(1) On Veterans Day: “Ten Science-Fiction and Fantasy Authors Who Served in the US Armed Forces” from Suvudu.
9) Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was an Army nurse during the Vietnam war, an experience she has drawn upon in her fiction on occasion. She is the author of several series, including Acorna and Petaybee, but her modern fantasy novel The Healer’s War is perhaps the most autobiographical. Interviews with Scarborough aren’t easy to find online, but here’s one in which she mentions her nursing experience.
10) Gene Wolfe After serving in the Army during the Korean war, Gene Wolfe returned home and became an engineer. Writing was a hobby that he pursued in his off-hours, but his talent was apparent from the very beginning. He is the author of numerous books, but his The Books of the New Sun series revolutionized fantasy and is a classic of the Dying Earth genre. If you have a literary bucket list then this series belongs at the top. Wolfe spoke about the effect the war had on his fiction during an interview with MIT’s 12 Tomorrows: “It’s a real wake-up call. What military service does is rub off a lot of the pretense and self-deception from a person. You have to keep going, knowing that there are people over there who are trying to kill you. You’re right: they are.”
(2) N. K. Jemisin reacts to dropping the Lovecraft statuette from the World Fantasy Award in “Whew”.
That’s a sigh of relief. One less thing to feel conflicted about. One more thing I can celebrate freely, easily, and without reservation.
I’m talking about the World Fantasy Award, which will now no longer be represented by the head of H. P. Lovecraft. My feeling re the whole thing is a) ’bout time, and b) whew. Because while I have no idea if I’ll ever win a WFA myself — I’ve been nominated twice and that’s awesome — I have watched other anti-racist friends and fellow writers of color win the award. It’s impossible not to feel that visceral clench of empathy when they speak of the awkwardness of Lovecraft, of all people, as the representation of their honor. I’ve heard a number of winners talk about the ways they plan to hide or disguise or otherwise disrespect their own award so that they can reach a place of comfort with it. I’ve contemplated what I would do if I won, myself. (Was planning to put it on full display atop my cat’s litterbox.) I never show off my nomination pins, because I don’t feel like explaining when people ask, “Who’s that supposed to be?”
(3) Rocket Books is running a series of sf author trading cards. Here are the four most recent sf all-stars.
#SciFiSunday Check back every Sunday for a new Legend of #ScienceFiction. RocketUp! #fantasy #scifi #books 05 pic.twitter.com/sYuGLFKHzt
— RocketBooks (@RocketBooksInc) October 31, 2015
Due to overwhelming demand, we now present the following in the Legends of #ScienceFiction series. 01 pic.twitter.com/s647NY11mS
— RocketBooks (@RocketBooksInc) October 31, 2015
#SciFiSunday Check back every Sunday for a new Legend of #ScienceFiction. RocketUp! #fantasy #scifi #books 07 pic.twitter.com/U8JgWB1UPQ
— RocketBooks (@RocketBooksInc) November 7, 2015
#SciFiSunday Check back every Sunday for a new Legend of #ScienceFiction. RocketUp! #fantasy #scifi #books 02 pic.twitter.com/scRWgxd33s
— RocketBooks (@RocketBooksInc) November 11, 2015
(4) Entertainment Weekly had Harrison Ford recreate his classic pose as one of four new covers for their upcoming Star Wars special issue.
(5) Worldcon organizer Ben Yalow is quoted in the New York Times story “F.C.C. Sides With Hot Spots, and Hospitality Industry Feels a Chill”:
…Since many convention centers outsource functions like their network management, it can be harder for planners to haggle down the price of Internet access, but the arrangement spares the center from having to finance technological upgrades and might provide it with a commission as well….
“Basically, you’re looking at six figures or more to wire up the place, and every couple of years you’ll probably want to do another low six-figure upgrade,” said Ben Yalow, a recently retired information technology professional with experience setting up and configuring networks in hotels and convention centers….
Hospitality industry experts predicted that the F.C.C.’s recent actions would force event facilities to become more competitive in their pricing, so as not to lose out entirely on the Internet revenue stream….
“I think the long-term solution is going to be that convention centers and hotels drop their prices down to someplace reasonable,” Mr. Yalow said. “They’re not going to make money off this the way they used to.”
