Rosemary Kirstein

Aside from the actual Scintillation events, it was nice to be in Montreal.   I’d only been there once before, as a teenager, when the family trekked up to see Expo 67.  Alas, we did not stay for long, as the trip was cut short by one family member who decided not to have good time.  (Hint: that person was not me, nor my sister, nor my mother, and there were only four people in our family.)   We left after not seeing very much at all.

I do recall, however, that one did not need a passport to visit Canada in those days.  I driver’s license would suffice.

This time I spent a lot of pre-trip angst worrying that I’d forget my passport and get turned back at the border!  I put the word PASSPORT! in various locations in my to-do lists, notes and bulletin board.  Just in case.

I had not realized that Quebec was so flat between the border and Montreal.   It was quite flat, for many miles, and very agricultural.

I got all excited when we crossed the St. Lawrence Seaway.  I don’t know why, but ever since reading about it in my Geography book as a kid,  it just seemed to me a very cool thing.  And it was!  Except that the bridge we were using (the Champlain Bridge) was under repair and squeezed down to two lanes.  Meanwhile, what looked like a brand-new bridge was being constructed right next the the one we were on, and it looked like it was going to be absolutely gorgeous: a graceful, modern design.   With plenty of lanes.

Actually, much of Montreal seemed to be undergoing repair — at least the parts that we were driving in.  A lot of stop and go, and we did not complain, as most cities have some of that going on.  New York, for example.  Plenty of repairs.  But it was Sabine who noticed the key difference.

Nobody was honking their horns.  Nobody was running the red-lights, or creeping into the intersections.  No causing gridlock.  And when the traffic cops gave a directing wave, everybody did what they were asked to do.

Whoah, we said.  Canada.

The hotel was very nice (if hard to figure out how to enter), right adjacent to Montreal’s Chinatown.  Loved the koi pond in the lobby, with the stone paths criss-crossing it.

And I took a little time out to wander the area (both alone and with Sabine),  and got some  good exercise and interesting sightseeing.

There seems to be a lot of public art…

This pole was QUITE tall.

Credit where credit is due.

A mural in Chinatown.

And then there was this:

Right to left.

These ladies were up on the third floor of a building — apparently just a random building, with nothing special in it other than old offices and a ground-floor shop of some sort.  They are left over, I assume, from a time when the building was much more important, and when buildings in general were likely to feature Important Patriotic Messages!  Embodied as women.  Carrying meaningful symbols.

I often make a point of looking for  odd architectural embellishments on old buildings, especially statuary.   And when they represent the apotheoses of some presumed elevated principle of a bygone era, even better.

These gals delighted me.  And confused me…

We see here, from right to left:

A Native North American, because hey, Canada. Let’s include the people who were here first!

Next, there’s… well, she doesn’t look very Asian, but that’s Buddha in a lotus position on her shield so…  this was right adjacent to Chinatown, so one can see the connection they’re going for, right?

Then, well: white lady with a good ol’ British lion, hurrah!

But then, on the far left:

Why here?

That’s a stereotype of a pharaoh-style head-dress.  And hieroglyphic-style figures on the shield…

So…  why Egyptians?  Why on the front of a building?  In Montreal?

What’s the message?  I’m baffled!

Can anyone explain this?  Because I just can’t decode this one.

Also: I’d like to give a shout-out to author Su Sokol and her partner Glenn Rubenstein, who made it possible for Sabine and me to not miss the Dead Dog party on Sunday night, when we would have otherwise been driving home.  Su and Glenn let us stay in their guestroom, with zero forewarning, and provided interesting conversation as well!  And breakfast the next day.   It was really kind and generous of them.

On the way home, we stopped off at Lake Champlain, which was lovely, even in the rain.

For some reason, people build cairns along the shore.  I don’t know why.

There were two other panels that I participated in, both well worth the time.

One was on Writing a Series, with Ruthanna Emrys, Sherwood Smith, Debra Doyle (with her oft-times collaborator Jim MacDonald commenting from the audience), and Fran Wilde.  Many issues were covered, including: planned series vs. accidental series ;   secondary characters who end up getting their own story;  famous series and what makes them good, bad or indifferent;  series where the milieu is the integrating element, with multiple simultaneous series weaving in and out.

