I do a good bit of writing by hand, usually in a large hardbound sketchbook, although I sometimes like the feel of a nice narrow yellow-lined pad or the sprawl of an enormous expanse of drawing paper. And to write on these, while sometimes I’ll wander over into glitter gel pens or fine-point felt tips, my favorite is the Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen.
Depending on where you’re getting it, the price varies from $3-10, with the high range of that usually appearing in fancy stores aimed at writers, which will strategically place a mug of them near that stack of leatherbound, gilt-edged journals locking with tiny moon and star clasps whose splendor will prove so intimidating to live up to that you will never actually use it. Overall, it will prove much cheaper to buy yours at an art supply store, which is where I get mine, since I go through at least a few each month.
I like writing with this pen because it never feels as though the nib and paper are dragging at each other. The nib could best be described as medium, somewhere well between broad point and narrow. The pen comes in a variety of shades and shows clearly what color it is at both the top and the bottom. For me, the availability of the color depends on how recently the store’s restocked, but the web tells me it comes in black, navy blue, red, green, pink, purple, and turquoise blue.
My only quibble with the pen is a small one that may not apply to many people’s experience. I am tough on pens. They end up jammed in purses, pockets, lost in coat linings, moved from one book bag to another. And so if your treatment of your possessions is overall gentler, which it probably is, you may not experience the same results I do, which is that about one in twenty pens ends up not exploding so much as getting a bit drippy to the point of ink-stained fingers.
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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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Yearly Recap Plus What's Ahead in 2018
Among the things I’ve done in 2017:
In writing, I did the works listed here as well as turning Hearts of Tabat (so MANY thanks to my awesome editor, Kevin J. Anderson) into the publisher (also Kevin) and starting book #3, Exiles of Tabat, which I’ve got about 40k on so far. I didn’t publish any book-length work, but I’d had two in late 2016 (to the point where I was thinking one had come out this year) and will have at least two in 2018, so I guess it all evens out.
Lots of new classes for the Rambo Academy, including guests like Alex Acks, Jennifer Brozek, Cassandra Khaw, Rachel Swirsky, Paul Weimer, and Fran Wilde.
In skill acquisition, I added how to cook sous vide, coffee roasting, basic lockpicking and (even more basic) scuba to my overall character sheet. I also learned how to load and shoot a pistol, along with basic gun safety.
In fear conquering, I swam with sharks (twice) and took a self defense class.
In travel, I visited Orlando, New York City, Indianapolis, and Pocatello (ID) in the US and Dominical and surrounding areas in Costa Rica.
Nebula weekend, 2017.
Notable highlights of SFWA-related stuff:
The Singularity, SFWA’s electronic newsletter, an entity I kicked into existence and which Kate Baker and Terra LeMay have coaxed into blossoming, has a regular, predictable monthly schedule now, and is always full of useful and timely stuff. This newsletter has garnered consistent compliments for its friendly but professional and informative feel, and it’s provided a new way to let SFWA members know about SFWA stuff they might want to take advantage of, as well as to share their own appearances and projects with each other.
SFWA’s excellent Executive Director Kate Baker said a few years back, “I want to make the Nebula weekend -the- premiere conference for professional F&SF writers” and I said, “Tell me what you need to do it.” This year’s Nebulas were fantastic; next year’s will be even more, including having Data Guy there to present on the industry, an effort that’s taken a couple of years to get in place.
The SFWA Storybundle had its first year and was wildly successful, as was the Nebula-focused HumbleBundle. The Storybundle program will grow 150% in size in 2017, which sounds really impressive but just means 3 bundles instead of 2. Plus – SFWA’s Self-Publishing Committee has taken that effort over, so no work for me! (Last year I read a bajillion books for it.)
A long, slow revamp of Emergency Medical Fund stuff driven by Jennifer Brozek, Oz Drummond, and Bud Sparhawk is coming to its final stages. I just saw the EMF stewards in action: they received an appeal, evaluated it within 24 hours, and within a week, if I am correct, funds had been disbursed. The Grants Committee just wrapped up its 2017 work; next year it’ll have even more money to play with, thanks to the aforementioned Nebula HumbleBundle.
