Pixel Scroll 11/15/18 Pixel Longstalking

(1) STOP BREAKING THE RULES, DAMMIT. Thanks to Doctor Science, I discovered “Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Writing Novels” (at LitHub) and the mirth he’s inspired in many of our friends. (Links take you to the thread.)

The first time I meet him, I’m in an almost-empty laundromat. It’s the height of the August heatwave. I’m folding my towels when he comes in. His hair is tousled. He wears a rumpled, button-up shirt with a ten-year-old blazer that was already ten years old when he bought it from a Salvation Army.

I know this, because he tells me it. I haven’t asked. He tells me he’ll forgive me for not having asked, this once….

And while we’re on the subject, writers can learn a lot from this – “Ask a Triceratops: Susan’s 10 Rules for Novelists” at Camestros Felapton. Here are the first two:

  1. Ensure your primary narrator is comfortable. Remember the novel is an aural medium and your narrator should have a comfy nest of uprooted plants to stand or lie down on.
  2. Pay attention to the little things: how did the t-rex get drunk? What kind of tree is she trying to climb?

(2) TRANSLATED LITERATURE. Europa SF brings word that the winner of The 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature is of genre interest – the dystopian novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (Japan/Germany), Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. Europa SF has a long post about the award and the winning writer.

(3) WFC ACCOUNTABILITY. Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes the 2019 World Fantasy Convention committee to task:

So I’ve been wondering if I should say something here because I am busy and tired and I don’t need the attention, but I think I must: the WFC guest of honor lineup for 2019 is sad. The con takes place in Los Angeles but all the GOHs are white. The theme is Fantasy Noir.

Los Angeles has a huge Latinx population. But the one mention of diversity on the website right now is about “culinary diversity,” making me think POC are only good for making tacos.

On top of that there’s the odd choice of having Robert Silverberg, who was recently the cause of much Internet talk due to some of his comments related to Jemisin, as the toastmaster.

(4) FROM EXPERIENCE. Rachel Swirsky has written a “Q&A on Being a Jewish & Disabled Author”.

…I think my interest in Jewish science fiction stems from my interest in Jewishness itself, which is probably related to my self-identification as Jewish. I’m not sure why I have a strong identification with Judaism — I didn’t have to. As the granddaughter of a secular Jew who tried to cut all connections, I could have just put it aside; my brothers have. Our father is from WASPy blood with deep roots in American history–we’re descended from one of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence–and I could have chosen to identify with that to the exclusion of my Jewish ancestry.

What are you writing about now?

I’m writing a lot about disability. As a disabled person, there’s a lot of rich material to mine–and I still have a lot of unreconciled thoughts about disability, and things I’m figuring out. I think a lot of good writing is produced when the author is still on the edge of revelations, instead of settled.

(5) AMC OPTIONS SF. Good news for Annalee Newitz.

(6) WHO SWITCHES HOLIDAYS. It takes a Time Lord to fix a problem like this – or to cause it in the first place. BBC announces “Doctor Who to skip Christmas Day for first time in 13 years”.

The festive edition of Doctor Who will be shown on New Year’s Day on BBC One instead of Christmas Day for the first time since the drama’s return in 2005.

It will be the first Doctor Who episode to debut on 1 January since the second part of David Tennant’s series exit aired on the first day of 2010.

(7) HAVE AN APPLE? Mythic Delirium has revealed Ruth Sanderson’s cover for Snow White Learns Witchcraft by Theodora Goss.

In these eight stories and twenty-three poems, Goss retells and recasts fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, always lyrical, the works gathered in Snow White Learns Witchcraft re-center and empower the women at the heart of these timeless narratives.

They also made sure we didn’t miss this —

Just yesterday, Variety broke the news that the CW is developing The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter for television. We want to sincerely congratulation Dora and wish her luck that this project comes to full fruition. Needless to say, we’re thrilled to be releasing her next book into the publishing wilds.

