(1) HONEST POSTERS. “If 2016’s Oscar-nominated movie posters told the truth” they’d be very funny. Courtesy of Shiznit.
(2) A TOP TEN WITH FANGS. Here’s Fantasy Faction’s ingenious list – “Top Ten Wolves In Fantasy”. How come I never do Top 10 Lists for File 770? People love them. Ah well, there isn’t enough time to do everything that’s a good idea.
- Maugrim (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C.S.Lewis)
Maugrim was the head of The Witch’s Police in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and relished the dirty work that had to be done. Seen by many as an agent of the Devil, he is the ugly face of evil in Narnia and makes no bones about it. He is instrumental in the coming of age of Peter who eventually slays him, earning the name Sir Peter Wolfsbane.
(3) BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Gustaff Behr tries to work out “How Much Does It Cost Being A Doctor Who Fan?”
Fred starts where all new fans start. He wants to go back and take a look at how Doctor Who came back in 2005 which means, including Series 9 which he will definitely get; Fred needs 9 seasons of complete box sets which costs on average $65.00. That’s $585.00 in total for Chris, David, Matt, John and Peter.
Being a Who fan costs at least $585.00 if you buy all nine New Who seasons of Doctor Who.
And after watching nine seasons of Doctor Who, barely sleeping, bathing or eating, Fred craves more. He needs to see how Doctor Who started all the way back in 1963. He also has to see the celery Doctor, the scarf Doctor, the pullover one and all the other past Doctors he’s heard so much about. He knows there are 156 classic stories of Doctor Who which range between $13.99 and $16.99 so we’ll budget for $15.49 as a rough average. That’s $2416.44 for the whole of the Classic Era of Doctor Who.
Being a Who fan costs at least $3001.44 if you want to have the entire television collection of Doctor Who from William Hartnell all the way up to Peter Capaldi.
And then he moves on to the merchandise….
(4) FUNICELLO OBIT. [CORRECTION — Turns out the source has taken an old story and given it a 2016 timestamp. But it might still be news to somebody….] Annette Funicello (1942-20162013) died January 11, 2013 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. She was 70. Funicello was a child star as a Mousketeer on the original Mickey Mouse Club, and as a teenager starred opposite Frankie Avalon in several beach movies. Her genre work included Babes In Toyland (1961), and quasi-genre movies like The Monkey’s Uncle, and Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
(5) GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON TRIBUTE. The Girl George & the Dragons Radio Show talked about George Clayton Johnson with his son, Paul Johnson, and others on January 17.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 17, 1605 – Don Quixote was published.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY SITH
- Born January 17, 1931 — James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader (and an actor renowned for many other roles.)
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 17, 1962 – Jim Carrey, of Hugo-winner The Truman Show, The Mask, and other quasi-fantasy films.
(9) MEET KYLO. Joseph Pimentel reports in the Orange County Register that Kylo Ren will replace Darth Vader in the “meet-and-greet” section of Disneyland’s Star Wars area in Tomorrowland where people stand in line to get autographs and photos with Disney characters.
Guests will be able to mingle with Kylo Ren, a central character from the smash hit “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” in Tomorrowland, Disney announced Friday. The company declined to say when the light-saber-wielding dark warrior and Jedi slayer will debut.
Ren will join Chewbacca, and Boba Fett as characters from the “Star Wars” franchise available for visitors to meet and take photos with at the Star Wars Launch Bay. There’ll also First Order Stormtroopers roaming around.
The upper floor of the building, the Tomorrowland Expo Center formerly known as Innoventions, houses the Super Hero HQ where guests meet Spider-Man and Thor.
Ren will replace Darth Vader, the original “Star Wars” villain, in the meet-and-greet. The Sith Lord Vader will continue to be in the show “Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple.”
Meet-and-greets with various Disney characters have become one of Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s signature attractions, drawing long lines of visitors wanting autograph, pictures and hugs.
(10) KYLO ON SNL. Saturday Night Live sent Kylo Ren (guest star Adam Driver) undercover as Matt, a radar technician, in Star Wars Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base.
(11) ABOUT SPECTRAL PRESS. Simon Bestwick has written a lengthy, heavily-documented post about issues with Spectral Press, publishers of his book Black Mountain.
Readers may wish to pour themselves a large, stiff drink before continuing. This is going to be a long post.
I’ve thought long and hard before blogging on this topic, but there is a great deal of confusion and misinformation out there, and I believe it’s important that the facts be made available. There is also an issue of transparency to customers regarding Spectral Press in its past or present incarnations….
7) The Short Version Spectral Press has published books, which sold. A share of the money from their sales is, contractually, their authors’. Their authors have not received it, and yet Spectral do not have it. Spectral Press has taken money from customers from books that have gone undelivered and, in some cases, unpublished. Many of these customers want their money back, and yet Spectral do not have it. I would just like to close by reminding anyone who feels Spectral’s critics are being unreasonable, that this situation has persisted for over a year; that the amount owed is a very large sum for a small press to owe, and that the individual in whose hands this situation has been placed has responded to polite and factual criticism with insults and blocking critics on social media, and whose own history should be cause for concern.
