Cat Rambo's Blog, page 43

Welcome to the Funhouse, 2016

If I were truly organized, this would have appeared on New Year’s Day, but I had a very nice weekend instead. Now it’s Monday, and I’ve had my coffee and homemade yogurt and done some stuff. I’m feeling good about the year and have made the usual sorts of resolutions. Things that I’m trying in 2016:

More productive. Daily writing, no matter what the circumstances, shooting for 3k, but taking 1k as the absolute minimum. Getting the novel done, done, done, and a slew of other stories and projects, all stuff I’m looking forward to, but which must be banged out and then (ugh) revised. Daily free-writes to get warmed up and help me listen to my unconscious. Doing some of the daily little practices that end up accumulating, like practicing my Spanish on Duolingo.

More organized. Sitting down in the morning to take ten minutes to sort out my day and write the three most important things to get accomplished. Tracking things better. Having a household system where things have their designated place and get put there, and eliminating the clutter clusters, the places where stuff gets dumped and remains. The new house helps with not just the act of having to purge and sort that moving involved, but in having more spaces to put things.

More mindful. That same morning moment helps me figure out my day and live it more purposefully, less prey to random disorientation and derailing. Keeping a daybook/journal where I jot down ten things about the day, as well as a short list of what I got done, and the more important occurrences like visitors, trips, etc. Giving my poet-side time to sit and think at times.

More healthy. With the move, I’m walking more, and with the Fitbit, I could be tracking that and making sure I hit at least 5 miles a day, but hoping to be closer to an average of ten by the end of the year. Fewer eat-ALL-the-sweets moments and more fruits/veggies. Focusing on positivity and trimming negative crap out of my life where I can. Celebrating things that should be celebrated and practicing gratitude for being alive in such a nifty world, under what are pretty darn good circumstances.

I thought about trying to map everything out in Habitica but in the end I’ve just got a journal page with it all listed, plus I’m trying to build in habits that let me audit how I’m doing.

Part of mindfulness is the occasional moment where I remind myself that I have managed to do okay so far, and that despite feeling like a hapless mess half the time internally, I put on a reasonable facsimile of a responsible adult with an actual career and stuff. That’s kinda key too. While my inner teenager does give me a lot of pleasure, she’s also pretty insecure. To me, taking care of all those internal personae seems crucial, and it’s that part of me that’s actually achieved a semblance of adulthood.

Currently working on a couple of collaborations and a story whose title makes me laugh every time, but actually seems to have some social commentary at its heart.

Happy 2016, everyone! Here’s to health and happiness, to an overall increase in human empathy and a decrease in insecurity and meanness. Here’s to living life in a way that’s meaningful, rather than treading water and waiting for things to occur. Here’s to wonderful words and songs sung together, full voiced and beautiful, even with the occasional disharmony to make the rest sound all the better.

Class Excerpt: On Creating a Story When You Have the Plot

Now that we’re all moved in to the new place, I can find books when I want to refer to them.

I’m finishing up the year by trying to wrap up writing the on-demand version of my Moving from Idea to Draft class. This is a tough translation, because the live class depends heavily on what the students have brought: I try to help them go deeper into the idea each has brought to class and show them ways of fleshing it out.

For the on-demand version, what I’m doing is looking at each of the various ways I’ve seen stories develop and doing a section on each, looking at what it is, what it gives you to help with fleshing out the story, possible trouble spots, some ways to proceed with it, and then two or three exercises to refine skills with that, each with a basic and then an overachiever version, a model I used with the Description and Delivering Information class. There’s twenty-three sections altogether, but here’s the section on starting with a plot, minus the exercises.

What It Is:

Some stories begin with a plot. This is a complete story: you know the problem, some basics of the characters and what will happen. Perhaps it’s something you’ve generated or taken from elsewhere. Perhaps it arrives pre-made in your head (and you should glory in it when it does, in my opinion), so all you need to do is sit down at the keyboard and write it out.

