Wiscon in a Nutshell: Fun Was Had by All             
 Tuesday May 29, 2007   |    comments

RETURNED FROM WISCON to discover that due to Brood-17 our neighborhood now has a soundtrack inspired by science-fiction B movies from the 1950s. In addition to the oddly soothing buzzing waves, you'd think the Starship Enterprise's phasers have been on full blast all day, or that the Martians from War of the Worlds (classic version) were all around us. I love that sound.

Well, if you came looking for a long, detailed con report of everywhere I went and everyone I saw, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm only going to hit a few highlights: Marsha Sisolak's reading of her dead Charlie story was hilarious, and other wonderful readings included those by Dave Schwartz and Alan DeNiro. The sort of blur that was the Think Galactic/Small Beer/Endicott Studio/Tor/Strange Horizons/Rat Bastards/and many others party was a lot of fun; in particular chatting with people with whom I got to catch up, got to know better, and/or met for the first time. And the variety of good beers didn't hurt any either.

While it was sad to learn that fellow Semi-O Jenn Whitson soon will be moving to Austin, at least I got to introduce her to Maureen McHugh, who recently became and Austinite (Austinian? Austiner? Austinola? Auster?), and could you ask for as a better welcoming committee? Speaking of Maureen, she gave me a bit of advice about plotting that led to a crack-of-dawn epiphany that just might make that old novel draft workable after all. Sounds so obvious: if your story resolves too soon, then you haven't really finished raising the stakes and making things worse for your characters. Why didn't I think of that? I guess sometimes you just have to hear it from the right person or at the right time for the obvious to fall into place.

And just to remind me of my place in the grand scheme of things, there was the encounter I had with a certain Big Name Editor who seemed spontaneously and surprisingly interested in talking with me. Of course, it took all of about ten seconds to get to the bottom of that: he thought I was someone else. On learning who I actually was, he made fun of my name and then walked away, no doubt having forgotten that I even existed in the time it took him to turn his head. Oh well. Not really a highlight, I suppose, but it amused me.

My haul from the dealer's room was modest: Jennifer Stevenson's Trash Sex Magic (which I swear I bought before, but must have misplaced) Jenn Reese's Jade Tiger, copies of Weird Tales, Talebones, and LCRW, and a Walter Mosley ARC. We could have had a free copy of the Interfictions anthology too, the prize that my dear better half rather boldy claimed from a raffle we didn't win. We did the honest thing, though, and passed it along to its rightful owner, complete with autographs.

Meals are generally a family affair for me, but I had lunch with Richard Chwedyk, where I was happy to learn that he has more saurs stories up his sleeve.

And those are pretty much the highlights (at least until five minutes after I post this, when I will no doubt remember something else). I didn't get to much in the way of programming (often not learning about interesting stuff until after it had already happened), and there were far too many people I'd have loved to hang out with that I only saw in passing. In at least one case, I never even saw the person I was hoping to see again. But that's the way these things seem to work out. There's always next year.

One last thing: Seems my daughter and her friend pulled off their first large-scale Wiscon prank. If anyone saw the posted signs and went to the "pool party" at 10:45 (15 minutes before the pool closed), er ... sorry about that. I only learned about this on the drive home.

 Brood-17 Has Arrived!             
 Wednesday May 23, 2007   |    comments

BROOD-17 has definitely arrived. We're seeing and hearing more and more of the little buggers every day, with their prehistoric legs and shiny fairy wings, their coal-black bodies and beady, bugging red eyes. Should be loads of fun come next week.

In other news, I haven't been talking much about writing lately, ostensibly the reason for this blog. That's because there hasn't been that much to speak of in that department. But I've been thinking big lately. I recently dug out the files from an old novel dare and looked them over. Hey, I thought, they weren't so bad. I wondered why I gave up on that project. Then I did a word count. It's only about 50K, or half a novel. Since then I've been trying to figure out how I might open up the story without padding it. After Wiscon, I'll dig in and see what I can do.

 Alien Invasion and Paranoia             
 Sunday May 20, 2007   |    comments

ALTHOUGH we've seen a few signs of the advance party, tomorrow is the big day, Cicada Day, the day that the 17-year, extraterrestrial-like insectoids are expected to emerge and swarm. But the high temps tomorrow are only expected to be in the low 50s, so we'll see if they delay their invasion until later in the week.

