KittywampusAs many know, I’m participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. Last week I let people choose the title of the story I’d write for the write-a-thon’s first week, and the people’s choice was “How Deep Is Red”.
So here’s a chunk from this morning’s writing so far. The story will be the sequel to “Sugar”, which is available in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. If you’re interested in getting to see the whole story, then I invite you to support me in the Write-a-thon! I’ll be sending a weekly e-mail that will include the stories that I write for the Write-a-thon over its six-week course, so for a small donation, you’ll be getting what I’d like to think of as high quality fiction. 🙂
Laurana used a bowl of mercury to watch her lover’s battle. The thick, silvery liquid showed the ships from above, a fat-bellied Tabatian merchant, and the two pirate ships, lean-lined and fanged with cannon, converging on it from either side, the wind behind them making them race forward.
Tiny toy ships. The name of the merchant was Saffron Butterfly The pirate ships bore no names, only figureheads of women, one with a flaming skull for a head, the other with bracelets and necklaces of snakes. Flame’s Kiss and The Serpent.
The liquid didn’t transmit sound. For that Laurana relied on imagination: the deep-throated boom of the guns, the crash of cannon balls, the shouts of despair and defiance.
The Kiss neared the merchant. Laurana leaned forward, trying to find Cristina among the mass of pirates: some readying spidery hooks and ropes, others with hackbuts raised and aimed, all braced for collison, another sound dependent on Laurana, whose mind rendered it down to the taste of salt on one’s lips from the relentless wind, the crash louder than anything one had ever heard. There. A purple bandana tied across orange curls. Cristina, swinging herself aboard the pirates’ prey.
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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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Teaching and Burnout: Taking a Break
What classes are coming up? There's Writing F&SF Stories, the First Pages workshop, Podcasting Basics, Literary Techniques for Genre Fiction...and more.I’ve been teaching online classes for a few years now. They have been awesome and one of the coolest things has been the number of talented writers I’ve had the privilege to work with. However, I’m scheduling a break from teaching during the latter half of 2014, and it’s for a few reasons.
The first and most important is that I can feel a little burnout creeping up around the edges. I’ll be talking in a class and think to myself, “I know I’ve said this before,” and it will be because I have said it before, repeatedly even — but not to that class. I can tell that if I don’t take a break, that feeling is going to drown me.
The second is to focus even more on the writing, because there’s at least two books I’d like to finish up this year, along with the usual roster of short stories. (I’m at ten completed so far this year, which is unusually productive but highly pleasing.)
The third is because I don’t want to get in a rut. I want to go think about some new things and then come back ready to talk about them to students.
So – if you want a class with me in 2014 — check out the list now. I’ll probably list a couple more conversation classes in June, but that’s it. But I’ll be back in 2015!
“Hey, how about that SFWA mess?” my brother asked in an e-mail.
I winced, because I knew exactly what he meant. In my capacity as the lead of the moderating team on the SFWA internal forums, I’d been reading about it for the past few days – and working to keep the discussion — on those boards, at least — somewhat sane. There was a whole lot of shouting going on. And some of it, I think, could be avoided if some of the shouters had actually taken the time to listen to (by which I mean read) what was being said.
That’s a problem happening on both sides (and honestly, there aren’t really “two sides”. There’s a lot of possible takes on this and part of the problem is this idea of “us vs. them”.) “OMG they are attacking Mike Resnick!” screams one group. “OMG old white dudes telling us what to do!” shouts another.* There’s assumptions being made that’s there’s no room for the organization for both sides and that each is trying to somehow oust the other.
So…I’d urge you to actually read what’s under discussion, as well as how it’s being discussed. The article in question was third in a series of what seem like bad moves on the SFWA Bulletin’s part. First there was a cover that many felt was inappropriate for a professional magazine. This was accompanied by an article in the same Bulletin written by Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick that, while doing an admirable job of trying to document the role women have played in the early days of SF, also applied appearance standards to those women in a way that did not seem congruent with how they’re applied to men, as well as emphasizing how anomalous these creatures were by appending “lady” to editor, so we have editors and lady editors. Since very few of us lady editors actually manipulate the keyboard or pen with our vulvas**, the need to specify gender seems a little unnecessary, but okay. That was followed by an issue with a column in which the writer used Barbie as an example in what seems like a misguided rhetorical strategy. (I am trying to be somewhat neutral about all this, but you can no doubt tell that my sympathies do lie more on one side than another.)
And then came a third issue, containing a rebuttal to the criticisms by Malzberg and Resnick, which did exactly what I’m talking about. I’m forced to believe that since they identify the criticisms as “anonymous,” they didn’t bother to go read any of them, in which case they would have noticed that they weren’t anonymous but that people were quite willing to attach their names to them and had been doing so from the start. And the reply — well, go read it and decide for yourself whether or not you think of it a reasoned response to criticism.
Since then tempers have continued to flare, some people have resigned from SFWA while others decided to stay, a task force has been formed to try and figure out how to make the Bulletin more professional, and on and on, including lots of shouting about “PC” and censorship. So what I’d like to say is, if you decide to weigh in, exercise a little due diligence and do your homework beforehand. That means read the pieces as well as some of the discussion. Don’t rely on how someone else is interpreting or framing the debate, because that’s just lazy. Don’t rely on someone else’s summation of events (including this one!) but decide for yourself. Jim Hines has put together a list of some of the commentary. If you’re a SFWA member, come on over to the forums and take a look. If you don’t understand some of the objections, take the time to figure out what’s underlying them. Because ain’t nobody shouting just for shouting’s sake.
And remember – SFWA’s not a monolithic entity. There’s close to two thousand members, and that’s a whole lot of different points of view.
One of the great things about this is that there are useful, informative, and interesting discussions going on. There are changes being made, there’s awareness being raised. In the past I’ve sometimes ranted to my spouse about the odd forms of Luddism that sometimes appear on the part of some people writing about the future, and it seems to me this convulsion is helping drag SFWA into the 21st century as well as a more professional form. I look forward to seeing what’s to come.
* I should note that this is a rough paraphrase of a couple of the shouts and not an encapsulation of everything that’s been said.
** Feel free, fellow “lady editors,” to correct me on that if I’m wrong.
