Sounds Like Weird
04 August 2014
Catherine Schaff-Stump has a great post: she’s got a copy of Mists of Avalon, and would like to see people donate to RAINN because of the recent revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s abuse of her children.
Here’s her post.
Thanks Cath!
02 August 2014
So, as you all know, I’m a big fan of Canadian DJ Overwerk. He’s in the middle of his first US tour, and I just had to go.
Look, the first time I went to a concert was to see Jethro Tull in 1973 on the A Passion Play tour. I’ve seen a ton of bands since then, including: Led Zeppelin (pre- and post-Stairway to Heaven), Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Queen, and, well, so many others that if I list them all, I’ll never get to the point.
What I’d not really understood was how much electronica had changed over the years. When I took an electronic music in the 70s, synthesizers were not only monophonic (meaning they could only play one note at a time). Well, okay, there were some polyphonic synthesizers, but the college could not afford them. Yet. The one thing this class really did for me? Made me realize how amazingly awesome Switched-On Bach was. What an unbelievably large amount of work. It reminds me of spectacular English marquetry in terms of hours of labor.
Somewhere in the late 80s, I had a Roland D-50 for a short while. I was determined to go the MIDI route, but it was tremendously painful. Things hadn’t progressed as far as I’d hoped.
In the 90s, I worked for Synclavier, or at least the remnants of it. I had a synclavier.com work email address. I didn’t work on synth-related stuff; I worked on managing royalties for use of digital audio elements. Still, I had a sense of what was possible then, vastly improved over the years.
But since then? No clue.
In 2005, I was talking with a colleague about music, and I thought I was showing that I was fairly current because of the relatively recent artists I was listening to. However, he pointed out, half correct, that most of the bands were more than 10 years old. (Some had been around that long; most were newer, but not new-new.) Who was I listening to that was new?
Ever since then, I’ve made more of an effort to listen to a wider variety of music and more newer artists, not just new albums from artists I already love or have newly discovered.
I know I used to compete in ice dancing, and that I’ve studied dancing. I first appeared on stage in a white satin duck suit. Tap dancing. As a teen and in my twenties, I had no use for non-ballroom dancing, though. I was always feeling out of my element when I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, especially when it was something physical.
So I did what I always do: I ignored it, pretended it didn’t matter.
Yet, at the same time, once we got past the main part of the disco era, dance music started to diverge more. I loved dance music, I just didn’t, you know, dance. In that sense, I was an equal opportunity hater and wound up rolling my eyes more than once when asked to pick sides. I like what I like, musically speaking.
Then my back and knee started bothering me, and so the point is now moot: I simply can’t dance for more than a couple of minutes, and most dance moves have me risking collapsing (and I mean that literally) in a heap on the floor.
So, Overwerk’s coming. What to do?
Overwerk was coming to both San Francisco and Santa Cruz, but they were dates I was out of town. I wrote to the Santa Cruz club anyway, as I could have made it if I changed my flight (and missed the Great Namaste), but I never heard back from them.
I also tried to contact several that would have been doable with some combination of the various miles I have hoarded.
The one club I contacted that answered me: The Monarch Theatre in Phoenix. They were really nice about assuring me there would be some place for me to sit.
I used my British Airways miles to book tickets on US Air, found a great rate at the Arizona Biltmore, which is a cool historic American property.
So I got up at 5:30 in the morning on Saturday to fly to Phoenix, then checked into the Biltmore and took a nap. My friend called; she couldn’t make it. Bummer. Had an amazing dinner at the Biltmore all by myself.
I went alone to the club, and I can’t tell you the number of times I completely wanted to chicken out. The number of times I’ve found accommodations non-existant makes anything like this completely intimidating, especially at a dance club when you aren’t able to dance.
I found the place, arriving just early enough that there were only a few people in line. However, not being able to stand, they found me a seat, which effectively put me first in line (not that that actually mattered as there were few enough people in line).
The DJs paraded in ahead, as did various people on the guest list. We were all let in, and I needed to go back and get the VIP wristband for the seating area.
The first DJ, Joey Williams, warmed everyone up.
Second up was 2ToneDisco.
