(1) DID YOU VOTE? I voted by mail two weeks ago, and was notified the ballot has been received and counted. However, the official LA County voter outreach service I registered with is still sending me email and text reminders to vote. They don’t want me to feel left out!
(2) DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY BRINGS BACK COLOR OF SCI-FI EXHIBIT. The inaugural Color of Sci-Fi events occurred in 2023 at Detroit Public Library and will return this month by popular demand. Get “The Color of Sci-Fi” Tickets at Eventbrite.
DMJ Studio is curating an all-new exhibit celebrating people of color in science fiction. This year, the exhibit celebrates diversity within the world of science fiction with a special focus on Star Trek characters Captain Benjamin Sisko and Lt. Uhura, icons who have inspired generations through their portrayal by actors Avery Brooks and Nichelle Nichols.
COLOR OF SCI-FI EVENTS
November 9 | Opening Reception
Art Exhibition and Author Discussions
Featuring artists; April Shipp, Justin Perry, Kimberly Givens, Tia Nichols , Mandisa Smith, Anthea Calhoun, Miriam Uhura, Molouk Harp, and works by members of the DMJStudio team.
Authors Discussion | November 9
Steven Barnes – NY Times bestselling author of over thirty novels of science fiction, horror, and suspense, author of the Star Trek novel, Far Beyond the Stars.
Derek Tyler Attico – A speculative fiction author, essayist, and award-winning photographer. Author of The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko.
Storytime for All Ages
Reading of To Boldly Go: How Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek Helped Advance Civil Rights by By Angela Dalton, Illustrated by Lauren Semmer.
(3) A BOOK BAN DEFEATED. “Freedom to Read Advocates Notch a Legal Victory in Alaska” – Publishers Weekly has details.
After a favorable legal ruling in August, freedom to read advocates in Alaska have scored a significant victory in court over would-be book banners. In an October 31 filing, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska agreed to pay $89,000 to settle claims that the district improperly removed dozens of books, including several works of classic literature, from school libraries.
“First the court, and now this settlement, confirm what these students and their parents have known all along: you cannot remove dozens of books from school libraries simply because a vocal minority dislike those books,” said Savannah Fletcher, attorney for advocacy group the Northern Justice Project, in a statement. “Our Constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of ideas. After successfully having the majority of those books returned to school shelves, we hope the District has learned to not judge a book by its cover.”
First filed nearly a year ago, on November 17, 2023, against the Mat-Su school district, north of Anchorage, by eight local plaintiffs, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, and the Northern Justice Project, the suit sought the return of 56 books that school officials ordered to be removed after a handful of parent complaints until a committee was established to review the allegedly offensive books….
(4) MOORCOCK WARNS ABOUT FRENCH PUBLISHER. Linda Moorcock is circulating this complaint:
EDITIONS L’ATALANTE:
This French company continues to sell books by Michael Moorcock ILLEGALLY. All Moorcock contracts have expired. Editions L’Atalante were refused renewal requests earlier this year after they illegally reprinted and put on sale one of the books they no longer had rights to.
If you are doing business with this company, at least be aware of how they have behaved towards Michael. We have repeatedly asked them to stop all sales and they continue to ignore us.
(5) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders advises “It’s Not About Making the Word Count, But Making the Work Count” at Happy Dancing. Anders seems to have been farther along than the point where Anne Lamott’s famous advice about getting down a “shitty first draft” applied. And at that point —
2) Your first draft doesn’t need to be total garbage.
I’m currently trying to finish something — it started as a novella, but I’m afraid it may have ballooned into a novel. Just last week, I hit a wall and spent a few days trying in vain to keep moving forward. I even beat myself up over the paucity of words I was producing, because I just could not get any purchase on the story.
At last, I reluctantly scrolled back in the document and found the problem: about 8,000 words earlier, there was a scene which set completely the wrong tone for a key relationship, and basically left the relationship no place to go. Without giving too many spoilers for something you might not read for a couple years, these characters had already reached a place in their relationship that they shouldn’t have reached until closer to the end of the story. This literally gave them no room to grow, no space for an arc, no way build out the story.
