Second, and more disturbing, I found little here that I haven’t seen in previous books about science fiction. The history of fantastical literature beginning with the ancient world, the ways that SF uses and changes elements of myth, the endless quibbling about terms — what should be called “science fiction” versus “speculative fiction,” what determines a “novel” as distinct from a “romance” or a “fable” — these are issues that have preoccupied SF scholars, writers and fans for at least two generations. So have the relationships among myth, SF and their more simplistic cousins, comic book heroes. Atwood recapitulates many salient points, but doesn’t add much that is original.

Third, this book is not new because it seems stuck in a time warp. The most recent SF novel discussed, or even mentioned, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in 2005. That would be fine if the second-most-recent novel weren’t William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Much of Atwood’s book is given to considerations of already-much-considered novels such as Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Huxley’s Brave New WorldShe (1886). Surely a book devoted to “SF and the Human Imagination” should consider that the human imagination has continued to produce science fiction in the last several decades? (1932) and Rider Haggard’s

Which raises a genuine question: For whom is this book intended? If it is for fans and scholars of SF, it may well seem both redundant and dated. If it is for people uninterested in science fiction, it’s difficult to imagine why they would read it in the first place — unless they are interested in Margaret Atwood.

And this is where In Other Worlds does have something to offer. Atwood’s sections on her personal involvement with the genre are witty and charming. She begins with her childhood and the fantastic stories she and her brother used to tell themselves about super-hero flying rabbits. Her earliest creations were White Bunny and Blue Bunny, modeled on actual stuffed rabbits, and they could fly (“propelled by an age-old technology called ‘throwing’ ”). Later versions, Steel Bunny and Dotty Bunny, dwelt in Mischiefland, wore capes, kept pet cats (little Margaret wanted a kitten but was not allowed to have one) and ate nothing but ice cream cones.

Atwood is also engaging when she describes researching her university work on speculative fiction, and later writing her SF novels The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. She talks frankly about the reactions to her books within the “skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities,” meaning SF fans and writers. In 2009 the queen of literary SF, Ursula Le Guin, took Atwood to task for “not wanting any of her books to be called science fiction.” Atwood defends her position — not convincingly, I thought, but with self-deprecating charm, and with all the respect that Le Guin merits.

Another plus: The prose in these essays is of a very high quality, as one would expect from the author of The Handmaid’s Tale. This is true in even the most incidental material, such as the witty “An Open Letter From Margaret Atwood to the Judson Independent School District,” which begins: “First, I would like to thank those who have dedicated themselves so energetically to the banning of my novel The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s encouraging to know that the written word is still taken so seriously.”

However, the “science” part of “science fiction” does not interest Atwood much. She considers science the “myth” of our time — “a story central to our self-understanding: nothing about truth or falsehood implied” — and the Big Bang theory “a new creation myth.” Nowhere does she consider that science might be more than that. Her arguments against biotechnology are very one-sided, all cons and no pros. Nor does she consider any of the excellent SF in which extrapolation from cutting-edge known science leads to plausible futures.

It all adds up to a rather lopsided view of science fiction. However, if even the basic theories about the genre and its history are unknown to you, or if your primary interest is Atwood herself, you might enjoy this collection.

Doubtful at the Movies

2011-10-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw IDES OF MARCH, the new movie of political machinations during a primary campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. George Clooney is the candidate, Philip Seymour Hoffman his campaign manager, and Ryan Gosling is Hoffman's gifted subordinate. Gosling begins as an idealist and -- because that's the way these films go -- loses his idealism by the end. Nobody else had any to begin with.

And therein lies the problem. IDES OF MARCH is absorbing throughout; the actors are all very good; there are some arresting visuals. However, everybody here is willing to sell out everybody else, friend or foe, not merely for the good of the campaign but to improve their own position in the campaign hierarchy. No trick is too dirty, no betrayal too profound, no friend more important than one's own importance. It gets to be Too Much.

Yes, I believe that politics can be a nasty business. The good-hearted crew on TV show WEST WING, which I adored, is probably too good to be true. But a film can also be too nasty to be true, in that it presents a lop-sided picture of reality. I enjoyed IDES OF MARCH (gazing at George Clooney's eyelashes alone is worth the ticket price), but I ended up not believing it. See it and decide for yourself.

Words

2011-10-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

Quick -- which of these car names sounds "faster" -- Tarin or Parin? Which sounds more luxurious?

If you're like mist people, you think "Tarin" sounds faster and "Parin" sounds more luxurious. Those were the findings of researchers at Lexicon, a firm profiled in the October 3 issue of the NEW YORKER. Lexicon helps companies find brand names for products. They've made a science of studying how people react to individual letters, to phonemes, and to words. Surveying 500 subjects in Europe, Asia, and the United States, they discovered, for instance, that "c" and "v" and "p" all convey "vigor, liveliness, and well-being."

In the new scientific approach to naming things, you can't call a spade a spade -- or a mop a mop. That word has an image of dirt, limpness, drudgery. When asked in the mid-1990's to name Procter & Gamble's new mop, Lexicon generated thousands of possibilities. They finally chose "Swiffer," because (1) it sounds like "swift," implying that mopping that floor won't take too long, (2) it ends in "er," the suffix of agency (teacher, driver), implying that the mop is the agent doing the work, not you, and (3) "f" is a friendly consonant. Lexicon also named Pentium, Dasani, and Wisp, a portable mini-toothbrush.

I own a Swiffer. Did I buy it in part because I was suckered by a good brand name? Maybe. I'm not immune. George Orwell would have understood -- if not necessarily approved.

Workplaces

2011-10-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Some writers do it standing up. Others do it lying down. Most, however, write while sitting, and where they do it is interesting.

Connie Willis works at Starbucks, in long hand.

Ellen Klages, when on a tight deadline, retires to a rustic lodge several states away.

A military-SF writer I know works on the back porch, in all weathers. He wears fingerless gloves when it's cold.

Terry Bisson works on a no-frills bench in his garage.

And, I learned yesterday, Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson and Mark Teppo work on the on-line experimental fiction project THE MONGOLIAD in a building that also houses a circus school. I hadn't known that Seattle even has a circus school. Mark gave Leslie Howle, of Clarion West, and me a tour. "It has interesting things to watch when you're on break," Mark said. Here, for instance, are trapeze artists warming up:

In contrast, my own working quarters seem prosaic: I work on a desk in the living room. I share these quarters with Jane Austen, here shown with the new desk I just bought her. If Jane were selling more copies, perhaps she could not only buy her own desk, but also pony up more of the rent.

Where do YOU write?

More Adventures in E-Pubbing

2011-10-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

My novel DARK MIST RISING is now available on the Nook and the Kindle, attractively priced (I hope) at $3.99. But why, you ask, if this is my latest novel, does the cover say "Anna Kendall"? Therein lies a publishing tale.

Over the past three years I wrote a YA fantasy trilogy, not because I made any planned decision to switch from SF to fantasy (my career never seems to involve planned decisions) but because this scruffy kid kept tugging at my mental elbow going "Write me! Write me!" So I did, beginning with CROSSING OVER, continuing through DARK MIST RISING, and ending with A BRIGHT AND TERRIBLE SWORD. CROSSING OVER came out in the United States and England, and will be published this summer in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The four European countries bought the entire trilogy; Viking bought only CROSSING OVER, which was also slightly rewritten for the American market (the original was deemed too dark). Now DARK MIST RISING is available in England, and I am creating it here as an original e-pub. Will anybody buy it, or even find it? I don't know, but I like this book and wanted to at least offer it somehow.

The set-up is this: Roger Kilbourne can cross over into the Country of the Dead. He isn't thrilled about being able to do this, and with good reason: Everybody and his brother attempts to exploit his gift. Not only that, the poor guy gets caught in the cross-fire of a war that has been going on for quite a while, between forces battling for control of both the Country of the Dead and the more prosaic land of the living. Roger has an unrequited passion for a girl far above his rank, the devoted love of a girl he doesn't value enough, mentors he doesn't want, and a savage chieftain (living variety) with good reason to want his blood.

I think the second book of this trilogy is better than the first. This is a problem I have with my trilogies; it sometimes takes me a while to get my bearings firmly in a new locale. (I also think PROBABILITY SUN is better than PROBABILITY MOON, and it was the third book, PROBABILITY SPACE, that won the Campbell.) Of course, I'm only the author. My hope is that you will read DARK MIST RISING and decide for yourself.

Terrified at the Movies

2011-10-02T05:56:00.000-07:00

For someone recovering from pneumonia (and thank you all for your good wishes), the film CONTAGION probably wouldn't be everyone's choice for a first up-from-the-sickbed outing. But I'm glad I went. After a summer of silly movies with over-the-top special-effects heroes and villains, CONTAGION is a genuinely human, genuinely terrifying movie.

An American woman attends a business conference in Hong Kong. [NOTE: SPOILER ALERT] She visits a casino there, flies home, has sex with an old boyfriend during a lay-over in Chicago, then goes on to her family in Minneapolis. Unknowingly she infects everyone along the way. Some of those people fly to other cities. Soon there is a worldwide outbreak of a new disease.

The movie follows several characters' stories, including a French doctor with WHO, researchers with the CDC, Chinese and Americans whose families are affected. The cast includes Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Jude Law. With so many diverse stories playing out, some critics have said that the film is too diffuse; we don't get enough screen time with anyone to deeply invest in them. I think those critics have missed the point. The real star here is the contagion itself, and fighting it is the work not of a superhero but of a world-wide team. There are individual heroics, but the focus stays on the disease.

It's a bad plague, but not as bad as it could be. The kill rate is about 30%: much greater than the flu epidemic of 1918, but much less than, say, Ebola or Marburg. The contagion kills quickly, within a few days. WHO, the CDC, FEMA, the National Guards all fight it with containment, quarantine, and frantic races to understand the virus's nature, to find a cure, to develop a vaccine. Meanwhile, some people panic and some riot and some try to profit financially and some risk their lives to help others. A teenage girl focuses on seeing her boyfriend despite the quarantine. The president is moved underground. Congress tries to carry on work via the Internet. It all feels very real.

That is why I was so riveted by the movie: It seems real. This is the way it could happen. I believed pretty much everything. It's been a long time since I believed pretty much everything that happens in a film.

It's also been a long time since the heroes of a movie are mostly scientists who work for big government agencies. The government is not evil, the corporations are not evil, the plague is not caused by evil terrorists (at the very end we find out how it was caused). Government employees -- flawed human beings but dedicated scientists -- work together to find answers and implement them. When was the last time you saw THAT on screen?

Not an uplifting film, but a very good one. Let's just hope it's not prescient.

Hiatus

2011-09-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

No blogging for a bit -- I have pneumonia. Stay tuned.

Tachyon Party

2011-09-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

On Sunday Tachyon Press celebrated its sixteenth anniversary with a party held at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. Publishers Jacob and Rina Weisman beamed like the proud parents they are. The Emperor Norton Awards were given out. These are named for an eccentric, colorful, half-legendary San Francisco character who declared himself emperor, printed his own money, and enlivened the young city for many years. The awards are given to writers in the Bay Area who "exemplify imagination unhampered by paltry reason." This year's winners were Stephen Boyett and Rudy Rucker. Other party guests included Peter Beagle, Lisa Goldstein, Ellen Klages, Pat Murphy, Jeremy Lassen, and Grania Davis.

The anniversary cake, was baked by writer Madeleine Robbins ("Swords and Bakery"). The figure on top is the Tachyon logo, a rhinoceros, busily typing:
Here are Ellen Klages and Lisa Goldstein, waiting for cake:

Jack and I finished the evening with a long, catching-up-what-are-you-writing-now dinner with Lisa, Ellen, Madeleine, and Pat Murphy. A lovely weekend -- but NO more traveling for at least three months! I need to remember what I was writing, who's in that novel, what they're doing, and why I wanted to write it in the first place.

San Francisco

2011-09-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

This is the view of San Franscisco in morning fog, taken from the deck of Ellen Klages' house. Jack and I are staying here for a few days. We had dinner with Ellen and a whole slew of SF people, including Terry Bisson, Brad Templeton, Jacob and Rina Weismann. Last night we both read at SF in SF, with Terry Bisson moderating a post-reading panel of sorts. Jack read his short story "Everyone Bleeds Through," and I read the opening of a very long novella that Tachyon will publish as a book in April, "Before the Fall, After the Fall, During the Fall." The whole thing was fun.

The panel considered, among other topics, the question "Where do you begin a story? What occurs to you first?" For Jack, it is an image he wants to explore: "a woman standing at an open window, say, and feeling a rush of cold air on her skin. Who is she? What is going on?" For Terry, it is an idea: "What if bears discovered fire? How might that happen?" For me, it is a character: "What if this fifteen-year-old kid had to carry out a dangerous mission he was completely incapable of understanding? What would that feel like?" It was a good discussion.

Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery

2011-09-10T05:40:00.001-07:00

I goofed! My reading today in San Francisco is NOT at Borderlands! It is at SF in SF, at the Variety Preview Room Theatre - details at http://www.facebook.com/l/mAQBc3BWf/www.sfinsf.org.

I must not post on Facebook when I am very tired!

Travel

2011-09-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

How much travel is too much?

I have hardly been home this summer. Teaching Clarion, teaching Taos Toolbox, visiting family, Worldcon, visiting friends. It has all been fun, but the downside is that I have not written anything in eight weeks.

Tomorrow Jack and I read at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco, and then attend the anniversary party for Tachyon Press. That, too, will be fun.

But afterwards I am going to stay home for three months. I will be more faithful about this blog. I will work harder on getting my backlist up on various epub formats. And I will.. oh, yeah, write.