James and Omni had an energetic set of Nu Disco and other fun stuff. Probably the crowd favorite was their Ghostbusters remix, which you can listen to (and download) for free:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174253553″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
I don’t know who the third DJ was; he was quite popular with the crowd. He tended to play vocal songs that had very singable anthem lines. Not my cuppa, but the crowd was having fun, and that’s the important thing.
Fourth up was Overwerk, who came on at 12:30.
The crowd cheered when his signature motif, “Overwerk it,” played for the first time in his set.
The biggest crowd pleaser of his set was 12:30, which is a remix of ABBA’s “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (a Man after Midnight).” You can listen to (or download) it for free here:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/84242101″ params=”color=00aabb&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
At 2 a.m., Edmond ended his set with my personal favorite, Daybreak, though the club isn’t conducive to the quieter opening this song has (and thus it started differently). I can’t embed this one, but you can listen to it here.
I loved how each DJ had a different visual style. The three large monitors gave quite the light show in addition to the ceiling lights. Not having spent a lot of time in clubs, and never for a traditional dance event (it was always some private event held at a club), this was something I’d never known about (or expected).
All in all, a great time. Many thanks to the Monarch Theatre, Overwerk, 2ToneDisco, and the other DJs, as well as Relentless Beats, the promoter.
More of Jacob Tyler Dunn’s photos here.
01 August 2014
Now available on Redbubble: prints, posters, t-shirts, pillows, totes, phone cases, iPad cases, and greeting cards.
I love this E.B. White quotation.
I get up every day determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time.
Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
Polygon background: Justin Thanks, Justin!
Pattern overlay layers: two from 2 Lil Owls (from a Design Cuts bundle) plus 2 from Joyful Heart Designs.
Font: Brave from Nicky Laatz. Post-processed with Ian Barnard’s Inkwell.
31 July 2014
I’ve been doing some tidying around the social network space and got around to looking at reviews on This Is My Funniest 2 on Goodreads.
From a one-star review of the book….
No outright guffaws but….
Big smiles:
The Robot Who Came to Dinner by Ron Goulart
Frog Kiss by Kevin J. Anderson
A Sword Called Rhonda by C. S. Moen
Hey, up there with Ron Goulart and Kevin J. Anderson, ahead of the other 26 authors?
I’ll take it.
Overall, the anthology hasn’t done particularly well, though I was happy to be in an anthology with Larry Niven. When I had him autograph my copy, he said I should autograph his. This is why I like Larry.
When I queried Mike Resnick, he said, “If I laugh, I’ll buy the story.” He must have.
At readings, there’s usually one line that does get a LOL.
25 July 2014
Note: topic is child sexual assault.
Another piece of Walter Breen/Marion Zimmer Bradley history came via snail mail today.
The events recounted weren’t given a time, but checking against the Breendoggle suggests that it’s of the same era as the Breendoggle (1964). I can’t tell if it’s before or after the Breendoggle was published, but very close in time.
I’m paraphrasing here, but the parents of one kid went to the Alameda County DA (which is the county Berkeley is in) and tried to press charges, but the specific case, penetration had not occurred, and thus the DA wasn’t able to prosecute the case. The parents of that same kid tried to get the Contra Costa DA involved, who was eager to take the case, but wanted other parents to also testify.
Because there were no rape shield laws at the time, the parents of other victims were rightly concerned that this would follow their children around in perpetuity and they thus refused to press charges.
This was 1964. I saw at least one note that Walter was arrested in 1964, perhaps this was what that was concerning.
There are also apparently earlier dox. More news when and if they become available.
I’m just very glad that rape shield laws started becoming the law in the 70s. Sadly, this was before laws protected rape victims, especially the children.
25 July 2014
I found this beer bottle mockup last night, and thought I’d have fun with it.
Catch is, this particular product would probably be better vended in something stranger—like a Klein bottle. Oh well.
Click for full size:
It’s an homage to a Tom Smith song of the same title:
There’s many drinks you’ll drink, me lads, but this one beats them all.
One hundred fifty-three and one-half percent alcohol,
A beer brewed in a tesseract, it’ll shoot you through the roof,
And if you don’t believe me, I’ve got lots and lots of proof.
Font: Veneer by Yellow Design Studio I love this font, use it all the time.
Logo font: Trend Handmade by LatinoType
(Both of the above via Design Cuts, as usual.)