In that last category, the prime example is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.  There are so many threads going on in that world: the witches; the wizards of Unseen University; Sam Vimes and the Night Watch; Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men; Moist von Lipvig, the reformed con artist who keeps getting dumped into important bureaucratic positions –  what am I leaving out? Because there’s more.  We took a little time reminding ourselves about how wonderful those books are.  They aren’t just charming and humorous; they include some true and deep observations about the human condition, and it’s so clear how much Pratchett just loved his characters.  And he didn’t just love them himself; he had a level of skill that allowed him to bring us right into the story, and love them too.  He was so wonderful. I’ll miss him forever.

Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan  series was held up as a good example of a series that follows one character across his or her life, and the panelists and audience had much to say about how they loved that series…  But alas, inexplicably, it has just never managed to grab me. I can’t explain it.  There seems to be nothing wrong at all with the books.  I simply fail to engage fully.  I’ve tried lots of times!  I suppose I ought to try each and every book, just to be sure.  Maybe there’s an entry point that will open it all up for me.  Because once I’m in, there will be a lot more available!  And I do feel a bit left out… Fortunately, Bujold does not need me.  She has plenty of people who love what she does, and more power to her, I say.

As for the authors in the panels:  Fran Wilde spoke of always having a plan, but also always going off-plan.  She needs the plan to exist, but never sticks to it.  Ruthanna spoke of having a place she wants the story to go, but not always knowing how she’s going to get there (I believe it was her who said that… I might be misremembering).  I told of how I always know where I want the story to end up, and really do like to have a planned structure to the story, which lets me tell tales that are integrated and interlocking; but the moment- to-moment writing happens at the keyboard, and I’m open to surprises, too.

The third Panel was “Where are the Books Like Pandemic?” with Alison Sinclair, Eugene Fischer and Ruthanna Emrys.   Pandemic is a board game, one that is unusual in that the players are not set against each other.  Instead, everyone cooperates toward a common goal — preventing the pandemic of the title.  I haven’t played it myself (yet; Sabine bought it), but I’m looking forward to it.  And the topic of the panel was:  What are the books that work that way?  Books that have no villain, that don’t pit person against person, but involve people working together for a solution to a problem?

Jo was supposed to be the moderator, but was called away for a family emergency.  Her role was ably covered by Emmet O’Brien, who did a bang-up job and introduced us to the idea (he was quoting someone, but I missed who it was — was it Jo’s son Sasha?) that the three types of plot can be expressed as “Man vs. Man, Man vs. Plan, and Man vs. Canal,”

And as we talked the issue through, it did become clear that most non-adversarial novels tended to fall under “Man vs. Canal.” There was a thing, a physical thing that had to be done, and we got together and did it, hurrah!  Blow up the asteroid, explore the alien world, make that starship.  I brought up Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky as in that category.  Let’s Terraform Ganymede!  But then we had to take time out to collectively grind our teeth at 1950’s Heinlein’s attitude towards women, and his assumption that a Real Man knows how to do All the Things,

I made sure to bring up what I consider a prime example of a cooperative novel that is not  in the (Hu)man vs. physical thing category:

Geary Gravel’s novel has no villain, and no big physical survival challenge for the characters to solve.  Instead, it’s a group of people gathered together to address an idea, an assumption held by a civilization.  It almost functions, in some ways, as the intellectual equivalent of a classic heist movie: individuals are selected according to the particular skill they each posses, and the organizer has to convince them to undertake this great cooperative task.

And… I’ve stayed up way too late again.  But that does cover the official parts of my visit to Montreal.

Next up: The unofficial parts.

I really didn’t quite know what to expect from a panel all about my books.

Jo did contact me first, to make sure I was okay with the whole idea.   And after I was done being gobsmacked, I shifted over to chuffed, and naturally gave my approval for the whole concept!  What’s not to like, right?

Then, at some point, I went into a sort of “Wait, what?” mode.   Was that really going to happen? 

And I remained in something like a state intellectual limbo.   Because, how would that even work?  Could it even work?  How was I going to react, on stage, with a whole panel full of people discussing my work?  Could I predict my own reaction?  Should I even try?  Was I likely to pass out cold from the sheer unbelievablity of the situation?  If so, should I bring, like, a pillow to fall down on?  You know, just in case?