Happiness and Limitations

2011-09-05T05:19:00.000-07:00

I am reading Gretchen Rubin's THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, an odd little book that looks cursorily at the current research on happiness and intensely at Rubin's own, year-long attempt "to make myself happier." She went about this is a very methodical fashion, including the use of spreadsheets, month-by-month resolutions, and progress charts (and I thought I was an organized person!) She tried many different changes to her life, but one particularly caught my attention.

Rubin asked herself: What do I REALLY like to do for fun, as opposed to what I'm supposed to do, or have fallen into the habit of doing, or think I should like doing? She thus realized that she was spending a lot of time doing things she didn't really enjoy (movies, parties) and not doing things she really did (scrap-booking, reading children's literature). Gradually she cut down on things she didn't genuinely like and found ways to do those she did. One way to discover those was a question she asked herself: What did she like to do when she was a child?

This, naturally, led me to wonder how many things I'm doing because I think I ought to like them. Answer: Not very many (too lazy, maybe). How many things do I enjoy that I'm not doing enough of? Quite a few (too lazy, maybe). Those are the things I, too, need to find more ways to incorporate into my life. They include seeing more movies and plays, finding some chess partners for live play (not just on-line), experimenting more with cooking, and finding a good book-discussion group. I have spent most of the summer on the road (like, right this minute) but after one more trip, will be home for three straight months and can tackle this.

What fun things aren't YOU doing enough of?

Spotting Talent

2011-08-31T05:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read LADY SUSAN, the short epistolary novel that Jane Austen wrote while still in her teens. It is astonishing that I haven't read this before, since for decades I have been a devoted fan of Jane Austen's six novels. LADY SUSAN is not of their quality; the letter format precludes dramatization, and the ending is rushed. What surprised me, however, was how much of Austen's talent was evident even from this clumsy, juvenile attempt.

I teach a lot (this summer it was Clarion and Taos Toolbox). When a student is talented, it's usually evident right away. The story may be hopeless: badly constructed, implausible, too slight. But there will be an aptness of phrase, or a flash of complex character, or an interesting take on an old idea, or a gift for dialogue that brings personality alive. Something that suggests an original mind trying to paint a story in words.

However, talent by itself does NOT predict success. That also I have learned over decades of teaching. Many talented aspiring writers never grow beyond their initial talent, for one of three reasons: (1) They don't write enough to improve. A story or two every year is seldom enough. (2) They cannot take rejection, becoming too discouraged or too defensive, and so stop writing entirely. (3) They cannot really "hear" feedback and incorporate it into their writing, and so their aptitude for the phrase, the sentence, or the scene doesn't grow into an aptitude for story as a whole.

These are, basically, character traits: commitment, resilience, and humility. There is no way that working with students for a few weeks lets me assess those. So when a writer asks me, "Do you think I can make it?" the only honest answer is, "I have no way to tell." Talent is the seed, but only time grows whole plants and brings them to fruition.

Criminals and the Brain

2011-08-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

The July/August issue of THE ATLANTIC contains a very disturbing article, "The Brain On Trial," by David Eagleman. It makes the argument (the topic of one of my panels at Worldcon, by coincidence) against free will -- or at least against totally free will. Eagleman cites a number of legal cases and scientific studies in which brain conditions prompted out-of-character violent actions.

The most upsetting of these is Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed the University of Texas bell tower and shot 45 people. The night before he had murdered his wife and his mother. He had written in his diary:

"I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts....It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight...I love her dearly and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this."

Whitman's suicide note requested that his brain be autopsied, because he thought something might have changed in it. Doctors found a glioblastoma compressing a third of the amygdala, the brain center associated with fear and aggression.

Eagleman goes on to explore the philosophic and legal ramification of brain tumors and brain chemistry: Can we be held morally and/or legally responsible for our actions if they are prompted by our biology? Does such a thing as "good character" exist, or it is the product of lucky brain conditions that conform to societal norms? On a practical level, what can be done -- or should be done -- with regard to punishment and/or rehabilitation of those in such circumstances?

There are no easy answers to any of this. Personally, I think Eagleman's answers are a bit too easy -- he pretty much erases the concepts of free will and character. But the article offers fascinating, if troubling, information, and raises questions touching the very foundation of what it means to be human. A highly recommended read -- even if you hate it.

Wildlife

2011-08-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

I am visiting my family in New York State, at the house I grew up in, which my father still occupies. It is very rural. Although I very much like living in a big city now, I do miss the wildlife of my woods-and-fields childhood. Today I saw several deer, a flock of wild turkeys, and a rabbit. There is also a coyote slinking around, captured on film by my father a few weeks ago:

The eastern coyote (unlike the western one) carries DNA that is a mix of coyote genes (82%), wolf genes (9%), and dog genes (9%). It eats carrion and small mammals. My toy poodle, Cosette, is a small mammal -- so perhaps it's fortunate that she is back in Seattle.

This rural idyll is also a good contrast to Worldcon in Reno. Both are fun, and it is the contrast itself that is so satisfying.

Worldcon -- Day 3

2011-08-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

Although I missed last night's masquerade, many of the costumes were still roaming the convention center. This trio from PLANET OF THE APES posed in classic monkey philosophy:I spent the day talking, which is both the best and the worst of cons. I love seeing people, but by evening I hit a wall -- conversationally, socially, energetically. I don't know if other people experience this or not at conventions. Then each fresh engagement pulls me in again. Breakfast with Eleanor Wood and Brenda Cooper; brunch with my chess partner Lou Berger and his friend Kelly; a kaffeeklatsch, a reading, countless lovely and exhausting conversations in the green room and corridors.

The pre-Hugo dinner, by long-standing tradition, was with Robert Silverberg, Karen Haber, Connie and Courtnay and Cordelia Willis, George R.R. Martin and his new wife Paris, Kim Stanley Robinson, Walter Jon Williams, and Jim Kelly. Then on to the Hugos! Here are Karen Haber and I waiting for the ceremony to begin:

It was one of the longer Hugos -- well over two hours -- and hosted by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes. I got to present the Best Novelette Award, and was not nearly as funny as Robert Silverberg, presenting the Best Novella (ask him if he would REALLY have named a child Iago Silverberg). All the winners were gratified, none as much as Best Fanzine Winners (for THE DRINK TANK) Christopher Garcia and James Bacon, who ran around the stage, leapt off it, and collapsed into a heap weeping for joy. And the fiction winners are:

Best Short Story: "For Want of a Nail," Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novelette: "The Emperor of Mars," Allen M. Steele
Best Novella: "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," Ted Chiang
Best Novel: BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR, Connie Willis

Over 600 computers live-streamed the Hugo ceremonies. Next year: Chicago.

Worldcon -- Day 2

2011-08-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Breakfast with Connie and Cordelia Willis and Sheila Williams was slightly delayed while Connie finished ironing. She is the only writer I know who irons things. Once we got past the pressing issue, breakfast was a good chance to catch up with each other, and to discuss the burning question: Is it possible to have too much fame? No consensus was reached.

I did three panels today: What Is Consciousness? (no conclusive answer), What Are The Hidden Problems In Cloning? (many, including the rapid mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA, the complications of epigenetics, in utero influences), and What Is Hard SF? (also no conclusive answer). These panels were all well-attended, interesting, and contentious enough to be lively without being so contentious that people got upset. On the Hard SF panel, Toni Weisskopf and I disagreed on the relative importance of characterization to SF (Toni: "All you need is a big effing idea!") All this was fun.

I also sat on the Iron Throne from George R.R. Martin's epic GAME OF THRONES, the imperious effect slightly spoiled by the name tag (Robert Baratheon did not wear a name tag):

The evening was devoted to pleasure. A dinner organized by Arc Manor publisher Shahid Mahmoud, followed by a long session in the bar of the Atlantis with, it seemed, everybody else at the con. Here are Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper, Michael Swanwick, Jack Skillingstead, and me:

A quick look in at a few parties, and I took the shuttle (running more or less reliably) back to the Peppermill Hotel and so to bed, while Jack and Daryl Gregory went on to try out the blackjack tables. It's all research!

Worldcon Day 1

2011-08-19T07:35:00.001-07:00

This is actually day 2 of Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, in Reno, Nevada, but I didn't arrive until today. This is very much a Reno setting: gaudy, crammed with casinos, and very big. The two main hotels are a mile apart, the convention center is a long walk even from the attached hotel, and the dealer's room is cavernous. No one will run out of space! Shuttles run continuously around the various venues.

Our hotel, the Peppermill, has seven restaurants. Below is the one in which I had dinner with Jack, Mike Flynn, Ellen Klages, Daryl Gregory, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Rebecca. The restaurant, Oceano, is supposed to feel as if you are underwater. Mike, who knows everything, carefully explained to me the biological difference between the plastic squids and the plastic jellyfish. Ellen, who had played poker for ten hours yesterday, enlightened us all on house odds for various games. I did no programming items today, except for signing at the Tachyon booth. There was a Tor party in the evening, at which everyone was present and no one could hear anyone else, because it was so crowded because everyone was present. Tomorrow I actually get to work here, with three panels. These are going to solve the issues of consciousness, cloning, and what's happening to hard SF -- all by 3:00 p.m.

Dogs

2011-08-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

The title of this post refers not to my biothriller of the same name, but to an interesting article by Adam Gopnik in the August 8 NEW YORKER. Purporting to be a personal history of owning a dog for the first time, Gopnik's article ranges far afield to discuss the various theories of how humans domesticated dogs. The DNA evidence is clear: our pet dogs are descended from wolves. Bot how did they get from those fierce and sometimes dangerous beasts to my toy poodle, Cosette, shown here in all her cuddly domesticity?The competing theories are (1) we deliberately kidnapped wolf pups and trained them to useful work, (2) dogs hung around human garbage heaps, eating our refuse, and over time more or less domesticated themselves by self-selection for animals willing to follow us, until breeders took over. Theory #1 used to dominate, and then Theory #2 did, but now scientists say that there is a problem with Theory #2. The domestication appeared to happen about 10,000 years ago (unless it didn't, and there is some competing evidence for much earlier). 10,000 years ago humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. As they moved on from one area to the next, any wolves trailing along would have entered the territories of already established wolf packs, which would have challenged their right to be there. So now Theory #1 is back in the ascendancy. We did it, over time, and quite deliberately.

But, Gopnik also points out, in the modern era the tables have turned. Dogs use us. We cater to their needs, and most of them do not do very much work in return. Except for the odd sheep herder or K-9 pooch, our dogs are the winners in evolution, the successful domesticators of that other species that now works to ensure their survival.

Cosette would agree.

The Three Rs

2011-08-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Since I am back to writing my new novel, and since I actually know the ending of this one (well, sort of), I have been thinking about the middle. Beginnings are easy for me. The first three or four scenes usually come to me along with the basic idea, wrapped up like a Christmas package, and I write them very rapidly in a few days. When I get to the end, it also tends to go fast, since by the time I'm two-thirds or so of the way through, I know the climax. (If I don't, the book is really in trouble.)

That leaves the middle.

How to get from C or D (we're way past A) to, say, V or W? This is where I think about the three Rs: reveals, reversals, and raising the stakes. This is, for me, what creates the middle of the plot.

Reversals: Who is doing well and about to get a pie in the face? Who is struggling mightily and might have some unexpected aid, even if only from his own inner resources? Whose careful plan is about to blow up in his face? Who gets a sudden (but foreshadowed) ally?

Reveals: What does the protagonist discover that he didn't know before? What do I show the reader that she didn't know before?

Raising the stakes: What else hangs on the outcome of this conflict besides what is already there? How does the prize get bigger or the cost get higher?

Okay... I just got an idea. Back to work.

A Huge Mistake

2011-08-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

As some of you pointed out -- and thank you -- the cover of the e-pubbed version of my novel CRUCIBLE used the image of an X-wing fighter from STAR WARS. This is not good. It came about because a young friend of mine did the cover, with Photoshop. She assumed that because she found the image on a free-wallpaper site, it was in the public domain. She didn't recognize it as a STAR WARS image because she never saw any of the STAR WARS movies. I didn't recognize it because I haven't seen one for 25 years and don't have a good visual memory for space craft anyway. So -- a boondoggle.

I'm fixing this. The problem is that neither Nook nor Kindle will let me edit my publication because both are "in process" (of, presumably, approval). It's been 48 hours, the "process" is only supposed to take 24 hours, there is no way to talk to a live person. Meanwhile, the purloined cover has turned up in the Kindle storefront, and why is that if it hasn't yet been approved?

Welcome to the brave new world of e-publishing.

CRUCIBLE and Some Good News

2011-08-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

My efforts to put my backlist up as e-books continues. This is the latest, the sequel to CROSSFIRE. In the previous book, Jake Holman and friends managed to avoid having their human colony, Greentrees, wiped out when it got caught in the crossfire of a war between two alien races. Both sets of aliens are far more technologically advanced than humans. But Jake's previous maneuvers only bought him some time, and the war continues.

Apparently all of us writer's efforts -- e-pubbing, writing new books, even traditional publishing -- are not going to waste. This morning's NEW YORK TIMES included a very optimistic report on publishing, the result of a joint survey by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Group. 1,963 publishers were surveyed, including the Big Six. Among the findings:

In all categories, publishers' net revenues for 2010 were up 5.6 % over 2008.

In all formats, publishers sold 4.1 % more books in 2010 than in 2008. This was not divided equally among formats, by any means: mass-market paperbacks declined 16%. Hardcover sales were relatively flat. E-books were 6.4% of the total market (including textbooks), whereas two years earlier they had been only .6 %. Figures for e-book sales in 2011 are expected to be significantly even higher.

