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May 10

writing to-do list

I’m putting this out here so you people can hold me accountable.

Submission for BWDR (May 31)
Book Reviews (multiple due dates between now and August)
[Redacted] Re-Read Series for Tor.com (starting in July)
Short story submission for LoneStarCon writing workshop (July 1)
Continue work on novel (something substantial, defined as at least 75% of a completed first draft, by Dec 31)

I need to get serious about this shit, y’all.

Apr 22

“

There are several immortal characters in the show, and at one point, two of these immortal characters, one who’s been on Team Bad Guy for a while and one who is seemingly waffling toward Good, have an argument that seems to the viewer and the other characters to be needlessly antagonistic.

When the other characters ask why this is, the waffling-good immortal replies “We have been together for two thousand years. You can not begin to imagine the depth of hate and love between us.”

This line has stuck with me long after the rest of the show fell away, and as I became a story teller in my own right, this idea of the weight of time between characters, the intensely complex layering (both and good and bad) that would happen to any relationship if it was strung out for that long, came to form the core of how I approach immortal characters.

You see, forever is a very long time. Think about yourself ten years ago. You were a totally different person. Ten years from now, you’ll probably think the same thing. This process of change slows as we get older, but unless we’re experiencing arrested development (the psychological phenomenon, not the awesome show), we will keep changing and maturing until we die. So when you have a character who is 500 or 1000 or 2000 years old, you have a someone who has gone through 50/100/200 of these changes, and I think it’s safe to say by that point that they have evolved completely off the deep end of what we mortals can comprehend.

” Pretentious Title: Forever is a very long time (via sandrayln)

Reblogging as a memo to self for things.

(via immlass)

Apr 13

Jam Tomorrow

tealin:

Jam tomorrow or (older spelling) jam to-morrow is an expression for a never-fulfilled promise. It originates from Lewis Carroll’s 1871 book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. In the book The White Queen offers Alice “jam every other day” as an inducement to work for her:

“I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the Queen said. “Two pence a week, and jam every other day.”

Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said, “I don’t want you to hire ME – and I don’t care for jam.”

“It’s very good jam,” said the Queen.

“Well, I don’t want any TO-DAY, at any rate.”

“You couldn’t have it if you DID want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.”

“It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam to-day’,” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

I keep using this idiom on people who have no idea what I mean, which makes it kind of useless. I share with you now a simple way of summing up a complicated abstract idea! Go forth and propagate its usage!

Billy Bragg also uses this expression in his great song “The Home Front”:

Mother sees but does not read the peeling posters
And can’t believe that there’s a world to be won
But in the public schools and in the public houses
The Battle of Britain goes on
The constant promise of jam tomorrow
Is the New Breed’s litany and verse
If it takes another war to fill the churches of England
Then the world the meek inherit, what will it be worth?

Apr 5

Rockets & Rayguns: In Praise of Critics

rocketsandrayguns:

What do we need critics for?

In which Bruce does a really great job of answering this question and reminds me of exactly what my goddamn job should be when I write a book review—I needed that reminder. Go read.

Jan 1

Stuff I wrote this year

Most of this year’s writing is for Tor.com. I can’t list the PW stuff, alas, but trust me, there was a lot of it (18 reviews of 160± words each, the majority of which were of books that ranged from mediocre to terrible, but with a few genuine, wonderful gems in there).

Also, after a couple of years of not being able to write any fiction at all, I spat out a couple of pieces of fanfic in short order at the end of December—one for the Yuletide fic exchange (today was the author reveal, so I waited until today to post this), and one just for the hell of it. Have to say, it felt really good to finally write short stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

Here’s the rundown. It’s for Tor unless noted otherwise.

Readers' reviews: Pet Shop Boys, Alt-J and Cat Power

In which you can see me throwing around some ideas about the Pet Shop Boys’ Actually—the second one down by “karinl” is me.

May 23

“So what’s at the root of this problem? Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored?

I’d put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the “eyeball kick” as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don’t need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse “New Scientist”. We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We’re carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn’t a 1980s cyberpunk vision that’s imploded into the present, warts and all, I don’t know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren’t airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we’re trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.” Charles Stross, “SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?”

May 22

“Gender isn’t simply a biological trait; it’s a societal one. The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well. A man walking alone through Midtown Manhattan at three in the morning may have concerns for his safety, but I promise you, it’s a very different experience for a woman taking the same walk, and it’s different again for a man wearing a dress. Think about it. That’s a societal factor, and it’s a gendered one, and this is not and can not be subject to debate. If you’re looking to argue that sexism is a thing of the past, that the world is gender-blind, you’re not only wrong, you’re lying to yourself.

An ignorant writer is a poor liar, and a poor liar makes for a bad crafter of fiction. If we accept that a story, no matter how grounded, is ultimately a tapestry of falsehoods, then it must follow that the author is required to tell his or her lies with as much skill as possible. As every politician and con artist will attest, nothing sells a falsehood better than a kernel of truth at its heart. Honesty at the correct moment, presented in the correct way, can buy the author an awful lot of rope with which to make the absurd seem plausible.

The way writers achieve this is through research.”

Greg Rucka, “Why I Write ‘Strong Female Characters’”

The entire essay is pretty damn kickass. Go read.

ETA: …and give the comments a miss, bearing ever in mind Fry’s Law of Comments and Ewing’s Equation.

May 9

The Life and Times of Thomas Cromwell: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

Latest thing what I wrote for Tor.com—a long-ass review of Bring Up the Bodies with a lot of blathering about Wolf Hall by necessity included. Loved it, obviously. In prepping to write this review, I actually read Bring Up the Bodies TWICE, and re-read Wolf Hall as well. Mantel’s prose; my god. Delicious.

I haven’t been posting every one of my reviews here lately, but if you’re curious, you can see the whole gallery here.

Apr 10

Full transcript of interview with Peter Rogers on “The Professor”

For anyone who might be interested in these things, here’s the full transcript of my IM-based interview with Peter Rogers on his work in The Professor, which formed the backbone of my article on the show for Tor.com. I didn’t quite manage to work all of it in (obviously), so here it is for the curious.

Thanks also to Justin Davis for answering several background questions I sent to him in email.