dfable

I sat down last month with Matt Selznick, author of Brave Men Run (coming out from Swarm Press next Monday!) to discuss DIY, small press, and his awesome book.

Promo: Adventures in SF Publishing and ISBW Keys To Publishing contest! More later on the ISBW blog!

Originally published at The Murverse. You can comment here or there.

It's going to be interesting to watch the reactions to this Mosley malarkey.

On one hand, it would be somewhat cheering to have the NoTW shut down because that entire edifice contributes root(fuck-all) to the sum totals of human knowlege or happiness. On the other, case law proscribing press freedom would be a bad thing. On the other other, way to shoot yourselves and the rest of your trade in the foot you useless tabloid lackwits.

See, to anyone sensible, it just sounds like a B&D scene. The participants sounded like they were having fun. Safe, Sane and Consensual. Your Kink is not My Kink but, etc...

The problem I have is that the hysterical and disapproving tone of the NoTW has become a commonplace. It's a bit bloody disturbing to take a mental step back and examine one's own reactions to other people's sex lives. To be honest, I've held some less-than-splendid attitudes over time. Which given the sorts of things I've gone and done is a bit bloody rich. I've also let other people bang on where I should have called them on their statements or more properly just told them to fuck off out of my general area.

The long dance
Originally uploaded by lucy huntzinger

I finished Sherwood Smith's King's Shield and loved it as well as admired it, but I was sad the story was all over. I hate that I can't have all of a character's life when I really like them. I'm still sad I can't ever know the rest of what happened to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, for instance.

I am totally loving Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel. Her fantasy reliably rocks my socks. On the other hand, I always feel I'm not really getting her science fiction even though there's not a thing wrong with it. I accept this dichotomy. Sometimes I am just not the right reader for something.

On vacation I read Tanya Huff's Four Quarters quartet, if that's the right name for them. They were well-written. They were chock full of plot and character and story. And I just didn't love them at all. There's something about her work that doesn't engage me. It entertains me very well, but it doesn't move me on any profound level. I suspect I would have been devoted to her had I read her in my teen years.

But am I still devoted to anyone I read in my teen years? Sure, but not much science fiction or fantasy outside of Tolkien. Either I have a hard time recapturing what was so magic about a book I loved then or I don't have a sentimental attachment to anything I've outgrown. Which is odd, considering how much time I spend wallowing in nostalgia for this, that and the other part of my past.

What I am most nostalgic for is the days when I was omnivorous and read anything I could get my hands on. These days I'm so picky it's frustrating. I can't decide if my tastes are exquisitely refined or just rigid. Either way, I dread finishing this book and having nothing to read.

Okay. I've figured out how I'm going to handle the book sale*. Which will commence after Readercon, I think, because the next two weeks are just too damned busy.

Basically, what I will do is put up a post for each book or set of books announcing how many copies of each I have to get rid of send off to good homes. And they'll go to those who comment-and-paypal, first-come first-served. Cost will be cover price plus $5.00 shipping and handling anywhere in the world.

I think the only payment option I'm offering is paypal, right now, because really it's all I can swing without fussing, and the goal is not to fuss.

NB: I do not yet have any copies of Ink & Steel or Hell & Earth to unload, because large boxes of same have not yet turned up on my doorstep, but it's only a matter of time. I have at least a couple of copies of everything else, and even some leftover ARCs, for people who like those.

And then I will have an entire four foot bookcase back!

*(which may also be the buy-Bear-a-new-laptop sale, as the 5-year-old HP refurb I have been happily using since 2003 is reaching the end of its lifespan, and also is awfully heavy).

Most of you already know I own and operate Absolute Write, and the AW Water Cooler, a writer's community.

In my copious spare time, I've been working on learning the ins and outs of Vbulletins' features and updates without disrupting the AW boards, as much as possible.  The Water Cooler is friggin' huge, and disrupting 25,000 posters makes 'em all cranky.  Then they send me cranky emails.

That led me to (with the generous assistance of medievalist, and I'll likely be co-opting Hawkins to help, too) license and download a copy of Vbulletin onto my own personal site, to muck about with at my leisure . . . but, in the meantime, I was poking around readers communities - which are altogether a different group of folks, albeit often overlapping, with writer's communities, because we're starting the Official Stephen King reading project. (But that's a different post. . .)