If you can describe in a few sentences what will happen in a story, you know the plot. For example:

A little girl takes cookies to her grandmother and encounters a wolf along the way. When she gets to her grandmother’s house, the wolf is waiting to attack. A nearby woodsman comes and kills the wolf. (Little Red Riding Hood)
A man steals the defense plan for a planet that is immensely wealthy. When he tries to use it, he finds out that the defense is constructed out of (because this is a spoiler of an excellent story, you should go read it) and meets a terrible fate. (Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, by Cordwainer Smith)

What it gives you:

You know the overall flow of the action: this happens so this happens so this happens and then it ends this way. You know the basic story pattern: that tension increases until the climax, and then rapidly falls. You know the source of the tension and usually the basic conflict: how the wants of two or more entities are collide in some fashion.

You have some sense of where it begins and a stronger sense of where it ends (although the reverse is not impossible).​ Connie Willis says to begin at the moment when the problem becomes a crisis. I don’t know that I agree that you should always do that, but it’s certainly better, in terms of story tension, to start with a moment where the problem is already taking place than to start with an idyllic landscape that slowly goes bad.

You may or may not know the characters involved, but you have some broad basics, and know some of the things about the character that affect it most for you, which will probably include gender and approximate age.

Similarly you have some broad basics of the setting, the overall world of the story, although you may need to think of specifics pertaining to scene locations.

More importantly, often you have an impalpable feel for the story, a sense of the overall tone and emotion that will help you shape the words as you write. To make the most of that, spend a couple of moments thinking about the atmosphere of the story. What movies or books might you compare it to? What is the overall emotion, both yours in writing it and what you want readers to take away?

What you need to think about:

What do you bring to the story that makes it unique? There are only so many plots (opinions of the actual number differ, with some saying seven, others numbers like 3 or 36, but the fact of the matter is that at a certain level you will not be able to do anything genuinely new unless you are more of a genius than I, and so you should look at what you bring to the table: the unique details of your life and experiences, your emotions and understandings, and your sensibilities. What instances of this plot have you witnessed being played out in your own life, perhaps as actor, perhaps as audience, and what of that experience can you draw upon?

Specifics of the action may be lacking in your broad overview, in which case you will need to flesh them out. Your burglar steals something – what? Who owns it and what defenses against thieves do they have? Your bounty hunter is chasing her prey, but what crime has that prey committed? Specifics of the location are something that you may well need to flesh out, in which case try to think of aspects that are particularly engaging and use those as interesting backgrounds to add interest to a scene: make that important conversation take place while the two are racing on ice skates through a city’s lower levels or at a party whose main entertainment are levitating performers who are half-dragon, half-human. What can you use?

Things to watch out for:

Sometimes when you go to put these stories down on paper, they are not the well-fleshed entities we hoped, but incomplete things, hints of lines that don’t tell us the entire picture, whispers instead of words, a sense of brushing up against one side of the story in the dark rather than holding it in its entirety. In such cases, I usually build a mind-map, writing down the details that I know and expanding from that. I’ll build on how to do that in the next section, Possible Next Steps.

Be careful of the generic. We all have a set of flimsy and unconvincing stage sets in our heads that, when examined with care, can probably be traced back to specific television shows or movies. My desert island will always have Gilligan lurking in the underbrush, for example, and any Victorian London scenes have to be forcibly wrenched out of the black and white of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.

Possible next steps:

Take your two or three sentence description and expand on it, stretching it to five hundred words by expanding on generic details with specifics and figuring out the overall timeline.

Write out list of scenes then develop the basics of what happens in each scene: they go to the movies, see a clue in the opening, and try to rush out of the theater only to find a bunch of lamias in the parking lot ready to brawl; they fight with the lamias and defeat them by throwing soap bombs at them, but Ellen’s arm gets broken in the process. You will probably tell it in chronological order, but it’s not too early to think about mixing it up if you think it would accomplish something in the story, like provide additional pleasure for the reader by allowing them to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.

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2015 Publications in Retrospect

I haven’t written here yet.

2015 was a good year for publications, including a few nonfiction ones. Huzzah! Part of that was the Patreon campaign, another was the flurry of promotional pieces I released to accompany my first novel. 34 stories published in one year is a record for me, although many of them were flash pieces and/or self-published either as publicity for my novel or for my Patreon campaign. Here’s the month by month breakdown, with some stats and what’s coming up in 2016.

