labingi

I've been so remiss with DW. It's due to being overwhelmed with real-life work. But here's a brief rundown on stuff.

Been Watching...
Star Trek: Discovery and wish I had time to do a post, and may make time. I both enjoy it and don't really like it. Yet we're paying to watch it, and may even pay if it gets a season 3.

Game of Thrones: Three episodes in and I'm enjoying this season more than the last. Still not what it was, but much more engaging than S7. I'm glad it's back for a little longer.

Sapphire and Steel (rewatch): My partner has never seen it before, so that's fun. I had forgotten how much I love this sort of X-Files precursor show. My mom once described it as "soporific" and I think that's kind of fair, but I love sitting back and watching it go through its very slow paces, a bit like 2001 (only in the sense of pacing). The titular leads are the heart of the show and so great.

Russian Doll: Partner had to cajole me into this one, because I'm a stick-in-the-mud and tend to be unenthusiastic about new stuff, but this is an amazing show! The nearest comparison I can make in terms of "genre" is The Prisoner. Their metaphors, societies, and mise en scène are very different, but I think their underlying psychological purpose is kind of the same.

Been Reading...
Tons of stuff for the science fiction class I'm teaching.

The Left Hand of Darkness umteenth reread: I still love this book; it will always be one of my favorites, but doubtless informed by the paper I'm writing on Le Guin for a conference, I keep seeing the white privilege, which is interesting--never saw it before. I'm also noticing its age more (of course, it keeps getting older). Also noticing the craft more, including bits that feel rather heavy handed. Still love it though. Still a work of genius. Still needs to be made into a TV series, which they keep threatening to and then not.

Short stories: highlights include...( Read more... )

I am saddened by the passing of Ursula Le Guin. It was her time. She was almost ninety and lived an amazing life, contributing immensely, but the world is poorer without her.

Of all my literary idols, she was the only one who wrote in my native language whose life overlapped with mine. Of them all from any language, she was the only one I've ever had the privilege of meeting—once, briefly, at a workshop. I saw her again when she presented at the 2007 ASLE Conference at the University of Oregon. I treasure both memories. I wrote her twice. She answered both letters, though I don't think, across almost twenty years, she remembered me from the first time. She said she would read my book (The Hour before Morning) if she got to it on her giant pile of books. I don't think she ever got to it. For the past couple of years, I have been accustoming myself to the idea of her passing, that I'd missed my chance to ever speak to her beyond that brief workshop intro. It's okay.

What she gave us is more than we could ever ask. It is enough. I'll miss her, but she's still here with me. But I'll miss her.

I've been in a writing slump the past 2-3 weeks--and it has less to do with intrinsic interest in writing than just overwhelm and tiredness in life, especially getting toward the end of the teaching term. Around last week, I decided to try something novel and just rest up when I'm not having to watch my kids or do my day job. I took a nap. I have been reading more. It's lovely.

And yet, though I haven't been writing much, my muse started talking to me this morning, and I got down some good notes on a novel I'm not actively working on right now. It's the prequel to the novel I finished a draft of last year, The Sins of the Mind Readers. My mom finally finished reading said draft and remarked to me that "it's not entirely successful." And you know when your mom thinks your work is not entirely successful, you'd better pay attention. Thing about Sins is it may never be successful. It's a big, ambitious look at the human heart in a sort of literary fiction vein but as science fiction, which is a weird line to cross. However, the one thing I can do to greatly improve it is write the damn prequel because at least 65% of what's tripping everybody up is that they can't understand the plot and too many characters are "off stage," and that's because it's really a sequel to another story.

So I need to write the prequel--and I had some cool revelations about it today. This story--I'll call it Ghanior's story for the main character because I don't have a good title yet--is one I started at 16, and it suffers from some teenage assumptions. For one thing, I sort of assumed that my main character would just be able to leave his home planet and take extremely powerful technology to another nation and no one would really stop him because, hey, he's not a slave. It has been dawning on me in revisiting this story that he couldn't get offworld without breaking major, major laws--hard-won laws that go back to the end of my first novel, Perdita. He would be in so much freaking trouble. So my main revelation is what to do about this, and I had an idea I think is reasonably clever to actually open this book with maybe 50 pages on these machinations, basically becoming a plot between protagonist Ghanior and a few others to get him illegally off-planet with this tech. I think it will not only answer the logical problems but be pretty good, tense storytelling if I do it right. It also fits pretty well with Ghanior's overall character trajectory. He pops up in Sins about 40 years later and really has a history of playing fast and loose with law, so this would be a good genesis for that characteristic.

