Mediocrity at its Best

The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived has a cast!

2013-04-25T17:27:02Z

A while back, I sold film rights to Waterloo Productions for one of my short stories.

It was pretty exciting to see this morning that they’ve posted a cast announcement! Hooray! I don’t know very much about all the stuff that goes on around films getting made, so it’s cool to see the occasional updates when something happens regarding the project.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

A reading (tomorrow) and other stuff

2013-04-23T15:31:46Z

First up, the subject line of the post. Aaand, yes, I realize that this is at the last minute, but you can see where “BLOG SOME STUFF” fits on my current to-do lists… not very high.

Tomorrow, Apr. 24 at 7pm, I am participating in a reading at Soul Food Books in Redmond (the address is under the Contact Us tab on the website). I’ll be reading with Cat Rambo, Brenda Cooper, K.C. Ball, Jennifer Brozek, and Caren Gussoff.

Also coming up at the end of July is the Cascade Writers workshop, which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s a good workshop, with a bunch of cool speakers. It’s filling up but not yet full. There is also still time to apply for the scholarships which will cover your registration fee.

Other than that, I have to run off and study for/take a cell biology exam. Eep. Cell membranes are full of so much barely comprehensible STUFF.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

When I click the subject line, it tries to autofill with my responses to slush stories

2013-04-06T03:19:43Z

Poor neglected LiveJournal.

10 Years ago…

2013-03-20T17:04:16Z

In Bellingham, 300 to 500 peace activists made their way onto Interstate 5, temporarily blocking freeway traffic for two miles in either direction.

Barely even a footnote, now.

War is apparently our only priority in this country.

I should probably have more to say. The thing is, I don’t really see what good saying it would do.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Kickstarterrrrred out

2013-03-05T18:49:19Z

I’m kinda KickStartered out right now.

Before anyone gets all upset that it’s somehow their Kickstarter, specifically, that I’m being pissy about, it’s not. It’s the cumulative effect of my feed being all Kickstarter all the time, every day. I used to feel relieved on the days when various fundraising efforts finally finished because I was looking forward to the constant “fund! FUND! fund! FUND!!!HEY @WHOEVER RETWEET US FUNDFUNDFundfundfund” to end. I don’t really get that relief though, because there’s always a new one starting up for something else.

And they’re successful, so whatever, people like them.

And some of them are interesting projects that nobody (including the presses behind them, I guess) has the funds to just do without the kickstart.

And I’ve funded several of them, based on how much I’ve got sitting around, and whether or not I really want the anthology/whatever.

And I’ve submitted to… one? Maybe two, after the fact, because I happened to have a story that I thought fit. (I was wrong! But such is life. )

BUT.

Right now, KS is feeding the same exhaustion that I feel when magazines have desperate fund drives, or the publishers of anthology series vent that they get more submissions than sales. This exhausts me because the result seems to be: find ways to convince authors to fund your press/whatever.

Lately I hear people lauding Kickstarter as the salvation of short fiction, or whatever. I guess? But it feels like a better way to convince writers to pay for magazines/anthologies/projects in hopes that they’ll be able to submit to them than anything else.

I guess I just feel like the atmosphere around short fiction is basically, “Nobody cares but you, so fund it!”

No, this isn’t some grand pronouncement of RAEG!!1 No, I don’t expect anyone to stop. I’m just overly sensitive to sales pressure of this type so it’s getting to me.

My kingdom for a week without Kickstarter.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

My Norwescon 36 (2013) Schedule

2013-02-18T23:17:58Z

I’ll be at Norwescon next month, sitting on a lot of panels and pretending that I have good advice and hopefully not boring anyone to tears. I don’t think this is a completely final schedule, so it’s possible some things might change (time, location, other panelists, etc.) But this should give you an idea of what I’ll be up to.

Thursday!

4 pm Surviving the Slush Pile
If the editor doesn’t read past the first page, it doesn’t matter how good the rest is. How to quickly capture and hold a slush reader’s attention.
Cat Rambo, Gardner Dozois, Jenna M. Pitman, Keffy R.M. Kehrli
[Cat pictures in your cover letter. Works every time.]

Friday!

2 pm Crossing Boundaries: Writing the Other
Can you write a great character of another gender? From a different culture? A different sexual orientation? How do you know what’s good characterization and what’s stereotyping?
Caren Gussoff, Dennis R. Upkins, J.M. Sidorova, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Sheye Anne Blaze

7 pm SF & Fantasy Themes in Metal Music
Do you fondly remember the first time you heard Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” or Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”? Do you love GWAR just because they claim to be from outer space? Have you mocked black metal bands for their misuse of Orcish? If so, join us for a discussion of the use of science fiction and fantasy themes within the metal genre. Whether your interest in metal is recent or long-lived, occasional or die-hard, there’s something for every lover of the fantastic and loud!
Lilith von Fraumench, David J. Peterson, John (J.A.) Pitts, Keffy R.M. Kehrli
[\m/ \m/]

10 pm Future Management
Science fiction has its ideological roots in technocracy and the belief that you could manage a better society. But lately, SF seems to have lost much of this feeling, giving us darker and darker futures. Is hope still a feasible story-line, or is it a non-starter in SF? Are we doomed to dystopian futures in SF, or is it just a phase? And if it is, how can we get back on our traditional track (and do we even want to?)
Stina Leicht, Gregory A. Wilson, Keffy R.M. Kehrli
[Are current SF futures actually darker than those of the past? Much of what was proposed in "Golden Age" SF sounds like a dystopia to me, so iunno.]

Saturday!

Noon My reading!
Me!

4 pm Short Stories — At the Cutting Edge of Science Fiction
Novels may get more attention, but short fiction has many advantages, and much of the best fiction, both inside and outside of the genre has been short. Join us as we look at some of the best short fiction of recent years and how the Internet has revitalized the market for short fiction.
Leslie Howle, Gardner Dozois, Jude-Marie Green, Keffy R.M. Kehrli
[I hope this doesn't turn into a panel where the audience just shouts short story titles for 20 minutes straight because snrrrrrrr.]

Sunday!

Noon Being a Good Ally
You may be a straight, white, able-bodied person who means well, but somehow you just seem to keep putting your foot in it while trying to be supportive. What does it mean to be a good ally to groups you don’t actually belong to? What can you do to help without silencing others or co-opting their message?
Sheye Anne Blaze, Gwen Yeh, Jennifer McCreight, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Ro Yoon

2 pm Queer Voices in SF/F
Science fiction and fantasy authors often use the fringes of mainstream culture as plot material. How do authors portray gender and sexuality in their works, and how realistic are the works of those who write outside their own identities? Are the tales of early authors who played with gender still relevant? And have these worlds of SF&F changed the attitudes of fandom and made those in the QUILTBAG community feel welcome?
Amber Clark, Gregory Gadow, Gwen Yeh, Keffy R.M. Kehrli
[I would just like to go on the record here as saying that I hate the word "quiltbag." Not that others can't/shouldn't use it, but I don't.]

I also switched my blog theme because I was tired of the old one (didn’t like the contrast levels on the posts) but didn’t have time to pretend I know CSS and screw around with it today. I’ll probably start hating this theme tomorrow, or something.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

I’ll be presenting at Cascade Writers Workshop this year! :)

2013-02-15T16:56:26Z

The hunt for applicants to Clarion UCSD and Clarion West is ramping up. Both instructor line-ups are really great this year (across both workshops, three of my instructors are back at it — Nalo, Kelly, and Neil were great teachers). If you’re thinking about applying to either of the Clarions, I’ve blogged about it consistently. Some relevant posts (maybe) are here and here.