(12) ENOUGH IS TOO MUCH. Anne Wheaton tells her blog readers why she bid Twitter goodbye.
In real life, I stand up for myself. If someone says or does something to me or someone around me, I do something about it. As my online presence grew, there were people who don’t follow me showing up to say something horrible about me, my husband, or my children. Yes, they can be muted, blocked, or reported, and I was doing that all the time, every day. Sometimes I responded because like I said, in real life I stand up for myself so occasionally, I will do that online. But after a while, it’s like trying to smile and have a pleasant conversation with a kind person in a room full of people screaming hateful things in your face. You can ignore it but eventually, it just isn’t worth even talking at all and you just have to walk out of that room to protect yourself.
I chose to be on Twitter. I am not a celebrity. I am a middle-aged woman who’s a retired hairdresser who now runs a non-profit, is on the Board of Directors at Pasadena Humane Society, has a house FULL of rescue animals, and has two wonderful boys. I do not have a job I need to promote, nor am I looking for a job to take on. I have a full life with an amazing husband and family, wonderful friends, and a successful business I run. If something I choose to do on the side isn’t fun, I need to walk away from it because my free time is pretty scarce. Twitter used to be the fun thing I did on the side, and for the most part, it just isn’t fun anymore, so I need to walk away from it and that’s okay.
(13) ANOTHER TWITTER MAELSTROM. Neil Gaiman’s tweet endorsing Clarion set off a wave of complaints. Brad R. Torgersen was as surprised as Gaiman himself by the controversy, but did a better job of understanding the reaction.
I guess Gaiman upset people with this?
https://t.co/KxqDo9CY9y is where you apply to go to Clarion. If you want to be a writer, you want to go to Clarion, NEED to go to Clarion.
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) January 15, 2016
…Second, Gaiman is simply expressing what all of us have expressed — from time to time — about our favorite learning experiences. I have evangelized for the Kris Rusch and Dean Smith workshops, the Dave Wolverton workshops, the Writers of the Future workshop, the Superstars Writing Seminar, the “Life, The Universe & Everything” symposium, and so on, and so forth. All of them have been very valuable to me, and remain valuable long after attendance and participation….
It would be great if a Clarion-type experience were free. But running a workshop with that kind of scope and scale, is not cheap. And the truth is, there are people who will argue that it shouldn’t be cheap. That the high cost weeds out the dilettantes. So that only serious students, who are dedicated, will apply for acceptance. Clarion isn’t designed for wannabes. Clarion is for budding professional artists, who want to flower in an environment that will feed and nurture their professional artistry. Or at least that’s the ideal. And I definitely think Gaiman had the ideal in mind, when he wrote what he wrote.
Still, there is no royal road to publication and acclaim. I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I suspect Clarion’s success rate is probably on par with just about every other workshop going. Which means two-thirds of Clarion’s graduates, won’t make it. They won’t sell. Or at least, they won’t sell well. They will find that life has other work for them, and they will move on.
(13) ONE THUMB DOWN. Fran Wilde’s tweets, 10 of which are Storified here, illustrate the negative response.
https://twitter.com/fran_wilde/status/687982330942722049
(14) ANOTHER THUMB DOWN. Alex Bledsoe, in “Thoughts on Clarion, Privilege and Gaiman”, is one of many other writers sounding off about how they launched professional writing careers without the help of a workshop.
Now, I don’t for a moment believe that Gaiman literally meant need, as in you can’t consider yourself a real writer unless you have Clarion on your CV. But at the same time, I understand the outrage of those who see his statement as an unthinking beacon of privilege. Who the hell is Neil Gaiman, who will never again have to worry about paying bills, or child care, or taking time off from work, or any of the day-to-day struggles that most of his readers experience, to tell us what we need? It’s in the same ballpark as Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous statements about her being a “typical” mother.
Like a lot of writers, I never went to Clarion, or any professional writing workshop. I learned to write via journalism, both from studying it and working at it. I like to say it’s one reason my books are so short, but in another very important way, it taught me to approach writing as a job. A reporter is no special snowflake: if he or she can’t do the work, there’s always someone waiting to eagerly step up. So you get on with it, and do the best you can with what you have. That lesson has been incredibly useful as a fiction writer, too.
(15) GAYLACTIC SPECTRUM AWARDS. The winners and recommended short list for the 2014/2015 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards in the Best Novel category were announced at Chessiecon in November 2015.
- The 2015 award for 2013 titles winner was Death by Silver by Melissa Scott & Amy Griswold.
- The 2015 award for 2014 titles went to Fairs’ Point by Melissa Scott.
(16) DAVIDSON ON THE FINE POINTS. Steve Davidson discusses “How To Recommend Without Slating” at Amazing Stories.
As it has evolved, an acceptable Eligibility Post is limited to the following elements:
- A statement that a work is, under the rules in play, eligible for a particular category of award.
