An Unconvincing Narrative

I’m sitting on a panel about blogging at AggieCon with the queen of snark, Caroline Spector, but she isn’t being very snarky.

Click the Pic for their blog with all the up to date stuff

I’m the Writer Guest of Honor at AggieCon 41. I’ve known most of the guests listed below longer than I’ve known my own wife (who is also a guest.)  Selina Rosen, Toastmaster is the only one I haven’t met.

Editor Guest of Honor: Ellen Datlow

Artist Guest of Honor: David Lee Anderson

Media Guest of Honor: Marv Wolfman

Toastmaster: Selina Rosen

Special Guest: Martha Wells

Special Guest: Noel Wolfman

Hope to see you there!

Over at her blog, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been writing a series of ongoing posts called The Feelancer’s Survival Guide. This weeks post is about Jealousy and the line I’ve bolded below really struck me–like with a brick to the head struck me.

But jealousy isn’t about “them.” It’s about you.  What you want. What you’re missing.  And it’s also about your attitude.

We’ll get to the attitude in a minute.  You can find the key to what you want and what you’re missing once you figure out what’s making you jealous.  You might think you’re jealous of your friend’s lovely store, when really, you’re jealous of your friend’s thriving business—the one that allowed her to remodel her store in such a gorgeous fashion.

Figure out what it is that you are truly jealous of and you have the key to your own heart. [emphasis mine]

Then, figure out how the person you’re jealous of got that thing that makes you jealous.  Here are the unacceptable answers in this category: Oh, she’s more talented than I am. Oh, she’s prettier than I am. Oh, she’s luckier than I am. Oh, she’s more devious than I am.

Those comparisons do no one any good.  You have to step out of your emotional framework which is (sorry) I want what you have and I can’t have it. Waaa! and become a full fledged professional.  You have to calm down and look at the other person’s situation dispassionately.

There are 43 posts/chapters in her series so far.  Go here for the table of contents.

Offered without comment.

Photo by Al Grillo, Associated Press

One day after word came that Sarah Palin is joining FoxNews, Ireland’s biggest bookie reports that about half of bettors doubt the ex-Alaska governor can keep the gig a year.

Calling her “gaffe-prone,” bookmaker PaddyPower.com adds that the minority group she’s most likely to offend first is gays/lesbians/bisexuals (4-1), followed by African Americans and Muslims (both at 6-1).

Least likely to bear the initial insult: the Irish, the infirm and Inuits (all tied at 20-1), and Jehovah’s Witnesses (25-1).

Philly.com

A meditation on disability, beauty, and augmentation. My favorite line? “Pamela Anderson has more prosthesis than I do and nobody calls her disabled.”

That’s why.

(Zeppelin under construction 1933)

Ursula K. Le Guin resigned from the Author’s Guild over their so called settlement with Google.  I have very mixed feelings about the Google Rights Grab but I am totally in agreement that it is plain wrong for one party to appropriate another party’s property unilaterally.  And that’s what their so-called settlement does.

Ms. Le Guin says in her resignation letter:

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the “Google settlement.” You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the “Google settlement.” They don’t have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Now she is also collecting the name of professional writers who want to be counted with her on this issue.  Read her full resignation letter and the follow up over at the Bookview Cafe.  And leave your name there, too, if you think it stinks like I do.

Last night I did my usual hour of Aikido followed immediately by an hour of Iaido. Halfway through Iaido class we were told to sit down and then two of us were called up. Shoden, Sensei said. We did the twelve forms (which I haven’t done in months since we’ve been doing the standing forms from Shindo Munen Ryu lately) and I completely blanked on the last part of #8. He gave me another chance to do it at the end and it came back to me.  By the way, the person above is performing the form I messed up on.

Sensei promoted us both to Shodan, the first rank I’ve had in Iaido.

Mur Lafferty, writer and creator of such award-winning Podcasts as I Should Be Writing, Playing For Keeps, Heaven, Lessons of a Geek Fu Master, and The Takeover, is hosting a new podcast for Tor.Com.