Also, if you have more questions and for some reason I’m the one you want to go to for them, you can drop me a line in email. Some people also choose to ask me things through Facebook, but that requires you to be lucky that a) Facebook will actually forward the note to my email, since I don’t log in if I can possibly avoid it, and b) that I then remember to log in and respond to you. (I just find the user interface completely unusable.)

BUT! Clarion costs thousands of dollars and takes six whole weeks out of your summer. If you don’t have that much time or money, I’d like to recommend another workshop, especially if you happen to be on the west coast, so getting to Portland, OR for a weekend won’t break the bank. (Alternately, since the workshop is only a weekend, you could take a vacation and visit the rugged pacific northwest… or whatever.)

Cascade Writers Workshop is a Thursday-Sunday workshop with classes/talks by various people (including ME!) and Milford-style critiques. That’s the same critique style used at most major workshops, including the Clarions.

The workshop leaders are pretty cool:

Claire Eddy, Tor Editor
Nisi Shawl, Author
Delilah Marvelle, Author
Cameron McClure, Agent
J.A. Pitts, Author
Patrick Swenson, Editor/Author

It’s also reasonably priced, and there are two tiers. So, if you want to do the whole thing, it’s $245. If you just want to go to the talks and don’t want to get critiqued, it’s less.

AND! There are now scholarships available that will fund your registration fee. So that’s pretty awesome.

I’d recommend registering ASAP. Registration is open until June 15, but the deadline to apply for the scholarships is May 15th. Also, I believe that unlike Clarion it is entirely first-come-first-serve, so if it fills up, you’ll be doing the sad waiting list dance.

Anyway! I hope to see some of you this June.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Lackluster update of some variety

2013-02-13T16:57:01Z

So, what’s been going on for the past few months? (Besides Twitter. Twitter is always going on.)

WRITING

Despite classes, general disgruntlement with my abilities, and every procrastination technique known to the modern writer, I finished what I tentatively called “a draft” of my novel. It was the first time I’ve slapped THE FUCKING END on a novel and gave it to other people to read, so I guess it was an achievement of some kind. And just like XBox achievements, it doesn’t really count for much of anything. Oh well!

I had my critique group (Horrific Miscue in Seattle) go over it, and got additional feedback on the beginning. This was illuminating in a “fuck, that thing I thought was a problem but just kind of hoped nobody would notice because I wasn’t sure how to fix it is actually a problem and everybody noticed” sort of way. Due to being busy, etc, I haven’t started pulling teeth redrafting yet, but that’ll happen soon.

Also, there is general disagreement about what genre it is.

I’ve been working on short stories AND keeping track of how much I’m writing, which is why I can sadly sigh and say that writing 5,000 words in about a week feels less useful when you’ve been bouncing between three stories. But, well. Progress. I only mostly hate what I’ve been doing.

That said, I SOLD a short story last month, which was great because I was starting to get that mopey “oh man, I will never write or publish again! I’m just going to be one of those people who goes to cons for years on end and sits on panels but never publishes anything until finally the audience starts wondering why the fuck I’m there!”

Story: “This is a Ghost Story” to Apex. I’m not sure when it’s going to come out, but I’m assuming April or later this year. Probably later than April, since I suspect March/April line-ups already know who they are. BUT I AM JUST WILDLY SPECULATING. I’m excited to have this one out, and also nervous because I have no idea how people are going to react.

EDITING!

I’m still editing for Shimmer. This consists of being the most horribly picky slush reader (which is less a point of pride and more “sorry, I’m just really, REALLY picky”). Now that there are enough numbers for it to matter, about 3% of what comes through my first reads pile goes to the second reads forum. I also do actual editing… though by the time we decide a story all the major edits are taken care of, so it’s mostly copy-editing with the occasional, “WTF are you intending to do with this paragraph, can you clarify this description?”

I always get anxious about it, like the author’s going to get my edits and go, “Wow, these are stupid. STET 4EVA, MOFO!”

We recently put out Issue 16!

ME!
I also moved on the last weekend of 2012, which basically sucked on pretty much every level. We were able to find one person to help, and we moved two apartments in one day. I’m not really sure where my boundless energy for leaping into and out of UHaul trucks came from, but it was probably my impressive fat reserves. Pete (who helped) is basically a saint at this point, in some religion that I just made up where they have saints and I can just declare that someone is one.

I’m still doing science for the time being as a day job, and am slowly reaching the point where I feel vaguely competent with regards to some biological science topics. TA-freaking-DA. I probably should have been a bio major in undergrad instead of physics/linguistics. That said, people do get all O___O at a physics degree, which is nice. Ish. Right now, I’m taking Advanced Human Genetics or something, also known as, “No, seriously, how are we even alive?”

I’m sure there’s other stuff that’s been going on that I’ve missed.

OH. On the subject of the Duotrope thing, there was not enough money for a crowdfunding replacement effort to get off the ground, but there’s now The Submissions Grinder which is a free replacement. Includes data visualization, for people who want to look at a given magazine’s bimodal distribution. Right now is a good time to check it out because it’s still in active development. If there are features you’d like to see, you can suggest it to the site admins.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Catwoman and Wolverine Go To Heaven Which Looks Suspiciously Like 19th Century Paris.

2012-12-26T16:28:20Z

TL;DR version: Les Misérables is okay, I guess. Might be good if you've never seen it on the stage.

Les Misérables was not entirely terrible**, and mostly it rose to about what I expected. I did have a serious moment of doubt about 10 minutes in after Jackman and Crowe sang-talked through a terrible duet and Jackman's "What Have I Done?" kept giving me the impression that he was being reminded to stop overacting and sing a few lines.

Just as Valjean started ripping up his papers, I thought, "This movie is reminiscent of having ground glass poured into my ears and then stirred around with a Q-tip." I also thought, "Nobody else is sitting in this row. I don't even have to stumble over anyone to leave."

But then I thought, "I spent way too much money not to at least snark my way through in my head."

Crowe and Jackman aren't completely terrible once things get going and there are other actors around to buffer the two. But seriously, every time they sang duets, I imagined myself being punched in the face repeatedly, because that was preferable.

Besides my "wah wah the singing" complaints*, almost the entire movie is shot in close-up. It was more like, "Can you hear the disembodied heads sing?" There were so many close-in images of tears wavering on eyelashes. So many! Whoever is in charge of impeccably balancing single tear-drops on eyelashes was working overtime on this movie.

It got to the point where eventually the camera would pan back and I'd be like WTF, SCENERY? I CAN SEE THE SET. IS THIS A DIFFERENT MOVIE WHAT IS GOING ON oh wait, there's Eponine, okay.

I mean, at some point you start wondering if they ran out of money and were like, "Shit, we don't have a backdrop for this scene, quick -- pan in. Farther. Farther. Okay. But don't worry too much about the focus. Good." I mean, at some point if all you're going to show me is GIANT SINGING HEADS I can just go home and listen to the cast recording.

