Iron Gall Ink

Readercon 2008

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:46:29 GMT

I'll be at Readercon this weekend, and am very much looking forward to seeing a bunch of folks from here.

Thursday 9:00 PM, RI: Workshop (60 min.)

Reading Aloud for Writers. Jim Freund with participation by Michael Cisco, Terry McGarry, Judith Moffett, Geoff Ryman, Sarah Smith, _et al_

Freund has produced professional broadcast radio of f&sf writers reading their own work for almost 40 years for NYC's WBAI-FM, and is also the curator of _The New York Review of Science Fiction_ Reading Series, and a professional performer himself. In this workshop, Jim will share and discuss live reading technique in almost any setting a writer may find themselves: bookshop signing, library, convention, broad- or pod- cast. He'll discuss selecting your material, presentation (intro, Q&A), microphone usage, characters versus narration. For studio performance (or at-home podcasting) he'll share knowledge of simple yet professional recording technologies and sound ambience. This is a workshop, so you will have a chance to get some paragraphs in edgewise.

Friday 7:30 PM, VT: Reading (30 min.)

Reads ~~either some deleted material from her novel _Triad _ or~~ her story "The Piper's Chair," forthcoming in _H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror_. (Half-hour reading, which is just right for the story, so I'll be reading that.)

Saturday 11:00 AM, Salon G: Panel

The Einstein Introspection. Dale Bailey, Nina Harper, James Patrick Kelly (L), Terry McGarry, Paul Park, Delia Sherman

The degree to which we understand our own psychology can vary widely across different periods of our lives. How do stories informed or even inspired by introspection differ from stories in which characterization is largely drawn from observation or is generated unconsciously without self-awareness? Some writers report that writing "introspeculative fiction" leads to the creation of characters _less_ like themselves, a seeming paradox that's well worth exploring.

Sunday 12:00 Noon, RI: Discussion (60 min.)

You Got Spec Fic in My Romance! (And Vice Versa!) Victoria Janssen (L) with Nina Harper, Mary Kay Kare, Terry McGarry, Gayle Surrette, Nancy Werlin, _et al_

One of the hottest romance sub-genres at the moment is paranormal, which encompasses everything from vampires to valkyries, werewolves to gargoyles, men who are cursed and women who carry demons on their skin. Many of the more recent paranormals, such as those by Patricia Briggs and Eileen Wilks, arguably have more fantasy than romance. Is paranormal "true" speculative fiction? How often do readers cross genres? Are paranormal romances and speculative fiction showing cross-genre pollination in their content?

Wordle Lullaby

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:05:14 GMT

Lee McGarry

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:10:37 GMT

I wrote the first part of what follows over the last week of March, but caring for my mom was taking up most of my time day and night, and I didn't manage to post it.

Last week of March, 2008

My mother, who's in her early eighties, started subscribing to Astounding magazine in the nineteen-forties. Her friend Mimi turned her on to it. Mimi was a physics major at Hunter, where she and my mother went to college, and she grabbed Mom one day and put a copy of the magazine in her hands and said the equivalent of "This is so cool, you have got to check this out." Mom was initially skeptical, but she read the issue and was hooked. Before long she was reading the pulps on the subway to and from school, then later on to and from work. Our apartment was always strewn with the magazines--F&SF, Galaxy, Analog, Asimov's, and many others--and she read every issue from cover to cover.

After getting her degree in English and then deciding she didn't want to be an English teacher after all, Mom taught dance at Arthur Murray's for a while, and then put in several decades at an insurance company, first in the steno pool, then as an attorney's secretary, and for the last twelve of her years there as a paralegal after finishing a night-school program at NYU while she was working full-time and parenting a child and coping with the whimsicalities of life with my father. (They hadn't exactly hit it off the first time they met, but got together after discovering a shared love for A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh.) After she retired from the Equitable, she took a full-time job as parish secretary at our Episcopal church, also serving as a lector and lay minister, and retired from there about twelve years ago, when we moved out of that neighborhood. She'd always been a fantasy reader--Charles Williams, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, and E. R. Eddison were especially beloved, as was Tolkien--and she loved mystery novels and War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. She was an English-history buff and an admirer of Elizabeth I. She loved opera and folk music and Gilbert & Sullivan, and had shelves filled with albums and librettos; we had a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera and went to operas there and at the New York State Theatre together for years. She loved Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Cary Grant and Indiana Jones, Gunga Din and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Partly because of her love of opera and partly because of her love of language, she studied German, Russian, Latin, Italian, and French, and kept a reading understanding of all them as long as she had a dictionary handy; we worked through a teach-yourself-Welsh course together when we were both on an Evangeline Walton kick, and we took Irish Gaelic language classes together. She loved Gormenghast and Majipoor and Middle Earth with all her heart. She loved Kipling's India, and Discworld, and Earthsea; she loved Ellis Peters and Lindsey Davis and Dorothy L. Sayers. She loved E. Nesbit and Diana Wynne Jones and Tove Jansson, she loved His Dark Materials even though it broke her heart, and she loved the Harry Potter series; until she had the last book in her hands she worried that she wouldn't live long enough to get to read the end of the story. She did the Times crossword every day of the week, and all the other crosswords and acrostics she could get her hands on. She kept voluminous diaries and reading journals in a beautiful, meticulous hand.