I completely scrapped that scene and replaced it with a brand new one, and then went about revising large chunks of the following 8000 words, until they had the beginnings of a proper arc to their relationship — one that started in one place and ended in a different place. As soon as that was done, I could once again start cranking out the rest of the story moving forward….
…And some of my earliest attempts at writing a novel got messed up, in large part, due to a mistaken decision that I made and never fixed, which ended up throwing the entire rest of the draft out of whack. Speaking from experience, it’s actually very hard to revise a first draft where everything is headed in the wrong direction and the basic character stuff doesn’t hold water.
I think of the first draft as being like the foundations of your house: if the foundations aren’t sturdy, the rest of the house is going to be rickety as heck. And going back and redoing the foundations later can sometimes be a lot more trouble….
(6) BOMBS DEFUSED. “’It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen’: 10 film flops that became classics – ranked!” in the Guardian.
At number four:
4. Blade Runner (1982)
Budget: £21.6m. Worldwide gross: £32.2m
Not the biggest flop among all these, but still a galling disappointment for Ridley Scott and Warner Bros, not least given the sensational design. The same weekend The Thing tanked, this came a distant second to ET, and sank fast: word-of-mouth, at first, was more bewildered than awestruck. When Scott was allowed to revisit it for his 1992 director’s cut, one of seven versions that now exist, interest flourished and its reputation soared.
(7) UNIFORM TENDENCY. Camestros Felapton’s “Fashion Blog: Near Future Space Adventure” shows what the best-dressed space crew will be wearing.
… There you are in your new and yet somehow grungy spaceship/space-station facing the important questions of the future: what to wear that will be in keeping with the hot fashion of your community….
(8) AI TRANSLATION PLANS. [Item by Steven French.] The thin end of the wedge? “Dutch publisher to use AI to translate ‘limited number of books’ into English” reports the Guardian.
A major Dutch publisher plans to trial translating books into English using artificial intelligence.
Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) – the largest publisher in the Netherlands, acquired by Simon & Schuster earlier this year – is “using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of books”, Vanessa van Hofwegen, commercial director at VBK said.
“This project contains less than 10 titles – all commercial fiction. No literary titles will nor shall be used. This is on an experimental basis, and we’re only including books where English rights have not been sold, and we don’t foresee the opportunity to sell English rights of these books in the future,” she added…
(9) UPSCALE BRANDING. Wayne Enterprises (at brucewaynex.com) encourages you to immerse yourself in Batman’s secret identity while selling you stuff at Bruce Wayne prices.
Exclusively curated products—including many limited editions and capsule collections created only for the Wayne Enterprises Experience are inspired by the world of Bruce Wayne, who has access to the best of the best of tech, fashion, automobiles, art, multimedia, watercraft, residences, and much more.
Via this site and live events, we are placing retail at the center of a theatrical experience for the first time—and you can be a part of the Bruce Wayne story via these truly limited editions and collaborations.
Maybe you’d like to drive around on a set of Batman’s wheels? Price tag $2,990,000.
Limited production of 10 Wayne Enterprises Tumblers, fully functional iconic “Batmobile”, are exclusively being sold by invitation only. These highly collectable Tumbler Batmobiles are officially sanctioned by Warner Bros. and will be available for sale to an exclusive audience of avid car collectors.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
November 4, 1996 — Anniversary: DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”
Twenty-eight years ago on this evening in most markets, DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” first aired in syndication.
A most delightful episode, it blended footage from the original “The Trouble with Tribbles” into the new episode in a manner that allowed the characters from DS9 to appear to interact with the original Trek crew.
SPOLER ALERT
The story is that those meddlesome Agents from Temporal Investigations have arrived on Deep Space 9 and so Sisko is recounting how he and the crew of the Defiant traveled back in time to the 23rd century to prevent the assassination of Captain James T. Kirk during the original Enterprise’s mission to Space Station K-7.
END OF SPOILERS. REALLY.
The story was by Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler and Robert Hewitt Wolfe with Ronald D. Moore and René Echevarria writing the actual script. It’s amazingly well done for that many hands being involved.
So let’s talk about this episode to the Deep Space Nine.
It would digitally insert the performers from this series into the original episode. I’m still amazed after watching a half dozen times how well they did this. I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did a stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still think they are there.)