I'm actually trying to think of what the scene settings looked like, and then I remember that I kept being distracted because apparently Les Misérables and Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge took place in the same intersection. There were a few half-hearted attempts to show Notre Dame from the distance while Javert was doing balancing acts on tall buildings, just in case we didn't believe them that it was set in France.

During the showing I went to, a guy in the back fell asleep at some point during the barricade massacre/climbing through shit/Javert doing a Disney villain impression part. So Marius sits down to sing his very tragic and sad "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" and sleeping dude starts to snore. Loudly.

So it was more like:

There's *snort* a grief that can't be *SNRRRRRRRRRRRR*
There's a pain goes on and *SNRRRRRRRRRRR*
Empty chairs at empty t- *SNRRRRRRRRRR*
Now my friends are *SNORT SNORT SNORT* goooone

with expected giggle chorus from the rest of the theater.

The kids they got for young Cosette and Gavroche did a good job, and I liked Hathaway as Fantine and Samantha Barks as Eponine. Cohen and Carter are unsurprisingly good as the Thernardiers. But I kept thinking Crowe and Jackman were doing okay, and then they'd end up in a duet again.

Anyway. It's not terrible... but it's not crying out to be seen in the theater. In fact, on your TV screen, the giant singing heads might be a more manageable size.

* I was mostly okay with all the other singing, although Hathaway's "I Dreamed a Dream" didn't do much for me, possibly because we were in EXTREME CLOSE UP and staring at all the pores in her face for the entirety of the song.

** I was actually expecting it to be not that great, but whatever it is that I love about this particular musical was missing from this movie. Even before the snoring counterpoint later in the movie, I felt almost no emotional connection to what was happening on screen. This is weird for me, I'm the kind of person who will sometimes tear up at a heart-felt and well scored toilet paper commercial.

On a side note, I had to watch every single trailer that they could possibly dredge up to stick before this movie. I think there were like... ten. Of all of them, I'll probably see Gatsby because I tend to enjoy the way Baz Luhrmann inaccurately pretties up historical eras. Also, the trailer for Zero Dark Bullshit made me feel even more ashamed of my country than I typically do. Everything about that movie disgusts me, starting with and especially the fact that it was made at all.

Derpotrope

2012-12-02T18:01:26Z

So Duotrope is going to a paid model, which is not surprising as they’ve been telling people they would go to that model for years if “keep it free” didn’t pay the bills.

The Important Announcement!

So their roll out is just announcement that basically says “thanks for the donations, guys, but now it’s going to cost $5/month!”

Well, or $50/year.

Um…

So on a personal level, I’m not going to cough up that much money. Sorry guys, but just no. For various reasons I’ve just cut my subscriptions to things that cost money by a TON, so adding a new thing was really banking on it being in the $1-$2 a month range (I actually assumed it would be something like $20 a year with an option to pay more).

I think I know where the numbers came from. Previously they’d said that “if every user gave $5 a year” they’d make enough money. Since about 10% of users donated some money at some point, I guess the assumption is that those 10% will now remain users and give $50/year and everyone goes home happy. Or something.

Mostly this has resulted in a wild flurry of free-flung assumptions on Twitter, which is always fun. As usual, we end up in the swamps of doom and confusion and “my financial decisions are more pure than yours” or whatever, which is usually reserved for the conversation about whether or not an e-book should cost $15.

My personal, “What what what!?” response came from a) sticker shock, because $50/year is considerably more than their previously quoted yearly amount, b) because, sadly, the main value for the site for ME comes directly from the submission tracker being free, thus inducing writers to give up their data for free to be crunched and obsessed over, and c) because even assuming the data didn’t degrade in quality, I’m not sure the site subscription would be worth that to me.

Yes, I’m aware that in the dark ages, authors bought Writers Market for $20, and it wasn’t that great. Well, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone suggest paying for market info in the past six or seven years because, uh, we have the internet. This isn’t 1993.

I’ve also seen both the coffee comparison and a cell phone comparison, neither of which make a ton of sense, and both of which primarily exist to shame the other party into feeling bad about what they have or haven’t chosen to spend money on. I mean, yeah, I spend considerably more than $5 a month on my cell phone. I have also indulged in overpriced coffee beverages, both of which give me more enjoyment than paying $5 to have a look at some market listings, most of which I can recite from memory at this point. But mostly, whatever. I don’t have to justify whether or not I have a $5 bill somewhere and whether or not I’d rather go blow it on pinball and hard cider down the street.

Likewise, I know some people for whom the site is worth it, in which case they’ve probably already set up their subscriptions. To whom I may say BUT THAT $5 COULD TOTALLY HAVE BEEN SPENT ON VEGETABLES.

I was being slightly facetious when I suggested on Twitter that a Duotrope Kickstarter (keep it free for one whole year!) would have probably funded and overfunded, at least for the first one. But… the thing is that’s probably true. What would have helped Duotrope would have been to be less terrible at fundraising, which has never been their strong point.

2008-2011, I gave them $10-$20 a year in donations* to keep it free, because they said they wanted $5 and I was like “well, this is for me and 1-3 other people.” The thing is, I have no idea how much that helped. At no point in their years of “if you don’t donate, we’ll have to make this subscription!” have they ever said “you know, it costs us $X a month to run this site.” So that might have been a good start? You know? Instead of “give us some unspecified large amount of money or we’ll never stop nagging you.”

Here’s a cache of the Keep it Free page from about a week ago.**

As far as making most of the site subscription only… Why not do it in a way that isn’t stupid? Like … here’s the subscription tracker, but for free you can only look back at your last month or two months of submissions history — if you subscribe, you can see the full history. Or here’s the submissions tracker, but if you want to see the response times, that costs money.

Since I wrote the majority of this post last night, Duotrope has responded to concerns: I know some of you want specifics on our numbers, our decision process, etc. While we understand your desire to know the inner workings of Duotrope, we are a private company, and our internal data is not public domain.

Oh, okay. They couldn’t tell us how much money they needed us to donate because they’re a private company. That’s cute. It’s a secret as to how much money they needed us to give them to remain free, but we were supposed to just come up with it passively. Now they want to charge us twice as much as the average yearly contribution to donate our data to their super secret company. I guess it’s good to know that they’ve always been coy about how much they actually need in donations on purpose and not just because they’re substandard fundraisers.

But anyway. Duotrope can charge whatever they want for their service, and I’m free to point out that I’m perfectly capable of tracking my submissions in a searchable excel file for free. I’m sad to be losing access to their searchable index, but it’s not worth $50/year to me as I rarely go spelunking for markets and when I do the majority of the new ones I find there are non-paying or token. There are others for whom it may be, and who aren’t annoyed by the company communications. It’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

*I didn’t donate this year because I haven’t had stories out anywhere I didn’t know about and barely visited the site compared to years previously. However, some of the people who did donate (including last month) are annoyed that there’s no acknowledgement of that, no subscription discount for people who just dropped $20+ on them, nothing. Good job. Because the last thing you’d want to do is warm up to the people who have given you money in the past.

**Also, based on a highly informal poll that is biased as all fuck, most people assumed the subscription rate for Duotrope would have been in the $10-$20, which tracks well with the data from the cache of the Keep it Free page, where they give the mean and median average donations as $19 and $10, respectively.

