It's been quite a year, and not even for writing!
In February, I went to Mannheim, Germany, for a little over 2 weeks for a practicum in my German-teaching-certificate program, then I visited a friend in Stuttgart, and we went to see Hertha play VfB (and win).
March saw my first personal rejection for a story. April saw two sick cats, one of whom we lost in August.
In May, I successfully chaired a convention, and we're doing it again in 2015, this time with more staff huzzah.
I spent the last two weeks-ish of June in Berlin, then watched Germany win the World Cup. After that, it was building armor for DragonCon and having a cat die.
I started teaching German at a local language school in mid-September, and I'm cramming to finish the last module I need to get my certificate by Feb 1. (I have until April 1.)
In November I went to World Fantasy Con, met a lot of new people, and saw a bunch of my VP17 classmates. I won NaNoWriMo with a rewrite of my current novel (which I intend to finish a draft I can give to people to read by March 1).
This month involved a lot of baking, planning my next German class (German 2, starting next Tuesday), and visiting my family in Maryland. And crocheting a blanket for my sister's baby, which I finished just in time for her shower.
I didn't read nearly as much fiction as I wanted to, partly because I was either planning a convention, building armor, or reading about the theory of foreign language instruction in German.
For 2015, I want to sell a short story (at least one, preferably more than one; I only have 3 at the moment), get the novel to a state where I can shop it to agents, teach, successfully chair another convention, and run a 5k. I want to make a dent in my to-read backlog (much of which is electronic, thankfully).
I wish you all a happy new year and einen guten Rutsch.
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
31 December 2014
06 September 2013
Friday!
I'm back from DragonCon, though I still haven't caught up on sleep. I had a lot of fun, though I only made it to a couple panels. I saw a lot of costumes, hung out with friends, and bought a Pacific Rim poster signed by Guillermo del Toro. (That was my top accomplishment of the con.) My costume was successful, and I only got mistaken twice: once for Daenarys (or however you spell it; I'm not a Game of Thrones fan), which was utterly mindboggling, and once for Starbuck from new BSG (which actually made *sense*).
I have a bunch of photos up on my tumblr. Disney set, anime set, superheroes set, miscellaneous, and *punk.
And here's a picture of me and another person cosplaying Sasha Kaidonovsky, from the Pacific Rim photoshoot. I'm on the right. The coat got really warm really fast.
On a topic not related to DragonCon, once again/as usual people are attempting to gatekeep science fiction. Paul Cook wrote an essay on the Amazing Stories blog about how women can't write real SF because they put in things like feeling and descriptions of clothes, and also women are destroying SF with their writing about stupid girly things. Foz Meadows has an excellent deconstruction of his garbage.
Lightspeed Magazine has announced a special Women Destroying SF issue for next year.
I have a bunch of photos up on my tumblr. Disney set, anime set, superheroes set, miscellaneous, and *punk.
And here's a picture of me and another person cosplaying Sasha Kaidonovsky, from the Pacific Rim photoshoot. I'm on the right. The coat got really warm really fast.
On a topic not related to DragonCon, once again/as usual people are attempting to gatekeep science fiction. Paul Cook wrote an essay on the Amazing Stories blog about how women can't write real SF because they put in things like feeling and descriptions of clothes, and also women are destroying SF with their writing about stupid girly things. Foz Meadows has an excellent deconstruction of his garbage.
Lightspeed Magazine has announced a special Women Destroying SF issue for next year.
23 August 2013
Meta: fannish shibboleths
When I read Making Book, it spurred a lot of thoughts about fandom, fannish culture, inclusion, and modes of exclusion, and how these relate to the “fake geek girl” phenomenon.
A major aspect of fannish culture is the reliance on in-jokes and cultural references: reciting lines from Monty Python, Star Wars, or the Princess Bride, or any number of geek books or media quotables. "It's only a flesh wound." "As you wish." "When 900 years you reach, look so good you will not." "You remind me of the babe." "Fear is the mind-killer." "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Et cetera.
These media references are relatively accessible to all. In some ways, these references act as shibboleths: you are one of us if you know this thing. The fan, hearing quotes from their favorite movie or book, may feel more comfortable, more at home. A new fan might not know where "As you wish" comes from, but they can ask (or google it), and then they can go watch Princess Bride.
It's part of human nature to want to belong, to fit in. For a lot of people, finding fandom was a revelation: There are more people who like these things. I have a complicated history with my relationship to being a geek, because I wasn't raised in a household where geekery was understood. I was given books, but they were random books Grandma found at the used book store and in any genre, from Gothic romance to crime. I missed out on a lot of the so-called geek kids' canon. I wrote a short series on this last year, so I won't go too far off on that tangent.
But finding fandom, meeting other people who liked weird, geeky things and had read Lord of the Rings a dozen times too, was a turning point in my life. I found people who understood me, if only on a certain level; I found people I could connect with over a mutual love of Legolas and Gimli.
And then I learned that some sections of fandom don't want to let other people in.
These fannish shibboleths can also be used a gatekeeping tool: to keep out the people who don't know the reference. This is the "fake geek" (usually "fake geek girl") phenomenon. Someone (usually a man) decided that unless you (usually a woman) can name every incarnation of the Green Lantern or every captain of the Enterprise or some other equally ridiculous piece of trivia, you're not a real geek, and you're only doing it for attention. A lot of other people, like Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi, have discussed this at length, so I won't rehash it here. My position on the matter is that you're a geek if you say you are.
Gatekeeping is a tool of exclusion, definitionally. Someone is an arbiter of who is allowed to belong to the group. Some exclusions can be passive, while others are active.
In Making Book, there are a lot of things referred to that aren't explained in the footnotes. A lot of the material wasn't for me as a reader, because I wasn't there for the referent. A lot of the essays were from fanzines, which were circulated among friend groups as a way to keep in touch with each other. (This was before the internet. A lot of the purpose of fanzines has been filled by blogs and livejournal.) I felt excluded from it. It wasn't her intent in writing it to exclude me-personally or anyone else in particular from the club, but that's how I felt when I read it. I wasn't part of the audience of the original fanzines, and that's fine! I certainly don't expect anyone I don't know to read my Dreamwidth journal and have it make sense. It's passive exclusion, and that's okay. Not everyone is going to be actively included in everything.
There's another sort of shibboleth: the shared experience and the in-jokes born from it. Every friend group, every family, has a few. There's comfort in the sense of belonging that comes from the knowing smile or shared laughter when someone shares a “Do you remember the time when...” story. It could be the time when your cousin spilled wine at your other cousin's wedding, or the time when you went to Disney World and saw Thumper. Or it could be a shared joke.
As I mentioned, I don't have a lot of the geek childhood reading canon. I'd never heard of a lot of these books until after college, sometimes years afterward. I don't share the experience of reading Ender's Game in seventh grade and finding it utterly transformative (I read it at 25 or so and found it overrated.) But I was picked on in school because I was smart (and overweight and also poor: the trifecta!), so I share that experience.
When it becomes a problem is when these passive exclusions are used to justify active exclusion. If you get married, your family starts teaching your new spouse the in-jokes and references to welcome them in. (Unless you don't have a good relationship with your family, which changes things.) If you make a new friend, you welcome them into the group by teaching them the references.
But in fandom, there are people who don't want to welcome new people in or see any changes. So they make up the “Fake geek girl” or decide that only certain methods of fannish expression are valid. I'll discuss this more in another post.
A major aspect of fannish culture is the reliance on in-jokes and cultural references: reciting lines from Monty Python, Star Wars, or the Princess Bride, or any number of geek books or media quotables. "It's only a flesh wound." "As you wish." "When 900 years you reach, look so good you will not." "You remind me of the babe." "Fear is the mind-killer." "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Et cetera.
These media references are relatively accessible to all. In some ways, these references act as shibboleths: you are one of us if you know this thing. The fan, hearing quotes from their favorite movie or book, may feel more comfortable, more at home. A new fan might not know where "As you wish" comes from, but they can ask (or google it), and then they can go watch Princess Bride.
It's part of human nature to want to belong, to fit in. For a lot of people, finding fandom was a revelation: There are more people who like these things. I have a complicated history with my relationship to being a geek, because I wasn't raised in a household where geekery was understood. I was given books, but they were random books Grandma found at the used book store and in any genre, from Gothic romance to crime. I missed out on a lot of the so-called geek kids' canon. I wrote a short series on this last year, so I won't go too far off on that tangent.
But finding fandom, meeting other people who liked weird, geeky things and had read Lord of the Rings a dozen times too, was a turning point in my life. I found people who understood me, if only on a certain level; I found people I could connect with over a mutual love of Legolas and Gimli.
And then I learned that some sections of fandom don't want to let other people in.
These fannish shibboleths can also be used a gatekeeping tool: to keep out the people who don't know the reference. This is the "fake geek" (usually "fake geek girl") phenomenon. Someone (usually a man) decided that unless you (usually a woman) can name every incarnation of the Green Lantern or every captain of the Enterprise or some other equally ridiculous piece of trivia, you're not a real geek, and you're only doing it for attention. A lot of other people, like Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi, have discussed this at length, so I won't rehash it here. My position on the matter is that you're a geek if you say you are.
Gatekeeping is a tool of exclusion, definitionally. Someone is an arbiter of who is allowed to belong to the group. Some exclusions can be passive, while others are active.