On the official Stephen King message board, I discovered that their forums are closed for posting over the weekends, and after some ridiculous hour like 5pm, Eastern, on weekdays. And every new post has to be manually approved, before it appears.

Since I was specifically looking for a place to invite people to have a King reading-group discussion, without co-opting AW space (because I always have to be the boss, there, whether I want to or not -- well, it's a long story) BUT what happened is I got really cranky, because it seemed like a lame-ass way to run a community of readers or anyone else.  And there WASN'T anyplace good, that I could find.

Then I started thinking about the empty Vbulletin board, installed for me to tinker with . . .

The long and the short of it is this:
We've opened a new community for readers, Written In Stone, and you're invited.

Good news all around!

(1) Since it's in the newspaper, I guess I am allowed to talk about this now. David Moles and I will be sharing the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction work in 2007. I'm deeply honored by this, and very sad that I couldn't be there. (I wanted to, very much, but the travel and work schedule... was already topped out.)

(2) Blood & Iron ebook. Yay!

AppleCare shipped my computer on the fourth.

To my old address in Ithaca.

Which I didn't bother to point out was inaccurate, because I specifically told the Mac genius (*cough*) that I wanted it shipped back to the Apple Store, since I wouldn't be home to sign for it.

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

The manager at the Apple Store was very helpful, and she's trying to track it down now, at whatever Fedex depot it's gotten sent back to. But. Computer! WAH!

I added a chapter today. This is what I have been doing the last three weeks or so, adding that fourth POV. These chapters are coming along really well. They are adding even more depth to this story than the additional (3rd) POV did.  

Will I be finished by the end of July? First I thought May, then June before I left for the cruise, then July before camp started. Now the end? Nope. I'm not even going to hope for it. I will hope for the end of the summer. I am really looking forward to sitting in my sky chair, manuscript in hand and just reading, reading, reading the whole thing. I've yet to do that. Until I do, I can't know if all my hard work paid off.

Jack Skillingstead, who informs me that his ROF story, "Everyone Bleeds Through," is slated to be reprinted in Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction 2008.  Normally, I learn about these sorts of cool tidbits much faster, but being as this reprint will be appearing in an sf anthology as opposed to a fantasy one it snuck up on me.  In fact, this is the first story ROF story I know of that is going to be reprinted in a Year's Best for SF.  JJA reprinted ROF's "Artie's Angels" in his post-apocalyptic reprint anthology, which is really a science fiction anthology.  It's very cool that he did that (and based on the stories I've read in there so far you totally need to buy this!), but it's not quite the same thing.  

The folks at the new Nebula website interviewed me a little while back, and it's just been posted here:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/interview/jennifer_pelland/

I managed to get my fourth try at starting Emasculata underway yesterday, and I think this one will work. I think a lot of the problem I was having stemmed from the thought that I needed to document every millisecond of the events of the first few days of the novel, when really, I don't (although I had to play a little literary trick to pull it off). My original plan had been to get through my rewrite of parts 1 and 2 during this week off, but that's not going to happen. Instead, I'm going to try to get through as much of part 1 as I can and be happy with that.

It might be easier to get more writing in if it weren't so freaking hot, that's for sure.

What did I do on the 4th of July?  Saw a banner plane crash into the surf running distance from my parent's house.  Luckily, no one was injured -- not the pilot, and no one in the water (which is amazingly fortunate, considering I've never seen that beach so crowded).  I can't upload pictures from work, but Cordell's got some on his site.  Also, reporters interviewed my dad about it (he saw and took the pictures KNBC aired).  We saw him on the 11 o'clock news, which was fun.  

After dinner, we went to my in-laws house and saw the fireworks from the hill.  Looking down toward the city we could see fireworks exploding all over it, which was kind of like watching the opening sequence of Blade Runner, where all of LA looks like it's erupting. 

Less unique, but no less exciting was taking Claire to see Wall-E, which was the first movie she'd ever seen in the theaters.  I was...a little bit nervous, because she had seen Ratatouille, and although she liked it, now she's scared of the woman with the coke-bottle glasses wielding the shotgun at the rats in the French countryside.  But Wall-E didn't seem to have any upsetting parts for her, and she quite liked the babies in the space ship.  There was an upsetting part for me, though.  When the preview for Beverly Hills Chihuahua came on and she laughed.  And laughed.  And laughed.  I'm doomed.