Well.

I eventually reached a stable point, propped up by the facts that the panel was thought up by Jo, who I know likes my books; and included Alison Sinclair, who I know likes my books; and Cenk Cokce, who I know likes my books; and while I’d never met Liza Furr, chances were pretty strong that she was on the panel because she liked my books.  And the audience was probably there because they liked my books.  These people were not likely to be there to tear me down…

On the other hand, that did not change the sense of unreality.   This was something from the Daydream Zone.

I decided to just roll with it.  Plus: it was one panel that I did not have to prepare for beforehand.  No research required.

And how did it turn out?

Here’s the thing.

There’s one thing that a writer — or any artist, for that matter — wants more than anything.  And that is to be understood.

To know that you have reached someone, and that they have seen what you’ve done, and known what it means.  It’s a sort of doubled success: you know, from the reader understanding, that you’ve managed to communicate well and clearly; and you see, by the reader understanding, that the people you hoped existed actually are out there.  It’s encouraging and uplifting from two directions at once.

Possibly I’m speaking for myself here — but really, what artist doesn’t want that?

Fame and fortune?  Sure, it would be great.   But without that understanding, it would be pretty empty.

At that panel, I had a whole room of people who understood, and who also told me that I understood them.   They showed that they are the people for whom I wrote those books.

And when they brought up particular moments in the stories that they especially liked — it was always for the  very reasons that I’d put those moments in there.

One woman in the audience told of how glad she was about Lorren and Eamer in The Language of Power, because it’s rare that you see in fiction any depiction of people who are elderly but still so very much in love; and that’s exactly why I’d put them there.  Because people do sometimes stay in  love forever, getting old doesn’t mean it’s over.   And then her saying that she loved the closing lines of that scene — and them someone else actually quoted them to her.

And (I think it was) Alison bringing up the fact that it’s  good to see books where the central  relationship is a friendship and not a romance; and I was so glad to hear that, because that’s exactly what I wanted to get across: that friendship is a deep and wonderful relationship, and it just isn’t recognized enough in literature.

And of course, there was talk about the original turnaround in the first book — And I’m always interested in hearing from readers about at what point they “got it.”  Because that point is not the same for everyone, and the difference is  not at all linked with how intelligent you are.  It has to more to do with your expectations, your preferences, and even your hopes.

And another thing I noticed: how very kind and careful everyone was in skirting around possible spoilers for readers who haven’t gone through the whole four books.  That was so generous of people toward future readers.   In fact, the only slightly negative reaction I got was when I accidentally dropped  a spoiler for The Outskirter’s Secret.   Some gentle warning rumbles from the crowd… it was actually very gratifying that they would care so much!

I was… well, I was  overwhelmed, delighted, encouraged, heartened.

So, my thanks to Jo, to the panel, and to the audience… and all of you reading this.  Because I’m pretty sure you’re here for the same reasons that people showed up for that panel.

I’m glad you’re out there.

Tomorrow: more about the rest of the convention.

Way back on Monday of last week, I got back from Scintillation, the brand-new small convention in Montreal that Jo Walton started up via Kickstarter.

For years Jo had been throwing a  big yearly event called the Farthing party (after one of her novels), and this year she wanted to convert it into a more formal convention.  Using Kickstarter to fund it, she managed to get enough interest to keep it going for the next couple of years.

So: success!

The event itself was delightful.  After going to so many humongous conventions across the years, it was nice to attend one that wasn’t overwhelming, but was still interesting at every turn.  It was a great bunch of guests (not least of whom was the amazing Jo herself), plenty of opportunity to both hold forth on a panel and chat informally, a pleasant hotel, and a brand-new city to visit.

I  did not catch any of Ada Palmer’s panels, but I did get to hear her and her Sassafras companions perform on Saturday night.  They did some Renaissance tunes and selections from Ada’s Norse mythology song cycle, “Sundown”.   Jo added to the entertainment by reading a selection of her poems.  The woman seems to just generate sonnets spontaneously — I don’t know how she does it.  Makes me a bit jealous, actually.