(8) FANZINES OF 1943. Dublin 2019 has announced that they will present Retro Hugos for works published in 1943. In order to provide material for those that would like to nominate fan materials for the awards, Fanac.org has assembled the list of fanzines published in 1943, with links to those available on line. Several hundred fanzines are already available, and they plan to add more as they become available, so keep checking back — http://fanac.org/fanzines/Retro_Hugos1943.html

(9) VALE, STAN. Stan Lee’s Twitter account (“The Real Stan Lee”) tweeted out a final statement from Lee as a short video.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]

  • Born November 15, 1877 – William Hope Hodgson, Writer from England whose best known character by far is Thomas Carnacki, featured in several of his most famous stories, and at least partly based upon Algernon Blackwood’s occult detective John Silence. Two of his later novels, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land would be lavishly praised by H.P. Lovecraft. It is said that his horror writing influenced many later writers such as China Miéville, Tim Lebbon, and Greg Bear, but I cannot find a definitive source for that claim. (Died 1918.)
  • Born November 15, 1929 – Ed Asner, 89, Actor and Producer whose genre work includes playing Santa Claus to Will Farrell’s Elf, and roles on episodes of TV shows spanning decades: The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Invaders, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Tall Tales & Legends,The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, The Wild Wild West, Hercules, The X-Files, The Dead Zone, Spider-Man, and the upcoming Dead to Me. He has lent his distinctive voice to the main character in the Oscar-winning and Hugo-nominated Pixar movie Up, as well as with a long list of other animated features, series, and videogames, most notably in Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Gargoyles, and as Jacob Marley in The Christmas Carol.
  • Born November 15, 1939 – Yaphet Kotto, 79, Actor, Writer, and Director who’s known mainly for playing gruff law enforcement officers, but whose short genre film resume nevertheless packs a punch. Assuming we count the Bond films as genre – and I do – his first genre performance was as Dr. Kananga aka Mr. Big in Live and Let Die, and roles in Dan O’Bannon’s Alien, Stephen King’s The Running Man, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, as well as guest parts in Night Gallery and seaQuestDSV.
  • Born November 15, 1951 – Beverly D’Angelo, 67, Actor and Singer whose genre roles include appearing in The Sentinel, High Spirits, and episodes of TV series such as Tales from the Crypt and Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre and Tall Tales & Legends. She was also a primary cast member in The Man Who Fell to Earth, a 1987 pilot for a series that never got picked up for continuation, which was based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel and Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film.
  • Born November 15, 1972 – Jonny Lee Miller, 46, Actor and Director from England who has been playing Sherlock Holmes in the Elementary series for the last seven years, but his first genre role was as a 9-year-old in an episode with Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor Who. While he’s had a fairly steady stage, film, and TV career across the pond since then, it’s only in the last decade that he’s become well-known in the States – unless, like JJ, you remember that 23 years ago he appeared in a shoddy technothriller called Hackers, with another unknown young actor named Angelina Jolie (to whom he ended up married, until they separated 18 months later). Other genre appearances include a trio of vampire films, Dracula 2000, Dark Shadows, and Byzantium, the live-action Æon Flux movie, and the lead in the pseudo-fantasy TV series Eli Stone.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) WHITE WOLF ANSWERS. In Item #2 of the Pixel Scroll for November 8, Joseph D. Carriker identified a big problem with the next Camarilla book for Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. The next day, publisher White Wolf replied:

White Wolf Community – We realize the way we have portrayed various topics in the recent Camarilla and Anarch setting books can be viewed as crude and insensitive. We appreciate this feedback and we are actively examining our choices in these books. Earlier this year, we made a pledge to you to meet certain standards and be more direct with the community regarding the World of Darkness and our games. That’s a pledge we failed to uphold, and we are deeply sorry.

White Wolf is currently undergoing some significant transitions, up to and including a change in leadership. The team needs a short time to understand what this means, so we ask for your patience as we figure out our next steps.

We thank you for your support, and for calling us out when it’s needed. Your thoughts and opinions are essential to the improvement of White Wolf.

