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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries June 24th, 200911:51 am: A frivolous political post
Minutes ago, I heard a teaser about coming revelations about South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. I hoped that it would be something more interesting than what it turned out to be, inevitably, seconds later. When he was missing a few days ago and the cover story turned out to be that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, that was entertaining. Then when he turned out to be in Argentina, that was exotic, and I could imagine that he was on a secret mission (governor of South Carolina and secret agent!), although I thought it was more likely that he would turn out to suffer from the standard politician's problem. Political power is clearly a major aphrodisiac. What would have been a more interesting explanation for the five missing days? Mark Sanford, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, ran into a pack of wolves. While fighting them off bare-handed, he was abducted by aliens and taken to their spaceship orbiting the earth, where he underwent extensive abdominal surgery and sperm harvesting before losing consciousness. When he came to, he found himself in Argentina, on the alta plana. He wandered aimlessly for hours, a day, a night, and a day, getting colder and colder, until he encountered a flock of mysteriously friendly alpacas. The alpacas would not permit him to ride on them; they hummed ominously whenever he tried to get on their backs. They did allow him to accompany them as they walked and to sleep snuggled up to their warm, wooly backs, so that he did not freeze to death. Finally, he reached Cordoba, where he found an ATM that accepted his bankcard, allowing him to buy a bus ticket to Buenos Aires, where no one believed his story.
June 22nd, 200907:53 am: Gunn & Swanwick: Xtreme Collab
Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick are collaborating in public in support of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, as they've done for the past few years. Watch them plot a novel live at http://www.clarionwest.org/node/633, updates roughly once a day (weekdays only, probably), until July 31. During last year's Write-a-thon, they wrote a round-robin story on the forum, along with L. Timmel Duchamp, Gord Sellar, Ruth Nestvold, and Marilyn Holt. One of the stories they wrote during the 2007 Write-a-thon, “Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!” appeared in the September, 2008, issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Support Eileen, Michael, or one of the many other Write-a-thon participants by making a donation to Clarion West at http://www.clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/2009, or just browse through the web pages to get an idea of the effect Clarion West has had on writers at the start of their careers.  "Beer as good as the stuff that God hides from the Angels in Heaven," the dog said.
-- from "Trouble Ensues," by Swanwick, Gunn, Duchamp, Sellar, Nestvold, and Holt.
June 7th, 200907:05 pm: Tell me about your headache
Okay, this isn't about me. This is about you. What was your worst headache ever? Do you know what caused it? Did anything you did to get rid of it have an effect? How long did it take to go away? There is no downside to being told that whatever made my head hurt, it wasn't going to kill me. That's totally a good thing. There is a downside to having my head still hurt more than a week later. There are no monster explosions inside my head; it doesn't hurt that appallingly intense way still. It does hurt, though, and it makes it hard to think. It's hard to do anything. I cannot possibly have been sympathetic enough to people with headaches in the past. I am so sorry, you all. Historically, I don't get headaches. I didn't, anyway; I guess I have to change my perspective now. We didn't even have ibuprofen in the house. If I'm going to have this unwelcome addition to my life, I'm going to have to learn how to live with it. So tell me stories, please. I feel your pain. Dammit.