In other news, a couple of recent incidents have me wondering if I'm getting paranoid in my dotage. First: I was focused on copy editing the other day, when I realized that through the open window I'd been hearing the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up for the past few minutes. We live just off an intersection where the local fire department sometimes practices backing the fire trucks around corners, so I got up to see if that's what was going on. What I saw was a truck with a flat-bed trailer that had backed up close to my car, which was parked in front of the house. I watched for a moment as the driver futzed around, apparently preparing to lower the trailer. I decided, just for the heck of it, to put the car in the garage. After slipping on shoes and my glasses, I sauntered out the front door, just as the guy hopped back in his truck and tore off up the street. The question is, did I jump to conclusions, or was I just about to lose my car?

The second incident: One of our regular weekend lunch spots, for some reason, always puts a pickle on my girl's plate despite the fact that we ask them not to every time. If you don't like pickles, is there anything worse than a pile of chips spoiled by pickle juice? Turns out, the manager brought our orders to us this last time. My girl's disappointment on spotting the offending pickle was clear, and we muttered something about it. "You want another pickle?" asked the manager. When we pointed out that she didn't want the pickle, he asked, "Four pickles?" It was kind of hard tell if he was kidding; he's pretty stoic. No, we responded with uncertain chuckles, no pickle. "Six pickles?" he said in mock surprise before wandering away. We shared quizzical looks and shrugs before digging in to lunch, thinking that was the end of it. A few moments later, he reappeared with a plateful of pickles on a bed of lettuce, and said in all apparent seriousness, "I couldn't give you six, but here are four pickles." And then he went away again. The question is, was he just goofing off with what he must recognize as regular customers, or was he being a dick?

 A Final Excerpt (Adapted) from Cat's Cradle            
 Monday May 14, 2007   |    comments

"THE TRUTH WAS that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever."
   "But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
   "So life became a work of art," I marveled ....
   "But Bin Laden was never caught?" I asked.
   "Bush never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bin Laden. It would have been easy to do."
   "Why didn't he catch him?"
   "Bush was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless."

 Another Excerpt (Adapted) from Cat's Cradle            
 Friday May 11, 2007   |    comments

"BIN LADEN suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for terrorists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madamen Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly.
   "Did many people die on the hook?"
   "Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew who had died that way. Bush had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against terrorists—which was everybody."
   "And Bin Laden went into cozy hiding in the jungle," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him.
   "Bush would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, in great Bin Laden hunts.
   "About every six months Bush would announce triumphantly that Bin Laden was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.
   "And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to Bush, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bin Laden had done the impossible.
   "He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"

 An Excerpt (Adapted) from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle            
 Thursday May 10, 2007   |    comments

"WHEN BIN LADEN AND BUSH took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bin Laden, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."
   "I know," I said.
   "Well, when it became evident that no government or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bin Laden made it his business to provide people with better and better lies."
   "How did he become an outlaw?"
   "It was his own idea. He asked Bush to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang."

 What, No Rest for the Weary?             
 Tuesday May 8, 2007   |    comments

I HAVE DISCOVERED that, on the road of life, there's no rest stop when you get halfway to I-90. Who'd have guessed?

 Goodies from the Forgotten Bookcase            
 Wednesday May 2, 2007   |    comments

MORE THAN a week has passed without me getting locked out of my AOL account, or without my account being unexpectedly cancelled. I hope that means everything is back to normal now (knocking on wood).

I've fallen back on comfort reading, old favorites instead of something new. I'd only just begun Tim Powers's Last Call when I heard that Kurt Vonnegut had passed away. So I went in search of some of my old Vonnegut favorites, and was quited surprised and annoyed that I couldn't find any of them. So I pushed ahead through Last Call. I don't think I was as enamoured of it as the first time I read it. While the blending of the mythologies of Vegas, poker, the tarot, and the Fisher King is still fabulous, the main plot seems like a fairly conventional action-adventure plot, and the characters, while interesting, are eccentric in the way characters in something like Elmore Leonard are eccentric. I don't know; are eccentric characters becoming passé, or is it just me? But all in all, I was happy reading it again.

