Open Thread and Link Farm, Friendly Face Edition

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Ampersand

6.-Most-body-pierced-woman-in-the-world

  1. This is historic: Hillary Clinton is the first woman presumptive nominee of a major party – Vox
    Whatever I think about Clinton as a nominee, to have a female nominee – and soon, I believe, a female president – is pretty amazing (and, also, long overdue).
  2. Trangender Actress MJ Rodriguez Talks About Her Hamilton Audition | Playbill
    The link includes a video of her singing “Satisfied,” which led to Hamilton’s producers asking her to come in and audition for Peggy. She realized she’s a trans women while playing Angel in “Rent.”
  3. Another Benefit of Voter ID Laws (for Republicans): They Prevent Trans People From Voting
  4. How Clarence Thomas Broke My Heart – Bloomberg View
    Interesting account of how easily being “race blind” turns into making any possible excuse for racism – as if the person who should be assumed innocent until all reasonable doubt is removed is the prosecutor, rather than the man on death row.
  5. Bruenighazi: how a feisty Bernie blogger’s firing explains Democratic politics in 2016 – Vox
    I was surprised at how interesting I found this article.
  6. Comics&Cola: Snapshot thoughts: Holding together the Kingpin’s humanity in patterned waistcoats
    Interesting post about the Kingpin’s costume design in Frank Miller’s and Bill Sienkiewicz’s 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love and War.
  7. “Like a Damn White Knight”: Feminism and Chivalry, Love and War and Sin City « The Hooded Utilitarian
    And Kristian Williams argues that there are interesting (and possibly unintentional) feminist themes in Love and War and Frank Miller’s Sin City.
  8. Green Party’s Jill Stein on the Feminist Case Against Hillary Clinton | Rolling Stone
  9. Donald Trump and the Backlash Against Political Correctness – The Atlantic
    Basically, he’s afraid that if people knew his political opinions, they might not like him (because PC thought police), so he’s voting for Trump.
  10. The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society | WIRED
  11. Dr. Heimlich Uses His Maneuver At Retirement Home, Saves 87-Year-Old Woman
    Dr Heimlich is 96 years old, and has apparently never performed his maneuver to save someone’s life before (although there is some question on that point).
  12. Should you edit your children’s genes? : Nature News & Comment
    This article, about “the emergence of a powerful gene-editing technology, known as CRISPR–Cas9,” interviews several disabled people about the technology.
  13. 5 Times Student Art Was Censored For Being Offensive | Heat Street
    Includes a mix of suppression from the right and from the left.
  14. Why Sci-Hub Will Win — Medium
    It’s not just cheaper; it’s a much better service.
  15. Impact of Social Sciences – Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.
  16. For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds | Pew Research Center
    That headline could give the impression that >50% of young adults live with their parents, but that’s not true; it’s about 32%. Still, that’s a big rise from 1960 (when it was 20%), but a return to the norm for 1880 or 1940. The biggest change in recent years is the much lower chance that 18034 yr olds will be “married or cohabiting in own household,” from 62% in 1960 to 31.6% today.
  17. The 4 Most Damning Revelations In Wisconsin’s Voter ID Trial | ThinkProgress
  18. The word “Nazi” was an insult to the Nazis.
  19. Child Labor in Tobacco Supply Chains – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
    ” We have more levers over these processes than we think, it’s just that policymakers choose not to use them.”
  20. Heated Argument Ends After Man Helpfully Points Out That Both Sides Are Bad – Point & Clickbait
    I suspect I’ve been this guy all too often, albeit without the wonderful results.
  21. A universal basic income only makes sense if Americans change how they think about work – Vox
  22. Legal groups slam NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo for creating “unconstitutional” blacklist of BDS supporters – Salon.com
    To me it seems instinctive that states electing not to do business with or in another state is substantively different than creating a blacklist of businesses not to be dealt with. But is that true? I’m having difficulty parsing out what the important differences are, so it might be that my instinct is mistaken.
  23. A Hillary Clinton presidency will greatly boost women’s representation in politics, with big policy consequences – Vox
    The very brief overview of polity differences coming from having female politicians in office especially interests me. Also, interesting side note about class differences and policy.
  24. Sit-in at Seattle U raises allegation on dean’s use of slur that may have been reference to book
    It’s no secret that I think many criticisms of student protestors for being oversensitive and anti-free speech are themselves hyperbolic overreactions. But this case – specifically, a petition to (among other things) fire a Dean for recommending Black civil rights activist Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger – is legitimately ridiculous and censorious.
  25. Google bans plug-in that picks out Jews – BBC News
    Antisemites being simultaneously frightening and ridiculous.
  26. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs – STRIKE!
    Thanks to Grace for this link! I don’t agree 100% with the article – it sometimes veers close to claiming the ruling class has more deliberate intent than I think it does – but I’ve certainly held some jobs the world could have happily done without (like night secretary at JP Morgan).
  27. How Frankie Manning’s incredible dancing skills made him famous twice, 50 years apart – Vox