In Making Book, there are a lot of things referred to that aren't explained in the footnotes. A lot of the material wasn't for me as a reader, because I wasn't there for the referent. A lot of the essays were from fanzines, which were circulated among friend groups as a way to keep in touch with each other. (This was before the internet. A lot of the purpose of fanzines has been filled by blogs and livejournal.) I felt excluded from it. It wasn't her intent in writing it to exclude me-personally or anyone else in particular from the club, but that's how I felt when I read it. I wasn't part of the audience of the original fanzines, and that's fine! I certainly don't expect anyone I don't know to read my Dreamwidth journal and have it make sense. It's passive exclusion, and that's okay. Not everyone is going to be actively included in everything.
There's another sort of shibboleth: the shared experience and the in-jokes born from it. Every friend group, every family, has a few. There's comfort in the sense of belonging that comes from the knowing smile or shared laughter when someone shares a “Do you remember the time when...” story. It could be the time when your cousin spilled wine at your other cousin's wedding, or the time when you went to Disney World and saw Thumper. Or it could be a shared joke.
As I mentioned, I don't have a lot of the geek childhood reading canon. I'd never heard of a lot of these books until after college, sometimes years afterward. I don't share the experience of reading Ender's Game in seventh grade and finding it utterly transformative (I read it at 25 or so and found it overrated.) But I was picked on in school because I was smart (and overweight and also poor: the trifecta!), so I share that experience.
When it becomes a problem is when these passive exclusions are used to justify active exclusion. If you get married, your family starts teaching your new spouse the in-jokes and references to welcome them in. (Unless you don't have a good relationship with your family, which changes things.) If you make a new friend, you welcome them into the group by teaching them the references.
But in fandom, there are people who don't want to welcome new people in or see any changes. So they make up the “Fake geek girl” or decide that only certain methods of fannish expression are valid. I'll discuss this more in another post.
22 April 2013
Trying something new
As you've probably noticed, I'm not very good at updating. I haven't finished any books recently, so I don't have anything to review, and the general details of my life really aren't that interesting. (And the quick update things are all on my twitter.)
So I'm going to attempt to stick to a schedule of posts, and see how long I can post three times a week.
Mondays: book reviews
Wednesdays: anime/manga reviews or recommendations
Fridays: what's in progress: what I'm reading, writing, or otherwise working on.
Let's see how long I can keep this up. It's much easier when I have a topic to think about, but we'll see.
So I'm going to attempt to stick to a schedule of posts, and see how long I can post three times a week.
Mondays: book reviews
Wednesdays: anime/manga reviews or recommendations
Fridays: what's in progress: what I'm reading, writing, or otherwise working on.
Let's see how long I can keep this up. It's much easier when I have a topic to think about, but we'll see.
06 March 2013
On Saying No
Yesterday on twitter, I came across this article, which purports to be about the pros and cons of "being agreeable and saying yes." Except there's just one little paragraph about the perils (being overextended), and the rest of it is about why you should always say yes, even if you're already overextended.
If you will pardon my French, bullshit.
Saying no is a valid response. Looking at how many things you've already agreed to do and how many other things are going on in your life (like maintaining relationships, raising a child, working a 9-5 job to keep food on the table, illnesses, etc) and knowing that you just can't do everything is an important skill. You have to protect yourself.
I also wonder how much of the scutwork of housekeeping and childraising falls to Salesses' wife while he overextends himself, and who has, he believes, his best interests in mind when she tells him to say no, but does he consider her feelings? Does he consider that maybe she's overextended because of his foolish insistence on saying yes? Not in this particular text.
He generalizes his personal experiences to everyone. Because a few times he got some good opportunities by always saying yes, everyone should always say yes. First off, not everyone gets invitations to write things for people. Most of us just have to write our stuff and send it off to magazines or agents or editors and hope they like it enough to buy it. Once you've established yourself somewhat, that's when the invitations to write for anthologies come in.
Second off, not everyone has the privilege he does. Not everyone has a wife who is willing to pick up the slack when he can't do his share of the housework because he's too busy. (I assume; he doesn't go into detail, and I refuse to give the Good MRA Project any pageviews to read his other writing.) Women still perform the majority of household chores, even if they work outside the home and the male partner does "some" housework. (Here are some numbers.)
In our society, women are taught to always be agreeable, always say yes, and if we have to say no, to do it with a smile and as gently as possible. Women who say no are bitches, disagreeable, cold. Articles like Salesses' perpetuate this particular thread of misogyny. (Before you react, no, he's not addressing women specifically, but we do make up half the population.)
I had a job once where I could literally not say no to anything, because my (female) bosses would guilt trip me until I agreed, or tell me what a horrible, disagreeable person I was because I'd already made plans with someone else for Friday night and it's Thursday, and you can't just drop new work in someone's lap like that. Or because I had strep throat and was too sick to go to work, let alone drive two hours each way for a monthly conference, which made me disagreeable and not a team player. It was a seriously toxic situation, which was fortunately only a one-year contract position.
Saying no is valid. Saying no when you know you're too busy, too sick, or just don't have enough interest in it is valid. It is self-protection.
I don't talk much about my health in this forum, but I'm chronically ill. I have hypothyroidism and two kinds of migraines (typical and variant). If I don't get enough sleep over a period of time, I get a migraine and am not functional until it goes away. If I'm lucky, it's a typical migraine and a triptan makes it go away. If I'm unlucky, it's the abdominal variant, which I just have to ride out. Either way, I spend the rest of the day in post-migraine fog. Through experience, I've learned that I can be two hours low for three days before I get the early warning signs that I need to get to bed early. (Which is why I missed the post-Hugo fun at WorldCon last year. I'd hit that wall. Now I know that I should plan sleep accordingly, because post-Hugo fun looked awesome.) [And my migraines are also linked to minor perturbations in thyroid hormone balance. Fun!]
If I took Salesses' advice and always said yes, I wouldn't be getting enough sleep to function*, and I'd spend half my time sick. Which is counterproductive, don't you think? If I were Salesses, I would generalize my experience based on my health and say that people should always say no.
But I'm not him, so I'll say that every person gets to decide for him- or herself which new projects or tasks they want to say yes to and which they want to say no to. They get to base that on whatever criteria they feel are most important. Every writer gets to decide whether the invitation to write a story for an anthology is worth it, whether the call for submissions that just opened up and they have a great story that isn't more than a line on a card at the moment is worth dropping other things, potentially at the risk of missing a deadline. They know what's best for their careers and their personal lives.
No one else gets to decide for you. You can be disagreeable. You can do the things you need to do to maintain. Like they say, put your own air mask on before helping others. Tell the people who think you always have to say yes to take a hike.
*well, no one's beating down my door with anthology invitations and column proposals, but if they were and I were as overextended as Salesses.
If you will pardon my French, bullshit.
Saying no is a valid response. Looking at how many things you've already agreed to do and how many other things are going on in your life (like maintaining relationships, raising a child, working a 9-5 job to keep food on the table, illnesses, etc) and knowing that you just can't do everything is an important skill. You have to protect yourself.
I also wonder how much of the scutwork of housekeeping and childraising falls to Salesses' wife while he overextends himself, and who has, he believes, his best interests in mind when she tells him to say no, but does he consider her feelings? Does he consider that maybe she's overextended because of his foolish insistence on saying yes? Not in this particular text.
He generalizes his personal experiences to everyone. Because a few times he got some good opportunities by always saying yes, everyone should always say yes. First off, not everyone gets invitations to write things for people. Most of us just have to write our stuff and send it off to magazines or agents or editors and hope they like it enough to buy it. Once you've established yourself somewhat, that's when the invitations to write for anthologies come in.
Second off, not everyone has the privilege he does. Not everyone has a wife who is willing to pick up the slack when he can't do his share of the housework because he's too busy. (I assume; he doesn't go into detail, and I refuse to give the Good MRA Project any pageviews to read his other writing.) Women still perform the majority of household chores, even if they work outside the home and the male partner does "some" housework. (Here are some numbers.)
In our society, women are taught to always be agreeable, always say yes, and if we have to say no, to do it with a smile and as gently as possible. Women who say no are bitches, disagreeable, cold. Articles like Salesses' perpetuate this particular thread of misogyny. (Before you react, no, he's not addressing women specifically, but we do make up half the population.)
I had a job once where I could literally not say no to anything, because my (female) bosses would guilt trip me until I agreed, or tell me what a horrible, disagreeable person I was because I'd already made plans with someone else for Friday night and it's Thursday, and you can't just drop new work in someone's lap like that. Or because I had strep throat and was too sick to go to work, let alone drive two hours each way for a monthly conference, which made me disagreeable and not a team player. It was a seriously toxic situation, which was fortunately only a one-year contract position.
Saying no is valid. Saying no when you know you're too busy, too sick, or just don't have enough interest in it is valid. It is self-protection.
I don't talk much about my health in this forum, but I'm chronically ill. I have hypothyroidism and two kinds of migraines (typical and variant). If I don't get enough sleep over a period of time, I get a migraine and am not functional until it goes away. If I'm lucky, it's a typical migraine and a triptan makes it go away. If I'm unlucky, it's the abdominal variant, which I just have to ride out. Either way, I spend the rest of the day in post-migraine fog. Through experience, I've learned that I can be two hours low for three days before I get the early warning signs that I need to get to bed early. (Which is why I missed the post-Hugo fun at WorldCon last year. I'd hit that wall. Now I know that I should plan sleep accordingly, because post-Hugo fun looked awesome.) [And my migraines are also linked to minor perturbations in thyroid hormone balance. Fun!]
If I took Salesses' advice and always said yes, I wouldn't be getting enough sleep to function*, and I'd spend half my time sick. Which is counterproductive, don't you think? If I were Salesses, I would generalize my experience based on my health and say that people should always say no.
