Games, Like Crack

Improve your spacial reasoning skills! Trounce others online!

Make the biggest snowball ever! Trounce others online!

Kill slugs! Pretend to kill other people's slugs!

Ne fume pas! Trounce smokers!

Yeah, it was another great ass-kissing day here in balmy Chicago...

Campbell Award Eligibility

Well, it looks like I'm still eligible for the Campbell award for Best New SF/F writer (2nd year of eligibility) because of the screwy rules regarding when Strange Horizons became a pro market.

For anyone interested in voting, here's the list of eligible nominees.

SO VOTE! No pressure. :)

As usual, I'm a pretty small fish (I mean, Naomi Novik, Justine? Sarah Monette? And then there's Meghan McCarron and Cherie Priest. Yea, right).

Tra la.

Is it Spring Yet?

Really, any time now, folks.

Free Hugs

On Thursday night I was walking home from work downtown when I saw a woman on the corner of Washington and State holding up a Free Hugs sign. I'd already seen the original Free Hugs video on YouTube, so I had a little shot of happiness at seeing somebody out in Chicago doing the same and prepared to step hastily by and get to my train.

But as I passed by and saw her hugging people, my step faltered, and I wanted to turn back.

I really wanted a hug.

Here was this person offering some bit of comfort without requesting anything in return, without obligation, without any power-crazy or twisted ulterior motives (that's the idea, anyway). You don't see that a lot. You don't get unconditional comfort or affection all that often.

It made me wonder if this is what the appeal of prostitution is, that you can pay someone to pretend to care about you for an hour. The difference, in this case, of course, is that Free Hugs are given without the need to receive anything in turn. I'm not shaking hands or giving out blow jobs because I can't pay my rent. It's done out of pure compassion as opposed to desperation/material gain.

And man, did I want to turn around and go back, to the point where I started crying there in the street, because I couldn't believe that it was possible for anyone to give me something without desperately needing something back, without taking something away from me, and I was so, so tired; after the year or two I've had, I felt like I had nothing to give to anyone, and I couldn't turn back and receive that hug because I didn't have anything to give her in return.

So I cried on the way home on the train, and I thought about a world full of free hugs, of compassion without obligation, of being able to give of yourself without fear of having someone try and take it all away.

I would like to live in a world like that, or even a world where I believed that was possible.

One of the best heroines I've come across in a really long time is Nausicaa of comic book fame. She's strong and compassionate and will fight if she needs to, but prefers negotiation and the showing of love and compassion over brute force if possible. I loved the idea that that heroine could exist. The idea of nonviolence and universal love as a means of changing the world is what draws me to stories of people like Ghandi or Jesus or even MLK. I want to believe that love can change the world. I write about bloody, violent, mean people who fight hate with hate; they're the sort of monsters created by societies that use hate against hate, that keep order through strength and submission.

That is not the world I want to live in, and it's not the world I want to believe in. I write about it because it fascinates me, and because I hope that someday, if I can understand it, I can find an alternative to it, one that I really believe in. I don't buy the idea that all we need to do is stand in a circle and put flowers in our hair and dance around saying "I believe in fairies!" (what about health care? Who's going to make insulin? Who's going to do the laundry and build the houses and make great medical breakthroughs if we're all standing around in a circle all day patting each other on the back?), but I know that there's an alternative to all this blood and anger and hate.

Sometimes I feel that what I do with a lot of my writing is take all of the anger and hate and violence that I've absorbed from the world and try and excise it through writing. Otherwise I just turn it inward, and it seethes inside of me and treies to claw itself out, and it chews me to pieces. I'm tired of being full of self-loathing.

I want to be able to let good things in, to appreciate all that good stuff, all those free hugs, without the desperate fear that by letting those things in, by releasing all the fear and anger, I'll become weak and vulnerable.

The only way to learn how to fly is to let everything go. I know that, but the fear of falling, the fear of falling... that's the worst fear of all.

Revolutionaries

The Secret Lives of Secretaries (Blowjob Edition)

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One For the Road

Random Word Generator

When you need just the right word... that doesn't actually exist.

Plotting Failure

Plot should really be a very simple thing.

Something bad happens to someone.

Then things get worse.

I'm pretty good at heaping on trouble, I'm just not sure that in the end, any of it makes any sense. Being a sort of "sit down and see what happens" writer, the whole process of discovery thing when I'm writing a book is great. The horrific result of writing this way, however, is that I spend years rewriting in order to figure out how the plot sticks together.

Character, setting, dialogue: I started out being pretty strong at character, worked real hard at setting, worked my ass off at dialogue, and now I feel competent at all of this. What has continued to elude me is... plot.

Not even "something bad happens. Then things get worse." Oh yes, THINGS GET WORSE. But why? How do I tie all that together and make it resonate?

I just sat down and revised an old story of mine from Clarion, the template character for the one I'm currently writing several books about, and I managed to tie up some of the themes so that when you get to the end you go, "Oh." (Well, *I* went "oh." It has yet to be seen if anyone else will). It's taken me seven years to make this story something more than a "so what?" story.