Posted in Link farms | 35 Comments

Making Lemons into Stuff: Appreciating A Decade of Hand-made, Artisinal Lemonades.

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Mandolin

It’s the last day of my Making Lemons into Jokes campaign! Thanks to absolutely everyone who has contributed, supported, signal boosted, chuckled, and etc. And there’s still a little time to chip in! There are three stretch goals left —

$850 – A satirical essay by Greg Machlin on the topic of how I, personally, destroyed science fiction.

$900 – I’ll write a silly story based on a prompt that John Hodgman gave SFWAns at this year’s Nebula banquet.

$950 – I’ll write a silly story based on all three of his prompts.

$1000 – I’ll hire a professional to make the whole bundle into something pretty.

It would be nice to hit the last one; I could probably use the help. 😉

 

I’ve written a bunch about the harassment and the campaign this month. On Ann Leckie’s blog, I talked about why the common advice to ignore trolls isn’t enough. On Mary Robinette Kowal’s, I wrote about some of the threads of oppression that make solidarity personally important to me. On Jim Hines’, I wrote about coping with harassment as a vulnerable person.

Today, I wanted to write a little about the places where the light is increasing.

When I started selling my writing in 2005, if I wrote a story with queer characters, I had to think about where I could send it. Not all markets would publish things that pushed those boundaries. Even editors who had no problem with queer content might have to deal with things like school library distribution, where some librarians (more than do today) believed that “gay” = “sex” = “inappropriate for children.”

These days? I don’t even think about it.

These days, when a young trans writer asks me whether there are people with non-normative genders in the industry, I have instant access to an array of publicly known names like my former student, An Owomoyela, one of the fiction editors of the Hugo-winning Strange Horizons, Keffy Kehrli, a brilliant writer who is also running his own queer-themed podcast, and Charlie Jane Anders, whose beautiful writing has been acknowledged with well-earned awards.

In 2005, a venerated old, male writer grabbed a woman’s breast without her permission, on stage, in front of thousands. The science fiction community was befuddled, tripped over its own feet in confusion, and nothing decisive proceeded.

Now large numbers of pro writers have signed pledges not to attend conventions without harassment policies. Activists like Elise Mathesen, Genevieve Valentine, and Rose Fox, among so, so many others, have stood up to make those policies mean something.

And yet more activists, like Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael and Lynne Thomas, and Mari Ness, have come up with a similar pledge about accessibility policies, to try to extend that energy and protection to disabled congoers.

In 2008, fans of color stood up to be counted, because people didn’t even really believe they were there.

I think most white people know better now. It’s been a long time since I saw someone suggest everyone who said they were brown was a sock puppet.

Con or Bust did that. Tempest Bradford did that. The Carl Brandon Society did that. Smart, dedicated, writers activists and fans, did that, by raising their hands.

When I came into the field, I knew a little about post-colonial and Indian diasporic science fiction because of my anthropology classes, and I’d been reading some Japanese fiction in translation. But it’s only been in the past several years — thanks to the efforts of American translators like Ken Liu, and international critics and writers like Charles Tan and Lavie Tidhar — that non-anglophone speculative fiction is being widely read and heard in the United States, leading to the recognition of powerful, non-Western writers like Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang.