But I'm not him, so I'll say that every person gets to decide for him- or herself which new projects or tasks they want to say yes to and which they want to say no to. They get to base that on whatever criteria they feel are most important. Every writer gets to decide whether the invitation to write a story for an anthology is worth it, whether the call for submissions that just opened up and they have a great story that isn't more than a line on a card at the moment is worth dropping other things, potentially at the risk of missing a deadline. They know what's best for their careers and their personal lives.
No one else gets to decide for you. You can be disagreeable. You can do the things you need to do to maintain. Like they say, put your own air mask on before helping others. Tell the people who think you always have to say yes to take a hike.
*well, no one's beating down my door with anthology invitations and column proposals, but if they were and I were as overextended as Salesses.
17 January 2013
Experiments in outlining
I'm the type of writer who is variously known as a "discovery writer" or a "pantser." I get an idea, usually a beginning, middle, and end, then start writing.
This isn't necessarily bad for a short story, since it's much harder to write yourself into a corner in 5000 words than in 50,000 or more. It's a really bad plan for a novel, though. (I've learned this the hard way.)
So when I read the Writing Excuses transcript Brainstorming with Mary and the supplemental material, I thought I'd give that a shot, since it explains an actual process with examples. I'm not very good at learning without examples, so when someone says, "Outline your story!" I balk because I don't know how. All I remember is mandatory paper outlines for high school English.
Anyway. I'm writing a short story from an outline right now. It's maybe a little easier, since I already have guidelines for each scene, and I can still discover things while I'm writing. The first draft is kind of rough (duh), but this will mainly need tuning of the word choice and style kind, as opposed to fixing the plot. Probably. Which is a little different, and I like it.
After this, I guess it's time to outline a novel. I have one in mind, even.
This isn't necessarily bad for a short story, since it's much harder to write yourself into a corner in 5000 words than in 50,000 or more. It's a really bad plan for a novel, though. (I've learned this the hard way.)
So when I read the Writing Excuses transcript Brainstorming with Mary and the supplemental material, I thought I'd give that a shot, since it explains an actual process with examples. I'm not very good at learning without examples, so when someone says, "Outline your story!" I balk because I don't know how. All I remember is mandatory paper outlines for high school English.
Anyway. I'm writing a short story from an outline right now. It's maybe a little easier, since I already have guidelines for each scene, and I can still discover things while I'm writing. The first draft is kind of rough (duh), but this will mainly need tuning of the word choice and style kind, as opposed to fixing the plot. Probably. Which is a little different, and I like it.
After this, I guess it's time to outline a novel. I have one in mind, even.
10 December 2012
The story behind the story: Something There Is
Two and a half years ago, I was sitting on an overnight train from Berlin to Vienna, watching the city I love pass by and fade into the distance.
I'd just finished a four-week intensive course at the Goethe-Institut, and I was off to Austria to meet my husband, who was flying out for a two-week trip around the Habsburg capitals for our tenth anniversary.
When I visit Berlin, I'm always overwhelmed with the sense of history there. As I'm walking past brick walls that surround cemeteries or past any of the hundred or two-year-old buildings, I feel like I could reach out and touch the stone and get some sense of that building's past.
Like Sergey Larenkov, I can imagine the ghosts of the city, the old and new overlaid. (Check out more of Sergey's work. He's got some really amazing pieces about the siege of Leningrad/St Petersburg.)
I'm a child of the 80s, and a lot of the media and entertainment during my formative years were about the impending nuclear holocaust. The ones that weren't about misfit high school students, anyway. The Cold War is still interesting to me, even more so as I get older and read more about the history I never got in school (partly because there wasn't time (we got as far as Vietnam in US History 2), and partly because it was current events).
Abandoned, lost, and forgotten places have a certain appeal to me. There's a bit of sadness, of melancholy, of the decline of something once majestic ("Ozymandias" is one of my favorite poems). You can almost see the ghosts.
Places like this are scattered throughout former East Germany, as the massive state-support structure collapsed and these firms were unable to compete with the vast capitalist world. Unemployment is higher in the east (the euphemistically named "new states") than the west.
I have, scattered in various notebooks, beginnings of stories about a girl (always a girl) who can commune with the city of Berlin. This one sprang from an opening line (which doesn't actually appear in the story): "The city tells me things. That's why they find me useful." Then I saw the call for submissions for Substitution Cipher, and I had to write it.
I thought it should be a Cold War story, but Cold War spy stories are a dime a dozen. So I took that concept back to the 1880s, kept Kaiser Friedrich III alive, and tried to make it about a minor functionary (alternately the mayor) spying on some anti-reform faction or other, but a) the research was making my head spin, and b) the story just wasn't coming.
So I went back to the Cold War and the initial construction of the Berlin Wall. That's what this story had to be. It's not your usual le Carre or James Bond-style Cold War spy story. It's not even a Black Widow story. It's a cross between magical realism and historical fantasy, about a high school girl coerced into working for the Stasi.
I hope you like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I'd just finished a four-week intensive course at the Goethe-Institut, and I was off to Austria to meet my husband, who was flying out for a two-week trip around the Habsburg capitals for our tenth anniversary.
When I visit Berlin, I'm always overwhelmed with the sense of history there. As I'm walking past brick walls that surround cemeteries or past any of the hundred or two-year-old buildings, I feel like I could reach out and touch the stone and get some sense of that building's past.
Like Sergey Larenkov, I can imagine the ghosts of the city, the old and new overlaid. (Check out more of Sergey's work. He's got some really amazing pieces about the siege of Leningrad/St Petersburg.)
I'm a child of the 80s, and a lot of the media and entertainment during my formative years were about the impending nuclear holocaust. The ones that weren't about misfit high school students, anyway. The Cold War is still interesting to me, even more so as I get older and read more about the history I never got in school (partly because there wasn't time (we got as far as Vietnam in US History 2), and partly because it was current events).
Abandoned, lost, and forgotten places have a certain appeal to me. There's a bit of sadness, of melancholy, of the decline of something once majestic ("Ozymandias" is one of my favorite poems). You can almost see the ghosts.
Places like this are scattered throughout former East Germany, as the massive state-support structure collapsed and these firms were unable to compete with the vast capitalist world. Unemployment is higher in the east (the euphemistically named "new states") than the west.
I have, scattered in various notebooks, beginnings of stories about a girl (always a girl) who can commune with the city of Berlin. This one sprang from an opening line (which doesn't actually appear in the story): "The city tells me things. That's why they find me useful." Then I saw the call for submissions for Substitution Cipher, and I had to write it.
I thought it should be a Cold War story, but Cold War spy stories are a dime a dozen. So I took that concept back to the 1880s, kept Kaiser Friedrich III alive, and tried to make it about a minor functionary (alternately the mayor) spying on some anti-reform faction or other, but a) the research was making my head spin, and b) the story just wasn't coming.
So I went back to the Cold War and the initial construction of the Berlin Wall. That's what this story had to be. It's not your usual le Carre or James Bond-style Cold War spy story. It's not even a Black Widow story. It's a cross between magical realism and historical fantasy, about a high school girl coerced into working for the Stasi.
I hope you like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
06 December 2012
The history behind the story: Something There Is
5 July 1961
Mielke sat behind his desk, and a pair of officers stood on either side of it. They couldn’t consider me a threat to the minister, not after leaving me alone with him so far. Could they? I’m not much of an athlete. I get decent marks in sport, but I’ll never make it onto an Olympics team. Surely they’d know that. They knew everything else.
“Have a seat,” he said.
There was only one chair, so I sat in it.
“How long have you been having these feelings?”
I knew what he meant without asking him to explain further. “I can’t remember not having them.”
I swear he looked like a cat who’d stolen a fish as big as himself before he settled his impassive face back on. “Interesting.” He made notes in a pad on his desk. “What was the first time?”
I told him about how I got separated from Mama and Papa in the park when I was three or four, and when I got scared, I felt something like a hand on my back, guiding me toward them. He wanted to know how often it happened, and I told him it didn’t happen all the time, only when something was important. I didn’t mention that it’s been happening more often recently...
The German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949 in response to Allied recognition of the Federal Republic of Germany. It took shape in the Soviet Occupation Zone as designated by the Yalta Treaty. Berlin, the once and future capital, was itself divided into occupation zones, Soviet, French, British, and US. The Soviet zone comprised about half the city and included many landmarks, like the Museum Island and the Brandenburg Gate.
When the Western Powers worked with Chancellor Adenauer and his government, relocated to Bonn, to create the Deutsche Mark (which sparked the West German economic miracle), the Soviets and the SED (Socialist Unity Party, the East German politburo) disagreed and blockaded West Berlin. The Western Powers responded by airlifting supplies into the city for nearly a year until Stalin ended the blockade.
West Berlin served as a convenient exit point for residents of the Soviet sector, as they could go into the other side of the city by showing simple documentation, and they could defect to the west from there. Alarmed by this exodus, the SED decided to put a stop to it. In 1952, they built a barbed-wire fence along the inner-German border, and throughout the 50s, they made it increasingly difficult for GDR citizens to travel into the west.
Berlin remained a loophole, however, and it wasn't until 1961 that the SED closed it. The Party began stockpiling bricks and other construction materials, and, when asked about it, First Secretary Walter Ulbricht said, "No one has the intention of building a wall," and that they were using the materials for normal construction. The city was still largely devastated from the bombings, after all. This was June 15, 1961.
August 13, 1961, the border between West Berlin and East Germany was officially closed, and the first foundations of the Wall were laid. This sparked international outrage, and fear among the citizens--including some who were separated from their families. The original cinderblock and barbed wire wall grew into this, which they called the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall:
A two-cobblestone-wide line runs through Berlin today, a reminder of where the Schandmauer (shame-wall) once stood. A vibrant business district stands in the former wasteland of Potsdamer Platz.
The Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, kept GDR citizens in line through both spying and a formalized informer state. After 1989, it was thought that the Stasi had 175,000 unofficial informants, but more recent studies suggest it was closer to 189,000, not including the official employees. They rooted through the garbage, steamed open letters, installed hidden cameras and microphones in people's walls. (They also operated an outward-facing spy agency.) People who opposed the SED were jailed. People who tried to escape were killed.
The GDR was a real-life dystopia.
How does this relate to the story? you ask. What would happen if a teenaged girl who can hear the voice of the city were coerced into becoming an informer for the Stasi? Find out on December 18, when Substitution Cipher is released!
Come back on Monday to find out more about the story behind the story.
(This post was inspired by fellow Substitution Cipher author M. Fenn's post about the real history behind "So the Taino Call It.")
11 October 2012
The story you want to write vs the story you can write
I like space opera. I don't care if it isn't fashionable to do so, because it's not "rigorous" or because it's all tropey or whatever other reasons people say space opera sucks. (That was the first google hit for that phrase.)
I love Bujold's Vorkosigan series. I love Cherryh's Alliance-Union and atevi series. I want to write stories in universes as big as those, with characters people remember and care about.
But I don't have the skill yet. I have 160,000 or so words in two related space-opera-with-mercenaries novels (one's a completed first draft, the other is around 68k on the 0.5th draft). I intend to finish making book two into a completed first draft, then going over book one for continuity changes and "oh hey I should mention...", but I don't know if I want to keep poking at them.
What I can write, apparently, because I can sell it, is historical fantasy that borders on magical realism. U8: Alexanderplatz (1989) is a story about the end of the Cold War with ghost trains in the ghost stations of Berlin. "Something There Is," coming out in the anthology Substitution Cipher in December, is about the early days of the Cold War, with a teenaged girl who can hear the voice of Berlin.
(I have a vague idea about making "Something" into a novel, going on after the end of it, but I don't know. It needs to cook more, I think.)
It's a hard realization to have, that the thing you really want to do isn't something you're very good at. Though, to be honest, writing historical fantasy set in Germany is something I also really like, and it lets me use half my college degree.
This isn't the first time I've had this realization. I dropped out of chemistry grad school, because I a) wasn't very good at it, and b) discovered that lab chemistry wasn't what I actually wanted to do with my life. So I went to pharmacy school, which I liked better. Apparently what I want to do is write, but that's not making me any income, so I'm back on the hunt for a job in my field. (20 applications in a week, and not a single bite. This economy, I tell you...)
So, for now, I'll write the stories I can, which happen to also be ones I want to write, or I wouldn't be inspired by them, and let the universe-spanning space opera wait. Hopefully not forever.
I love Bujold's Vorkosigan series. I love Cherryh's Alliance-Union and atevi series. I want to write stories in universes as big as those, with characters people remember and care about.
But I don't have the skill yet. I have 160,000 or so words in two related space-opera-with-mercenaries novels (one's a completed first draft, the other is around 68k on the 0.5th draft). I intend to finish making book two into a completed first draft, then going over book one for continuity changes and "oh hey I should mention...", but I don't know if I want to keep poking at them.
What I can write, apparently, because I can sell it, is historical fantasy that borders on magical realism. U8: Alexanderplatz (1989) is a story about the end of the Cold War with ghost trains in the ghost stations of Berlin. "Something There Is," coming out in the anthology Substitution Cipher in December, is about the early days of the Cold War, with a teenaged girl who can hear the voice of Berlin.
(I have a vague idea about making "Something" into a novel, going on after the end of it, but I don't know. It needs to cook more, I think.)
It's a hard realization to have, that the thing you really want to do isn't something you're very good at. Though, to be honest, writing historical fantasy set in Germany is something I also really like, and it lets me use half my college degree.
This isn't the first time I've had this realization. I dropped out of chemistry grad school, because I a) wasn't very good at it, and b) discovered that lab chemistry wasn't what I actually wanted to do with my life. So I went to pharmacy school, which I liked better. Apparently what I want to do is write, but that's not making me any income, so I'm back on the hunt for a job in my field. (20 applications in a week, and not a single bite. This economy, I tell you...)
So, for now, I'll write the stories I can, which happen to also be ones I want to write, or I wouldn't be inspired by them, and let the universe-spanning space opera wait. Hopefully not forever.
27 September 2012
Forgive me, readers, I've been busy.
I know, all dozen of you on Google FriendConnect, and however many people follow the links from twitter or facebook...
The weekend after WorldCon, my cousin got married, so after I'd managed to catch up from that, I spent 12 hours in a car over 2 days and had to catch up again. Planning for ConTemporal has gone into full swing, so I've been spending a lot of time on that--inviting guests, making budgets, all that sort of thing.
I'm also taking an evening class at Durham Tech and a taiji sword class.
AND I'm applying for jobs, jobs, and more jobs, and hoping something works.
I read a book that I'd like to review, but I want to read it again first, probably, so I won't have a Monday book review for you all. Maybe next Thursday; we'll see.
The weekend after WorldCon, my cousin got married, so after I'd managed to catch up from that, I spent 12 hours in a car over 2 days and had to catch up again. Planning for ConTemporal has gone into full swing, so I've been spending a lot of time on that--inviting guests, making budgets, all that sort of thing.
I'm also taking an evening class at Durham Tech and a taiji sword class.
AND I'm applying for jobs, jobs, and more jobs, and hoping something works.
I read a book that I'd like to review, but I want to read it again first, probably, so I won't have a Monday book review for you all. Maybe next Thursday; we'll see.
10 September 2012
On WorldCon bids
I mentioned in my WorldCon wrap-up that I am supporting the bid for Spokane in 2015 over Orlando, despite one of these places being really close and the other on the opposite side of the country. Helsinki just announced their bid during WorldCon, and all they have right now is a twitter page and maybe facebook, so I can't really comment on their bid at this time.
Spokane's materials really impressed me. The people running the bid have a lot of experience running conventions, and it shows. The convention will (probably) be well run should they win.
I like their location, in the Spokane convention center, with four hotels close by. (Though I wonder if they have any way to give people with disabilities preferential booking for the closest hotel. Interesting question. Fandom isn't getting any younger...more on that later.)
Spokane has a ton of restaurants in close walking distance from the convention center, apparently, which can't really be said about Disney's Coronado Springs resort, where Orlando is proposing theirs.
A factor that weighs, well, not MOST heavily, but it's up there is that CJ Cherryh is supporting the Spokane bid. She'll be at the convention. (She lives out there.) She doesn't fly, so she doesn't do east-coast cons, or much she can't drive to readily. If they win, I'm going. The hard part will be deciding which of my 60 Cherryh novels to take with me to get signed. Without checked bags.
The Orlando bid appeals to my revolutionary Marxist nature. But I can't tell if anyone on the committee has any experience running a con. This comment says they do. Not knowing Florida fandom, I can't say I recognized any of the names on their list, and unlike Spokane, there aren't brief bios anywhere.
Disney's Coronado Springs Resort has a lot of restrictions, like not being able to bring your own food in, and rather limited vegetarian food options (at least when my fellow-vegetarian friend went to a work-related conference there a few years ago). Also, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get off the property without a car. Which, well, is kind of bad.
One person who approached the Spokane table while I was there said she didn't think the Orlando group "knows what a WorldCon is about." I can't say I agree. I think they do, but their idea is different than traditional fandom. See Thursday's post on the Hugos, where I talk about that some. Cheryl Morgan has an interesting post on the historical natures of fandom and those who want to keep it the Old Way.
Where I definitely agree with the Orlando group, and Chris Galvin Nguyen in this Mind Meld, is that WorldCon is too expensive for many, if not most, fans to attend.
Between airfare, a $200+ membership, and hotel, plus restaurant food for 5 days, young fans and international fans are being priced out of attending WorldCon. Even a non-attending supporting membership, which entitles you to vote on the Hugos and in site selection, is $60+. If you wonder why WorldCon-attending fandom is a mostly older and US-based crowd, well, there's one answer.
Though, of course, we can't forget that there are fans who are retired and living on a fixed income, so they're being priced out, too. (And the Hyatt Regency had some very interesting interpretations of the ADA as far as bathroom accessibility was concerned. Power chairs couldn't fit into the stalls, and the panel rooms were often tight.)
I think the World Science Fiction Convention should be out in the rest of the world more often than it is, and Nguyen's got data in the Mind Meld I linked above. Kind of depressing, really. So in theory I support Helsinki's bid, because, hey, a non-US bid. I'm skeptical they'll win, because 2014's going to be in London, and, let's be honest, US-based fandom's not going to want to go abroad two years in a row. Helsinki's a nice city, I hear, and I've never been to Finland. I'm still unemployed, though, so I can't really afford the airfare.
Spokane's materials really impressed me. The people running the bid have a lot of experience running conventions, and it shows. The convention will (probably) be well run should they win.
I like their location, in the Spokane convention center, with four hotels close by. (Though I wonder if they have any way to give people with disabilities preferential booking for the closest hotel. Interesting question. Fandom isn't getting any younger...more on that later.)
Spokane has a ton of restaurants in close walking distance from the convention center, apparently, which can't really be said about Disney's Coronado Springs resort, where Orlando is proposing theirs.
A factor that weighs, well, not MOST heavily, but it's up there is that CJ Cherryh is supporting the Spokane bid. She'll be at the convention. (She lives out there.) She doesn't fly, so she doesn't do east-coast cons, or much she can't drive to readily. If they win, I'm going. The hard part will be deciding which of my 60 Cherryh novels to take with me to get signed. Without checked bags.