- Information on where and when the story was made available (so that others can verify its eligibility)
- A suggestion that those voting for the award in question might be interested in checking it out
- An Eligibility Post may also include an opportunity for others to add other works that are eligible
An Eligibility Post does not contain:
- reasons why someone ought to vote for the work
- begging for votes in any manner
- discussion of external politics that are somehow related to voting for the work
- discussion of the “messages” that will be sent by voting for the work
- plays for sympathy, or authorial love, mentions of career status
The Eligibility Post was soon joined by the “Recommended Reading” list…..
(17) POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE. In 2004, soon after meeting Howard Waldrop, Lou Antonelli succeeded in selling his first story.
I wrote Howard and told him meeting him had brought me good luck. He later dropped me this postcard. I recently found it in a drawer while cleaning up a messy storage shed, and thought I’d share it. If you have trouble reading Howard’s handwriting, this is what it says:
“Dear Lou,
“Congratulations on the sale to Gardner. (You were already getting rejection letters – it was only a matter of time, whether you came to Austin or not!) You’ve sentenced yourself to a life of bitterness and frustration, like me..
“Way to go!
“Yer pal,
“Howard”Howard is a great writer, a nice guy, and it also seems, a clairvoyant.
(18) BOWIE MOVIE SCREENINGS. The Vista Theatre in LA sold out its Labyrinth 30th Anniversary midnight screening (for obvious reasons) and has scheduled another.
In January we’re going to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of our favorite fantasy films- LABYRINTH, featuring everyone’s favorite goblin king Jareth and his Bowie-bulge! Feel free to join us in costume and dance, magic dance! Response to this event was larger than we expected- we were trending towards a sell out by show night, but with the tragic passing of David Bowie yesterday we sold out in 6 hours of the news breaking. We want all our friends and Bowie fans in our nerd circle to be able to grieve in the manner they chose and if celebrating his life with Labyrinth on the big screen is what they want than we’re here to help. We’ve added this SATURDAY NIGHT midnight screening for those that were unable to catch tickets for Friday night. We will have a costume contest both nights, and hope everyone enjoys the hell out of this film and Bowie’s incredible performance on the big screen
(19) ONE BUSY HOMBRE. Today’s mandatory Guillermo del Toro news is that he will develop to potentially direct Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark for CBS Films. The film is based on the trilogy by Alvin Schwartz.
He is such a big fan of the books that he owns ten of the original illustrations by Gammell.
In addition to potentially directing, del Toro will also produce the film alongside Sean Daniel, Jason Brown and Elizabeth Grave. Alvin Schwartz’s trilogy of short story collections have sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. Even though, from the moment it was published in 1984, the Scary Stories series was one of the most banned from placement by the American Library Association, as the collections were considered to be too scary for children. The ensuing controversy only helped to fuel sales, and the trilogy has remained a cultural phenomenon ever since.
(20) RAINBOW BATMAN. DC Comics invites fans to “Brighten your batcave with Rainbow Batman figures”
Why should the criminals of Gotham get all the colorful costumes? Now you can have the Caped Crusader in pink, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Where did these come from? According to Yahoo! Movies —
A year ago, DC Collectibles opened up their vault to reveal prototypes of statues, action figures, and busts that were never produced and allowed fans to vote on which item from the collection should be produced and sold. A colorful line of Batmen figures based on “The Rainbow Batman” cover of Detective Comics #241 (1957) won the poll.
(21) JACK KIRBY DRAMATIZED. Now on stage in Seattle (through January 23), “’King Kirby’ play profiles the artist behind the superheroes, overshadowed by Stan Lee”.
“King Kirby” opens with the canonization of its subject at a high-level sale, where an auctioneer recounts the artist’s pictorial achievements and begins the bidding on each Kirby illustration at thousands of dollars.
From somewhere in the beyond, Kirby (who died in the 1990s, and is portrayed with vigor and conviction by Rick Espaillat) looks on disgustedly at the pretentious upscaling of his work.
In a pungent Brooklyn accent and with a defensive edginess, Kirby takes us back to his humble beginnings growing up in a rough neighborhood, where he had to use his fists to fend off attackers.
No wonder he invented heroic protectors and epic rescuers. Fascinated by mythology and quick with a sketchbook, Kirby starts out doing grunt work in a cartoon sweatshop, forms a partnership with a business-savvy pal, and comes into his own working under a series of amusingly irate moguls. In collaboration with head honcho and collaborator Stan Lee, he’s a big reason why Lee’s Marvel Comics still thrill the masses with spinoffs of characters created in the 1940s and ’50s.
Lee is portrayed as a marketing maestro and idea man, who not only stiffed his top artist out of franchise deals and royalties but also presented himself as the sole inventor of superheroes co-created and fleshed out by Kirby.
(22) STAN THE MAN. CBS Sunday Morning program featured “The Marvelous Life of Stan Lee” on January 17.
The comic starts out, as Stan started out, as Stanley Martin Leiber, born to Jewish immigrants in 1922. He grew up poor in a tiny Bronx apartment during the Depression.