So I'm feeling pretty good despite little writing happening. I did revise my short story "Oxymorons" for my writers group. It's one of my only things not set in my Continuation universe. It's a fairly near future, climate change story set on the moon.

With the heightened visibility of fan fiction in recent years, conceptions of what constitutes professional-caliber fiction have been in flux, and derviative fiction (based on pre-existing works) has been slowly regaining legitimacy. I want to share my new enthusiasm for the richer, truer world that opens up for all participants in narrative when we accept the artistic legitimacy of retelling stories.

The Copyright Model

Our culture's dominant view of what constitutes quality narrative still draws its lines based on copyright. Under this model, professional writers write “original fiction”; i.e. works dissimilar enough from preexisting copyrighted works that the writer (or publisher) can claim copyright over them. Published writers who extrapolate stories in public domain are sometimes highly respected but sometimes placed on a lower tier than "original" writers. At a lower status, but still professionals, are authorized writers of works within others' copyrighted universes, such as official tie-in novels. Low status and traditionally derided are fan fiction writers, who write unauthorized derivative works.

The dividing line for professionalism in this model is how much the writer gets paid. Original and authorized authors make money through traditional publishing (and, more rarely, self-publishing); unauthorized fan fic writers are legally barred from profiting on copyrighted works. ( Read more... )

I'm quite happy with the way this one is shaping up!

On Slashing Enjolras

I keep updating this on AO3, so let me just direct you there.

Would you be interested in posting a brief Amazon.com review of either of my two novels, Perdita--an ecological sci fi story with a fairly traditional sociological/action/some romance plot--and The Hour before Morning, a shorter, more philosophical novel about colonial oppression and personal redemption?

I'm trying to gather enough reviews for a listing in Digital Book Today (18-20 reviews).

I'd be glad to send PDF review copies of either or both to anyone who's interested. Reviews can be really short; I'm basically just counting numbers of reviews.

Perdita teaser:

For a long while, Ethan sat on his cushion at the terminal, staring at the frequency dial without seeing it. If only he could get rid of the prisoner. She won’t give us anything. I’ve seen that wild look in her eyes; she’s even worse than some of the others....

And he didn’t want to have to hurt her. But the job was his; he’d have to do it. How could he convince her to speak honestly and speedily? Duress would not work well. Persuasion might work slightly less badly.

The Hour before Morning teaser:

But Elek didn't want to kill Jenchae. All at once, he felt old and strained and wanted to sleep. Recently, he started to picture himself just clinging to an outcropping of rock in the face of a sandstorm, expecting every moment to be torn into the wind. And the wind was in him, and if it didn't die soon, it would tear him to shreds. He wondered if Jenchae could make the wind die -- just for these last days.

Rieko Yoshihara on Ai no Kusabi, Volume 7:

"From here onwards (laughter), it will be all original content…. Well, according to the schedule, it wasn't supposed to be this long. Once I started on it I couldn't stop (laughter)…" (127).

I couldn't come up with a better expression of loss of authorial distance if I tried. Honestly, as an Ai no Kusabi fan, it makes me kind of angry. Because AnK used to be a good story. For all its execrable prose and cheap porn, it justly earned its place as one of the most famous and lauded BL works of all time.

( Spoilers Follow )

This is a very old list of links from my StarMerrow site, which I'm taking out of commission. A lot of them are probably dead, but some might still be alive and useful. Use as you wish and can!

SF&F Organizations

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.: The big cheese of SF/F writers' organizations.


Speculative Literature Foundation: a new organization, with resources, including a grant, to help spec. fic. writers.


Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists

( Read more... )

I very rarely have truly interesting dreams these days, but I had one last night. It was a massive, expansive dream about an extroverted Hamlet in a surreal setting that varied from medieval to cyberpunk with a stopover in the 1970s (and a very modern Ophelia too). It was so fun and interesting, in fact, that I may work it up as a story--not right now but as a project for the future.

The neatest thing is that it's very different from any story I'd think up consciously. I managed to dream up a protagonist whom I suspect of being an ESFP, which is just really unusual for me:)