Sales of adult fiction in all formats increased 8.8% over three years. Sales of juvenile fiction (which includes both children's lit and YA) increased 6.6%.

Given the rest of the economic news, these are welcome statistics. So -- write! Read! Buy!

PNWA Conference

2011-08-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I taught a three-hour workshop at the annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference, held at the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue. The organizers had told me to bring about 70 hand-outs. However, on Saturday afternoon there turned out to be only two tracks of programming, so I got over 300 people. During the three hours, people came and went as each kept appointments to pitch their work to the agents and editors present -- a prime attraction at this sort of conference. Hotel workers had to open up partitions between two rooms to accommodate everyone at the workshop.

It went well, even though this kind of thing is exhausting for everybody. I talk for about two hours out of the three. The attendees are expected to write, in stages, an entire scene during the course of the workshop. We cover dialogue, description, point of view, characters' thoughts, the shape of a scene, different kinds of scenes, using exposition, ordering scenes -- a lot. At the end they are dazed with information overload, and I am hoarse. I like it.

I also taught a smaller, shorter workshop on Friday, on writing SF. Friday was enlivened by a different sort of communication as well: my very first ever obscene fan mail. And no, whoever you are, I do not want to work in a futuristic brothel. I'll stick to writing and teaching.

Very Cranky at the Movies

2011-08-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

What's worse than a genre movie filled with stereotypes, worn-out tropes, plot developments that are unmotivated and make no sense, and a sappy and false "moral"?

Two such movies stuck together.

COWBOYS AND ALIENS is terrible. Not just run-of-the-mill terrible, but truly truly terrible. We are asked to accept [SPOILERS AHEAD]:

That a man who in his opening scene drags an innocent man to death behind a horse, is in fact just a gruff old guy with a heart of gold.

That a star-faring race that can cross galaxies has no better way to capture humans for "study" than to lasso them. With rope.

That such star-faring aliens (scaly, green, and unarmed, of course) would equip Daniel Craig with a weapon whose sole value is to wipe out alien equipment and facilities.

That if only aliens had invaded the Old West, then whites, Indians, Mexicans, and the odd border collie would have all cooperated and come to value each other's unique humanity.

I could go on and on, but I won't. It's too discouraging. With that money and that talent (Craig, Olivia Wilde, Harrison Ford) the filmmakers might have made a worthwhile genre film, one which not only made sense but which kept explosions to a necessary minimum. But, then, they never do, do they?

Writing Method

2011-08-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

How long can a writer be away from a work without losing momentum to finish it?

That depends, of course, on the writer and the work. It also depends in part on the writing method. If you know exactly what comes next in a novel -- in other words, if you're an outliner -- perhaps you can leave a work for months and then pick up where you left off with no trouble. Or perhaps not -- I'm no outliner, and so wouldn't know. My working method (and I hesitate to dignify it with that term) consists of feeling my way through a novel by a combination of (1) becoming the characters to figure out what they will do, (2) visualizing no more than two scenes ahead of where I am now, while simultaneously craning my metaphorical neck for glimpses of some eventual end, and (3) blind luck.

This method does not lend itself well to leaving a novel-in-progress for long periods, and I have been away from mine for over six weeks. A week to prepare for Clarion by reading, line-editing, and wiriting critiques of student stories; one week teaching Clarion; a week to prepare for Taos Toolbox; two weeks of teaching at Taos; a week of picking up by normal life and writing several neglected small commitments (an Appreciation of Connie Willis for the WFC program book; proofing a book for e-Pub; stuff).

Six weeks is too long. I have lost the momentum, forgotten where my complex cast of characters each is located and what they're doing, slipped out of identification with my heroine. So I've had to do what I never have done before with a novel: start over. Each chapter must be read, thought about, revised. Slowly the book is coming back to me. Again, this is not just a matter of mental reminder, but of emotional investment.

It causes me to question, though: How do writers like Connie Willis and George R.R. Martin, who write a novel over a period of YEARS, manage to do it?

Clarion Graduation

2011-07-30T07:22:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was graduation for the Clarion West class of 2011. Leslie Howle conducted a simple ceremony in which (to a CD of "Pomp and Circumstance") each student received: (1)from Leslie, a certificate of achievement, (2) from Charlie Stross, a poster signed by all six Clarion instructors, and (3) from me, the Clarion Secret Decoder Ring. This flashes blue light at steady intervals and with enough disconcerting brightness to induce epileptic fits in the susceptible. Students had already received their tee-shirts, the back emblazoned with memorable lines from critique sessions. Then there was cake:

In the evening the last Clarion party was held, at Eileen Gunn's. Students wandered around with their rings flashing like so many electronic fireflies. Somewhere across town George R.R. Martin was giving a reading, but for Seattle SF, Eileen's was the place to be. I sat in the cool evening on the front steps with a small knot of people lamenting the state of publishing. Or maybe just our publishing. Or not. There was wine involved.

Clarion is sometimes a traumatic experience, after it's over. Some students are unable to write for months afterward, until they process all the (sometimes contradictory) advice they've received. This group, however, seemed eager to keep on writing. Today they fly home to D.C. and Canada and the Netherlands and Australia, ready to become the next generation of George Martins in our unpredictable genre.

Charles Stross Reading

2011-07-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

Last night Charles Stross gave a reading at the University Bookstore. The place was packed, with chairs jammed in everywhere possible and people standing in the back (none of which is actually visible in this photo):

Stross read a section from his new novel. Interestingly, the book is written in second-person, present tense, an unusual choice. That point-of-view can be really annoying ("Don't tell me that 'You did this' -- I know I didn't!") Stross, however, made it work. After a few minutes the POV disappeared and the story shone through.

Leslie Howle also announced next year's Clarion instructors, one of whom will be George R.R. Martin. Much applause.

As Duane, store manager and events co-ordinator, read off the last of up-coming appearances, it occurred to me that mostly I fail to publicize my own up-coming appearances, usually not blogging or tweeting about them until they're over. So in case anyone is interested:

August 5 and 6 I will be conducting two workshops at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in Bellevue.

At Worldcon, I am a panelist, will hold a Kaffee Klatsch, and will be a presenter at the Hugo ceremony.

On September 10, Jack Skillingstead and I will read in San Francisco, a reading sponsored by Tachyon Press and part of the SF reading series at the Variety Preview Room with books for sale courtsey of Borderlands Books.

On November 6, I will teach one of Clarion West's new "One-day Clarions" workshops. For details and registration, see clarionwest.org/one_day_writing_workshops or call 206-322-9083.

Final Taos Report Plus Bear

2011-07-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in addition to a steady invasion of ground squirrels into the lodge, we had a bear sighting. It was ambling across the parking lot:

Today, however, was less about wildlife than about the last class. We critiqued the final two stories, after which there was a round-table discussion of agents, e-pubbing, political correctness in SF, other worthwhile workshops, and general trends in publishing. Tonight will be a farewell dinner at Old Blinking Light, with many Margaritas, and tomorrow everyone goes home. During the two weeks, we read and critiqued a total of 197,000 words of fiction. It's been a great workshop. Memorable quotes from the last few days:

"Breast reduction surgery is a shamefully under-explored topic in SF."

"You can never have too many maggots in a re-animation scene."

"Being dressed in a loin cloth and flak jacket, with a Mohawk and a Fu Manchu mustache -- this doesn't really inspire fear."

"We have butts and nipples that don't seem to be doing anything."

"I was confused about how many legs your narrator has."

"EEEiiiEEE! Flaming dicks!"

And, in the most concise synopsis ever offered of the rest of a story:
"What you just read.
Stuff happens.
The heroine wins."

Pubbing and Critiquing

2011-07-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

The first volume of my two-volume reprint space opera is available for Kindle and Nook. Attractively priced (I hope) at $3.99, it will soon be followed by CRUCIBLE. See humans caught in the crossfire of a space war between two powerful alien races!

Meanwhile, critiquing continues at Taos Toolbox, although everyone is looking a little brain-weary and there are more drinking parties at night. Memorable lines from critique sessions over the last few days:

"Give me more gears and pumps!"

"These guys are really talkative during a gun fight."

"It's bad marketing to have a product that kills your clients."

"It could go on a little longer before the squid enters."

"I love stories where someone argues with a car."

"Are you asking if the pickle in the story is an instrument of joy?"

Taos: Week Two

2011-07-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Taos routine is by now well established: breakfast, assemble for class, my daily lecture, critique some stories, lunch, Walter's daily lecture, read and write in preparation for the next day. However, a few events vary this. This is a ski lift I rode up on Sunday, to a dizzying 11,500 feet:

Also on Sunday, Jack Skillingstead gave his guest lecture, an honest examination of one writer's journey toward publication, including the internal fears and discouragements that can inhibit writing.

Monday brought hard rain and a power outage. Everyone looked for non-existent flashlights, lit candles, and worked by computer-display light until batteries ran low. Ah, wilderness.

Memorable critique lines:

"I think you should grab the reader by the reproductive organs and go on from there!"

"I need more parasols."

"I like the idea of media people beating each other senseless -- it should be done more often."

Taos: A Day Off

2011-07-17T06:36:00.001-07:00

Yesterday at Taos people finally got a day off. Well, not everybody actually took the day off -- I saw a lot of typing going on at various places around the lodge. But Jack and I went sight-seeing. This lovely carved wolf statue, which I coveted, is in the Millicent Rogers Museum. Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, fell in love with the desert (as do a lot of older women: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe), settled here, collected many Native American artifacts, and left them all in a museum.

We also viewed the Rio Grande Gorge. The gorge itself is impressive and stately, but where I come from, the river at the bottom would barely qualify as a creeklet.

Dinner was at a Bavarian restaurant yet further up the mountain. Much, much further, some of which seemed straight up. The car labored and groaned. But at the top, along with yet more ski chalets and condos, was a lovely German restaurant, all of its beer imported from Munich.

Memorable lines from Friday's critiques:

"You may suffer from extraneous fairies."

"There's nothing like a rat in the first sentence to put us right into a story."

"I'll just have to go back and blow something up."

2011-07-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

This strange-looking object is an "ethernet concentrator." It was built by Taos student Jeff Duntemann and brought with him to Taos Toolbox in case Snow Bear Lodge had a weak wi-fi signal (it does in some places but not in others). The concentrator is built from a 1918 copper bathroom heater, a pillbox, and some other things I don't understand.

This level of scientific tech is typical of this year's Taos students, which also include an astrophyicist, a doctor, and many computer-savvy types. It's actually a bit intimidating: During last night's post-dinner conversation on the causes of nuclear melt downs, I had nothing to contribute.

The writing, critiquing, and class work go forward very well. Yesterday I lectured on world building, and Walter gave a wonderful talk on the Three R's (reveals, reversals, and raising the stakes). Some memorable quotes from critiquing sessions:

"This is The City and the City on LSD."

"Is it a scheduled squid or a chartered squid?"

"If steam is coming out of his ass, I'd notice."

"I need vowels!"

"Food is intimate without being sentimental."

Taos Toolbox, Mid-week

2011-07-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Taos Toolbox's second day of critiques; it went very well. However, a ground squirrel invaded the instructor apartment shared by Walter and me. Walter, less than helpfully, pointed out that ground squirrels can carry plague. From now on I am keeping the door shut. Here is Snow Bear Lodge, where the workshop is held. The tilt is due to the photographer, not the structure:

Memorable quotes from yesterday's critiques:

"If he actually gets beaten with the sex toy, that's okay then!"

"If I wanted to find a frozen girl in the woods, I'd hire an eagle, too."

"Did you consider crashing the car into a house?"

Taos Toolbox: Day 1

2011-07-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Today was the first class-and-critique session of Taos Toolbox. All went well. We critiqued two stories, I gave a lecture on writing in scenes, Walter gave one on plot. Here we are at work:

The critique room, which is also the dining room, is rustic. Everything that can be decorated with a bear or a moose, is. This is true throughout the lodge; the overhead light fixture in my apartment appears to be constructed from elk horns. The bedspreads have a moose pattern. Moose on the lampshade. A carved bear on the mantle.

Memorable lines from this morning's session:
"Specify the shape of her ass."
"I want to hear the horses scream and see the blood on the ground."
"Each story gets one free miracle."

Taos Toolbox

2011-07-10T10:20:00.001-07:00

Last night Walter Jon Williams and I drove from Albuquerque to Taos to teach Taos Toolbox, a two-week intensive workshop in writing science fiction and fantasy. We drove through drifting smoke from one of the huge wildfires which New Mexico is currently battling. Everything is very dry. Through Taos and on up the mountain to Snow Bear Lodge in Ski Valley. Walter was bummed to discover that the hiking trails have been closed due to fear of fire. But the view is wonderful; the photo below was taken from the porch of the lodge. The air smells of pine needles.
Today the students arrive. My hope is that by the time they do, I will have overcome my altitude sickness, which last night was very unpleasant. Snow Bear is at 10,000 feet. This is a glorious clear morning, but thunderstorms are predicted for this afternoon. I'm looking forward to seeing them over the mountain -- as long as they don't ignite fires here. There is only one way down the mountain and if it ever becomes blocked by fire, Walter has a contingency plan involving a nearby beaver pond -- but I hope we never need to use it!

New Kid on the Block

2011-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

I have neglected blogging lately, shamefully, for two reasons. One is that New Kid, Twitter. It's so much easier to dash off 144 characters than to write a considered essay! But I will do better.