(6) “A member of Britain’s Parliament feuds with store over ‘Star Wars’ shoes”.
A member of Britain’s Parliament has been nicknamed “Shoebacca” after using House of Commons letterhead to complain about missing out on Star Wars shoes.
Angela Rayner, 35, a Labor party member who represents Ashton-under-Lyne, used notepaper with House of Commons letterhead to write a letter of complaint to the Irregular Choice shop after the store sold out of Dan Sullivan-designed Star Wars shoes that featured R2-D2 figures as the high heels.
(7) David Gerrold responded to the latest news about accessibility and harassment policies on Facebook. This excerpt is what he said about accessibility.
For the past two or three years, when I have been invited to conventions, I have requested that panels be made up of qualified individuals of all genders. While sometimes it happens that a panel ends up as all-male or all-female (as a function of subject matter), con programmers should make every effort to be inclusive.
In the future, I will be expanding that request to include ramps and other appropriate accessibility requirements for disabled participants. Larger conventions should consider having a sign-language interpreter for deaf attendees.
I have to make it a request, not a requirement — because some conventions might not have the resources. A convention survives on its attendance. Small cons can’t always afford these things. The rule of thumb is to spend the money where it will serve the most people….
A convention is supposed to be a gathering of the community, a place where we share our love of the genre and go home inspired. We don’t want our friends in fandom going home unhappy. The unwritten rule in fandom has always been that everybody is welcome, everybody is included — but it’s not enough to have that as an ideal, we have to demonstrate it by accessibility and inclusion.
(8) On Veterans Day, Cedar Sanderson recommended reading Tom Kratman’s columns for EveryJoe.com based on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
Here are the links to Kratman’s “Service Guarantees Citizenship (Part I)” and “Service Guarantees Citizenship (Part II)”.
We’ve been discussing the system put forth in naval officer and science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s book, Starship Troopers. For some background see last week’s column. For more background, read the book and spurn the wretched movie.
*****
So why are we – those of us who are in favor – even concerned with radically changing the system that has, and for the most part well enough, seen us through over two centuries? It’s simple: We think that system’s time has run, that we are not the people we were and that our ruling class is no longer worthy. Indeed, it’s not even trustworthy, let alone generally worthy. We observe that our political and economic fate has fallen into the hands of the denationalized rich, who frankly don’t care a fig for us. We see that where once we were an “ask what you can do for your country” people, we are increasingly indistinguishable from the worst third-world kleptocratic and nepotistic hellholes. We see the PC fascisti replacing us with unassimilable foreigners, often enough from cultures that are not just incompatible, but which actively hate us. We see that we are fracturing in ways that are arguably worse than anything we’ve ever seen before, worse even than before and during the Civil War. Yankees and Rebs used to, at least, mostly speak the same language. Our language today, as spoken by left and right from north and south, may sound the same but the words and concepts have changed meanings.
In short, we think that we either, in Brecht’s words, elect a new people, as our denationalized and corrupt rulers seem to be trying to do via immigration, or we fall hard – so hard we’ll never stand again.
(9) Adam-Troy Castro quizzed his Facebook readers:
Unanswered question, from a thread: what if the World Military Fiction Award were a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Would you consider a black novelist childish for questioning the appropriateness of that choice, or the award committee too PC for considering that maybe he had a point?
(10) Today In History
- November 11, 1982 — The space shuttle Columbia blasted off on the first commercial space mission.
(11) Today’s Birthday Boy
- Born November 11, 1922 — Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
(12) David Kilman at Amazing Stories devotes the November installment of Scide Splitters to “1941 Retro Hugo Eligible Novellas”.
Two of the three novellas I will be exploring today are ones that I read at an early age, albeit in modified form as they were incorporated into The Incomplete Enchanter. My reviews here, however, are of the stories as they appeared in their original form published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction. Even though all three were advertised as novels when first published, I have confirmed that all three are of novella length (17,500 to 40,000 words).
(13) Litigation Comics from The Line it is Drawn #265 – “One Moment Later” on Famous Comic Book Covers at Comic Book Resources.