Every single moment of progress has had its backlash, of course. When Nora Jemisin came to deserved prominence as one of this century’s most important, emerging voices, jealous graspers harassed her, to try to put her back in her “place.” Elise Mathesen and Genevieve Valentine are still subjected to victim blaming.

But they made a difference. They’re still making a difference.

If my post on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog was about why people still need to stand together, then this post is the light side of that. When we push hard, and when we bear the costs of pushing, we can make progress. We have.

Posted in Making Lemons into Jokes, Patreon | 1 Comment

Silly Interview with Anncillary Leckie, Yes I said That, I’ll Be Here All Night

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Mandolin
Ann Leckie
This is Ann Leckie. If you’re a fan of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, and you don’t know who she is, you may have spent the last few years in cryogenic storage. In which case — awesome, and welcome back.
Ann likes dinosaurs, lives in Missouri, and really, really likes researching things.

RS: I’ve been reading your Raadchai stories for eleven years now (Yeah, eleven years. Let that sink in.) and I know the gloves and tea were in them by the time I started reading. Were they part of the initial germ of the Raadch, or if not, how did they evolve?

They weren’t part of the initial germ, but they got into the mix pretty soon after that. And I’m not sure where they came from or why they stuck–it just kind of worked for me somehow.

Which is how a lot of things are when I’m writing. Sometimes I’ll see someone say, like, “Oh, and this detail here, this is obviously Leckie doing this profound intentional thematic thing” and I’m like, no, actually, it was shiny, or else it made the story work the way I wanted it to, but I am  not going to speak up and spoil the impression that I was actually doing this very sophisticated thing!

RS: Tell everyone the story of the tea Vonda.

So, Clarion West has a party every Friday night of the workshop. And I turned up to the first one and I walk in (actually into the front yard of the house where it was) not knowing anybody, and this woman comes up with a plastic bag full of yarn and says, “Here, I make these for the students every year. Take one.” So what they are is these crocheted…objects. Our class mostly called them “scrunchies” or “scrunchy things.” If you were to crochet a couple chains and then join them to make a small loop, and then do a dozen or so double crochets in the loop and join the first and last ones to make a flat circle, and then every round after that make two double crochets in every double crochet, after a few rounds you’d have a scrunchy thing.  Mine was mostly a sportweight yarn that was white with a strand of what looked like silver tinsel in it, and then it was edged with a round of single crochets in red.

Anyway, so I picked my red and silver and white scrunchy thing and I thanked the nice lady and she went off to give one to another student and someone leaned over and said to me, very quietly, “That was Vonda McIntyre,” and I nearly fell over. Vonda McIntyre! Gave me a scrunchy thing she had crocheted herself! I put it on my desk in my room where the workshop was.

And so then, while I was working on the story that eventually became “Night’s Slow Poison” I needed a creature. Building creatures can take quite a while if you take your worldbuilding seriously, which I generally do. But I needed something fast, and I looked up and there was my scrunchy thing. “Right,” I said, “you’re my creature. What to call you?” And thus the tea Vonda was born.

RS: Do you have a picture of your tea Vonda?

I don’t!  I know it’s in my office somewhere, I ran across it the last time I cleaned the whole office, but Mithras only knows where it is now. Probably under a huge pile of beads and yarn.

RS: I do not have a picture of my tea Vonda. Maybe I’ll find it when we clean our office.

Hahaha clean the office. The very idea. I don’t know about yours, but that would be a big project here in my office.

RS: I love your fantasy world in which gods must always speak the truth, and suffer penalties when they lie. Can you describe it more fully and talk about how you came up with it?

I actually designed that world for “The God of Au” and then found that I could use it for other things.