I had some lovely conversations with friends old and new, like Ruthanna Emrys and her wife Sarah. I caught Ruthanna’s reading, where she read first from  Winter Tide, Book 1 of the Innsmouth Legacy; and then a bit from her upcoming novel, The Fifth Power (link has slight spoilers!), which was really quite a treat.  I’ve already fallen in love with the characters — protagonist and spouse had to pause to change the baby’s diapers while investigating an alien fortress.  My kinda people.

Jo read from an upcoming work, as well, one scheduled for release next year:

Without giving too much away, it’s about Savanarola, who was apparently not the S.O.B. you thought he was.  The part Jo read made me smile, and at a couple of points laugh out loud.   Really looking forward to this one.

Sabine and I also had a nice dinner and conversation with Alison Sinclair, who I met a couple of years ago at and before Worldcon in Kansas City.

You really should check out Alison’s Darkborn Trilogy; she’s used such an interesting setup for her world and society.   I’ve only read the first one, and really enjoyed it — but Sabine’s read them all and can’t say enough good things about them!

Another discovery of Sabine’s:

I bumped into David at the giveaway table — literally, as I physically bumped into him, and also knocked all his books off the table as I was setting up mine, causing him to view me askance as I dithered through an apology.  But Sabine glommed onto his first book, and fell in love instantly.   She got all the sequels, and is now full of enthusiasm about how delightful they are.  High adventure!  Plucky heroine!  You  should take her advice and check them out. I plan on doing exactly that myself.

As for me: I had three panels and a reading.   I read the bits that I previously read at Readercon, so if you went to that, you didn’t miss anything new…

But the panels were an interesting selection –  and I’ll say more about them tomorrow (running out of time today)…  Let’s just say that the words “chuffed” and “gobsmacked” both apply.

Chuffed.

Actually, I got back from the writing retreat with Laurie J. Marks over a week ago.  I just neglected to blog about it… this being due to my going right back into hunker-down-and-flail mode on Book 5, and basically ignoring all else.

But it was, in fact, a lovely time!  I don’t often  get to hang with Laurie for extended periods, so that alone made it a treat.

There were some negatives, however, one being: Far too short!  It was Friday through Monday, which sounds like four days, but when you really work it out comes down to two days.  One spends the first day getting there, setting up and settling in, and the last day packing up, moving out, and getting home.

But still, well worth the trip.  I’d show you some photos, but alas: my phone’s ancient battery refused to hold a charge, and shut the phone down any time I tried to do anything. I managed to take exactly one photo.

Fortunately, Laurie’s phone was just fine, and I’ve shamelessly nabbed her photos from Facebook:

Very very small.

The Hermit’s Hut, as they call it, is not accessible by any vehicles except back-country 4×4’s, which neither of us had.  Luckily, a member of the staff was on hand to shuttle our gear up the hill; but on the way back down, we were on our own.

All this. Down a hill. Except where the road went up for a bit. Then it was up a hill.

This was a fairly heavy load, but at least we were going down (mostly).  What was more difficult was hauling water up the hill, which we fortunately only needed to do once.

The hut was not really primitive as such; it would more accurately be called basic.

Interior, seen from the couch where Laurie mostly worked.

It was comfortable, and had both a screened porch and a screened pavilion, which I immediately claimed as my workspace!  Because I so love to be outdoors when I work.

My one and only successful photo.

The woods around were crisscrossed with multiple trails, both long and short, both climbing and ambling.  They invited thoughtful wandering, and in one case exhausting bushwhacking when we lost track of the trail markers.  It was an adventure.

I tended to be in front, as possessor of the trail map.  I was constantly running into  cobwebs and flailing at them, which at least spared Laurie the trouble!   They were replaced overnight, to be broken again the next day.

On our final day, what must have been one supremely frustrated spider constructed a massive web across the main access road as we were descending — his last chance to get us, and he made it good.

We successfully avoided becoming a meal or possibly a banquet for the entire spider-neighborhood.

Luckily I spotted it before running into it, and we sidled around.  Far too excellent a construction to break out of spite!  This thing must have been four feet wide, and was anchored right across the entire road.  You have to respect that.

But the critical question: was it a productive retreat?

Well.

I’m really tied to the keyboard.   At a keyboard, I think and it appears on the screen as if by magic.  I’m hardly aware of typing at all.

But it would be very useful for me to be able to write prose by hand, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to give it a solid, serious try.