It was because of the complexity of these digital interactions, and may other things, the single longest shooting of any Trek episode. Just creating the footage for the fight with the Klingons in the bar would take almost a full week to shoot due to the number of separate shots involved, the complexity of staging, and other minor details.
And everyone loved that they brought Charlie Brill back to film new scenes.
Every detail possible was attended to. The original model of station K-7 was long lost by the time this episode was being shot so the model here was created by watching the original episode over and over until they got just right says the modeling staff. Yes, almost everything here isn’t digital.
For their model of the Enterprise, the staff consulted sketches made for the original series and had a special set of plans made for the new model’s construction. They couldn’t use the original model in Smithsonian as the restoration over the decades had altered the way it looked.
I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…
Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?”
Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”
Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.”
No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2 but lost out to Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams”. I personally think it should’ve won.
Critics loved it. Really. Truly. They all turned into fanboys.
Paramount promoted the episode by arranging the placement of around a quarter million tribbles in subways and buses across the United States. Anyone see one of these?
A note: In the original episode, after Kirk opens the cargo hold door and is showered in tribbles, lone tribbles continue to fall on him one by one, every minute or so, for the rest of the scene. This episode provides the explanation as to why this happens: Sisko and Dax are hiding in the cargo hold, scanning all the tribbles and then tossing them out the door. Very neat.
It like almost everything Trek is available on Paramount+.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Broom Hilda shows another affected by the time change
- Speed Bump presents new figures.
- The Argyle Sweater brainstorms a bad show.
- Wannabe may have found a source of ancient wisdom. As well as pointy teeth.
- Wumo depicts the moment before a TSA search goes bad.
- Australian cartoon strip First Dog on the Moon never fails to land a solid punch, while also being funny: “Artificial intelligence – is it bad? Yes. But on the other hand it is also terrible”
(12) SANS CULOTTES. “Kathryn Hahn Receives Award For Historic Marvel Nudity” — Giant Freakin Robot has coverage (well, not exactly).
Agatha All Along has proven to be one of the better Disney+ MCU shows, one featuring quirky characters, a fun cast, and plenty of dark laughs. All of these would be great reasons to tune in, but the first episode featured an additional incentive: our lead actor getting naked and flashing audiences her rear end. Recently, Jennifer Hudson decided to reward Kathryn Hahn for her fearless Marvel nudity with an (ahem) cheeky plaque that reads “First Woman To Show Butt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Before giving the star her award, Jennifer Hudson asked the Agatha All Along star if she realized she was “the first woman to show butt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?” Kathryn Hahn clarified that she didn’t know that ditching her clothes was making Marvel history but that she is now happy to share this honor with Chris Hemsworth, who showed off his own godly glutes in Thor: Love and Thunder. “Thor and me,” Hahn quipped before receiving her plaque, “just our butts encased in gold — that’s my dream.”…
(13) CANCEL THE PARADE. John Barrowman says the announcement is fake:
If for some reason you want to see the fake news item at its source – click this Facebook link.
TORCHWOOD RETURNS!!! JOHNATHAN GROFF!!!
Prepare for an epic return in Torchwood Rogues as Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) team up with Rogue (Johnathan Groff), a mysterious new character from Doctor Who. This eight-episode series, produced and directed by Russell T Davies, promises thrilling adventures and unexpected twists. Premiering in November 2024 exclusively on Disney+, Torchwood Rogues is a must-watch event from BBC Studios.…
(14) THE LESSON OF HAL. At Collider: “’It Warns Us What Happens If We Allow AI Into Our Universe’: Ridley Scott Explains How ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ Predetermined The Future”.
RIDLEY SCOTT: I think Kubrick did a film that predetermines everything by 50 years with AI. He did 2001 [A Space Odyssey]. 2001 is an act of genius because it warns us what happens if we allow AI into our universe. It will take over, and all it has to do is switch [cellphones] off, and you’ve got chaos. It could switch that off for fun. If I’m gonna design an AI, I’m gonna say, “Okay, the first job for you is I want you to design another AI smarter than you are.” By the time you’re done with that, we’re in deep shit.