The other reason is that I have been drowning in work -- and NONE of it is writing new fiction. I finished teaching Clarion, only to plunge into the manuscripts for Taos Toolbox. These are mostly novel openings of 10,000 words each, plus synopsis, and they all must be read, line edited, carefully considered, and then a critique written. The more of these I can get done before I fly to New Mexico on Saturday, the better off I will be as I fight the inevitable altitude sickness of being at 10,000 feet. I love teaching Taos, but it takes a physical toll.

I have also been proofing copy to get my backlist up on Kindle and Nook -- and the first one is up! It is NOTHING HUMAN, priced at (I hope) an attractive $3.99:

Plus -- I got a new phone. For the tech-challenged, this has meant hours of fiddling with it and reading the manual, trying to figure out how to make it behave. I think it's almost tamed.

However, I WILL do better about blogging from there, along with pictures. Last year we had a black bear come right up on the porch of the ski lodge. If there is one this year, too, I will try to get a picture with my new phone. Maybe. If I can remember how. Or if the bear will hold still long enough for me to read the manual.

Clarion

2011-06-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

All this week I am teaching Clarion West in Seattle. Eighteen students are spending six weeks writing stories, critiquing, and learning from six professional writers, one per week. This year they are Paul Park, me, Margo Lanagan, Minister Faust, L. Timmel duChamp, and Charles Stross. Here we are, hard at work in our classroom, which the rest of the year is part of a sorority house: Each Clarion has its own group personality. This one is affable, well-mannered, dedicated, and determined. Most of them attended my reading last night at the University Bookstore, where I read "Eliot Wrote." The next morning, there we all were back at the big table, improving each other's fiction and producing such memorable statements as:

"But there is no blood in bread."

"I was pleasantly surprised that I understood some of what was going on in this story."

"Being British, I did understand why you just summarized the sex scene."

"I am totally Team Pillow!"

LOCUS Awards and Hall of Fame

2011-06-26T08:37:00.001-07:00

Yesterday were both the annual LOCUS Awards and the inductions into the SF Hall of Fame of four new honorees. The Awards, held at a Seattle hotel, were preceded by two panels: one on humor in SF (Connie Willis, Terry Bisson, Gardner Dozois, Gary Wolfe) and the other on the future of e-publishing (me, Gary Wolfe, Ellen Datlow, Mary Robinette Kowal, Paul Park), below:

The awards themselves were, as always, ably and hilariously conducted by Connie Willis, who reprimanded everyone not wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I, in my role as Official Heckler, received a grass skirt. It may be difficult to convince my Clarion class next week that I am a serious and knowledgeable instructor, since their first sight of me was performing a hula in a plastic grass skirt. Below, Connie, me, and Gardner Dozois, who is wearing a flowered, lei bra:

The Award winners for fiction were Neil Gaiman (twice, for both short story and novelette), Ted Chiang (novella), China Mieville (fantasy novel, KRAKEN), and Connie (SF novel, ALL CLEAR).

Unfortunately, my camera battery died before the Hall of Fame inductions at the SF Museum. These were far more serious, with moving speeches by honorees Gardner Dozois and Vincent di Fate. (Although the seriousness of Gardner's speech may have been slightly undercut by emcee Terry Bisson saying to him, "We inducted your butt today!" and Gardner answering from the audience, "Only my butt?") Unable to be present were honorees Jean Giraud (Mobius) and Harlan Ellison. Jim Woodring accepted for Moebius, and Neil Gaiman for Harlan. I got to introduce Neil, who made a moving speech about what Harlan's fiction had meant to him when Neil was young.

Next came a reception at the museum, after which I was tired of smiling. So Connie and Courtney Willis, Jack and I went to dinner at a Thai restaurant and snarled at each other about the movies we disagree on, which seemed to be all of them.

An enjoyable, exhausting day, steeped in the genre I love.

Summer Updates

2011-06-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

A round-up of various bits and pieces:

Gordon Van Gelder is asking everyone to participate in the 100 Best SF Novels of All Time poll at http://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137249678/best-science-fiction-fantasy-books-you-tell-us Last year thriller readers got 17,000 voters, and for the honor of science fiction and fantasy, he would like to better that. So go to the site and vote.

NOTHING HUMAN still is not available as an e-book (nor is the rest of my backlist). But it's coming! Having completely messed up the scanned document while trying, earnestly but in total ignorance, to fix it, I turned the whole mess over to ex-Taos-student Eric Kelley, whose own novel you will be hearing about here eventually.

I did make progress with another piece of technology, however: I can now Twitter from my phone.

This weekend are the LOCUS awards and the SF Hall of Fame inductions. For the latter, I am introducing Neil Gaiman, who will be accepting for inductee Harlan Ellison. Ellison is too ill to attend. After that, I begin my week teaching Clarion. Thus, the next blogs will concern these events, with pictures -- IF I can don't mess up the camera.

On the writing front, the copy-edited manuscript of "Before the Fall, After the Fall, During the Fall" arrived. This is a very long novella (39,000 words) that will be published in April, 2012 by Tachyon Press, as both a stand-alone book and an e-book. I really like this one (not true of all my own work), so proofing it will not be the chore that I often consider proofing to be.

And Seattle actually had two days in a row above 70 degrees!

A Tale of Two Movies

2011-06-20T08:34:00.000-07:00

Recently I saw two movies, which taken together indicate a critical point about all fiction: You must deliver what you promise.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, the new Woody Allen-directed movie starring Owen Wilson, is completely charming. From the beginning it promises comedy with a bit of soul, and that's what you get. Owen Wilson, a writer uncertain of his talents and consistently undermined by his bitchy fiancee, somehow (a key that this is not a movie to be taken seriously) goes back in time to 1920's Paris. He meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Cole Porter. Nothing makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't have to. It's great fun, and we're rooting for the protagonist, who is befuddled but enthusiastic (and nobody does enthusiastic befuddlement better than Owen Wilson). There are lots of literary jokes that apparently only the writers I was with got, judging from the silence in the rest of the theater while we were laughing our heads off: Owen Wilson tells T.S. Eliot about Hollywood: "Where I come from, we measure our lives in coke spoons."

In contrast, THE TREE OF LIFE signifies from the very beginning that it is meant to be taken very seriously. Even the music, a weird mixture of opera and New Age, shouts: SIGNIFICANCE. Unfortunately, the movie is pretentious and boring. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in this film. I am interested in, and in sympathy with, its underlying message: There is more to life and death than we know. But the film tries to convey this through endless images of clouds, the tops of trees, hands lifted skyward, and whispered voice-overs that are almost incomprehensible because they're so whispered. There is also a long stretch of images recapitulating the birth of the solar system right through all of evolution. No dialogue here but lots of portentous music. Counterpointed to all this is the ordinary life of a 1950's family in Waco, Texas, doing ordinary things. The boy portraying the young Sean Penn is a good actor, but he's not given much to do beyond glower at the world. The adult Sean Penn is given even less, and what he does do has no real context. Why does his brother's death thirty years ago make him incapable of concentrating on his (unspecified) job now?

By the time the last pretty image (sunflowers) appeared on screen, I was bored to tears -- and I LIKE slow-paced, ambiguous movies with mystical overtones. But not this one. Go see MIDNIGHT IN PARIS instead.

China Mieville

2011-06-17T08:57:00.001-07:00

On Friday my review of China Mieville's new novel, EMBASSYTOWN, went up on the web site for the WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS. You can see the full review, titled "China Mieville and the Far Edge of Science Fiction," here: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/embassytown/ Here I will just summarize what I said.

This is a good book. It is not, however, a book for everyone. The novel asks a provocative question: What are the abilities and limits of language? It also inadvertently raises a different question: What are the abilities and limits of science fiction?

EMBASSYTOWN takes place in a far future on the planet Arieka, which we see through the eyes of narrator Avice Benner Cho. She grows up there and then later returns with her husband Scile, a linguist, during a cross-cultural crisis with the native Ariekei. The Ariekei have two “mouths” and speak through both at once. This is ironic because a key feature of Ariekei thought is that they are unable to lie. Language for them does not signify reality, it is reality, and they are literally unable to double-voice anything that is not true. Nor can they, again literally, recognize any speech that does not feature two words spoken at once by the same creature. Humans, wanting valuable trade with the Ariekei, have developed genetically-engineered “ambassadors,” clones who speak separate words in perfect synchronicity.

SF built around the potentialities is not new, but nobody I can think of has taken it as far as Mieville. This is a fully detailed world, fascinating in its strangeness. The characters are interesting. But Mieville is so close inside his narrator's head, who is of course familiar with everything, that he explains nothing. Scores of new, unexplicated terms come at the reader from page 1. The result is that a reader needs patience and persistence to unravel everything, especially since the actual conflict doesn't begin till one-third of the way through the book. For the hard core SF fan. this book is a delight. For the uninitiated, the casual SF reader, or those preferring a fast-paced plot, this one may be a difficult read.

I loved it.

Clarion West

2011-06-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

I am preparing for my teaching of Clarion West Week #2, June 27 -- July 1. "Preparing" means several things: reading the students' submission stories, thinking over the writing lectures I want to give, wondering what the unpredictable Seattle weather might be doing that particular week. It also means signing up for the Clarion Write-a-thon.

Clarion, sometimes called "boot camp for SF writers," is an intensive six-week workshop in which everyone lives together in a sorority house (minus the sorority girls) and talks, breathes, critiques, dreams, and performs the writing of science fiction and fantasy. Each instructor, all working professionals, stays one week, after which his or her drained carcass is hauled away and fresh meat is brought in. The Clarions (there are two) have produced some notable writers, including Vonda McIntyre, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Andy Duncan, Felicity Savage, Ted Chiang,and Cory Doctorow.

The Clarion Write-a-thon is a way to raise funds for the workshop. A number of writers (by no means all of them are instructors) have agreed to write a certain amount each week, and donors have agreed to sponsor them. The details are on the Write-a-thon web page, http://clarionwest.net/events_page/write_a_thon. Basically, however, this works like sponsoring runners in a race for a good cause: sponsors pay a certain amount to Clarion for each goal met. My goal is 10,000 words each week that I am not teaching either Clarion or Taos (which leave the instructor no time for writing, although students do). I will receive a list of my sponsors (I hope) and will email them each week my word count, plus a snippet of the writing I did that week on my new novel. All this begins this week.

However, it doesn't solve the Seattle weather problem. If I could ask you to send Clarion warm temperatures instead of dollars, I would.

Reading with Ursula LeGuin

2011-06-08T08:10:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I had the privilege of reading with Ursula LeGuin and Ted Chiang as part of the SFWA Reading Series organized by Mary Robinette Kowal and Mark Niemann-Ross. Jack and I took Amtrak to Portand, Oregon, a trip that began in the dingy King Street Station but rapidly improved to a comfortable train and some gorgeous scenery. Also a lot of backyards, which for me is one of the charms of train travel: you see behind the scenes of America. Mark met us, and we took a quick trip to Powell's, Portland's famous and enormous bookstore. I saw a minute fraction of it.

Dinner and the reading were at McMennamin's, once the Kennedy Elementary School but now a multi-purpose building. The hallways gave me the odd sense of having been sentenced back to the third grade, but not so the restaurant, bar, and auditorium. At dinner, counter-clockwise from lower right: the back of my head, Ursula LeGuin, Charles LeGuin, Mary Kowal, Mark Niemann-Ross, Ted Chiang. Jack Skillingstead took the picture. The second picture shows we three readers, lined up to perform.

Ted read a complete story, about an "automatic nanny," with some interesting things to say about the nature of children, machines, and human adaptability. I read part of "Eliot Wrote." Ursula read an essay on the current state of books and publishing, plus a poem about Las Vegas, both bleak. This led to the Q&A being mostly centered on e-publishing and very little on the art of writing, a phenomenon I have noted a lot in the last year whenever an audience asks questions. When I teach Clarion in a few weeks, I intend to reverse the emphasis.

For me, introducing and reading with Ursula was the culmination of a life-long love affair with her work. It was too difficult to resist gushing, so I didn't try to resist. I think I embarrassed her. But reading THE DISPOSSESSED when it came out was a seminal experience in my becoming a writer. Here were characters I could relate to, who did more than speed around the galaxy in space ships or solve scientific puzzles. They loved, suffered, had babies, screwed up friendships -- AND solved scientific puzzles. I have felt the same way about much of her other work, especially THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and FOUR WAYS INTO FORGIVENESS
An evening I will never forget.

Keeping Up

2011-06-06T14:07:00.000-07:00

Forget the Joneses. Keeping up with oneself is now the stressful point of modern life.

Do you know your credit score? Are you doing anything to improve it? Do you floss every day? If so, why aren't you flossing twice a day? You need thirty minutes of exercise every day. You need to get a bone density scan to monitor your bones, and you should also be monitoring your blood pressure, the oil changes in your car, and the mulching schedule for the azaleas. The new mulching schedules are out. Have you recently checked your home for radon and carbon monoxide? When was the last time you checked the batteries in your smoke alarm?

Update your wardrobe; that top is so last-year. Keep your roots dyed and your hair trimmed and your skin moisturized. And for God's sake, watch your diet! Make sure your vegetables are organic and your meat free-range and you really need more antioxidants in your diet. Also more L-carnatine, omega-three, and calcium. Do you know how much fat is in your diet? It shouldn't be more than 20% -- monitor that. You are what you eat!

You need to save for retirement. You need to call your Aunt Grace, what's wrong with you she was so good to you when you were a child. Remember all your friends' birthdays -- what, you didn't put them on a calendar? If you shop smart and monitor sales, you can get them nice gifts for much less than the regular price. Check the sales on-line.

