My Readercon schedule

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Most SF writers in my area will be spending this weekend in Burlington, MA at Readercon, everyone's favorite literary SF convention.  If you live around Boston and have never tried it, you should, at least for a day.

This is my schedule, if you want to track me down.

Thursday July 12

8:00 PM    ME    Managing Motivation to Write. Alexander Jablokov, Steve Kelner (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Matthew Kressel, Ben Loory. Kipling (an SF writer himself) wrote: "There are nine-and-sixty ways/of composing tribal lays/and every single one of them is right!" Science fiction writers should know this better than most, yet most people don't realize just how different the creative process is for different writers. Join a panel of writers discussing how they keep themselves going, the underlying reasons for why a given tactic works for them, and how it might (or might not) work for others.
 
9:00 PM    G    Why Is Realistic Fiction Useful?. Daniel Abraham, Nathan Ballingrud, Grant C. Carrington, Liz Gorinsky (leader), Alexander Jablokov. In a 2011 blog post, Harry Connolly wrote, "If I want to understand the horrors of war, the pain of divorce, the disappointment of seeing a business fail, I don’t need to read fiction. There’s non-fiction on that very subject.... So forget about justifying the utility of fantasy. How do people justify the utility of realism?" Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried distinguishes between "story truth" and "happening truth"; O'Brien feels that fictionalizing some aspects of his own experience makes them more universal. On the other hand, reality TV, Photoshop, and CGI have proven how blurry the line between fiction and non-fiction can be. How do we tease out these distinctions, and what is realistic fiction's place in the literary landscape?

Friday July 13

2:00 PM    G    Evaluating Political Fiction. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alexander Jablokov (leader), Robert Killheffer, Vincent McCaffrey, Anil Menon, Ruth Sternglantz. This panel examines the intersections among story as political expression, story as entertainment, and story as art and craft. When an author takes a clear political stance within a work of fiction, how does a reader's perception of that stance--and the extent to which we find it compelling or intriguing--affect our sense of whether the work is entertaining or well-crafted? Given the diversity of opinions among readers and the ways that judgments of quality are necessarily influenced by culture and personal experience, should readers aim to achieve consensus about a political work's merits and meanings, or do we need to embrace a more pluralistic understanding of how literary works are both experienced and evaluated? What are best practices for critics, academics, and other professional readers as we navigate these tricky waters?
6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? . Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader). Building on last year's talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.
8:00 PM    NH    Group Reading: Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop. Heather Albano, James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer, Sarah Smith. The members of the oldest extant professional writers group in New England give brief readings from their works.

Saturday July 14

3:00 PM    G    If It Doesn't Sell, What's the Point?. Jeffrey A. Carver, Bernard Dukas, Andrea Hairston, Alexander Jablokov, Barry B. Longyear, Nick Mamatas (leader). Fiction writing is usually considered an art but frequently judged in terms of commerciality rather than artistic achievement. Publishers want to know whether books are selling, and writers want an audience. These days, when rough economic times have hit writers particularly hard, "Why continue?" has become an important and frequently asked question. Are there reasons writers should continue even if their work isn't selling as well as they, or their publishers, would like? Are there times they should stop? Why do we write, anyway? The panelists will consider how writers can make these decisions, and what options are available in the current economic climate.

My first audio book: Nimbus

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Quite some time ago, a gentleman by the name of Colby Elliott wrote me, said he was a fan of my novel Nimbus, and asked if he could an audio version of it. How could I say no?

Colby worked hard on the book, slowed down at almost every step by my unresponsiveness, my confusion, and my general ability to make simple things complicated. He never lost his humor or his determination, and now, at long last, we have an audio version, voiced entirely by Colby.

Nimbus is my brain surgeon/jazz musician future noir, and has always seemed like it could use some more attention. The audio version is surprisingly fun, because of Colby's ability to maneuver around the complex sentence I really liked writing in those days. If you are going on a long car trip or something, this is what you should take, particularly if you are headed in the direction of Chicago. Check it out.

Nimbus audio version, from Audible

 

We are our symptoms

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As I've mentioned, I had a retinal detachment, and have been in for three successive eye operations, none of them pleasant. Presumably, this did more damage than just one operation, but the results will not be clear for months.

Like most people, I immediately search online for the experiences of other people suffering the same physical disorder, since that is where you discover that the unique is actually fairly common.