I did a lot of reading on various topics, and ended up fascinated with the very…I guess I’ll say “contractual” nature of some pagan Roman religious practices. Like, you’d make an offering and you would be careful to describe the terms of your offering very specifically so there was no misunderstanding. “I give you the wine I pour out on the ground” rather than “I give you this wine” which could, if you squinted, mean all the wine in the amphora, or from the harvest, right? Or when praying to a god or asking them for something, they’re sometimes very careful about names and identities. If you clearly needed to propitiate *some* god (there’s a plague, or a string of misfortunes, or some ill-omened event but there’s no information about which god might be the one to go to) you’d make an offering to something like “the god who’s concerned in this, whether they’re male or female or neither, by whatever name they answer to” (that’s a very loose paraphrase, not an actual quote of any inscription). In fact, such a dedication occurs in “The God of Au.” Or, like, there were certain ceremonies that had to go off as specified, and if there was one detail wrong they had to start over from the beginning, because the deal was it had to happen a particular way. So if, say, it was a procession during which the officiating priest couldn’t be contaminated by seeing something–let’s say a dog–during the procession, well, instead of having to start over every time a stray dog turned up, they’d put blinders on the priest in the procession so even if the dog was there, he wouldn’t, you know, see it.

I found that really interesting, in part because of the way it implied the assumption of the very real presence of gods, and the potential for a very direct relationship between people and gods, and for gods’ very direct actions on the world, in a way that makes perfect logical sense if in fact gods exist and they consider themselves bound by contracts in that way. It was a small step from there to “gods are bound by their own words.”

Which is essentially the premise of the universe–not much different from the world we live in at all, but for this one thing–multiple gods exist, and their power comes from the fact that whatever they say is true–even if it wasn’t before they said it. Of course, a world that has such beings in it is going to be very different from ours, even if everything else is basically the same.

RS: Have you considered writing a fantasy novel? Do you have an idea for it?

I have! I have some faint scratchings of an idea. It would take work to develop those into an actual novel, but I would really like to do it some time.

RS: What is the best kind of tea?

The kind that tastes good to you! Right now I’m enjoying different oolongs, but there aren’t many kinds of tea that I just don’t like. Well, I’m not a rooibos fan. (Well, let me amend that, I’ve got a green rooibos blend that I was given as a gift and I like that one a lot. But generally, not a rooibos fan.)

RS: For the past several years, you’ve been making spectacularly gorgeous woven bead jewelry. Can you describe a couple of your favorite projects? Pictures please!

Oh, wow. I’m not sure I’d say “spectacularly gorgeous,” but. I’ve got a few necklaces I’m very proud of, and I got into doing pins for a while (for maybe obvious reasons), which are nice because they’re small and finish quickly. Beadweaving can take such a long time! I’ve got a freeform peyote necklace that’s been in progress for a couple of years, sheesh, I really do need to finish it.

I’ve posted pics of some of the pins on my tumblr:

imageI’m kind of proud of that one, though it’s mostly bead embroidery and polymer clay. The cuneiform allegedly says “the goddess Innana.” I know “the goddess” part is right, that’s that star-looking thing on the left, it’s the determinative for gods. (alone it can also mean “star” or “sky” and you now have almost the entire extent of my knowledge of Sumerian.)

image (1)These are just kind of playing around. In colors I hardly ever use, actually, but I walked into the bead store last winter and was so tired of gray, and they’d put a bunch of beads those colors up front and I was like ‘I need the bright colors!”

image (2)This is a freeform square stitch project. Freeform kind of takes some getting used to, I think, but it’s fun.

image (3)More bead embroidery. The “jewels” are of course plastic things from a huge bag I got at the craft store. I can’t help it, I like sparkles.

image (4)There are more, and I did bunches and bunches of little triangles. I did the necklace in my author photo! And also the necklace and purse I wore for the 2014 Nebulas and Hugos! I’m not sure I have pictures of all of them, though.

RS: New fans may or may not know you as someone who was the assistant/associate editor at PodCastle for several years, and the founder and editor of Giganotosaurus Magazine. What do you get out of editing? Do you see yourself taking up another editing project?

Maybe! I enjoy editing, but it does take up a very similar part of my energy as writing does, which is why I handed off the editing of GigaNotoSaurus to Rashida Smith (who is doing a fabulous job).

Part of what I’ve learned from editing is how to look at something that isn’t working for me and think of effective ways to fix it. I wasn’t doing the fixing myself, but I think I got better as time went on at identifying things and coming up with workable suggestions for the writer. And of course, sometimes the writer’s reply would be “No, actually, I think this other thing will work better” and it would! That was something I felt I could bring back to my own work, that would make it better.