She hasn't done a crossword or written in her diary or felt like listening to music in a while now. She keeps a Cadfael book by her at all times, and has a pile of Falcos and an Earthsea omnibus close to hand, but she doesn't really read them, just picks them up and looks at them and puts them down and closes her eyes, figuring she'll read when she's not so tired. They're all getting a little ragged from being handled and slept with, the way the things that comfort you tend to do.

She has fairly advanced, metastatic lung cancer and COPD and is increasingly showing symptoms of senile dementia. Throughout the agonizingly protracted diagnostic process (the mass in her lung first showed up on an X-ray on December 3rd, but it's in a tricky spot and two needle biopsies failed to get enough tissue for a diagnosis), she was clear and firm about wanting to fight for as much time as she could get, and she's now three weeks into the light chemotherapy and Avastin treatment proposed by her oncologist. (Without treatment she'd have fewer than six months. If the treatment helps, she might have an eighty percent chance of surviving the year, and could live two years, five years, no one can say for sure.) In February she was hospitalized for two weeks after a fall that may have involved some kind of stroke. While she was in the hospital, a thoracic surgeon did a mediastinoscopy and bronchoscopy that she'd been scheduled to have as an outpatient the day she fell (and which yielded the diagnosis at last), and installed an infuser port. The first couple of weeks she was home, she started eating a bit better and getting stronger, responding well to physical therapy and other home-care-agency support, but the chemo or the disease or her natural decline or a combination started taking a heavy toll, and she's doing rather poorly right now. She's unable to perform any of the basic tasks of daily living by herself. I've become her full-time caregiver, with invaluable help from the RN and home health aides who continue to come three times a week.

The double whammy of cancer and mental decline is a frightening, exhausting experience for her, and heartbreaking and difficult for me to witness and to cope with. Her mother suffered dementia at the end of her life (we cared for her in our house, with the help of a paid daytime nurse, during my teen years), and my mother said to me on numerous occasions thereafter that she had a horror of ending up like that. I fear that her fears are coming to pass, and I don't know if any time she carves out for herself by fighting the cancer will be time she can enjoy. We take each day as it comes and do the best we can. We laugh when we rediscover the grunting noise her big stuffed hedgehog makes when you squeeze it. We sit and watch the early-blooming willow outside her window come into flower.

I believe that good wishes have power, and appreciate all good wishes sent Mom's way.

April 6, 2008

This past Wednesday night, after continuing to decline rather than improve and after a decision to stop chemotherapy and try to regain some quality of life for the time she had left, Mom had severe abdominal pains, and after talking to the on-call RN at the home-care agency I called the paramedics to take her to the emergency room. A CT scan showed an intestinal perforation. She went into surgery at 6am Thursday, where it turned out that the perforation was a rupture; she survived the surgery, but she had become septic, and she went from Recovery into the ICU. It was touch-and-go for a couple of days, but she took a turn for the worse over Friday night. At 6am Saturday we got a call to come to the hospital right away. She died--in my arms, inasmuch as is possible with the tubes and monitors and bed rail and all, and looking into my eyes--at about quarter past seven.

She didn't want a funeral service; she wanted to be cremated and brought home again to be with me, and that's what I've arranged for. Because some people very dear to us have said that they hope for an opportunity to show their respects, there may be a memorial service in a few weeks; I can't make that decision right now. There are many picures I want to share, but they require scanning, and that will have to wait a bit. She contributed to Planned Parenthood, Alzheimer's and macular-degeneration research, various wildlife- and nature-conservation organizations and animal shelters, public television and radio, and the Democratic Party, and she very much wanted the genre magazines to continue publication.

I was privileged to share her life with her for more than half its span, and I grieve past the capacity of words to convey.

Irish Gaelic from Rosetta Stone

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:17:17 GMT

Rosetta Stone has finally added Irish Gaelic as one of the languages it offers instruction in, and at all three levels, which is great. I did Italian Levels 1 and 2 online and Japanese Level 1 with the old-version CD-ROM, and it's a terrific and effective way to learn a new language.

I haven't tried the new version--I'll post an update once I have--but the old version was fantastic and I trust that the new one improves on it, so I highly recommend Rosetta Stone to anyone who's been wanting to learn some Irish but has no access to local instruction and has been frustrated trying to work with teach-yourself books and tapes. You used to have to download software to try the method out, but that's no longer the case, and the demo is here. The lessons are pretty addictive, and as fun and absorbing (to me, anyway) as FreeCell or any online Flash game.

It's not cheap, but it's reasonably priced and competitive with other language-learning tools and classes, and the cost should be deductible as an educational and/or software expense for writers and editors. If you're self-motivated and a fairly fast learner with a broadband Internet connection, an online subscription is the way to go; you'll probably zoom through Level 1, and Level 2 has the material you'll need to start usefully communicating. I'd just started Level 2 Italian when I flew off to Italy, and I did pretty well with my month's intensive study, but when I got back and finished Level 2 I found myself learning everything I sorely lacked when I was there (how to ask for and understand street directions, for example). "Oh, man, if only I'd gotten this far," I said partway into every Level 2 lesson. You don't need to own Level 1 on disk unless you'll be working through it very slowly, you'll want to have it available for years for starting-overs and brushing-ups, and/or you be working primarily offline. For me, all three are true of my Level 1 Japanese (especially the working-through-it-very-slowly part), so I'm glad I bought that on disk, and I'll be buying all three levels of Irish Gaelic (least expensive place I've seen it so far is Amazon), but the online subscription suited my needs perfectly for Italian, and I'll be using it to dabble in other languages and refresh my fading Spanish and Latin in the future.