Check Group-On specials on-line. Check the news, check Facebook, read the blogs important in your field, how come you never know what's happening? Are you keeping up with your tweets? You'll lose audience if you don't.

Write every day. Write more every day. Read a lot -- all good writers read a lot. Why haven't you read the Hugo nominees yet? This is important to an SF writer! Get that backlist up for the Kindle and the Nook. Monitor all your sales on both so you can jump in and drop or raise the price for the best revenue stream. Come on, this is your livelihood! Keep up!

You didn't exercise today. You didn't book that flight for next month. You didn't make an appointment for your physical. An annual physical is important -- catch problems early! Balance your checkbook, check on your investments to optimize performance, perform one act of kindness every day.

And what the hell IS your credit score? You're supposed to know! Come on, keep up!

Publication Progress

2011-06-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested, progress has been made on several of my publishing projects:

Small Beer Press will publish a collection of my short stories next year. The collection includes a few award-winning stories: "The Erdmann Nexus" (Hugo) and "Fountain of Age" (Nebula), plus other stories written in the last few years. Editor Gavin Grant asked for my input on a title; naturally I don't have one, titles being hard for me (my last collection was NANO COMES TO CLIFFORD FALLS AND OTHER STORIES, always the easy way out.) Since the two stories I just mentioned plus "Fools Like Me" all feature elderly first-person narrators, I could call it "GERIATRICS!" but this does not seem a felicitous choice. Also, there are some younger protagonists, who might feel slighted.

Lightspeed has had my story "Eliot Wrote" up for the entire month of May. I know May is over, but maybe it's archived if you missed it. I missed it. I must screen my emails better.

The scanning project for NOTHING HUMAN goes forward. The entire book has been scanned, and Jack is wrestling with Omnipage to turn it into a good Word document. Omnipage is supposed to be very good at this, and I'm sure that eventually it will cooperate with us. Maybe this weekend. Or soon. Very soon.

ASIMOV'S has bought "A Hundred Hundred Daisies" and it will appear some time or other.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday I go down to Portland to host a SFWA reading featuring two fine writers, Ursula LeGuin and Ted Chiang. I don't know what either of them is reading, but I know it's bound to be good. The reading is part of SFWA's new reading series organized by Mary Robinette Kowal. It takes place at a restaurant, McMinaman's, which may or may not be spelled that way. I'm looking forward to it.

Charmed At the Movies

2011-05-31T15:57:00.000-07:00

"Tell me what a man likes and I will tell you what he is," somebody said a very long time ago. I had only a mild liking for THOR. But the movie I saw last weekend captured my heart.It's QUEEN TO PLAY (in French, with English subtitles; the French title is JOUEUSE). It's about chess, although that's not why I liked it. The chess games are never clearly presented, probably because a film full of chess positions would baffle or bore 98% of the audience 98% of the time. This movie is about people.

Hélène, a chambermaid at a small hotel by the sea, glimpses a vacationing couple playing chess on the balcony. The woman -- sensual, confident, absorbed in something challenging -- is everything that Hélène is not, and would like to be. She has her hair cut like the woman's, but that makes no difference at all. She acquires a satin nightdress like hers, but Hélène's husband doesn't even notice. What Hélène needs is not a superficial make-over, but a passion. She learns chess, the thing that attracted her to that balcony in the first place.

How she does so, what she learns along the way, and how Hélène's passion transforms every relationship in her life, is the substance of the movie. Chess is not without its dark side. Many of its champions were at least partly mad (Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer) and some of its adherents became so drawn in they abandon the rest of their lives (Marcel du Champ). Hélène, however, does not become lost to ambition or gain the World Championship or destroy others' happiness -- this is not THOR. QUEEN TO PLAY is a delicate, wry, humane film about change, and it stays on a human level. Sandrine Bonnaire as Hélène and Kevin Kline as her chess teacher are both superb. See this movie.

Bemused at the Movies

2011-05-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

I am not a comic-book movie person. It's not that I don't like fantasy, it's just that I have this arcane idea that it ought to make sense in its own terms: self-consistent, not a gross insult to the myths it sprang from -- things like that. Nonetheless, I sort of enjoyed THOR. It was so silly that no one could ask more of it than it gave. It would be like asking a two-year-old to do calculus.

The silliness begins with the cast. Asgard, home of the Norse gods, is now politically correct enough to include an Oriental warrior, a female warrior, and a Black keeper-of-the-bridge to other realms. The bridge itself appears to be made of glitter-covered Legos. Asgard, too, glitters, made up of gold-colored abstract buildings designed by some far-past ancestor of Frank Gehry. All this is rather sweet, in a frivolous sort of way. Also sweet is the movie's rather Victorian premise: That an insensitive and loose-cannon guy can be saved by the love of a good woman. The guy is Thor, and the woman is a mortal who is supposed to be an astrophysicist but who records her data in spiral notebooks by drawing little pictures of planets.

So why did I enjoy this movie? Not for the plot, which mostly involves fighting: Norse gods versus frost giants, Thor versus Loki, various hapless humans versus each other. But there are fun touches throughout. When Thor's hammer falls to Earth and is stuck there, nobody can draw it off the stone it landed on (move over, King Arthur). The locals set up a contest; people arrive in pick-up trucks; someone is selling hot dogs. That kind of thing kept me amused, even though ten minutes after I left the theater, most of the movie had vanished from my head. No loss. There's always another comic-book movie coming.

Adventures in Re-issuing

2011-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Re-issuing one's work is always easiest if you don't have to do it yourself. Writers Digest Books has just reissued my book on writing fiction, BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES, AND ENDS, with a soft-sell cover featuring trees:

These are presumably the same trees that will be cut down and pulped to print the fiction I am telling you how to write. There's a moral there, although I don't know what.

Meanwhile, my project to re-issue my books in electronic form proceeds apace. Well, okay, not "apace," exactly, but I have done several things:

I have ascertained that I own electronic rights to four books on my backlist. These are books that were published before there was such a thing as electronic rights.

I am going today to Vonda McIntyre's house to learn how to use a scanner. Then, this weekend, I will actually buy a scanner. Thereafter, I will scan in my books while watching TV, instead of doing sudoku while I watch TV.

I have decided that the first book I will e-pub is NOTHING HUMAN. A friend is making a cover for this.

Not, perhaps, a lot of progress, but some. Oh, and I also started writing another novel -- which, I have to say, is easier than dealing with the old ones. Go figure.

Zombies at the CDC

2011-05-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's that time again: Spring Weird Season. You can't make this stuff up.

The Centers for Disease Control, perhaps tired of having its factual, health-based bulletins ignored, on Monday posted on its website an article on how to cope with a zombie attack. By Tuesday, it had gotten so many hits that it crashed the server. The report was put together by the CDC Zombie Task Force, and I'm sure you'll want this valuable information.

In an unusual sting operation, a woman was accused of trying to sell a fraudulent and tightly controlled substance to an undercover agent, for 1.7 million dollars. She was detained by authorities. The substance was a moon rock and the agent was "an undercover NASA investigator" -- something I didn't even know existed.

And the biggie, of course -- today is the Rapture. If you're still here at midnight, that means you're among the damned. I'm sure you'll have plenty of company.

E-Format Questions

2011-05-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

I found the right last page to my YA novel, and am now turning my attention to the next project: getting my backlist onto e-readers. Actually, I also hope to turn your attention there, in hopes that I can get input from all of you out there more knowledgeable about things electronic (which is virtually everybody).

Assuming I can get the e-rights, or already possess the e-rights, to a book, and can't get the copy edited ms. from the publisher (almost a certainty), the first step seems to be to find a company that will scan in the book. I found one, but here are my questions:

Has anybody had any dealings with Blue Leaf Book Scanning Company?

Can anyone recommend a scanning company they have had dealings with?

Since I have a choice of formats in which they will deliver the electronic file, should I ask for PDF or order two files, one in e-pub and one formatted for the Kindle? Specifically, if I get those formats, are they readable so that I can proofread them, or would I have to have proofread in PDF anyway?

Pricing: How much would you pay for a backlist book on the Nook or Kindle? I want to find a price that would actually induce people to buy.

All help very welcome!

Endings

2011-05-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

So I've finished my YA science fiction novel. Almost. Sort of. The climax, rewritten, is now more dramatic (but stops short of melodrama, I fervently hope). There is a title (FLASH POINT) that works on several story levels. I still love my characters. But -- the last page isn't right.

Endings are important. The end of anything is the power position. This is true on the sentence level, which is why "I saw the blood on the floor when I woke up in the morning" is much weaker than "When I woke up in the morning, the floor swam in blood."

It's true on the paragraph level, where you don't bury the high point in the middle of a narrative paragraph but save it for the end.

It's true on the scene-or-chapter level, which should end with, if not an actual cliff hanger, at least an intensifying of the situation to keep the reader going to the next scene.

And it's completely true at the ending of a book. Sometimes a deliberate understatement works, as in the last paragraph of Somerset Maugham's OF HUMAN BONDAGE. But I haven't got a deliberate understatement and I haven't got much of anything else, either. Fatal to let an ending peter out, turn sentimental, or become preachy. Back to the keyboard.

Science Fiction Ladies' Lunch

2011-05-16T06:51:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the First Annual Science Fiction Ladies' Lunch at my apartment in Seattle. Eleven female SF writers exchanged information on writing and publishing, ate quiche and salad, drank mimosas, talked and laughed for several hours. It was great fun: networking as friendship rather than as professional chore. Clockwise from lower left: Nicola Griffith, Timmi duChamp, Kelley Eskridge, Nancy Kress, Brenda Cooper, Nisi Shawl, Eileen Gunn, Judith Berman, Cat Rambo. Taking the picture: Vonda McIntyre. Had to leave early: Leslie Howle. Out of town: Louise Marley.There was much discussion of self-promotion: How much is necessary? What if you don't like doing it? Where do you cross the line from legitimate self-promotion to blatant egotism? What about the trade-off between time spent marketing and time therefore not spent writing? Nobody came to any real conclusions, but everybody learned something from the others.

And speaking of self-promotion, here is the link to my interview on Multiverse News:
http://www.itvnw.com/ITV/Podcasts/ITVLIVEMulti/ITVLIVETST051211Multi.mp4 Caveat: I have not watched this interview (I hate watching myself on camera) so I have no idea if I said anything embarrassing.

Also: Taos Toolbox, the intensive two-week workshop that Walter Jon Williams and I are teaching in July in the gorgeous mountains of New Mexico, is filling up fast. If you're interested, check it out at taostoolbox.com.

Srange Interview

2011-05-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I did the oddest interview of my career. It was live for Independent Television Network, a web-TV site (www.itvnw.com). The interview is not yet up on the site, but will be soon. I'll post the exact URL when I have it.

Did I say that it was live? That doesn't begin to describe it. The interview was conducted by Gregg Lienweber, host of Multiverse News, in a glass-sided van parked in front of Dick's Hamburgers on Capital Hill. Passers-by could see us, hear us through loudspeakers, and also catch our camera angles on a TV screen mounted in a corner of the van to face outside. People stopped, looked puzzled, mouthed "What the hell?" They made faces through the glass. They listened for a while, before standing in line for their quarter-pounders with pickles. Sun streamed in through the glass, heating up the inside. It was a little like being a zoo animal, one so dangerous that not even bars are permitted on the cage. An asp, maybe, or a tarantula.

But Gregg had clearly read my work and he asked interesting questions. I ended up enjoying the whole thing.

Once.

Kress Outed!

2011-05-11T11:33:00.001-07:00

I am not who I am. At least, not all of the time.

Over the past few years I have not published a science fiction novel because I have been writing and publishing a YA fantasy trilogy under the pseudonym "Anna Kendall." They have sold in five countries thus far. The first one is out in the United States, and the first two are out in England. Here are the covers:

Why YA? Why fantasy? Why a pseudonym? I wrote fantasy because my protagonist, Roger Kilbourne, popped into my head one day and began tugging at my sleeve: "Write me! Write me!" No, I said, I don't write fantasy. More "Write me! Write me!" So I did. (You really can't argue with these people). Telling his story took three books.

Why YA? Because Roger is fourteen at the start of the first book, and apparently any novel whose first-person protagonist is fourteen, is YA. I actually did not realize this when I began Roger's complicated story.

The pseudonym evolved because my agent and publishers did not wish to have this confused with my usual SF, much of which concerns genetic engineering. There is no genetic engineering in CROSSING OVER. There is a dark form of magic; Roger has the ability to cross over into the Country of the Dead. There are some things more dangerous than dying, and Roger encounters them.

Reviews have been good. And I like these books. If you choose to read them, I hope you will, too.

Crazy Time

2011-05-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

Finishing a book can make anyone crazy. Moods swing wildly -- This is great! This sucks! I have no idea if this is good or not! Nobody in their right mind would read this drivel! This one might be my break-out novel! Why am I in this business again?

And then one's ideas get weird. Yesterday, while trying to decide if my protagonist Amy would or would not say the dialogue I just typed in (and why at this point in the novel don't I KNOW?), I had a great insight: Writing a novel is just like doing sudoku.

Consider:

With sudoku, one's person's easy puzzle is another's terrible challenge. With writing, one person's subject matter is another's guaranteed failure.

With sudoku, a lot depends on where you start. If you happen to fill in certain key numbers early on, the whole puzzle is easier. With a story, much depends on where you start. Too early and it lacks tension, too late and you struggle to fill in backstory without resorting to expository lumps.

With sudoku, there comes a point where you find the one number that makes all the rest obvious -- usually about 2/3 of the way through the puzzle. For me that's exactly how writing works, since I don't plot beforehand. For both, it's the AHA! moment.