The Orlando bid appeals to my revolutionary Marxist nature. But I can't tell if anyone on the committee has any experience running a con. This comment says they do. Not knowing Florida fandom, I can't say I recognized any of the names on their list, and unlike Spokane, there aren't brief bios anywhere.
Disney's Coronado Springs Resort has a lot of restrictions, like not being able to bring your own food in, and rather limited vegetarian food options (at least when my fellow-vegetarian friend went to a work-related conference there a few years ago). Also, it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get off the property without a car. Which, well, is kind of bad.
One person who approached the Spokane table while I was there said she didn't think the Orlando group "knows what a WorldCon is about." I can't say I agree. I think they do, but their idea is different than traditional fandom. See Thursday's post on the Hugos, where I talk about that some. Cheryl Morgan has an interesting post on the historical natures of fandom and those who want to keep it the Old Way.
Where I definitely agree with the Orlando group, and Chris Galvin Nguyen in this Mind Meld, is that WorldCon is too expensive for many, if not most, fans to attend.
Between airfare, a $200+ membership, and hotel, plus restaurant food for 5 days, young fans and international fans are being priced out of attending WorldCon. Even a non-attending supporting membership, which entitles you to vote on the Hugos and in site selection, is $60+. If you wonder why WorldCon-attending fandom is a mostly older and US-based crowd, well, there's one answer.
Though, of course, we can't forget that there are fans who are retired and living on a fixed income, so they're being priced out, too. (And the Hyatt Regency had some very interesting interpretations of the ADA as far as bathroom accessibility was concerned. Power chairs couldn't fit into the stalls, and the panel rooms were often tight.)
I think the World Science Fiction Convention should be out in the rest of the world more often than it is, and Nguyen's got data in the Mind Meld I linked above. Kind of depressing, really. So in theory I support Helsinki's bid, because, hey, a non-US bid. I'm skeptical they'll win, because 2014's going to be in London, and, let's be honest, US-based fandom's not going to want to go abroad two years in a row. Helsinki's a nice city, I hear, and I've never been to Finland. I'm still unemployed, though, so I can't really afford the airfare.
06 September 2012
Thoughts on the 2012 Hugos
I ranked a lot of the winners first in my voting, which I thought was pretty cool. And some of them I had second. (Instant runoff voting is fun.)
The novellas were the hardest for me to rank, because the four I ranked were all really good, really well-written pieces, and I would have been happy with any of them winning. (The two I didn't just didn't do anything for me.)
I was fairly pleased with the winners' list. I agree with Carrie's thoughts to an extent--of the people on the list for several of the categories, the obvious winners won: Neil Gaiman. George RR Martin. Sheila Williams. Locus. That isn't to say none of these people deserve their wins, just that they're very popular. To an extent, the Hugos are a popularity contest, kind of like being nerd prom king/queen.
And there's nothing wrong with that. (Also, best anything is always a very subjective matter.)
What I thought was good about the Hugo winners' list was that many of the winning pieces had a sort of newness to them. It wasn't the same old 1950s SF story told with less-flat characters and more-current story techniques. It was still a mostly-white list, but there was a majority of women.
(Also, it's about damn time Betsy Wollheim won. DAW has published a lot of good, popular books since the 70s. In her acceptance speech she said, "Dad, FINALLY there's a Hugo with the name Wollheim on it." He'd be chuffed.)
The place I was most pleased to see the winners were the fan writer and fan zine categories. I read Jim Hines' blog, and I enjoy it. I kind of agree with Carrie, in that he's a big name, people have heard of him, so maybe he had an unfair advantage, but I also disagree. He has a different type of fannish writing than the other people on the list.
I think there's a change in what people want to read about in fan writing. Personally, I like the meta stuff, the sociology of fandom, the picking apart of sexist or racist tropes in novels or comics, and lampooning the anatomically improbable drawings of women in comics or on book covers. I like book reviews, movie reviews, that sort of thing. I'm not really interested in reading stories about how one time someone I don't know hung out with some other people I don't know, which apparently is what fan writing has been about for the last 50 or whatever years.
If Jim had declined the nomination, I would have voted "no award." With the demise of metafandom, I don't know who's writing the type of fannish writing I like to read, so point me there, if you have anyone, so I can read and rec them when the time comes.
Look also at SF Signal and compare it to the other fanzine nominees, like File 770 or Banana Wings. SF Signal has book reviews, book discussions, and mind melds, where a bunch of people talk about the same subject--like this recent post on whether a non-Anglo presence is possible in the Hugo awards. File 770 has some interesting stats geekery about the Hugos, and their November 2011 issue had a good bit of "get off my lawn, youwhippersnappers media and anime fans!"
Which, I gotta say, as an anime fan, that's a pretty huge turn-off.
I wasn't at the business meeting where the graphic story category was permanently ratified and the YA category once again denied, but apparently there's a contingent that fears change, that thought graphic novels were a fad, who thinks that YA is a fad. This says a lot about traditional fandom, really.
So, I wonder: are we looking at a sea-change as far as fan writing/zines are concerned, where we new fans who aren't interested in traditional fan writing and fan zines are starting to be heard more? Or is this an anomaly? How long will it take to get a YA category for the Hugos? Discuss.
The novellas were the hardest for me to rank, because the four I ranked were all really good, really well-written pieces, and I would have been happy with any of them winning. (The two I didn't just didn't do anything for me.)
I was fairly pleased with the winners' list. I agree with Carrie's thoughts to an extent--of the people on the list for several of the categories, the obvious winners won: Neil Gaiman. George RR Martin. Sheila Williams. Locus. That isn't to say none of these people deserve their wins, just that they're very popular. To an extent, the Hugos are a popularity contest, kind of like being nerd prom king/queen.
And there's nothing wrong with that. (Also, best anything is always a very subjective matter.)
What I thought was good about the Hugo winners' list was that many of the winning pieces had a sort of newness to them. It wasn't the same old 1950s SF story told with less-flat characters and more-current story techniques. It was still a mostly-white list, but there was a majority of women.
(Also, it's about damn time Betsy Wollheim won. DAW has published a lot of good, popular books since the 70s. In her acceptance speech she said, "Dad, FINALLY there's a Hugo with the name Wollheim on it." He'd be chuffed.)
The place I was most pleased to see the winners were the fan writer and fan zine categories. I read Jim Hines' blog, and I enjoy it. I kind of agree with Carrie, in that he's a big name, people have heard of him, so maybe he had an unfair advantage, but I also disagree. He has a different type of fannish writing than the other people on the list.
I think there's a change in what people want to read about in fan writing. Personally, I like the meta stuff, the sociology of fandom, the picking apart of sexist or racist tropes in novels or comics, and lampooning the anatomically improbable drawings of women in comics or on book covers. I like book reviews, movie reviews, that sort of thing. I'm not really interested in reading stories about how one time someone I don't know hung out with some other people I don't know, which apparently is what fan writing has been about for the last 50 or whatever years.
If Jim had declined the nomination, I would have voted "no award." With the demise of metafandom, I don't know who's writing the type of fannish writing I like to read, so point me there, if you have anyone, so I can read and rec them when the time comes.
Look also at SF Signal and compare it to the other fanzine nominees, like File 770 or Banana Wings. SF Signal has book reviews, book discussions, and mind melds, where a bunch of people talk about the same subject--like this recent post on whether a non-Anglo presence is possible in the Hugo awards. File 770 has some interesting stats geekery about the Hugos, and their November 2011 issue had a good bit of "get off my lawn, you
Which, I gotta say, as an anime fan, that's a pretty huge turn-off.
I wasn't at the business meeting where the graphic story category was permanently ratified and the YA category once again denied, but apparently there's a contingent that fears change, that thought graphic novels were a fad, who thinks that YA is a fad. This says a lot about traditional fandom, really.
So, I wonder: are we looking at a sea-change as far as fan writing/zines are concerned, where we new fans who aren't interested in traditional fan writing and fan zines are starting to be heard more? Or is this an anomaly? How long will it take to get a YA category for the Hugos? Discuss.
07 August 2012
Geekdom and me, part 2
So, yesterday I talked about my history of geekiness. Today, I'm going to talk a little about fandom and my experience with it.
I attended my first convention in March 2000. It was ... actually, that's not true. My first convention was in 1999, a gaming con at RPI. I'm not much of a gamer, but a lot of my friends went, and it was fun.
March 2000 was my first Animazement. I can't remember if I wore a costume, but I don't think I did. I had fun, I volunteered, I saw a lot of great costumes, and I took a lot of pictures, back when cameras still needed film.
I fell deeply into anime fandom. I wrote fanfic. I made cosplay. I flew across the country to go to cons. I joined Yahoo!groups for my favorite 'ships. I joined livejournal communities for fanfic. (I've since left both; the former because the particular fandoms didn't interest me anymore and the latter because it got too big and there was too much drama.)
As I said, though, I still read print science fiction and fantasy. I don't see a good reason why liking anime and manga should exclude me from liking a good science fiction novel, or vice versa. (Let me tell you about some really good SF anime sometime.)
I went to my first Dragon*Con in 2006. I'd wanted to go for years--the friend who hooked me on Bujold goes every year--but I was in pharmacy school until 2005, then on residency, and I couldn't skip classes. It was chaos, but it was awesome. I spent a few hours down in the basement of the Hyatt at the lit track, wandered around gawking at amazing costumes, and being awed by TV/movie stars, even if I'm not a big media fan.
Apparently, there's some controversy about whether being a fan of Firefly is "real" fandom, or whether a costumer is a "real" fan.
Let me tell you, as someone who has done costuming, spending in excess of 50 hours sewing or otherwise crafting a replica of a piece of clothing someone wears in a TV show, comic book, movie, or whatever, and spending large sums of money on materials and patterns, is a pretty damned geeky thing to do.