Finally, Cordell, Emma, and I experienced our first "House Concert" Sunday for one of Cordell's favorite musicians, Bill Mallonee.  I hadn't heard much of his stuff before (compared to the 20-odd times Cordell's seen him), but I was curious about house concerts -- basically, where people pay a small admission price to sit around someone's living room, see a performance, and talk to the artists afterward.  The musicians get kind of an "unplugged" tour, get to stay in the house of the person hosting them, get paid a little bit, and then get back on the road the next day for the next venue.  This seems pretty idea for a guy like Mallonee, who seems to draw as much inspiration for his music from Jack Kerouac as Jesus Christ.  I am not big on Kerouac, made it through On the Road 10 years ago with teeth grit, but I thought it was an interesting combination, and I'm tempted to give him another shot now.  So Mallonee was a really nice guy and a very cool way to see him play music, which both Emma and I very much enjoyed.

So I've been reading the CODEX page, and looking at the reqs. etc, and wondering if I should try to join (after all, the recent workshop sounded really neat!).

So, what do you people think?

rachelmanija explains more about auctioning off a copy of our Avatar spec script here.

Due to a full day and evening in LA I am behind on things here, including catching up with my enormous flist--shades of Rumpelstiltskin! I did scroll through at lightspeed last night, and caught sight of a magnificent photo by heleninwales that I hope I can find again, but I think that was at least four hundred postings back, probably more. Yow!

A couple of things. I do hope those who are inclined are still checking livelongnmarry which has some extraordinary offers, like care packages from all over the world. As for my own offer, which is doing far better than I'd thought it would, if any of those bids go to a hundred bucks, I'm getting gold ink for the lettering, and adding in margin drawings and the like. Prints won't get those--what machine can repro gold ink? I'm thinking of vellum for the paper, but will experiment with some of the luscious papers over at the art store.

I'm also busy with Coyote Wild--wow, some very fine stories indeed have showed up for the final round of selection. I and a panel of teens are busy reading.

Last, I note that Readercon is coming up soon, filling me with envy and bitterness....so what could be more appropriate than a Bittercon? If anyone has any topics they think would be awesome to discuss, either mention them here, or link up to bittercon when the con starts, I think next weekend or maybe the one after. I will be mining their wonderful program for stuff we can discuss out here.

Okay, back to work.

by Avery Gilbert
This book is sub-titled: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life
More apt subtitle: Smells and their Appearance in Pop-culture.

Whether you like this book depends on why you wanted to read it. It contains a great deal of information about how and where scent appears in modern culture, from the people spritzing you in the mall to the advent of Smell-O-Vision to the appearance of scent in dozens of literary sources.

Unfortunately, in the 238 pages of writing there's very little science. A few tidbits of scientific fact are thrown out among the references to Garrison Keillor and James Joyce, but for the most part, this doesn't actually spend much time covering the science. If you want that, I'd suggest taking the money and putting it into a subscription to Scientific American Mind. Seriously.

So, what did I get out of it?
a)I did find the scientific name of the scent geosmin, the scent that rises from dry earth after a rainfall.
b)The Liang Limit--basically no one can separate out more than four scents at a time, if that.
c).....

Well, darn. Being that I wanted this book to be about science, I found this dearth rather frustrating. There's not a great deal of information here that I didn't already know before...that I had any interest in. Other people will love this book. It's just not for me.

There are spoilers and such below the cut and in the comments. I've especially gone into some thoughts on Donna's character.

******SPOILERS*****

------- ( Click here to read thoughts on Donna )

48 day nope from Fly in Amber.
79 day nope from Horror Literature Quarterly.
27 day nope fro Necrology.
and more recently a quick under 24 hour nope from Lone Star Stories.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010421.html

Thank you, Bob Barr, for reminding us that "libertarianism," as espoused in America today, is fundamentally about hating black people, homosexuals, liberals, and the poor.

Up until this, I actually had kind things to say about Barr, based on the notion that he'd gone through some interesting changes since being a floor manager for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Never mind that. I'm obviously a complete idiot.