With sudoku, slow and steady solves the problem -- race too fast and I end up with two "8s" in the same square. With writing, the novel comes out best with a steady accumulation of pages each and every day, rather than frenetic marathon sessions punctuated by idleness.

Of course, there are differences -- sudoku really could use more plot. But -- wait! I just realized how writing is actually like growing squash! Yes! You see--

Blogging Success

2011-05-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

The new NEW YORKER contains a long article on one of the most successful blogs on the Internet, with millions of followers: Ree Drummond's, found on her site www.pionerrwoman.com. Drummond is the best-selling author of HIGH HEELS TO TRACTOR WHEELS, which describes how a suburban woman fell in love with a "laconic rancher," married him, and now happily lives life on a ranch, home-schooling their four kids, rounding up cattle, cooking from scratch, and loving every photo-shopped moment. I have not visited her site, but what the article did was bring home to me how important it is to know yourself.

Because when I was young, Drummond's life was what I thought I wanted: rural, domestic, fecund, close to the land, married to a gorgeous strong-silent, Gary Cooper type. Since I had a powerful imagination and considerable will, I pursued this dream, cloaking in imaginative fantasy everything that didn't quite fit, or that fit but made me uneasy. It took decades for me to learn enough about myself to recognize:

I like nature to look at but not interact with all that much.

Home-schooling kids mean you never have time alone to do things alone, like write. Yes, Drummond does it, but she writes in short fifteen-minute bursts (doesn't work for me for fiction) and appears to need no sleep. I adore my sons, but I needed them to be at school during the day so I could be at the keyboard.

I don't enjoy laconic, outdoorsy men. I like men who talk, read books, talk about those books, and would rather go to a play than a rodeo.

I am afraid of horses.

This knowledge did not come easy. I learned it by living ten years in an isolated rural area, teaching fourth grade for four years, falling off a horse and hitting my head enough to become unconscious, writing novels, divorcing, moving to a big city, and attending a lot of plays (not in that order). I wish Ree Drummond nothing but the best as she describes her western version of Arcadia -- but no thanks. Listen to Polonius instead.

Writing Dilemma

2011-05-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

I have finished the first draft of my YA novel, under contract to Viking, and immediately ran into a dilemma. The climax does not seem dramatic enough. I can make it more dramatic -- but only at the cost of less plausibility in my near-future scenario. So which matters more -- increased drama or greater plausibility?

Reading recent, successful YA fiction, it seems that drama trumps plausibility. I did not buy the premises of either THE HUNGER GAMES or LITTLE BROTHER (see ancient blogs for reasons), yet both were best sellers. LITTLE BROTHER, like my (still untitled) novel, is set just a year or two in the future. It seems to me that the closer you get to present day, the more critical is believability. Rewriting my ending would still preserve psychological plausibility -- that is, all my characters would still act in character. But it would also verge closer to melodrama.

I might do it anyway. Still deciding.

LIFE ON MARS

2011-04-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

The YA anthology LIFE ON MARS, edited by Jonathan Strahan, turned up in my mailbox yesterday. It includes my story "First Principle," as well as fiction by Ian McDonald, Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ellen Klages, Stephen Baxter, the late Kage Baker, and more.

I noticed an interesting thing about this anthology. From the author bios as well as the contributors that I know personally, only Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds are actual scientists. Stan Robinson, of course, wrote the RED MARS trilogy that (deservedly) set the standard for colonizing-Mars novels. But he did so as an obsessed writer, not a working scientist. Some of the rest of us in the anthology (me, Ellen) have no scientific credentials whatsoever. This underlines an important point that came up on panels over and over again last weekend at Norwescon:

One of the tasks of a writer is to research a story's background. But even more important is take a little bit of knowledge and make it sound like you know a lot. This is true whether the "knowledge" is of Mars, genetic engineering, the workings of dryad magic, or the history of the Seven Kingdoms. In other words: For fiction, it's not what you know, and it's certainly not who you know -- it's how skillful a liar you can be, giving the impression that you know a lot more than you do. One of the ways to do this is by understatement. The casual throw-away reference, artfully placed, can convince more than the earnest block of exposition.

On another subject: I have finally untangled my long-dormant and badly confused Twitter account. Is there a word for people who follow tweets, as opposed to dispensing them? If you are one, you can follow me on Twitter at nancykress.

Titleless in Seattle

2011-04-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

I have finished the second draft of my YA science fiction novel, which is under contract to Viking. That is, I've almost finished it. The thing has no title. 98,000 words of prose I can come up with but a title -- no.

I am terrible at titles. Really, really bad. Nearly all of mine have been supplied by other people. Bruce McAllister once gave me a title, swearing that "it will fit any story ever written." I was skeptical about that -- such a sweeping statement! So much hubris! But he was right. The title was "In A World Like This" and Ellen Datlow ran the story in OMNI.

But Bruce is not here now. Jack is busy with his own book. Viking is going to want to call this book something other than what is on the first page now ("Title," in twenty-point Times Roman -- if it's big enough, it doesn't have to be original?) I still have a clean-up draft to do. Maybe by the time that's finished, I will have thought of something.

Why are some other writers so good at titles? How do they do it?

Norwescon. Last Day

2011-04-25T06:55:00.001-07:00

Today I did something I almost never do at cons: blew off a panel I was supposed to be on. I asked Michael Swanwick to take my place on the Human Evolution panel (which he did) so I could attend the editors' panel on the future of small presses. I'm glad I did. Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press ("We publish bizarro fiction"), Patrick Swenson of Fairwood Press, and Lou Anders of Pyr were interesting and informative.
Among the points they made:

Hardcover sales are down, but e-book sales continue to rise, now accounting for 9% of all book sales. In SF and fantasy, this number may be higher because we are a wired-in group. Gordon Van Gelder thinks it may top out at about 35%.

Publishing, like music, is increasingly developing strong niche publishers, who do a specific kind of book which in itself becomes a "brand" that readers look for; Eraserhead is a prime example.
Lou added that, "Unfortunately, hard SF itself is increasingly becoming a niche, which only small presses like Nightshade do, except for big-name authors who already have a following." (The Pyr catalogue, I noted afterward, is almost all fantasy titles).

From Lou: "E-books will be the new mid-list," with hardcovers mostly going to either big-name authors or to the spectacular, expensive collectors' editions done by, for example, Subterranean.

Nobody wants to publish short story collections, which do not sell well.

Bookstores may eventually become display centers where you go to see what's new, with one or two copies of everything on the shelves, then order what you want either from a Print-on-Demand machine in the basement or on-line for your e-reader. (Some of us already use bookstores in this manner.)

But the big agreement was this: It's the Wild West out there in publishing, a time of tremendous change. Stay tuned.

Norwescon Day 2

2011-04-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

Conventions are sometimes hard work.

Yesterday at Norwescon I was originally scheduled for seven panels. I dropped one, which left me talking for six hours, often one after another. Now, I like doing panels, but by dinner time I was hoarse, tired of smiling, and completely talked-out. There was not even time to recuperate in the bar between sessions. Here are Kelley Eskridge, Jack Skillingstead, Mary Rosenblum, me, and Ted Kosmatka discussing Methods of Characterization:But the costumes were amazing. Here is a plant person:

A gorgeous Victorian lady:And, incongruously, Uncle Sam. Or maybe not so incongruously: the hallways were full of aliens, Storm Troopers, Starfleet officers, Regency bucks, butterflies, Alice in Wonderland, satyrs, and barbarians, all jostling each other in the hallways.The most interesting panel I was on was called "The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received," moderated by the incomparable Jay Lake. Some samples of received wisdom:

Eileen Gunn was told by William Gibson: "You must overcome your quite natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work."

I was told by Bruce Sterling: "Follow the money."

Jack Skillingstead offered: "Finish things."

Jay Lake offered: "No matter how much you're writing, do a little more."

Norwescon 34

2011-04-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first day at Norwescon. I would have more pictures of this except for technological glitches with camera, computer, and me. Today I will get pictures of some of the great costumes, since this is a big costuming con. It is a large con, and a fun one.

The day began with dropping off Cosette at the dog boarders. She was not happy about this. Jack and I had Mary Robinette Kowal with us, since she is staying at our apartment for the con. During the day I sat on a panel with Mary, Jack, and Claire Johnson on "When Writers Don't Get Paid." This covered two issues: piracy, and the changing publishing environment in which electronic publishing is in the ascendancy and print publishing is (maybe) in some sort of (possibly temporary) decline. I resolved to get more of my work up on Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Sony eReader.

Later I did a reading, reading for the first time from the YA fantasy I published under a pseudonym. More on this later in the week.

The high point of the day was dinner with Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, John Berry, Ted Kosmatka, Jack, Brenda Cooper and Leslie Howle. The hotel cocktails all include dry ice, so our table foamed quite a bit. Here is Michael with a martini, looking very Punk Riviera:
During dinner there was much discussion of autobiographies by writers. The question was raised: If you wrote an autobiography, would you be completely honest about your past actions and thoughts? Even if your children might read it? Everybody at the table said no. Which says something about us all -- but what?

Oh, Susanna, With a Problem on My Knee

2011-04-15T13:09:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago on an airplane I reached up to put my suitcase in the overhead rack, turned to take my seat, and did something terrible to my left knee. For a while I did nothing about it, not knowing what to do (ice? heat? wrap? rest? walk it through?) The knee got worse. Eventually I went to a doctor, who sent me to a physical therapist.

I didn't tear my meniscus (until this happened I didn't even know I possessed a meniscus. Or, more accurately, two). This is good because it means I don't need surgery. The meniscus is, however, strained and "profoundly irritated," an image I like because I picture the ball of cartilage in there scowling furiously. So now I must do exercises, take anti-inflammatories, refrain from jogging (which I wasn't doing anyway), and take the dog on only very short walks. The dog will not like this. However, her menisci are fine, so she'll have to give way.

Good thing I'm a writer instead of, say, a dancer. Writers have a long shelf-life, even if some of our bits and pieces become battered. In fact, a study I read recently compared when people in various professions on average "peak": do their best and most original work. Writers are the last to peak. Physicists and mathematicians peak earliest; often they have their most original insights in their twenties, and then spend the rest of their careers exploring the implications of those insights. With or without working menisci.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

2011-04-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Once again, I am way behind everybody else. Recently I finished Stieg Larsson's mega-bestseller THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Not only am I behind everyone else, I'm apparently at odds with their judgment.

I thought it was a perfectly competent mystery novel. The character of Lisbeth, so geeky and socially alienated and reserved that most people think she is mentally challenged rather than brilliant, was interesting. So was the setting, Scandanavia in winter.

However [SPOILER ALERT] the serial-killer-of-women villain was two-dimensional, and hardly fresh. The murders were described in such grisly detail that it became not just graphic but unnecessarily sensationalistic. A major aspect of the plot, the Biblical tie-ins to the murders, was introduced with much fanfare and then just dropped. Other plot aspects seemed merely distracting, such as Lisbeth's mother's never-revealed "secrets." Finally, the story is cluttered with much backstory about family history, going back to the fifteenth century, that has little bearing on the present and introduces -- literally -- at least a hundred names who never appear again.

So I'm left wondering -- why this book? Why this novel at this time to become such a hit? I don't know. I never know. Publishing is mysterious, but not nearly as mysterious as readers' responses to it.

Or maybe it's just me.

Hemingway and Paula Mclain

2011-04-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

Paula Mclain's book THE PARIS WIFE, about Ernest Hemingway's first wife, has been on the NEW YORK TIMES best-seller list for a while now. It's a readable, first-person story of Hadley Richardson's life from the time she met Hemingway until their divorce, much of which was spent either in Paris or on the Riviera with the Fitzgeralds, Murphys, and other members of the 1920's gorgeous, hard-drinking, hard-living expatriate artists. Mclain is very careful to label her book "A Novel" (it's in the subtitle). And she sticks to the known facts of who lived where when, who wrote what when, who sent letters to whom and about what.

But if this were a TV show, it would be labelled a "docudrama," not a documentary, and as such it shares the great weakness of such productions: the reader/viewer doesn't know where fact leaves off and invention begins. When Mclain writes of Hadley "I thought this" -- did she really? Did Hemingway really call her shortly before he shot himself to express regret that he had treated her badly ("I ruined it, Tatie.") Did Pauline, who would become his second wife, really slip into Ernest and Hadley's bed in the south of France while both of them were asleep in it?

This all makes me queasy, although I feel hypocritical about the feeling. After all, I love Philippa Gregory's historical novels that do exactly the same thing for Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the rest of the Tudors -- another hard-drinking, hard-living, promiscuous set. So what's the difference? I'm not even a Hemingway fan.

But somehow, there does seem to be a difference. I just can't decide what it is.

Happy at the Movies

2011-04-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

I went to see THE LINCOLN LAWYER under the vague apprehension that it was about Abraham Lincoln. It's not; the movie about Lincoln that involves lawyers is called CONSPIRATOR and isn't out yet, at least not in Seattle. I don't know if that one is any good, but THE LINCOLN LAWYER is.

I want three things from a movie: characters I'm interested in (which is not the same as liking); a plot that is logical, cohesive, and absorbing; and a sense that there is something being said about the world. LINCOLN LAWYER delivers on all three. Other viewers may want other qualities from a film: visual style, for instance, on which this movie does not score as high. Or so I'm told -- visual style is not something I'm very sensitive to.

