Musings

For any of my readers who are interested in the Hugo Awards, a standout story, The Cambist and Lord Iron, has been nominated. It’s by my friend Daniel Abraham, and you can read it at issuu.com/spectra/docs/cambistandlordiron.

It’s by talking with Daniel, and reading his stories that I’m beginning to get the smallest glimmer of understanding of how to write short stories. Daniel is the ultimate triple threat — brilliant novelist, great short story writer, and comic book writer.

Remember how I said I don’t read reviews. I don’t seek out reviews. I don’t set up my computer to look for any mention of my book title, etc. etc. Well, there is a review that I had to read, because there is a funny story associated with it. Way back during the football season George R.R. and Patrick of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist had a bet concerning the Giants and the Cowboys. Well, George won, and to pay up Patrick had to review two books of George’s choosing. One of the books was mine. I admit, I stressed out horribly wondering hot Edge would be received. Well, now I know, and I’m humbled and digging my toe into the carpet by the review.

You can read the review at www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2008/04/edge-of-reason.html I recommend this site as a way to get some guidance on new books coming out, and books you might want to pick up and read. With so many titles being published, and the cost of books, it’s great to have a resource like the Fantasy Hotlist.

It’s been a fun couple of weeks for me because I actually got to read something that wasn’t my own sh**, I mean _work_, or submissions for Critical Mass. I have two books to recommend. The first is The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold. I enjoyed the book, but I also was really intrigued by the structure of the book, and how in the Hell she made it work. All the action is front loaded and almost the entire second half is about these two people trying to get married. Yes, I’m serious. They are from different classes, and backgrounds with a large age gap between them, and somehow she makes this fascinating. If anybody else has read this book, please, weigh in because I can’t figure it out. It’s a given she’s a good writer on a line by line bases, and she has always created great characters — witness Miles. Perhaps men wouldn’t find this at all interesting, and this book might breakdown on gender lines.

The second book I just finished last night. Actually early this morning. Damn you John Scalzi! I sat up to finish The Ghost Brigades until 2:00 am. This is a sequel to Old Man’s War, and again the author made an interesting choice. I knew that he was setting up something with John Perry and Jane Sagan, but he didn’t use either of the characters as the direct protagonist in Ghost Brigades. Instead he created a brand new character to interact with Jane. Jared Dirac was a terrific character and I’d so date him. I liked the character so much that I stayed up way past my bedtime to see what happened to him.

I’ve really enjoyed Scalzi’s books because I’m a huge fan of early Heinlein, particularly the juveniles, and the only two people doing Heinleinesque fiction right now are Scalzi and John Varley with the Red Thunder books. If folks have other people they can mention who fall into that category, I’d love to hear them.

My wonderful and amazing publicist at Tor, Dot Lin, emailed me a review. Since it was in the body of the email I couldn’t avoid reading it, and I’m glad I did. I got a rave review from Romantic Times, and I’m really pleased. Now, why, I hear you ask would an S.F./Fantasy writer be glad for a good review from the Romantic Times?

First, the romance reading population is huge and they buy a lot of books. Second, it showed that sometimes treating this very much as a business can pay off. (Or at least I hope it will pay off.) When I sat down to write this book I was inspired by my frustration of a country that’s still arguing about whether to teach the science of evolution or the fairy tale of creationism. But once I’d made the decision to tell this story, I wanted to give the book every chance to succeed so I took into account a number of factors.

George R.R. had told me that a significant percentage of all books are purchased by women — I don’t remember the exact number but it was like 60 or 70 percent. I next began to think about what made certain characters just resonate for women — characters like Spock, or Data or Angel. I realized that what attracts us are suffering males who offer a challenge, and the secret sense that “I will be the woman who can comfort him.” Finally, I read a few of Diana Gabaldon’s time travel/romance books. I know when she sent in her first book she thought she was going to be a S.F./Fantasy writer. Instead she became an enormously successful romance author.

So, armed with all of this information I tried to write and, I hope, write well a complicated, emotionally charged protagonist. I don’t want people to think that this was just calculation. I like characters like that. I know I couldn’t write the straight up jock very well. I’m not particularly interested in that character, but give me neurosis and I’m all good.

I hope the review is good for a few sales. The review also said there was “food for thought”. Maybe a few people will ask a few more questions about comfortable assumptions.

Netflix’s has been providing me with season three of Galactica, and I’ve been mainlining them so I can get caught up and watch season four. And I’ve noticed something. Some shows mainline wonderfully — Buffy, Dead Like Me, Firefly, Veronica Mars. Others — not so much. Unfortunately Galactic falls into the later category.