(13) NOVEMBER BOOKS. Raise Mt. Tsundoku high! Andrew Liptak recommends “11 new sci-fi and fantasy books to check out in late November” at The Verge.

I wonder if my daughter will want to read this one –

Firefly: Big Damn Hero by James Lovegrove and Nancy Holder

Earlier this year, Titan Books announced that it was releasing a trilogy of Firefly novels, expanding the world of Joss Whedon’s short-lived TV show. With Whedon on board as a consulting editor, the first novel follows the crew of the Serenity as they’re hired to transport a cargo of explosives to a buyer. Things go sideways the Alliance takes an interest in the cargo and as a band of rebel Browncoat veterans begin to cause trouble. In the midst of it all, Captain Malcolm Reynolds goes missing, and his first mate, Zoë, has to make a choice between finding him and saving her crew.

And for the rest of you, there’s –

How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin recently won her third consecutive Hugo Award for The Stone Sky, the concluding volume of her phenomenal Broken Earth trilogy. She has another book in the works right now, but her next will be her first collection of short fiction, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? The book features 22 of her fantastic, shorter works. Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review and said that the stories “demonstrate both the growth and active flourishing of one of speculative fiction’s most thoughtful and exciting writers.”

(14) SECOND OPINION. Answering Collins Dictionary’s choice of “single-use” (Pixeled recently), “’Toxic’ Is Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of 2018”.

(15) WHERE HE’S LEAST EXPECTED. BBC tells how “Lost Disney ‘Oswald’ film found in Japan”.

An anime historian had the cartoon for 70 years before he realised it was one of seven lost films.

The two-minute short features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a precursor to Mickey Mouse.

Yasushi Watanabe, 84, bought the film from a toy wholesaler in Osaka when he was a teenager, paying only ¥500 (£3.45 at current exchange rates).

Originally called Neck & Neck, the 16mm cartoon was tagged with the name Mickey Manga Spide (Mickey Cartoon Speedy), and remained in Mr Watanabe’s personal collection for 70 years.

(16) DUMBO. Here’s a recommendation for you – io9’s Beth Elderkin promises “The New Trailer for Disney’s Live-Action Dumbo Will Pretty Much Rip Your Heart to Shreds”. Not to mention, you’ll believe an elephant can fly…

(17) WORLDBUILDING. In this case, literally. Nature shares “A key piece in the exoplanet puzzle”.

The detection of a low-mass exoplanet on a relatively wide orbit has implications for models of planetary formation and evolution, and could open the door to a new era of exoplanet characterization.

The orbital distance of the reported planet is similar to that of Mercury from the Sun (Fig.). This places the planet close to the snow line of Barnard’s star — the region out from the star beyond which volatile elements can condense. The snow line is a key region of planetary systems. In particular, there are indications that the building blocks of planets are formed there.

(18) MORE ABOUT THAT EXOPLANET. Mike Kennedy notes, “The planet is, alas, probably outside the zone where liquid water could be expected to exist. Wikipedia has a partial list of stories taking place at or near Barnard’s Star. The earliest they note is Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space.”

National Geographic notes:

[…] Barnard’s star is a small red dwarf that’s older than the sun and about a sixth its size. It’s invisible without a decent telescope—the close star wasn’t even discovered until 1916.

Still, Barnard’s Star has long been buttoned into the lore of science fiction, inspiring astronomers to propose the presence of orbiting worlds as far back as the 1960s, and prompting fiction authors to weave tales of adventure around the hidden pinprick of light.

[…] “We’re 99-percent sure this is a planetary signal—but 99 is not 100,” he says. “What if the Barnard Star planet is not really there? It will be shot many, many times and people will try to kill it, but that’s how science works.”

(19) ONE PAGE SF. Jonathan Cowie announces SF2 Concatenation just posted its penultimate Best of Nature  ‘Futures’ 1-page SF story of year.