Also, honestly, it is genuinely fun to buy stories, to say “Yes, give me the story I want to publish it!” And then even more fun to have it go out into the world and maybe see people read it or talk about it. Most of the credit goes to the writer, and rightly so, but there’s just something…I don’t know, parental? about publishing stories.

RS: Should dinosaurs have guns?

Yes. Yes they should. Especially if their technology has gotten to the point that they’re mounting expeditions to Mars.

RS: What is your least favorite way to end an interview?

I..don’t know? I don’t think I’ve had an interview end badly. 😀

Posted in Interviews | Comments Off on Silly Interview with Anncillary Leckie, Yes I said That, I’ll Be Here All Night

A Launch Party, Some Other Upcoming Events, and Publication News

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Upcoming Events

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here—I’m hoping to get back to more regular blogging soon—but June is coming and I have a lot to tell you about, starting with Ghostbird Press’ 2016 launch party, which will be on June 26th, from 5-7 PM at Fatty’s Cafe in Astoria. I will be celebrating the publication of my new chapbook, For My Son, A Kind of Prayer, along with Roger Sedarat and Kimiko Hahn, whose new chapbooks–Eco-Logic of The Word Lamb and Resplendent Slug respectively—Ghostbird has also just published. If you live in the New York area and you can come, it would be lovely to see you. For more details, click here.

These are my other June events:

 

Publication News

I have three poems in Unlikely Stories Mark V: In November 2014, I attended Enough Is Enough: A Meeting on Sexism and Accountability in NYC Poetry Communities, a meeting organized to help “forge a more respectful, alert, and conscientious [poetry] community.” It was (and is) an important initiative, addressing a problem that is at once all-too-pervasive and rendered all-too-invisible. I am happy that “Gender Politics,” a poem rooted in a couple of different true stories of sexism and sexual violence both in and out of the poetry world is one of three, gender-politics related poems published in Unlikely Stories. I’d love to hear what you think of them.

Picture1The father figures who have moved in and out of, and sometimes back into, my life have taught me many things. One thing they didn’t teach me, however, was how to be a father. For My Son, A Kind of Prayer is a chapbook about finding a language in which to talk to my son about what it means to me to be his father, about what it can mean for him to be a man. If you can’t come to any of my June readings, or to the launch on June 26th, I hope you’ll consider buying a copy directly from the publisher. It’s only $10 and the book would make a lovely Fathers Day gift.

vhsVeils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women is a first-of-its-kind anthology, collecting several hundred poems by poets in dozens of countries, each of which takes a stand against men’s violence against women. I am especially happy that the title poem from For My Son, A Kind of Prayer is in this anthology. If you live on Long Island, I hope you will consider coming to the reading on June 5th at the Nassau County Baha’i Center. If you live in Westchester, I hope you’ll consider going to the reading on June 26th at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. If you can’t make one of the readings, I hope you’ll buy a copy from Kasva Press, if not for yourself, then perhaps for someone who needs to hear what these poets have to say about resistance and healing.

Other News

a4025872578_16My son’s band, Starbat, has released their first single, “Anyway” on Bandcamp. It’s a very cool song that I hope you will give a listen to. If it moves you, I hope you’ll consider buying it. You can name your own price.

Posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Writing | Comments Off on A Launch Party, Some Other Upcoming Events, and Publication News

Aphantasia: A life without mental images

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Ampersand

Asterios-Polyp

Aphantasia: A life without mental images – BBC News

Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?

Most people can readily conjure images inside their head – known as their mind’s eye.

But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.

The BBC article includes a simple quiz to see how your ability to mentally visualize images ranks. I was in the bottom 5% – I have basically next to no mental imagery of that sort.

Honestly, before reading this article, I didn’t realize that other people DID have this sort of mental imagery. I mean, I heard other people say they were “picturing it in their mind,” but I always assumed that was a metaphor. So that’s a little bit freaky, to me.