(14) Nerds of a Feather hosted a roundtable discussion on Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni Rising between Joe Sherry, Rob Bedford, Paul Weimer, Jonah Sutton-Morse and Fred Kiesche. Here’s a sample:
Joe Sherry: Two things stand out for me. One: How quickly Kurtz gets into the action of the story and how tight the timeline is here. Everything that happens is so immediate, but it feels appropriate with the political risk of Kelson being able to hold on to a crown he is barely prepared to accept because he is only about to hit his legal majority all the while he is about to face a challenge from an external threat with an internal agent. I’m not sure that stuff really gets old when it’s written so smoothly. Two: This may be colored by how I feel about some of the later novels, but what I like is the minutiae, the details of how things work behind the scenes – the Council sessions, the rituals of the church, the tidbits on Deryni history.
(15) Larry Correia, in “The 2015 Still Not a Real Writer Book Tour Recap” at Monster Hunter Nation, shows how to make the jump from Sad Puppy to Bestselling Underdog.
One stop was at Powell’s in Beaverton. It is a great store, and I had a great time with a good crowd. But I saw later on Twitter somebody had apparently seen me there, and taken to Twitter to talk about my pathetic showing, and how nobody was there at the lamest book signing ever, and hashtag something about how I was the saddest puppy of all.
That struck me as odd, since we had over forty people show up, which by most author’s reckonings is great, and we filled the signing area to the side. But then I realized what he’d probably seen (mistakenly thinking that a Puppy Kicker was honest and not just lying about me on Twitter, silly me). I’d gotten there almost an hour early, and had killed time just hanging out in the audience with the seven or eight people who’d shown up really early too. I figured that was what he’d seen, because by seven o’clock we had filled the chairs, and more people kept coming in the whole time. So being my usual diplomatic self, I responded and told him that the “big hand goes on the seven, doofus”. Luckily, some of the fans had taken pictures of the crowd too, and since you guys are so super helpful, you posted the photographic evidence to the dude.
Now, a smart person would say, whoops, my bad. But not a Puppy Kicker. They have that whole narrative about how anybody who disagrees with TRUFAN is irreparably damaging their career, so of course he doubled down. Oh no. He was there at 7:05! And he saw my 40! And that was still horrible garbage failure of suck, because that bookstore ROUTINELY gets 500(!) people at a book signing…
This of course came as a surprise to the people who work there, and my more famous author friends who sell ten times as many books as I do, who only got around 200 there. Basically, you can count the number of mega superstar authors who routinely get five hundred people at a book signing on your hands, and have fingers left over. Puppy kickers are harsh, man. I think the average book signing in America is like five to seven people.
But I don’t make the rules. Five hundred it is! Anything less is shameful garbage.
(16) Max Florschutz tells his own strategy for “Dealing with Detractors” at Unusual Things.
You ignore them.
For the most part. But seriously, this is usually the best solution. Because if you try to do battle with them, be they trolls or individuals/groups in power, you’re basically throwing gas on a flame. It’ll ignite, and sometimes that can catch you on fire as well. If nothing else, a detractor will try their hardest to make sure that if they’re going down, they’re going to take you with them, any way you can.
Now, some detractors can take things to the point where you need to confront them in some way or another. But you know what?
Let them ruin themselves.
You see, the thing about these detractors is that they’re toxic individuals to one degree or another. And one way or another, unless they change, they’ll end up poisoning whatever atmosphere they’re involved in. Eventually, people catch on. It might take years, but eventually, one way or another, time has a way of catching up with those who’ve made their hobby tearing down everyone else and eating away at their own pyramid. And as long as you haven’t let them catch you in their claws, they probably won’t take you with them when they fall. Ignore them, work with those critics and individuals who are concerned with making your work the best it can be, and detractors will remove themselves from the creative pool; exercising a form of social Darwinism.
(17) Mike McMahan has written an ST:TNG parody, Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season.
The official parody guide to the unaired eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, based on the popular @TNG_S8 Twitter account from creator Mike McMahan!In the basement of the Star Trek archives, behind shelves of U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D models, bags of wigs, and bins of plastic phasers, sits a dusty cardboard box. Inside is a pile of VHS tapes that contain never-before-seen episodes and behind-the-scenes footage for something truly amazing. The world thinks there are only seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but there’s one more. A secret season.