And now I’ve officially spent way too much time talking about this.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

NaNoWriMo: Still not destroying publishing as we know it

2012-11-14T17:20:04Z

This year, the NaNoWriMo haterade has been more delightful than the past few years, much to my overall joy. I’d thought we’d all moved on to “Kindle will ruin the publishing industry, so don’t even bother submitting to agents/editors, kid!” It’s good to see that the classics still exist. (But, to take a quick break from kicking my feet and giggle-snorting)…

Here’s a link to my blog post from five years ago, (old, old post) which was brought on by various amateur (at the time, some may have successfully sold novels and/or short stories since their days of bitterness, in which case hooray for them!) writers talking about their terror that NaNoWriMo was going to produce too much competition for them, thus preventing them from being published.

http://kehrli.livejournal.com/500193.html

(Some parts of that post make me cringe a little, but hey.)

As of last year, the number of participants was about 250,000 and the number of “winning” novels was about 36,000. But 36k is really only the the number of files that had 50,000 words in them that got uploaded to the website, irrespective of quality or actual novel contents. Yeah, that’s a big number, but judging from the people who show up every year, it still consists of a lot of people who heard about this and thought it might be fun, many of whom are teenagers. Most of the people I talk to don’t actually have any publication goals, and are just doing it for the hell of it.

There are two dueling misconceptions at play, I think. The first is the idea that everyone has a novel in them — which N did not start by a long-shot. The second is the idea that putting your time in as a “writer” means anything.

As to the first, long before N was anywhere near as large a thing as it is this year (or last year, or the year before, or five years ago when I wrote that post), I heard people saying that they would write a novel if they only had time. I find ten people who are typing up novels that sound terrible far preferable to one person droning on about what they would write.

As to the second, yes! Working hard for years is how you build up any skills, especially the skills necessary to later create art. But it doesn’t entitle you to anything. If I read two books and I like one more than the other, the amount of time that the two authors spent on their books is meaningless. There will always be someone who shows up with far less experience and does better.

I mean, I have a long and storied history of failing at novels, but I sold the first serious attempt I ever made at a short story to Talebones. I’m certain that there were people who sent stories to Talebones throughout its run and never managed to sell to Patrick. I’m certain that there were people who had been writing short stories since before I’d even learned how to type who hadn’t been able to sell to Patrick. It didn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter. When I read slush at Shimmer and I get the occasional cover letter that says, “I’ve been writing short stories since 1987″ or whatever, my response is never “Oh! This person is DUE, I better buy this story.”

Someone who has been writing for fewer years, who spent less time on their project, and who may have even participated in NaNoWriMo could write a book that gets chosen over yours for any number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with how many years they did or didn’t spend writing it.

Tough shit.

Also, who the hell has time to police who does or doesn’t try to write a novel?

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

On the Occasion of My 10th NaNoVersary

2012-11-08T19:44:41Z

I don’t have much time, but want to blog ON THE DAY damn it, instead of several weeks later when I remember, buried in a post in which I’m trying to do four things at once but fail because I should have been blogging regularly but wasn’t.

Anyway.

I may have actually heard about NaNoWriMo in 2001, but was working on My Grand And Epic Science Fiction Novel That I Had Started At Age 16 In Response To The Fountainhead Being Bullshit. Plus, I thought NaNo sounded stupid, so I didn’t bother.

Regardless, on November 8, 2002, I opened a forum account on the NaNoWriMo forums because some of my friends were doing it (from back in the Elfwood/IRC days, oh my). I wasn’t too excited about it. Actually, I thought it was a terrible idea, and I didn’t want to start anything new anyway, so whatever. I probably TOLD everybody in IRC that NaNoWriMo was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard WHILE I was filling out the account info. I was 18, and it was my freshman year of college, and I was kind of a shit.

(There are people who met me in my late teens/early 20′s and I have no idea why they still acknowledge my existence. Waiting for schadenfreude?)

It’s been ten fucking years, now.

I mean, it’s just this thing that happens one month a year. It’s an event, sure, sometimes little more than a social event. I’ve showed up to meet other people doing NaNo in Bellingham, Helsinki, and Seattle. This year when I stopped at Powell’s during Orycon, I ended up in the middle of a Portland write-in. Every year, I churn out about 50,000 words of shit, usually finishing right at the very last minute so I can get that pixel star or whatever next to my name.

Yeah, none of those books are published. We can argue about whether or not they were ever finished.

I’ve got some short stories, though. And the novel I’m almost-just-so-close-to-done-with now. The thing is, besides being 18 and a disgruntled college student, I was also a procrastinator, and I had no idea how to finish anything.

That novel I mentioned up at the beginning? That I’d started when I was 16? It persisted for a while (even post NaNo, and after I’d started other projects in November). By the time I gave it up, I did have about 40,000-50,000 words of manuscript! Awesome! And I was pretty sure the plot was just… about… to… start. Yeah, so it was kind of a soap opera that was supposed to be science fiction about an active rebellion, but really it was just a lot of people running around and being dramatic at each other. Yet, somehow I had a small fanbase for it even though I would currently title the project, “The Author Desperately Tries To Come Out of the Closet To Himself But Is Persistently Clueless.”

(Actually, that probably explains WHY people sent me folders of fanart…)

In 2003, Cory Skerry and Liz Coleman were doing NaNoWriMo in Bellingham, and they attempted to make contact, but that was during the one time I tried to date someone, and he was pretty much all of my social contact until he dumped me because he found my reluctant blow job unsatisfactory (and I beat him at Risk). Also, I was still working on the terrible novel rather than starting something new, so I still wasn’t too into the whole NaNo culture yet.

But in 2004, I responded to their NaNoLy summons and did something I had not done much at all during my previous two years… I DESCENDED FROM THE CAMPUS ON THE HILL.

The thing is, until I wandered through downtown Bellingham in search of this mythical place named, “The Black Drop,” I was totally and entirely one of those amateurs who is going to finish a story Someday. There was just other shit I needed to do first. Somewhere, there’s an alternate universe in which I’m working a perfectly ordinary job, and getting slowly more and more bitter about how disappointed I am in myself. I mean, more than I am anyway. Like the way I am now, but a thousand times worse. Alternate universe me probably gets paid more, though. Thankfully I was sucked into the weirdo artsy coffeeshop crowd in Bellingham before I turned into someone respectable.

I participate in NaNoWriMo every year and it’s part of my life, but it wasn’t until I sat down and thought about it this morning that I realized just how much it meant to me. Without the relationships I formed through NaNo, I suspect I may never have written short stories, found out I could finish things, had a webcomic, transitioned, gone to Norwescon for the first time, or found out about Clarion. I’d be one of those sad fuckers with a 9 to 5 I hate, a chip on my shoulder, and a sagging pile of overworked mush that I was still calling a novel “in progress” after 12 years.

I see new people show up at write-ins now, people who always wanted to write, but weren’t sure if they could, who aren’t too sure about what this whole nonsense is about and just want something to do in November. Most of them will just have fun and put everything aside for the rest of the year, sure. And there are always plenty of people writing their fanfiction opuses for themselves and their friends.

Still, when I see people joining for the first time, I wonder if what they’re about to start is a novel or something much more profound.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Still alive, politics, whatever

2012-11-07T18:08:40Z

Cool, so wordpress's crossposting thing isn't broken anymore. Of course, after all that, I'm not even crossposting. HAHA!

