Yes, It Is All My Fault!

Over 100 years of Popular Science issues have been digitized and made available for free on the internet!

A good article for anyone interested in the cutting edge of neuroscience and how it connects to story.

And I’m thinking about attending the World Fantasy Convention this year in Columbus, Ohio. I have extended family living in a suburb of Columbus, and it seems like it would be fun to have the DreamCafé and my mom and brother along for the trip. With this many months to plan it, we might even make it happen! Any feedback from the readers on this convention, if you’ve previously attended?

Getting the bad news out of the way first, here is an incredibly concerning article about the latest battle on the women’s equal rights front. I’ll get sterilized before I’ll live under any “pre-pregnant” laws if they actually start passing them…and if you know anyone who lives in Utah, get them to write the governor to veto!

In more pleasant news, I finally got around to joining the Horror Writers Association. I qualified as an Affiliate member with the publication of “Memory Box” in the Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, by Dark Scribe Press. It slipped off my list of priorities in the busy-ness of the last several months, so I’m glad to have finally taken care of that.

Related to that, I found out this week that the World Horror Convention will be in Austin,Texas for 2011. How cool is that!

For those of you following the Callie posts, I’ll put up a separate page when we get a little farther along in the story, collecting them in one easier-to-read place. In the meantime I’ll post a link collection every 5 entries or so, like now!

Inside the Box
A Box Has No Windows
Opening the Door
At The Bar
Finding help?

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention was great this year (and promises to be awesome next year, add it to your reminders now!), and though I didn’t get to attend all the panels I got a lot of tasty thoughts and ideas from those I did attend.

One idea might have come from either a panel or one of the good discussions that happened throughout the weekend. I was reminded of the importance of setting in science fiction and fantasy stories. This, coupled with Ella’s sound critique, have caused me to revisit and refine where and when in space and time my novel exists. I spent much of my first draft slogging out what and who, and I’m quite fine with having delayed further development until now. On the other hand, I think not working out those when and where details now will make extra work for me in later drafts, and I do so try to avoid extra work where I can. (Extra work isn’t the same as more work, which I hardly ever avoid, so wipe those smirks off, smartarses!)

Someone at the con mentioned that in a fantasy work, the setting not only affects the characters and the plot, but in many ways is developed and acts like a character in its own right, in terms of its effects. I think this holds true for many sf settings as well; the same characters and basic plot will very likely turn out differently if I drop the characters into 1950s-style space opera instead of hyper-urban New Calcutta fifty years from now.

For those reading interested in cool discussion, I’ll start off with this question: What are your experiences where social, temporal, geographical, cultural, or other contexts significantly affected a particular event or creation? I’m finding for this novel, so far, that the cultural and ethnic heritages of the characters and the location in space-and-timeline of various events heavily affect the development of characterization and plot points.

Whew. Back from 4th Street, which was great, of course. I think I talked with others about writing for about 12 hours on Sunday alone, not to mention all the other wonderful conversations with amazing people that happened throughout the con. I didn’t get to attend as many of the panels as I wanted to (in part due to arriving later than planned on Friday night), but I do have some good notes that I hope to share on the panels I did attend.

I got to meet an old friend of Steve’s at lunch after the con on Monday that involved me missing the post-con Fish outing. I really enjoyed seeing Neil and Steve interact with each other; I understand much better now why Steve refers to him as his “evil twin”. The lunch was delicious, the conversation and stories delightful, and Steve got more exercise wandering around the grounds looking at cool plants and animals than he has in a year! We should definitely go on more walks together, that was fun.

Even though I’ve traveled from California to Texas to Minnesota back to Texas all in the past two weeks, I’ve *still* managed to get two short stories viciously dissected and put back together into (hopefully) better stories during that time. The revisions on the latest one were an especially fun editing mini-workshop with Steve and Nathan on Sunday night when we all probably should have been in bed hours earlier. It was intense but really enjoyable and there was only one part that none of us could agree on or easily fix when it was all through. (Nathan, by the way, shows some early signs of developing into an awesome editor.)

And speaking of editors, one of my few epiphanies of the past weekend is that I don’t tend to categorize writers, even those with some measure of public fame, as larger-than-life in my head…but put me around brilliant editors like Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Beth Meacham, Debbie Notkin, Sharyn November (and others I met but didn’t get time to talk with), and internally I turn into a fascinated wide-eyed fan-girl. Hopefully it’s not TOO obvious on the outside…

Okay, back to sending off one of these stories, finishing inputting the edits on the other one before sending it off, and then maybe I can get back to such cat-waxing activities as typing up my 4th street notes. And my main character in the next novel I shall be writing can QUIT hijacking the mental processes already because I won’t write her story until this novel is finished. Back in your box!

That’s right, folks, the anthology I sold my first story to that was published last year just won the Stoker award for superior achievement in an anthology! That would be Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, available for purchase at the link, in case you’ve somehow missed reading it. I’m very excited, so glad to have been able to attend the conference (thanks again mom!), and I adore my editors (Vince Liaguno, Chad Helder)! They are wonderful, and I’ve really enjoyed meeting them and my fellow contributors, along with many wonderful people too numerous to list individually. I was very impressed by the con, it is by far the most professionally organized con I’ve yet had the pleasure to attend on this side of the ocean. (Tel Aviv’s Icon was the largest and most organized overall, that I’ve attended so far.)

