THEY SAID THIS AIR WOULD BE BREATHABLE
Wait, what? The State of the Union address is tonight? Someone was supposed to tell me these things.
Also, what is Obama thinking? Doesn’t he realize that he’s going to get swamped by the release of the Apple Tablet? This is madness!
Mmmmm… Apple Tablet.
Dear Whatever commenters:
WordPress’ spam detection has the last couple of weeks been bumping a few more of you into spam and moderation queues than is usual. I’ll be working on tweaking the backend, but in the meantime if you post a message and it seems to go nowhere, don’t panic, and don’t assume I’ve suddenly banned you (unless, you know, I’ve said to you “you are now banned.”). Just relax and I’ll go through the spam and moderation boxes as I generally do a couple of times a day, releasing comments. Thanks.
I’m quoted in it. Because I am an authority, damn it!
I was grumbling to my friend, copy editor Deanna Hoak, about my need to lop twenty pounds or so from my frame, and she responded by giving me a whole scad of advice about dietary intake, especially for folks like me who do a lot of eating at their desks. After she was done, I asked her why she was just telling me these tips when she could in fact be telling the whole Internet, which almost by definition is full of desk-grazing folks just like me. So she wrote up her advice here. Go check it out — it’s sensible stuff to dial down that mindless chomping so many of us do while we stare into the ‘tubes.
When thinking about “urban fantasy,” we’re aware that the word “urban” sets the fantasy in a particular type of setting — but does that setting (and those stories) require a specific place? For the purposes of the genre, and our conversation, is one “urban” as good as another?
Not for author Margaret Ronald, and in this Big Idea, she explains why the city of Boston is in itself essential as the setting of her acclaimed fantasy series, of which Wild Hunt is the latest installment. Take your places, please.
MARGARET RONALD:
I am not a city girl by nature. I was born in a small Indiana town, lived there for close to two decades, and went to college in an even smaller Massachusetts town. When I’m on vacation, I retreat to lakes and cabins well away from civilization; when I think about what got me started writing, I remember biking down flat roads with fields on either side, watching storms approach for miles.
So when I describe Wild Hunt and Spiral Hunt as “urban fantasy,” there’s always part of me that wonders how on earth I ended up writing anything remotely urban.
Some of it is probably part of how my muse operates, since a strong sense of place is something that really sparks my imagination. After all, the first story I ever sold — “Christmas Apples,” in Realms of Fantasy, also an Evie story — was inspired by a place. I’d visited a friend’s house several times, always in winter, at the turning point of the year. The house was hard to find, difficult to reach even when you knew where it was, and at the times I’d seen it, always a place of revelry and rejoicing, a golden haven against the cold.
A better description of an Otherworld feasting-hall I could not conjure. And when I started playing with the idea of a story set at that time of year, that house and the feel of it were central to the result.
But with Boston — and with any city, I think — the scale is entirely different. I think a lot of it has to do with being entranced by the city. There’s so much here that I want to show to other people. Doing so in writing is like having a friend over and taking them to all the cool places you’ve discovered over the last couple of years. You have to see this, hear about this, try this! Sharing the joy I found in that first discovery is one of the best things about writing a story set in Boston.
And in doing so, I keep discovering more about the city, more than I could ever write about. There is so much here — and so much of it is hidden to the casual glance.
As an example, take the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It’s not one of the big tourist draws, nor is it one of the first things that come to mind when most people think about Boston. But if you’ve been there, you have some idea what I mean about hidden magic within a city.
If you haven’t been there, go, preferably sometime in winter or very early spring, when the world has been repainted in shades of blue and gray, warmth is a memory, and green is a cruel joke. Inside what appears to be a dull brick building is as great a wonderland as any hollow hill: a lush garden under an atrium, tiles and columns and sculpture from dozens of cultures jammed together in an arrangement that at first seems chaotic and only slowly reveals itself as part of Mrs. Gardner’s plan. There is mystery here as well: why choose these artifacts, why place them like this, why set the sublime beside the mundane? Why put an ushabti next to an ostrich egg in silver fittings and both below a Titian? (And then there are the empty frames that still hang in the Dutch Room . . .)
Entering this place can be like stepping from one world to the next. Yet it’s still very much part of Boston — in fact, I’d argue that the culture of Boston of the time was one of the major reasons Mrs. Gardner chose to build the museum and fill it to her specifications.