January

I wrote nonfiction column #PurpleSF for Clarkesworld Magazine and my short story “The Ghosteater” appeared in Thirteen: Tales of Transformation, edited by Mark Teppo. The story involves a traveler, Dr. Fantomas, and his companion, who are asked to investigate a haunted restaurant, and it takes place in Tabat.

February

I lounged about the house eating bonbons in February. Well, not really. But I didn’t get anything published.

March

My flash fiction “Bit Player” appeared in Daily Science Fiction, after I wrote it during one of my Flash Fiction Workshops. I went to Emerald City Comicon and had my first book release party there, plus sold it at the Wordfire booth, meeting all sorts of delightful people in the process.

April

The cruelest month was also the busiest month, with the official launch of my first fantasy novel, Beasts of Tabat, the first volume of a fantasy quartet set in the world in which I have placed multiple stories.

I also had stories appear in Airships and Automatons (“Memphis Barbecue”), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (a novelette set in Tabat and related to Beasts of Tabat, “Primaflora’s Journey“), Daily Science Fiction (another story produced in one of my classes, “You Have Always Lived in the Castle“).

I put up Tabat-related flash pieces throughout the month, fifteen total, and another, “A Souvenir of Tabat”, appeared on Quarterreads.

May

“The Subtler Art,” a story set in relatively new locale Serendib, appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries, and Rogues, featuring retired assassin The Dark and her spouse the wizard-alchemist Tericatus in a game of marital oneupmanship. Also appearing that month was The Haunted Snail, a flash piece (yup, written during one of my classes) in DAILY SCIENCE FICTION, and two Patreon stories, a horror piece titled “Reality Storage” and a story set in the same world as the Blackguards piece, “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer”.

And Ad Astra: the SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook, which I co-edited with Fran Wilde, appeared, and was a thing of joy and wonder, mostly due to Fran’s effort, as well as those of Sean Wallace. I will remind you all that the cookbook is eligible for a nomination for Best Related Work when Hugo nominations come around, mainly because I love that little book and think it deserves a nod.

June

Patreon story 2611, a horror story set in the apartment complex we have been trying to move out of for several years, appeared. I wrote this last year while we were living in a horrible temporary apartment and trying to get everything packed up and ready to go; most of the events are based in reality.

July

I went on retreat down to southern California and got some work done on Beasts’ sequel, Hearts of Tabat. “California Ghosts” appeared on my blog for Patreon as I switched the campaign over to publicly viewable.

August

Steampunk story “Snakes on a Train” appeared on my blog as part of the Patreon campaign. During the same month I attended Sasquan in Spokane, which was a lot of fun, and read “The Owlkit, the Candymaker, the Beekeeper, and the Brewer” there.

September

Talking in the Night, a literary flash piece appeared on my blog for the Patreon campaign. At the same time, “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” appeared in Recycled Pulp, edited by John Helfers. That story owes much to the old Twilight Zone episodes and I hope it manages to evocatively tell the story of an unlikely artist and the consequences of the pieces he creates.

And we moved into Seattle proper, or rather West Seattle, which is AWESOME, and involves an apartment with multiple great writing spaces, including a kitchen table that looks out towards the sound and the mountains.

October

My first on-demand class, Literary Techniques for Speculative Fiction Writers, went up. I took 1500 words of notes for the live workshop, which is based on one I developed for Clarion West and which is one of my most popular classes, and ended up expanding them to 15,000, so I think counting this as a non-fiction publication is quite valid. I still need to go back and reformat and clean this one up somewhat since I’ve learned so much about formatting and setup since then; that’s on the list for January.

At the end of the month, flash piece “As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road” appeared in Grendel Song, newly revived by Paul Jessup.

November

I put up steampunk story, “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?” on my website as part of the Patreon campaign. Also “Reflections from Mirror World 57,” a story made up of superhero flash pieces for Outliers.