The @TNG_S8 book is out next week! @pleaseprint wrote the funny funny! I drew the pretty pretty! You'll love it! pic.twitter.com/mkLNC3xq0c
— Jason Ho (@jasonhohoho) October 6, 2015
(18) Marvel’s Jessica Jones – Official Trailer #2, coming on Netflix. Suvudu gives a detailed rundown.
[Thanks to Ryan H., JJ, Daniel Dern, The G., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]
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Herbert Hoover graduated from Stanford with a degree in geology. Jimmy Carter took part in Rickover’s nuclear submarine program. So yeah.
The biggest signings I’ve ever been to were Pratchett, but I imagine Gaiman would draw similar numbers. At each one, the line was best described as “bloody hell, he’ll never get through all those in two hours.” He never did, but he always stayed till the line was done.
@Jonathan Edelstein: I thought it was extremely obvious you were being sarcastic, yes. 🙂
Re book signing tours: I suspect that general publicity associated with the tour is far more important than the number of people that actually turn up. It gets your name out there, advises people you have a new book out, and quietly suggests to a broader audience that you have fans who like you enough to want to get your signature on a book.
Personally, I have little or no interest in collecting signatures, but there are any number of times I’ve been alerted to the existence of a new book by hearing that the author was going to be appearing in my vicinity.
@TheYoungPretender: “I’m sure Beale, and Correia when he gets over his feels, and Torgersen when he gets around to it, will be saying just how freaking brilliant The Colonel’s rant was as well.”
They’re not a freaking political party. They’re just a bunch of authors. And even if they *were* a political party, not everyone in political parties believes the same thing [rolls eyes].
For UK Filers of all ages, Sainsbury’s Christmas advert is a delightful return by Judith Kerr to her beloved cat, Mog. A book is being published to go with the story (which is set in this part of SW London, near Kerr’s home in Barnes).
http://youtu.be/kuRn2S7iPNU
(For the SFnal link, Judith is also the widow of Nigel Kneale, creator of many classic BBC SF dramas.)
Regarding ST and “civilian” veterans –
http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
tl;dr The best argument is that:
– the book AS WRITTEN has “veterans” meaning only military or military support
– Heinlein probably intended to mean civil service as a whole, with only about 5% of “veterans” being military, as per a statement in “Expanded Universe”. However, he was wrong about this being in the book.
@Vivienne Raper–
And therefore we’re not supposed to notice how very much they act like a political faction? You do realize these are the same people who dragged the culture wars into the Hugos, claiming that the Hugos have “always” been political, controlled by an ideological clique for a period of time that varies, as far as I can tell, with the phases of the moon. Ten years, or twenty, or thirty…
However inconvenient and annoying you find it, we’re going to keep on noticing their actual behavior.
The other part of the Federal Service thing is that Heinlein was a science fiction writer, and one of the things he enjoyed most about writing, by all accounts, was creating societies and then watching them work. So that’s why we get the balkanized America of Friday, the Crazy Years and Coventry of the Future History, the admixture of Navajo and Finn in Citizen Of The Galaxy, the libertarian anarchy of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and on and on and on.
All so very different, and all from one man’s typewriter.
@Lis Small ‘p’ fandom politics doesn’t necessarily line up with big ‘P’ politics. It would be like saying that everyone who enjoyed If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love has the same views on fiscal policy.
Small ‘p’ fandom politics doesn’t necessarily line up with big ‘P’ politics. The key Puppies appear to share views on books
And based on their many statements concerning “big P politics” they share a wide swathe of the same opinions regarding those as well. Did you not notice this?
@Vivienne Raper–
In fact, they’ve been quite explicitly clear that their “issues” are all about “political correctness,” feminism, gender equality, and the “unnecessary”, “arbitrary” presence of “diverse” characters for what they perceive to be ideological reasons–a complaint that’s grounded entirely in staff ng the real-world Culture Wars into the Hugos while the rest of us were just trying to read good books. Yes, based on their behavior to this point, there’s every reason to expect that BT and LC will be voicing agreement with the Marmot’s latest rant. They certainly won’t be disagreeing with it on anything significant.