As far as stuff going on: I've not had a lot of short stories out lately (read: any) because I'd mostly stopped writing them. The reasons for this are mostly that I've been busy trying to write a novel that I can let someone else read without wanting to slam my head in the front door a few times afterward. I'll get there, especially since I've told my writing group that I'm going to give it to them for critique by the end of this month. As it has been for forever, I think the first half is pretty good, but the second half keeps getting mired in self-doubt and nonsense.

Also regarding the lack of short stories: I couldn't think of anything to write that wasn't substantially better than what I was seeing in the slush pile. Pointing this out to friends just results in someone suggesting, "maybe you should be an editor instead of a writer" to which I say INSTEAD OF!? But I feel particularly sore about my lack of good output, and a bit like screaming every time I hear yet another "writers write!" statement.

Orycon was okay. I felt a bit like I only barely flew by it, somehow, despite the fact that I was there for 2/3 of it. Lots of people there who I barely saw, and we did the "will you be at X future event" dance, which was depressing because for me the answer was mostly that I wouldn't.

The election last night ended up taking far more of my attention than I intended because I ended up having a bus ride from hell and then being surrounded by chirpy happy people who seemed surprised and pleased that Obama had won Washington (!?). Well, no shit.

The marijuana initiative seems to have passed, legalizing recreational pot use. I'll be interested to see how that plays with federal laws, if it does at all. It will be nice to have actual medical use separated from "sure it's medical, teehee" use.

We're probably going to get same-sex marriage, AGAIN, so that's good. Can we just go with it now? Can it just be over? That'd be great. Also, dear fellow queers, what is up with the HRC equals sign? I had no idea what the hell it was and just assumed it was something from Ikea due to the colors. LOOK, I LIVE IN SEATTLE. ASSUMING THAT PEOPLE AROUND HERE WOULD PUT IKEA STICKERS ON THEIR HYBRID VEHICLES SEEMS HIGHLY REASONABLE, OKAY.

Kshama Sawant (Socialist Alternative party, http://votesawant.org/issues/) ended up with 27% of the votes in my legislative district (running for state house of reps). I'd also voted for her in the primary, but she only came out of that with about 10%. The gain against a Democratic incumbent who has been in the house since 1995 and is currently the speaker is huge, and it'll be interesting to see what she does next.

Also, Puerto Rico! 51 states! SCREW WITH THE FLAG DESIGN YESSSSS CONFUSE EVERYTHING.

Regarding Chicon 7:

2012-09-12T17:26:02Z

Unsurprisingly, the ~~Omelascon~~ Chicon committee* has chosen to close ranks and deny recent harassment reports.

This, of course, after their Social Media Coordinator wrote two "Rage Posts" that essentially stated "We're good people, therefore she's lying," and accused Kate of getting her story wrong, despite the fact that Kate's story has been consistent and Meg seems to have repeatedly misunderstood Kate's tweets.

There is something I would like to point out (regarding the Chicon committee claiming that Kate is a terrible volunteer) in the form of a screen-captured tweet:

So... there's an organization in which at least one (if not more, I've been disappointed so often on this subject lately that very little would surprise me), of the coordinators believes that screaming at volunteers regarding their performance is a good idea.

You know what? No. It really fucking isn't. If you find that screaming at volunteers is necessary to increase performance, there IS a problem, and it's not your volunteers.

EVEN IF Kate was not doing her work properly/on-time/whatever, EVEN IF she was slated for firing for that job performance**, SCREAMING AT AND PHYSICALLY THREATENING HER over her job performance is still not acceptable and whoever did that should have been fired. Period.

As far as why other people on the committee may not have heard about it? Was there an established way for volunteers to report harassment and threatening behavior? Were all volunteers made aware of the proper way to report harassment and threatening behavior? Were volunteers always able to report harassment and threatening behavior to people other than the ones who harassed them in the first place?

And why should anybody believe that this committee is safe to report harassment and threatening behavior to, when the only official response is to publicly trash the victim?

When I was tweeting my disappointment in Chicon last week, I got a bit of the old line about how if people want to change things they should volunteer, etc. Considering what I'm seeing about how people who apparently hold important positions treat their volunteers, why in the world would I?

I understand that some of this comes from "Oh no, I didn't know about this, and I was part of this committee and fuck, I look bad." This is true. But the reason you look bad is not the people pointing out that This Is Wrong, but rather whoever in the organization thinks that the way the issue is being handled is appropriate.

I did not attend Chicon, but I was at the Montreal and Reno Worldcons and so far intend on going to Lonestarcon. I've had a really good time at Worldcons but not everybody can say the same. Unfortunately, some of that has to do with situations being horribly mishandled by convention staff. The proper response is to Fix the Problems, people. I don't want us to never have Worldcons. I'm with N.K. Jemisin on this one. I want people to have fun. I want to have fun. I want to have some measure of confidence that while I'm hanging out and drinking ridiculous drinks at the bar with my Clarion classmates, the volunteers who put the convention on aren't being threatened by their bosses, and people aren't being harassed by people who feel entitled to sex. Or, barring that, feel confident that if the situation comes up, it will be dealt with appropriately.

Worldcon costs well over $200 just to get in the door, and people who want to vote on the Hugo awards (SF's most prestigious blah blah blah whatever) have to either attend or pay $50 for the privilege of doing so. What I'm asking myself is "Do I feel comfortable paying so much money towards an organization that shows very little concern for volunteer safety?"

*Or whoever the Chicon committee is putting in charge of updating that site. Which, you know. If you are part of a group and are being misrepresented, maybe do something about it. There are people involved in Chicon who I am particularly fond of, which is one reason why this frustrates me so much. Because it's hard to say who is doing what (and the recent news item about Kate is attributed to Chicon), so I am left speaking about the convention in general.

**Yet, strangely, in a situation where she is not being harassed and physically threatened by one person and sexually harassed by another, she produces good work. Work that was apparently good enough for Chicon to use.

See also: this.

EDIT: I've locked comments because I'm done here. Though it's possible I might reopen them in the future, at the moment I'm tired of getting depressing comment emails. I'm not deleting any of it, though.

A little less than 6 hours to go…

2012-08-04T18:37:35Z

Four years ago today(ish), I had to pack up all my stuff, try to cram 6 weeks of belongings and books into my single suitcase, and catch a flight back to Bellingham. Even though it was horrifyingly sunny the whole six weeks (which just seems unnatural to me), I miss San Diego. Well. Okay, I mostly miss the people. Even though today is the sad leaving day, I hope this year’s class had a great 6 weeks. I hope they learned as much as they could and that they’ll stay in touch with each other. Endings are hard.

Anyway, the Clarion UCSD Write-a-Thon has a little less than 6 hours to meet its fundraising goal! Which means I have a little less than 6 hours to finish my last story. Phew.

And, I’m still offering to send books to people who sponsor me for $10 or more.

To donate to Clarion, you can visit my page, or the main page.

HUGE thanks to everyone who has sponsored or participated this year!

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Yet Another Write-a-Thon Update

2012-07-25T19:11:42Z

Hey!

So, I finally finished a second short story draft, with what… a week and a half to go?

(No, you can’t read it yet, it’s terrible. No, you don’t want to, trust me.)

Basically, if I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to have to suck it up and finish drafts of all these miserable and abandoned stories — and do that WHILE taking the first two weeks of a super-condensed organic chemistry class.