There’s a lot I like about the show — the look of it, Colonel Ty, the relationship between Adama and Lee, the love between Boomer and Hilo (sp?), the fact that the people are wonderfully flawed and very human. It really is the anti-Star Trek, and I bless Ron Moore for that. But on the most fundamental level this show just doesn’t work, and when you’re watching three and four episodes in a row the seams and cracks really start to show.

For example, I sat through an episode where they had to go through a region of space where stars were being born, and they lost two civilian ships, and a pilot got killed, and I was supposed to care, and I didn’t because it was stupid. They have ships that can make some kind of FTL jump. Why didn’t they go _around_ this region of space. The explanation was that it was “really big”. _But You Have Ships that Can Jump through Space_ So it takes three jumps to go around or over, or under. Space is not a flat highway. There’s plenty of real drama in this show, they don’t need to manufacture it.

I admit the religious themes are starting to make me nuts. So, we’re on this planet with a temple that supposedly was built four thousand years ago, and there’s something about The Five which are like prophets for the humans, but the Cylons think the five are the hidden skin jobs. Huh? It can’t be both since the Cylons weren’t built four thousand years ago. Or is Lucy Lawless just a religious nut job? If so then please make this a good deal more clear.

And why all the scenes of Baltar in bed with two Cylon women who appear to be sleeping? Why are they sleeping? They’re machines. That’s a really inefficient use of time. I wish I didn’t have to sleep. Which brings me to the basic problem I’ve got with the show. The Cylons want to kill 99% of all humans, and sleep with the remaining 10%. Why? I cry plaintively.

Presumably the “Toasters” built the Skin Jobs. So, why are the toasters treated like second class machine citizens. Why doesn’t the bit jefe toaster kick the snot out of the Skin Jobs and make them behave, and tell them to stop creating nutty religions?

And please, don’t try to force a relationship between Lee Adama and Starbuck. There is no chemistry there. None. Nada. Whole minutes are given over to long, lingering shots of these two actors looking at each other. Please go back to drunken Ty, or the Chief, or Adama doing anything — I’d watch him pluck his eyebrows or read the phone book, I’d even watch _him_ sleep.

Okay, the rant is now over. But this does raise a very real issues for creators of shows and show runners. The way people experience television is changing profoundly. People aren’t waiting for a week to pass between episodes. Downloads and Netflix are a reality, and so you need to plot these show so they can be viewed in quick succession.

I don’t exactly know how we do this, but I think it’s a area for fruitful discussion. I’d love to hear other folks analysis of the issue.

And I have to address the derivation of the term “Toaster”. Walter Jon Williams used it first in a Wild Cards story about his robot character, Modular Man. I then borrowed it when I wrote The Measure of a Man, and applied it to Data. Ron has now brought it into the mainstream, but I wanted to give the tip of the hat to Walter Jon who coined the term originally.

Okay, so before I get a substantive post over in the Hollywood/Writing categories I wanted to burble about my amazing horse.

On Friday evening I got to move Vento to the barn that is two and one half miles from my house. I am a very happy human to have him this close, I can tell you. A five minute drive versus a forty minute drive one way. Anyway, so he would be calm and tired before the trailer ride, I turned him loose to play, and he ran and bucked and ran and bucked. He finally wound down, and I entered the indoor to catch him. I thought I might have trouble because he was so wound up, but he came trotting straight to me, and stopped about three feet away.

I walked up to him, and he maneuvered himself until he was standing on my right side with his head right at my shoulder. I decided to try a little experiment. I walked about ten feet, and he walked right beside me. I stopped and he stopped. I retested — same result. I set off walking again, and made a sudden turn. He stayed right with me. We started making serpentines through the arena, and frequent changes of direction, and frequent stops. He stayed with me every step of the way.

I swear, my dog doesn’t heel this well.

Friday was a hectic, busy day. We began at Mark’s at eight for breakfast. In the midst of a raucous meal with some twenty people, the power went out. This offered a real challenge for Dr. Alberto Rojo who was going to give a power point lecture about the “Physics of Jumper” at 10:00 am. Alberto is handsome, charming, a physicist and with a beautiful Argentinian accent that was like warm syrup. He asked if he could tape our conversations so he could write articles for a newspaper in Argentina. We all agreed, but I’m not sure how well we acquitted ourselves. When you’re with a bunch of writers the conversations range from the sublime to the ridiculous. At breakfast we were more on the ridiculous side of the scale.