I recommend getting a good basic grammar book to go along with any Rosetta Stone course. It helped me with both Italian and Japanese, at any rate, because I can soak up a great deal intuitively, but there are times when I like to have the rules laid out for me (and I needed a lot of ancillary materials to help me with the reading aspects of Japanese). Máiréad Ní Ghráda's Progress in Irish is a wonderful book we used in class at the Irish Arts Center, and since it's good to have a dictionary, too, I suggest Foclóir Póca.

Match It for Pratchett

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:16:27 GMT

fastfwd posted a couple of heartening Match It For Pratchett reports yesterday. I donated through the Match It For Pratchett Website last week, but didn't get a chance to post the link and am now rectifying. As melissajm's Tech Support demonstrated, the T-shirts make good gifts, too.

"Help stamp out and abolish redundancy..." she said, trailing off.

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:54:41 GMT

In the Pet Peeve Department:

If you use ellipsis points at the end of some dialogue to indicate faltering or trailing-off speech, you do not then have to announce in the narration that the utterance has "trailed off." It's evident from the punctuation.

If you use an em-dash at the end of some dialogue to indicate sharply cut-off speech, and the next line is another line of dialogue, you do not have to announce at any point that the second speaker has cut the first speaker off. The two lines of dialogue and their punctuation work aurally, just as in a playscript, and the reader doesn't need any help from the narrator to get what's happening.

"If you just turned yourself in..." He trailed off.

"Turning myself in is not an option."

We don't need to be told that he trailed off. We can see that he did. If you're going to highlight the fact, then tell us why it's significant enough to be worth highlighting:

"If you just turned yourself in..." He had so much faith in the integrity of the local security forces that he didn't bother to complete the sentence. The happy outcome was that obvious to him.

She knew how corrupt they were. "Turning myself in is not an option."

Telling us what we can see for ourselves is just lazy padding.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why don't you just--"

She cut him off. "Because it would get me killed!"

All "She cut him off" does is interrupt the rhythm of the speakers' exchange. If you're going to interrupt it, do something more substantive in the process.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why don't you just--"

She cut him off before his insufferable naivete could make her any angrier. "Because it would get me killed!"

"I don't understand," he said. "Why don't you just--"

She raised a hand to fend off yet another of his naive suggestions. Which part of "the whole security force is in my enemy's pocket" had he failed to grasp? "Because it would get me killed!"

This one comes up often as a participial phrase:

"I don't understand," he said. "Why don't you just--"

"Because it would get me killed!" she said, cutting him off. Her hands jerked forward and balled into fists, as if she were taking him by imaginary lapels to shake some sense into him.

We saw that she'd cut him off eight words before the sentence told us. Nothing is lost by deleting "cutting him off" or the entirety of "she said, cutting him off":

"I don't understand," he said. "Why don't you just--"

"Because it would get me killed!" Her hands jerked forward and balled into fists, as if she were taking him by imaginary lapels to shake some sense into him.

A lot of the time, "said" tags are unnecessary; we know who's speaking from context, from interpolated description ["Okay." His pained expression belied the assent. "Yes"], and from the content, syntax, and vocabulary of the dialogue itself. But "said" tags do serve a rhythmic purpose and help keep the reader oriented, and as long as they aren't awkward or excessive they're close to invisible, hardly registering on the reader's conscious mind, as integrated as punctuation. "He trailed off" and "he said, trailing off" and "She cut him off" and "she said, cutting him off" make the "said"s visible to no good purpose. When they appear frequently throughout a piece of fiction, they amount to a rhythmic crutch; to me they loom larger each time, and become annoying narrative tics. It's like the TV commercial where the guy's in the job interview talking about his qualifications and what the interviewer sees and hears is this droning guy in the background and the stain on his shirt SHOUTING IN CREEPY GIBBERISH!!!! He can't focus on what the guy's saying, because the stain distracts him so much.

Dude. If She Can Do It...

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:19:53 GMT

My elderly mother, who's quite ill and for whom it is an effort to walk up or down a flight of stairs or cross the street, felt it was so important to vote today that after an exhausting three-hour doctor's visit she asked to go with me to the polling place instead of being taken straight home.

I'm just sayin'.

(And I'm very proud of her.)

Happy Robert Day

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:21:24 GMT

Happy birthday, readwrite!

Go Giants :)

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:17:23 GMT

We're a big Giants household here, so today is a day of celebration. Me, I still can't believe we got into the Super Bowl. It's going to take me a couple of days to believe we won. One of the biggest upsets in NFL history, and it was our team! Not to mention that it was a fantastic game. We reserved a table for dinner at our local sports bar and went kitted out in our Giants gear (well, with me kitted out in K's spare Giants gear, since I couldn't turn up my jersey, which given the power of sports paraphernalia voodoo may have been for the best, since IIRC the last time I wore it was for the Giants-Ravens game that it's best not to speak of) and watched with a crowd of enthusiastic fans. It's a pretty wild experience--the massive TV screens, the sensory overload, the voices chanting "DEfense!" in unison, the primal roar of the clapping and pounding hands and feet, the strange temporary community of strangers--and on the way home we had what K called Pavlov's car horn: beep at any corner and a cheer would go up from all the people out on the streets. We could still hear the horns and revelry from the strip when we got back to the house. It was as if all of New York had gotten married.