By writing about these places, setting my characters to run around them or discover their secrets or fight their way through the magic that surrounds them, I hope to introduce them to readers — not by showing a realistic portrait of the place, but by pointing out some of their wondrous elements. It’s like a quick set of introductions at a party: here are some interesting things, now go see what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what hasn’t even been mentioned. Or the ways that I introduce characters to the reader. Here is the Gardner, a place of beauty no matter the season. Here is Genevieve Scelan, in over her head and trying to wrangle what’s left of Boston’s undercurrent together. Here is the tower of Mount Auburn Cemetery, from which you can see the whole city and beyond. Here is Abigail Huston, named for her great-grandmother, a woman with one too many secrets.
Here is the real Boston, deep with history and a thousand hidden sources of beauty or strangeness, a thousand doors to other worlds that are all the more wondrous for being part of our world. Here is Evie’s Boston, reflecting the original and itself reflected in its own fragmented, chaotic undercurrent, in which every deal has the possibility of betrayal . . . and in which more than one Hound is hunting.
Welcome.
—-
Wild Hunt: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s
Read an excerpt of the novel. Visit the author’s blog. Read the Big Idea for Spiral Hunt, the first book in this series.
Yes, you read that right. Just a few moments ago I formally sent my candidacy letter to the Elections Committee of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and also posted it to the SFWA Web forums. But so the rest of you know as well, I’m telling you here, too.
Posted below the cut is my candidacy letter, if you are interested in what such a thing looks like, and also what my platform and positions are — and who is running with me, as part of a slate of candidates, all committed to the same goals for SFWA. And for those of you who can’t wait, here’s who the VP candidate for our slate is.
If you are a SFWA member, I hope you’ll read this letter here or in the SFWA forums and consider giving your vote to me and the fellow members of our slate. If you are eligible to be a SFWA member but are not, please consider joining SFWA and helping us continue to build the organization. Thanks.
My Friend Bill: Ahoy John — very quick question for you, as a man who is well-informed on a wide variety of topics, if you don’t mind.
Me: Fire away!
Bill: An apt response, because the question is:
What sort of ordnance is fired from pie-mounted artillery?
Me: Hmmm.
Bill: My feeling is that the answer is “delicious ordnance.”
Me: Well, that does depend on the pie, now, doesn’t it.
Bill: And probably upon the individual tastes of the target.
Me: I was thinking the German for it might be “Meringuenflak”.
Bill: The Germans undoubtedly attempted it when traditional materials for constructing and arming artillery became scarce toward the end of the war.
Me: Who can forget the Marzipan Panzers of April 1945?
Bill: Or the “marzipanzers” as they naturally came to be known.
Me: Yes. At least until the rains came.
Bill: The death toll was terrible.
Though most of it came years later, in the form of complications from diabetes.
Me: Well, and of course the fact that the collapse of the German forces around Berlin was actually a sugar crash.
This is the secret and flavorful history of WWII, which we must witness to the world.
Bill: The truth will no longer be suppressed.
A couple of notes:
* Serious stuff first: There’s an online initiative called 100 Stories for Haiti, in which writer Greg McQueen is hoping to very quickly gather up that number of short short stories (1,000 words or less) and put them together in a flash e-book anthology, all of the proceeds of which will go to the Red Cross for assistance in Haiti. My pal, bestselling author Nick Harkaway (The Gone-Away World), is penning a story and an intro. This is an all-volunteer effort (i.e., no one’s getting paid for the work), but it’s a good cause, so that’s worth a one-time pass from me. If you’re interested in contributing a story, they’d be interested in seeing what you have.
That said, there is a catch: The deadline is hella close — as in, today. BUT, McQueen, hoping to harness the awesome might of Whatever, sends along this note:
Please feel free to say that if someone puts SUBMISSION JOHN S in the subject line of their submission, we’ll accept them as late as Wed/Thursday this week.
So there, I scored you an extension. Because I love you, man. So if you’ve got the urge to write something short and to help out Haiti, now you know where to send your stuff.
* There, that’s done, now let’s talk about me. Zoe’s Tale received a nice accolade on Friday when the American Library Association’s Amelia Bloomer list for 2010 was announced, and Zoe was on it. The Bloomer list, for those of you who don’t know, is “an annual booklist of the best feminist books for young readers, ages birth through 18,” and Zoe was of course written with younger readers in mind, even if it wasn’t marketed directly as YA. I’m delighted Zoe’s on the list; maybe she will pick up some more young readers as a result. I would be happy with that.