Beer Mockup: Original Mockups
Logo: 12 Sci-Fi Badges from VoxelFlux
25 July 2014
Tim Grahl of Outthink, and Michael Bunker, one of his clients, are giving a three-hour training session next month.
Tim’s had five authors on the New York Times Bestseller list simultaneously, and indie author Hugh Howey is one of his clients.
However, for this particular workshop, he’s using another, lesser-known author who still has unarguable success as an indie. Michael Bunker writes Amish science fiction, which you could argue is a limited market. It’s the kind of specificity that indie was designed for.
Michael’s latest book Pennsylvania Omnibus sold 4183 copies in 48 hours.
Michael’s latest book Pennsylvania Omnibus has sold 13,000+ copies since its launch in January 2014.
$4.49 * 70% * 13,000 = $40,859 (assuming the price has stayed constant)
Not shabby at all, especially for a single title.
If that’s not for you, Tim’s got a ton of free resources on his site for both indie and traditionally-published writers (and aspiring writers).
24 July 2014
There was a time when I was so starved for any writing advice, I’d take whatever crap would fall in. Granted, I was a Scientologist at the time, so you could say I was particularly primed for not only sources of bad advice, but also the unquestioned acceptance of same.
Over the years, I found that my brain became so constrained by all the bullshit I’d accepted that I found it impossible to write at all. I was bound by the red tape.
Look, having any kind of respectable publishing credits helps. No question.
But not all novelists can write short. Even if they can write short, they may be nowhere near as good a short story writer as they are a novelist.
So here’s my revised answer to that: Write short stories because you want to. Submit them because you want to.
If they don’t speak to you, there are plenty of other, better ways to spend that time.
I heard this last weekend. Verbatim.
Do I believe it’s true? No, I do not. Edward D. Hoch made a living as a short story writer.
Do I believe the odds are against you?
Sure, if you insist on thinking of it in terms of odds, which I don’t think is helpful.
Rather, I prefer to think of it this way: if you want to make a lot of money as a short story writer, you’d likely need to have a large number of relatively uncomplicated (in the sense that it’s a “short story” idea rather than a “novel” idea) ideas that you can write and polish to professional levels.
I know me: I have a smaller number of ideas but they’re more complex, and thus I’m a novella or novel kind of writer.
There’s also the issue that how much you make from short fiction depends on what venues are available for you to sell it, including film and television. Excluding self publishing at the moment, I’d argue that novella length has new life in the digital first markets.
Case in point:
We both have short stories and novellas, which frequently don’t make it into print except in collections or magazines. Those collections and magazines tend to pay token amounts if at all — contributor’s copies are common — whereas I’ve made over $8,000 from a novella published in 2011. Aleks and I co-wrote a short story that was released last year and has made each of us just under $2,000.
(Quoted from here.)
I’d say that most people would think $8,000 was “a lot of money.” Somewhat fewer would consider $4,000 ($2,000 x 2 writers) “a lot of money.”
But $10,000? For two pieces of short fiction? That’s a lot of money.
Ahh, but she writes male/male romance, you say.
I say that’s not the point. The point is that this construction, “You’re never going to make a lot of money as a short story writer,” assumes things one cannot possibly know about me and my future. It’s a prediction that my future will suck because someone else’s past (e.g., the speaker’s) has sucked.
Besides, Clive Barker did pretty well with this one novella. There are other examples, too.
Rather, it’s more helpful to know what kind of writer you are and whether or not that road would be easier or harder for you. If you’ve got a background writing short non-fiction, then writing short fiction may be easier for you.
Just because it’s a hard road isn’t a reason not to do it. A hard road is still a path, just a difficult one.
There are plenty of kinds of writing, if writing is what you want to do. If it’s not, there are plenty of things to do in almost any field. I really wish I’d understood this early on, because I felt roles were far more rigid when I was in high school. Maybe that was my mistake.
To which I respond: my favorite novel’s in second person.
