Five Ways To Fall In Love On Planet Porcelain(From a story I’m working on.)
Over the years, Tikka’s job as a Minor Propagandist for the planet Porcelain’s Bureau of Tourism had come to shape her way of thinking. She dealt primarily in quintets of attractions, lists of five which were distributed through the Bureau’s publications and information dollops: Five Major China Factories Where the Population of Porcelain Can Be Seen Being Created; Five Views of Porcelain’s Clay Fields; Five Restaurants Serving Native Cuisine at Its Most Natural.
Today she was composing Five Signs of Spring in Eletak, her native city. Here along the waterfront, she added chimmerees to her list as she watched the native creatives, cross between fish and flower, surface, each chimerene spreading its white petals as it surfaced, white clusters holding golden centers, tendrils of golden thread sending their scent into the air along with the most delicate whisper of sound, barely audible over the lapping of the sound’s water.
The urge to pose beat along every energy vein of her silica body, but she resisted it. She would remain alone this spring, as she had every spring since she had made her vow and inscribed it in the notebook where she kept her personal lists, under “Life Resolutions,” #4 under “Keep myself clean in thought and mind,” “Devote myself to promoting Porcelain’s tourism,” and “Fall in love.” The third item had been crossed off at the same time, in vehement black pen strokes.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Social Networking: How Much Is Not Enough?
Social networking - is it all just navel-gazing and blogging about blogging? Or are we actually building connections that will matter?So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.
So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.
I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.
Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.
One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?
And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.
Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.
What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?
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Michael DeLuca's Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice
Reckoning 2: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice is solid in weight and content. The stories, poetry, essays, and art deal with the world around us and our ethics in dealing with it. This refined focus sharpens the magazine’s impact, I think, and makes it something that tries to evoke change through its art rather than the shallow comfort afforded by something whose theme was simply “Nature”.
The annual’s mission statement is A locus for the conflict between the world as it has become and the world as we wanted it to be. Editor Michael DeLuca’s opening editor’s note, “On Having a Kid in the Climate Apocalypse,” deals with a life situation that makes that mission even more pressing: having a kid:
My son is three months old. He has no idea what the world is, what it has become. I can say anything in front of him. I can curse. I can cry. He’s happy or he’s sad. there’s no cause and effect. I can read to him from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book that spends hundreds of pages drawing an analogy between a child growing up and an invasive tree species flourishing in a sidewalk crack, a book full of compassion for the poor hated by the rich, casual about the hatred it portrays for people of other cultures. He doesn’t understand a word.
The essay is intimate, frank, and willing to comtemplate its own imperfections:
Maybe this revelation isn’t for everyone. Maybe not everyone needs it. Maybe, to people who aren’t white, aren’t straight, aren’t privileged children of educated families, some of this is so painfully obvious. I’ve spent this essay embarrassing myself. I needed it. I needed to write it. I needed my assumptions undermined and broken up and reassembled around someone who wasn’t me.
While there are several essays in the magazine, all of them nicely put together and executed, my favorite pieces from the issue are all stories:
“Wispy Chastening” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires is slight but significant, much like the narrator’s crimes against the environment, turning this into a sharp look at the idea of thinking globally but acting locally, or even individually.
“To the Place of Skulls” by Innocent Ilo provides an Afrofuturist post-apocalyptic world where its protagonists visit a landscape of grit and myth:
We are going to the Place of Skulls: Saro-Wiwa, Babbe, Gokana, Ken, Nyo, Ueme, Tai, and myself. For you to know, this is not the place Bro Lucas said Jesus was crucified when he was spitting into my face from the broken lectern during his sermon, last Sunday. The Place of Skulls is where a stark reality stares us in the face. We all have after-school exhaustion, Babbe’s diarrhea has worsened, Gokana is still nursing the burns on his legs from our last visit and Mama will yank at my ear if she hears fim about it, but we must go. The Place of Skulls is that important.
“Girl Singing with Farm” by Kathrin Köhler broke my heart and yet I know I’ll go back and read it several more times. What seems like it may be simplistic turns into a beautiful, layered story with a final image that will linger with the reader.
I’m saving the best for last and that is the story “Fourth-Dimensional Tessellations of the American College Graduate” by Marie Vibbert. I love this story so much that I am not going to discuss a single detail except that the ending made my heart leap and it is my favorite story of 2018 so far. I will hold onto my copy of this magazine forever because it contains it.
Highly recommended for those enjoying more literary SF as well as thoughtful essays.