Two more on-demand classes went up, the Character Building Workshop and Reading to an Audience. As I worked on the former, my ideas about how to shape these classes continued to refine themselves; I’m looking forward to using a lot of what I learned in doing these in classes for 2016.

One piece of past experience that’s been useful in assembling them is a stint of work I did writing study guides for college textbooks, for a range of classes that included economics, retail marketing, and terrorism. I used the software’s capacity to create mini-quizzes with the Character Building Workshop, in a way that led to my only complaint, someone who thought the quizzes were silly.

They are silly — mainly because they’re intended as an amusing interlude that nonetheless gives you a chance to review the core concepts of the material just presented. I’d be curious to hear other takes on them from people who’ve looked at the classes. Should I cut those?

December

December publications included my take on Mrs. Claus in “He Knows When You’re Awake” for Jenn Brozek’s Naughty or Nice holiday anthology, and forthcoming “Dark Shadows on the Earth”.

I also finished up with another nonfiction essay for Clarkesworld Magazine, this time On Reading the Classics and an essay on what I hope for SFWA in 2016 for this blog.

I hope to have one last writing class, Moving from Idea to Draft, done by the end of the year and am working on that, but these classes tend to get more complicated as I write them and this is no exception.

2016

Stories coming out in 2016 include “Red in Tooth and Cog” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (booyah, that is a longtime goal and I am still so tickled to have hit it; “The Mermaid Club,” a conspiracy tale about underground feminists, co-written with Mike Resnick; science fantasy, “Haunted,” co-written with Bud Sparhawk; “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” set in the same city as the owlkit and Blackguards stories, which will appear in in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; “Tongues of Moon Toad” in The Bestiary; Preferences in Chasing Shadows (edited by David Brin) and The Threadbare Magician in Genius Loci, among others.

Status of Current Projects

I need to finish up Hearts of Tabat, and that book was the main casualty of a year whose events included cancer on one side of the family, dementia on another, and a death among my favorite in-laws. I have about 115k words on it and need to make them all make sense and flow nicely into each other. I know the main action of the two books after that. I have some other stuff I’d like to write.

Collaborations coming up include a couple with Rachel Swirsky, one with David Boop, a stroy with Emily Skaftun and Randy henderson that we need to finish up, and one with Tod McCoy.

Upcoming on-demand classes include Creating an Online Presence for Writers, Flash Fiction, Revising and Rewriting, Linguistics for Speculative Fiction Writers with Juliette Wade, Creating Your E-book with Tod McCoy and quite a bit more. And there’s another round of live workshops coming up in January-March.

Books coming out include:

Neither Here Nor There, another two-sided collection, this time with a focus on fantasy (Hydra House)
Hearts of Tabat (Wordfire Press) and (maybe) Exiles of Tabat
Creating an Online Presence for Writers, 2nd edition

Some Overall Stats:

Stories published in 2015: 33, including flash pieces

Novels published: 1

Nonfiction books published: 1

Number of on-demand classes published: 4

Large writers organizations on which I served on the board: 1

Number of books read: bunches and bunches

Number of blog posts written: I will fill in this number when I have more time.

Happy holidays to all my readers. I hope your end of the year ruminations leave you feeling happy with what you’ve brought to the world over the last twelve months, and that you’re moving forward into productivity and joy in 2016.

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What I’m Hoping For SFWA in 2016

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,

Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!

Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

If you don’t recognize the above, you have a treat in store and should go spend a few hours with that. To those just returned from that mission and the others who know Pogo when they see it, salutations and so many warm wishes for the season.

I’ve got a few end of the year write-ups I’ll be posting, but the first of them are some thoughts about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 2015, and what I hope to witness for the organization in 2016. As you may know, Bob, I became SFWA President midway through the year, after a year of serving as the Vice President.

SFWA’s 2015 Accomplishments

Recently I wrote up some thoughts for our internal publication, the SFWA Forum, and that end of the year assessment led me to think about the org and give it a letter grade, which was a solid B despite the fact I’m a notoriously hard grader. Plenty of room for improvement, but overall we didn’t do too badly and have some things we should be quite pleased by.