You’re four hours into your shift, decompressing from two weeks of working nights supervising clean-up after drunken fights on Lothian Road and domestics in Craiglockhart. Daylight work on the other side of the capital city comes as a big relief, bringing with it business of a different, and mostly less violent, sort. This morning you dealt with: two shoplifting call-outs, getting your team to chase up a bunch of littering offences, a couple of community liaison visits, and you’re due down the station in two hours to record your testimony for the plead-by-email hearing on a serial B&E case you’ve been working on. You’re also baby-sitting Bob—probationary constable Robert Lockhart—who is ever so slightly fresh out of police college and about as probationary as a very probationary thing indeed. So it’s not like you’re not busy or anything, but at least it’s low-stress stuff for the most part.
Second is very voicey, and it’s both a boon and a bane because of that.
Write in whatever viewpoint you feel happens to fit the story best, including second if you’re so inclined. If you’ve never tried it before, consider rewriting a scene in second person. See how it feels. Try the same scene in first and third emphasizing different viewpoint characters.
There’s no single right answer, but some genres are more frequently in one or the other.
I’ll give an example, though, of where I think first person really hurt the book.
Twilight.
Edward hovered over Bella at night in part because he was protecting her against rogue vampires that she didn’t know existed. Because the book was written in first person, it made Edward look more manipulative and controlling (and for worse reasons) than was actually true. because the book’s POV only showed things that Bella knew, and she didn’t know the whole story.
Read the partial of Midnight Sun (Twilight told from Edward’s POV) alongside Twilight. The two taken together, plus the movie, are a rare opportunity to learn from POV choices and mistakes.
So, if the motivations of another character are important to understanding the piece as sympathetically as possible, consider writing in third. Or, you know, some other POV that’s not a single first person POV.
I know a lot of heartbreaking stories in publishing. People having solicited manuscripts lost in piles in a publisher’s office for years. People having their novel abandoned when an editor goes on maternity leave and the replacement editor quits to go into the food business.
There are all kinds of narratives about publishing, and one of the ones I want to address is this: that there is such a thing as odds that determine whether or not you’ll sell a story or whether it’ll do well.
When I receive, say, 100 submissions for BayCon, the odds that I accept your story is not 1 in 100. I don’t roll any dice. Did you write the best story I received? Does your story mesh with my taste? Does it fit the theme better than other stories? (We don’t require that it fit the theme, but it doesn’t hurt.) That’s not a matter of odds.
More than half the time, I reject a story on the first page. I’m sure every writer did the best they could on their first page. Sometimes, it’s a matter of fit. I’ve said that the story we buy has to be family friendly, so “fuck” on the first (or any) page is a non-starter. And yes, I’ve rejected more than one story for exactly that reason.
It’s entirely random that I once, back in the Abyss & Apex days, received two short stories in a row with first sentences that had unintended flying trees. Yay misplaced modifiers. (Both of those were rejected on the first sentence.)
So you’ve survived the first page. Does your piece plunge immediately into backstory on page 2 or 3? That’s probably the single most common reason I reject stories on pages 2 or 3. And yes, this can be done right, and it so frequently isn’t. I’ve done it badly myself. Recently. (First draft, so there’s that.)
Let’s say I get to the end. More than half the time, I’ll still reject the story. Most frequently, it’s one of: the story you started isn’t the story you finished, or you didn’t nail the ending.
Another common failure is what I call the “this feels like a novel chapter” problem. I didn’t really understand this phrase until I saw it a few times as an editor. If you’ve raised more interesting questions/problems/plot points that are referred to in the narrative but don’t happen in the narrative present, it’ll feel like it’s a piece of a longer work. The only way I know of to fix one of these babies is to trim off the glittery parts that point out to other plot lines and story arcs until it feels like the story is resolved in the short form.
But selling a story? That’s not a matter of odds.
Let’s say the first page is solid and interesting, and pages 2 and 3 are strong enough to keep me going, and I finish the piece, and you have a great ending. You’ll likely wind up on the short list.
If anything in the process involves odds, then it’s what happens on the short list, because generally there are more pieces than there are slots we can publish. Since we’re picking newer writers, name isn’t a consideration. It’s just which stories the various people like the best. (I pick the short list, but that’s winnowed down by a small group.)
Three little things.
23 July 2014
I wound up having a discussion about making printed t-shirts last longer over the weekend, so I thought I’d discuss a few techniques.
I prefer machine drying because I have problems with dust and lint, but air drying really does make t-shirts (and underwear) last a lot longer.