It can go the other way, too. On Tumblr, “Rabbit Cube” wrote:

I think so visually that it took me forever to realize that other people sometimes thought in words. For the longest time I thought that inner monologues and thought balloons in comics were merely a narrative convenience, not an indication of how (some) people actually think.

I brought this up on social media, and a few people have been surprised that I don’t picture things in my mind, since I’m a cartoonist.

I can imagine things without picturing them – I can imagine the idea of someone running very hard with sweat pouring from them without having to see a picture of that in my mind. I can imagine that contained in a very narrow panel border shape that conveys tension and speed, again without actually seeing the picture of that in my mind.

To convert that into specific images I can see, I generally need to actually sketch the picture out. (Although the sketch might not be anything more than a stick figure). And sometimes, when I actually sketch an idea so I can see it visually, it’ll turn out that it doesn’t work.

Thanks to Mandolin for the link.

[Illustration: Excerpt from Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli.]

Posted in Mind-blowing Miscellania and other Neat Stuff | 24 Comments

Friday read! “The Traditional” by Maria Dahvana Headley

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Mandolin

I’m a big fan of science fiction that takes vivid, strange images into the future. I think, actually, I always have — and if you look at a lot of classic SF, that’s what it’s doing. That’s obvious when reading someone like Stanislaw Lem, but I think it’s still true about folks who we consider more traditional now. It’s just that some of the weird images they used have been carried on in the conversation so far now that they’ve become standard, and have lost their newness. Stories like this, and space opera by people like Yoon Ha Lee, bring a contemporary disjunctive strangeness to the genre. I look forward to seeing what happens when the next generation gets bored with it.

If you like odd surrealism and lyrical writing, Maria Dahvana Headley is worth perusing.

“The Traditional” by Maria Dahvana Headley:

The-Traditional-by-Maria-Dahvana-Headley-575x442

By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give 3your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in.

So you give him the piece of your skin just beneath your ribcage on the right side, where the floating ribs bend in. It’s a good part. Not the best. You’re like a food hoarder who pretends her larder’s empty, all the while running her finger along the dusty ledge that leads to the trick shelves that hold the jars of Caspian caviar. You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere. When they fall in love, you Shun & Break™ them. Their poor plastic hearts are Pez dispensers topped with copyright violation Mickey Mice.

Your boy’s not falling for this shit. He simply refuses. He sees through your methods. You met him in a bar on the night of the first apocalypse, just prior, and both of you somehow lived through the night.

He clocked you from moment one, when you bought him a drink and brought it to him, fresh lipstick on your mouth, altering your walk to cause him pain. He drank it. He then took the cherry out of yours and drank your drink too, looking at you the whole time like he was a prime transgressor who was going to rock your world until it broke.

“You gonna try to make me love you now?” he asked. “That your thing?”

“Brother,” you said, taken aback by the way he’d just needlessly whacked the rules of flirtation, “I don’t even know you exist.”

Read here.

Posted in Recommended Reading | 1 Comment

Five days left on the Butts Fundrasier! Audio book stretch goal achieved & thanks to Jim Hines for hosting me today!

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Mandolin

Five days left in May, and five days left until the end of the “If You Were a Butt, My Butt” fundraiser.

Thanks so much to Jim Hines for hosting me at his place today! I talked a little bit about how to be an individual coping with harassment when you’re someone who’s vulnerable.

As of yesterday, we’ve reached $700, and the audio book stretch goal!! Unicorn glitter!!

Just a bit more to reach $800, and original cover art from Barry Deutsch!

Posted in Making Lemons into Jokes | Comments Off on Five days left on the Butts Fundrasier! Audio book stretch goal achieved & thanks to Jim Hines for hosting me today!

Silly Interview with Cat Rambo Who Plays in the MUD

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Mandolin

Cat Rambo

Cat Rambo is a Nebula-nominated writer, successful online writing teacher, current president of SFWA, and one of my Clarion West classmates–along with Ann Leckie, who I’m interviewing next week. I’m a great admirer of her short stories (I’ll be publishing some fan art of a few of them in a bit), like this one and this one. Her first novel came out this year, too, in the lovely and well-developed world of Tabat (I have a draft of the sequel in my inbox, and I can’t wait!) Also, she’s tons of fun to hang out with, and everyone should do so, but hopefully not all at once.00

1. Although you write stories in other venues, you have at least two peristent worlds. One is Tabat where your novel takes place. Can you talk about the world and how it came to be?