Yes, because pacing myself was apparently too difficult of a concept. Whoops! But, I’m still going to make it, because a) it’s for Clarion and b) at this point, I’m so fucking tired of having no finished fiction that I don’t even care if these are terrible. I DO NOT CARE. That’s what rewrites are for!

ANYWAY. Besides the update, I have a reward for people who have donated!

If you have sponsored or pledged ~~$15~~ $10 or more to my write-a-thon drive (or if you choose to do so before August 5) I will mail you a signed perfect bound dead-tree edition of the PDF I made last year. It contains four of my short stories: Advertising at the End of the World, Machine Washable, Bone Dice, and Daha’s Son. And illustrations! The PDF copy is available online, but I don’t sell the print version, so this is going to be a veeeery limited print run.

I’m on the wrong computer right now, so I can’t find the cover image complete with terrible font choice, so here’s the full image I used for the cover (I drew it in December 2010.)

And, either way, here’s the PDF (I kept forgetting to put it back up after I switched my site around:

four-stories

Thanks, everybody!

ETA: If you already sponsored for $10 or more, I’ll be in touch with you on August 5 or 6. Also, if you don’t want another book (I totally understand), then I won’t send you anything.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

ARGH baseball ARGH

2012-07-24T04:41:22Z

I get home to find out that the Mariners traded MY FAVORITE PLAYER. TO THE YANKEES. FOR SOME IMAGINARY PITCHERS.

BECAUSE APPARENTLY THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND
THAT ALL PITCHERS
IMMEDIATELY START TO SUCK
UPON REACHING SEATTLE
SERIOUSLY WHY NOT JUST COME TO MY APARTMENT
AND PUNCH ME IN THE FACE.

BUT MOSTLY.

TO THE YANKEES!

FFFFFFFFFF THEY TAKE EVERYTHING I LOVE FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU

(okay, yes, so he's 38, which is like 97 in baseball years, but still. baseball emotions, i have them.)

AUTHOR WEBSITES

2012-07-18T00:47:17Z

I still sometimes see people asking questions about author websites. Do I need one? What do I put on it? Who should I pay for it? Do I really need to blog? Do I need to social network facespacepintwitlr? Blah blah blah.

Okay, first, the obligatory HA HA, why would anybody take website information from a site as ugly as this one? (I don’t know.)

There are roughly a million billion sites that will tell you stupid minutiae about what your website should look like, and how to blog, and whatever. 99% of all that shit is optional. I won’t say that nobody cares about that stuff, but it’s not essential. I’m not saying that more advanced/complicated questions aren’t good. But sometimes I see websites that are full of all sorts of fancy bullshit but not the basics.

I don’t care how pretty your design is. Your website exists to tell people who you are and what you write. If it doesn’t do that, fix it.

You need:

a website
with your name on it
and a way to contact you
and a list of your published fiction (if you have any).

Website!

It does not have to be a fancy website. You can go to WordPress.com or blogspot, or even LiveJournal if you are feeling nostalgic for 2003. Try not to make your site look like it was designed in 1996. If you don’t know what means, just choose something like WordPress and use one of the free themes. It’s sufficient.

Name!

It does not need to be your legal name. It needs to be the name that you put (or intend to put) on your fiction. Recently, I went to an author’s site to try and figure out who the author was, since their Twitter account didn’t have their name attached. I had to dig through several pages of the site until I finally found a jpeg file of a book cover with the author’s byline. Their name was not on the main page, in the header, in their bio, or on the “about this blog” page.

Don’t do that. Make sure it’s visible on the main page of your site.

Contact!

Shit happens. Especially in slush piles. Your email provider can decide that the magazine you’ve submitted to is spam. You might fuck up and send a submission with no contact information. I don’t know. Name anything that could possibly go wrong when submitting a story. It’s happened.

Editors become very, very sad if they read a story, want to buy it, and can’t get into contact with the author. No, if you somehow forget contact info, good editors are not going to automatically reject the story. Why? Because if it’s worth publishing, it’s worth the (admittedly annoying) task of typing the author’s name into Google and sending an email.

It can also result in awesome stuff falling in your lap. Example: a few weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from an independent film producer who wanted to give me money and make a short film based on one of my stories. So that’s cool. I felt all validated about making myself easy to contact.

Bibliography!

List things you’ve had published (or published yourself). Link to everything that’s online. If I find one of your ancient stories in a back issue of a magazine, make it easy for me to find something more recent to read.

Okay? Okay. Everything else is optional, so stop freaking out about how some person is claiming that you ABSOLUTELY NEED an account in the current trendy social media site.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

One down… five to go?

2012-07-13T00:26:34Z

AGH. I somehow always manage to forget that summer = BUSY. Usually this is because everything that I’ve promised to be involved with happens in the summer. You would think that I’d figure this pattern out at some point, but no.

So, what is up with the Write-a-Thon? I’ve written every day (although I missed clicking the button once or twice, oops). And, though I’m woefully behind, I have finally finished A Draft of A Short Story that turned out to be not so entirely Short — and really I would have been better off if I’d just said HAY GUYS IT IS NOVELLA.

Except, I didn’t, and instead I spent the time trying to cram a great big huge story down to a short story length. In the end, I have 6,666 words (yes, that many exactly) of a draft-nobody-else-gets-to-read. This is, incidentally, why I didn’t write a bunch of updates. I kept getting embarrassed after the end of week one that I hadn’t finished a short story yet.

But now I have! Even though I had real writer’s block as opposed to my usual problem, which is that I’m moping because I intensely dislike everything I write. I fixed that by writing on the Link light rail which is a surprisingly good place for me to write. I would do that every evening, but I’m worried the light rail people will freak out if I go to the airport and back for no reason except that I want to sit on the train.

So far I’ve raised $124 and I have $132 in pledges (which means I need to write faster.)

The little bar is turning GREEEEEEN.

This story is going to need a lot more work before I can send it out, sadly, if I get that far. But, the path to publication is littered with the eviscerated bodies of failed projects, so whatever.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Important Poll.

2012-07-04T07:36:21Z

View Poll: #1851436

The Clarion UCSD Write-a-What Now?

2012-06-21T20:46:36Z

This was going to be some super long exciting post in which I talked about how much going to Clarion meant to me, etc. However, almost all of those posts read pretty much the same, and I’ve made a bunch in the past. Almost all of which are somewhere on my LiveJournal account because I didn’t bother reposting any of my stuff here. Because, come on! It’s the internet! It’s a series of links!

(And if you’re reading this from LiveJournal, I still love you! I even check my friend’s list. I’m just enjoying the WordPress ability to schedule posts.)

Anyway!

I am doing the Clarion UCSD Write-a-Thon. Which is great for me, because it doesn’t officially start until Sunday. I would already be muttering profanity under my breath if I was doing the Clarion West Write-a-Thon since it started last week, and I have done nothing.

The Write-a-Thon is pretty much what it sounds like (and since I’ve tweeted about it once or twice, I suspect everyone I know has already heard about it — but that has never stopped me from posting about something before). As a fundraiser for Clarion, I’m writing stuff and convincing people to donate to keep the workshop going.

Links:

Clarion Write-a-Thon

Clarion West Write-a-Thon

Incidentally, I have an intense and unreasonable dislike for the word “Write-a-Thon.” I mean, the event is awesome, but I always stare at the word. Capitalization varies. Write-A-Thon, Write-a-Thon, Write-a-thon, write-a-thon. …Yeah.