Yeah, ultimately it's just entertainment and just a game, but there's an awful lot of suckage going around these days, and when glee comes to revel in, I'm reveling in it. Go Giants!!! :) :)

Old McGarry Had a Farm?

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:28:19 GMT

I hadn't worked on that Funny Farm puzzle in weeks, but the link came up as a saved-workspace document when I opened WordPerfect on this notebook today, and I plugged it into a Firefox tab, and it's still functional. Probably any of you who were playing with it finished it long ago, but in case anyone's still tearing hair out over the thing and wants to merge or just peek, here's my last saved game:

http://shygypsy.com/farm/p.cgi?state=pppppppppppjpppppnolppppppllpdlpppphkpppphpppppphpppppnlpppppppppppppnnpphopppoppppoppppppppppphmplppppopaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa&style=vbvswpzqavttqaqvyfnyogwwuuicdyzwrtuwswwfzsiqzrdfuyyypyrdpsduznnidhvlgidw&i=1&j=4&cmd=guess&guess=+

Happy TheNetwork Day!

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:06:59 GMT

And right on the heels of the last birthday message, since when it rains, it pours...

Happy birthday,

thenetwork!

I was hoping to get Photoshop (casualty of my last hard-drive crash) reloaded in time to make you a birthday giftie graphic, but alas I did not. Nonetheless, sincere wishes to you for a marvelous year to come. *hugs*

Happy Patrick Day!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:34:43 GMT

I've been terribly slapdash about the birthday messages this year, but nonetheless...

Happy birthday,

tbclone47!

And many, many more. :)

Seventh Generation

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:51:39 GMT

As many of you are well aware, I am not a very domestic person, so this is a weird post for me to be making...but lately I've been trying to clean greener, and as I'm also trying to update my journal more often, voilà, an entry about environmentally friendlier household products.

I started out by substituting things like baking soda and vinegar for general-purpose cleaners because I didn't want to mop the floors and clean the carpets and bathroom with stuff that could poison my pets, and that's worked out fantastically well. The past couple of weeks I've been trying Seventh Generation products--paper towels, laundry detergent, trash bags, and so on. I figured that if I found environmentally friendlier stuff that worked as well as what I'd been using, I'd be willing to switch over even though it does cost more. (Paper towels especially; like any pet owner, I go through a ridiculous amount of paper toweling, no matter how good I try to be about using washable cloths instead.) I used a drugstore.com coupon to pick up some things from the site's Seventh Generation store, and then found a whole shelf of SG products in my local supermarket and grabbed a roll of the toilet paper to try too.

I haven't done a lick of research into claims like this made by the company...

If every household in the U.S. replaced just one bottle of 25 oz. petroleum based dishwashing liquid with our 25 oz. vegetable based product, we could save 81,000 barrels of oil, enough to heat and cool 4,600 U.S. homes a year!

...but they sure sound good, and here's what I thought of the stuff I tried.

Wholehearted thumbs-up on the liquid laundry detergent and the dishwashing liquid. Works as well as Era or Tide and Dawn in the same amounts. I'm converted.

Thumbs-up on the kitchen-can trash bags. User reviews complained about them tearing easily, but I have to wonder what the hell those people were stuffing into their trash. We're pretty hard on trash bags here, and nary a poke-through to report, never mind catastrophic breakage.

Thumbs-up on the (natural brown) paper toweling. Kevin grumbles a four-letter word at it every now and then because he's a loyal Bounty user, but as far as I'm concerned it's a worthwhile compromise for the recycled content: it feels flimsier and less absorbent than Bounty, but in service it's perfectly good. It doesn't fall apart during vigorous scrubbing of things like cast-iron pans, it absorbs just fine, and I don't find that I'm using two sheets to do the job one sheet of Bounty would do.

Not-a-thumbs-down on the toilet paper. It's definitely harder and more industrial-feeling than ScotTissue, my usual brand--and, granted, I don't like the fluffy perfumy stuff like Charmin--but using it is not, IMO, the horrific scratchy experience some user reviews reported. Nevertheless, I don't think we'll be adopting this one. After we finished up the roll I'd bought, I said to Kevin, "So, how much did you hate that toilet paper?" Having used the test paper without complaint and having been admirably silent on the topic until I brought it up, he promptly said, "I went from Charmin to ScotTissue to sandpaper." I'll be satisfied with doing my part for the environment by using the other products. :)

Oh, and I almost forgot: Thumbs-up on the facial tissue too. Just as good as Kleenex, and a lot of people around here have had bad colds lately, so testing was extensive.

Now to hope I can find this stuff cheaper in quantity at a place like BJ's or Costco.

What I Really Want Now Is to Hear It Rendered by Orchestral Kazoos

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:39:19 GMT

During today's Ohio-Michigan game, one of the marching bands played a phrase of Carmina Burana's "O Fortuna!," and I came one step closer to being able to say "Now I've heard everything."