Tabat started with a game concept. A friend was working on a MUD (a text-based multi-player game) where each administrator would create their own city, and I decided to do a seaport. One of the cool things about the game engine was that you could add tags onto room, so there were bits of description that only appeared under certain conditions, including things like time of day, season, moon phase, tide, and so forth, including things like if the player was carrying a specific object or had particular spells on them.

I went nuts with it. I built a city where you smelled fish when the tide was high and the wind was coming from the south, and where the tiles of the great Moonway shifted in color depending on whether the moon was full or lean. In the spring there was the smell of particular flowers when you descended the stairways leading from one terrace to another, and in the fall, storms sweeping in from the south-east brought the smell of rotting reeds from the marshes bordering the city on one side.

Alas, much of my work was lost in a server accident, and after that discouragement and the falling away of the other administrators, Tabat never got to see actual players.

Later, I tried to recreate it in another MUD. I had been working with Armageddon MUD, which had a period each Saturday where the game was inaccessible to players while the staff performed maintenance and additions. We planned to have a space available only on Saturdays, a mini-mud that would be a single city. However, we ended up doing away with the Saturday downtimes, and so this project also never saw light. (Armageddon still exists; enter at your own peril.)

So when I started writing fantasy stories, it was a logical place to set some. I knew it well, and it’s gotten even further fleshed out in my head over the decade I’ve been working with fiction in it. Writing a fantasy quartet in it has been fun, but the next volume, Exiles of Tabat, actually moves the reader outside the city, accompanying Bella and Teo.

2. Likewise, you have a space station (Twicefar, right?) where you’ve set a lot of stories. (I can link to some here.) How did that develop?

Twicefar grew out of a single story that I wrote while at Clarion West, Amid the Words of War, which is set in a brothel named The Little Teacup of the Soul aboard the station.

As characters emerged in one story, I ended up exploring them further in others. One of my favorites is “Kallakak’s Cousins,” which appeared in Asimov’s. The universe around that far-future setting has hosted some stories as well, such as TimeSnip, Angry Rose’s Lament (another Clarion West story), and Bots d’Amor.

3. What new writing skills have you learned from teaching regularly?

I’ve gotten better things like placing the reader inside the character’s head, rather than a spot about six inches behind it or, worse yet, hovering at a distance. A lot of it are little tricks, devices I wouldn’t have thought about if I hadn’t been thinking about the topic for a particular class.

And I’ve gotten much better at knowing how to get from “this would be nifty” to finished story. I keep getting people who tell me they want to learn how to tell the ideas that will turn into stories from the ones that will peter out. And that’s not actually a skill you pick up. Instead you learn how to reliably turn something into a story.

4. You and I have both attended a lot of workshops in different venues. In my experience, diferent workshop cultures have different strengths and weaknesses. Common, useful metaphors known in sci fi workshops might not be common in graduate programs that concentrate on realism. What did you learn in graduate school that doesn’t get included in most science fiction workshops?

Hmmm. I think one of the things that gets emphasized in grad workshops as opposed to SF workshops is a sense that you’re part of the overall conversation of literature, that anything you write is influenced by and in some ways a reply to the texts that have moved you in one way or another.

I wrote “Bus Ride to Mars” as a love poem to Geoffrey Chaucer, who I adore, for example. Do you need to have read The Canterbury Tales to appreciate it? I sure hope not. But there’s great pleasure in reading a text and seeing the layers of influence at work in it, and sometimes SF workshops don’t talk about that or even denigrate it as snooty literary stuff. That’s a shame and it’s something that hampers us.

I’m very happy to see efforts to keep genre history — particularly the pieces that end up dropping away often — preserved in projects like Kris Rusch’s Women in SF website.

5. How does your women’s studies background influence your writing at this point? Does that relationship continue to develop as you keep writing?