Over 50% of the membership participated recently in the survey that went out this year, so we have some data about who the members are and what they want. I would like to think that the high participation rate was driven in part by enthusiasm for what the organization has been doing lately, but it might have something to do with the idea to offer a chance to win one of the ten $25 Amazon gift cards we gave out for participating.
Many of the steps talked about in this discussion of the Fireside Fiction’s report on black writers in speculative fiction and what SFWA could do have been or are being put into place. One thing I’d like to find in 2018 is a volunteer who might coordinate diversity efforts, searching for opportunities where they might dovetail in order to strengthen and inform each other as well as helping make sure we’re examining and evaluating results to see how we’re doing, etc.
I appreciate the many of you who have joined or renewed their memberships specifically because of things I’ve done; it gladdens my heart when you tell me that, but I want to stress that it’s a team effort. That’s because this year I have increasingly experienced a wonderful thing, which is that I will say, “Hey we should do X,” and someone will reply, “Already on it, here’s what’s been done and the overall action plan/timeline.” Dan Potter, Derek Kunskën, Erin M. Hartshorn, Jeffe Kennedy, Jonathan Brazee, Kate Baker, Sarah Pinsker, Steven H Silver, and Terra LeMay, among others, have all given me the precious gift of moments like this in 2017. You folks rule.
When I first came on board a few years ago, I sometimes felt like I was wandering through a morass of undone things and incipient crises. Some plates that had been in the air had fallen and shattered, sometimes disastrously. As I got them back up, it was a panicked dash from one plate to the next at times, and I know I dropped my share. But now more and more of them have their own dedicated spinner, usually with a fallback person in the background, and that lets me stop long enough to take a breath.
I’m kinda amazed I got as much done as I did in terms of writing and teaching. Certainly some words that I otherwise would have written this year got sacrificed on the SFWA altar, but I think that will be less so in 2018. *fingers crossed* (If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting the Patreon effort; $1 a month gets you at least one story each month; double that to get weekly writing tips and resources.)
The second project, which is still taking submissions, is an anthology of political SF focused on the aftereffects of 45’s era, which will come out around the same time as the elections. It’s called If this Goes On and will appear from Parvus Press.
I am insanely juggling three novels and need to just buckle down and knock them off one at a time. They are, in the order I plan on doing so in 2018, The Five, a YA space opera (currently at 30k, destined to be somewhere in 70k range), the sequel to Hearts, Exiles of Tabat (Hearts was 120k, suspect Exiles will be as well, currently around 30k done), and an urban fantasy, Brazen (got 20k written, will be in 70-80k range.)
I have enough SF stories for another collection. Maybe two. Debating whether I want to approach a small press or self-pub those. I have around 50-60 flash stories, depending on how you define flash length, that I am putting together in a book for Patreon supporters and can after that can use to accompany the Flash Fiction class.
The Idea to Draft book is so! close to being done and I just need to get butt in gear and finish it up.
Conventions I definitely plan to be at in 2018: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), Norwescon, the Nebula weekend, Worldcon, and Snake River Comic Con.
I do have one very large and absolutely terrifying project up in the air, getting ready to launch in 2018. It is not a creative effort but a political one. Stay tuned for info on that or drop me a line if you’ve been looking for a place to put some volunteer time/effort in 2018.
DisCon III condemns the violent and hostile content found within Baen Books’ forums. We also cannot condone the fact such content was enabled and allowed to ferment for so long. We want to make it clear abusive behavior is not, and will not be, tolerated at DisCon III. Such behavior goes entirely against our already established policies concerning inclusivity and creating a welcoming environment for our members, which can be found here: https://discon3.org/about/inclusion/.
We knew simply saying those words with no actions to back them up would be unacceptable. Too often, we have seen individuals and organizations say they are on the right side of issues yet do nothing to act on those words. We knew we had to take a hard look at our own position and take action based on our established policies.
As a result, after discussion with her, we have notified Toni Weisskopf we are removing her as a Guest of Honor for DisCon III.
Many authors and some con-runners have weighed in on the choice, from all sides of the fence.
Some of the writers championing free speech are, in my opinion, working from a notion of a past version of the Internet, the world of the Well and lively debate and intellectual exchange and alla that. That ignores the fact that nowadays speech on the Internet has been weaponized, used by world powers as part of today’s fourth-generation warfare.