...WFC goes

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:22:33 GMT

So, World Fantasy.

derrylm appeared before me at the mass signing, early on while it was still fairly chaotic. "Hey, you!" I said, truly delighted to see him. We exchanged maybe five words; maybe I asked where he was sitting, thinking that I would go find him later and chat for a bit, or maybe he volunteered that he wasn't signing because he wasn't doing programming; somehow it came up that he didn't think he was signing because he wasn't doing panels, and I told him that I wasn't either and hadn't thought so either but thanks to the lovely WFC people if you were a writer and had a convention membership there was a name placard for you out at the check-in table, and I told him to go check in because I bet there was one there for him. Last I saw of him he was striding back in with name placard in hand. Thereafter, of course, I ended up being so busy at my own spot that I never got over to his for that chat I hoped to have. I used to say that attending World Fantasy and Worldcon was a lot like attending your own wedding reception: All your favorite people are there, but you don't get to spend more than five minutes with eighty percent of them. I glimpsed eglady sitting one row over from me and meant to go say hi to her and never did that either, but stevendj and I ran into her in the consuite on Sunday morning and did get to hang out a bit; at least you do get second chances, sometimes.

As stevendj and I were leaving some panel or other on Friday, a woman passing us looked back to say a bright hello to Steven. Out in the hall, after a moment to process, I said, "Was that Diana?" It had been so long since I'd seen her at a convention; I've been going to fewer of them myself the past two years, and before that she'd stopped going completely for a while. I checked the membership list the next chance I got, and yes, found her name! Then she was kind enough to drop by my table at the signing, so we did have a few minutes to catch up. If I were giving out awards for Coolest Author Bio, I think hers would tie with David Gemmell's as Most Likely to Get Me to Read a Book Based on the Bio. (A related award would be Coolest Byline That Is Extra Super Cool By Virtue of Being the Writer's Real Name; Felicity Savage's byline would be the inaugural recipient.) When I first met Diana--in person at DeepSouthCon '98 (here we are with kurtisroth), after we'd been friendly in Greyware chat and on irc.sff.net for some time--she was a casino blackjack dealer; she went on to become a cop, and now works in forensics. I'm rooting really really hard for her agent to find a good place for her first novel; I have a feeling that she could make quite a splash.

The mass signing is sort of Brief Encounter Epitomized, actually (although melissajm called it "trick-or-treating for readers," which I like better). I got there just before they opened the room, and for some reason it seemed to have filled up back to front, so I grabbed a prime spot right at the front, cattycorner to janni and Sharon Shinn, and the table soon filled in with Esther Friesner, jjschwabach, and melissajm. We had a delightful time chatting with each other and the people who swung by. I really do love the WFC mass autographings; they're a wonderful social event, and sitting at a signing spot can be as handy as manning a dealers'-room table for getting to see a lot of people as folks circulate around. In the past, though, I've gone circulating as well as just sitting in my spot. This time I didn't, and missed a good opportunity to say hi to a lot of the people I regret not having gotten to enjoy those five-minuteses with; next time I'll make a point of it. But I had a satisfyingly long conversation with clarkesworld, and got to chat a bit more substantively with Yves Meynard and Bill Mingin and ianrandalstrock, and quite a bit more with Kim Greyson, the guest liaison for next year's WFC, whom David Coe had introduced me to earlier in the convention and who is a really lovely man I look forward to seeing a lot more of in Calgary. Because Lisa Tuttle was a GoH, I got to sign a whole lot of copies of the British edition of Skin of the Soul, which she edited and in which my first pro short-fiction sale appeared, back in 1990 (well, first published pro sale; I may have sold to Aboriginal Science Fiction first--I really can't remember and would have to dig up the contracts to find out for sure--but "For Fear of Little Men" didn't come out until '91), and a couple of copies of Blood Muse crossed the table from me to Esther (who edited) as well. I also had the pleasure of signing a few copies of Triad for people who had gotten Illumination and The Binder's Road signed at other conventions and read them and were now about to embark on the concluding book and wanted a whole signed set, and had one of those funny-sweet moments of appreciating the core of the convention experience, which is to connect with readers. I don't know why I'm still just a little bit startled, after all these years and all these cons, to find that people have actually read and loved the things I've written, but it's affirming in a way that goes way deeper than ego, and I treasure it. Then there was the young lady who was getting her World Fantasy T-shirt signed by every writer in the room (it was looking really cool by the time I got to add to it), and Geri not quite bringing herself to carry through on one of the more creative ideas I've ever heard of for a personalized signature. Mark and Geri were kind enough to hang out and wait for me (we were bar-bound thereafter) and bring my table a plate of yummy spanakopita and Unidentifiable but Tasty Stuff in a Blanket to put a base down under Jennifer's Halloween candy and Missy's most excellent cookies. (Yeah, I'm back on the low-carb diet today.)

As for brief but memorable conversation-clumps-outside-the-dealers'-room and aimless-strolling and after-panel encounters: Lee Modesitt came over at one point to let me know that he'd named a character for me in a recent book, which delighted me in and of itself and because I really had been bemoaning, just a couple of days before, the fact that nobody had ever Tuckerized me. I chatted a bit with David Drake about copyediting, and also with Jim Frenkel; Jim said "Hi!" and I said "Hi!" and he said "You're not copyediting!" and I said "Not at this very moment!" (I've missed more than one WFC because of rush jobs), and I missed what he said next as I tried to remember which books of his I'd last worked on, and then I said "Is Daniel Abraham one of your authors?" and he said "Yes!" and I said "Man, that book rocked!" and then we stood there for a while just kind of going "so freaking good" and "so freaking good." (It really is. It's called An Autumn War, it's scheduled for July '08, and it's accessible whether or not you've read the previous books in the series. Lovely writing, interesting worldbuilding, terrific characterization.) Other too-brief but enjoyable chats were with Barbara Chepaitis, Barbara Campbell, Paul Barnett, Chuck Rothman (who mentioned that the Albacon Website had just announced Anne McCaffrey as this year's GoH); other drive-by greetings were exchanged with Joni Dashoff, Andy Duncan, Victoria McManus, Alexandra Honigsberg, and...well, a slew of fine folks, and I'd better stop now before the list gets any more dull and I bury myself any more deeply in the names I'm neglecting to mention.