Among SFWA’s accomplishments that I’m particularly proud of:

We hammered out membership criteria that didn’t just include writers publishing independently or with small presses but made us the first organization to consider crowdfunded projects as a publication path. That’s led to an influx of new members and fresh energy that’s been delightful to be part of.
Ad Astra: The SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook , which Fran Wilde and I edited, was recently featured in a Humble Bundle and has earned some money for the SFWA Legal Fund, while the overall Bundle benefited the SFWA Givers Fund, which feeds money into the funds underneath it such as the Legal Fund, the Emergency Medical Fund and other projects. Many thank yous to Sean Wallace, who both helped get the cookbook produced and also suggested including it in the bundle.
Establishing that same Givers Fund, an effort by Oz Drummond and Bud Sparhawk (as part of their much larger effort to get SFWA finances working efficiently and correctly), has let us standardize a process for accepting, evaluating, and awarding grants. We just finished the process for 2016 grants, and money is going to places such as a YA lecture series, the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop, historical archives, and an innovative effort focusing on encouraging crowdfunded efforts, among others.
Kate Baker, the SFWA Operations Director, has been putting out the Singularity, an electronic newsletter for members that appears twice a month, since early in 2015, and it’s become a publication to which multiple committees, volunteers, and members submit their news. If you’re a member curious about the Singularity, you can find the back issues on the discussion forums.
The SFWA New Release Newsletter and curated Kickstarter page are volunteer-driven efforts that provide additional publicity outlets for members. They’re spiffy! And show we’re paying attention to this electronic age, in my opinion.
The Nebula Awards Recommended Reading List was made public for the first time, and that, along with related efforts, has led to unprecedented levels of participation in the award so far, a pattern which continues.
The Contracts Committee hammered out a model contract for magazines and did a beautiful job of it, including annotating it for the benefit of writers. Contracts like this are a subtle but powerful way to affect the industry for the benefit of writers as well as markets. Other model contracts are in the works. (If you’re a SFWA member, please note that we have sample contracts for most of the SFWA qualifying markets; you will find them in the Resources section of the discussion forums.
We publicized our accessibility checklist when we realized it was a resource that conventions could use, something we’d already done with our anti-harassment policy.
I’m not recounting any of the small or behind the scenes things happening with groups like the Grievance Committee, but I can tell you they worked hard to solve problems and when it was something they couldn’t help with, they tried to give me a headsup so I could figure out where the organization could be of service. I met a writer at a convention recently, heard her troubles, and was able to say, “Okay, we’re going to start with X, and then once that’s done, we hook you up with Y and Z,” and feel confident that we would be able to do something.

Overall, I think that’s a pretty strong list of accomplishments for a year and it underscores that at a time when there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about cultural boundaries and social media clashes and all of that, the organization — which represents and is made up of professional F&SF writers — spent its energy and time on things that genuinely benefited the field overall rather than running around worrying about pissing on things, which seems to have become a favorite sport for some in the field.

Some Bad Stuff

It wasn’t all peaches and cream, needless to say.

The 2015 Nebula Awards went over budget because of unanticipated costs, and then there were other budget issues, including having to cancel the 2015 NY Reception. The lack of a plan behind the 50th Anniversary Anthology finally sank that project when our CFO and I realized that the books would have to sell for 84.50 each in order to break even. The Bulletin emerged at a limping, sad pace that was sorely behind schedule, and was missing at the Nebulas. The Nebula Awards anthology for 2014 just got released this month (and would have appeared in 2016 if someone hadn’t made me aware of the issue so I could push back on that.)

We lost some people that the world will be less for. And on a small and personal level, I had no idea how much impact this would have on my writing, and that’s, frankly, painful.

Some necessary rearrangements were made behind scenes. Some were smoother than others. Nuff said about that.



What I’m Looking Forward to in 2016

There’s plenty to anticipate in 2016, but here are some of the highlights as we continue to lurch boldly into the future.