For over a year, Tor.com has brought you excellent short fiction on our site, but now, podnovelist extraordinaire Mur Lafferty is making the audio of these stories available to you in podcast form. We’ll be bringing you both new fiction and our archived stories, so don’t worry if you’ve missed anything archived on the site. The podcast will also include mention of the recent topics on the Tor.com blog, convention reports, and interviews from time to time.

First episode features “After the Coup” by John Scalzi, second features “Overtime” by Charlie Stross, third features “Farewell Performance” by Nick Mamatas, and the fourth features “Bugs In the Arroyo” by me.

If you do the subscribe thing, you can grab the pod feed or download the individual audio files manually at http://www.tor.com/rss/category/TorDotStories (or through the above links.)

Scott Edelman, over on Twitter, pointed out this amazingly awful attack on the great writers of science fiction by David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service. It’s not quite James Bond, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but it does have a ring to it.

Anyway, his post, titled Beware of Science Fiction, uses Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Roddenberry, as examples of agnostic or atheistic proponents. His descriptions are factual, using quotes from the writers in question. After reading every one of the quotes, my reaction is “Right on!” but he seems to see them as, uh, damning.

He finishes with:

Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!

So, I’m guessing that evidence based science is just right out of the picture, for him.

I laughed when I read the informational paragraph at the bottom of the website which includes:

OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.

In conclusion, I’m making a unilateral deal with him. He shouldn’t read ANY Science Fiction and I’ll promise never to read his web site again.

(also posted at Eat Our Brains)

Very interesting post by Nicola Griffith about why fundamentally flawed books end up on the bestseller lists.

Blockbuster-book buying isn’t about books. It’s about human behaviour and group dynamics. It’s about belonging. The blockbuster consumer hears people talking about the the secret codes underlying national monuments, or vampires vs. werewolves, and they want to join in the conversation. Just as they haven’t spent much time thinking about dress design, they’ve never considered how narrative works. They don’t have the critical tools to see that the book is ugly and badly made. All they know is that they’re joining in and having a blast. They aren’t habitual readers; they have time/inclination for one book a year, so they pick the one that they’ve heard their coworkers and fellow students and clients raving about. A blockbuster novel is like a Halloween costume: it only has to last one night and provide something to talk about in the morning. It’s a way to feel part of the party.

Had to run up to Santa Fe yesterday to rescue someone.  It caused me to miss aikido but I did get dinner out of it.  The Bull Ring is a lovely restaurant with great food and very nice staff.  Couldn’t afford it frequently but the bacon wrapped scallops knocked my socks off.

I’ve talked about how our current War on Terror methodology is terribly askew.  It’s guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset is not only unjust, it’s terribly inefficient.  In biological terms it resembles an autoimmune disease that, in response to a bacterial or viral threat, attacks normal, healtht cells.

Here’s an interesting article on how the Israeli’s handle airport security while keeping the parking lot to flight time under 25 minutes. link 

Okay, this is petty but this IS the first day of the new decade.  Yes, millenniums do start on the year 1, 2001, 3001–there was no year Zero. BUT, decades start with the zero. We don’t call 1940 the last year of the thirties.

So there.

By the way, we have a fair chance of having a better decade than the last. Hoping we don’t have two MORE wars in that time. Hope the continued War on the American People Terror becomes the far more sensible International Effort Against Illegal Acts.

And I hope you all have a great decade.

I have a new phone and one of the things it does (supposedly) is create wordpress posts on the phone and then toss them up through the evdo-ther.  This is a test of that capability.

If it works I intend to blog five times a week in the tens (as all the cool kids are calling the new decade.)  They’ll be short posts mostly–I don’t want to sabotage myself or my fiction writing by over-committing.

I will also be writing at least once a week over at Eat Our Brains.  

I have some other resolutions but those involve the 7 pounds I picked up in holiday excess so I’ll be dealing with that on my own.