I ran into Mark Rich and Martha Borchardt at The Evolution of a Drawing on Thursday night, and should really have followed them up to the Australia party so that we could talk more, but at least we did get to catch up a little bit, partly in the function room and partly out in the hall as people clustered to get a closer look at what the artists had drawn during the hour. (I was completely enchanted by the critter Shaun Tan created, and I want to upload the snapshot I took, but I'm not sure that permission to photograph extended to permission to post.) We did the ships-that-pass-in-the-hall thing for the rest of the con, but it really was good to see them. I first met Mark, along with Roger Dutcher (who's remained a staunch correspondent and a good friend ever since) and my not-a-twin Terry Garey and a bunch of other sf poets, at the Chicago Worldcon in '91. (Here we are! And for the heck of it, here I am with Roger in that same mugshotty Chicon hallway, and here we are at the 2000 Chicon. We've been talking for two or three years now about getting a trip together to Asia or Central America, and one of these days we're actually going to make it happen.) I'm a couple of years late for twentieth-anniversary-of-congoing reminiscences, but I think it's taken a couple of years to sink in that it's really been a couple of decades since that first Philcon I attended. I'd even forgotten I had so many years of convention photos up on the Web until Scott Edelman said something in passing this weekend and reminded me. (His WFC '07 photos are here. "We have to keep contributing to the pixel pollution!" he'd said to me, just as Steven and I were walking up to register for the con.) They go back to the 1989 Worldcon (where those same stone-washed jeans! and my vestigial perm and I posed with a stuffed Pierson's Puppeteer at the Louis Wu Birthday Party, and Graham Collins played flamingo croquet and adorably transformed into a kzin), so maybe the year after next I'll really wax nostalgic. I had my good digital camera with me almost the entire time at this con, and never once pulled it out; the only pictures I took were with my crappy camera phone, because I absolutely had to have a memento of that Shaun Tan critter.

On Thursday I ate at Wheatfield's with Mark Edwards, Geri Diorio, Steven, davidbcoe, and Renee Stern; it was a most excellent meal (the red-pepper-and-artichoke soup was awesome) and most excellent company, and neither David nor I broke anything (in fact, no furniture or eating utensils were broken by either of us during the entire convention! we're not upholding tradition very well). Friday's dinner was at Lime, a Caribbean restaurant down one of the side streets, with Steven, Renee, and Andrea Howe, a copyeditor from the Seattle area who was a delight to meet and spend time with. On Saturday, Steven and I ate at the hotel restaurant (Chez Sophie) with West and Jamie Flanagan; I've never before encountered a restaurant menu that had only one entree I'd be willing to eat, forget want to eat (I don't eat pork or lamb or veal or duck or venison and I don't want to eat pheasant or quail or pigeon), but the fluke I ordered was very nicely prepared and the company and conversation were great. And I'd hate to have missed the opportunity to try red and green tomato sorbet. (Whatever you think that would taste like, it did, only about five times stronger. Wow.) I'm not a breakfast person, and lunches I mostly skipped except for one day when we happened to be in the consuite just as they'd set out bread and cold cuts; melissajm's yummy M&M cookies kept me going on Saturday (thanks, Missy!). Oh, and the Freihoffer's chocolate-chip cookies that the con gave out, along with Saratoga sparkling "Open It Wisely or It Will Spray All Over" spring water, in addition to the traditional complimentary Pile o' Books and the outdoing-themselves nylon zipper carryalls they provided instead of canvas totes. (Next year, someone suggested, we'll be expecting a full set of Samsonite luggage. This year, on the elevator, someone else mused aloud on what airport security personnel were going to make of all these identical blue bags.)

Friday night I spent a wonderful two-plus hours in the bar with Mark and Geri after the signing. I know Mark--a playwright, photographer, fiction writer, college instructor, and MFA student--from the sf/f writing workshop that Shawna McCarthy taught at the New School in New York back in '89. (Another reason to pencil in some trips down memory lane for 2009. It was the same workshop where I met Russell Handelman and Rob Stauffer and Bill Mingin and emrecom, and by extension how I met particlemannyc and Larry Cuocci and Luis Ortiz and Gay Terry and a whole bunch of other writers who continued to workshop on their own after their class with Shawna ended, and took in some of us who'd done the workshop after them. For me, that workshop had some of the qualities of a Clarion; it laid the foundation for some lifelong friendships and professional affiliations, and had a surprisingly ripply effect on my life and career for a class that met only once a week for the equivalent, as I recall, of one semester.) We snagged a table with a perfect location--at the center of the room and at just the right distance from the Great Balls of Fire! fireplace--and had a lovely but strangely private conversation. My experience of hanging out in the bar at most conventions, and especially WFC, has been more of the coral-reef variety: a couple of people sit down, a few people join them, a few more people join them, chairs are brought over, tables are nudged closer together. This bar wasn't really conducive to that, and the result was smaller and more discrete clumps of conversation, at least while I was there. But the area outside the dealers' room had tables and chairs aplenty, so there was a nice place for the kind of aggregation I'm more used to, and it was nice that the social reefs didn't form only in the bar. One person I know spent almost the entire con in that area and the adjoining lobby area of the hotel, rarely making it in to the function rooms for the scheduled programming because she was having a great time just hanging out where she was. That works too.