22 July 2014
Several times over the last month-ish, I’ve been told or heard some variant of: “If you want to do X, you need to [do it this way that I’m not].”
I call bullshit.
I don’t write longhand on top of a refrigerator, write with a fountain pen using an oil lamp for illumination, or other variations on the extreme no-computer end of things, but those are valid processes for those writers.
As is wherever you happen to fall on the plotter vs. pantser spectrum of pre-writing organization.
Every writing process has flaws. Every. Single. One.
Many of us have had the outline where the book takes a sudden hard turn into unexpected territory. I’ve heard the writer whose shorts I love but whose novels always seemed flat to me say that she makes her characters adhere to the outline.
Many of us who write without an outline have had the book proceed neatly into no-story land, never to return. Or veer off onto story B, leaving us with half of story A and half of story B.
I was told over the weekend that I needed to decide in advance how long a story would be, then write that.
I’m sure that does work for some people, but I generally only have a vague sense of how long something will be when I start. Basically, I know how complex the idea I have is, and I write it to what I think is the natural length. Sometimes, it winds up being several orders of magnitude more complex, sometimes less complex.
I underwrite the first draft (I think overwriting is more common). In part, that’s because I have open questions that I haven’t resolved yet, so don’t have those details to fill in during the first draft until toward the end of the draft.
I went to the Maui Writer’s Conference in 2007, and went to this lecture by Karen (who was one of my Clarion instructors in 2002). I bought the CD for the lecture also, so I’ve transcribed the first few minutes for you.
If you haven’t heard of Karen Joy Fowler, she’s a New York Times bestselling author, and most famous for her book The Jane Austen Book Club. She recently won the PEN/Faulkner award for her most recent book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. My personal favorite of her books, though, is Wit’s End.
The page one that I start with, when I’m first beginning to start writing the novel, is rarely the page one that I have when the novel is finished.
I think that you come to conferences like this, and you hear a lot of writers talk, and you hear a lot of writers explain their own methods, and how they create the books that they create. It sounds often like things that you should be doing.
You’re told to outline, you’re told to not outline…that’s probably the major one.
What I have come to believe, after several years of taking classes, and several years of teaching classes, is that your own working method is your own working method. In fact, I don’t think that you can alter it greatly. Or I worry if you try to alter it greatly. I think that we all start this enterprise because we love to write. Because there’s something about the process of writing that is actually fun for us, and something that at least has parts that we very much look forward to doing. And if you make your method something more efficient, something more reasonable, something smarter—what I worry is that what you edit out of the process is the thing that you loved. So that you’ll be working in a much more streamlined, much more reasonable way, but you won’t be having fun with it any more.
I’m going to talk to you about my working method, therefore. In no way is this meant to suggest that this should be your working method. In point of fact, my working method is a very silly, an inefficient, and stupid one, but it is mine. And I do have fun doing it.
So, I am not a writer who outlines. I am not a writer often who knows much about the book I’m going to write when I start writing the book. The whole process of writing the book is a process of making decisions, and hopefully finding different things that will surprise me as the writer—as well as the reader of the book.
This means that the first draft is kind of an intensely painful one step forward, two steps back sort of process for a long, long time until decisions are made. I probably spend half the time I spend on a book writing the first fifty pages as I am just feeling my way into the book, making the decisions that seem best, then questioning those decisions, and going back and making other decisions, getting to know my characters.
So, just as you often have a working title for a book, I have a working first page. When I am first starting, I do not know where the book is going to go. All I want is a page I can proceed from. Something that, for me, has enough energy, and enough pleasure in it as a writer that I want to write the next page.
I spend a lot of time rewriting—experimenting—with writing the first page. Trying it one way, trying it another way.
When I have actually finished the book, and I know how it ends, is the only time that I confidently know what the first page should be, because you always want to finish the same story that you started.
I’m a pantser. I don’t just write without an outline, I write out of order, too.
For books, I write in order until I get stuck. If I have a part later in the novel that’s clearer, I’ll write that because it gives me something to work toward. If not, then I look at the decisions I’ve made recently, because I’ve possibly worked my way into a corner.
If that doesn’t unstick the writing, then I ask myself three things I’d like to have in the book. Maybe I want a big set piece wedding that goes horribly wrong. I keep a running list of these things in the front of my working document. The first section will have a list of those things where I have an order to them. Like: I know they’re going to do A before B. Then I keep a second list for unordered items. Like: I want someone to order a frou-frou coffee drink with whipped cream at the worst possible time.