Not very successful.   Prose written by hand just doesn’t look real to me.  I could make no good progress…

However, I’ve always been able to write analyses of the work in progress by hand, and spent some time bouncing ideas off myself, and reading the  manuscript print-out I brought along and noting what needed attention.  And then I worked on a poem; and when that stalled, on a different poem.

And then I worked on some song lyrics, which I’ve always written by hand.  And then I remember a song I wrote ages ago which I cannot stand to sing because the bridge was just awful.  The verses are gorgeous!  The melody is lovely!  The bridge is dreadful, clunky bad in pretty much every way —

Ah, but now I am much older and wiser, and I decided I could write a better bridge, one that did not actively suck all the beauty out of the song.  So, I worked on that for a bit, and discovered that I’d completely forgotten all the lyrics of the entire song except for the chorus.  I spent some time painstakingly recovering all the verses except for one line.  And that was enough to start figuring what went wrong on that bridge.

What went wrong became very quickly evident: I had tried to cram an entire novel’s worth of story into a four-line bridge.  Yeah.  That never works.

And yet, back when I was primarily trying to be a songwriter, that’s the error I made over and over — trying to put too much into one song.  I am, apparently, really a novelist.

Still, I do think I can rescue Hannah’s Song, now that I see the problem.  Songs are moments — forget the plotlines, the complications, and anything like a message.  Think awareness, now-ness, more like mindfulness meditation.

I think I can work with that.

September and October both have chunks of time devoted to non-writing events, so I’ve been trying especially hard to hunker down and get some wordage banked so that I don’t actually fall behind.

Laurie Marks and I are heading off for a brief writerly retreat this weekend; a couple of weekends later, it’s Scintillation in Montreal (a new small convention  instigated by the remarkable Jo Walton); three weeks later, a visit to pals in Newport (an immense long-weekend house party).  And after that, Thanksgiving looms.

Actually, Thanksgiving has been a traditional time for me to hunker down especially hard, basically ignoring the entire world.  Sometimes I go away to do that; this time I’ll stay put.  It’s sort of the opposite of a staycation.

Usually, when I’m writing intensively I find it very distracting to read fiction.  If I immerse myself in someone else’s imagined universe, it can be hard to get my head back into my own imagined universe.  I tend to stick to non-fiction when I’m writing, but lately I’ve been on a fiction diet for far too long and could stand it no more.  So, more or less at random, I picked up Karl Schroeder’s Lockstep, about which I knew nothing — except that I’d read his Ventus ages ago and liked it.

It turned out to be a YA — not a problem, actually, as many fine books are written for young adults, and deserve to be read by everyone (Scott Westerfeld is one of my personal favorites).  Lockstep is definitely a young-protagonist travel-through-wonders book, and it has one of the most interesting solutions I’ve seen to the social ramifications of slower-than-light interplanetary travel.

On the science side, I picked up Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Science Astray  some time ago,  but didn’t have a chance to get into it until now.

One of the interesting things about science is the way that a true theory so often turns out to be one that’s perceived as beautiful.  Hossenfelder takes the remarkable iconoclastic view that not only is this not universally true,  it’s actually doing damage to the pursuit of new breakthroughs in understanding foundational physics.

I haven’t got very far into it yet, so I can’t yet say whether she’s sold me on the idea.  But I do love seeing things turned upside-down, so I’m sure I’ll find it interesting no matter what.

On the audiobook side of things, I’m about halfway through Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, and I think that I’d do better reading it instead of listening… I might switch modes.   I’m having difficulty getting involved in the story, and I think it might be due to the fact that I read faster than I hear, and my brain gets impatient.

In other news:  One problem about writing intensively is the fact that you can end up spending whole days staring at a computer screen.  Actually, that’s a fact of modern life in general, not just a writer’s life.  We stare at our screens.  A lot.

Much has been said lately about the issue of blue light vs. more natural light, and the negative effects on sleep patterns of all this screen-time.  But a lot of it comes down to the fact that you’re basically staring directly at a source of light, for hours on end.

I used to deal with this by making MSWord, and later Scrivener, jump through some rather tedious hoops where I paint the background some dark color and the letters some other lighter color, thus reducing the light-source to the individual letters,  rather than the big fat background.  The problem there was reversing the fussing-around when I wanted to print out or email things.