Congratulations to my fellow contributors and editors, I am honored to have been a part of this wonderful project and am looking forward to many more!

I finished an editing and revision pass of “…Elmer the Cat” today, thanks to Nathan, Steve, Andrea, and Lynn for great beta reader feedback. I like the story much better now.

I have a couple of writing post ideas written down so I won’t forget them, but am already behind on packing for my flight leaving tomorrow morning so for now I’ll squee about my trip. My mom and I are going to the Stoker Weekend conference in Burbank, California; I’m excited about it, it’s my first horror writing convention, though I’ve been to several sff conventions. I signed up for the Marketing Workshop and there look to be some good discussion panels as well, so we’ll try to catch a couple of those. My publishers are hosting a signing on Thursday at the Dark Delicacies bookstore, and also the Saturday pre-banquet party. It sounds like it will be a busy and interesting weekend, I’m looking forward to observing some of the similarities and differences in the sff and horror conventions. I also expect to meet a bunch of cool and interesting people, which is always great! And hopefully learn a lot.

See you back here on the blog next week!

Next weekend I’ll be in Burbank, California for the Stoker Awards Weekend conference. The anthology I was published in last year, Unspeakable Horror, is nominated for an award. It will be cool to meet my editors and some of my fellow writers. I’ll even have a new story finished just in case. I’m going with my mom as her birthday present to me, thanks greatest mom in the world! I expect we’ll have lots of fun. Come up and say hello if you’ve been reading me and happen to be there!

Tomorrow I leave for my first international and transatlantic plane flight (hopefully not the last!), an event both trepidatious and exciting. I’ll be at ICON, a convention with academic, sff, film, and role-playing aspects. It’s held over several days in Tel Aviv, Israel. You can see the link for the 2008 con here.

I’ll be giving a version of the presentation that Kit O’Connell and I gave in San Francisco a couple of weekends ago on Friday, October 17 at 3pm. Given my topic and that the theme of this year’s convention is “Revolutions” (and I’ll have all the days ahead of time to spread the world subtly), I’m expecting it to be a fairly lively panel. That part, I’m very excited about. Although when I stop to think (thankfully, not much time for that pre-trip), I feel a little like “geez, when I decided to jump in the deep end, no one mentioned it was Lake Baikal!”

Regardless, this convention sounds like exactly what our project needs at this time. What fun! (We’re also making arrangements to be translated into Portuguese; I’m hoping to make a similar connection for Hebrew while in Israel. Anyone with lingual fluency and the time to spare who wants to help with the international saturation elsewhere, contact any of us at the Dream Cafe.)

Kit and I missed the panels that happened before ours, but thanks to the wonders of sexy technology, we can go listen to them as posted mp3s at Arse Elektronika’s website. The conference was aural ecstasy: voices from all over the globe filling the air with delicious ideas and discourse, echoing in a space that appears as a blend of an industrial warehouse and a theater.

I took a few scattered notes on the two panels that came after ours. The first was a two-person presentation and talk about transparency, oversharing, and how you decide how much to share of yourself on the internet (and the consequences of those choices). I felt the speakers, Susan Mernit and Viviane, raised a couple of interesting questions that I will enjoy thinking over and discussing with other more local minds.

The second panel was an informal two-person discussion about sex in science fiction from the 50s through the 80s, between author Richard Kadrey and AE host Johannes Grenzfurthner. I found the talk interesting, but more immediately noticed that it is hard not to adore Johannes; he’s the perfect person to lead the conference, full of vibrant energy and thought-provoking ideas and questions, funny and personable. Not to mention the hot accent–add German to the list of languages I enjoy hearing spoken (on the level of “here, read from this menu, I’ll just listen moistly over here”).

We came back to the hotel to rest a bit and eat, intending on attending the AE readings going on nearby starting at 9pm. We chatted a bit about notes I’d taken on our presentation–parts we’d glossed over or skipped, physical notes about fidgeting, gestures, and the like, what to improve next time–then dozed off for “just a few minutes”…

Yeah, missed the readings. We were tired monkeys. It was a good rest and obviously needed, but I was pretty disappointed to miss the evening’s event. Our hotel room is strange; the hotel itself is historic and very nice, but our room was discounted, I assume because its room window is permanently boarded up (probably due to the humming machinery outside it) as well as plywood covering the broken bathroom window. And no towel rack or thermostat. Thankfully, the bathroom plywood was loose enough that we didn’t have too many problems with air circulation. Still, weird that they would rent it out at half-off rather than repair it and charge higher rates. The doors carry sound but the walls themselves are some of the thickest of any hotel in which I’ve stayed. The wood replacing the windows means that very little light gets into the room–waking up Saturday morning was fairly disorienting.

And that’s as good a lead-in to the next Day as any, so I’ll end the post here for now. Must check out of this historic hotel and go back to our little glorified motel near the airport for our final day’s stay in San Francisco.

Made it through our presentation, about as perfectly as it could go given our level of preparedness and non-rehearsal.  Other talks were good.  We’re running a bit behind this morning, as we needed to walk to a drugstore to get an ankle brace since Kit’s ankle is still bothering him.  Now we have snacks and just need to clean up, re-dress, and catch the bus to the conference.  This is Day 2, Technology, and all the talks promise to be quite interesting.

I hope to be working on a more detailed post about Day One, but no time right now as we need to be as little late as possible.  Everyone at the conference is cool and interesting and sexy and beautiful and quirky and the pigeons here are HUGE.