June 5th, 200907:41 am: Clarion West Write-a-thon sign-up - another reminder
We're done with the early warning phase of Write-a-thon sign-up and have moved on to the timely sign-up phase. As of now, we have 31 people signed up for the 2009 Write-a-thon, enough flavors for an ice cream store. We're hoping for 75 writers this year, an ambitious increase from last year's 58. We're also hoping that most of the rest of you don't wait until the very last minute to sign up. Go ahead! You're planning to write this summer anyway, aren't you? You have some stories you want to work on, a novel to revise, an ending you need to get just right, some editing that's calling your name. Set your own goals and work at your own pace. Ask people to sponsor you in meeting your goals, or work without sponsors if you prefer. Post your progress in the Write-a-thon forum and get encouragement from other writers throughout the summer. We do want to raise money with the Write-a-thon -- we're pretty much always working on a shoestring -- but the Write-a-thon is about the writing first. The Write-a-thon runs from June 21 to July 31, just like the workshop. You sign up by sending email to Writeathon@clarionwest.org. There's more info on the Write-a-thon page at http://clarionwest.org/events/writeathon/2009. Sign up now, in the timely sign-up phase. Don't wait for the last-minute, just-before-it-starts phase. Remember, the volunteers and staff working on the Write-a-thon (Deb Taber, Chris Sumption, Caren Gussoff, Kate Schaefer, Erin Cashier, Andi Shechter, Nisi Shawl) need time to get your web page set up and proofread, and lots of them are doing the Write-a-thon themselves, so give 'em a break and sign up before June 19. We welcome alumni from Clarion in San Diego or Clarion South as well as Clarion West alumni and friends. If you want to raise money for Clarion, Clarion South, or one of the scholarship funds that send students to the Clarions, we'll cheerfully split the donations we receive on your behalf. Thanks!
June 3rd, 200909:05 pm: Sometimes heads just hurt
Before I start my dramatic story, I'll tell you the end of it: I'm fine. I have no need for dramatic tension here. Last Thursday, Glenn and I were on our way home from the Seattle Symphony (perfectly fine performance of Smetana's Bartered Bride overture, world premiere of David Stock's cello concerto which I would rather not have heard even though the Symphony did a fine job and boy wonder Joshua Roman's solo stint was superb, and a Rachmaninoff that even Glenn, fan of Rachmaninoff that he is, concedes is the sort of thing that gives Rachmaninoff a bad name), when allover sudden it felt like three small bombs went off in my head: boom. Ka-boom. Ka- boom! It was the most amazing head pain I'd ever experienced. It made the old Excedrin jackhammer seem like understatement. It made me yell, "Ow ow ow," and rip off my glasses, as if changing the way I saw the world would make the pain go away. And then the pain did go away, and I felt mostly okay. There was a dull, residual ache, but it was as nothing compared to the cluster bombs of doom. Fortunately, Glenn was driving, as I might have driven us into a wall just to make the pain stop. We went home, and I called a triage nurse, who asked a lot of questions and passed me on to a triage doctor, who told me to get the hell over to an emergency room right away, and he would call them to let them know I was coming. Oh. As anyone who has ever been to an emergency room knows, the rest of the night was alternately too exciting and very dull. Vital signs, blood samples, and a cat scan, followed by a doctor trying to persuade me to have a spinal tap as well. ("Your cat scan was normal, so you don't have a brain tumor and you're probably fine, but because cat scans miss about 1-2 percent of the subarachnoid hemorrhages, we want to do a lumbar tap just in case.") I turned down the spinal tap, because at that point the doctor was kinda reeling from tiredness, and the phlebotomist kinda scared me by reaching across the room when she had a needle in my arm, and I wasn't actually thinking too well. If you're ever in that position, say yes to the spinal tap, okay? It was close to five in the morning by then, so we went home and slept for a few hours. I got up and called my doctor, and Googled while I was on hold. It turns out that about 25 percent of people who have thunderclap headaches have them because they're having sentinel bleeding, and later on -- a few days or a few weeks later -- they have massive aneurysms, and lots of them die. My doctor told me I was probably fine, but she checked in with her neurologist and radiologist friends (she says the main thing she learned in med school was how to reach anybody on the phone at any time; I notice that she learned a bunch of other things, too), and scheduled me for an MRI on Monday. That meant that I got to spend the weekend alternating between cheerful certainty that I was fine and morbid certainty that I'd die horribly and soon. The MRI was painless and dull but very very loud. I knew immediately that I was fine, because the MRI tech (who had already said that he couldn't discuss the results with me) was cheerful and joking rather than solemn as he showed me pictures of my brain. I asked if he was going to send them to my doctor, and he said she'd just asked for a report, no pictures. I asked if I could have the pictures, and he said, sure. He gave me the CD of pictures from the cat scan, too. And that's where I got the icon for this post. I don't recommend this technique. I asked my doctor if all these tests gave her a clue about why I had the appalling headache on Thursday, or if all we had learned was that I wouldn't die from it. She shrugged her shoulders (I could see it even without the picturephone) and said, Sometimes heads just hurt.