I favor inclusive fandom. I share Scalzi's opinion that the core of being a geek is saying, "You love this thing I love? Let's love it together!"
I don't agree at all with Taral Wayne in his essay in File 770 [p 40] (which I only read because it's in my Hugo packet). I don't believe the purpose of being a fan is to be a big fish in a small pond, or, to use his metaphor, Andy Griffith in Mayberry, as opposed to some faceless person in a big city.
If you wonder at the greying of fandom, at the greying of the long-running cons like Boskone, or BayCon's (San Francisco) likely impending demise, wonder no further. Gatekeepers who want to keep fandom tiny and exclusive are driving away the new fans. They're driving away people who love science fiction/fantasy TV shows or movies and read books on the side. They're driving away anime fans.
Look at Dragon*Con. It's huge. The first year I went, they were in three hotels. Last year, they were in FIVE (and need to go to more; it's so crowded). The WorldCon Orlando 2015 bid chair said that there's no reason to compete with D*C, and he's bidding for the same Labor Day Weekend because he doesn't see it as a zero sum game (see File 770, op cit) and "there's enough fandom to go around." He'd prefer to work with them, not against.
I want to be excited about the things I love, whether that's the newest Macross series or the latest CJ Cherryh novel, with other people who love them. That's what fandom is about. Not self-aggrandizement.
I attended my first convention in March 2000. It was ... actually, that's not true. My first convention was in 1999, a gaming con at RPI. I'm not much of a gamer, but a lot of my friends went, and it was fun.
March 2000 was my first Animazement. I can't remember if I wore a costume, but I don't think I did. I had fun, I volunteered, I saw a lot of great costumes, and I took a lot of pictures, back when cameras still needed film.
I fell deeply into anime fandom. I wrote fanfic. I made cosplay. I flew across the country to go to cons. I joined Yahoo!groups for my favorite 'ships. I joined livejournal communities for fanfic. (I've since left both; the former because the particular fandoms didn't interest me anymore and the latter because it got too big and there was too much drama.)
As I said, though, I still read print science fiction and fantasy. I don't see a good reason why liking anime and manga should exclude me from liking a good science fiction novel, or vice versa. (Let me tell you about some really good SF anime sometime.)
I went to my first Dragon*Con in 2006. I'd wanted to go for years--the friend who hooked me on Bujold goes every year--but I was in pharmacy school until 2005, then on residency, and I couldn't skip classes. It was chaos, but it was awesome. I spent a few hours down in the basement of the Hyatt at the lit track, wandered around gawking at amazing costumes, and being awed by TV/movie stars, even if I'm not a big media fan.
Apparently, there's some controversy about whether being a fan of Firefly is "real" fandom, or whether a costumer is a "real" fan.
Let me tell you, as someone who has done costuming, spending in excess of 50 hours sewing or otherwise crafting a replica of a piece of clothing someone wears in a TV show, comic book, movie, or whatever, and spending large sums of money on materials and patterns, is a pretty damned geeky thing to do.
I favor inclusive fandom. I share Scalzi's opinion that the core of being a geek is saying, "You love this thing I love? Let's love it together!"
I don't agree at all with Taral Wayne in his essay in File 770 [p 40] (which I only read because it's in my Hugo packet). I don't believe the purpose of being a fan is to be a big fish in a small pond, or, to use his metaphor, Andy Griffith in Mayberry, as opposed to some faceless person in a big city.
If you wonder at the greying of fandom, at the greying of the long-running cons like Boskone, or BayCon's (San Francisco) likely impending demise, wonder no further. Gatekeepers who want to keep fandom tiny and exclusive are driving away the new fans. They're driving away people who love science fiction/fantasy TV shows or movies and read books on the side. They're driving away anime fans.
Look at Dragon*Con. It's huge. The first year I went, they were in three hotels. Last year, they were in FIVE (and need to go to more; it's so crowded). The WorldCon Orlando 2015 bid chair said that there's no reason to compete with D*C, and he's bidding for the same Labor Day Weekend because he doesn't see it as a zero sum game (see File 770, op cit) and "there's enough fandom to go around." He'd prefer to work with them, not against.
I want to be excited about the things I love, whether that's the newest Macross series or the latest CJ Cherryh novel, with other people who love them. That's what fandom is about. Not self-aggrandizement.
06 August 2012
Geekdom and me, part 1
I've been thinking about writing a post about fandom and what it means and how it's changing (or isn't changing) for a while, and then there was apparently a spat about who's a real geek or not, and then the ReaderCon harassment thing happened, and the whole conversation of who's a geek, who cons are for, and whether women are welcome blew up a bit.
If I'd written the post when I first thought of it, I may have seemed prescient. (Or not; as if my readership is that big...) So now, I'm taking advantage of the Zeitgeist serendipitously.
I didn't grow up a geek. I was smart. I should have been in the gifted program but my mom wouldn't let me, so I was just in the advanced track in my elementary school. I finished first grade math before Christmas, and I had to change classrooms to a second grade class. I corrected my kindergarten teacher's spelling of "vulture." (She wanted to spell it with a g.)
I liked to read, but my mom isn't a big reader. She mostly had Harlequins and Barbara Cartlands, which I read a few of. I'd read from the two-volume dictionary, or the four-volume medical encyclopedia from my grandpa's time in pharmacology school, or, if I was really bored, the copy of Emily Post's Etiquette from 1917.
I don't have fond memories of going to the public library to check out books. The only times I ever went there were for English papers, when I needed to access the literary criticism books. I borrowed books from the school libraries, though, and I tore through the L'Engles in sixth grade, I think, and Earthsea, and, for some reason I'll never know, The Left Hand of Darkness. I have no idea why it was in a middle school library.
My grandma would buy me books whenever she went to the used book store. That's how I got my first copy of Lord of the Rings, which I read so many times the cover fell off. Then I got the Book of Lost Tales, which I found recently, with all the notes and bookmarks for cross-referencing.
My dad would take me to the bookstore when he visited, and that's how I got more books. He's an old school Trekkie, and when I visited him at his house, or in his truck (he drives a big rig), I'd read whatever books he had around. I read a lot of Stephen King one summer, and another summer it was Ben Bova's Mars.
So I had geeky interests as a teenager, but I never knew there was such a thing as fandom until much later. I didn't read a lot of the geek youth "canon" until I was 30!
At college, I fell in with the LARP crowd, didn't really get into tabletop, etc, but it was awesome to meet more people who liked nerdy things and be able to be open about it, because the popular kids wouldn't harass me over it. (As if being fat, smart, and poor weren't enough...)
When I moved to North Carolina, I joined the UNC anime club, through which I had my first fandom and con-going experiences. I still read books, often ones suggested by one of the older members of the club. (He told me I should buy Shards of Honor when we were stuck in an airport. Then I tracked down everything else Bujold had written up to that point, which was 2000 I think.)
That's my background in being a geek. Or not, whatever. I've fairly thoroughly embraced my geek nature, and if someone wants to label me a poser, that's not my problem. I'll go more into the what is fandom/who are fans in my next post.
If I'd written the post when I first thought of it, I may have seemed prescient. (Or not; as if my readership is that big...) So now, I'm taking advantage of the Zeitgeist serendipitously.
I didn't grow up a geek. I was smart. I should have been in the gifted program but my mom wouldn't let me, so I was just in the advanced track in my elementary school. I finished first grade math before Christmas, and I had to change classrooms to a second grade class. I corrected my kindergarten teacher's spelling of "vulture." (She wanted to spell it with a g.)
I liked to read, but my mom isn't a big reader. She mostly had Harlequins and Barbara Cartlands, which I read a few of. I'd read from the two-volume dictionary, or the four-volume medical encyclopedia from my grandpa's time in pharmacology school, or, if I was really bored, the copy of Emily Post's Etiquette from 1917.
I don't have fond memories of going to the public library to check out books. The only times I ever went there were for English papers, when I needed to access the literary criticism books. I borrowed books from the school libraries, though, and I tore through the L'Engles in sixth grade, I think, and Earthsea, and, for some reason I'll never know, The Left Hand of Darkness. I have no idea why it was in a middle school library.
My grandma would buy me books whenever she went to the used book store. That's how I got my first copy of Lord of the Rings, which I read so many times the cover fell off. Then I got the Book of Lost Tales, which I found recently, with all the notes and bookmarks for cross-referencing.
My dad would take me to the bookstore when he visited, and that's how I got more books. He's an old school Trekkie, and when I visited him at his house, or in his truck (he drives a big rig), I'd read whatever books he had around. I read a lot of Stephen King one summer, and another summer it was Ben Bova's Mars.
So I had geeky interests as a teenager, but I never knew there was such a thing as fandom until much later. I didn't read a lot of the geek youth "canon" until I was 30!
At college, I fell in with the LARP crowd, didn't really get into tabletop, etc, but it was awesome to meet more people who liked nerdy things and be able to be open about it, because the popular kids wouldn't harass me over it. (As if being fat, smart, and poor weren't enough...)
When I moved to North Carolina, I joined the UNC anime club, through which I had my first fandom and con-going experiences. I still read books, often ones suggested by one of the older members of the club. (He told me I should buy Shards of Honor when we were stuck in an airport. Then I tracked down everything else Bujold had written up to that point, which was 2000 I think.)
That's my background in being a geek. Or not, whatever. I've fairly thoroughly embraced my geek nature, and if someone wants to label me a poser, that's not my problem. I'll go more into the what is fandom/who are fans in my next post.
06 November 2011
So you like male writers. So what?
A writing pal of mine recently wrote that he figured he ought to read more books/short fiction by men, because he realized his shelves were mostly full of books by women. Cool, whatever.