The film is about Mickey Haller, well played by Matthew McConaughey, a very successful defense lawyer of sleazy scumbags. Haller knows every scam, trick, and deception in the justice system, and employs most of them himself. When he gets a client who is actually innocent, possibly a first for him, his usual balance is upset. The glimpses of the underbelly of the courthouse-and-jail life are fascinating. Haller, who at first seems one-dimensional, reveals other facets of himself as we see his complex relationship with his ex-wife, his love for his child, and his confusion as he approaches a moral dilemma: a guilty man may still deserve a good defense, but what if he's really really guilty of something really really heinous? Where is the line in aiding evil that you don't cross -- or do you?

The plot twists and turns, and the rest of the cast keeps pace with it (Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillippe, William H. Macy). If you like courtroom dramas, you'll like this one.

SF and the Outer World

2011-04-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

The March 31 issue of THE NEW YORKER reviewed PAUL, which I blogged about recently. THE NEW YORKER didn't like it. They mentioned the same thing I objected to, the gratuitous raunchiness, but that was not the reviewer's main problem, which seems to be with science fiction itself. Anthony Lane (admittedly, always a hard man to please) calls SF as a whole "nothing if not mockable." He finds "science fiction so inherently close to the absurd that the toughest challenge is not to lampoon it -- as movies like "Galaxy Quest" have done before, and Mottola does here with his blatant gestures to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." -- but to play it straight, as Spielberg managed to do. Only thus can we probe, to borrow a key verb from the aficionados, the ridiculous for the sublime: those terrors, or unlikely consolations, that lurk within."

I have several issues with this lofty denigration of an entire genre. In no particular order:

Most of SF "plays it straight," and often does so quite convincingly.

ALL art is "mockable." It's not as if parodies don't exist of HAMLET and ANNA KARENINA. Not to mention the parodies that go on in the world of modern painting.

Not all SF is "ridiculous" or needs to be "probed" for something -- anything -- of psychological value. Much hard SF, for example, exists in the borderland between the science we have today and the science we will have tomorrow. It is not ridiculous but predictive, not of a specific future but of aspects of the future we should take seriously.

My main objection to Lane's statement, however, lies in its last words. I am one of those writers who would agree that fiction is driven by character, by what "lies within." Yet that does not mean the outer world is valueless. The best SF explores large questions of how technology interacts with humanity; how political systems interact with humanity; how science shapes our thought. In short, it focuses on the outer world, while much of contemporary fiction focuses solely on small lives lived in small circumstances. Surely the larger universe -- the one outside our own lives -- has interest? Are we SF people the only fiction writers still cognizant of that? If so, then what we do is neither ridiculous nor inherently mockable.

Bad call, Mr. Lane.

A Concern of Taste, or Literature, or Something

2011-03-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes writing presents questions you never dreamed of.

Two months ago I wrote a very long novella (38,000 words) called "Before the Fall, After the Fall, During the Fall." It will be published by Tachyon Press late this year, or perhaps next year, as a stand-alone book, in the same manner that Tachyon published James Patrick Kelly's BURN and James Morrow's SHAMBLING TOWARD HIROSHIMA. My novella features, as part of the story but not in close-up or affecting the protagonist directly, a tsunami hitting Japan. I did my research; the tsunami starts with an earthquake on the same fault line that spawned the real quake a few years ago, although in a slightly different way, so that the main wave hits Tokyo. Still, the effects are similar and the coincidence is ghoulish.

Here is my concern: Does it look exploitative or tasteless to leave my tsunami in the story, given the monstrous suffering occurring right now in Japan? Nobody will know I wrote that scene before, not after, this real-life tragedy. It wouldn't be hard to move my tsunami to another place around the Pacific Rim. Should I do so?

What do you out there think? Help me sort out the issues of exploitation, taste, and honesty involved, because I can't seem to decide.

Semi-Cranky at The Movies

2011-03-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

PAUL is a movie made for nerdy sci-fi geeks, among which I count myself. Unfortunately, it's also made for fans of raunchy and tasteless humor, among which I do not.

It starts at Comic-con in San Diego, which two British fans, Graham and Clive, are attending as the culmination of a life-long dream. Meet the artists! Buy the comics! Come in costume! Extending the dream, the guys then rent an RV and head for Area 51. I loved these guys. The film makers understand our culture. They are bright, decent, enthusiastic, literate, and clueless.

On the trip, they meet up with the alien who crashed in Area 51 in 1947. He has escaped the government, calls himself Paul, and needs a ride to a location he won't reveal. Of course, the feds are chasing him. The movie is a spoof of ET, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and MEN IN BLACK, itself already a spoof. It has delicious bits such as the scene in which Graham asks Paul what he's been doing all these years. "Well, a bit of consulting, for one thing," he says, and we get a drop-in of Paul sitting across the desk from a shadowy figure and saying, "You could do it this way, Mr. Spielberg..."

I saw the movie with a teenage friend who missed a lot of the SF references which I thought hilarious. On the other hand, she didn't mind the stupid raunch -- bathroom jokes, homophobic digs, fart humor, etc. that for me marred an otherwise enjoyable romp.

Cranky at the Movies

2011-03-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

First -- apologies for not blogging for so long. I was without Internet access for a week while closing out my just-sold house, a sobering experience. We don't realize how wired-in we are until we're not.

But I did go to the movies a lot, including the new contemporary fantasy, ADJUSTMENT BUREAU. In this film, an "Adjustment Bureau" of super beings invisibly keeps humanity from going to pot by discreetly nudging human affairs as necessary. Complete free will, after all, has not served the world very well. One "agent" explains that the last time it was tried, Europe slid into the Dark Ages. Hence the supernatural interference from time to time.

The current interference is to prevent two characters, a budding politician and a gifted dancer, from getting together and falling in love. If they do, we're told, [NOTE: SPOILER ALERT] they will so distract, content, and otherwise fulfill each other that he won't go on to be an influential president of the USA and she'll won't revolutionize dance. So the movie becomes a struggle between the two to find each other again and the Bureau to keep them from doing it.

This is amusing enough, and so is the look of the Bureau: all dark wood desks, shaded green lamps, and conservative dark suits, as if in a 1950's bank. The movie manages to use these contrivances to set up a real question: Which matters more, private love or the greater social good? It's a question that has driven much greater literature (ANNA KARENINA, AGE OF INNOCENCE). Given its romantic and limited parameters, the film sets this up convincingly.

And then it backs off.

The ending should, to be honest, choose either love or duty and then show the consequences of that choice. Had it done so, it could have been a highly interesting and controversial piece of art. But, like much of American culture, it takes the easy way out, with some platitudinous hokum about "the Chairman" being so impressed by the couple's love that He (or She -- this is left deliberately vague) will rewrite the entire Plan for all of humanity just so the lovers can be together. Too bad. What started out as what fantasy can do superbly well -- set up thought experiments on big issues, using characters we care about -- degenerates into drivel and pap.

Not recommended unless you walk out 7/8 of the way through.

Twlight

2011-03-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

Several years after everyone else, and in the name of research into current YA novels, I finally read Stephenie Meyers's mega-bestseller of vampire love, TWILIGHT. I finished it with very mixed reactions.

First, if I had been given this book at age 13, I would have loved it. At 13 I read absolutely everything that came my way, and with an absolute lack of taste or discrimination. I would have fallen for the book's central theme: A gorgeous guy falls totally and almost instantly in love with a normal girl, loves her romantically and unconditionally, saves her life over and over, and would risk anything for her. As she does for him. No one else in the world can disrupt their love; no one else even matters much. My overly romantic 13-year-old soul would have thrilled.

But I'm not 13. And so I was put off by that very excess of romanticism; real love does not occur instantaneously; other people and pursuits do matter; no love is unconditional, and shouldn't be. Edward now seems to me not romantic but creepy: breaking into Bella's house to watch her sleep, obsessing over her every move, all but stalking her. She seems to me immature in her disdain for everyone but Edward: the "friends" she makes at school, the father who gives her a home and tries to please her, the entire Olympic Peninsula. The vampirism, in fact, seemed to me more believable than the relationship.

Nor did I like the writing much. Characters seldom just say something: they "growl" it or "decide" it or "agree" with it (even when the dialogue already carries agreement). Everyone glares a lot; that seems to be the author's favorite verb. Meyers isn't bad at description of weather and landscape, but the only words she can find for Edward, used over and over, are "perfect," "magnificent," "gorgeous." He even has a "crooked smile."

Yet millions love this book. They can't all be 13. Go figure.

Here Again and Gone Again

2011-03-07T06:27:00.001-08:00

Yesterday Jack and I drove back from the Rainforest Retreat. It had, uncharacteristically, finally stopped raining. The retreat was a satisfying experience; I wrote 6,500 words (a paltry amount compared to many others). I got to have dinner or chat with friends: Jim Van Pelt, Patrick Swenson, Brenda Cooper, Louise Marley. I won four games of chess against Bob Brown and lost two. I got to see the world's oldest spruce tree, 1,000 years old and 58 feet in circumference. That tree stood there during the Crusades, the Renaissance, two world wars, and the birth of Facebook. I took no picture: It was raining.

Now tomorrow I fly to Buffalo to see my family and to -- finally! -- sell my house. It was on the market 16 months, and I am selling it for less than I paid for it, but at least I was able to find a buyer. I had had visions of it just sitting there unsold for a thousand years, during more renaissances and more wars and the birth of who-knows-what form of social networking.

A study quoted on TV last night: People with huge numbers of Facebook friends experience more anxiety and social tension than those with either a small number or no Facebook presence at all. Evidently all that information can be difficult to keep up with, creating anxiety. Or something. (Possibly related note: The spellcheck on Blogger does not recognize "Facebook." It gives me "Forsook.")

It is snowing in Buffalo. I cannot escape precipitation.

Rainforest Retreat

2011-03-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

This weekend is the first of two writers' retreats, both called Rainforest Retreat, that Patrick Swenson is running in March on remote and beautiful Lake Quinalt. The retreat is held at a lodge in the world's only temperate rain forest. It has not stopped raining since Jack and I arrived on Thursday. This actually makes good sense because there is nothing to do except stay inside and write, talk to the other writers about writing (when they're not writing), and watch it rain. Here is Lake Quinalt from our cabin in the 15 minutes when it only threatened to rain:
People work in their cabins or in the large central building, which the rest of the year is a restaurant and bar. There is a daily word-count log, which Jay Lake appears to be winning. Brenda Cooper hard at work:
There are also presentations. I did one today on world-building; Jim Van Pelt did one yesterday on narrative time; tomorrow lawyers Alex Tillson and Elizabeth Stephan will talk about legal issues for writers, a session I'm eager to attend. Louise Marley leads twice daily yoga classes, which so far I have not been able to attend since during the morning class I was writing and in the evening one playing chess. Here are Brenda Cooper, me, Jack, and John Pitts talking about "Breaking Into Print:"
Lodge decor is rustic. A statue of a bear carved with chainsaws greets restaurant patrons:
People come here from as far away as Florida. There is a whole contingent from Calgary. It's fun, after writing all morning or afternoon or evening or all three (you know who you are) to have a casual dinner with other writers, or shmooze in the bar, without having to make prior arrangements and then drive all over creation to meet up. Now if only it would stop raining...

Flying Blind

2011-02-28T13:09:00.001-08:00

Last week I taught the second half of a writing-fiction course. Nothing new in that -- I teach often. This one, however, was different. Sponsored by the Odyssey Workshop run by Jeanne Cavelos, it was on-line, conducted with Go-To-Meeting conferencing software, and I could not see any of my fourteen students. Two of them were in Australia, two in Japan, one in Canada, the rest scattered around the United States.

It's very odd lecturing to people when you cannot see their faces. I am used to nods, smiles, expressions of interest or concern or puzzlement, raised hands to ask questions. Questions were possible; the student typed a Q in the "chat box," the monitor "un-muted" him or her, and then everyone could hear the question and my response (they could also hear my dog bark). Other classroom activities were likewise possible: I "wrote on the board" by typing on my screen, which typing then appeared on theirs. Prepared hand-outs could be put on screen, scrolled through, and discussed. Email took care of homework assignments. In fact, everything was there from a usual classroom -- except faces.

Faces, it turns out, are critical. Even for me, who has trouble recognizing them (see previous post on prosopagnosia). I'm not saying I would not teach on-line again, but I am saying it was an eerie experience. Sort of like teaching ghosts.

Connie Willis Combines

2011-02-19T08:41:00.001-08:00

Last night Connie Willis spoke at the University Bookstore in Seattle. As always, she captivated the crowd. Her speech ranged over an amazing array of subjects: writing, Bristol Palin, technology and the future of books, her new kittens, air travel. Here is Connie, holding forth:
One thing she said about writing especially caught my interest. The book she is currently working on is about Area 51. Connie said that every time a new book comes out on the subject she catches her breath, wondering if it will cover her territory before she can finish the novel (she is a famously slow writer). Upon reflection, however, she said she realizes that is not going to happen, and for a specific reason. Most subjects and plots have already been written about many times (certainly in SF, UFOs have!), and so when writers do them again, the trick is to combine the subject with other subjects. What is new is the combination. Connie said that her particular combination is "probably" new: UFOs, romantic comedy, and the Liberace Museum.

I don't think there can be any doubt.

But the point is intriguing. My Nebula winner "Fountain of Age" was about the quest for immortality and a single person who already has it -- a very old SF theme. But I combined it with the Romany people, a protagonist in his 90's, and romantic obsession -- possibly a combination not before attempted. As I thought about other successful stories, mine and those of other writers, I realized that they, too, often feature unusual combinations of elements. Two examples: China Mieville's THE CITY AND THE CITY combines the noir police procedural with the concept of cultural willful blindness. Mary Robinette Kowal's SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY combines Jane Austen's Regency world with delicate minor witchcraft.