When Stan was old enough, he started looking for jobs to help pay the bills, and in 1939 he landed at a publishing house which just happened to have a small division called Timely Comics.
“I’d fill the ink wells — in those days they used ink!” he said. “I’d run down and get them sandwiches at the drug store, and I’d proofread the pages, and sometimes in proofreading I’d say, ‘You know, this sentence doesn’t sound right. It ought to be written like this.’ ‘Well, go ahead and change it!’ They didn’t care!”
Characters like Destroyer, Father Time and Jack Frost soon had Stan’s fingerprints all over them.
He got so caught up in the battles of good vs. evil that after Pearl Harbor, it seemed only natural he join the Army.
“Oh hell, how could you not volunteer for the Army?” he said. “Hitler was over there doing all those horrible things.”
But instead of fighting, Lee found himself drawing. His best work: a poster telling soldiers how NOT to get VD.
“I drew a little soldier, very proudly,” he recalled. “And he’s saying, ‘VD? Not me!’ as he walks in. They must have printed a hundred trillion of those! I think I won the war single-handedly with that poster!”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Tom Galloway, Steve Lieber, Andrew Porter, and Kendall for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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[10] Well, I thought it was funny.
[13]-[14]
This is the problem when Twitter gets its two minute hate on. The writer of [14] doesn’t think for a moment that he meant his statement literally, and yet, understands perfectly why other people would get upset.
But… did any of the people getting all het up sincerely think he meant it literally? Or did they all just agree that IF you took it literally, it was a terrible horrible no good very bad thing to say, and so, why not give everything the worst possible spin? CONTEXT OVERBOARD, ASSUME THE WORST AND FULL SPEED AHEAD HUFFING ON THAT SWEET CRACK PIPE OF MORAL INDIGNATION.
The Puppies have done this sort of thing a lot, and I don’t like it any better when other people do it.
@RedWombat: People have Feelings, apparently. I think Gaiman stuck his foot into a rather large puddle of them.
Writing’s a very personal thing, and a source of insecurity, and also a thing that lots of people are judgemental about – as with parenting, there’s a lot of unstable Feelings-energy attached. So it’s quite easy for people to feel stung by (what they read as) a public pronouncement that might have been perfectly acceptable in a smaller online community or the introduction to a book. (I’ve seen similar blow-ups over food and cooking elsewhere, for similar reasons.)
ObReading: Tanith Lee’s “Cyrion”, on the basis of James Nicholl’s review. It’s a nice playful and mildly subversive take on various pulp adventure tropes. Slight by Tanith Lee’s standards but I find Tanith Lee a bit too elaborate, so that’s a positive for me.
And – also via James Nicholl – I’m halfway through a second read of Graydon Saunders’ “A Succession of Bad Days”. Magic-and-civil-engineering competence porn plus Full Communism, and very much a comfort read for me. I’m not sure who else would like it, but if the intersection of high-magic fantasy, SFnal sensibility, and C J Cherryh-style tight first-person perspective sounds like your kind of thing then definitely give it a try.
I believe Neil Gaiman’s definition of need is adjacent to my periodic need for chocolate. As in, it’s something I’m quite enthusiastic about in the moment and inclined to proclaim loudly.
I only know Clarion West, but I imagine there are similarities with Clarion. CW offers generous scholarships to their programs and has a reputation for providing solid assistance and excellent to great teachers. It also does a lot of outreach, making sure writers of various backgrounds know about its programs and its scholarships.
For all of those who are crying “overreaction” about responses to the Gaiman tweet, I’d like to point out that labeling the reaction “outrage” falls very solidly into the category of “overreaction”. (Possibly even into the category of “outrage”.)
I saw a lot of individual people responding to a public exhortation by saying, “This is how this statement makes me feel excluded.” And they provided a lot of very specific individual examples of why that exhortation was not a true statement for them.
It isn’t the Gaiman exhortation in a vacuum — aspiring SFF writers who are marginalized for any of a great many reasons are subject to a constant barrage of gatekeeping experiences, some overt, some silent and implicit. (Believe me, I’ve known both.) Gaiman’s tweet provoked people to react — each in a small individual way — because it was so specific, so concrete, and so clearly false. But those reactions were also inspired by a lot of other experiences that were much more slippery.
Calling the accumulation of those individual reactions “outrage” implies some sort of coordinated campaign. I would suggest, instead, that if a great many people each have an individual reaction of hurt to something one has said, perhaps the fault lies in what was said rather than the reactions. Or perhaps what was said was simply one more boot stepping on a broken toe.
@Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on January 18, 2016 at 2:51 am said:
Meanwhile, I thought the all-caps NEED was the thing that clearly signaled he was engaging in hyperbole and not to be taken literally.
The most important takeaway from Clarion, from what I’ve heard or read by attendees over the years, isn’t the nitty-gritty details about putting words on paper, but that it gives you a long concentrated opportunity to get into (and learn how to get into) a writer’s mindset.