It cannot be mentioned often enough that the events of January 6, the ones Republicans and other conservatives are working so hard to downplay and erase, was not a case of a rowdy bunch busting up a Starbucks. It was an organized effort that destroyed and stole government property, in which people died and it would not have taken much more for a pre-planned section of that mob to use the chaos in order to kidnap and kill government officials. Camestros Felapton illustrates this in an infographic here.
Expressing admiration and support for an armed insurrection is not illegal, nor is talking about how you and your family were there watching the events from the sidelines, as with one longtime Baen author. Nor is discussing how to engineer the downfall of American cities
or opining that people of color were the best to recruit to wage violence, as another longtime Baen author was. But the Baen forums, by multiple accounts, had been swarmed in recent months by new users who found the established culture welcoming. If you don’t think domestic terrorists weren’t going through them with an eye to recruitment, you are — in my opinion — somewhat naive as to how the Internet works. The FBI is not. Many excellent related points are made here.
David Weber’s stated he won’t go to cons that disinvite guests. I agree that often these dis-invitations happen in a way that ignores the fact that a GoH appearance is something that is scheduled months in advance, and which you shape other events and appearances around, sometimes saying no to those other gigs as a result. Inviting/disinviting is essentially saying “here is a shiny special thing for you” and then yanking it away, no matter what emotions the person doing the yanking are experiencing. Disinviting someone shouldn’t have to happen and cons need to be better about that.
By that, I mean inviting a GoH needs to include anticipating situations in advance by doing due diligence. If a potential guest is advocating something your attendees are going to find awful in their social media and not showing signs of moving away from that, then maybe they’re going to say something in their social media further on down the road that would make you disinvite them. Maybe be smart now and avoid being awful to them — because how awful does being uninvited to something that was a celebration of you, that you would have been looking forward to enjoying have to be? Disney tried this with the firing of Gina Carano, a move based less on wanting to do the right thing than to avoid controversy further on down the road — and sure enough, Carano followed pattern and created it, at which point it was revealed that Disney had severed the relationship with her months earlier.
At the same time, there are obvious circumstances under which I would definitely expect a convention to dis-invite a guest no matter at what point they arose. Criminal behavior is real high on that list. I once worked for a company where a guy brought a live grenade to a meeting. Not wanting to be in the same physical space as that guy anymore was, in my opinion, pretty valid.
As far as Weisskopf’s removal as GoH goes, it’s not a call that anyone would have made lightly, particularly given that they had to know that either way there was going to be considerable, outspoken public opinion about it. Running conventions is tough, and people who do it invest literal years in bidding for and running a WorldCon. Fan conventions like WorldCon are usually not for-profit events, as opposed to comic-cons, which are profit-driven. As such, I find it dubious that any amount of public calls or attention would sway the decision.
Taking down all of the forums rather than the ones specifically mentioned was a reasonable choice in many ways. If it had only been the politics subforum, the next, absolutely inevitable thing to happen would have been for the users to immediately move into other forums and thrash around disrupting those with their protests.
At the same time, taking down all of the forums made uninvolved people inconvenienced by the act and very angry as as a result. I can speak from experience that hell hath no fury like a user who can’t log in to get their daily fix, and I suspect a good deal of the conflation of Sanford’s article about the forums and a coordinated attack on the publisher comes from the removal of the forums in their entirety.
Is Weisskopf’s removal a punishment for that choice — as it will surely be read? I don’t think so. It’s more a product of what a convention is, and what it represents, and wanting to honor guests who’ve made the field more awesome.
Weisskopf has definitely done some awesome things, including inspiring other women by becoming the owner and leader of Baen. Since taking over for Jim Baen in 2006, Weisskopf has created and implemented an innovative e-publishing program light years ahead of the efforts of other publishers, established the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, and the Baen Best Military SF & Adventure SF Reader’s Choice Award. She co-chaired DeepSouthCon 50 in 2012 and served as the official Editor of the SFPA, the Southern Fannish Press Alliance, and edited an history of Southern Fandom.She has edited six anthologies, in which she’s helped find and nurture new voices. Baen itself is responsible for some terrific writers, including Lois McMaster Bujold. It cannot be overlooked that it is an indie publisher in times increasing dominated by corporate alliances.
