News and More Stuff from Chez Rambo
Hello folks!
Well, by now you know my big news, which is that my novelette Carpe Glitter is a Nebula Award nominee. I’m deeply honored to find myself in such fine company and absolutely twitter-pated to find out how many people have enjoyed it. The Nebulas are chosen by other writers who are SFWA members, and that makes this very meaningful to me. I will be at the conference that weekend.
If you’re not a SFWA member, but want some say in whether or not it appears on other ballots, it’s eligible for the Hugo Award and Locus Award in the novelette category and the World Fantasy Award in the novella category. You can see the cool banner that Meerkat Press did for me at the top of this newsletter.
If you’ve read the book and found it fun, please think about giving it a review or posting about it on social media!
Want to hear the first bit of it? Here’s a YouTube video.
In recent class news, I’m in the process of lining up classes for the April-June time frame, but will be taking most of April off due to travel and moving.
One new class I’d like to point you at is How Not to Feel Like a Failure in Your Writing Career with Jennifer Brozek, which talks about dealing with imposter syndrome, guilt, and other writerly frailties.
I’m excited to say Judith Tarr will be giving a workshop on how to write about horses on May 2, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time. I’ll post more details as soon as I have the full description but you can go ahead and reserve a slot if you know you’re going to want to attend.
Look for news of more upcoming classes soon – I’m hoping the list will include at least one with Seanan McGuire, plus I’ve got some other rad stuff in the works.
Here’s the complete list of live classes in March at the moment. Classes appearing for the first time are bolded.
- Writing and Gender with Cheryl Morgan, Sunday, March 1, 2020, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time
- Dunking the Reader in the Details: Toolsets for Creating Immersive Worlds with Cat Rambo, Sunday, March 1, 2020, 1-3 PM Pacific time
- Writing Your Way Into Your Novel with Cat Rambo, Saturday, March 7, 2020, 1-3 PM Pacific time
- Head Hopping and Head Hunting: Deep Point of View Writing with Tracy Townsend, Sunday, March 8, 2020, 9:30-11:30 AM Pacific time
- How Not to Feel Like a Failure in Your Writing Career with Jennifer Brozek, Saturday, March 14, 2020 9:30 am ““ 11:30 am Pacific time.
- Intro to Game Writing with Monica Valentinelli, Saturday, March 28, 2020 9:30 am ““ 11:30 am Pacific time
Remember that if you can’t make the live classes, there’s plenty of on-demand ones!
Along with chat server access and class discounts, Patreon supporters this month got:
◦   2 installments of serial novella BABY DRIVER, the pulp-y adventures of Patricia Savage and her five associates in 1930s America.
◦   Weekly online co-writing sessions on Wednesday mornings. If you’d like to join the next one, the link will be posted on Patreon and Discord. I will schedule at least one weekend one in March.
◦   A chance to participate in weekly goal-setting and check-in.
◦   Snippets included bits from Flowergod (SF story), The Butterfly Court’s Bathroom (fantasy story), (2) Because It is Bitter (SF near future novella), writing exercises from Fran Wilde’s Fantastic Worldbuilding class.
Want to join us in the Chez Rambo community? Here’s how.
Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each MonthWant access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
"(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
You may also like...Merry Christmas! Or if you celebrate some other holiday at this time of year, happy that. Maybe your days be merry and bright, and may there be many more of them to come! And if you just got a Kindle or e-reader, may I remind you that you can get my collection for it for a mere $2.99? ... Opinion: When Writers Punch - Up, Down, or Sideways This is, I hope, my final followup to earlier pieces on reactions to Jason Sanford’s post identifying hate-speech and similar posts in a specific forum of Baen’s Bar, Politics, and the subsequent DisCon action in removing Baen’s leader, Toni Weisskopf, as an Editor Guest of Honor. I want to address a specific phenomenon, which is writers punching people who displease them via their readers, which has been directed at Jason Sanford. When a writer publicly calls someone out, they need to be aware of all of the implications, including the fact that the more popular the writer, the more devastating the results can be, not due to any intrinsic quality of the writer, but the number of fans. The more fans, the more likely it is that the group will contain people who, emboldened by the idea of pleasing a favorite writer, can — and will — go to lengths that go far beyond the norms of civil, and sometimes legal, behavior. This played out recently with reactions to Jason Sanford’s piece on a specific forum within the Baen’s Bar discussion boards administered by Baen Publishing, which have included web posts doxxing Sanford and calling for complaints to be made to a lengthy list of people at Sanford’s placement of employment about the post he made on his free time on a platform that has nothing to do with his employment. As I’ve said earlier, I have a great deal of respect for Baen and hope it emerges from this watershed moment in a way that suits the bigheartedness of its founder. But in the fray, a lot of writers have been egging their followers on to do shitty things in general, and what has emerged include the above specifics. It’s not okay to point your readers at someone and basically say “make this person miserable.” It is okay to vote with one’s pocketbook. To not buy the books of people you don’t support. That is called a boycott, and it is an established tactic. (One of my consistent practices throughout the years, though, is to read a book by each one before I make that decision, so I know what I might be missing out on. So far, no regrets.) Going