By “writer’s mindset”, I mean that focused creative state (called by more general self-help books “The Flow” or “The Zone” or other terms) where things start to *click*, where you can make choices about plotlines or character development or worldbuilding, and they’ll be good choices.
You don’t need Clarion specifically for that. (But it certainly seems to help.) You might be able to learn it from other immersive workshops, or from local writers groups, or online, or other methods. A few people seem to be born with the ability. Some seem to gain the ability thru pure pig-headed stubbornness. But I think it’s not just the actual putting of words on paper that’s important, but getting into that mental zone where you can put the right words onto paper. Whatever works for that, works.
Reading about writing, listening to discussion of writing, thinking about writing (as its own subject, rather than thinking about a specific story being written) are all things that, in my experience, can help get you into that zone. (All the particular and specific tips and tricks used by writers — write in a specific location, write at a specific time, write with/without music, etc — all seem to me to be aids for getting into a writer’s mental zone.)
I’ve been wrestling with a story idea off and on, one that hasn’t been able to come together in a workable or acceptable manner. But last week, I was catching up on listening to a batch of last year’s Writing Excuses podcasts. Listening to Sanderson, Kowal and company talk about writing got my own mind working in the background. And-d-d-d… I suddenly realization my own incipient story could work by giving it the plot structure of a Spaghetti Western (mashed up with Bride of Frankenstein, because, y’know, my mind is kinda weird). AND also realized that the character I’d thought would be the protagonist was actually the catalyst, and that the story needed to actually be about what I’d thought was a secondary character.
I’m not at all certain I’d have come to those realizations without the immersion in the Excuses podcasts, even though none of the episodes I was listening to had a direct connection to my realizations.
Personally, speaking as an impoverished and unpublished* aspiring writer who has as much chance of getting into Clarion as I do of getting into the Japanese Women’s Olympic Pole-Vaulting team… I’m fine with Gaiman enthusing about it.
*As distinct from impoverished and published, which seems to be the norm these days. There was an article in today’s Times about how little writers make, with some typically well-chosen examples. Did you know that some writers make less than £30,000 a year from writing? That actor Nick Frost made only £110,000 from his celebrity autobiography? One’s heart just bleeds, doesn’t it?
Today’s read — Uprooted, by Naomi Novik.
OK, yes, I certainly see what all the fuss has been about! The writing here is what I might call virtuoso — pretty much every note is perfectly played, so to speak. I found Novik’s Temeraire books to be enjoyable but slight, so this one jumps my opinion of her up a lot higher. I don’t think it’s my favorite book of the year, but it’s certainly on my Hugo longlist, with a decent chance of making the shortlist.
Possible mild ***SPOILERS*** follow in Rot13 to discuss some recent internet comments on the book.
V’z njner bs gur erprag qvfphffvba bs gur ceboyrzngvp nfcrpgf bs gur ebznapr ryrzrag va gur obbx naq V … qba’g ragveryl nterr jvgu gurz, nygubhtu V frr jurer gurl’er pbzvat sebz. Jung V’yy nterr jvgu vf gung gur ybir vagrerfg vf bsgra na nohfvir wrex naq abg fbzrbar V sbhaq nggenpgvir. Jung V’yy qvfnterr jvgu vf gung gur obbx snyyf vagb gur “snyyvat va ybir jvgu lbhe nohfre orpnhfr nohfr vf ebznagvp” gebcr. Vg qbrfa’g. Uvf nohfr vf arire cerfragrq nf nggenpgvir (vg’f bgure nfcrpgf bs uvf crefbanyvgl fur snyyf sbe), fur qrznaqf gung ur punatr fbzr bs uvf hasbetvinoyr orunivbef naq ur qbrf, naq ol gur raq bs gur obbx fur vf qrnyvat jvgu uvz ragveryl nf na rdhny. Ure ragver fgbel nep vf nobhg ure tnvavat naq hfvat ntrapl va n jbeyq gung jnagf gb gnxr vg sebz ure va rirel jnl cbffvoyr, naq fur vf hadhrfgvbanoyl znxvat ure bja qrpvfvbaf sbe ure bja ernfbaf ng gur raq. Gurersber, zl ernpgvba gb gur ebznapr fhocybg jnf, “Jryy, V jbhyqa’g jnag gb qngr uvz, ohg V thrff gur urneg jnagf jung vg jnagf” engure guna n “Htu, ab, nohfr vf abg frkl jung vf jebat jvgu lbh?!”
@McJulie:
You see what you did there, right?
I think the reaction to Gaiman’s Clarion tweet stemmed from a couple of things, one fair and one perhaps less so. First, it was genuinely clueless. A survey within the last couple years indicated that half of the US could not lay their hands on an extra $400 if they needed to. And beyond just the five thousand dollars that is the retail price of Clarion, the population of people who can arrange to take six weeks off from the rest of their life is…select. If one really did “NEED” to go to Clarion, that would really suck!
That part is entirely fair.
The second part is that Gaiman is married to Amanda Palmer, who has a reputation for racial cluelessness owing to some Twitter incidents in the past. So there’s probably some guilt by association there.