Except, it seems, in my case.  In various iterations of my freedom-seeking retina, I have seen a field of translucent green, looking somewhat like beach glass formed from an old Fanta bottle. Light comes through it, and some vague shapes. It has a solid look to it.

But I find that decent narratives of retinal detachment are not that common, and no one mentions seeing blobs of vivid green between them and the world they are trying to see. In fact, when I searched on it last week, I did find a reference--this blog, a few days earlier.

My surgeon, Dr. B, is blithely dismissive of my concerns. It's all normal, he indicates. We've been partners in this struggle since early April, and I have become an affront to his surgical amour propre, as well as, I suspect, a financial drain on his partnership--the insurance company pays a global for the surgery and followups. As a result, every visit from me no represents unpaid labor. I doubt he consciously recognizes that his lack of joy in seeing me is at least partly based on a financial calculation, but I certainly feel it is there.

I have no interest in having weird, off-brand symptoms. I want a normal recovery, no more than a sigma or two away from the mean, because I fear that every odd symptom is a sign that I will need further surgery, or that my eye will never recover any function.

That's enough about my intimate physical decline for a while. I wish I had had some spiritual awakening, or some epiphany about the rest of my life during my enforced face-down inactivity, but no. That is not something that seems to come to me. I did some plotting and thinking, but no more than I would do on a decent evening at the Diesel.  Which is where I think I will head now, to start getting caught up on my writing projects.

My annual science fictional final exam: signing up for panels at Readercon

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Readercon is my favorite local science fiction convention. It has a considerably more academic/litcrit slant than most cons, and focuses entirely on written fiction.

That's all fine.  But it does have the longest, and most intimidating panel sign up I have ever encountered.  It takes me more than an hour to fill out.  Just reading and comprehending the dense paragraph describing each panel takes me back to the SAT.  I always feel a bit of relief when I get to the end and don't see lines of ovals to fill in with a #2 pencil.

Plus, it has you rate each potential panel A+, A, or B, but does not limit the number of A+ ratings you can give. The obvious strategy, if you want to be on a panel, is to rate them all A+, and then beg out of whatever does not appeal. Every year I try to be honest, and every year I end up on one panel about "Semicolons and Other Narrative Partial Stops" held at 10 am on Sunday. No more!

On the other hand, if I don't even understand the panel description, it seems bad form to get all enthusiastic about it.  There are a lot of people at Readercon who probably do understand it, and can say insightful things about it.

I'm a third of the way through sing up and am exhausted.  I'll have to get back to it some other time.

 

If I'm not timing, I'm not working

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I've discovered something about myself--something I could have done with discovering a few decades ago.

I work best when I use a timer.  I have become a devotee of Pomodoro intervals: twenty five minutes of work, followed by five (OK, usually a bit more) minutes of break. Pomodoro Technique has a lot more to it, but I'm not really that strict about it.

But when I time, I work. That doesn't mean I literally don't work when I'm not timing, but the odds definitely go way down. I often delude myself that I'm working only to conclude, on mature consideration, that I'm not. Because the damn timer's not on.

Those twenty-five minute intervals are perfect for me. I work intensely, but that is about the time my mind would start to wander. So I get an official break. I generally follow the rule of sets of four (two hours), with a longer relax in between. If I do it strictly, without cheating, I get an immense amount done.

I often fail. But more and more often, I succeed. My mind is astonishingly disordered. I need external rules to get anything done. I'm fortunate I can dress myself. I am a triumph of technique over essential personality.

But now I am off the timer and should finish. The more strictly I obey the breaks, as well as the work periods, the more I get done. So now I'm done!

Ow, my eye! Part I

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Retinal detachment is both weird and depressing. For me, it was a spontaneous failure of a part of my body I normally did not worry about. One day my retina was in place, sending signals to my brain, the next it had peeled off, and all I saw was a green, translucent blot. No impact, no external cause.

As soon as my optometrist saw it, she sent me to an ophthalmologist. A charming young guy from his office came and picked me up and drove me up to Andover, about a forty five minute drive from where I live. After a couple of hours of sitting around, the ophthalmologist popped in and injected gas into my eyeball to try to float the retina up in preparation for surgery, to take place two days later. This was less fun than it sounds.