But rather to my surprise, Windows 10 has a nifty feature built right in!  Yes, the operating system that we love to hate but have to have!

With one click, I can change this:

Like staring into a light bulb.

To this:

Sorta peaceful…

Have to set it up first, but once set, it’s ready to go on request.

Like this:

Go into Settings; select Ease of Access; select Color Filters.

On the Color Filters screen, click on Greyscale Inverted, and checkmark “Allow the shortcut key to toggle filter on or off.”

Once you’ve done that, forever after you only need to hit simultaneously hit CTL, the Window key, and the letter C, and you toggle between full color and reverse greyscale.

But if you prefer not to go black and white, there’s a nifty app that will cool down your screen colors, depending on how close to bedtime you are.  It’s called f.lux, and it’s a free download.

F.lux also has a “darkroom mode” buried in its menus, that will give you a black screen with red letters, even easier on the eyeballs.

Holy Moses, is that the time?  Better call it a night.  Except, it’s morning.

If you ask me politely, I will — regretfully and politely — say No.

If you just go ahead and send me your material, without even the simple courtesy of asking me before doing so, I will  also say No — but I will not bother being polite about it.

For the polite people:  I know it’s tempting, but please consider the fact that reading, evaluating, considering, and critiquing manuscripts is work.  I already have a job.  It’s writing! If I don’t do my job, it doesn’t get done.  Also, if I don’t do my job, my income suffers. Additionally, there are other aspects of my life that need time and attention. While I’m very flattered that you might regard me so highly that you’d want my input, please don’t put me in the position of disappointing you by refusing your request.  That would just make us both sad.

For the impolite people — hm.  Well, you puzzle me.  It’s hard for me to imagine how someone could just forward their stuff to a stranger without a even simple, “Hey, would you mind?” first.   But if you send me hard copy, I’ll either refuse delivery, or return it unopened, or shred it, unread; if you email it, I’ll delete it, also unread.

For a more extensive and much more entertaining treatment of the subject, check out John Scalzi’s blog post here.  While I am nowhere near as busy or successful (or well-paid!)  as Mr. Scalzi, most of  his general principles apply in my case, too.

There used to be a great book on professional etiquette for writers, but alas, it’s out of print.  Also, it’s out of date, being pre-internet and pre-email.  But if you find a copy, the ideas are certainly still applicable.

That said, back to Book 5 — which still seems to require an inordinate amount of wrestling to get it to behave…

I find it impossible to believe that you haven’t already seen the list of this year’s Hugo Award winners somewhere else… It’s all over the Internet, of course.  However, just in case this is your only contact with the world of SF/F fandom and publishing, here are the winners:

Best Novel : The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Best Novella : All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

Best Novelette: The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)

Best Short Story: Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Best Series: World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Harper Voyager / Spectrum Literary Agency)

Best Related Work: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Best Graphic Story: Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs, directed by Patty Jenkins (DC Films / Warner Brothers)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: The Good Place: “The Trolley Problem,” written by Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan, directed by Dean Holland (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television)

Best Editor, Short Form: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas

Best Editor, Long Form: Sheila E. Gilbert

Best Professional Artist: Sana Takeda

Best Semiprozine: Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Julia Rios; podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky

Best Fanzine: File 770, edited by Mike Glyer

Best Fancast: Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace

Best Fan Writer: Sarah Gailey

Best Fan Artist: Geneva Benton

And the non-Hugo Awards also presented at the ceremony:

Award for Best Young Adult Book: Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Rebecca Roanhorse

For a list that includes all the nominees, head over to the official Hugo Awards website where they also have a link to the detailed voting results.

Or you could pop over to Tor.com, where the comments stream also has some interesting info.

And as you probably also already know (but just in case you don’t) N.K. Jemisin just made history by being the first person to ever win the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row.

And here’s her acceptance speech, which made me cry:

I had planned to watch a live stream of the Hugo ceremony on Sunday, but  forgot to set an alarm.  Somewhere along about 2AM I looked up from my work and said, “Wait — did I miss it?”  And yes, I had.

On the one hand, alas; on the other (as Ms. Jemisin states most definitely, above) the way to get ahead is to work your ass off.  So, I regret nothing.  Well, I do, a bit.  But it was a good night of work, so it was worth it.