My shelves are mostly full of books by women. They're mostly full of books by two authors: Lois McMaster Bujold's entire bibliography (including The Spirit Ring) and a sizable fraction of CJ Cherryh's bibliography. My shelves are a good 4' wide, and her books take up two of them. The only other author whose books come close to the same amount of space? Terry Pratchett. Lynn Flewelling comes in fourth place, with seven books.
That doesn't count the random selection of Literatyoor from high school or college and assorted non-fiction, nor the extensive manga collection (mostly by women, except the large Naoki Urasawa section).
Apparently, it's brave for people to say they like male authors, or that they plan to read more male authors. I disagree with another writing pal that the drive to promote women in fiction has evolved into open season on men, as if a predominately male field of writers in the past means that men writing now must all be assholes.
I didn't talk up male writer TC McCarthy's debut novel Germline, because I hate male writers and think no one should talk about them. Oh wait, I blogged about it and wrote a really positive review of it for a magazine, and I've talked it up to everybody I know who enjoys military SF.
I didn't review books by Mark Van Name, David Drake, Eric Flint, Tom Standage, or Patrick O'Brian in the last three months, either. The feminist anti-male-writer conspiracy has me silenced!
But, apparently,
As they say on wikipedia, [citation needed].
It is good to expand one's reading horizons. It is good to find books written by people who come from different backgrounds than you, because they often have different perspectives than you do. If you are reading books by only one type of person, you are limiting yourself. If you say that only men can write SF, and women don't belong in the SF clubhouse, you may be sexist.
No one is saying that reading books by male writers makes you a bad person prone to "shady behavior." What people are saying, and this comes up more often than it should, frankly, is that readers should expand their horizons.
Isn't expanding horizons and exploring different perspectives what science fiction's supposed to be about? Why's there such a push-back, then?
My shelves are mostly full of books by women. They're mostly full of books by two authors: Lois McMaster Bujold's entire bibliography (including The Spirit Ring) and a sizable fraction of CJ Cherryh's bibliography. My shelves are a good 4' wide, and her books take up two of them. The only other author whose books come close to the same amount of space? Terry Pratchett. Lynn Flewelling comes in fourth place, with seven books.
That doesn't count the random selection of Literatyoor from high school or college and assorted non-fiction, nor the extensive manga collection (mostly by women, except the large Naoki Urasawa section).
Apparently, it's brave for people to say they like male authors, or that they plan to read more male authors. I disagree with another writing pal that the drive to promote women in fiction has evolved into open season on men, as if a predominately male field of writers in the past means that men writing now must all be assholes.
I didn't talk up male writer TC McCarthy's debut novel Germline, because I hate male writers and think no one should talk about them. Oh wait, I blogged about it and wrote a really positive review of it for a magazine, and I've talked it up to everybody I know who enjoys military SF.
I didn't review books by Mark Van Name, David Drake, Eric Flint, Tom Standage, or Patrick O'Brian in the last three months, either. The feminist anti-male-writer conspiracy has me silenced!
But, apparently,
This is what we’ve done, readers. We’ve allowed ourselves – as a community of writers and readers – to think that talking about women (in a positive way, of course) is right and good, but liking men leads to shady behavior.
As they say on wikipedia, [citation needed].
It is good to expand one's reading horizons. It is good to find books written by people who come from different backgrounds than you, because they often have different perspectives than you do. If you are reading books by only one type of person, you are limiting yourself. If you say that only men can write SF, and women don't belong in the SF clubhouse, you may be sexist.
No one is saying that reading books by male writers makes you a bad person prone to "shady behavior." What people are saying, and this comes up more often than it should, frankly, is that readers should expand their horizons.
Isn't expanding horizons and exploring different perspectives what science fiction's supposed to be about? Why's there such a push-back, then?
08 August 2011
My Online Life
There has been much discussion about pseudonymity and real-name policies in the wake of Google+ (I'm on it! Come say hello!), and what expectations different groups have for online interactions.
I didn't meet the internet until I started college. I didn't get email until I started college. I'd guess about half my peer group (Gen X) was about the same, though among my friends (geeks with a high fraction of CS/math/physics types), I was late to the party. They had 512 baud dialup to BBSes and whatever. I couldn't figure out how to play Oregon Trail on the high school computers. I'm sort of the generation that had a lot of formative experiences in meat-space before the internet really took off. (I know people who are a decade younger than me who say they're "from the internet.")
Yet I have many friends online, some of whom I've never met in person, but I see pictures of their kids or pets on facebook or twitter. I received a box full of Turkish media (books and DVDs) in English from an almost-complete stranger who offered to send me some things to help me understand Turkish culture better. (I was expecting, like a book or 2. I got 5 plus 3 DVDs.) I commented that I love German Christmas foods, and an acquaintance sent me a care package full of marzipan and Lebkuchen and hazelnut chocolate. I hope someday to return the favor, or pay it forward to someone else.
I have friends who I met online and have become close friends, with whom I share trials and joys, to whom I offer support and congratulations. Some of them I've since met in person, but many, possibly even most, I haven't.
I met my husband via the internet, through some people I met in person who had an IRC channel they hung out on and a mailing list.
Thanks to twitter and the German football league, I have casual friends who live in Norway, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh, as well as Germany and various places in the US and Canada. I talk with fans of my club team on twitter, and the next time I make it to Berlin, I'll see about meeting some of them in person. (To catch a match at the stadium or in a bar, whatever.)
I've been online for seventeen years now, close to half my life. I became more involved in the internet about thirteen years ago, when I met the people with the IRC channel. I've had a dozen online identities since then, on mailing lists, general forums, topic-oriented forums, blogs, communities. I currently have seven different handles online, some more public than others. I don't make it a secret that @exaggerated and @strafraum are both me, but @exaggerated is where I put pictures of my cats and links to my blog, and @strafraum is where I talk about (FIFA) football.
Where was I going with this? Right. I think online is where a lot of people have formative experiences, develop deep friendships, and generally interact with other like-minded individuals. It's so much easier now than it was twenty years ago to find other people who like reading/writing the same kind of stories you do. I've wondered so many times how my high school life would have been different if I'd had access to the internet, or even known that there were other people out there who liked SF/F. (A much less trivial aspect is that LGBTQ teens in small towns can find support online through various communities and know that they're not alone.)
Oftentimes, these experiences take place under a pseudonym, a handle. The handle, once used long enough, becomes as real as the name on the driver's license or birth certificate. It's a name we choose, not the name we are given, and that's as real to us as the name our parents chose for us at birth -- and sometimes more real. People legally change their names for a variety of reasons, and whether it's because they hate their birth name or because they're transgender and their birth name is wrong, those are equally valid reasons.
The first link in this post discusses who is harmed by real-name policies. The answer is anyone who is outside the societally-accepted norm.
I didn't meet the internet until I started college. I didn't get email until I started college. I'd guess about half my peer group (Gen X) was about the same, though among my friends (geeks with a high fraction of CS/math/physics types), I was late to the party. They had 512 baud dialup to BBSes and whatever. I couldn't figure out how to play Oregon Trail on the high school computers. I'm sort of the generation that had a lot of formative experiences in meat-space before the internet really took off. (I know people who are a decade younger than me who say they're "from the internet.")
Yet I have many friends online, some of whom I've never met in person, but I see pictures of their kids or pets on facebook or twitter. I received a box full of Turkish media (books and DVDs) in English from an almost-complete stranger who offered to send me some things to help me understand Turkish culture better. (I was expecting, like a book or 2. I got 5 plus 3 DVDs.) I commented that I love German Christmas foods, and an acquaintance sent me a care package full of marzipan and Lebkuchen and hazelnut chocolate. I hope someday to return the favor, or pay it forward to someone else.
I have friends who I met online and have become close friends, with whom I share trials and joys, to whom I offer support and congratulations. Some of them I've since met in person, but many, possibly even most, I haven't.
I met my husband via the internet, through some people I met in person who had an IRC channel they hung out on and a mailing list.
Thanks to twitter and the German football league, I have casual friends who live in Norway, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh, as well as Germany and various places in the US and Canada. I talk with fans of my club team on twitter, and the next time I make it to Berlin, I'll see about meeting some of them in person. (To catch a match at the stadium or in a bar, whatever.)
I've been online for seventeen years now, close to half my life. I became more involved in the internet about thirteen years ago, when I met the people with the IRC channel. I've had a dozen online identities since then, on mailing lists, general forums, topic-oriented forums, blogs, communities. I currently have seven different handles online, some more public than others. I don't make it a secret that @exaggerated and @strafraum are both me, but @exaggerated is where I put pictures of my cats and links to my blog, and @strafraum is where I talk about (FIFA) football.
Where was I going with this? Right. I think online is where a lot of people have formative experiences, develop deep friendships, and generally interact with other like-minded individuals. It's so much easier now than it was twenty years ago to find other people who like reading/writing the same kind of stories you do. I've wondered so many times how my high school life would have been different if I'd had access to the internet, or even known that there were other people out there who liked SF/F. (A much less trivial aspect is that LGBTQ teens in small towns can find support online through various communities and know that they're not alone.)
Oftentimes, these experiences take place under a pseudonym, a handle. The handle, once used long enough, becomes as real as the name on the driver's license or birth certificate. It's a name we choose, not the name we are given, and that's as real to us as the name our parents chose for us at birth -- and sometimes more real. People legally change their names for a variety of reasons, and whether it's because they hate their birth name or because they're transgender and their birth name is wrong, those are equally valid reasons.
The first link in this post discusses who is harmed by real-name policies. The answer is anyone who is outside the societally-accepted norm.