Always. I’ve got an undergrad certificate in Gender Studies from Notre Dame, plus I taught in the Women’s Studies department at Towson for a number of years. It shapes a lot of my reading as well as many of my approaches to life and acts as a goad to keep me trying to understand and learn about my own filters and blind spots.

Sometimes it overtly influences a story, as with “All the Pretty Little Mermaids,” another Asimov’s story, which actually also has a little tribute to one of my favorite professors from Notre Dame, Charlene Avallone, in it.

6. Is there a color that you would never dye your hair?

I probably would never bleach it again. I did that one year to go purple at World Fantasy and found the process alarmingly painful.

7. As president of SFWA, can you describe your plan for fixing all problems with the Hugo Awards?

Hahahahaha. I’m too busy with the SFWA mission of doing stuff that actually helps working writers. Lots of cool things lately, and more to come this year. For recent examples, see the Speakers Bureau and the SFWA Star Project program.

8. Upcoming projects and other news: take it away.

I just finished Hearts of Tabat, the sequel to Beasts of Tabat; it’s off with beta readers right now. Finishing up the second edition of Creating an Online Presence for Writerswith lots of interesting updates. Releasing two collections this year, one of steampunk stories on June 1 and another two-sided collection from Hydra House in August. Writing lots of stories, finishing up “The Wizards of West Seattle” for Patreon supporters later this month. Working on more on-demand classes, including both class and book version of Moving from Idea to Draft. Plenty of travel this year, including the Nebulas next week, Gencon, Worldcon, Westercon, Dragoncon, Orycon, and the Chinese Nebulas in Beijing in the fall. Whew!

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Guest post at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog: “So Do I”

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Mandolin

Many thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal for hosting me at her place today to let me talk about Making Lemons into Jokes, my campaign for responding to harassment with support for LGBTQ healthcare.

Trying to think about why I’m doing the fundraiser, and what LGBTQ care and harassment mean to me, I ended up in a sort of non-linear meditative space, remembering many needle-like moments that form the sharp space where isms live.

If you read it, I hope you enjoy!

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Yay for Round Robin Dinosaurs! And new stretch goals: Greg Machlin and John Hodgman!

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Mandolin

Iiiiit’s time for an “If You Were a Butt, My Butt” update!

Butt My Butt Square

(By the way, that’s a tomato. If you’re at work, Liz Argall suggests that just in case you’re worried, you exclaim, “It’s a culinary vegetable!” whenever anyone passes by.)

Kermit arms and confetti! We reached the $600 stretch goal. Now I can continue to usher forth into the world the terrible brainchild that is the round robin short story about dinosaurs currently being written by me, Brooke Bolander, Adam-Troy Castro, John Chu, Alexandra Erin, Ann Leckie, Ken Liu, Juliette Wade, and Alyssa Wong!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand we’re halfway to $700! Mary Robinette Kowal, of the sultry tweet-reading voice, will narrate the audio book if we hit the stretch goal, and I personally think that would be hilarious so I hope it happens.

At $800, Barry Deutsch will create original cover art — but skipping over him for a moment, because I have new announcements for the later stretch goals:

At $850, Greg Machlin will contribute EVEN MORE SATIRE with an essay detailing his argument that I, personally, have DESTROYED SCIENCE FICTION. (Confession: I had help.)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if John Hodgman wrote a science fiction story? In a way, we could call that the first fiction authored by an artificial intelligence (because he’s a P.C…. thank you, I’ll see myself out). At this year’s Nebula banquet, John Hodgman proposed three science fiction concepts he felt SFWAns should get on writing.

If I can find a copy of his speech (I’m trying!) then at $900, I will be that SFWAn for one of his prompts. At $950, what the heck–I’ll just do all three.

And if we hit $1000, I will hire someone to make a professional, pretty package out of the whole thing, so that my poor subscribers are not burdened by my technologically unsophisticated hands.

I know that’s a long way to go — but what the heck, why not go for it, right? There’s nothing to lose, and only ridiculous things inspired by John Hodgman to gain.

Posted in Making Lemons into Jokes | Comments Off on Yay for Round Robin Dinosaurs! And new stretch goals: Greg Machlin and John Hodgman!