Then the doctor disappeared. I had to sign a long series of sheets detailing the possible procedures he would perform on me in a couple of days.  I had never heard of any of them: scleral buckle, vitrectomy, etc. They might remove my lens, my iris, inject oil into my eye. It all depended on how things looked when he got in there. The sheets I was signing said the doctor had carefully explained things to me, and I was aware of all the risks and possible negative consequences.

Of course, he had done no such thing. To the doc, I was a bunch of supporting tissue dangling from a surgical site. I might have feelings about what was going to be done to me, but I certainly wasn't supposed to have opinions. It was just like clicking Accept on a software contract. What other choice did I have? To give him a little credit, I was an emergency addition to what was clearly a busy schedule, some of it presumably with other people who had serious conditions.

This was a surgery that shouldn't wait. The retina is an impossibly thin and delicate piece of tissue, thinner than plastic wrap. Waiting around could damage it beyond repair. Given a lot of advance planning, I might have reviewed a series of eye surgeons in the Boston area, considered the options for treatment, and chosen someone. But, again, time was tight, and a quick search showed that this guy had the characteristic of most use in cases like this: he does a huge number of these operations, on a daily basis. With any delicate surgery, you want a specialist, who does only that type of surgery, and has done it a lot, so that by the time he gets to you, every kink has been ironed out, every oddball condition seen, and every movement deeply ingrained into his nervous system.

And, of course, I wouldn't trade that amount of experience for a better bedside manner. I presume it's possible to get both.

This is where physician ratings by "consumers" become kind of meaningless. I could rate how well he explained things to me, but how was I to rate how well he did at the thing that mattered, the operation itself? I know how I am recovering (slowly, but steadily). If something goes wrong, was it because of something he did, or because things go wrong no matter how well he did? Could I be recovering faster? When my vision settles, will it be as good as it could have been? Really no way for me to tell. He can be rated only statistically, and I have no way of doing that.

So they sent me home, to sit up and bed and fret. The bubble floated the retina up a bit--there was a bit of translucency in the green, and it got a bit smaller. But not enough to be worth anything. A day later, early in the morning, Mary drove me up to a surgical center in New Hampshire

 

Post-surgery entertainment: Frailty

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I like movies but watch too few of them. Somehow I can't sit still for long enough, or have something else to do. I have to make resolutions to watch them. It's really quite silly.

But after my eye surgery, I was confined to bed, and still am forbidden much movement, so have watched more movies than usual, and even a whole season of Deadwood, in a truly decadent binge.

As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like is movies that are pretty good but not great, that let me rewrite them as they are going on, and serve as inspirations for new plots. Last week I watched a movie that was perfect for that: Frailty, which is about religious revelation and murder in an East Texas town. I liked it, but thought it was only half good, in that it carefully built up a situation that it then blew. Most crucially, it dumped a key character, one with genuine strength of soul that we had every reason to respect, in the toilet, in an ill-advised attempt at a creepy twist ending. And the ending was genuinely creepy. I just thought it was the wrong one.

On a rainy night, a young man, Fenton Meiks (played by Matthew McConaughey) shows up at FBI headquarters to tell FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (the impressive Powers Boothe--also in Deadwood, as it happens) that he knows who a notorious serial killer, the Hand of God, is. And he knows this because of what happened to him in his childhood.

Now, as a movie viewer, you know that, in any kind of movie worth watching, the FBI agent is not just a neutral listener to a confession. He is receiving this confessional because he, in some twisted way, is related to the things being confessed.

And so it is. I won't tell you what the connection is, except that it turns out to be lame and pointless and totally contrived. That revelation comes pretty late in the movie, though, so most of it can be enjoyed before it gets to that point.

As Doyle and Meiks drive out to check out where the bodies are buried (oddly enough, though the Hand of God is billed as a serial killer, only the first of his bodies have been found, an oddity that gets explained later), Meiks tells the story of his childhood. He starts with some idyllic childhood scenes of him and his younger brother Adam, an idyll shattered one morning when their widowed Dad comes into their bedroom and tells them that he has been visited by an angel. This angel has told him that the world is inhabited by a number of demons, looking exactly like normal human beings, that it is his mission to eliminate. And his sons need to help him.