Simon:
Here’s the thing, though. You can read Starship Troopers as an exploration of a hypothetical society, or as a political polemic advocating for a particular political system. As societal exploration, it is bollocks. I mean, just a fundamentally incompetent book. As polemic, on the other hand, it is excellent. An extremely well-written book. If we are to argue that Heinlein did not intend the book as a work of advocacy, we are forced to conclude that he wrote the book very badly.
I’ve only read a handful of Heinlein novels, and ST is my least favourite. The action scenes are terrific but I think we’ve pretty well covered the problems with the rest. I’ll say this for Heinlein, though: if I’m sitting, reading and saying to myself ‘this is nonsense’ for forty pages at a stretch and yet I keep reading, then that’s a talent.
Biggest signing I ever saw was Alison Hannigan at the height of the Buffy craze. A friend of mine and I went into the shop where they were holding it, and said ‘Why does it smell like a con in here?’ And then saw the massive line.
When The Truth came out, Terry Pratchett was booked to do a signing at Forbidden Planet in London – on the day my family and I already had tickets to see the Bollywood Brass Band. Naively, not knowing exactly how popular Pratchett would be, my sisters and I (who were all fans) convinced our parents that we could turn up and get the signatures before the concert… Only to get to Forbidden Planet and see a line wrapping around the block. Literally. So off we trot to the concert, disappointed but still determined to enjoy ourselves, and indeed they were very good. Then, being optimistic and determined smallish people, we then convinced our parents that we should just check if maybe the signing was still going on. Lo and behold, when we got there, there was still a fairly impressive (but not around the block) queue and we tagged onto the end of it, got our books and our signatures (plus a poster – signed – because they were taking them down at the time and I wasn’t a particularly shy smallish person), and left feeling incredibly impressed with his fortitude at signing for hours.
The Truth is still one of my favourite Discworld books.
@iain As it has long been one of my least favourite Heinlein novels, I suspect the latter.
From a practical point of view, I’ve always found the government in Starship Troopers fairly realistic given that many countries have been governed by a military elite for large parts of history. And people have made lots of arguments over time justifying the military rule.
Regarding Kratman, I guess he missed the part in Starship Troopers where the veterans from all nations come together to form a world state? Feeling that their shared experience gives them more in common with each other than the civilians of their countries?
I seem to recall Heinlein saying somewhere (maybe in Expanded Universe rather than ST] that there was nothing uniquely moral about veterans, it just happened to have been a group of veterans who put together a government in the aftermath of some sort of chaos, and they trusted other veterans more than non-veterans, so they wrote rules to limit the franchise to veterans. Which puts it on the same (non-)ethical level as Harvard graduates hiring only other Harvard graduates for powerful jobs, or popes appointing their relatives as cardinals.
In a “now this is an interesting MilSF novel aside”, just finished Greg Bear’s Wardogs. A rather interesting take on the “beware aliens bearing gifts” trope, it sends a multinational force to Mars to fight another faction of aliens – only to trip over a secret history of the early solar system. Most enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to the sequel Killing Titan.
Bear’s take on the military is nicely nuanced, and his long-ignored Martian settlers are a fascinating set of characters.
@Vivienne R.
However, the people I mentioned, (and some I did not who blog at Mad Genius Club) all have taken the time put many of their writings in an electronic format, archived and searchable using the same technology we now use to converse.
By merely reading their words this technology bears to my device – yes, yes I can say that Beale would find that sort of Volk-ish view of the state under the firm hand of some uniformed leader acceptable, because he has said so. Yes, I can say that Torgerson has an almost sacramental view of uniforms and the intrinsic superiority of those who wear them because he said so. I can say John Wright advocates the lynching of those he finds distasteful because he has said so. Yes, I can say that many of them share The Colonel’s paranoia about all the many Others, all of the Thems, who they feel cluster round and threateningly because they have said so.
There words do not vanish and change as their justifications do (unless those words are comments on Torgerson’s blog, of course) and so yes, I can say all of that. And because I have indeed read this history that they often speak of, I can look at this worship of uniforms and guns, this constant alert against the conspiracy, the iron conviction in the intrinsic alien-ness of any person or custom you don’t share, and call it by the name it has been called historically.