And I should get back to it.  I’m going to be at a four-day social event starting on Friday, and I need to rack up enough word-count to justify the inevitable resulting word non-count.

The Perseids are here!  My favorite annual meteor shower.   In fact, I amuse myself by pretending that it’s my personal meteor shower, falling, as it does, on the days around my birthday.

And this year it’s also the dark of the moon for those days, so we won’t have that nasty ol’ moonlight brightening up the night sky, and washing out all the meteor-trails.  Excellent!

Check out this very cool rotatable visualization of the debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle, source of the Perseid meteors.

Now, let’s just check on the weather…Hm.

Friday night: rain

Saturday night: rain

Sunday night: thunderstorms!

Monday night: more thunderstorms.

Tuesday night — well, it’s all over, but even so: thunderstorms.

Ah, but not everywhere in the country!  I could drive to…

Okay, it would be a four-hour drive for me, at the least, to reach some place with non-cloudy skies.  And then four hours back.  I don’t think I can manage that…

But you might be luckier — find yourself on the visibility maps, here.

I see, for instance, that Michigan should have a nice view on Sunday night.  I know people in Michigan.  I’ll be happy for the people in Michigan.

Of course, thanks to the 21st Century, you can watch a livestream of the sky somewhere over Colorado, on Sunday night.  I plan to do exactly that.

In other news: same old news, as I push onward, wrestling Book 5 into shape.  I’m devoting as much of August as possible to the task.  (Minus, of course, the 3-day celebration of the birthday of my pal Brian Bambrough, who is turning 80 this month.  And who, by the way, actually wrote a diet/lifestyle book, so that you could stay as fit as he is for as long as he has.)

My latest point of writerly ditheration (minor spoilers for Book 5!):

An extremely important chapter containing: much cleverly-embedded incluing about Rowan’s world; introduction of a new character, Sarah;  expansion and deepening of an existing character not seen much previously, whom I plan to make the reader love (Artos); set-up of the current situation, to be executed (one hopes!) in such a way that it naturally launches everything  else that follows, as surely as an arrow leaves the bow; and spooky foreshadowing.

At some point I realized that I should not be introducing a new character there at all –  I should be using Keridwen, the chart-mistress instead.  We were in the chart-room; she should be there. Seemed natural.  So, I changed Sarah to Keridwen.

And the chapter stopped working.

I had to change every sentence of dialog, because Keridwen is a different person from Sarah, and they do not speak alike.  And I had to change every physical movement, because how one moves reflects one’s personality.  And then I had to change what Artos said, because his relationship to Sarah is different from his relationship to Keridwen.

And then I lost the spooky foreshadowing.  Keridwen is an extremely definite person!  She has many facts at her command, and is active and practical.  Sarah has a deep well of wisdom, and moves and speaks with quiet, graceful strength.  A conversation with Keridwen would be lively and enlightening, and make you think about cool stuff.  A conversation with Sarah might point in many directions, and make you wonder about deep things.

I love both these women.

I decided that it was Sarah in the chart-room, after all,  and not Keridwen.  Keridwen was busy doing something else.  Possibly chopping wood.  Keridwen is sixty-one years old, and Sarah is.. Hm… Seventy-four?  About.  If wood needed chopping in the dead of winter, it would probably be Keridwen doing it, not Sarah.

Problem solved!  Okay, problem created, and then solved.  By going back to the original version.

Now, the question for the class is: Why was this not a waste of time and effort?   Because, you know — it wasn’t.

By going through all this testing and analysis, I :

• clarified the characters in my mind
• clearly identified their interrelationships,
• understood better why the spooky foreshadowing mattered, and how not to overdo it
• established Sarah now, when there’s space, instead of later, where there’s none
• learned a few extra things about Artos, which will serve me later
• gained an extra level of insight in how words on the page transform into characterization, mood, plot, theme, milieu

All of this will help not only this book, but subsequent books in the series, any parallel books — and probably everything I ever write from now on.

Not a waste of time. Worth every moment.

In other news:

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Brian Jay Jones’ biography of Jim Henson.

It was simply amazing.  What an incredible life of creative genius he led.  What a privilege it was to have him on Earth with us for a while.

Jones did a fantastic job with this book.  And he had access to all the information: the people Henson knew, all of his projects, even his personal journals and letters.  It’s revealing, and stunning, and inspiring, and heartbreaking.