Torgersen’s response to Gaiman’s tweet was remarkably reasonable for Torgersen.
However in one spot he says “There will be people who argue that it shouldn’t be cheap. That the high cost weeds out the dilettantes”
Hmm. The high cost doesn’t weed out those dilettantes who can afford to drop a few thousand on a whim. And it does “weed out” a lot of the serious would be writers who can’t come up with a few thousand at all. There is a middle range of people who could come up with a few thousand for something they really wanted very badly. Within this middle range you could be said to be weeding out the dilettantes, but that is as far as I would go. To me this looks to be sorting at least as much on wealth as anything else.
Which I gather is a lot of what the response (I’m not going to call it outrage until I see a good deal more of it) is about.
Re: Gaiman
Man, people get worked up about anything nowadays. It’s remarkable how people can take virtually any post on any social media site and twist it into some strange message meant to wreak havoc on the world. Why do people even use Twitter? Sheesh.
@k_choll:
In my case, it provided crucial emotional support during debilitating cancer treatment. And otherwise, because of @dog_rates. Since you asked.
More people looking to destroy science fiction:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lightspeedmagazine/people-of-colour-destroy-science-fiction
Perhaps we should be asking Lightspeed to do a special “American rightwingers destroy science fiction (awards)” for 2017.
@Jim Henley
And also a reputation for insensitivity in his own right in some quarters, for calling his last collection “Trigger Warnings”(*) and for involvement in the unfortunate blow-up over Hugo Award presenters in 2014(*).
(*) I have opinions about both of these, but am happy for a variety of opinions to exist. Particularly if it means not fighting those particular skirmishes again.
@ Kyra – That pretty much sums up my response as well (though not to lessen the response of any who felt he was a bridge too far–different strokes, etc.)
My feelings are perhaps somewhat warped by the fact that I actually felt a certain sympathy for Dragon. I want all my stuff in the proper place and I want regular meals and I frequently want to be left alone to do my work and not have people bother me. And while I am very fortunate that I can just say “IN THE ZONE PLEASE SLIDE FOOD UNDER DOOR!” to my husband and all these things will happen, if I were a magician in a medieval setting and had not been forced by circumstance to be a decent human being with social skills…well, y’know. And I all too often feel the angry futility of someone who is bailing the tide on something very important (get involved in plant conservation even at the edges and it’s inevitable.) So even though my coping mechanisms are different…yeah. Props to Novik for getting me there.
Re: twitter
I mainly use twitter to keep from mumbling to myself in public places. If I have an idea, I just sort of fling it out there and don’t have to worry about anyone reading it. I’d be in deep trouble if I were a celebrity with a lot of followers. I’m amazed any well-known person bothers to tweet. It’s pretty much like walking through a cow pasture at night.
Other than that, I mainly follow about 50 people. After awhile, I’ll go through and eliminate a bunch and start following some new people for a while. It’s mainly just something to do to kill time when I should be getting work done.
Or you can live in a city with an excellent library system like Portland, where you can check out nearly every episode of Doctor Who from the beginning (between county system in Portland and the county system in the suburbs–which allows Portland residents to also sign up for a library card).
Then you can watch them for no cost all!
I’m reading Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, a novel about five dueling interbred families of rapacious capitalists running an energy-rich moon that provides for an energy-poor Earth.
The book follows a lot of protagonists in a future where bisexuality is commonplace and carries no stigma of societal disapproval. (Perhaps it’s just that way among the upper classes.) There’s lots of sex in the book, so I was amused when I reached the longest and most anatomically described sex scene — and it was solo activity.
The character is so exceptionally taken with herself that no one else could compare.
I think I’m in love. That may be favourite dog-related Twitter after @BearDeHond
I love Twitter. Short, quick, does not require a commitment. It’s like texting, only with the Internet. I blog too, but that’s more like committing to a phone call, and I don’t always have the energy.
Chris Meadows: The first rule of celebrity deaths is to be sure they’re actually dead. That’s why even though the Wikipedia declared George Clayton Johnson dead days before it happened I was among the last to report his passing because I waited for a statement from his son.
@Snowcrash: Curse my inability to read German.
Instead of a comment about Twitter, I have 20 seconds or so of the boy kitty wagging his tail while alternately watching the gardeners outside and his sister, whom he’s been roughhousing with.
Kyra – That was pretty much my reaction to that relationship, as well.
I didn’t recognize the name Anne Wheaton, so I wondered why she’d become a target of venomous abuse on Twitter. Silly me. She’s a woman who spoke out on something, so quite obviously the ragemonkeys who ruined her experience were from GamerGate.
As someone who remembers the sense of optimism that pervaded the early web about the potential of the medium, I find myself today kind of bummed out. Part of it is my age, no doubt, but the Internet is also a far nastier place than I imagined it could ever become.