So, between June 24 and August 4, my goal is to write six short stories, since I currently don’t have any to send out.

You know what is the saddest feeling as a writer? When editors are like, “HEY, so… I have this magazine that pays pro rates, and you aren’t in my slush! You should send me something!” But you’re me, and so you’re like, “Yes! I will do this!” And then you remember that not only do you have no new, fresh, awesome stories, but even the trunk is empty because you were afraid that one day in a moment of weakness you’d send them out. So you pressed the giant DELETE FROM THE UNIVERSE button. But even knowing that those stories should never have seen the light of day doesn’t end the sad, sad, writer feelings.

My Write-a-Thon page is here. The photo was taken in the Bellingham Airport just before I got on the plane to go to Clarion San Diego in June 2008. I had no idea what I was in for. Heh heh heh. /huttlaugh

There are two options for donations this year. First option is a straight up sponsor, which is a donation to Clarion UCSD. The other option is a pledge. As of right now, I have a little bit over $100 in pledges. This means that so far, for every short story I finish during the Write-a-Thon, Clarion will get another $18. The higher the pledge amount the more terrified I will be of failure the more incentive I have to succeed!

If you’d like to participate, you can still sign up for the Clarion UCSD Write-a-Thon until June 24.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

Some advice for people heading to Clarion:

2012-06-12T19:11:17Z

At Wiscon, I was on a panel about workshops that was utterly remarkable in that the audience primarily consisted of people who hadn’t been to major SF workshops yet. This was a pleasant surprise, since usually when I’m on a Clarion and/or workshop panel at a con, I show up to discover that almost all of the audience has already gone to Clarion. I mean, at that point, we might as well just have a pan-Clarion bar meet-up. One person was an incoming Clarion West student, though, and she told me that one of the things I’d said on the panel was helpful. So, I’m fighting down my natural urge to go, “ADVICE BLOG POST? BLEEEEECH” and writing this.

When you’re at Clarion for six weeks, you’re supposed to write six short stories, one for each week. These stories will then be critiqued by your classmates and instructor.

You should write stories that require you to use techniques you’re unfamiliar with, in genres that you don’t typically touch, with themes and characters you’ve never considered writing about before. Stretch yourself. Challenge yourself. Learn some shit. Blah, blah blah.

Everyone says that.

Okay, so here’s the important part: Do not write these stories with the intent to publish them later. They should still be complete stories, obviously. It needs to be enough of a draft that it can be critiqued. But your goal for these six weeks is to learn how to write better stories, not to sell these six. I mean, if all you want is six weeks off of work to write short stories for publication and send those off? Shit, you can do that at home.

I’m not saying you can’t or won’t be able to sell those stories, just that you have every other moment outside of these six weeks to sit down thinking, “AND NOW I WILL WRITE AN AWESOME STORY FOR BLAH MAGAZINE.”

So… when I was at Clarion, I had not written very many stories. In fact, I had only written three short stories at that point (one of which was The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived, one of my application stories). Writing a whole SIX short stories in a six week period was going to be a huge stretch for me. I thought, well, at least I’ll have six more stories to sell later!

Sigh.

So. I did end up selling my first three stories. Two of them went out the door with fairly minor rewrites, one of them is completely unrecognizable from its original form. Which is good! Because the original draft sucked.

But weeks four, five, and six were pretty much unmitigated disasters. These aren’t even in the category of “Oh, I’ll just rewrite them,” because the shit goes all the way down to the premise. I got super stressed out while writing them which is why they were all written between noon and 3pm of the day that I needed to turn in my drafts (by 3!). I hated writing them. I hated that I knew they weren’t going to sell while I wrote them. I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it anyway. I mean, I could have just gone downstairs and taken pot-shots at Hugo Award Winning Authors with a water pistol. Or pick through the giant wad of glued-together action figures that Grá found in a dumpster. Or go to the beach and wonder if it was the nude beach, and if it’s a horrible faux pas to be at a nude beach with pants on.

I turned the stories in, and I did learn some stuff from the critiques… but mostly I shot myself in the foot. I felt like crap because I knew that they weren’t going to sell, so no matter what the crits said, I couldn’t turn them around. So why bother. (Eeyore moment.)

AND. WORSE.

I knew that other people, better people, amazing people, had written award winning stories at Clarion! Because those stories were in the archives! And someone from my class had looked them up! So I knew that it was possible! But my stories weren’t that good yet. So, obviously, I had failed at some imaginary Clarion … measure. And by imaginary, I mean really super imaginary, as in, probably only in my head.

AND. WORSE.

You’d think that I’d have figured out that this was an unhealthy way to look at my Clarion experience as of, oh, August 2008. But no. It kind of dragged along behind me for a few years like a string out of a cat’s butthole. That part probably won’t apply to you unless you’re similarly neurotic (or a cat). But I felt for a long time like those unmitigated disasters from weeks 4-6 were proof that I’d wasted at least half of my Clarion experience, and someone else would have been a better choice for my spot.

Phf. I learned plenty from those stories. Like, how to not write something that sucks the same way again.

But, my point isn’t that you can’t write salable stories at Clarion, or that you should write crap on purpose. I’m just saying, if you get stressed out, remember that you’re ONLY writing for the workshop and to learn some shit. It’s okay. Just write some stories, try some things. Worry about your Duotrope stats when you get home.

At least that way if your Clarion stories suck, they’ll suck in new and interesting ways.

(This is one of the blog posts I’m writing as part of my participation in the 2012 Clarion UCSD Write-A-Thon.)

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

I understand about the scissors.

2012-06-05T17:01:36Z

If you follow me on Twitter or pay attention to news about trans people, you’ve probably heard about CeCe McDonald.

If not, go read this: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/cece-mcdonald-transgender-hate-crime-murder and this: http://supportcece.wordpress.com/ and this: http://stuffqueerpeopleneedtoknow.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/updates-on-the-cece-mcdonald-case/. There’s more, but I’m going to trust your Google abilities.

Last month, CeCe took a plea bargain (manslaughter) rather than going to trial for murder, and yesterday she was sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $6,000 in restitution. There is a lot fucked up about the situation. A lot. Including the fact that since she is incarcerated, the state of Minnesota will make its own determination of her gender to decide where to imprison her.

Everett Maroon quoted the judge in his most recent blog post on the subject: In his words to Ms. McDonald at her plea bargain, Judge Daniel Moreno stated that in introducing scissors into the altercation–which was not the first weapon brought into play, as she’d already been lacerated with a broken beer mug–“You realize. . . you endangered other lives.”

Other lives. Yes. Because as long as it was only her life being endangered, that was acceptable. Because, hey, she was trans and black and that made some drunken assholes angry, and we all know how that’s supposed to end.

===

Let me tell you a story.

This was either early last year, or late 2010. I could probably figure out the exact date, but I’d have to dig through Twitter and I don’t feel much like it since I have more than 14,000 tweets. (Holy shit.) I’d been on testosterone for about a year at the time, but I still did (and still do) go to work female. If you’re curious, it’s because even though I bind my breasts for cons and other pro SF things it hurts and I can’t do it every day.