(20) ORIGIN STORY. The Verge tells us that “YouTube’s tech-noir series Origin is Lost… in space (With a hefty dose of Alien and Dead Space on the side)”. The YouTube Originals show is on YouTube Premium, which is available in about 30 countries.

A man wakes up abruptly, gasping in shock. He’s alone in an unexpected place. Something has clearly gone wrong with the trip he was on, but he won’t know just how wrong until he finds his fellow passengers. They’ll have to work together to manage their basic needs and unravel the mystery of why they didn’t arrive safely at their destination. But can they trust each other, given their various unsavory backgrounds, which will largely be revealed by a series of flashbacks? On Lost, this man’s name is Jack Shephard. But in YouTube Premium’s new space series Origin, it’s Shun Kenzaki (Sen Mitsuji).

In Origin, the passengers wake up from stasis, en route to the distant planet Thea. They were supposed to reach the planet before being revived, but they’re still on board their transport ship, Origin. The Siren Corporation, which put them on the ship, offers its colonists a clean slate. Signing on for a colony means having all records of their history on Earth sealed — which gives the writers a perfect excuse to create crew members with particularly colorful pasts. “We’re five light-years from Earth. Who’s going to stop us?” one Siren spokesperson says in a promotional VR experience, channeling the sort of corporate hubris that always goes so well in science fiction stories.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Carl Slaughter, Rachel Swirsky, Mike Allen, and Chip Hitchcock for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

55 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/15/18 Pixel Longstalking

  1. (8) Wasn’t “Fanzines of 1943” a MGM musical?

    Here in 8320, I’m still humming the songs the nanites beamed into my mind from
    “Scrollway Pixel-dy of 8320”

  2. [third]

    According to C.J. Cherryh’s Facebook page, her next Alliance/Union novel Alliance Rising (co-authored with Jane Fanscher) is still scheduled for release in January 2019.

  3. (3) WFC ACCOUNTABILITY.

    While I agree that Silverberg seems like a really tone-deaf choice right now, she probably doesn’t understand that the Toastmaster and Guest of Honor invitations likely went out many months, maybe even a year ago.

    … and I suspect that the chairs were face-palming after the little 1-2 punch of Silverberg refusing to applaud at the Hugo Awards ceremony and his ridiculous self-own in the internet forum afterward, but it was too late, and rescinding an invitation like that is simply not done.

  4. 16) I still don’t quite get the point behind most of those Disney live action remakes, particularly of movies with animal main characters.

    As for Dumbo (which has the distinction of being the first Disney film I ever saw in the cinema at the age of five, i.e. actually too young to go to the movies), when you’re a kid the movie is sad, because Dumbo is separated from his mother and everybody picks on him.

    As an adult, it takes on a more sinister undertone, once you know about the abuses real circus elephants suffered in the early 20th century, particularly cases like Topsy or Mary. This is also why I had no problems accepting the fictional Disney cartoons mentiond in Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing. Because Dumbo is already halfway there.

    This new live action version seems to dial that discomfort up to eleven, because we get glimpses of Dreamland, one of the Coney Island amusement parks, where Topsy the elephant was first abused and then killed. There’s also a circus tent fire hinted at in the trailer, which happened several times in the real world, usually with massive death tolls. Also, the Coney Island amusement parks, including Dreamland, had the tendency to burn down, though usually with little human death toll, though a lot of circus and show animals still died.

    All this makes the trailer for this live action Dumbo (as well as the original Dumbo) more disturbing than it would otherwise be.

  5. @Cora
    I saw a different bit of trailer with Dumbo made up as a clown – and that’s more than enough to put me off it entirely, as the paint job made the baby elephant look sinister.

  6. 10) It’s not horror as such, but Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time does explicitly reference Hodgson’s Night Land — not by name, but at one point somebody mentions a story in which the last dregs of humanity live in a giant pyramid surrounded by monsters in the unending night, or something to that effect.