At any point during the book, I can use an unordered item if it makes sense. (Sometimes I’ll use one even if it doesn’t. Writing should be fun.)
When my writing unsticks, I generally go back to the main working narrative, continuing forward.
One book I did write almost completely out of order, and it’s fascinating to see what sections I completely managed to skip over. (It doesn’t help that I have this sinking feeling that I’m missing one of the notebooks for that book, either.) But it’s largely a first draft that, save for a few gaps, is a mostly complete first draft I wrote when I was having a really horrible few months and needed to write something.
So I mostly organize my book as I write it, and I write mostly in order except when it helps to do it otherwise.
21 July 2014
Natalie Luhrs has the linkfest about the fallout from Jim Frenkel’s appearance at this year’s Wiscon after last year’s harassment complaints that went, well, apparently nowhere.
I know a lot of bay area locals go to Wiscon, and that’s had quite the ironic problem set, recently. I typically haven’t gone because I’d rather go to a local con and spend my travel $ elsewhere.
Here’s a review of this year’s BayCon by Carrie Sessarego of SBTB. I was delighted to be on panels with her. She’s thoughtful and smart, and extremely well-read.
So, just a thought: come to BayCon next year. The theme is Women of Wonder.
17 July 2014
But important work gets done every day by flawed people, sometimes even by assholes. No one should be more aware of that than people who work in the tech industry, where many of the vaunted innovators and revolutionaries were not warm, fuzzy people. Ultimately, they’re judged by their work.
If you’re in tech—or interested in tech or diversity issues in tech—Model View Culture is a superb magazine that has no analog.
When I made the Traitor to the Mens t-shirts, I got a note about American Apparel. I’d known about the sexist advertising, but not about how awful the CEO was (he’s still awful, he’s just gotten resigned). Their shirts being produced in the US was important to me for various reasons, including knowing that labor standards and business practices were, at least in theory, up to US standards.
This human slavery story comes out of Thailand’s shrimp industry.
And this story about Scientology’s drydock bill also has, at its heart, human slavery. In short, Curaçao’s drydock was using slave labor from Cuba, people Cuba sent over to do work to pay down Cuba’s drydock bill. They worked under horrific conditions. (The electrocution story reminds me of the tale of Kendrick Moxon, one of Scientology’s attorneys, and his Sea Org daughter who died of electrocution.)
One of my concerns is knowing that I’m doing less harm, and that means knowing more about where things come from and how they’re produced/delivered. And sometimes, there’s a bunch of crappy choices.
You might think that t-shirt made in Nicaragua or Honduras is better because it’s not made by American Apparel.
You know what? Nicaragua has an appalling lack of infrastructure. Many Nicaraguans work part of the year in Costa Rica due to lack of opportunity. As our tour guide said:
We cannot even bag plantains.
So imagine, if you will, given that they don’t have the factory capability to bag plantains, how it is that they’re able to make t-shirts for shirt.woot (among others) but can’t even bag plantains, one of their major crops.
Nicaragua’s the only country I’ve been to where the TV’s world weather pointedly excludes the US and Canada from its list of world cities. They are angry with us and, frankly, they have good reason to be.
It’s not that I don’t want to do business with Nicaragua. To the contrary. I’ve been there twice (short trips, granted). It’s just that, given what I know, I don’t inherently trust that any business has manufacturing in Nicaragua has Nicaraguan infrastructure interests as a design goal.
As Rick has pointed out more than once, “How do you know the company you’re not boycotting isn’t worse?”
Like, you know, Nestlé, and its chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who doesn’t believe human beings have a right to water. Corporations buying up water rights in poor countries is an enormous global human rights issue.
Here, have a list of Nestlé brands for your boycott needs. I’m happy to say that none of my regular brands are on that list. \o/
Sometimes, I think we lose sight of the bigger picture because some bad things in front of us seem like the “worst thing ever.” They’re bad, but there are worse things, and I think we need to keep perspective on that.
No comments on my post, and few on Will’s. None on the LJ repost. None on Tumblr.