30 December 2010
Anime rec: Princess Tutu
Long time, no update, and I come bringing a recommendation!
Princess Tutu is a magical girl show in which the battles are fought with ballet.
No, wait. Come back! I promise it's not like Minky Momo with toe shoes. Let me try again.
Princess Tutu is a deconstruction of fairy tales and tropes and a consideration of fate versus free will.
That makes it sound really boring. Have I mentioned that the magical girl is a duck?
Now that I (hopefully) have your attention, let's get more into the details of the story. There once was a man who died. He was a writer of fairy tales, and before he could finish his last piece, the story of the prince and the raven, he died, and the prince and the raven escaped from the story. The prince had to shatter his heart to seal away the raven.
Ahiru (Duck) is swimming on her pond, when she sees a beautiful boy with sad eyes dancing ballet. She wishes she could make him happy, and a creepy old man pops out of the air and asks her what she would give to make him happy. She answers, "My life." The creepy old man gives her a pendant that turns her into a girl. It also turns her into Princess Tutu. (Got that? A magical girl who's really a duck.)
The beautiful boy with sad eyes is the prince from the story, and it's Princess Tutu's job to return the shards of his heart. His name is Mytho, and he's best friends with Fakir, another student at Gold Crown Academy's ballet section. His girlfriend, Rue, is another ballet student. But, naturally, none of them is just a ballet student.
It's not that simple, of course, and every magical girl needs a nemesis. Tutu's comes in the form of Princess Kraehe, the raven's daughter. The tale of the prince and the raven is about to begin anew, and the principal actors in the tale rebel against their fate: the knight refuses to die, the puppet refuses to be on its strings, the princess who's fated to vanish upon confessing her love refuses to speak the words that will turn her into a speck of light.
Gold Crown Town is a place where stories become real and where nothing is quite normal. Ahiru's ballet teacher is a slightly anthropomorphic cat. There's another student who's a goat, along with meerkats, aardvarks, and cows. A traveling troupe comes to perform a show, and the troupe leader turns into an electric eel. (One of the dancers says, "He wasn't like that until we came here.")
It's an excellent deconstruction of both fairy tale tropes and magical girl tropes, and the characters are very realistic. There's no lack of stock characters -- the lovelorn widow, the show-off who's really awful -- but the handful of characters who matter are well drawn, and they're active, which you'd expect in a story that's all about challenging your fate. Speaking of well drawn, the character designs are perfect.
It's a magical girl show in the vein of Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is also (technically speaking) MG and about revolutionizing the world.
You can buy the complete collection.
Princess Tutu is a magical girl show in which the battles are fought with ballet.
No, wait. Come back! I promise it's not like Minky Momo with toe shoes. Let me try again.
Princess Tutu is a deconstruction of fairy tales and tropes and a consideration of fate versus free will.
That makes it sound really boring. Have I mentioned that the magical girl is a duck?
Now that I (hopefully) have your attention, let's get more into the details of the story. There once was a man who died. He was a writer of fairy tales, and before he could finish his last piece, the story of the prince and the raven, he died, and the prince and the raven escaped from the story. The prince had to shatter his heart to seal away the raven.
Ahiru (Duck) is swimming on her pond, when she sees a beautiful boy with sad eyes dancing ballet. She wishes she could make him happy, and a creepy old man pops out of the air and asks her what she would give to make him happy. She answers, "My life." The creepy old man gives her a pendant that turns her into a girl. It also turns her into Princess Tutu. (Got that? A magical girl who's really a duck.)
The beautiful boy with sad eyes is the prince from the story, and it's Princess Tutu's job to return the shards of his heart. His name is Mytho, and he's best friends with Fakir, another student at Gold Crown Academy's ballet section. His girlfriend, Rue, is another ballet student. But, naturally, none of them is just a ballet student.
It's not that simple, of course, and every magical girl needs a nemesis. Tutu's comes in the form of Princess Kraehe, the raven's daughter. The tale of the prince and the raven is about to begin anew, and the principal actors in the tale rebel against their fate: the knight refuses to die, the puppet refuses to be on its strings, the princess who's fated to vanish upon confessing her love refuses to speak the words that will turn her into a speck of light.
Gold Crown Town is a place where stories become real and where nothing is quite normal. Ahiru's ballet teacher is a slightly anthropomorphic cat. There's another student who's a goat, along with meerkats, aardvarks, and cows. A traveling troupe comes to perform a show, and the troupe leader turns into an electric eel. (One of the dancers says, "He wasn't like that until we came here.")
It's an excellent deconstruction of both fairy tale tropes and magical girl tropes, and the characters are very realistic. There's no lack of stock characters -- the lovelorn widow, the show-off who's really awful -- but the handful of characters who matter are well drawn, and they're active, which you'd expect in a story that's all about challenging your fate. Speaking of well drawn, the character designs are perfect.
It's a magical girl show in the vein of Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is also (technically speaking) MG and about revolutionizing the world.
You can buy the complete collection.
25 November 2010
Musing on music
There are a lot of writers out there who make writing soundtracks, character playlists, and that sort of thing. Some days it seems that everyone is doing it but me.
I like music. I like having tunes playing when I'm on a long drive or in the background during a party. Sometimes I get really excited about a new-to-me artist or CD and play it on endless repeat.
But never while I'm working. It's too much of a distraction. I can't focus on creating at the same time I'm consuming. Even back in high school when I was working on papers or any sort of homework that required intense focus (which wasn't a lot of it, really), I couldn't have the radio on.
So I don't really get the whole writing soundtrack and character playlist thing. I'm just not wired that way.
I will, however, fire up iTunes and AirTunes it in to my sewing room, as long as I'm in the putting things together stage, and not the part where I'm calculating how to shorten the pattern to fit my short self and laying it out and tracing it. And if I run into something that's confusing, I turn them off.
Hmm, I have a bunch of sewing I need to do. Pity my sewing room is a bit of a disaster, and the thought of going in and straightening it up makes me want to avoid it forever.
I like music. I like having tunes playing when I'm on a long drive or in the background during a party. Sometimes I get really excited about a new-to-me artist or CD and play it on endless repeat.
But never while I'm working. It's too much of a distraction. I can't focus on creating at the same time I'm consuming. Even back in high school when I was working on papers or any sort of homework that required intense focus (which wasn't a lot of it, really), I couldn't have the radio on.
So I don't really get the whole writing soundtrack and character playlist thing. I'm just not wired that way.
I will, however, fire up iTunes and AirTunes it in to my sewing room, as long as I'm in the putting things together stage, and not the part where I'm calculating how to shorten the pattern to fit my short self and laying it out and tracing it. And if I run into something that's confusing, I turn them off.
Hmm, I have a bunch of sewing I need to do. Pity my sewing room is a bit of a disaster, and the thought of going in and straightening it up makes me want to avoid it forever.
03 October 2010
An artist who's on my wavelength
One of the things I love about Berlin is its history. When I walk through the streets, it's almost like I can feel the people who came before, or imagine the buildings that were there a hundred years ago but aren't anymore.
Russian artist Sergey Larenkov takes recent photographs of cities (Moscow, Berlin, Kiev, among others) and matches them up with historical photographs (mainly from WW2), then puts them together, so you have modern-day Muscovites walking down the street past a gun emplacement or the Reichstag simultaneously whole and under attack.
It's like he read my mind.
Russian artist Sergey Larenkov takes recent photographs of cities (Moscow, Berlin, Kiev, among others) and matches them up with historical photographs (mainly from WW2), then puts them together, so you have modern-day Muscovites walking down the street past a gun emplacement or the Reichstag simultaneously whole and under attack.
It's like he read my mind.
01 September 2009
Outer Alliance Pride Day post
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
I'm not yet published, and I've decided to pretty much scrap the SF romance novella I wrote (for a variety of reasons, including that the plot was sketchy at best). But there's a scene in it that I still like, though it'll have to have some reworking to fit the new plot.
Michael is a communications officer on the Free Merchant Ship Donau. Atesh is a mercenary, but Michael doesn't know that. The Donau is taking Atesh's company to their next mission, and the Donau believes they're humanitarian aid workers. So, onward. (And this is still sort of first-draft-ish.)
The bunks on the Donau had not been designed with trysts in mind. The overhead light was too bright, and the bedside lamps, while less blinding, were fixed in position on the door-side wall. Michael had figured out a way to cover it to make it less obtrusive, but there was no way to change the narrow beds without taking the ship apart.
Michael pressed his back against Atesh’s chest, still warm and slightly sweaty from sex. “A guy could get used to this,” he said.
“Used to what?” Atesh draped his arm across Michael’s waist and lazily stroked his chest with a rough finger.
“Getting laid more often than every few weeks when he’s on station leave. The hand is a poor substitute for a good man.” He realized he’d miss Atesh when he was gone, and not just for the sex. He’d started to consider him a friend.
Atesh chuckled. “Maybe I should lay off a bit. Don’t want to leave you disappointed, when you drop us off and go back.”
Michael turned in the narrow bed and faced Atesh. “I think I’d rather take advantage of the situation while I can.” He trailed his hand over Atesh’s back and rested it on his hip. “We can keep in touch, you know. Meet up if we’re in the same place at the same time.”
Atesh ran rough fingers down Michael’s spine and over his ass. “I’d like that.” He shifted his weight and pushed Michael onto his back, then knelt over him, legs between Michael’s thighs. Michael wrapped his legs around Atesh’s hips and pulled him closer. Atesh kissed him, tongue sliding between his lips.
“Take advantage while we can, shall we?” Atesh murmured in his ear. His tongue traced the curve of Michael’s ear, and Michael raked fingernails down Atesh’s back.
“That’s an excellent plan,” Michael replied.
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