  7. I found a panoramic photo of Dreamland after the 1911 (I think) fire, which shows an aspect of American commercial life: cashing in on a tragedy. There are tours being given through the burned-out areas. I’m not sure how to link it here in a way that it won’t automatically show up for people and maybe break their browsers with its size, so please, dear Host, I’m fine with anything you may feel necessary.

    This, and a lot more panoramas, came from loc.gov, a superior time sink.

    http://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/pan/6a11000/6a11900/6a11998u.tif

  8. Jonny Lee Miller was in a Peter Davison Doctor Who? Gosh wow!

    He was also in a version of FRANKENSTEIN that the National Theatre did in which he and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated between being Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. One of these versions was simulcast to theaters in the US (I don’t know which role Miller played).

  9. @PJ Evans
    I vaguely recall that Dumbo is also made up as a clown in the original at one point, part of the many humiliations visited upon the poor little guy.

    A bit of googling also revealed that the historic Dreamland had a one-armed animal trainer, while Colin Farrell’s character is shown to have only one arm in a shot in the trailer. Plus, Dreamland had a baby elephant, which perished in the fire. Though it was Luna Park that killed Topsy.

    Still, this whole movie seems to be rather disturbing in spite of the cute CGI baby elephant.

  10. @1: I barely finished the first paragraph of Franzen’s Wikipedia entry; he sounds like a first-class wanker, the sort of person who gets held up as an example when people want to talk about how Literature has gone off the rails. Kudos to the people who could make something funny out of his pomposity.

    @7: Filers may remember me raving about The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter some time ago. (I read almost 200 novels a year; think about how long it’s been since I thought one of them was worth mentioning here. The sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is much longer, but expands focus enough to keep interest.) I may have to figure out what cable package this will be available on, or cross my fingers that it comes out on DVD.

    @18: note that “probably”; the BBC story said the planet is enough bigger than Earth that it could have a thick atmosphere trapping heat. It would be nice to know….

  11. @Chip Hitchcock: The CW is the network that does Supernatural and Arrow and The Flash and iZombie. If you have access to any of those, you’ll probably have access to Alchemist’s Daughter. Chances of DVD are near 100%.

    On the other hand…it’s the network that does Riverdale and Vampire Diaries and Reign. I’m a little worried what they’ll do to Alchemist’s Daughter. But if they don’t try too hard to reshape it into one of their teen soaps, we’re probably ok.

  12. (10) The first time I ever saw Ed Asner on TV was in a genre role – a 1970 or ’71 ABC Movie of the Week called “The Last Child.” He played a bad guy, very well too – some sort of government or police agent who was pursuing the couple with the illegal child.

  13. Martin Wooster on November 15, 2018 at 7:59 pm said:

    Jonny Lee Miller was in a Peter Davison Doctor Who? Gosh wow!

    He was also in a version of FRANKENSTEIN that the National Theatre did in which he and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated between being Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. One of these versions was simulcast to theaters in the US (I don’t know which role Miller played).

    In the on-screen version I saw he was Doctor F but I think they filmed/screen both versions

  14. The CW makes all their programming available to stream online – free of charge but they play commercials at you. That’s how I watch Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow. Episodes go up a day after they air.

  15. @Chip Hitchcock – Franzen has been on my wanker radar since his ahh-tist posturing over the selection of The Corrections as an Oprah book in 2001. It’s the first I had heard of him. He initially participated in the Oprah stuff with a filmed interview and background footage but between that and the episode when he would have actually appeared on the show, he started publicly dithering about whether he was actually all that thrilled about the book being selected.

    It’s fine if you look down your nose at Oprah’s picks if middlebrow isn’t your thing. Wevs. But he knew about the selection in advance of the book’s publication and it massively boosted his profile outside the NY literati types, and made the book a much bigger best seller than it would have been otherwise. The grossest part to me was his out-loud fretting about whether men would read his book when there was that “O” on the cover. Because as he has made very clear over the years, Franzen is a MAN who writes about MEN for MEN.