* Over in the UK, SciFiNow is listing its picks for “SF novels destined for the silver screen,” with Old Man’s War leading that pack, along with novels by Richard Morgan, Carrie Ryan, Terry Brooks and China Mieville. I can’t criticize any of their selections; I’d like to see the movies of each of those (and, you know, would mind OMW getting up there, too). There is that minor point that someone with access to millions of dollars and a film studio also has to want to see that movie. But really, that’s just fiddly detail, now, isn’t it.
* New review of The God Engines over at SF Site: “His writing is as good as ever, the tale moves along briskly, sex, violence and spaceship battles are featured. The story becomes darker with each revelatory twist, and ends up very dark and bloody indeed.” Yes. Yes it does.
* Apropos to absolutely nothing at all, and especially not the last note there, Aussiecon 4 sent me a press release yesterday noting that those of you who want to nominate works for the Hugo this year but are not yet Worldcon members this year have until January 31st to register. If you don’t register by then, you’ll be too late to have your nominations count (although if you are registered by that date, you can nominate works through March 13). So, you know. Register. Remember that even if you don’t plan to schlep yourselves to the Land Down Under for this year’s Worldcon, you can still become a Supporting Member for $50, which allows you Hugo voting rights and other neat goodies.
And there you have it.
Posts like this are why one of the best blogs you can read right now just happens to be written by a 90-year-old man.
I spent my weekend in Michigan, watching this:
That’s my friend Yanni feeding creme brulee to Krissy while both of them are wearing very sexy cocktail dresses. I could watch that all evening long, and did. So there.
We were in Michigan to visit friends, but as it happens most of the friends in Michigan whom we wished to visit were also at the ConFusion science fiction convention, so that’s where we were as well. As noted earlier, I’m mostly taking the year off from actively participating at science fiction conventions, so my “programming” at ConFusion this year largely consisted of parking my ass in the bar and talking my head off with whomever came to sit down. Occasionally I would leave the bar to eat or sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. Yes, there is an irony to my living in the bar for a weekend, considering I don’t drink at all. But hey, it’s a convention. Sooner or later, everyone walks through the bar.
Anyway, it was a perfectly lovely weekend and a fine excuse to get away from the Teh Internets for a couple of days. Hope your weekend was equally relaxing and friend-filled. Even if they were not wearing sexy cocktail dresses and feeding desserts to your spouse.
“It’s… it’s not possible, is it? An entire weekend away from Teh Interweebs?” Well, we’re about to find out, my fuzzy little friend. I have much to do that does not involve this mighty Series of Tubes™ we all know and love, and so am signing off until Monday. Do try to keep it together until I get back. In the meantime, consider this an open thread to chat amongst yourselves in. Remember to play nice with each other; I may be away for the weekend, but the Mallet of Loving Correction is here 24/7.
Jay Lake, a clever young fellow I think you’ll be hearing about a lot in the coming days, offers up “The larval stages of the common American speculative fiction writer,” detailing all the Stations of the Cross a newbie science fiction and/or fantasy writer is likely to visit on his or her path to crucifixion publication. Read it and see yourself in it, you larvae!
What you want to hear vs. what you need to hear: This is an eternal struggle with writers when they approach someone to read the drafts of their work. What you want to hear (“It’s brilliant! Change nothing!”) is sometimes very different than what you need to hear (“Here are the problems”) — so much so that even when we hear what we need to, we’ll still fight against it.
Josh Sundquist knows of this struggle. A cancer survivor turned motivational speaker, he had written a draft of what would eventually become his memoir Just Don’t Fall: How I Grew Up, Conquered Illness, and Made it Down the Mountain. He knew what he wanted to hear about it. But was he ready for what he needed to hear? Let’s find out.
JOSH SUNDQUIST:
“My advice to you,” the handwritten letter read, “Is to throw away this draft of the manuscript and start over from scratch.”
I was too young to understand it at the time, but I was lucky to receive such a letter. Very, very lucky.
Most first-time authors, upon completing their manuscript, assemble an inner circle of friends and family to read over the draft and give their honest feedback as to whether they think it’s ready to be submitted to agents. But therein lies the problem with this practice. Friends and family are inherently biased to like anything you produce and tell you what you want to hear. You are a genius. This is a surefire bestseller. It would make a great movie, too, probably staring somebody really famous.