A better, stronger, more timely SFWA Bulletin. We’re looking at resumes right now for the Bulletin Editor position while Neil Clarke is working on revamping the magazine a bit and has put up submission guidelines for people interested in submitting to it. (The SFWA blog also pays for nonfiction; you can find its guidelines here.)
Continued expansion of ways in which we serve independently and small press published writers. I’m seeing some cool projects, including a recent SFWA grant to support a crowdfunding effort that I’m excited about. We are (holy smokes, finally) about to have the long-promised NetGalley program in place.
The Nebula Awards are important to the genre and I hope to see them continue going strong. Making the recommended reading list public was part of the effort to help them achieve more prominence; you’ll see some others manifest in 2016. They’re being held in Chicago again this year; they coincide with BEA and I will point out that we’ve got a good hotel rate at a very lovely and historical hotel, the Palmer House, if you’re planning on going
M.C.A. Hogarth has been a terrific Vice President, proactive and self-guided. One of her projects is a guidebook for SFWA members that explains everything: how to join the discussion forums, how to nominate for the Nebulas, how to participate in the Featured Book Program on the website, who to mail with directory issues, etc. That will appear in 2016 and I think it will be a bit of a revelation to us all.
Even more members discovering the private SFWA discussion forums, where there’s a lot of information and industry advice being exchanged. People have been using the chat room functionality there for regular productivity sessions and chats and at least one board member, Jenn Brozek, uses it for “office hours,” where people can come chat to her about issues or questions.

Getting the newsletter in place has helped us start figuring out a process that coordinates SFWA’s outward and inward facing publications, which include the Bulletin, the blog, the discussion forums, the Forum, the Singularity, social media, and more. Getting these publications feeding into each other is crucial; we’re slowly assembling a picture of what that will look like and putting processes for consistently handling the organization’s publicity needs in place.

Volunteer efforts consistently wow and amaze me. I’ll close with one of those, member Henry Lien’s recruitment anthem for SFWA. Look for a synchronized performance of it at the Nebula weekend in 2016; I hope to see you there.

Early December Stuff

Instructions not included.

In recent news, I’ve got some stuff in recent bundles. The VanderMeer Winter Mix Tape Bundle includes The Bestiary, which holds my piece, Tongues-of-Moon Toad, and The Other Half of Sky, edited by Athena Andreadis, and containing space opera piece “Dagger and Mask.” The Holiday Fantasy Bundle includes my Christmas R-rated story, “He Knows When You’re Awake” in Naughty or Nice, edited by Jennifer Brozek

At the same time the current HumbleBundle holds one of the things that I’m happiest about from this year, Ad Astra: The SFWA 50th Anniversary Cookbook, along with a lot of other great stuff.

I talked about reading the classics in an Another Word piece for Clarkesworld Magazine. What prompted me to write it? Because there’s been a lot of discussion of the classics as though pointing out problems with a piece is the same as crossing it off the list of stuff to be read. I talked about the decision to change the World Fantasy Award bust back in January for Clarkesworld and emphasized that yeah, you can read H.P. Lovecraft and yet not want to accept an award bearing his face, and moreover, your objections could be pretty complicated and nuanced.

Today I’m finishing up the draft of the third in my series on teaching for the SFWA Bulletin. Part one was about prepping to teach and Part two about teaching, while this last part talks about what to do afterward and how to keep doing it if you find you enjoy teaching. Freelancers, the SFWA Bulletin pays ten cents a word and is actively looking for material, as is the SFWA Blog, which pays six cents a word.

Just turned in my edits for “Red in Tooth and Cog,” which appears early next year in a market that’s been a longtime goal of mine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Writing wise, I continue assembling Hearts of Tabat into coherent shape. I’m also finishing up a bespoke story, tentatively titled “She Eats My Heart Entire,” for an anthology and I’ve got a couple of others I want to finish up this month, including a Christmas piece that I should get drafted today and at least a couple for the Patreon campaign.