beyond that is, in my opinion, is the act of someone who’s gotten carried away and is no longer seeing their target as a fellow human being, and who needs to stop and think what they are doing. We have witnessed the results of this tactic when it happens in science fiction. Campaigns contacting employers to complain about posts made in someone’s free time, or even when they’re just suspected to be a particular blogger. People feel free to attack economically or via harassment, ignoring collateral damage in the form of their targets’ families. And let’s not forget SWATting or otherwise attempting to use the police against someone. Someone started a baseless rumor about Sanford having had a book refused by Baen, and assorted unhinged souls have been running with that one in large and frenzied patterns that spell out “it is possible I am projecting” when seen from above, including repeatedly contacting the Ohio News Media Association to demand that Sanford That one’s bizarre to the point of being more comical than serious, but there’s plenty worse, and that’s because of another phenomena. Free-floating online trolls cluster onto these situations like leeches, doing their best to drive people at best to shut down their social media, at worst to what those trolls see as an ultimate victory: suicide. They’re not in it for politics; they’re in it to feed on the festering hatred being stirred up and to use it as a justification for their own behavior. I am not overstating things, and anyone who thinks that I am might want to go for a remedial course in Common Sense About the Way Shit is in 2021, as opposed to 40 years ago, which would be when I was first floating around on one of the first message boards. In all sorts of senses, I’ve continued to engage with the world rather than letting someone else moderate it for me, and I don’t know that I had a choice in that but have dealt with a lot of bullshit from people trying to up their visibility in one way or another. I’ve been doxxed so many times it’s lost any scare value. I learned to shoot a gun a couple of years ago because of one doofus sicking his followers on me, and in some situations I carry a taser in my bag. Given some of the stuff that’s happened, it’s not an overreaction. A person should not have to go to these lengths in order to speak their mind; intimidation aimed at silencing someone overall, rather than a particular platform, is the true damage to free speech. I said it before and will say it again (and again and again, I suspect):
In researching my first two pieces about Sanford’s report and the resultant furor, I talked to a number of people who’d been driven off the Baen discussion boards over the course of the last decade. The most prominent being Mercedes Lackey, who was dogpiled on after she suggested, post 9/11, that maybe unmitigated hatred for Muslims wasn’t the best approach. The posts driving her away came not just from the fans on the boards but some of her fellow authors. [I have removed information here that I believe is either in error or incomplete. See the comments for further info. -Cat] Lackey had a good bit to say on the subject, including an angle I hadn’t thought of, which is that it can be dangerous to your readers to be pointing them at people:
Lackey also pointed me at this excellent essay on tolerance which has, I think, good points about why groups — including communities formed around discussion groups — cannot contain members attacking other members:
Much of the hoorah has led me to re-examine some beliefs just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, most notably my ideas about professionalism. Professionalism is something I’ve always tried to abide by. It involves a certain amount of dignity and detachedness, and it also requires not throwing verbal lumps of shit at people, particularly colleagues. I dunno, is this old-fashioned? It doesn’t mean not calling out bad behavior, it doesn’t mean I don’t often disagree with others. But I treat them with respect, overall, even when it’s hairy dude-bro looming at me to demand why I don’t do something about some matter that I have nothing to do with, because they are fellow human beings and we are all stuck here on spaceship Earth together. Being a bad passenger and using your fans to attack a fellow voyager is unprofessional. It gets you known for being unpleasant to work with in any form, because there’s always the worry you may turn it on the person the next seat over. You’re the person that has no qualms about waving live grenades; people don’t want to be around when they don’t know where you’re going to throw it, or even if you’re going to accidentally drop it. Perhaps a lot of the confusion between professionalism and being “authentic” has to do with the relationship between writers and social media, which can feel mandatory at times. Kacen Callendar notes:
When you know that any admission of weakness will be used against you by online trolls, that something like the death of a family member or pet will signal a new barrage of harassment playing on that grief, it becomes even more fraught. And those trolls go for the most vulnerable people — any vulnerability is like blood in the water to them. Can you be authentic and armor yourself at the same time? It takes some maneuvering and a certain amount of don’t-give-a-fuck-ery, and not everyone can do it. Overall, should any writer cry “release the kraken!” and send these folks after a supposed “enemy”? No. No, and no amount of arguing will ever convince me otherwise. Instead, they should learn to be professional perhaps, because in this heated kitchen, we’re working chefs, not home cooks, and should comport ourselves with a little goddamn dignity. ... Love's Footsteps (fantasy, short story) At the time he did it, the wizard Moulder found the idea of removing his heart, applying a calcifying solution, and storing it in a safe place, all in the name of achieving immortality, quite reasonable. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. |