What an author needs instead is an impartial reader, someone who doesn’t know him personally. There are two ways to find such a person. Number one, you could approach a random individual in a bookstore or some other place book readers tend to congregate (say, Whole Foods), hand her your manuscript, and hope she has an unnaturally strong inclination towards lending her free time to strangers. Number two, you could pay for feedback from a professional. But most first time authors don’t have that kind of money. I know I didn’t back when I wrote my initial draft.
Which is why I went with option one: Getting lucky with a near stranger. That, of course, is the very definition of high risk behavior (in writing and otherwise), but I was fortunate in that I received the aforementioned painfully honest handwritten letter in response to my request for feedback.
I was only sixteen years old at the time. As it happened, I had been featured in a national newspaper for the motivational speaking career I had recently launched. I was traveling to schools across the country, talking about how I had lost my leg to childhood cancer and gone on to become an internationally ranked ski racer.
After it was published, I sent the writer of the article my manuscript and asked if he’d read it. He was a professional journalist, I figured, so maybe he’d have some helpful suggestions.
He did. And that’s how I found myself reading his handwritten note telling me to throw away my life story as I’d written it and start over.
“You to need to tell us what it was really like for you,” he wrote. “You’re hiding behind motivation.”
He was right. It was a habit I’d developed on stage as a fledgling speaker, coupling motivational clichés with an I’m-so-perfect-and-heroic version of my story. But it wouldn’t be until I returned to writing in my mid-twenties that I was ready to take his advice.
Back in the first draft, for example, I wrote about my amputation like I was some kind of inspirational wunderkind, perfectly resolute in my bravery even at the tender age of nine. Why I wrote this way, I’m not sure. I guess it was a role I thought I was supposed to play as a motivational speaker. But when I wrote the new draft, I was ready to share the real story, the story of how for weeks leading up to the amputation I would sit in bed and hold my leg and cry myself to sleep. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t inspirational. I was just a boy facing the fact he’d never play soccer again.
When I took drafts of this new manuscript to friends and family, I received warnings that certain passages were overly raw and revealing, that they were dangerous to my career as a motivational speaker. But this time around, I knew these readers were too close to me, that they just wanted to protect me, that they in fact loved me too much to be able to step back and understand my big idea: Writing a memoir that connects on a deep, human level means writing a memoir that strips off the public mask and exposes the deeply flawed and frail child hiding underneath.
—-
Just Don’t Fall: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Visit Josh Sundquist’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.
Over at AMC this week, I’m talking about what the future of 3D might be, in the wake of the massive success of Avatar. Are we facing Northanger Abbey 3D? The answers await you over there. Check it out.
Also, a note for those of you following my column: in the next couple of weeks it’ll be changing location at AMC, thanks to some changes to the Web site there. If you get to the column though here, then there’s no worries, since I’ll just link over to the new digs when it happens. And that’s actually all the information I have about that at the moment; I’ll let you know more as I know more.
Just for perspective, everything I’ve ever written and everything I am ever likely to write in my entire life will fit onto this thumb drive. Several times over.
On one hand, it’s weird to consider one’s life’s work compressed into a space smaller than one’s thumb. On the other hand, I really don’t have any excuse not to back up my work, now, do I. On the third hand, in 50 years it’s doubtful anyone will be able to access the data on this drive anyway, so it’s best I keep making printed books, just in case. On the fourth hand, I seem to have twice as many hands as I normally do, and this is a puzzlement.
Hmmm. I think someone may have spiked my Coke Zero. Let me get back to you.
Want to know what aspects of the writing and publishing industry your average book author has control over? Sure you do. Well, Cherie Priest is here to tell you which they are in this useful and interesting essay (short answer: really very few). Click through to be enlightened, and then for f@#&’s sake stop e-mailing us to complain about the things we can’t do anything about. Because we can’t do anything about them, you see. Honest, we’re not lying.
Because everyone, including me, has thoughts about what last night’s elections means for the 2010 vote ten months from now:
Ten months ago, everyone assumed the GOP was doomed for several political cycles.
Ten months before that, there was still a chance Hillary Clinton would have been the next president of the United States, and no one outside of Alaska had heard of Sarah Palin.