But I will say, stopped clocks and all, the Colonel does have one thing right: left and right do talk different. I have not seen any of the walls of sentence fragments broken by ellipses with nary a paragraph in sight today that we saw a few days ago when Vox drew attention to the WFC awards discussion.
So yes, it would appear that left and right do talk and write differently.
“Smells Like Con Spirit” by Nerdvana?
Re: The question why Author signings still happen: there’s a saying that only 50% of marketing works. And that even marketing isn’t sure WHICH 50%. So they continue to do it all and see what works, and since they get different returns each time, they still can’t know.
I’ve attended readings and signings, almost never with great concern over getting the signature so much as the chance to talk with the author/musician. Thus in some ways too long a line is an issue because you don’t even get to do that, while a relatively small group means a chance to chat. One does hope they get a good minimum number, of course, but I’d rather there be 20-40 and not 400.
I saw the line-up for Terry Pratchett at the last Worldcon I attended (Which was Torcon 3), and I chose not to get into it, because OMG long. I regret that still, even though I didn’t have much to say that wasn’t standard gushing, because I’ll never get to shake his hand. However, I also think it was high as valuable to go and listen to what he had to say on some of the panels, even if it wasn’t personally to me, because it was also his chance to talk at extended length.
John Scalzi weighs in with words mostly supporting Larry, and calling the guy who criticized Larry “[k]ind of a dick.”
@ Soon Lee – lol.
I use ellipses …
On signings: I met my wife through encouraging a person I was chatting to on Usenet to come to a book-signing at a local store, as the SF group would probably be the only people there. We were, but that person came along, and we got on so well that it’s 23 years later and we’re still going to signings together…
(Oh, and the writer? Michael Moorcock touring Mother London.)
@Lenora Rose: I’d add that an author signing generally forces the bookstore to publicize the event, which can potentially be part of the effective 50% of marketing. I can think of a number of authors I’d have never heard of if our local bookstore hadn’t advertised their appearances. (And I never actually go to these things.)
Longfellow Books, one of two new bookstores within a ten minute walk of where I live, hosts north of a hundred book reads combined with signings a year. Their in-store space for these holds forty comfortably though one local mystery drew over two hundred there and was hot enough that several people fainted. Using other larger spaces has allowed them to have events that draw up to five hundred.
Most of these are for general fiction with mysteries being the next genre that generates most events. Outside of horror writers like Joe Hill, genre events are far and few between as they generally draw poorly. Even Cat Valente who lives here isn’t guaranteed to draw well.
I used to use ellipses a lot…until it occurred to me that I didn’t have to notify the world every time I paused for thought while writing. I also realized that there were other, often more appropriate, ways to indicate a pause—like the good ol’ em-dash. 🙂
(I was probably somewhat influenced by growing up reading the columns of Herb Caen in the local newspaper: a man whose style was often referred to as “three dot journalism.”)
@Peace
So do I….
But I tend not use them… A lot of the time… Like this while sticking chat speak… Like lol in…
Think the Jophi thread for one or two examples. Truth be told, there’s an argument for it being a way to simulate a conversational tone online. But one sees it often around US conservative websites, so there’s an association.
Of course, the joke used to be that PTerry had done so many signings that it was the *un*signed Pratchett books that were the rare ones.
As it happens, a signing was how I first met him. Back in ’96, before he’d really broken big in the U.S., he was doing a signing in a Boston suburb. Probably in the 30-50 range attendance. When I got up to the front, I said that I was associated with the Harvard sf club, and they were meeting that night and if he had no other plans, they’d love for him to attend. He replied that that did sound interesting, and while his author escort was clearly concerned the next day’s Boston Globe headline would be “Visiting Author Found Dead; Crazed Fan Suspected”, he told me what hotel he was staying in and we set a time for me to pick him up.
Brought him to the meeting, he gave an impromptu talk that everyone loved, and we took him out for ice cream after.
@Xtifr
John Scalzi is a class act.
Used to use them all the time back in the days of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Ellipse of the Heart.