June 2nd, 200907:21 am: Advice for spammers
When trying to tempt random people to open the spam you send out by suggesting that you might be a long-lost friend, use "Mary" or "Jennifer" or "David" as the fake name, not "Potteiger F. Crysta". Potteiger F. Crysta wouldn't even be a good name for a Groucho Marx character. Dude.
June 1st, 200909:23 am: Some stories
Some time in the early nineties, I was unable to get to my doctor's office because its waiting room was completely occupied by protesters from Operation Rescue. I don't remember the details of how this affected me; my need to see my doctor that day was routine and easily rescheduled, whatever it was. I do remember that my doctor and her staff took refuge in the office of my dentist, a few floors below, and that my dentist and her entire staff wore NARAL buttons on their lapels for many months thereafter; that my doctor later told me that among the patients she was unable to see that day was a pregnant woman with preeclampsia who very much wanted to have her baby and who suffered a dangerous delay in getting care because of the sit-in (she and her baby survived; I know nothing else about them); and that one of the protesters arrested and released in her office that day was Shelley Shannon, who a few months later shot Dr. George Tiller, wounding him badly but not killing him. I remember asking my doctor, some time before, why she did so many abortions. Didn't those patients have regular doctors? Yes, she said, but their regular doctors were afraid to perform abortions because of the harassment. And yes, she had performed abortions on women who regularly protest against legal abortion; she recognized them from walking past them to get to her office, and they knew where they could go when they needed an abortion because they spent so much time standing there. They'd ask her not to tell anyone, and she'd remind them that she could not reveal that information about any of her patients, but she'd appreciate it if they would not picket her office any more. Some of them stopped picketing; some of them didn't. My doctor retired from practice shortly thereafter. The doctor who bought her practice continued to have a general family practice with an emphasis on reproductive care, which included all aspects of obstetrics and gynecology. A few years later, she decided to cut back her hours and dropped the general practice to concentrate on providing birth control and abortion, because even fewer general practitioners would perform abortions by then and the need was so great. Let's just look at that sentence, shall we? The need was so great. Why is the need so great? Because people make mistakes. Because birth control doesn't always work, even when used properly. Because some people don't pay attention in sex education classes. Because some people don't think sex education classes should be taught. Because some people believe that women and girls are property that needs to be controlled. Because some women and girls are raped. Because some women and girls make different choices after they get pregnant than they think they would make beforehand. Because some wanted pregnancies turn out to be dangerous for the would-be mother. Because people make mistakes.In my youth, I at first believed that abortion should be a private choice of the woman involved. Later, I came to believe that abortion was wrong in every circumstance. Later still, I came to believe that it is always a tragedy, always a very sad choice, but that for the woman making that very sad choice, it may be the right choice, right then, and that she is the only one in a position to be able to make that choice. The role of the rest of society -- all of us who happen not to be pregnant with that particular fetus at that particular time -- is to make sure that the woman has all the support she needs to be able to make that choice: to carry to term, or to abort safely, where safely means that only one life is lost. I do mourn for every aborted child, as I mourn for every dead person in any time (which is to say, this is a somewhat abstracted mourning, folks, but real nevertheless). I do not use the word "tragedy" lightly in this or any other case. I hope for a time when abortion is much more rare than it is now, rare because women are able to choose when and whether to have intercourse as well as when and whether to try to conceive. In the meantime, knowing that the choices women make when they find themselves pregnant are different from the choices they think they would make -- and knowing women who got badly hurt getting illegal abortions in the seventies as well as women who were able to pay a lot of money to have safe illegal abortions in the forties -- I support a woman's right to choose and a doctor's right to perform abortions in a safe, sterile environment. And I mourn Dr. Tiller.