One night, this entitled, somewhat off-kilter asshole was aggressively hitting on three Asian, female, college students in the back of the bus. They were giving him every indication that they were so very uninterested, but he didn’t care. I would have said something sooner, but nobody had an escape route while the bus was moving and I am a Seattle-ite to my deep and rotten core. Direct confrontation? Oh, shit no.

When we got to the Northgate Transit Center, he tried to give one of the women his phone number, which she refused. The entitled asshole then turned to me.

“How do you like that? I talk to her the WHOLE RIDE and then she says she doesn’t want my number! What do you think of that?”

So, I admit that my next move was not incredibly smart. In fact, with my 20-20 hindsight, it was pretty fucking stupid. What did I do? I answered his question honestly. I told him that he’d been harassing those women. See… before transitioning I’d always been the unattractive girl. Unattractive cis girl. The type of unattractive that gave me the magical cloaking power of Straight Guys Don’t Want To Fuck Me, So As Far As They’re Concerned I Don’t Exist.

Except that testosterone had given me a more masculine face and my voice had already dropped. I’d just stepped onto the curb when the entitled asshole noticed.

“ACTUALLY, FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING TRANNY MAN-WHORE.”

I crossed the bus lanes to the sidewalk, and I didn’t look back until I had some distance between us. He was still cussing. Cussing and explaining what I “deserved.” He hurried to get in front of me and head me off at the crosswalk that was between me and my car. Then he stopped there and stared at me.

And I thought:

This is it. The odds finally tipped against me. After a lifetime of being lucky, I’m going to die in a mall parking lot.

It felt like everything I’d ever wanted for myself was collapsing down into a number. Trans person #whatever dead for the year. Another name for someone to read the next November 20th. I wondered if he had a weapon on him.

I wondered if I had anything on me that could possibly be used as a weapon. The only thing I knew was that if he came after me, I was going to fight back. Because here’s the thing: when people attack trans people, especially trans women, I have absolutely no reason to believe that they’re not aiming to kill. Because I’ve read the stories. Because I’ve seen the numbers. And right then, it didn’t matter who or what I was, he thought I was trans female.

But I was lucky, and this particular asshole decided that verbal abuse was enough for the evening. I got in my car and locked my doors and watched all the entrances to that floor of the parking garage until I stopped shaking enough that I could drive home.

I was lucky.

But if I’d had scissors or a knife on me and that guy had attacked me? I wouldn’t have hesitated to defend myself. There’s no question.

And here’s the other thing — from the moment this started, the fact that I’m white provided protection. On the bus, I didn’t look “exotic” to this guy, so he didn’t harass me. Afterward, when we were off the bus, it may have factored into his decision to leave me alone after all. And if shit had gone down, it would have made it that much more likely that people would believe me that I acted in self-defense.

So that’s some of what I think about when I hear about CeCe.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

I’m not afraid of heights

2012-05-22T14:16:38Z

I’m not afraid of heights.

Not really.

But.

Sometimes I get nervous when I’m standing next to cliffs, or on the roofs of buildings, or near windows, or on tall rocks, or after I’ve climbed onto the shoulders of a very tall person.

Not because I think I’m going to fall (except if it’s a very fidgety tall person), but because some part of me, some little itsy-bitsy, very unscientific, very not-so-good at self-preservation part of me still doesn’t quite believe that I can’t fly.

And that itsy-bitsy, very unscientific, very not-so-good at self-preservation part of me remembers being a kid and climbing up onto my dresser, and imagining really hard what it would feel like to go flying down the hall and out the door and past the dog and over the fish ponds and the creek and EVEN over the hill and the race car track. Maybe even to Australia.

And that itsy-bitsy, very unscientific, very not-so-good at self-preservation part of me suspects, even though this is obviously not true, that the biggest reason I never actually managed to completely destroy the rules of physics was that I always put pillows on the floor for my inevitable fall. So of course I landed on them.

But I’m not really afraid of heights. I’m afraid of my lack of fear of heights and that that temptation to launch myself out into space will eventually just be too strong, but then on the other hand WHEN I’M DIVE-BOMBING PIGEONS I’LL BE THE ONE LAUGHING, ASSHOLES.

…

I think if you pretend that this is an extended metaphor for art or something, I sound less alarmingly unhinged.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.

My Wiscon 36 Schedule

2012-05-09T18:02:10Z

This is my schedule for the upcoming Wiscon 36, taking place in TA-FREAKING-DA Madison, Wisconsin, May 25-28.

My programming doesn’t start until Saturday because my plane doesn’t get in until 5pm on Friday. Why am I missing almost the entire first day of Wiscon? I’m going to go see THE WALL again with my father the night before (Thursday). Yes, I have seen it before. Yes, I’m going to see it again. YOU CAN’T STOP ME.

Schedule:

Intersectionalism: It’s Not the Oppression Olympics Sat, 4:00–5:15 pm
Ian K. Hagemann (moderator), Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Beth Plutchak, Julia Rios, and Vanessa Vega
Many of us experience discrimination and oppression of many kinds, often concurrently. Blah blah solidarity blah blah. (Instead of introducing myself, I might instead engage in a well-meaning but probably stupid critique of the term “Oppression Olympics,” much to the excitement of all.)

Intersectionality in the Writing Workshop Environment Sat, 9:00–10:15 pm
Vylar Kaftan (moderator), Keffy R. M. Kehrli, and Ibi Zoboi
Intensive writing workshops can be incredible life-changing experiences. But what’s it like to attend them as a writer of color, a woman, a trans person, a queer person? Etc. (This is one of those where I was like OH HEY, I WAS GAY AT A WORKSHOP when I did the initial sign-ups, and now I’m like, oh, crap, can I talk about that for a whole hour?)

Outer Alliance: New Writings in LGBTQ SF/F/H Sat, 10:30–11:45 pm
Julie Andrews, Therese Arkenberg, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Catherine Lundoff, and Julia Rios
Readings from recent work featuring LGBTQ protagonists and themes. Outer Alliance is an organization created to combat homophobia in SF/F and to be awesome.(YOU’RE COMING TO OUR READING RIGHT? RIGHT?)

“But it’s not for girls!” Sun, 10:00–11:15 am
Caroline Pruett (moderator), Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Pat Murphy, Katherine Olson/Kayjayoh, and Jessica Plummer
Legitimate complaints about sexism in comics, video games, and other geeky media are often dismissed with the argument that they aren’t “for” women and girls—and since women don’t buy comic books and/or video games as much as men, they have no right to complain. (My presence on this panel should help to further confuse various con attendees as to what, exactly, my gender is or isn’t. I admit that I’m mostly showing up to mock the trend of needing to protect the sacred ballsacks of men everywhere by prefixing all words with MAN when it’s a dude using the item in question. It’s not a den, it’s a MANcave. Etc.)

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer & Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction Book-Party Sun, 8:45 pm–Mon, 3:00 am
Keyan Bowes, Brit Mandelo, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Ellen Kushner, and Delia Sherman.
This release party for the anthology Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction will include readings by contributors, plus tea and cookies. (It’s a party! PARTY.)

The SignOut (scheduled) Mon, 11:30 am–12:45 pm Capitol/Wisconsin
Includes a whole ton of other people, many of whom actually have published novels or collections, unlike me!

ALL OTHER TIMES: Shenanigans.

Originally published at Everything I do is SO fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes.. You can comment here or there.