(15) RADIO DAYS. “NASA’s Voyager finally phoned home with a device unused since 1981” reports Mashable.
…Voyager’s problem began on Oct. 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, when NASA expected to receive a response from the spacecraft, the team learned something tripped Voyager’s fault protection system, which turned off its X-band transmitter. By Oct. 19, communication had altogether stopped.
The flight team was not optimistic.
However, Voyager 1 was equipped with a backup that relies on a different, albeit significantly fainter, frequency. No one knew if the second radio transmitter could still work, given the aging spacecraft’s extreme distance. Days later, engineers with the Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth, found the signal whispering back over the S-band transmitter. The device hadn’t been used since 1981, according to NASA.
“The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations,” NASA said in a recent mission update….
(16) THE UNDERWATER WAY TO OZ. “Scientists Found a ‘Yellow Brick Road’ at The Bottom of The Pacific Ocean” says ScienceAlert. You can get a good look beginning around 1:34 of the video below.
An expedition to a deep-sea ridge, just north of the Hawaiian Islands, revealed a surprise discovery back in 2022: an ancient dried-out lake bed paved with what looks like a yellow brick road.
The eerie scene was chanced upon by the exploration vessel Nautilus, while surveying the Liliʻuokalani ridge within Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM).
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven H Silver, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
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(5) I ran into this in college, with some of the CS exercises (write a program that does thus-and-such). Get the beginning wrong, and it’s just not going to work at all. Get it right, and it’s like the whole thing lays itself out for you.
(The most fun I had was having the same professor for two different languages, and doing the same exercise in both. They didn’t work the same way.)
I’ve been voting absentee ever since the three knee surgeries back at the beginning of the Pandemic rendered the reality of standing in line to vote a very not good idea, so my ballot has been in for three weeks now. And yes I checked to make sure it was accepted as valid. It was.
(0) Forget John Pixelcorn, jetpack should die.
(1) Absentee, as we have for several years. And I dropped them in a drop-off box by Rockville City Hall, not trusting DeJoy. Got emails saying they’d been received, and tabulated.
(5) I agree. Not that I’ve written a lot, but I’ve never had to go back and revise major sections. Rearrange, yes. Short stories are more trouble… (Do wish Charlie Jane had reviewed the eARC I’d sent in Feb.)
(7) Disagree. In my future, the suit has attachments for boots, gloves, and helmet. They’re not for EVA, but in case of air loss.
(8) “Commercial, not literary”? I just adore being in the ghetto, and ignored, by the shrinking ranks of readers of lit-fic.
(9) That looks a lot like the one displayed in Glasgow. The one thing that made the one in Glasgow not a Batmobile were the two machine guns in front.
(12) Think of the children! I mean, next they’ll tell us that we’re BORN NAKED!!!
(13) As I said, Mike, I’m a little concerned at what might be waiting at the end of that road…
Trials and Tribble-ations is almost as good as the original, which is a high bar indeed. Bad luck to be pitted against Severed Dreams, that’s a tough call.
Oregon has been entirely vote-by-mail for 32 years now (although we usually drop off our ballots in a drop box at the library).
I voted a couple of weeks ago, Ruth voted last week, and we’ve both received notices that our ballots have been received and counted.
Voted the first week I could – dropped in the box on Wednesday, got the receiipt notice Friday.
I’d love a DVD with both the tribble episodes.
Whoops, 28 years of voting-by-mail in Oregon, not 32.
The absolute best way to see Trial and Tribble-ations was in the bar at OryCon with Gardner Dozois (he was the Editor GOH that year).
(1) I’ve been voting absentee for I’m not sure how many years. Even before they moved my polling place too far away to walk and with no parking.
Since COVID, everyone in California can vote by mail. It’s so nice. I turned Mr. LT’s and mine in at the library drop box (then checked out 2 books) the week they started accepting them, so it’s long since been counted.
Besides the obvious, I’m keeping an eye on the mayor’s race in hope. Also a state rep. I love seeing the R get trounced every 2 years b/c I was in a volunteer organization with him and if you look up old SWM mansplaining and patronizing, there’s a picture of him. He’s paying his own way because the state GOP isn’t about to waste money on him. The filing fees aren’t much, but I appreciate his contribution to the state budget and the schadenfreude.