Apart from a few people, mostly not in sf/f, being horrified, mostly on facebook.
I get this tweet:
@deirdresm i wish you wouldn’t promote WS. he’s a doxxer, racist sexist abuser, and has hurt a lot of victims of abuse.
— Ann Somerville (@ann_somerville) July 11, 2014
…which leads to a long conversation ending in…
@Cecily_Kane @deirdresm forget it. she’s not interested unless it’s her hobby horse. other victims can go fish
— Ann Somerville (@ann_somerville) July 12, 2014
Hobby. Horse.
Let me pull a quote out from Samuel Delany’s writing about sex with children:
Finally a composite score is reached, and the “seriousness” of the infraction judged accordingly. The consent of a seven-, eight-, or nine-year old is not the same thing as the consent of a seventeen- or eighteen-year old. And the “consent” of a three, four, and five year old means much less—especially if it’s negative. But it must count for something, otherwise you are just saying the child is not human and has no feelings or agency whatsoever—which, in itself, is abusive and counter-intuitive. And, I would maintain, immoral when another possibility presents itself.
Delany’s commented on Will’s post. He stands by what he wrote.
Is that really okay with everyone?
15 July 2014
One of the first questions I get asked when I mentioned that I was going was, “What’s the World Domination Summit?”
Fair question. And, to be honest, I didn’t know when I first heard about it either.
The goal is to help get people who want to do something different with their lives to take that leap, to find other people who also want to do different and remarkable things—and to help each other do them.
The speakers come from a variety of different fields, including Shannon Galpin, the only woman to mountain bike in Afghanistan, and who teaches street art to Afghani girls. Shannon linked to teafly’s amazing My Body Is Not a Democracy.
Another speaker, Saki Mafundikwa, a graphic designer teaching in Africa, is making a film about people dislocated due to a dam. He’s previously published a book on African writing systems.
Gavin Aung Than talked about giving up his graphic design job to start zenpencils, his cartoon and poster site.
Quite a few attendees got to stand up and give a short version of their own stories.
A woman had come to run the New York Marathon that was canceled due to Hurricane Sandy. She was disappointed, but understood. She had a trip coming up to London, so she thought: why not run the London Marathon?
Five months early.
She wound up getting on the front page of one BBC site, and had people run with her the entire way.
One of the reasons I love the science fiction community is that it’s a really broad spectrum of educated people (and not always in the traditional sense) who are interested in a wide variety of topics.
WDS is like that—squared, with the addition of more hopefulness.
I’ll end with this quote from speaker Michael Hyatt:
14 July 2014
In viewing my map statistics for who’s visited my site, the single largest block of land on the planet from which I’ve had no visitors is Greenland.
Sure, it’s sparsely populated. I don’t think that’s a good reason.
I’ve pondered the flight schedules of Air Greenland, wondering if there were any way to make a trip work for me. So far, not yet. Alas.
Also, no joy with the various cruise companies that come during summer. Much as I’d love to, they just haven’t been in the budget.
Anyhow, if you visit my website from Greenland, and it shows up in my web logs that you have, AND you drop me an email (I’ve placed a handy contact form below), I’ll send you a signed copy of an anthology I was in to your mailing address in Greenland. I’ll also give you electronic copies of my two current releases (one of which is in the book I’ll mail).
It’s not the same as me visiting Greenland, but a girl can hope.
[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]
13 July 2014
C.A. Starfire has an interview with Mark Greyland, the son of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen.
I thought everyone knew and that I was such a bad person no one would speak to me.
And, later, addressing the inheritance issue:
I was disinherited by language that sounded so unlike my mother that I knew she never wrote it, as was my sister and my half-brother who is now deceased.
The money went to the opera and to her lover.
Heartbreaking stuff.
In addition to the links C.A. Starfire provided, Mark previously permitted me to share two of his Zazzle links: Stringbreaker and Geofractal.
I bought the Space Kitten! t-shirt (partly from the proceeds of Scalzi t-shirts, so thank you for your support).
It doesn’t make up for the hurt I inadvertently caused Mark, but I really do love that piece.
In other news, given a significant number of my website hits are about Marion Zimmer Bradley and are likely to continue to be, I’ve added that as a category. Previously, it was just a tag. So I’m going back and re-categorizing older posts on this matter.