And that, at core, is I think what my problem is: when I'm not careful, I can write a lot of "so what?" stories. That's all well and good if you're content to go running around a wacky world with fucked up, wacky (often violent) people, but it's not usually until halfway through the story that I either find my point, or... I don't, and I have to trash the story. Then, once you actually find your point (if you do at all), you have to go back and make sure you set all that up at the beginning. If I'm *really* cool I can write forward by constantly looking back at the beginning of the story and trusting that everything I need for the end was totally frontloaded at the beginning by my really kewl subconscious.

Right now, that's sort of how I'm swinging things, but I want to be really good at plot, the nuts and bolts kind, not just the bordering-on-didactic kind. I want all the world's political pieces to come together. I want everybody running on their little plot highways to smack into each other and make the reader go "Oh! Of course!"

Basically, I want to be BRILLIANT.

So I suppose that's nothing new.

Worst. Fight Scene. Ever

Come now, who didn't LOVE this show?

I think Kirk should have just taken his mask off and screamed, "AHA!!!"

I Felt Terrible....

... when I was sick. But I could wear such cute clothes!

Indeed, I am well aware of the fucked-uppedness of that.

"What kept me sane throughout the diet, and stopped me from tipping over the edge and wanting to keep the new skinny self I'd worked so hard to achieve, was the realisation that my life was no better, or more successful, or colourful, when I was thin than before."

The Secret Lives of Secretaries

Yesterday, Nell and I discovered that someone has been stealing the handsoap bottles in the kitchen and in the coffee bar behind our reception desk at work (yes, we have a coffee bar behind the reception desk). Now we're missing a huge jug of Jergens lotion.

We have no idea who's doing this, or why they need that much handsoap. Or that much lotion.

In any case, it's not like it's a big deal. The head guy in the office upstairs made $238 million last year.

It might sound really exciting to have a plasma TV in the reception area you're working in, but believe me, 24 hours of CNN is really mind-numbing when the day's biggest stories are who gets to bury Anna Nicole Smith and Is Britney's Haircut Prelude to a Stint in Rehab? (the answer is yes, apparently). These are the sorts of things no reasonable human being really needs to know. And yet.

I figure if things get real dull we can always spice it up by ordering condoms for the bathrooms and renting out the conference rooms by the hour.

We'll need to order more lotion.

Gendered Writing

Surprise! If you write from a male POV, you must be a male writer, and if you write from a female POV, you must be a female writer.

All hail the gender genie!

I think this would have been more amusing if I didn't peg the whole insert male POV scene followed by "try again" and then insert female POV scene. That was way too predictable.

(via making light)

Call Me Crazy...

... but when I was a kid, I didn't think, "Golly gee, I want to be a professional Executive Assistant!"

And yet, these people exist.

Granted, in downtown Chicago they're making six figures. But really, who would have thunk it?

There are Few Things More Annoying...

... than a 52 number right after you've brushed your teeth.

Dammit.

Man, I Hope I Get That Interview...

... or I'm going to need to get a weekend gig at Starbucks.

"Girlfriend in a Coma, I Know/I Know - It's Serious"*

I have been trying to write up a post about writing and trauma for the last hour, inspired by this post.

I guess I'm still in a bad enough place that I don't feel like I can talk about it. Of course, much of my reluctance is that so much of the current situation would also be talking about the private business of somebody else, and that's not kewl.

So here I am.

Suffice to say that things have not been great for me or my roommate/Clarionmate/formergirlfriend/friend for the last year. There were bad relationships prior to us getting together, professional failures before and after we got together, a bad breakup, subsequent meltdowns, more professional failures, a job layoff, and let's not even get started on the whole, "Surprise you have a chronic illness"/"OMG Kameron's in a coma in the bathroom fucking shit fuck fuck fuck!!" thing. Cause that's some heavy shit to deal with on top of everything else. Or, shit to deal with as a nice appetizer before the meltdown.

We've chosen to deal with our pain and grief in very different ways, and I hope that, just as I'm rebuilding, she will continue to rebuild as well, and in twenty years we'll be better people.

Because, yes, at the end of the day, you do have to go on. If you don't go on, you die. If you choose to dwell in the darkness, it will devour you. You must find a new life outside of that. It's not like you're going to forget the darkness, it's not like it's going to go away, but you can build a place in the sun somewhere, knowing that the sun is all the brighter because you are one of those who knows what it's like in the dark.

I wrote the bulk of GW when I was slowly dying, when my personal relationships were bouncing all over the place just like my sugar numbers, during a time where I wasn't doing a lot of higher level thinking. It was all about this thing, and the next thing, and sleeping, and drinking water, mmmm sweet sweet water....

It's no surprise that when I was done with GW and still recovering from the mess of my life, dealing with a lot of resulting emotional craziness on both ends in this house, that I decided that GW wasn't a book, it was bookS. I didn't want to start my next stand-alone project just yet. I needed to work with this character and this world. I wanted to work through the issues I had to deal with in the life of this bloody, strong, brutally traumatized woman who masked all her weakness with witticism and pretended she was fine when she wasn't, and was, in reality, only alive because of the good graces or serious fuckups of others, and who knew it, but told herself a lot of stories about why that wasn't so, becuase those were the stories she needed to tell herself in order to go on.