The steady progress of this mission is the main motive spring of the film. Dad finds the instruments of his vengeance (gloves, a pipe, an ax). And he starts kidnapping people, murdering them, and burying them in a rose garden near his house. Young Adam is down with this. Fenton, a bit older, resists, and is savagely punished for his resistance. Things get worse and worse.

Is it crazy to do something crazy if an angel with a flaming sword appears on the underside of the oil pan of a sedan you are repairing and tells you to do it? Well...yes, of course it is. Even Moses asked for some indication of God's bona fides before doing his bidding, but Dad is a sad and lonely widower with two sons that are probably more trouble to raise than it seems, and is happy to have a mission.

I write novels, not screenplays. Novels can handle a lot of narrative complexity. Movies can't.  You can only do so much in 100 minutes. So the movie had no way to tie Agent Doyle to the past story, detail the actual actions of the Hand of God killer, and show the two boys in later life.  But the movie at least toys with an obvious notion for a science fiction writer: what if the demons are real? What if Dad has a real mission, no matter how deranged he seems?

When I was a kid I loved a show called The Invaders. It was about an architect who sees an alien spacecraft one night, and spends the rest of the series trying to persuade people that there are aliens invading the Earth. No one ever believes him. The aliens are always out to get him, and he often has to kill them. When they die they vaporize.

Already rewriting things in my head at age 10 or so, I waited, every week, for him to screw up and kill someone who doesn't vaporize, but just lies there and bleeds on the pavement. How can he possibly maintain a 1000 batting average? What does he do when he realizes he has killed a human being, not an evil alien? What new secrets get revealed by that, and what does he do? Needless to say, it never happened, but I thought something of the same thing watching Dad kidnap people and haul them home to be eliminated. Even if some of them are demons, is he always right?

Plus, the point of killing them off is unexplained. There is no hint of a coming apocalypse, a final struggle, whatever. It's just a form of extreme police enforcement, religious vigilantism. But that Dad is unreflective is totally fine. Bill Paxton, who also directed, does a great job with the role, holy vengeance as everyman. He's a good and loyal employee at the garage where he works, and he's a good and loyal instrument of the Lord.

But Fenton's childhood resisting the demands of his holy serial killer Dad...connected to a more interesting Now story, one where the consequences of that time really come home to roost, and some unexpected truths are revealed...some potential there.

Secular skeptic that I am, I'm probably not the right person to write it. Because I see refusal to play ball as a valid response to an insane request, even from a supernatural being. It's like the ending of one of the best debate-the-meaning-with-your-friends movies ever made, Michael Tolkin's 1991 The Rapture: if God insists on generating an evil world and then following it up with an Apocalypse that is simultaneously arbitrary, cruel, and cheesy, isn't the only existentially valid response to refuse to go along?

Many people would argue that it isn't. Ours is not to reason about the mission God gives us, or to criticize His special effects.

But it's been two decades since The Rapture and one since Frailty, so it's about time for another meditation on what one of us moderns would do if some being stepped out of Scripture, grabbed us by the shoulder, and gave us a mission.

 

Where I've been

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A couple of weeks ago, I suffered a detached retina in my left eye.  That required some fairly significant eye surgery, then a lot of lying propped up in bed with instructions not to move around too much, bend over, or read.

My eye seems to be recovering, though there are no guarantees. And I feel well enough to slide slowly into some of my usual activities.  So I will be writing more as time goes by.

That which does not destroy us: delivering a novel to the workshop

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In my day job, I am a marketing writer. In cartoons like Dilbert, and in much common belief in tech companies, marketing people are blithering idiots who have no idea of what the products do, who the customers are, or even what business they are in.

That hasn't actually been my experience. People actually expect marketing people to know a lot about the business they are writing for. In my case right now, that's a wide range of medical devices, from heart valves to hip implants. So, sometimes people are a little uncomfortable telling me when I have something wrong ("does he really not know that a good market for facet arthroplasty might not develop?") Well, no, I don't. That was just my guess.

But what I say to them when they wonder if I really want to be corrected: "Either you think I'm an idiot, and it's just between us, or you and some thousands of other people think I'm an idiot." There's really no way around it. Unlike most jobs, mine is practiced in the open. By definition, the world sees pretty much everything I produce.

I'm not telling this so that you'll feel sorry for me, or respect me more.  Or both. Paradoxically enough, we do frequently want both of those things simultaneously.