There were prime pitting (verb "to pit" = back formation from "conversation pit"; I want to attribute the coinage to Toni Weisskopf, but I'll have to rack some other people's brains before I commit) locations around the lobby/registration area as well, with coffee tables and sofas and comfy chairs, and after dinner on Friday stevendj and I joined a pit established by davidbcoe and lrcutter right outside the restaurant/bar, and met the personable and enthusiastic Michael Gallowglass and Robin; we got to talk to them some more after the pit adjourned in favor of the Tor party. Tor is actually the only party I got to all weekend, and I ended up spending only about three-quarters of an hour there, because Steven and I wanted to get down to a panel at ten. But I'd vowed to take in a whole lot of programming this year, and I did make good on that vow.

In fact, what I'd really vowed was to attend a lot of readings. I love readings and I never make it to enough of them at cons. On Thursday and Friday I didn't get to a single one, so on Saturday I started the day off right by attending Mattie Brahen's very entertaining reading of her Ultimate Halloween story, "Trick or Treat with Jesus," then just stayed comfortably ensconced right where I was for the next two hours and listened to Anne Bishop, Paul Park, and Gene Wolfe. I'm kicking myself now for missing Andy Duncan when I wandered off to stretch my legs and find a soda, but I went back for Ramsey Campbell and then a bit later for Laurel Winter, and it made for a lovely day--a bit like curling up with a wide-ranging, high-quality anthology, only read aloud by the writers themselves.

Kim Newman's interview was engaging and entertaining and gave me a yen to go back and reread The Night Mayor, which I originally read--along with David Skal's Antibodies and a whole lot of Daniel Pinkwater--at emrecom's urging back in the months after that New School workshop when we were all ferociously pushing books that we were passionate about at each other. I was worried that a lot of what Newman had to say would whoosh right past me, since he has a passion for horror films that I decidedly don't share, but that's the kind of assumption that I too often allow to dissuade me from attending programming that I might get a lot out of, and I'm glad that my desire to hear what the writer had to say won out. (He made a couple of pithy statements that beautifully summed up sentiments I do share, but I didn't jot them down because they seemed unforgettable at the time, and now, of course, I've forgotten them. Hopefully they're misplaced, not lost, and something will jog my memory at some point.) I also really enjoyed Lisa Tuttle's presentation on her family history, and I'm glad that she let the title--On Being Haunted--stand after she changed her mind about what she was going to talk about, because again I might have taken a pass on the assumption that the subject matter wouldn't interest me, and it was a terrifically engaging talk.

I also went to two art-related programming items, which I rarely do, because I rarely do. In The Evolution of a Drawing, Donato Giancola, Shaun Tan, and Bob Eggleton turned blank sheets of sketching paper into art while answering audience questions; from the photo of a woman gazing to the side over her shoulder, Giancola made a lovely, delicate, shaded portrait, Eggleton made a dragon (he came in a bit late and didn't have a view of the photo, so I'm not actually sure whether he was responding to the source or just sketching, but either way it was, of course, a lovely dragon), and Tan drew the freaking most wonderful sort-of-rabbit-eared, huge-nosed, stripey-furred critter viewed in profile, looking mournfully and perhaps fearfully at something beyond the frame of the picture and clutching a little tiny four-footed eyeball critter to its breast with one arm. (I fell in love with that critter. I adore that critter. I want to know its story; I want to tell its story. If that impulse turns into actual narrative, I'm totally going to run with it, and then see if I can email it off to him or something, as a token of appreciation for the experience of watching him create it.) The other art-related item was the panel How a Book Cover Is Chosen, with Tom Kidd, John Picacio, Jacob Weisman, and Lou Anders and moderated by Irene Gallo, and they did a terrific job talking about their experiences as artists and book designers and their approaches to creating covers, and giving what seemed to my not-an-artist self to be very useful advice to artists looking to break in. I do feel obliged to say that my editors were fantastically receptive to my thoughts about cover art (which were submitted in a spirit of "you guys know how to package and sell books, so if this is useful to you, great, and if it isn't I will take no insult"), so I can personally testify that the author's input isn't always discounted...but very good points were made about letting the art department do its job, and it's also very cool that Tachyon works with its writers to develop cover concepts, and I enjoyed the story Lou told about an instance where the cover artist's thoughts about the book influenced the manuscript revision in positive ways.