Ellipses can be useful, but I try not to overuse them. Every time I have a comment with one or two of them in I contemplate whether I really needed that ellipse and in the end I take most of them out. There are a few things that I spend extra time considering; ellipses aren’t the only one.
There were a couple of comments back on the bust change announcement thread which were a little difficult to read. Still, I don’t think they were among the ruder ones, so there’s that.
If I use ellipses at all it would be at the end of a post, in the hope that it conveys that I recognise that it’s an ongoing conversation, and thus I do not believe that once I’ve commented it’s all over.
I’m not sure that it works that way but that’s the intent, even here in the year 2351…
“Dots are believed by many writers of our day to be a good substitute for effective writing. They are certainly an easy one. Let us have a few more….”
(M.R. James, “Stories I Have Tried To Write”)
that’s the intent, even here in the year 2351…
Oh good, we have working time machines again, even here in 3406.
There is a convention in Japanese manga to have a person standing silently in reaction, possibly contemplative, their thoughts difficult to read, an ellipsis the only thing in their word balloon …
I almost wonder if signing/reading expectations are more burdensome for established authors than beginning ones. My basic “win condition” for signing at a convention is a non-zero number. I believe I’ve always achieved that. I’ve done convention readings for audiences of one.
To some extent, turnout (whether at bookstores or conventions) can be a function of having an extremely loyal core fanbase at the relevant location rather than being a measure of overall popularity as an author. Maybe at a convention you’ll have someone wander into a reading for lack of anything else interesting to do, but I doubt anyone is going to passively show up to a bookstore event without already being invested to some degree in the author.
Simon Bisson on November 12, 2015 at 12:46 pm said:
For UK Filers of all ages, Sainsbury’s Christmas advert is a delightful return by Judith Kerr to her beloved cat, Mog. A book is being published to go with the story (which is set in this part of SW London, near Kerr’s home in Barnes).
Oh I am so very happy to see this.
Mog was a great part of the kid’s bedtime reading at one point, and it was a keeper.
It’s still up on the shelf.
http://www.amazon.com/Mog-Forgetful-Cat-Judith-Kerr-ebook/dp/B00830SLNC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447376059&sr=1-1&keywords=mog+the+forgetful+cat
(I’m pretty sure that tabbies are a perfectly valid SJW option.)
Today’s second book (because I have some kind of horrible illness, so what else am I going to do): Trigger Warning, by Neil Gaiman. Actually more hit-or-miss than I expected, although there were some definite standouts: “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” (once I set aside my irritation about the hair thing), the October story in “A Calendar of Tales”, and “The Sleeper and the Spindle” were all excellent. And “Orange”, “Click-Clack the Rattlebag”, and “Black Dog” were all entertaining reads. The rest? Eh.
@TechGrrl1972: “Or, the way I like to phrase it: Call a spade an effin’ shovel. Irene knew a spade when she saw one.”
Teensy problem with that, TG: “spade” is one of the many slurs that have been invented for “black person.”
@Anna: I think your uncle deserved to vote in every damn country he might have wanted to. That is a wonderful example of bravery, heroism, and morality. He stood up against Nazis AND Fascists! Marmot isn’t worthy to lick his boots.
@Laura Resnick: I have been calling the bust “fugly” for a few years now. Even on this very website. It would creep me out even if Lovecraft had been a founding father of the NAACP, ADL, etc. Ewwww. Hugos are shiny rockets, Nebulas are swirly crystal stars, Campbells are a plaque and a tiara, Oscars are gold stylized men, Emmys are a lady with electric wings holding a globe… and then you’ve got this hideous thing. Yuck.
Let’s face it: LC does not need big readings, or awards. He needs a good CBT shrink to help him explore and root out his insecurity/impostor syndrome/need for external validation. There’s no shame in that — the brain’s a complicated thing and thus can go wonky like any other organ — unless of course you’re a Manly Man who still considers that shameful. Which is another problem with the military and those who worship them; that attitude clings. Real Men Suck It Up.
(We here in 2968 laugh at that idea the way we laugh at phlostigon.)
@The Young Pretender said:
They want to wax lyrical about blood and soil; anyone who got all shocked at Ms. Gallo can apologize to her about how upset they were at her for calling a horse a horse.