Since we didn’t see any reason to just sit in the dark we headed over to the university, and just before Alberto’s talk the power came back on. We all sat in on his lecture, and it was great — all about teleportation and entangled particles interspersed with writings from all through history that seemed to hint at an understanding of these issue of quantum mechanics.

Next we were off to the luncheon where Connie Willis served as our master of ceremonies. Steve Gould made a charming speech as did Christopher Stasheff. The luncheon ended with an announcement by Patricia Rogers that she’d convinced JPL to begin naming features on Mars after famous science fiction writers. Some of the first two were our own Jack Williamson and Roger Zelazny. It had most of us in tears.

I bought Steve’s book REFLEX, and now it was quarter to two and time to retire to the Golden Library, Special Collections for an afternoon of panel discussions. Joan Saberhagen was being honored and our first panel was in remembrance of Fred and how much he had given to the field. When you watch a Terminator movie, or the Sarah Conner Chronicles you have Fred to thank. He was the first person to have an interview with a vampire. He was an amazing man. He and Joan helped me find my voice as a writer, and I’ll miss him forever.

After that Connie and agent extraordinaire, Eleanor Wood, were doing a panel on trends in SF and Fantasy. Walter and I got pulled onto that panel too.

The day ended with a panel on From Books to Film (which was the only panel on which I was actually scheduled.) Steve Gould talked about his Jumper experiences, Ed Bryant, who has worked in Hollywood and had stories adapted discussed his time in La La Land. Craig Chrissenger discussed his work as a journalist for Starlog, and I talked about my time in the trenches. Basically we were talking or listening from two o’clock until five twenty. I was exhausted.

But we still had one more wonderful event. Gene and Jeannie Bundy???? were hosting a dinner for all of us, and the as many of the Williamson clan as could attend. We drank wine and ate lasagna, and talked and talked and laughed and remembered.

There was one distressing moment in the evening. I was sitting at the dining room table with Alberto and the topic of race and America came up. He asked me if I thought things had changed in the country, if I thought things were better, and if Obama had a chance. Thankfully, I didn’t make a sweeping statement about how much better things were. I said, I wasn’t sure. The overt racism I witnessed when I was a child and we’d go to Oklahoma to visit my grandmother seemed to be gone, but the stain was probably still there.

And then Alberto told me about being at the Portales Country Club. He was sitting at the bar having a drink and visiting with a gentleman. Now remember, Alberto was teaching at ENMU. The man asked where Alberto came from. When Alberto responded, “Argentina”, the man said, “Oh, I thought you were a beaner.” It had Scott and Ed and I fumbling to make apologies. Alberto shrugged if off. He’d never heard the slur and didn’t know what it meant. When he said as much to the man, the man became uncomfortable and left the room. Another time at the same country club Alberto heard for the first and only time the “N” word used, by a young man.

I was tired after a long two days, and depressed about Jack and Fred and Rick, and these stories just left me devastated. Maybe we really haven’t come as far as I’d hoped. Which brings me to an editorial in todays New York Times that I recommend. It’s Bob Herbert cutting through all the crap about Obama’s “bitter” comment. Herbert’s contention is that Obama tied himself in knots to avoid answering the question of why some working class whites won’t support him. Rather than give the true and obvious answer — “Because I’m a black man.” Obama tried to parse and he ended up talking himself into a hole. Anyway, here is the link. It’s worth reading. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp

Despite that brief moment of shame, it was a wonderful evening. I wanted to keep talking, but exhaustion won and I returned to the hotel. We all gathered for one final breakfast at Mark’s on Saturday morning, and then we all scattered to our various homes. It had that sad, letdown feeling you get at the end of a convention. You’ve spent time with all these people that mean so much to you emotionally and intellectually, and now you’ll part again for months, maybe years.

Fortunately I had company for the drive home. I gave one of my fellow Critical Mass members, Emily Mah, a ride to Albuquerque where she’d left her car. I returned home late on Saturday afternoon to find that the dog hadn’t eaten, but the cats had cleaned their plates. I have strange animals.

I gave an online interview to Mr. Travis Heermann of The Write Line. The interview will run on Friday April 18th. If you’re interested you can find it at www.travisheermann.com/blog/. Mr. Heermann asked interesting, thought provoking questions about the craft of writing. Though the karaoke question made me giggle and shudder. I can’t think of anything more horrible than standing up in front of strangers in a bar and singing. I had no problem with strangers in a theater. There is no real difference, but one is fine and the other makes my skin crawl. Maybe it’s that I’m backed up by an orchestra when I sang with Civic Light Opera, or in an opera, and my concerts had an accompanist. The canned music starts to make it seem fake, and I can’t exactly pinpoint why.