Remember that your local government has the most direct effect on you every day, and vote all the way down!
Mike and some others of you have had the biennial joys of figuring out the propositions, which Mr. LT and I refer to collectively as “Vote Yes on No”. I feel there should be some way I don’t get mailers and TV/radio ads after my vote’s gone in.
Probably incommunicado tomorrow and part of Wednesday. I have wine and uh, a thing that is legal in half the states for calming purposes. Going to stay offline and read.
Thank you to our foreign friends for putting up with us.
(2) That sounds swell! Marking it on calendar.
(8) But is it street-legal to drive? No point in having a Batmobile you can’t drive around to impress and delight people.
(10) Indeed, delightful start to finish, and the tech was so well-done. DS9 was my favorite of the shows running at that time, and they brought the funny here.
(13) Besides the obvious with Barrowman (wouldn’t anyone who’d care know that already?), I am also scoffing at misspelling the lovely and talented Mr. Groff’s first name.
(15) We’ve certainly gotten our tax dollars’ worth on that one. They don’t build ’em like they used to.
Thanks for the title credit!
1) I haven’t voted yet, but my polling place is like two blocks away from here and right on the route of my morning walk, so I plan to be there very shortly after 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.
(I did vote absentee in 2020. I voted absentee again in a more recent election, but the state had reinstituted the requirement to have my ballot witnessed and signed by the witness, which makes it considerably less convenient.)
Oh pixstress mine, where are you scrolling?
@Lurkertype
I asked elseweb about the design lifetime for those, and it was like FIVE years. They’re now about 50 years old…
(8) Doing the AI translation only on commercial fiction, not literary fiction, so, you know, nothing important. I suppose the nose on the air snobs are ignorant of the fact that Shakespeare’s plays were his day’s ultimate in cheap, commercial literature, and not at all what old Will hoped or expected to be remembered for. He was betting on his sonnets to make him one of the literary greats, if anything did.
(9) I really need clarification on whether these Batmobiles are street legal.
(15) I’ve talked with people who really, seriously argue that NASA’s robotic probes are “over-engineered,” as if it’s a bad thing that we so frequently get many more years of service and science out of them than planned. And from the Voyager probes, decades more.
It’s something to be legit proud of, I think.
(1) yes. Absentee by mail; checked that it was received and validated and will be counted.
(15) That’s good engineering.
(1) I voted early this past Saturday afternoon. I live about a mile from the nearest voting venue, so I walked. It was a beautiful day.
(10) A delightful episode – and so wonderful that they got Charlie Brill back. The temporal agents were Dulmur and Lucsly – not Muldur and Scully at all…
“Imagine, for a second, that these technologies have improved a bit beyond where they are now, and remember, when it comes to issues of “quality”, we’re not talking about the quality as referenced by successful practitioners of these arts, we’re talking about the market’s acceptance of that quality. “
1) Michigan recently amended the state Constitution to require early, in-person voting as an option. Which we did.
Seems like a sound solution to the problem of ensuring that everyone has a chance to vote without subsequently opening up the potential for ballot harvesting and other questionable practices.
Absentee voting is still an option.
Regards,
Dann
Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. – Calvin Coolidge
10) I was the one to hand Straczynski the Hugo statue at Lonestarcon 2. While I very much a fan of Babylon 5, I was filled with grief at the time that Deep Space Nine didn’t win, as that was a brilliant episode and had my vote.
(1) I’m old enough to remember Bob Dole being roundly mocked for blaming his defeat on the voters. Even or especially by his fellow Republicans. Truly, it was a different time.
And yes, I voted weeks ago, ballot received and counted.
I voted the week I got my ballot (Oregon’s vote-by-mail system is fantastic. I’m notified when my ballot is mailed, then when it is received and loaded to be tabulated). Put it in the mailbox since I’m not in my home county at the moment. That said, given drop box fires, I’m somewhat skittish about ballot drop boxes at the moment.
5.) The more books I write, the more I catch problems while drafting. I’m one of those writers whose process includes reviewing previous work in order to get up to speed for the day (I usually draft 1k-2k words per day). More and more, I find myself fixing a lot of the awkward sentence problems right away in that step of the process.