Give Someone Something Classy For the Holidays

Interested in giving someone a Cat Rambo-themed holiday present? Here’s three ways to do it:

Give a gift certificate usable for my on-demand writing classes, including brand new Description and Delivering Information for Genre Writers, each $29 for December.
Give a gift certificate usable for my live online classes, $79 in December only and usable on live workshops indefinitely. (I’ll be announcing the Jan/Feb classes on December 15.)
Give an inscribed copy of Beasts of Tabat or Near + Far. I’m happy to personalize and ship copies; mail me to figure out costs.
Or treat yourself to a post-NaNoWriMo reward and buy one of the above for yourself. Go ahead. You deserve it. I won’t tell anyone.

Mail me at catrambo AT gmail.com with a) what gift certificate(s) and/or books you would like, b) what physical address they’ll be sent to, and c) the date by which you need them to arrive and I’ll let you know the cost. Gift certificates are personalized and hand-decorated, and will be mailed to the recipient in your choice of physical and/or electronic mail.

I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your support throughout this up and down 2015. I hope your year has been full of things to be thankful for, and that you’re looking forward to a glorious 2016. Here’s to peace and love and understanding, to more empathy and less hate, and to a world that holds joy for us, each and every one.

-Cat

Give Someone A Little Class For the Holidays

Interested in giving someone a Cat Rambo-themed holiday present? Here’s three ways to do it:

Give a gift certificate usable for my on-demand writing classes, including brand new Description and Delivering Information for Genre Writers, each $29 for December.
Give a gift certificate usable for my live online classes, $79 in December only and usable on live workshops indefinitely. (I’ll be announcing the Jan/Feb classes on December 15.)
Give an inscribed copy of Beasts of Tabat or Near + Far. I’m happy to personalize and ship copies; mail me to figure out costs.
Or treat yourself to a post-NaNoWriMo reward and buy one of the above for yourself. Go ahead. You deserve it. I won’t tell anyone.

Mail me at catrambo AT gmail.com with a) what gift certificate(s) and/or books you would like, b) what physical address they’ll be sent to, and c) the date by which you need them to arrive and I’ll let you know the cost. Gift certificates are personalized and hand-decorated, and will be mailed to the recipient in your choice of physical and/or electronic mail.

I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your support throughout this up and down 2015. I hope your year has been full of things to be thankful for, and that you’re looking forward to a glorious 2016. Here’s to peace and love and understanding, to more empathy and less hate, and to a world that holds joy for us, each and every one.

-Cat

Small Business Saturday

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we’ve managed to avoid Black Friday as well. But if you’d like to support a small business this weekend, I’d like to point you at both my on-demand classes and my live workshops.

Want to give either of them as a gift? I do have gift certificates available, which will be mailed to your recipient. Mail me at catrambo AT gmail.com if you’re interested.

The live classes for December are all listed here. I will be posting the Jan/Feb classes in another week. Want to make sure you get news of them as soon as they’re available? Then sign up for my mailing list.

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The on-demand classes are all listed here, and consist of Speculative Literary Techniques for Genre Writers, the Character Building Workshop for Genre Writers, and Reading To An Audience. The next one to be added will be the Description and Delivering Information one, which should be up by December 7.

SFWA Releases Nebula Suggested Reading List

Click here to get to the Suggested reading List; lots of good stuff on there.

This has been in discussion for a while now; I’m glad we’ve finally moved ahead on the project of making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The intent is to build awareness of the awards, help drive participation by members, and help the genre by providing a solid list of notable material from the year. Authors do not need to be SFWA members to make their work eligible.

Here’s the official press release about it:

As part of its mission to serve professional genre writers, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is pleased to announce that for the first time they’ll be making the Nebula Suggested Reading List public. The list is compiled from the suggestions of SFWA members and is available on the SFWA website at http://www.sfwa.org/forum/index.php?a.... All SFWA members are eligible to add items to the list throughout the year, providing a list of notable speculative novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, and dramatic works from the year. Inclusion on the list is not an endorsement by SFWA.

From November 15 through February 15, 2016, Active and Associate members will be able to make actual Nebula nominations as well as nominations for the Bradbury and Andre Norton Award. The votes will be tallied and the final ballot will be released on or before February 20 for voting on by the membership. Winners will be announced at the Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held May 12 -15 at the Palmer House in Chicago. The banquet and awards ceremony will take place the evening of May 14. Other awards presented at the weekend include the Grand Master Award, the Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award, and the Solstice Award.