As for panel discussions, When Fantasy Becomes Science Fiction and Science Fiction Becomes Fantasy was a standout, with Nancy Kress moderating grrm, Walter Jon Williams, Lee Modesitt, and joe_haldeman for a surprisingly packed room at ten o'clock on Saturday night. Martin's furniture metaphor, and the extreme stretching of it, will stick with me for some time; I also particularly appreciated the writers' use of their own work as examples, since I've read all of them extensively and despite the panelists' voiced concerns about plugging themselves the examples were useful to me and seemed perfectly relevant. The ten-o'clock panel the next morning was another standout, with Steven Erikson, Lucienne Diver, Sharyn November (a moderator to reckon with as well as a smart and entertaining panelist herself), Tom Doherty, and Paul Barnett talking about what's taboo in fantasy fiction. I also enjoyed the panel that Janine Young, Liz Gorinsky, David Coe, Charles Gannon, and Sarah Hoyt did on the ghosts in Shakespeare, and the panel The Fantasy Graphic Novel, which now that I think about it also falls partly into the art-related-programming category. In fact, I just looked over the pocket program to see if I was forgetting anything, and it turns out I only went to four panels, but it felt like more because they were jam-packed with stuff to think about.

We didn't stay for the banquet and awards ceremony. The nominees and winners are listed here.

And before I finish up this post, which managed to be tl;dr even though I didn't open with a lengthy description of travel to the convention, I have to credit Austin Dridge with sending me up the Taconic and around the east side of Albany. The directions were impeccable, we did indeed avoid a fair number of tolls, and the drive along the autumn-tree-lined parkway was beautiful. On the way back it was also fun, as the parkway is quite twisty and I managed to get in with a clump of other drivers who wanted to go really fast; I dropped stevendj off at Penn Station on the day of the New York City Marathon, when the city was more traffic-snarled than it usually is on a Sunday, but still made it home three minutes before the Patriots-Colts game started. Yay.

ETS (edit to substitute) the LJ names of people who had LJs unbeknownst to me when I posted or who've acquired LJs since WFC, and to increase this entry's AB (abbreviation count).

WFC comes...

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:44:38 GMT

I'm heading up to World Fantasy with stevendj tomorrow. I know I'll see at least one of you there; I'm looking forward. :)

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

Robert Jordan

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:46:03 GMT

A few minutes ago, I heard from another author on the phone that Robert Jordan had died.

I started copyediting his books with The Shadow Rising, in 1992. When you work on a long-running series for so many years, you develop a strangely personal relationship with the author even if you never meet face-to-face or speak over the phone, and I feel...bereaved, in a way that's hard to articulate. And frustrated, with a shake-your-fist-at-the-universe kind of anger. The Wheel of Time was the grand work of a lifetime, and he should have had the lifetime to complete it.

Making Light, with many more links in the comments

Dragonmount (server appears to be overwhelmed)

Associated Press release, via Google

The longer AP obituary via the New York Times

A mirror of his cousin Wilson's statement

The Robert Jordan Memorial Forum at TarValon.net

MoveOn Fellowship

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:08:41 GMT

MoveOn is soliciting applications from people in the continental U.S. for five-month paid fellowship positions. The positions are full-time with health-care benefits and seem to primarily entail online organizing, so they could be especially interesting to people who already work from home and are comfortable in online environments (in other words, a fair number of you guys). More info and a link to the application form here. You can also nominate fellows and sponsor fellows.

Happy fastfwd Day!

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:35:21 GMT

Pfade des Lichts

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:15:52 GMT

It took me this long to get double-As for my camera and get a shot of this that looks more like the physical cover than the Amazon image does (it's quite a lovely, classy cover, so it deserves it), but at last I can say, "Look what showed up on my porch!"

It's the German-language edition of The Binder's Road, the sequel to Zauberin des Lichts, and I wasn't twmed this time; German Amazon dropped the weird Cassiopeian middle initial from my byline for this book. And it makes a lovely set with this one.

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:14:37 GMT

So, at 3:09 this morning I turned forty-five.

That means I revolve faster than I did at thirty-three, and I have an interesting B side that doesn't get much over-the-air play but is appreciated by collectors and aficionados. :)

Twenty years ago today, I didn't know I was saying goodbye for good

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:43:51 GMT

Three songs, since Vox lets one do that.

I miss my old man.

Happy Speedo Day!

Sun, 06 May 2007 21:47:15 GMT

Thu, 03 May 2007 16:45:08 GMT

Having cars beep their horns in order to say "Yes, ma'am, signal acknowledged, ma'am, I'm all locked up, ma'am" when you use the remote to lock them is like having a doorbell that's loud enough to startle the neighbors and passersby and that instead of politely chiming cries "Look out!" and "Don't hit me!" and "Help!"

Using a potato peeler to laboriously strip the top layer from a stalk of celery you've already rinsed as thoroughly as possible feels a lot like washing the soap. Then again, sometimes the soap does need washing.

I can no longer listen to music while I write because I sense a melodic, rhythmic shape to sentences before I have the words to fill the shape; I need to listen, I need to be able to hear what I haven't said yet.

(I used to like to have music playing while I was writing, and on a panel at the last Albacon--when the question "What music helps you write?" came up, as it frequently does--I said I couldn't have music on at all anymore, and Barbara Chepaitis was curious why, and I told her I didn't know, although I had a vague unarticulated notion that it might have something to do with aging, that when I was younger I was better at handling multiple sensory input and multitasking. Maybe that is part of it, and maybe it's all just different ways of saying "I need to be able to hear myself think." But yesterday I found myself listening for, reaching for, that word melody that didn't have words yet, and I thought, Huh. Wow. This is why. And it is.)

Visual DNA

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:15:38 GMT