Which is to say that a lot can happen in ten months. No one should get cocky, no one should feel doomed, and no one should be under the impression that any prediction that make now will have any relation to what happens in November. The only prediction I do feel confident in making is: the next ten months should be interesting.
Hey there, kids! I and Subterranean Press have got a present for you: An abridged audio version of “Judge Sn Goes Golfing,” the short story of mine set in the universe of The Android’s Dream, which was published as a stand-alone chapbook by SubPress.
The audio version is the version that I read live when I was on my book tour a couple of years ago: shorter than the full written version, and with most of the truly salty profanity trimmed out, on account that I’m hesitant to bellow the f-word in a bookstore with a children’s department in it. But as anyone who went to one of my bookstore appearances can tell you, this version is still pretty good.
If you enjoy the audio version, consider picking up the chapbook to get the full, unabridged story. The chapbooks are signed by me, and feature the really rather awesome illustrations of Gahan Wilson, a fact which still causes me to squee in an positively unmanly fashion whenever I think about it. The chapbook’s available from Subterranean Press directly (follow the link above) or from Amazon.
One technical note: For some reason, the audio is a bit low volume when I listen to it (I didn’t record it that way, I swear), so you might want to turn it up a bit. There’s a bit of intro of me blathering, so you can adjust to taste there.
Happy listening!
Slightly rambly as I’m running on a deficit of sleep.
* First, of course, it does seem that the Democratic ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory seems wholly undiminished. Depending on one’s personal politics, you could argue whether the newly-minted Senator-Elect Brown deserved to win the election, but given the campaign she ran, it appears Ms. Coakley squarely deserved to lose it, and did. Regardless of Brown’s virtues (or lack thereof) that would have been enough in itself. That’s some nice work there, Coakley. As for the Massachusetts Democrats, this is what you get for apparently assuming you’d win in a walk. Losing Edward Kennedy’s seat — and imperiling the last major legislative initiative he championed — is a fine job all around.
* That said, contrary to apparently popular opinion, health care isn’t quite dead yet. Now the real interesting thing is to see what the Democrats do next — whether they curl up in a legislative ball, moaning softly, and let their health care initiative die, or whether they double down, locate their gonads and find a way to get it done (there are several ways this can be accomplished).
From a purely strategic point of view, I’m not sure why they don’t just ram the thing through the House as is, fiddle with it a bit during reconciliation and get to Obama to sign it. To put it bluntly, the Democrats will look better by flipping the GOP the bird and then using the ten months until the 2010 election to get voters back on their side than showing to the voters that despite a large majority in both houses, they collapse like a flan in the cupboard at the first setback. We’ll see what happens now, and I suspect what happens in the next week or so will make a significant impact on what happens in November.
* If health care legislation ultimately collapses and the Obama Administration and its overall slate of initiatives take a severe hit, then, congratulations, progressives, you’ve just manufactured your “Nader 2000″ moment for this particular decade.
Yes, yes, I know, the GOP and conservatives have been completely losing their goddamn minds over Obama from the moment he was elected, but they were always going to do that, because the GOP today is comprised of hopped-up ignorant nihilists, and that’s all they know. You, on the other hand, are supposed to have brains, which are actually able to model consequences to your actions. And you should have been smarter about the political realities surrounding the Obama administration’s attempt to shepherd health care through Congress and into law.
Progressives were never going to get everything they wanted out of health care from Obama, and while I have no problem with them getting their hits in — indeed, glad they had their say — at the end of the day they should have more actively had Obama’s back in getting something through anyway because — once again — getting into law the idea that every American should have access to good and useful health care was the thing that had to happen now. Once that was through everything else would be up for negotiation in time. But that first step was the thing. The fact so many progressives spent so much time publicly and enthusiastically crapping all over the health care legislation made it easier for the people trying to bring it down to do so. Again: Well done, you.
And now the Obama health care legislation is on the verge of extinction, and if it goes, then it’s gone. And I’m sure that some of you progressives and liberals will be just fine with that, because you didn’t get everything you wanted out of it. Well, you enjoy that, then, over the next several political cycles at least. And hope you don’t actually need your health care coverage. But remember that you’re getting older. You know what that’s going to do to you.
No, it’s not all your fault. But if the health care legislation goes the way of the dodo, you’ll not be exactly blameless, either.
* Now I’m going to bed. Be polite to each other in the comments whilst I sleep. If I come back and have to do a bunch of malleting, I am going to be very cross.
The Blatherations of Others