On why Twitter:
There are some fun micro fiction accounts out there. Probably my fave:
@MicroSFF
Granted the format lends itself to snark or punnery but it’s a good quick distraction sometimes…
I would suggest, instead, that if a great many people each have an individual reaction of hurt to something one has said, perhaps the fault lies in what was said rather than the reactions. Or perhaps what was said was simply one more boot stepping on a broken toe.
Or maybe realize that not every thing is meant as a personal attack.
On a non-SF note I just discovered one of my favorite writers has died. RIP Florence King–Give ’em hell.
@dog_rates
Yeah, that’s going to eat up some time.
@snowcrash, love @BearDeHond too. Wish they’d get on and show PoI season 5 already!
@rcade – She’s a woman who spoke out on something, so quite obviously the ragemonkeys who ruined her experience were from GamerGate.
I believe my first online death threat came in 1997 and I’m pretty sure GamerGaters weren’t responsible. The crime of being a woman with an opinion on the internet has been around for a long time.
It’s not my intent to diminish Anne Wheaton’s experience, btw. I’m just noting that horribleness on the internet is not a new phenomenon. Also, as an aside, telling me to get back into the kitchen was a familiar rejoinder on Usenet, long before 1997, so there’s that data point as well.
Twitter is a source of information for me. I don’t socialize. I more or less only use it to get links to interesting articles that would be hard to find otherwise.
@ Harold Osler
Something doesn’t have to be a personal attack to cause damage.
On the other hand, perhaps you believe that every person who expressed a reaction to Gaiman’s tweet posted those reactions as a personal attack on him? No? Curious how you aren’t leaping to defend their tweets on the same basis.
True, but my comment was about Twitter. I wasn’t making a generalization about the Internet as a whole.
I can recall women being driven out of blogging and other places by abuse, going back to 1995 when I began publishing on the web. But I think Twitter is a class unto itself because it lets strangers direct @ replies to your inbox and has a global reach and real-time immediacy.
You’d think by now that there would be a setting that could ignore all @ replies from people you do not follow. I probably wouldn’t use it, since I have many positive experiences hearing from people I don’t know who contact me there. But if I was getting a lot of abuse I’d feel differently.
(1) Those posters are hilarious.
To anyone looking for possible Best Graphic Novel nominees: I highly recommend Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor. (Goodreads review here.) His panel colors are kind of odd–he only uses blue, white and black–but once you get used to it, it fits perfectly with the story.
Lumberjanes vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy is also cute, and rather subversive in a clever SFF and feminist way: you think it’s written primarily for young girls, which in one way it is. But then you get into some things (two of the characters’ names are Ripley and Mal, and some of the curses used in lieu of WTF and “holy shit!” are “What in the Joan Jett are you doing!” and “Holy Mae Jemison!”) which only adults can appreciate. I didn’t care for Nimona too much (also written/drawn by Noelle Stevenson) but I really enjoyed this.
@ Harold Osler: Nobody said anything about a personal attack. People who make remarks about how parents these days are screwing up aren’t addressing me personally. Some might even say, “oh, I didn’t mean you!” if I point out I am a parent these days. Some people overgeneralize or mean to discuss trends.
That doesn’t mean I can’t find it hurtful.
_______________
Someone, I think Jim C. Hines because it was via LJ and it’s his kind of thing to do, once polled relatively new published authors regarding what they had done to try and improve craft or get published. Did workshops like Clarion, got MFAs in writing, attended conventions, joined local/online writer’s groups, etc. In general, successful writers had… done SOMEthing other than just sit at home and write in private. The idea of which of the things they could do seemed less important than that they looked for ways.
And by the way, Max Max’s poster should read: One long feminist car chase. Heh.
I don’t think it will win Best Picture (George Miller might snag Best Director) but no doubt if it did, a great many Internet heads would explode, seeing the disgruntled male fracas raised in certain quarters when the film came out.
Heather,
Things like the Gaiman incident can really turn into an ‘outrage’ due to the propensity of people just retweeting, and in the case of Tumblr, reblogging things in their feeds without examining them(I call it the tweetlr effect). Someone they trust said or passed on ‘something’ so that is often enough for them to rebroadcast it, and that can grow exponentially.
At its height Clarion tweets were about 1/3 of my feed, none of which linked back to Gaiman’s tweet. From the tone I had imagined he had posted a pic of himself in a Clarion t-shirt spitting on some poor hapless wannabe.
The fun thing is the hypocracy I saw. A number of people who tweeted Gaiman/Clarion hate had previously lauded it, and talked of either their time there, or how they contributed to a fund to help struggling authors get to Clarion.
There was nothing considered about the incident, it was just a mob.
Maybe I’m just cynical, but to me, Gaiman’s tweet sounded like it was sponsored or an advertisement, rather than a spontaneous expression of his opinion.
On the other hand, perhaps you believe that every person who expressed a reaction to Gaiman’s tweet posted those reactions as a personal attack on him? No? Curious how you aren’t leaping to defend their tweets on the same basis.
I’m not even sure what that means.
It was personal in that they specifically mentioned him.