May 30th, 200908:15 pm: June's almost here: Clarion West Write-a-thon-a-rama-mama
Yo, Clarionoids West and fellow travelers! I talked to a bunch of you at Wiscon, waved at several others in passing, and heard rumors of the existence of still others huddled around the bar trading plots and writing tips the whole weekend. It's Write-a-thon time. Be part of Clarion West this summer without even attending the workshop. Set your own goals for your writing for the six weeks of the workshop. Post about your goals in the forums, and encourage others as they pursue their goals. Sign up sponsors in support of your goals, or just write alongside the others. Yes, the Write-a-thon is a fundraiser, and a very important fundraiser for Clarion West, but the writing is more important than the money. The writing comes first. Participants last year wrote first drafts, polished drafts, short stories, novels, screenplays. They wrote alone and as collaborators. Troublemaker-in-chief Michael Swanwick led Ruth Nestvold, Eileen Gunn, L. Timmel Duchamp, Gordon Sellar, and Marilyn Holt into writing a round-robin story right there on the forum, complete with a walk into hell with a dog, Dick Cheney, and gratuitous smoots. In 2007, Michael and Eileen collaborated on six stories in public in their Write-a-thon Smackdown. Yesterday this day's madness did prepare; what will tomorrow's silence, triumph, or despair include? Last year, we had more participants than ever before, 58. We'd love to see as many of you back as possible, and we're looking for some new challenge ideas. Naturally we're interested in monetary challenges, but we're also interested in participation challenges, writing challenges. Got a challenge for your classmates? Bring it on! The Write-a-thon is open to the whole Clarion West community: alumni, instructors, friends. Drop me a comment here with your email address, or send email to writeathon@clarionwest.org to sign up. Do it soon; do it now! Thanks.
May 15th, 200908:13 am: Wiscon, me too
I'll be at Wiscon. The only program item I'm on this year is "Metal, Beads, Fiber and High Geekiness," with Elise Matthesen and Laurie Toby Edison in Conference 5, Sunday, 1:00-2:15PM. I note that this panel is opposite a workshop panel I'd really like to attend (waves at Tina, Debbie, and Erin), but it wouldn't be Wiscon if I didn't want to be in three places at once. Clarion West alumni, can we get together at various points and in different combinations through the weekend? We can talk Write-a-thon (some pages have already been built! Go look!) and hang out. Some of you will have book covers or baby pictures. Some of you will have actual books or genuine babies with you. I'll have frivolous clothing to show off, especially cocktail hats with silly feathers. See you there.
April 7th, 200908:35 am: Gotta do something, somehow
Three times I've heard it now: the high-pitched hopeless crying, the heavy thuds, and the matter-of-fact BBC voiceover telling me what those sounds mean. The first time, I shouted at my radio. The second time, I turned it off and ranted at Glenn. The third time, it was the radio waking me up this morning. I turned it off again and thought about that young woman. I fear that she is dead. I know that I cannot help her. I cannot help that particular young woman in Swat in any way. (And what I write here is all about me, not about her. I don't know her. For me, she is a symbol of a big set of problems for women, particularly for women in that region of Asia, but she is also an individual whose voice I have heard. Because I listen to the radio so much, I have become a witness to her beating; I have taken on a duty to bear witness whether I want it or not. It's a thing to bear, witnessing, but my burden is light.) Okay, I fall back on what I always do: when I encounter a problem I can't fix myself and feel a duty to do something about it, I give money to people who are doing something that might help fix that problem. I can't give huge amounts of money, and I can't always find something that directly affects the problem, but I give what I can. I think about the problem and approach it from a few different directions: is there an organization I trust that is doing something about it right now? Is there an organization I trust that is doing something about a related problem? One hears of horrors every day. I hear of horrors every day. I know I can't solve them. I know as well that I could reshape my life and dedicate myself to fighting them in some particular way every day, but I do not feel that as a vocation. I do feel the need to try to make the world less bad for some people, some of the time; I do not feel the need to save the whole world. Most of the time, I deal with my need to make the world less bad by supporting writing organizations. I learned early on that the cure for bad speech was more speech, that the way to improve people's lives was through education, that knowing more things gives people more tools with which to comprehend and encounter the world, that the more you know, the more jokes you get. I am not a teacher, nor a journalist, nor a fiction writer; the writing forms at which I excel are private letters, school papers, and grant applications. These are not the tools with which to change the world, but this world must be changed. If I see that it must be changed, I must work to change it, and I must use the tools I have at hand. I'm pretty good at research, too, and I know how to read the financial statements of non-profit organizations. When I start making donations to a