I'm telling you because I just turned in the manuscript of my novel, Timeslip, to my writing workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop (CSFW). Finally, someone other than me will read this thing.

The CSFW is a powerful tool. It has a procedure set, a corporate culture, and a long-serving subset of members that makes it effective in uncovering a wide set of shortcomings in a manuscript. Like any workshop, it is a great servant but a terrible master. In my experience, they can only make a book better. Not that every suggestion or even observation is good or pertinent.

And it's done in private. No reader will ever have to experience that poorly motivated character or that impossible use of steam power. Just those brave folks of the CSFW.

It's long past the time when luck had anything to do with it, but I won't mind if you wish me some anyway.

 

In search of a fruitful idea, like the Trinity

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In a recent post, I characterized novel ideas as something like fugue subjects, something that can be reversed and transformed and played against itself, in the form of other characters, subplots, locations, etc. If it has that flexibility and extensibility, it can serve as the basis for a novel.

The same is true, I think of a variety of other ideas. Some ideas are fruitful, that is, they lead to other ideas. In another post, I wrote about the writer Ron Carlson's notion that, when writing, you should make sure your narrative choices give you "inventory". You make initial story choices not just on behalf of the plot, but on behalf of the future self that will be writing the rest of the story. You want to keep that person from running out of stuff to use. I've also written about how irritated that person will be if you aren't careful to do that.

In Christian theology, the Trinity plays something of that role (how's that for a dramatic transition?) The Trinity became dominant as a concept, not because it is, in some sense "truer" than, say, Arian monotheism, Monophysite spiritualism, or Nestorian humanism, but because it allowed for an incredibly complex narrative. Someone could always grab some part of that idea and develop an entire theology out of it. As a result, Trinitarian sequels, spin-offs, and fan fiction outcompeted the more closed-off and conclusive narrative notions of other Christological constructs. 

Having explained both post-Nicean theology and novel writing, what can I do next?

I can go in search of a fruitful idea.  I just sent my novel to my workshop, and have new tasks to take on.

The pain of the endgame

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I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the workshop-bound draft of my young adult novel, Timeslip. A few chunks need to be fixed, but right now I'm doing delicate surgery on the endgame: final confrontations, removals of pieces from the board, and a set up for what will come, I hope, in the next book.

It's harder than I expected. Pretty much everyone of significance in the rest of the book plays a role here somewhere. It takes place in an isolated factory building with some sinister features. But getting everyone there, on stage, then appropriately off, requires a lot of narrative machinery that must then be hidden so the reader doesn't get a glimpse of that sweating, desperate man behind the curtain as he raises and lowers scrims, moves furniture on and off stage, and gets the actors prepped for their entrances and exits.

I try to give my workshop a fairly finished piece. It may still have some deep problems, but it's not for lack of trying on my part. So, even though I suspect this section will require some significant changes once they get through with it, I do want it to work on its own terms, now.

I've learned, both through the response my earlier work has gotten, and what I have responded to from others, that lack of attention to that leads to a kind of weary annoyance that encourages the critic to focus on the wrong thing, and miss significant issues that need to be dealt with.

It's just like in marketing: you make your mockups, drafts, and approaches as polished as possible, even though you know they will get completely hacked up later. Otherwise people end up complaining about the font or telling you that you really should have put something in that last bullet where you indicated there was room for an additional point.

So, I'm later with it than I implied to my workshop, but it's in a good cause. I hope.

Short story ideas vs. novel ideas

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I was moderator of a panel on how we do short stories at Boskone last weekend, along with fellow workshop members James Patrick Kelly and F. Brett Cox, nearby neighbor Craig Shaw Gardner, and new friend Beth Bernobich. It was quite a fun panel.

Everyone said interesting things, but I most remember the smart thing I said. I don't know how that happened. I'll try to pay more attention next time.

Oh, what I said. One of my questions was how you tell a short story idea from a novel idea. Do have to run some battery of tests on it, or can you pretty much tell from the way it sits in your mind? And what about the idea makes it one or the other? I have to play with the idea for some time before I know which it is.  I compared it to the difference between a tune, and a fugue theme. A fugue theme can be pretty simple, but it can be inverted, stretched, modified, and played against itself in a variety of ways. Even as you add things to make something a novel, the additions in some way reflect that underlying fugue theme.

Not a piece of practical advice, really ("But that's just a metaphor. I still don't know how to tell!") You'll have to ask one of my other panelists for something actually useful to you.