    To me it seemed like Franzen wanted to have it both ways: get the cash and the raised profile of the Oprah imprimatur, and then diss it out of the side of his mouth to retain his literary cred with his buddies back in NYC.

    Oprah ended up canceling the show where he would have appeared in the studio for a discussion of the book, and I’m glad she did. She picked another book of his in 2010 and this time he did go on the show and discuss the book as well as the earlier controversy and Oprah declared the feud over.

    I like Oprah fine but I never really followed her show or the book club, so I’m not saying this as some sort of Oprah stan, but the whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth and killed any interest I ever might have had in reading anything by Franzen.

    His “rules” were typical of his bloviating based on every other interview I’ve seen with him, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Twitter skewering today, especially Chuck Wendig’s take.

  16. Joe H. says It’s not horror as such, but Greg Bear’s City at the End of Time does explicitly reference Hodgson’s Night Land — not by name, but at one point somebody mentions a story in which the last dregs of humanity live in a giant pyramid surrounded by monsters in the unending night, or something to that effect.

    Thanks. I’d not read that work by Bear and my only reference was Wiki which I implicitly distrust so I hadn’t any proof of that claim.

  17. Martin Wooster saysJonny Lee Miller was in a Peter Davison Doctor Who? Gosh wow!

    Keep in mind that he was ten years old at the time. It was his first acting appearence as far as I can tell.

  18. Camestros Felapton on November 15, 2018 at 9:58 pm said:
    The usual trolls are trying to spam IMDB with bad reviews for the Netflix She-Ra reboot.

    Also: The Netflix She-Ra reboot is excellent.

    I find these middle-aged guys complaining that She-Ra’s boobs aren’t big enough really weird.

  19. (15) I read about lost Disney ‘Oswald’ film & thought vaguely, “So Disney made a film about Lee Harvey Oswald…”

    Need my coffee.

  20. StephenfromOttawa, you may be thinking of “Oswald, the Hapless Pigeon.” (And having said that, I have to disclaim that I don’t buy those conspiracy theories any more, but they’re a convenient language for the occasional gag.)

    Anecnote: I finally got notifications back recently when I discovered that I must have clicked “stop sending me anything” when I left town for a month. I would just about swear that on at least one occasion, it thoughtfully clicked the box for me. I have a bookmark saved to “Blogs I Follow” at wordpress, which I went to just now so that I could helpfully explain what I did.

    Summary: I don’t know what the hell I did. Each time I do this, the menus I expect to find have all been replaced with “you should go to our other unhelpful app thing and let it laugh at you for a while,” and it seems like I go back and forth over these every time until my emotions reach into the computer and tickle some hidden gateway that finally lets me straighten it out. I hesitate to recommend it as a method.

    Hope this helps.

  21. FWIW: If there is one current 21st century word that retroactively belongs in Stand on Zanzibar, it is obviously “stan.”

  22. @Martin —

    He was also in a version of FRANKENSTEIN that the National Theatre did in which he and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated between being Dr. Frankenstein and the monster. One of these versions was simulcast to theaters in the US (I don’t know which role Miller played).

    He played both roles, actually. Both versions were broadcasted.

    In fact, my mom and I went to see the rebroadcasts of both performances just a couple of weeks ago. They were great! We agreed that Cumberbatch was better at playing the monster, while Miller was better at playing Frankenstein. Miller was taut, overwrought, and just about to tip over the edge as the doctor, while Cumberbatch was too calm and rational. But as the monster, Cumberbatch did a great combo of autistic/cerebral-palsy/stroke-victim/raised-by-wolves that worked very well.

    7) I loved Goss’s book (book 2 is on Mt. TBR) — will be looking forward to a series!

  23. 10) In addition to the abovementioned novel by Bear, his short story “The Way of All Ghosts”, part of his Eon setting, is basically Night Land fanfic.

  24. Camestros Felapton says: Also: The Netflix She-Ra reboot is excellent.

    It truly is a massively charming kids show. Witty, sharply plotted, and with honestly one of the best developments of an understandable villain I’ve seen recently. It’s also very very very queer positive. (Which is one of the big reasons the creepy guys hate it.)