The combination must be made plausible, of course, and all good fiction (in my opinion, at least) depends upon interesting characters. Still, Connie's observation is an intriguing one, worthy of further thought.

Return of a Pirate

2011-02-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

Last year I exchanged emails with an organization that had pirated my fiction. They're back. Below is -- with their permission! -- our new email exchange, in all its surreal weirdness.

Nancy,

Your situation (authors in general) troubles me. I appreciate that
you want complete control over your copyright work but
unfortunately in the real world this is not going to happen.

You can call us book thieves if you like but we are a very small
group of enthusiasts who are hungry for knowledge. Most of our
group are poor without money for expensive books so we resort to
photocopying library copies of downloading PDFs off the Internet.

I have asked authors in the past if it is okay to host their
material (for our small group) and some have agreed, others have
outright refused or just blanked the request. So there is no point
pursuing this line of action.

While I personally only distribute copies of material in private to
a very select few I understand that herm1t publishes VX related
material in the open to any member of our small club to download.
He's always done this and his site is famous for it. Some authors
even appreciate that VX Heavens is a great resource for virus
related information (good or bad, depending on what side of the
criminal line you come from)

Just so it eases my conscience I will send herm1t some money so he
can buy some books to keep you authors going a bit longer.

Regards
PZest

Nancy: Who are you? Have we communicated before? Did I even know your club has my
stuff on it?
Curious,
Nancy Kress

Paul: Hello Nancy,

Sorry you have forgotten your VX pirate friends from VX Heavens and
the publishing of your story "Computer Virus" without permission.
Refer back to your blog of April 2009 for a reminder.

Now an aside.

Given that the USA is on the brink of collapse and you are fast
turning into a stazi police state. (TSA, Homeland Security,
warrantless wiretaps, Patriot Act etc). How about a nice science
fiction story (or book) about how the Computer Virus Hackers come
to your rescue in the 11th hour through the rise of automated
Artilects, Artificial Intelligence that has a conscious awareness
and want to save America from the Illuminati New World Order world
domination.

Interested in ideas for computer virus science fiction best seller
then let us know. We are the experts after all and we can certainly
give you the technical insiders point of view. ;-)

Regards
PZest

p.s. My spelling, grammar and typos are bad but I think we can help
you with ideas for the above book.

Nancy: Oh! You're those guys! Nice to hear from you again, sort of.

Actually, your idea for a novel is a pretty good one. I am not, alas, the right person
to write it -- I don't have enough computer knowledge (like, zero). You want either
Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling.

Paul: But we want you Nancy! We've already broken the ice and we can
certainly school you with computer knowledge and all the technical
details to make a convincing science fiction story.

Let us be your ghost collaborators, after all we are already
quantum entangled with our crossed paths. Or we could do it the
other way around, we draft a story and you turn it into something
readable for mass consumption.

And given our philosophy is spreading information, and knowledge
for free you can take 100% credit for crafting and finishing a
great idea.

Regards
PZest

Nancy: Let me think about this. You caught me at a bad time -- a good time,
actually: tomorrow I leave for Las Vegas to be married. But I'll be back in touch.

On some level, I find this whole alliance hilarious.

Nancy

Paul: Well good luck with tomorrow! Best wishes.

Get back in touch when you've got hitched and been carried over the
threshold. We (VXers) are deadly serious about getting a positive
message out about a solution to this NWO Illuminati, Masonic
takeover of the USA and the rest of the world.

The rise of A-Life is upon us and we aim to steer it in the
direction of saving humanity not destroying it for a handful of
global elitists.

Regards
PZest (aka Paul Zest VX history and science philosopher)

Nancy: Isn't your plot line awfully close to Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER?
U.S. rights eroding, group of hackers retaliates and is triumphant over
Homeland Security?

Paul: Wow you've started researching the plot line before your even got
married!

No it's not like Cory's book, the difference between us (VXers) and
hackers is that VX is about the machines not the individual
hackers. Artificial Life is what rises from of the codes we think
about. These machines will rise without the hand of man, but they
come from the minds of men. This is the second genesis of life and
the emergence of a conscious soul that will protect us ordinary
humans in our desperate hour of need.

It could be the true rapture we have been waiting for, not the
false rapture the Illuminati plan to inflict upon us with their
Project Blue beam aircraft spraying the skies with radioactive
Barium isotopes.

Hey haven't you got a flight to catch? Watch out for those TSA
groping stazi stormtroopers and have fun in Las Vegas.

Nancy: Dear Paul,

So I'm back from my wedding and have thought about the novel. I really don't think I
can write it, for three reasons. First, I just don't know much about computers. Second,
I don't really believe that the USA is on the cusp of a Stazi-like grab of civil liberties.
Third, I see no reason why an AI would seek to "save" us -- it would be just as likely
to regard us as an enemy to its survival (as in my story you pirated, "Computer Virus")
and seek to eradicate us instead. Or at least to render us as harmless as it could.

Besides, if I wrote the book, you'd just pirate it anyway :)

However, I still think you should write it. You have the belief in that scenario that I
lack.

Nancy

Paul: Okay thanks Nancy. Btw in fairness it was herm1t that pirated your
"Computer Virus" story, so I can't take his credit away.

Sorry to hear that you feel the emerging AI will be like the
"Skynet virus" aka from the Terminator films. This emerging
entity(s) are inevitable whether or not the North American Union as
the forerunner to the NWO is on the cards or not.

Btw there is already an Artificial Life prophecy penned by J.D.
Farmer and published in the Santa Fe Institute Artificial Life
Proceeding II, written 20 years ago.

I note that you have already covered Genetic Engineering in your
"Beggars..." trilogy so maybe you would like to YouTube on a video
documentary called "Technocalypes" which included Genetics,
Artilects and the hyper-exponential evolution of AI machines.

This documentary as the name suggests puts a bit of a negative spin
on things, but you've really got to counter this with the genuine
need for some creations to follow a benevolent path as they become
aware of God.

Good will always win over evil, eventually.

Regards
Paul

Nancy: Dear Paul,

I think our last email exchanges are interesting. May I post
them on my blog? (You see that I follow my intellectual-property
protocols, as you do yours.)

Nancy

Paul: Sure, but can you leave the email address out.

Nancy: Okay.

Paul: Incidentally the "Nancy Kress" pirating thing came up after various
other threats were made against VX Heavens, recently.

Of course publishing houses send their boilerplate legal threats
but the most recent "threat" has come from Kaspersky Anti-Virus
company. The source code of their Anti-Virus product is now in the
hands of the hackers and virus writers, and herm1t ( the high
priest of knowledge) has published this freely available source
code.

I know most uninformed people think that VXers are pure evil but
this isn't true. Most of us are researchers and coders pushing the
*TRUE* Artificial Life envelope technology. VX Heavens is a
knowledge website and archive of computer virus information. There
is a big difference between readers and contributors of this
website and criminals that use technology to hurt others.

Real Artificial Life hasn't come into existence yet by certain
scientific *life* criteria but VXers will be amongst the early
witness it when it does happen. A-Life will not come from an
individual studiously coding his designs, A-Life will emerge from
some complex system outside of our control (and probably our
understanding). The one thing you can be sure of is that once
things get going the emerging intelligence out of the second
genesis of life will want to know what freedom and survival is, an
not want to be bonded slaves under the control of evil industrial-
military globalists.

Regards
Paul

The Grand Canyon

2011-02-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Jack and I visited the Grand Canyon. Onto a bus at the hotel, onto a prop plane at a small airport in Las Vegas, a 50-minute flight over desert, Lake Mead, and the Hoover Dam, and another bus to the South Rim.

The Canyon is impressive. Moreover, after two days in Las Vegas it is a complete contrast: austere where LV is glitzy, quiet where LV is frenetic, timeless where the entire Strip seems like some sort of gaudy and unreal mirage. The Canyon is not lifeless, but neither is it warm and inviting. Humans seem a bit irrelevant there.

Nonetheless, here is a human, Jack, against a view from Mather Point:Back in Las Vegas we visited a different hotel for dinner, New York New York, which turned out to be even gaudier than the MGM Grand, with "streets" of "typical" New York restaurants, shops, and bars. A quick walk around and we fled, although I was rather taken with the enormous sculpture of the Statue of Liberty done entirely in jelly beans:Below is the exterior of the hotel, shaped like sky scrapers. Much of Las Vegas is molded to look like something else.Here is the Strip at night. The picture really does not do justice to the glitz.Today we fly home to Seattle. It's definitely time. Still, I am glad to have seen this piece of America. Once.

Las Vegas

2011-02-11T08:08:00.001-08:00

Jack Skillingstead and I are in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand. Even this (fairly) upscale hotel is a cross between luxury and tackiness. Incredible restaurants, fountains, and penny slot machines. Bright colors, constant loud music, cigarette smoke, a very lot of security. Non-gamblers, we tried a dollar in a slot machine, could not figure out what the succession of "Bets" and "Credits" meant, and were sure only that we lost the dollar.
There are other attractions besides gambling, however. Here are the MGM lions in their habitat:
We saw David Copperfield make a Lincoln convertible appear on stage and thirteen people vanish from it. His show was unbelievable. Enormous stage presence, amusing stories, and dramatic magic.
We also saw the Cirque de Soleil in KA, doing things you would not have believed possible to the human body. We rode the monorail, then walked miles. Here are the flamingos at the Flamingo Hotel, looking contented and gawked at:
The Paris Hotel has a half-scale copy of the Eiffel Tower. We rode to the top for an incredible view of Las Vegas. If I had remembered to rotate this picture before I uploaded it to Blogger, you wouldn't be looking at it sideways:
And here is the most important picture of all. Jack and I were married on Thursday. I am very happy.

Commas

2011-02-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

I am reading Amy Chua's controversial, bestselling, non-fiction book, BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER, an excerpt of which went viral on the Internet. Chua, a Chinese-American married to a Jewish law professor at Yale, has two daughters, Sophia and Lulu. Her husband and she made a pact upon marriage: Their children would be raised Jewish by faith but Chua would have charge of their education, which she undertook according to what she calls "the principles of a Chinese mother." Such mothers, she says, do not have to actually be Chinese, and many ethnic Chinese do not qualify. Rather, being a "Chinese mother" is a set of practices.

By Western standards, these practices can seem appalling. Her girls were raised to never bring home less than an A from school; to practice a musical instrument five or six hours every single day; to be forbidden such "time wasters" as sleep-overs, sports, or any extra-curricular activities that don't help out a college application; to have their mother make all their choices for them. Both girls ended up brilliant, well-behaved, and playing at Carnegie Hall. Western parents, Cha said, don't demand enough from their kids, and it does the children no good in the long run. Tough love makes kids happier because they gain real skills to propel them through a real, often harsh world.

This was on my mind a few weeks ago as I listened to President Obama's State of the Union address, in which he mentioned that American kids are falling behind in international test scores, especially in math. The president said that our kids make up for this in creative thinking and flexibility.

Yes and no. A little background here -- I hold an M.S. in education and taught the fourth grade for four years. It was during the early seventies, when American education was embracing non-drill, non-coercive, open-classroom techniques where the underlying assumption was that if learning was fun, kids would naturally learn everything. Ten years later, when I was teaching freshman English at a college, I saw the results of this: most of my students could not punctuate, spell, or identify the parts of a sentence (as in, "Your verb needs to agree with the singular subject, not that plural noun that is the object of your prepositional phrase." What verb? What's a prepositional phrase?) Many could not sound out unfamiliar words because they had not been taught phonics, only "whole-word recognition." For a while I always knew which freshmen had been to Catholic schools -- they could do those things (they also had better penmanship). Eventually, however, that disappeared as well.

Now I teach adults who want to be professional writers. Too many come to this point without the basic tools of written English, which makes the job of learning to write well much harder for them (it also means I spend hours upon hours line-editing). The truth is that there are basic subjects -- commas, multiplication tables, phonics -- that are best taught by repeated drill, so that they become so internalized they can be forgotten about, allowing the mind to concentrate on the larger purpose of whatever task is at hand. Yes, kids may find that drill boring. That doesn't mean it isn't a good thing.

Chua goes too far, in my opinion -- way too far (she rejected a hand-drawn birthday card from Lulu because Lulu had done it hastily and "Your mother deserves better.") But underneath her appalling and amusing book (she writes very well) is a serious point. For parents and aspiring writers both.

Workshops

2011-02-04T08:07:00.001-08:00

Winter is workshop application time, and both Clarions have asked me to mention that their application deadline is March 1. Clarion West in Seattle and Clarion in San Diego are both intensive, six-week workshops in writing science fiction and fantasy. The instructors this year for Clarion (http://clarion.uscd.edu) are Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel, and Kij Johnson. Teaching in Seattle (www.clarionwest.org) are Paul Park, Nancy Kress, Margo Lanagan, Minister Faust, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Charles Stross. Both websites offer much more information, including the availability of scholarship money.

I'm also teaching a two-week workshop with Walter Jon Williams in Taos, NM, which is especially good for those who (1) can't manage to take six weeks away from home, and (2) like mountains, incredible scenery, and Mexican food. Find that one at www.taostoolbox.com.

Workshops can do several things for an aspiring writer. Primarily, they focus on aspects of craft that, although you would probably learn them anyway on your own after writing enough wordage, can shorten the learning process. Second, they give you feedback from actual readers of SF who aren't your mother or spouse. Third, a workshop can create connections, professional and personal, that last a lifetime. Certainly the ones I formed at Sycamore Hill Workshop have done so. I'm looking forward to extending that process at both workshops I teach at this summer.