But…I also like revisions and find that I’m a stronger revision writer than I am in rough draft. Sometimes you just have to say “I’ll fix this later, let’s keep the flow going.”
8.) I suspect the assessment that they’re using some “commercial” books is based on anticipation of potential sales and award value.
Voted last week in person. DC sends everyone a mail in ballot, but thanks to DeJoy I didn’t want to rely on USPS, and after news stories about drop boxes in other places being set on fire, I didn’t want to use the drop box in front of the library.
(1) Voted a couple of weeks ago. Washington, like Oregon, has been all VBM for decades. I filled out and returned my ballot the same day I got it, and went to the govt website to make sure it had been received and counted. Blue states WANT all eligible voters to vote and their vote be counted. Red states… not so much.
(3) Great news! People can make literary choices for themselves and their children – but have no right to make those choices for other people or other peoples’ children. You don’t get to decide what I can read. And, as usual, it’s a tiny number of ignorant flying monkeys who want to make those decisions for everyone.
(14) The more I hear about how AI is being forced on us by a bunch of rich white boys who just want to be richer – aided by the credulous investors with bottomless appetites for tech grifting – the more I devoutly hope the entire enterprise collapses in on itself and bankrupts them all. I wouldn’t care about them losing their shirts in any case, but the environmental damage they’re doing in order to catch those phantom billions of dollars renders me apoplectic. (ETA: To be clear, even if there were billions of dollars to be had, I still want the AI enterprise to fail, and fail quickly. No amount of profit makes the environmental damage acceptable.)
(16) I just read Susan Casey’s “The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.” It’s a whole other universe down there in the abyssal deeps. Casey’s book is a terrific read, gets a lot of technical information across that’s comprehensible without being too obviously dumbed down, and her love for the abyss comes through so very beautifully.
Given the number of propositions and obscure downballot races on the ballot in California, vote by mail has been a godsend. I voted weeks again, and now maybe in 14 hours or so I’ll be able to get a full night’s sleep. Maybe.
I have no mouth but I must order pizza
Good luck, USA!
5) While I’m not a writer of fiction, I recognized long ago that writing is an iterative process, and that the size and nature of the iterations vary, from writer to writer and even within a given single project. Sometimes the recognition that a paragraph–or even a sentence–isn’t working prompts me to stop on the spot, back up and revise it, knowing that even the revised version will be subject to re-revision. But the fix makes forward movement feel more coherent. I’ve also noticed that at some point this stop-and-start/back-and-fill process smooths out as the piece builds on itself more surely and drafting feels more continuous.
Fiction, of course, makes a different set of demands on the generating machinery–I’ve watched my wife work on stories, and there’s quite a bit more staring at the screen and figuring out what the next scene or line should be. And then the rewriting kicks in anyway.
When I was teaching college composition, I tried to offer as many approaches to generating copy as I could. Too many students had the rather romantic notion that a “real” writer just turns the crank and out comes copy that only needs tidying up or “polishing.” So I showed them my stapled-together working drafts (this was before word processing) and assured them that my particular work process was more like assembling bits and pieces and then plastering over and sanding the joints. I never could figure out how to demonstrate where the “ideas” come from, because I don’t know myself, but I did show how to cobble them together and discover coherence.
We got our ballots in the mail almost three weeks ago and I turned them in at a branch of the County Recorder’s office two days later.
Completely off-topic but I just read Isabel J. Kim’s “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” in the February 2024 issue of Clarkesworld and it’s simply brilliant.
Yes! Definitely going on my Hugo ballot.
Because Reasons, I didn’t get my ballot into the dropbox until Sunday, but I got my notification that it was received. It likely won’t get counted until after Maryland has been called, of course. (It will, however, get added to the official count.)
The Best Moment of this year’s Readercon was during the “Responses to Omelas” panel, which discussed Kim’s story, one by Jemisin, and others, when a woman in a middle row stood up during the questions-from-the-audience and said “My name is Isabel Kim, and the true meaning of that story is that it’s told by a drunken girl in an Omelas bar.”
Only she said it better.
STANDING OVATION.