    We really are living in the golden age of children’s animation. Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Star vs the Forces of Evil, Voltron, The Hollow, Over the Garden Wall, and now She-Ra. I should have been so lucky as a kid.

    rob_matic says: I find these middle-aged guys complaining that She-Ra’s boobs aren’t big enough really weird.

    Weird and creepy. And massively, massively entitled. Both misogynistic and homophobic. They hate both that the series is centered on girls, and is being created by a woman. Honestly, the * Puppies were a fairly mild case of the same group.

  25. @cmm: The grossest part to me was his out-loud fretting about whether men would read his book when there was that “O” on the cover. Because as he has made very clear over the years, Franzen is a MAN who writes about MEN for MEN. Not that any of his books sounded appetizing — but that ensures I won’t waste time with him. TFTI.

    @Paul Weimer: the BBC also noticed, but the Post has different info (including that his brother did a script for Sondheim!); thanks for posting.

  26. 3) Read the thread by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mostly interesting and fair observations that should be a part of the conversation.

    I disagree where she wandered into the neighborhood of de-platforming Robert Silverberg. His comments are well within the normal range of discussion.

    FWIW, I put Ms. Jemisin’s book in first place on my ballot this year and was pleased that she won. I also tuned out on her acceptance speech pretty quickly.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

  27. @Dann

    Saying someone is “an odd choice” is deplatforming?

    In honour of the recently departed William Goldman “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

  28. (1) Originally posted as a Facebook comment on the same list…

    Rev. Bob’s Rules for Writers:

    1. Get the words out of your head and into the manuscript.
    2. Never submit/publish an untouched first draft. At the very least, read it over one time and be sure there’s nothing you want to change.
    3. Pay attention to spelling, grammar, and punctuation. If you’re going to break those rules, do it on purpose.

    That’s about it, really.

  29. Pingback: Pixel Scroll 11/16/18 A Pixel May Not Scroll A Human Being, Or Through Inaction, Allow A Human To Be Scrolled | File 770

  30. @Carl Slaughter: You appear to have posted an HTML link without any text, which makes it look like an empty comment. 😉

    Here’s the link (which WordPress should use to embed the video), for anyone who wondered what the invisible comment was:

  31. P.S. Thanks, BTW, Carl! I forgot about this. I’m not sure the mediocre hotel wifi will handle video, but I’m bookmarking it for when I get home. 🙂

    Here in 9520, etc. 😛

  32. Twitter killed me fisking on Franzen yesterday. Alexandra Erin’s essay made me spit beer on a reread this morning. Still funny. Yes, I am drinking beer at 9am. It’s Saturday and my first day off in 2 weeks. Also, we are under a boil water advisory so I HAVE TO.

  33. I disagree where she wandered into the neighborhood of de-platforming Robert Silverberg. His comments are well within the normal range of discussion.

    He called a landmark achievement for a SF writer of color “identity politics” while admitting he never read her book, then called her speech “graceless and vulgar” two years after using the same Hugo stage to tell an extended dick joke.

    I grew up loving Robert Silverberg’s books, but I don’t think his racist dismissal of N.K. Jemisin’s work is “normal” discussion. It was contemptible and deserves the condemnation it has received.

    Your use of the word “de-platforming” is curious. Were you under the impression he was entitled to being honored by conventions without being criticized for something he said a few months ago?

  34. I’ve long been fond of Neil Gaiman’s rules for writing, occasionally posted to his blog and once told to me in person, that can be paraphrased as follows:

    1. Write.
    2. Finish what you write.
    3. Submit it to paying markets.
    4. Write the next thing.

    Camestros Felapton on November 15, 2018 at 9:58 pm said:

    Also: The Netflix She-Ra reboot is excellent.

    Eeeeeeeeeee!

  35. @Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: Heinlein’s rules for writing were basically the first three of Gaiman’s.

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