I know Clarion are Bilderberg-rich, but I don’t think they’re bribing-Neil-Gaiman rich
@Tintinaus:
By your own account, these tweets were not linking back to Gaiman’s original message*. Among other things, that means they didn’t amount to even the baseline abuse of flooding Gaiman’s mentions with hostility.
Mob is a very prejudicial term for “bunch of people weighing in on the topic of the moment, for a moment.” Here, by the way, is some “outrage” by well-known Twitter firebrand Mikki Kendall. I feel like Neil Gaiman may just survive this “mob.”
——————-
*Nor, structurally, would it be practical or desirable for every single tweet on the topic to link back to Gaiman’s original.
Just picked it up as well. I haven’t read McDonald before, but I’m finding the writing style very neatly fits his plot and pacing. There’s some overall issues I’ve run across, but it is an interesting new take on a lunar colony.
Jim,
Yeah, Gaiman probably isn’t going to lose much sleep over the whole thing but that doesn’t mean the group-think behaviour can’t be pointed out for the poison it became in places. It would be a sorry state of affairs if such piling-ons were only considered bad if the target is considered ‘worthy’ or in need of protection.
By the way, I find your correcting me on my useage of the word mob to be offensive. You didn’t see my feed or the linked posts and tumblrs I was pointed to, so have no basis to decide if I am right or wrong in my word usage.
I’ve almost picked up Luna: New Moon a few times now. Read the first few pages at Barnes and Noble and was intrigued. But then I picked up Linda Nagata’s The Red trilogy and that’s been consuming my leisure reading, which I haven’t had as much time for as I’d like over the last ~2-months. I’ll be interested to hear some more opinions about Luna.
@Tintinaus: I saw plenty on Twitter about Gaiman’s post. Why on earth would you think I didn’t? Nor am I saying Gaiman doesn’t deserve a defense because of his station, I’m saying he is not being abused. He wrote a stupid thing – seriously, his tweet is stupid; when I reread it an hour ago I was kind of shocked how poorly conceived it was – that kicked off a sharp but bounded reaction. Said reaction has already largely run its course.
Luna: New Moon is bubbling near the top of my TBR pile, bought as part of an Amazon sale late last year. I’d already read Brasyl a while back and liked it so I’m not a complete stranger to McDonald.
I’m interested to see how he handles a more obviously sf’inal setting.
Possibly of interest: a science-fiction novel being serialized in what is apparently a German-language magazine for jihadi geeks.
@redheadedfemme
Lumberjanes is enjoyable. I think I read it on Aaron’s rec, and have the next volume lined up. I did also like Nimona though. I suppose Nimona has quite a different tone to Lumberjanes – there’s a darkness hiding (not very far) behind the story, whereas Lumberjanes is mostly hiding awesome references.
I’m having a weird experience with Luna: New Moon. For the first 150 pages it felt almost plotless. When one of the half-dozen protagonists became the focus I was glad to see the character and catch up with what he or she was doing. But I never got a sense of the novel being driven forward by a plot.
Normally this would make me consider quitting a book without finishing, since I have a staggering to-read pile. But I was enjoying it enough to continue.
Without risking a spoiler, there finally was a major event that felt like plot. So at this point I have something I’m strongly looking forward to being resolved.
Of course Gaiman was just engaging in hyperbole. Of course you don’t have to attend Clarion to be called a writer. Claron doesn’t own the term writer, and you won’t get in trouble if you call yourself a writer.
BUT, what if that wasn’t the case? Dunh dunh DUHN
Harcey insisted on calling himself a writer, and that was the problem in a nutshell. Oh it was true that in the current age there were unlicensed people who referred to themselves as writers in private, or even among groups of friends- it was impossible for the security monitors to reach everywhere. But Harcey insisted on going online and calling himself a writer, and that was only a recipe for trouble.
“People have been calling themselves writers for centuries.” He scowled and poked at the keypad.” “It’s tradition.”
“But that was before the term was trademarked.,” Alice said, with more than a hint of desperation. “Before ‘Martin vs. Clarion’. Before the Ownership Rights Enforcement Laws were passed. If you don’t go through the program, you can’t call yourself a writer.
“Bah.” Harcey said, moving a paragraph, then moving it back, before deleting it.
“You could call yourself a scribbler. Or a wordsmith” Alice said hopefully. “There’s lots of things you could call yourself- that’s what other people do.”
“Bah again. I’m a writer, that’s what I do. I’m not going to lie about what I am.”
‘It’s not even like you write a lot. Or long stories.” Alice said, her resentment breaking through. “You spend more time talking about writing, than actually writing.
“Whether it’s a short story, or a vignette, or a paragraph on FaceTweet, I’m still writing. It’s what I do.” Harcey checked the passage for quotation marks, frowning.
Alice looked out the window at the long black limousine that had pulled up in front of their house.
“Not for long.” she muttered.
Some time after, Hercey appeared on the internet, bright eyes saying that he had been wrong, that yes, indeed trademark was good, very good and necessary….
– excerpt from “Repent Hercey Quinn, Said the TrademarkMan”