 

My Boskone schedule

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This weekend is our increasingly low-key winter science fiction convention, Boskone. Here is where I'll be and what I will be doing.

 

Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Occupy Luna, Carlton ( Westin)

How do we have a lunar society that avoids some of the problems we have today.

Vince Docherty (M), Allen M. Steele, Ian Randal Strock, Alexander Jablokov, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I presume I will figure out what this means by the time I'm done with the panel.

Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, The Writing of Short Fiction, Carlton ( Westin)

Let's take a close-up view of what to do when you create a horror, science fiction, or fantasy story in one of the shorter lengths. How do you decide that this idea will work best short? How many characters can you fit? What's got to go in? What must you leave out? What short form masters should you steal blind?

Alexander Jablokov  (M), Laird Barron, F. Brett Cox, James Patrick Kelly, Beth Bernobich

Hey, I’m the moderator for this panel! That’s way more work than just making ill-considered observations. I’ll have to figure out some interesting questions to ask.

Saturday 13:00 - 13:30, Reading: Alexander Jablokov, Independence  ( Westin)

I will probably be reading my recent alien sex story, “Comfort of Strangers”.

Saturday 15:00 - 16:00, Environmental Rearguarding: What To Do After It's Too Late, Burroughs ( Westin)

Let's assume, as some scientists now fear, that the tipping point for catastrophic global climate change has already been reached. What can and should we do to 1) lessen its effects and 2) build a sustainable civilization on the world we'll have left?

Alexander Jablokov (M), Jeff Hecht, Tom Easton, Joan Slonczewski, Shira Lipkin

I only just noticed that I’m the moderator for this one too. Better start thinking.

Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Reading: Flash Fiction from the Cambridge SF Workshop, Lewis (Westin)

Elaine Isaak, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer

This was a fun event last year. I’ve been so busy with my novel that I had no time to write a short piece for this. I’ll probably read a short, relatively self-contained portion of the novel in progress, Timeslip.

Sunday 13:00 - 14:00, Crossover: Mystery & Genre, Burroughs ( Westin)

Which genre do mysteries most resemble: science fiction, fantasy, or horror? What mental muscles do they use similarly, for writer and for reader? If a mystery story is a whodunit, is an SF tale often a howdunit? What works have most successfully crossed the streams?

Toni Weisskopf (M), Dana Cameron, Alexander Jablokov, Leah Cypess, Toni L. P. Kelner

I love SF/mystery crossovers, and have written a few myself.

Dealing with meetings

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Most people--most people with jobs, that is--say they hate meetings. The waste of time, the boredom, etc.

They are lying. Almost every employed person secretly likes meetings. Why? Because, bar the odd one where you have to do some tedious presentation or other, you don't have to work at a meeting. And, since you have to be at work all day, an hour or two sitting on a conference room is a chance to relax. All you really need to do is look alert. And make intelligent-seeming comments that have no work consequence for you.

Imagine that. All you need to do is sound smart. It's a great deal. People say they don't like them because if they admit they do, they fear someone will do something about it. Like cancel the meeting. Which just adds another hour of sitting in your cube staring at a screen.

When you're a freelancer, it's different. They pay you for product, but when you aren't working, it's entirely your business. Meeting filler is less valuable, because the alternative is not the grim cube, but the couch, or leaving the house altogether, or working on some other project. I have several regular meetings during the week with my main client, and they are nowhere near entertaining. Not terrible, just not something I would pick if it weren't part of the job. They just move me an hour closer to whatever deadline I have without allowing me to get anything actually done on what I'm supposed to deliver. They are a source of stress.

I do try. The meetings where they make me use a webcam are complete loss, plus I have to put on a nice shirt, adjust the lighting, and not slouch. But even the other ones, where I can put the Mute button on and type or something, I feel obliged to pay attention to what people are saying. It's just distracting. And sometimes they mix real content in with the announcements about events I won't be able to attend, staffing changes of no possible relevance to me, and bonus programs I don't qualify for. It's a cruel trick.

So, you, office worker: stop complaining about your meetings. They are a relatively painless way to abrade your day.

 

My Arisia schedule

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Since getting back from the holidays I've been buried by both my jobs:  many hours per day of book revision, plus prep for some sales meetings next month for the freelance job.  I should have more time in bit.