new organization, I check its form 990 through the Guidestar web site (unless I know the people running the organization personally or have some other reliable source of information about it). What I look for: do they file their form 990 regularly? Are they current? When I look at the numbers, do they tell me a reasonable story? Is the organization painfully sincere in revealing details about how they spend their money? (I like that, by the way, because it shows that they're trying really hard to be thrifty and transparent.) If they're running a deficit, does it look like they have a good reason for doing so, or a plan for changing it? If they're not running a deficit, are they being sensible in what they do with their excess? If they're really tiny (under half a million a year), do they look like they have a chance to survive long enough to fulfill their charitable purpose and therefore make good use of any money I give them? And I don't spend my whole day trying to find the perfect organization to make myself feel better. There are women's organizations on the ground in Swat that might be appropriate for me to give money to, but I have no way of judging most of them and no time to find a good network through which to vet them. All right, I look for something addressing the problem of educating women in Moslem countries, and I find http://www.greenvillageschools.org/faq.htm. I've read about Green Village Schools before. I don't know any of the people involved, but I know people who know some of them. There's information about all the board members on the web site. The form 990 is in order for at least three years. They've built one small school in Afghanistan, which was a big success with its village. The Taliban burned it down. They're going to build it again. And I've found a new organization for my donor dollars. They're in Afghanistan, not Pakistan, but they're fighting the Taliban by building schools, and by rebuilding schools, and by rebuilding schools. The Taliban and the forces represented by the Taliban are my enemy, and I want to fight that enemy through education, because that's a tool I understand, and because that's a tool the Taliban understands, too. They fight us by building bad schools ("bad" by the definitions I accept, where "bad" means educating only boys and not girls and teaching an extremely limited and distorted curriculum); we have to fight them by building good schools, where both girls and boys are educated, where they learn a wide variety of subjects, where they see the possibility that life can be different from how it is now. I can't save the world. You can't either. We can make parts of it less bad for some people.
March 21st, 200908:17 pm: Frivolous beer recommendation
Tonight Glenn and I split a bottle of Bridgeport's Raven Mad Imperial Porter with dinner. It's a tasty beer, with the obligatory chewy chocolate flavor of a nice dark porter, maybe a tad bit over-carbonated. It's a mix of three porters, one aged in bourbon barrels, one aged in wine barrels, and the third (the majority) unspecified. We'll get a few more bottles so we can share them later. If you get a bottle of this beer, take out your 3-D glasses and look at the label. The raven really pops out. If you don't have 3-D glasses, why not? Okay, okay, you can borrow mine.
March 5th, 200911:46 am: Shameless promotion of my friends
Last weekend, while at Potlatch, I re-read Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward's Writing the Other. That is, I thought I was re-reading it, but I must have skimmed it the first time through. I'll read it another time in a few months, and I may finally do the exercises as well as read the text. It's available and on sale for only $9 from Aqueduct Press at http://www.aqueductpress.com/orders.html; scroll down the page to the Conversation Pieces, #8. While you're on the Aqueduct page, go ahead and buy Nisi's short fiction collection, Filter House. It's fun to support good writers and small presses! Nisi is on LJ these days as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nisi_la. She posts rarely but entertainingly.
February 14th, 200909:45 am: Clarion West General Meeting at Potlatch 18
Clarion West's 2009 General Meeting is scheduled at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Friday, February 28, at the start of the Clarion West Scholarship Auction at Potlatch, in the Domain Hotel, 1085 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, California. This meeting will be a brief update on the state of the workshop, featuring Executive Director Leslie Howle and board members Eileen Gunn and Kate Schaefer, and then we’ll get on to the fun and frenetic auction featuring Jay Lake, Tom Whitmore, cool stuff, and lots of scholarship money for deserving new writers. The meeting is open to the public. We’ll hear a report on the previous year, plans for the coming year, and vote for board members. Only Clarion West members may vote, but you can join at the meeting. Please come if you're able to. For more information about Potlatch, see the convention website. It's a terrific small convention focused on the conversation between readers and writers. Potlatch travels up and down the west coast; it has been held in Seattle, Portland Eugene, Oakland, San Francisco, and now in the South Bay. It doesn't have guests of honor, but it does feature books of honor. This year: Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford and Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. Buy your Potlatch membership today to get the pre-con rate.