THIS. I, too, was thinking of feathers and quacking and being largely aquatic.
@Vivienne: I’m not accusing them of being a political party. Just a loud clique who fawns over each other’s work (and their mutual ideals).
@Rev. Bob: yes, that’s offputtiing. Which is why the quacking metaphor’s better.
@Simon: That Mog advert was lovely! I actually LOL at the nightmare.
There are too many of my family in the Armed Forces for me to swallow the whole It instills Loyalty, Discipline, etc” line.
While there are a few white sheep in my family, we are not good people. As my Grandfather has said, the Military brings out what’s in you.
I am applauding comments by writers and readers here, and John Scalzi’s post, supporting the idea of attendance at LC’s reading being a good turnout. And it is. not in the same category, but I’ve given talks at campuses, and in other departments here on campus, and of course academic presentations for years (and it can be hard, especially for the people at their first conference to have few people show up–and since I also have to schedule the presentations, I know that certain times like 8:30 am or 8:30 pm or the last slot on Saturday are MISERABLE for everyone).
Elizabeth Scarborough! I have ALL her stuff, I think. I started buying her comic fantasy series, Argonia series, when they were first out in PB. Think fantastic fantasy world-building, some nice deconstruction of fairy-tale tropes (protagonist being chubby and brown-haired and a hearthwitch!), hilarious puns, similar to but much better than Anthony’s Xanth (fantasy, comedy, high jinks, etc.). Argonia was based on Alaska where Scarborough was living or had lived, I believe, and no creepy fetishizing of women’s underwear or other yuck. She was firmly established in that comic fantasy voice when suddenly BAM The Healer’s War appeared and was a total shock. Serious war novel, VietNam era, it was amazing. (And won the Nebula!)
A few years later, I paired NS with Haldeman’s Forever War when I got to teach a sf course at the University ot Seattle (was hired as part time instructor after I finished my dissertation and before I moved to Texas). They hadn’t had anybody would could do an sf course for quite a while, and it was a fantastic opportunity for me. (My clearest memory of the course alas was a young man demanding, indignantly, on the course evaluation: “What do women have to do with sf anyhow?” especially with regard to THAT BOOK which clearly truly wasn’t sf despite you know winning the Nebula!).
A similar thing happened with Esther Friesner: she started publishing comic fantasy novels which I loved. My favorites were the Demon Series (about some demons who weren’t very good at being bad). Then BAM came The Psalms of Herod and The Sword of Mary, grim feminist dystopias. Blew my mind.
I’m not sure I can think of many other authors who do that major a shift in tone and genre……..at least not without a name change/shift (thinking of Charles de Lint publishing some of his dark horror under “Samuel M. Keys”….).
I like some of Gahan Wilson’s work, but he wasn’t usually aiming for beautiful, much less pretty. I would guess that whoever selected him as the artist for the award thought “Gahan Wilson is a good artist, and regularly published in F&SF” and ignored “Gahan Wilson is very good at drawing weird and sometimes ugly things.”
(Back here in 1130, we don’t have the printing technology for that sort of fine-line drawing.)
Rev. Bob
The difficulty arises, in part, because there is very large gap between USA English, and English English. Using the US term spade on this side of the pond is very unlikely to actually even register on our social lives, though if it does register it’s likely those people familiar with this sort of stuff got here early.
After all we have no reason to know about it…
I use ellipses, parables, hyperbole and circular arguments – basically ALL the conic sections…
There’s a term I’ve bounced around in my skull, when I think about doing conventions, signings and other events: “Calculus of Value”.
Basically, it’s a reminder that the win condition isn’t, “I’m going to go here (and spend $X to do it) and then walk out having done $Y in sales, and as long as Y>X, it’s worth my time.” In part because “Doing $Y in sales” isn’t even something I’m directly engaged in. But I have to look at the bigger picture, which isn’t always about dollar amounts or hand-sales.
@Stevie
Oh, I don’t think that term is unknown here. An episode of The Professionals (that was originally banned, actually) used it and definitely meant the racist term, and that show was both very British and late-70s/early-80s, so if we knew it then I’m pretty sure people would have a fair chance of knowing it now, even if it isn’t widely used.