And so I am feeling a bit squished by the fact that, a long time ago, I decided to go to the convention that kicks off our season here in Boston: Arisia.  I still have a lot to get done!

But here, quite late, is where you can see me at Arisia, if you are attending.  My panels:

Friday 5:30 pm
The Heinlein Juveniles, with Karen Purcell, Sandra Hutchinson, and Julia Rios.  I don't think anyone will ever read these again, but the reasons why are worth discussing.

Saturday 1:00 pm
Our Grim Meat-Hook Future, with Ken Kingsgrave-Ernstein, Steve Sawicki, Glenn Grant, and Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert.  Are we looking at the right dystopias?

Sunday 10:00 am (the hour otherwise known as the Event Horizon)
Traditional Stories, Modern Audiences, with Vikki Ciaffone, Meredith Schwartz, April Grant, and Bob Kuhn. Elaine Isaak, a friend from my writing workshop, indicated that she couldn't figure out why I was on this panel, and she may be right, because I want to talk about how removing religion, class distinctions, and early death from past stories alters something essential about them. But who is going to hear what I have to say at that hour?

If you're around, find me and say hi.

 

Can successful people teach you how to deal with failure?

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As in self-help books, bloggers like to write about failure, defeat, and frustration. Unfortunately, also like self-help books, they tend to write about these things in the context of...well, of success.  The author of the book, the author of the blog, are qualified to tell you about failure, because they are successful.

In this context, failures are learning opportunities. Frustration is surmounted and eliminated. The blogger is now a successful venture capitalist. Or award-winning (or even best-selling) writer. Or happily married with two kids and another on the way. Or just really good looking.

There is clearly a role for this kind of thing, as there is in belief in an afterlife. "Well, right now this sucks, but ultimately it will all work out." I too read these posts, looking for signs that the troops I've left on the battlefield did not die in vain, that all those corpses are really just a learning experience, fertilizer for the growth of future victory.

Part of the problem for me is that the failures of these now-successful people are also kind of like successes. They fail out of Harvard Law School even though their professors are in awe of their intellect. They lose a $5 million company. They sleep with 100 incredibly-hot-but-wrong-for-me people. They become desperate alcoholics, neglect their families,  and spend most of the award banquet after they win their Pulitzer puking in the bathroom.

So I understand I can't even fail successfully.  Or, as the old joke has it, "look who thinks he's nothing".

I understand that failure can sometimes only be discussed when an intervening success makes it less painful to contemplate. I just suspect that I'm not getting the real story, just as it seems that no photo you now see of a person shows you what they actually look like (I like the toggles in Figure 5, particularly the third and fifth ones).  We are curators of our own image, after all, and few people like to truly reveal the vomit-inducing pain of failure unless they fundamentally see themselves as successful. If you sometimes feel your being had by these stories, you are not alone.

I'm a middle-aged man trying to maintain a writing career that has never taken off the way it should have. I have not stopped trying, and will not. I'm not particularly confessional, so I doubt I will plumb the depths of failure for you here. But I will try to be clear about what this means, and what it requires.

Intertemporal hostility in the American author

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A couple of weeks ago I whined about revision. The great thing about revising a novel is that whining becomes a marathon event.  I'm marking up a draft of a YA novel involving a young man who gets shanghaied into an alternate world, gets home, and finds that his problems have only just started.

I try not to get too angry at that slacker of a few months ago who thought that an easy departure from the riverside hotel in the steam-powered world without a direct confrontation with the interdimensional Bad Cop was a great way to end a section. He didn't have the advantage of having the whole book in front of him.  All he had was a blank screen.

Well, cry me a river.  Now I have to face the fact that he didn't get Mom out of where she was stuck and just kind of abandoned her until she pops up suddenly at the end. Again, his excuse is that pesky blank screen. Does he think that gets him out of everything? That smug bastard, with his nice word counts and his sense of satisfaction at writing The End!  He barely did anything.

He knew the day would come when "and then a miracle occurs" would no longer cut it. And I'm uneasily conscious of the future self who will regard my way of busting Mom out and getting her home without having her actually prevent her son from diving into a dangerous alternate world to save his father as lame and predictable. Screw him. Doesn't he know how hard this is?

When you're a writer, you don't really need other enemies. Your past and future selves are quite enough.