And I can’t say enough good things about the narrator, Kirby Heybourne.  He has a very graceful touch with the voices.  And he did do the voices: when Henson is quoted, he sounds like Henson; when Kermit is quoted, he sounds like Kermit. When no one is quoted, Heybourne’s own voice is natural and engaging.

Only problem with an audiobook: no photographs.

(Edited to correct a mental blip that made me write “Sharon” instead of “Sarah.”  It’s Sarah.)

Well, the kerfuffle surrounding Readercon’s disinvitation sweep (AKA “geezer purge”) — as, um, interesting as it was — has now paled in comparison to the new kerfuffle surrounding WorldCon’s programming.

The interesting thing about them is that they seem to be flip-sides of the same general issue:

The geezer purge, while claiming to be about making room for more diversity, had the effect of targeting a specific group (elders), and thus apparently actively discriminating — going against Readercon’s explicit, written policy of inclusion.

While the Worldcon newbie snub favored the established writers over unknowns even when those new writers are among this year’s Hugo finalists.  Yeah, that’s just nuts.  They are Hugo finalists!  People will want to see them, don’t ya think?  And how exactly do you think people become established writers?

One seemed to say: You’re old, get out of the way!  The other seemed to say: Never heard of you, don’t waste our time.

Well.  Mistakes were made, as the saying goes.

Readercon apologized for the disinvitation letter, calling it “not well written.”  Actually, having read it, it seemed to me to be very carefully written.  If the problem was simply that there wasn’t enough room for all the people who wanted to be on the program, a simple “Sorry, can’t fit you on the program this year, try again next year,” would have done it.  But that’s not what was said.  It was, “We’re deeply grateful for your years of participation….But that longevity is exactly why we need you to step aside…”

Personally, I never assume that any convention is going to automatically include me just because I was there last year.  Or because I’ve attended for many years.

The more I look at it, the more that it seems like they went so far overboard in apologizing that the justifications kept piling up, and the fact that the disinvitation was not permanent was never mentioned.  It really did look like “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Did they mean it that way?  Well, once people complained about it, they assured us that they did not.

I did attend Readercon, and when I looked around, the convention seemed pretty much like any Readercon of past years — except that a number of specific people I normally see there were absent.

Barry B. Longyear was gone — But the even older Samuel R. Delaney was present.

Jeff Carver and Craig Shaw Gardener were gone — But James Patrick Kelly, of a similar vintage, was present.

Ann Zeddies and Shariann Lewitt were missing — but I was there, about the same age, same gender, and same level of experience.

(During the convention, I ran into a longtime participant who had been disinvited — and who showed up, not as participant or even attendee.  Just sort of strolled in, and chatted to a few people, including me.  Hey, it’s a hotel!  The convention didn’t own the building.   But this person was rather bitter, and made some statements that I could not take at face value without further discussion and/or evidence, to the effect that it was in fact a targeted purge, and that Those in Power had explicitly informed this person of his unsuitability.  But that was merely a brief exchange.  If true, I need more info, from a reliable source willing to be quoted by name.)

And actually, it was quite an enjoyable convention, for me.  I had a good showing for my Kaffeeklatsch, a good showing for my reading (which was lots of fun), and um, exactly two people for my autographing.  Hey, it happens.  Hung out with some nice people, including Ruthanna Emrys, who has a new book out:

It’s the second volume of her Innsmouth Legacy series, which poses the question: what if all that stuff H.P. Lovecraft wrote about was true — and, oh, by the way, not a bad thing at all?  If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you should check these out.

Now, as for the Worldcon newbie-snub kerfuffle: once called on it, they did an interesting thing.  They acknowledged their error, withdrew the offending preliminary program listing, apologized, and set about fixing the problem immediately.  

And please note in the above link, all the well-established SF/F professionals who volunteered to give up their places on the program, specifically to make room for the newer writers.

The kerfuffle also included — was in fact initially sparked by — the misgendering of Hugo finalist Bogi Takács,  drawing an apology from Worldcon Chair Kevin Roche.  I do hope that one gets sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction.  Alternative gender identification is newly publicly acknowledged in modern society, and one of the very interesting things about living in the 21st century.