And on the one hand, I worry that the GW books will end up being nothing more than Mary Sue-ish books, the sort of cathartic writing we all have to do every once in a while to get through the worst of things. On the other hand, I think they could be some of the best of what writers do: culling all the shit and blood in our own lives, mixing it up with what we've seen and heard and read of others, and making something new and powerful and wonderful out of it, something people can connect with.

That would be great if it happened.

In the meantime, it certainly gets *me* through the day, and believe me, right now, that's a really fucking great thing.

*

Writers' Rooms

Theirs.

And mine: old and new.

Names I've Given My Hardware

I was never one of those people who had names for my cars, mainly because I never actually owned them - my parents did. I got my first laptop as a graduation present when I finished highschool, and though I never named it at the time, the person I gave it to when I upgraded starting calling it "The Beast" because it weighs something like ten pounds (it also, unlike two of the three laptops that followed it, still works).

I had a nice, big-screened Gateway computer after that, which also went unnammed, though I certainly whispered many and varied terms of endearment over it when it actually managed to store 20 gigs worth of music.

When that one blew up on me, I bought one of those tablet PCs and called it "bird" because of it's small size (I think it weighed 2lbs).

When that one gave out on me last year or the year before, I bought this new Sony Vaio with the slick looking screen and comfy keyboard. It's reasonably light, but far from compact, and I've got a big wide screen for watching movies and a big keyboard for comfortably typing up a lot of fucking books.

It also just so happened that I was hip-deep in God's War about that time, and when I had to type in a name for this computer, the first one that popped into my head was the name of GW's heroine: Nyx.

My ipod, which I got soon after, has the name of Nyx's female sidekick: Anneke (that's the little name that shows up next to the drive letter and everything. It always makes me snicker).

If I keep burning through computers like this, I may have to shelve the old shells on the ego shelf with the actual books whose characters I named the hardware after and whose pages were typed on the same machines.

Books and dead laptops filed away on the same shelves feels very Gibson.

When the Plucky Heroine Stomps Her Foot and Tosses Her Hair, You Know She Means Business

I've been trying to get through Martha Wells's City of Bones for a while now, mainly because it's got a blasted-out desert setting with Old Ruines, bugs, mutants, and pirates, which sounded a lot like GW's world to me, and I wanted to see how somebody else handled that sort of setting.

And yea, you know, the world's cool and all, but it lacks a certain richness, mostly due to the writing style, and, worst offense of all - the characters are completely unlikable. I really don't care if either of them live or die, and they just aren't interesting.

There are great prose writers and great story writers, and if you're great at story or great at prose, I'll read you (I think writers like Catherynne Valente are great at prose, and writers like Stephen King are great at story - I'll read both, but for different reasons, and I'll get different things out of them), but great story means I need to enjoy reading about the characters. I want to be invested. It's not that they have to be likable: they just have to interesting.

Though SF/F has come a long way with it's female characters, they tend to suffer a similiar fate shared by their male counterparts, which is that they end up getting two or three character traits assigned to them, and in the same way a bad actor starts raising their voice during a particularly emotional scene as if to say "LOOK AT ME, I'M ACTING!!!!" these characters display their formulaic template of "plucky heroine" traits: stomp their feet, clench their fists, tug their braids, and then verbally spar with the Brooding Hero who doesn't get laid because he's "misunderstood," and then we move on.

The thing with this sort of set up - plucky heroine & brooding hero - is that that template *can work.* And when it *does* work - when it's done well - you can create characters people really love (Mal & Inara of Firefly, Alanna & her Thief King in the Alanna books, that Kushiel's Dart chick and the brooding celibate warrior guy in the first of the Kushiel books, etc); you know, the sort of characters people like to write slash fiction about. heh heh

The problem is when people get lazy, and they reach for that "plucky heroine" template and just scribble somebody in, like this Elen character in City of Bones. When she's feeling strong emotion, when we're given a scene meant to illustrate how Plucky & Independent she is, she does one of those clench-my-fists-and-stomp-my-foot things that I find really annoying. You see the same problem with Nynaveave in the Jordan books. When she feels particularly plucky, she'll tug her braid and stomp her foot, and then you know she means business! (this is amusing the first couple of times in book one. By book six, you want her to die quickly and suddenly; you hope a tree will fall on her).

I wonder how much of this is just plain cardboard character writing and how much of it is just seeing a lot of people rush to write Strong, Plucky Heroines without really knowing how to do that because most mainstream literature was about Brooding Male Heroes. The template you *did* drawn from that had strong female characters was romance, and I'm wondering how many of those Plucky Space Opera Heroines were originally conceived as pure Romance heroines.

So you end up with these women characters who may be smart and spunky, but they're pretty childish and vulnerable, too (again, how much of this is just poor and/or lazy writing?). After all, if she was *too* capable, and governed her emotions a little more diplomatically, then she wouldn't *really* be a female character, she'd just be a Guy in Drag.

I guess I've just never bought the idea that a fully realized female character who didn't act like a fourteen year old at thirty-five was "a guy in drag."