Turns out there's that one bookcase that I always forget about, the one tucked away out of sight in a corner upstairs. That's where I found the Vonnegut, and lots of other goodies as well. I picked Slaughterhouse-Five because its the first Vonnegut I ever read, the one that got me hooked on Vonnegut, and ultimately on fantastic fiction. And rereading it, I am reminded that it's a source, or maybe an affirmation, of my belief that, although we experience time linearly, in fact everything that has ever existed or happened still exists somewhere. Our very limited perspective of time—or the fourth dimension, if you will—is something like the way a two-dimensional being would experience the third dimension. That is, very vaguely, in a limited way. The fourth dimension is as fully extant as the other three, we just can't "see" it all. The point is, Slaughterhouse-Five influenced my understanding of the nature of the universe.

I'll have that book finished very soon, as it's not nearly as lengthy or dense as Last Call. I may move on to more Vonnegut—perhaps Cat's Cradle, which is my favorite Vonnegut—or I may move on to Huckleberry Finn, which I also found among the goodies in the forgotten bookcase. I haven't read that one since high school.

 A Manuscript-Flipping Blueprint             
 Wednesday April 4, 2007   |    comments

FLIPPING: I first became familiar with the concept a few years ago when I was the production editor for a book called Flipping Properties. That book became one of our bestsellers, a strong backlist title since it came out, which among other things is a reflection of the popularity of the topic. Today there are lots of books and a number of television programs on the subject.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, at its most basic flipping means acquiring an undervalued asset with the intention to resell it for a profit. The term most often appears in conjunction with real estate, and has been used to mean anything from remodeling fixer-uppers for resale to arrangements in which unscrupulous real estate agents, property appraisers, and mortgage lenders collude to fraudulently profit from undervalued properties.

I've never considered the term in conjunction with my fiction writing, though. But that's just what someone did recently over at Writer Unboxed. The blogger applied some of the principles of flipping to the fixer-upper of a manuscript. You know, that work in progress that you tinker with forever but it just never seems to come together. Their suggestions include:

• Take a tour of your manuscript. A scene-by-scene inspection can reveal which ones are working for you and which ones are "wasted space."
• Bake some bread. In other words, provide those sensory details that ground readers in your scenes and engage them in your story.
• Add that special feature. Just as flippers might add high-end appliances, bay windows, or French doors to make a property special in the eyes of potential buyers, what can you add to your story to make it stand out to the editor and please the readers?
• Know your market. Flippers know what buyers are looking for and what kind of changes will add value to a property. Do you know what editors and readers are looking for and what kinds of changes will make your story more marketable?

Go to the original post to see the full list, as well as to check out the nifty manuscript-flipping blueprint.

 Golly, There Sure Are a Lot Talented People Out There            
 Thursday March 29, 2007   |    comments

I WOULD LIKE to congratulate all the Hugo Award and Campbell nominees, especially:

• Paul Melko for his novella, "The Walls of the Universe"
• Benjamin Rosenbaum for his short story "The House Beyond Your Sky"
• Tim Pratt for his short story, "Impossible Dreams"
• Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link for their semiprozine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet

I also noticed that Kevin Brockmeier, whose The Brief History of the Dead I reviewed in my previous post, also showed up on table of contents of the forthcoming Best American Fantasy. I thought about but didn't note in my review how Brockmeier, despite being a writer of the fantastic, has managed to remain outside the so-called genre ghetto, his stories appearing in such places as The New Yorker. But there he is on a list that includes stories from Analog and Strange Horizons. Then again, scanning down the list, it's quickly apparent that most of the stories in Best American Fantasy have come from literary sources rather than genre ones. Does that mean that the editor decided to shy away from the "ghetto" or does it mean that the best fantasy these days actually appears outside the conventional fantasy markets? I'm not sure, but for aspiring authors of the fantastic, it clearly means that there are plenty of markets out there, not merely the few conventional ones.

 J.K. Rowling, Hugh Laurie, and Kevin Brockmeier Vie for My Socks             
 Sunday March 25, 2007   |    comments

I'M SURE I've mentioned before that one of the main reasons I began reading science fiction and fantasy as a young reader was for that much-discussed sense of wonder, that wow factor; I wanted to read stories that would knock my socks off. Early favorites such as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Philip Jose Farmer did that for me back then. But as I've gotten older, I guess I'm wanting more out of my fiction, or my socks have just become more stubborn about staying put. With a few notable exceptions, such as Kelly Link and Ray Vukevich, not much does excite me the way certain stories once did. It seems that the best I can hope for now is fiction that's entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that; I appreciate being entertained. I recently reread Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and found it perfectly entertaining. And next I read The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie, but was disappointed. I like Hugh Laurie, along with his colleague Stephen Frye, who has written some entertaining fiction, but The Gun Seller, a parody of the tough-guy action thriller, just never really drew me in.