There is no question all of that adds up to exerting a major, positive force on the field. And that’s what you want in a GoH, partially because you expect they will also be a major, positive influence on the programming. As I’ve talked about before, programming is an art. Who you pick as GoH is part of that. Often programming starts with the GoHs and fills in around them. And one of the (reasonable) expectations of a GoH is that they participate in a hearty chunk of programming. The GoHs are the literal faces of the convention, smiling out from the convention advertising and program books.
Bearing that in mind, DisCon had to ask was Is supporting a place where a bunch of people spend their time expressing their hatred of other members of the F&SF community something that makes a field more awesome? as well as What do we do, knowing that a choice to keep Weisskopf will be read as an endorsement of those words?
Words that support an armed coup. Words saying people with differing political beliefs should be killed. Words urging violence towards other people.
We talk about free speech, but with free speech comes responsibility for one’s words. Baen cannot disavow responsibility for those words, regardless of whether or not they happened because someone was asleep at the wheel. One of the reasons a business cannot ignore the importance of moderating any boards that they run is that they are responsible for the words posted on there. They can’t just turn over the keys to the car and say “drive this where you like.” They’re still enabling that car to bounce along the highway, swerving to hit any pedestrian it suspects of being from a particular group. It’s still their vehicle. And when you are a leader, whether you like it or not, you are responsible for what is happening under your leadership, whether you’re aware of it or not, because that’s part of the role. Weisskopf is not an employee of the company. She doesn’t just run it, but is one of its owners and profits from what it chooses to do. And that’s part of the choice.
Baen can continue as it has, and lean even harder into its conservative audience by choosing to enable and host the “liberals aren’t people” rhetoric, but if it does, it means they’re definitely saying “here is our very specific bunting-draped market niche,” and leaving a lot of other readers, a number of whom are liberal, out in the cold. That choice is also one that says “hate’s a good marketing strategy,” which may be savvy capitalism but I personally think equates with ethical bankruptcy.
If Baen makes that choice, it will not be the only entity using that; we’ve had four years of government based on exactly that, and it will continue to be profitable for the people printing the QAnon t-shirts or assembling the dogwhistle factories for quite some time. We’ve seen some of the usual uninvolved suspects jump into the fray trying to garner attention. My hope is, that with time and the rise of generations that have seen this approach and how hollow it is, hate will stop being so popular. I, for one, hail our new Tiktok and Hive overlords exercising the most punk attitude of all: kindness.
Or Baen can be what it claims to be, and work to appeal to a wide range of readers, some of whom are being driven off by the current rhetoric being encouraged there on the forums the company sponsors and runs. That’s not a novel approach. Most publishers actually choose this one.
I’m nudging up against two thousand words in my polishing of this, and I suspect the overall event is becoming one of those things a lot of people are devoting words to on the Internet. I do want to talk in an essay sometime about online swarming and the ethics of authors siccing their readers on people, but I’ll yield the microphone for now.
*Sanford has been forced to take his Patreon and Twitter private, while members of an organized campaign, in between composing clever and usually highly inaccurate sneers about his writing career, have been contacting his employers demanding he be fired for expressing his free speech outside of that job. Cognitive dissonance? That doesn’t seem to have dissuaded them. As a co-owner of Baen, Weisskopf faces a bit less economic pressure from the fall-out of his article than Jason and his family do.
I do a good bit of writing by hand, usually in a large hardbound sketchbook, although I sometimes like the feel of a nice narrow yellow-lined pad or the sprawl of an enormous expanse of drawing paper. And to write on these, while sometimes I’ll wander over into glitter gel pens or fine-point felt tips, my favorite is the Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen.
So what’s ahead for 2018?
Some of the writers championing free speech are, in my opinion, working from a notion of a past version of the Internet, the world of the Well and lively debate and intellectual exchange and alla that. That ignores the fact that nowadays speech on the Internet has been weaponized, 
At the same time, taking down all of the forums made uninvolved people inconvenienced by the act and very angry as as a result. I can speak from experience that hell hath no fury like a user who can’t log in to get their daily fix, and I suspect a good deal of the conflation of Sanford’s article about the forums and a coordinated attack on the publisher comes from the removal of the forums in their entirety.