I spent part of Thursday and all day Friday in Portales New Mexico, site of Eastern New Mexico University, and the Jack Williamson Lectureship. Jack would have been one hundred this year. Alas, we lost him at ninety-eight. An amazing life, and he was writing almost until the end of his life.

I made the long drive to the south east corner of the state on Thursday afternoon. Once I crossed I-40 and turned east at Vaughn I was on the eastern plains, heading toward Texas. The wind was howling at a steady forty miles an hour with occasional gusts up to sixty plus mph. The landscape is dry and flat adorned with scrub brush, sand grass and cholla cactus (a sign over overgrazing). In the distance the wind was lifting the salt flats high into the sky. It looked like a plume of white smoke. Fortunately it was just salt and dirt. I passed a place where a grass fire had left it’s black mark, like spilled ink, on the ground. The cholla were seared and black, but still defiantly upright. Everything else had burned away.

After Vaughn there are no real towns until you reach Fort Sumner, the sight of Billy the Kid’s death in 1881. But between these two small towns are a number of small dead or dying villages. (I can’t really call them towns.) I drove through one where a strip motel stood sadly on the side of the road. The windows were boarded shut and the roof was collapsing. Next door was an abandoned gas station with gaping holes where the windows used to be. I found myself with a tightness in my throat. Once upon a time this had been someone’s dream. A little business on the road to Texas. But it became a road to nowhere when the interstate went in, and the dreams shriveled and blew away. I saw only one domicile that looked inhabited — a beat up doublewide perched in the dirt.

At Melrose I headed took the cut off south and east. Alongside the two lane highway stood a line of gigantic metal towers carrying power to this southern corner of the state. They look strange and unearthly because they balance on a narrow point, and are supported by guy wires. They made me think of alien robots marching past the peanut fields, and they sang as the wind swept through the wires. Next was the town of Floyd with the graveyard right next to the highway. Grey granite headstones, and beyond the small fence — prairie. At last I saw the dome of ENMU’s gymnasium looking like the ship that had disgorged the robots all those miles behind me. I was on the main street heading toward the university, and the two hotels in the town — The Super 8, and the Holiday Inn Express. I passed my main landmark for Portales, a jet aircraft impaled on a pedestal.

Walter Jon William, Steve Gould and Connie Willis were at the public library doing a presentation. Walter gave me what passes for directions in a small New Mexico town — “come to one of the stop lights, and the library is across from the old hotel. You know they one.” I did know the hotel. It was four stories tall, I had stayed there once with Robert Silverberg was a guest at the lectureship, and it was one of the first hotels built by Conrad Hilton. New Mexico is filled with these odd little bits of trivia — Billy the Kid and Conrad Hilton.

Dinner was at the usual place — The Cattle Baron. The menu is meat — lots of meat. Fortunately they have a very nice salad bar. Dinner was fun, crowded and lively. I showed off my book cover, and pictures of Vento. (I really am like a little girl with her pretty white pony.) After dinner we went back to the hotel and sat in the breakfast room talking. I was exhausted from the drive, and the sense of loss had hung with me. Jack Williamson was gone. Rick Hauptmann was gone. I went to sleep remembering.

After my riding lesson I ran a few errands, and then treated myself to a movie. I’m an Anglophile and I love the nineteen twenties and thirties so I wanted to see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day before it disappeared. It’s a slight little movie, and I don’t think it’s going to be around for too long.

It’s a great cast — Francis McDormand, and my personal heart throb from Persuasion and Rome, Ciarán Hinds, and the delightful Amy Adams from Enchanted. There’s some great music, and wonderful evocation of period. The director reminds you nicely that this is 1939 and the war is coming. The story is very predictable, but it ends up being comforting rather than annoying. It’s funny, sometimes when you can predict every step it becomes like a story the audience is telling along with the characters, and it creates a sense of community and shared experience. That’s what happened for me with this film.

My biggest objection is that they didn’t really take enough time to develop the three boyfriends who are pursuing Delysia. They became cut out figures, and stand-in’s for familiar stock characters. Perhaps they did that so the Cirán Hinds character would stand out more.

If you aren’t expecting too much this was a delightful way to wile away a couple of hours. I’m hoping to get to Leatherheads in the next few days. Guess it’s my week to sigh over very attractive men.