My next book, which I've just completed, was The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, a book that's been on my to-read list for a while now, ever since a friend recommended it. I first picked up Brockmeier's The Truth about Celia, which being about a middle-aged genre fiction writer with a young daughter, I figured ought to appeal to me. It did have some powerful writing, but it also kind of ambled about plotlessly, a kind of patchwork of different points of view and some fiction within fiction (metafiction?). Perhaps it all came together in the end, but I don't know because at some point I put it down and never got back to it. Yet I was willing to give his newer novel a chance, as that was the one I had been after in the first place. And this one, if it didn't truly knock my socks off, at least rolled them down to the toes.

There are two storylines. In the more convention, plot-oriented one, Laura, a research scientist turned corporate shill finds herself alone and trapped in Antarctica after an epidemic has apparently wiped out everyone else in the world. She treks across the barren landscape from one station to another, trying to find the help necessary to survive. We the readers root for her in her heart-breaking struggles, even though we know that she's ultimately doomed. The other storyline takes place in a city where people go after they die, a place where they exist only so long as someone who still lives remembers them. Some make new lives for themselves there, others continue on as if nothing has changed. And it's this storyline where the ambling and the scattered point-of-view storytelling happens. This time, though, it has the alternate storyline to keep the whole thing feeling cohesive. We know, for instance, that Laura is the only person left alive when the city becomes mostly empty, and those who remain slowly figure out that they are all related to Laura in some way: family, colleagues, people she's seen in passing. The end of the novel is a little like 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Laura crosses over from life into death, and the city shrinks around the remaining inhabitants. Still, I enjoyed The Brief History of the Dead very much. It's a novel about identity and memory, losses and second chances. I recommend it.

 Speciously Upbraiding the Anodyne Polyglot for Her Panoply of Accoutrements             
 Wednesday March 21, 2007   |    comments

JAY LAKE's neglected word for the day is accoutrement.

Which reminds me that its about time I offered up ten more words for my writerly friends (or anyone, really) to make use of. Pick a couple of them, use them in a story or a conversation and let me know that you did so. Or just leave me a sample sentence in my comments, as the inimitible Mr. Lake's readers have done over there.

And Tobias Buckell takes the next step toward disappearing into cyberspace. I sure hope he'll send that postcard when he gets there.

 Won't You Send Me a Postcard from the Future?             
 Tuesday March 20, 2007   |    comments

TOBIAS BUCKELL has called for meetings of sf writers in cyberspace ... er, Second Life, that is. Sounds like he's suggesting readings and panel discussions and such like to take place in this virtual space. Can the day be far off when they start holding sf conventions there?

I guess I haven't yet taken enough baby steps into the new millennium. While I've heard of Second Life now and again, I have only the fuzziest notion about what it actually is or why I might want to "visit" it. Then again, I don't even have a livejournal or MySpace page. So I guess I won't be attending any conventions or workshops in cyberspace for a while. That's just as well; the way things have gone this past couple of years, I often feel like something of a fraud when I hang out with other writers.

Maureen McHugh posted a recipe for soup today that sounds quite yummy. A call for a good bowl of soup is more my speed right now. This is the first day of spring, right? Winter does seem to as if it wants to linger.

 Baby Steps Back to the Future             
 Monday March 19, 2007   |    comments

IDEOMANCER, the online magazine of genre fiction, is looking for slush readers, I see. You know, I probably would jump at the chance if I had enough free time that I felt like I could make the commitment (What is this "free time" of which you speak?). So while I'll have to regretfully pass, maybe one of you might be interested (he says as if he believes there are any readers of this blog left).

The astonishing thing is that I know about this call for help at all. I do because I have taken another baby-step into the 21st century by finally setting up an RSS reader. Now I just have to find my way back to all the blogs and forums that I used to haunt, not to mention any new ones that have popped up in the past nine months. Recommendations are welcome, of course.