Nebula Commissioner Terra LeMay says “Even before I became the Nebula Awards Commissioner, I’ve always thought the Suggested Reading List was one of the best resources I’ve ever encountered for finding the most exciting new science fiction and fantasy works each year. It is a great privilege to have helped bring this list out to the public where any reader may benefit from it.”

SFWA President Cat Rambo notes, “Every year there’s plenty of terrific stuff to read. I hope that providing a list that draws upon the wide spectrum of tastes represented in the SFWA’s membership of professional writers helps up the discoverability of great writing that should be considered for awards. For me the Nebula Awards remain the most meaningful in the field, chosen by writers working in the genre, who understand and appreciate craft and who possess an understanding of the works that have shaped our field. SFWA has had a productive year in 2015, and it’s a pleasure to share yet another result of our members working together.”

For more information please email pr@sfwa.org.

Recent high notes for SFWA include the Accessibility Checklist being made available to the public, an event Lee Martindale blogged eloquently about. Several conventions have expressed interest in the checklist already and we’ve gotten some useful feedback on how to update them to make them even more useful.

Stick with us; there’s even more cool stuff coming in 2016.

Birthday

The kitchen overlooks rooftops, then sound, then mountains. Hummingbirds live in the locust tree in back.

Well, happy birthday to me. I’ve managed five decades and a bit so far; here’s to many more.

Man, this has been a shitty year in many ways, and one full of life lessons that apparently the universe felt were overdue. Some of those I’m still grappling with. I am so freaking behind on this book it’s not even funny, but thank god for both the wonderful time spent writing in California this summer and the kick in the ass that NaNoWriMo has administered. I’m feeling hopeful about that again and making steady progress.

At the same time among the bumps there’s been plenty of bright spots. Among them my first novel, my first appearance in a Year’s Best collection (edited by Joe Hill, no less), and my first acceptance to longtime goal Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (I have been submitting there for over a decade now). I’ve had nineteen original publications come out since my last birthday, and twelve are currently forthcoming, including a team-up with Mike Resnick. Rachel Swirsky and I are working on some projects together, which is terrific fun. I have a good half dozen stories already spoken for. My collaboration with Bud Sparhawk finally got accepted so he can stop nagging me about why it hasn’t sold yet.

And I’m somehow SFWA President, which is surreal, but also cool because we’ve been getting shit done this year, including admitting independent and small press-published writers, getting a model magazine contract up, reinstating the member electronic newsletter, expanding SFWA’s offerings for self promotion, and even got a cool infographic that answers to all the times someone whinges about how SFWA doesn’t do anything. Not to mention the recent Accessibility Checklist. Nothing speaks like success, and we’ve had some solid ones this year, in my opinion, and I love this ass-kicking team. It’s freaky though, when there’s moments like talking to Harlan Ellison on the phone or getting e-mail from Robert Silverberg.

We moved! Which was awesome but a pain in the butt when it was going on. I love the new place so much; West Seattle feels like home already in a way that Redmond never did. We’re not quuuuuuite moved in all the way; at least, we’re still waiting on a couple of pieces of furniture before everything will feel squared away. And my brother Lowell came out for his first visit to Seattle, but hopefully not the last. I made lots of new friends, and had good times with existing ones, including my beloved Caren Gussoff and Sandra Odell.

As always I picked up some new domestic skills in my endless exploration; this year included how to brew kombucha, how to make Greek yogurt, and the amazing nature of browned butter, which remains me that I co-edited a cookbook with Fran Wilde whose contributors included some pretty august names. Holy smokes was that project a pain in the ass but we survived.

And there’s plenty to look forward to in the next twelve months. Another two-sided collection, hurray! Hearts of Tabat forthcoming, and hopefully Exiles of Tabat along with it. The usual plethora of stories. Continuing to expand the online school (I’ve got some very cool content coming up in 2016.)

So here’s to a lovely birthday weekend that will include Indian buffet and thrift shopping and either ordering myself a pair of shoes I’ve been wanting or pulling a couple of wants from my Amazon wishlist.