Here goes…

I’m thinking we should just skip December.  I never seem to get anything done.

Okay.  Not skipping it.  Just breathless.  I’m so over my head that I’m writing this instead of dealing with any of the many things coming down the pike.

We started the month with two (2) family birthdays, already passed, but the public party is this afternoon.  We’re talking my daughters BD on the 10th and Laura’s on the 8th.  We really just pretend Xmas doesn’t exist until we get these out of the way.  This of course, makes the Xmas stuff incredibly frantic as well.  In addition, various consulting jobs are hammering Laura and I wrote and sold an overdue zombie story for John Joseph Adams anthology The Living Dead 2.  I signed contracts for the third Jumper novel which I think is going to be called Frames of Reference.

I spent half of November painting and doing house repairs on the infamous Monkey House in Bryan, Texas.  Back in October I turned in and did editorial rewrites for the novel 7th Sigma, which includes the piece from Tor.com, “Bugs in the Arroyo,” and is set in the same universe as my Analog piece, “A Story, With Beans.”  And then there was other contracts to be fiddled with since “A Story, With Beans” will be reprinted in Prime Book’s The Year’s Best Science and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton.

So, maybe something are getting done.

Oh.

I’ve just been told the party is off.

Apparently I was also told this two days ago but I was playing xbox and said, “Yes, dear.”

So, there’s some pressure released.

So, this blog post which was supposed to be about avoiding getting ready for the party is just a blog post.

C’est la vie.

5) Roman jeunesse (Young Adult Novel)

Le clairvoyage et La brume des jours de Anne Fakhouri (L’Atalante)

L’étrange vie de Nobody Owens (GRAVEYARD BOOK) de Neil Gaiman (Albin Michel)

Jumper de Steven Gould (Mango)

Le sang des lions de Loïc Le Borgne (Intervista)

The recently published French edition of Jumper is up for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2009 in the Young Adult category.  Also on the ballot are the Newberry Award Winning and 1 full year on the New York Times Best Selling list The Graveyard Book.  Go Neil.  Go me.  Go Loic Le Bornge and Anne Fakhouri.

Everything sounds better in French, mon chou.

Dear sir or madam I am not some crank
I’m the widow of the guy who ran some bank
I’ve got some money that I need to send
And if you’d help there’d be some to spend
Cause I want to be…Nigerian Scammer, Nigerian Scammer!

Gardner Dozois pointed out the impeccable good taste demonstrated above. Fifth Book From the Left. Yes, the Wind in the Willows is good too.

I have been getting a lot of inquiries lately that fall into similar groupings so I thought I’d answer and discuss them here.

How could you let them, etc.

For all of those of you who are newly upset (or still) about the changes in the Jumper movie and want to know how on earth I could possibly allow them to happen, please read or reread my essay on the topic originally pubbed in the Tor email newsletter and reposted here.  It is titled “Misconceptions” for good reason.

What about that movie sequel?

I am told, by people who have access to the Pro version of the Internet Movie Database that there is a start date for principle photography listed for the movie Jumper II on that site.  I have not heard anything officially from the studio or my agent on this. The rights for sequels are already licensed from the original agreement so I don’t have to “give permission” but neither do they have to notify me.  At some point, if they do go ahead with a sequel, they owe me more money.

Will there be another Jumper book sequel?

While the novel I am finishing (part of which you can read at Tor.com here) is not a Jumper novel, the next novel after that will be.  It will be a sequel to the two original novels (Jumper and Reflex) and will not contain elements introduced by the film version or the film tie-in Jumper: Griffin’s Story.

If you’re not writing a Jumper sequel what are you writing?

I do not know the name of my current novel even though it is nearing completion.  Maybe I should have a contest.  The above mentioned story at Tor.com “Bugs In the Arroyo” is a segment out of the book and a story in the May 2009 Analog, “A Story, With Beans” is set in the same robot eaten American southwest.

Anybody have any ideas?