February 1st, 200907:29 pm: Reading recommendations
It's Black History Month again, and the Carl Brandon Society recommends the following books of speculative fiction by writers of African descent: Dark Matter: A Century Of Speculative Fiction From The African Diaspora, Sheree R. Thomas, editor, Warner/Aspect, 2000 Sly Mongoose, by Tobias S. Buckell, Tor Books, 2008 Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler, Seven Stories Press, 2005 The Good House, by Tananarive Due, Washington Square Press, 2004 Midnight Robber, by Nalo Hopkinson, Aspect, 2000 The Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor, Hyperion Book CH, 2007 The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi, Nan A. Talese, 2005 Wind Follower, by Carole Mcdonnell, Juno Books, 2007 Song Of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, Knopf, 1978, many other printings available Filter House, by Nisi Shawl, Aqueduct Press, 2008 I've read and enjoyed four of these. I'll read a couple more this month. Most of these books are available through the public library; all of them can be bought through Amazon.com.
January 20th, 200908:20 am: That leap second
Back at the turn of the year, rrangell suggested that 2008's leap second should be saved up and used today, just after Barack Obama takes his oath of office as the 44th president of the United States. Seemed like a good idea to me. Bob, I'm holding that second in my hand for just about another half hour. I know there will be a moment to be savored soon, a moment full of hope and joy.
January 19th, 200904:23 pm: Tell your story and change the world
It's Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a Congressionally-designated national day of service since 1994. Our president-elect has set an example by putting in some volunteer time at a teen shelter today, along with his family. On this day commemorating the civil rights struggle, as we wait for the inauguration tomorrow of our first black president, all over the country, many people are spending the day doing something to make this a better place. Like lots of you, I volunteer on a regular basis for a few causes and on an irregular basis for a few more, mostly for writers' education. Most of the work I do is fundraising, and most of the way I raise money is to tell people that a cause I believe in, a cause I think they believe in as well, needs money. Then I ask them to send some money to the people doing the work. If they agree, and if they have money available right then, they send it along. So that's what I'm doing today. I'm asking you to make a donation to the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund of the Carl Brandon Society. The Butler fund sends writers of color to the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle or the Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego (and will eventually send writers of color to Clarion South in Australia as well). It keeps Octavia's memory alive by trying to increase the racial diversity of writers working in fantastic fiction. I miss Octavia. I wish I had known her better. I am grateful to have known her at all. And while I'm at it, let me remind those of you who are writers considering attending Clarion West or Clarion this coming summer, get those applications in now! The deadline is March 1; the deadline for a tuition discount of $100 at Clarion West is February 1. Pass it on to other writers! And if you write, keep writing. Only you can tell your story; you are the only one with your voice. Let your voice be heard.
December 26th, 200812:00 am: The gift that keeps on and on and on
Two years ago, my friend akirlu gave me a copy of a Christmas sampler called "Gaudete 'Til You Drop." It includes five different renditions of "Gaudete" and a bunch of other non-standard Christmas carols and songs (many in Latin, some with gratuitous hippopotamus). It whomps the little drummer boy's tiny butt. Thanks again, Ulrika. (Edited to add: not available in stores. Custom-made by akirlu with my peculiar tastes in mind. Stand-by operators, sit down.)
December 21st, 200808:40 pm: Winter solstice
It is still snowing. It has snowed all day, sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly. It snowed all day yesterday and much of Thursday. Friday, the snow took time off from falling, but the already-fallen snow did not melt and drain away. Every surface that approaches horizontal outside, every surface that can hold snow, does. At least eight inches of snow are stacked up all over. I had forgotten how light it is at night when there is that much clear crystalline structure reflecting and refracting every bit of available light.
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