Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 42

Wasting Sunday

I complained on facebook that I had utterly wasted Sunday, and one of my facebook colleagues told me to stop being such a Puritan. One can rest on Sunday.

Actually, I got some things done: a load of wash, sweeping the kitchen floor, getting three boxes of manuscripts ready to mail to an archive, updating my blog, thinking about the panels I will do at Convergence.

I have discovered that I can mull while playing computer solitaire. It requires minimal attention, but occupies me just enough, so I don't get restless. So I lay on the couch and played computer solitaire and thought about the panel topics.

Next I need to think about the Wiscon panels, since Wiscon is a month before Convergence. I'm rereading Barb Jensen's book about social class for the class panel. The other two panels have people who are more expert than I am on the panel topics. (Actually, this is also true of the class panel. Barb will be on it.) So less prep is required. I can react to the other panelists.

Wiscon Panels +

Class Markers: The Obvious and the Subtle Sun, 1:00–2:15 pm

Vamps, Zombies, Steampunk, Dystopias: Where's the Hope in SF? Sun, 2:30–3:45 pm

Evolution and Cooperation: A Post-feminist View Sun, 4:00–5:15 pm

Overflowing the Aqueduct (READING) Mon, 10:00–11:15 am

The SignOut (MASS SIGNING) Mon, 11:30 am–12:45 pm

Convergence Panels July 4-7, 2013

These are my panels for Convergence, a very large local, mostly media con run by very, very nice people.

I am only going to add that Will Shetterly is on all three panels. I am on three panels with Will Shetterly.

Friday, July 5
11:00am
Successful and Unsuccessful Alternative History
7:00pm
Creating a Monster: How to Write Villains
Sunday, July 7
11:00am
How to Write an Interesting Hero

The question that really interests me about alternative history is: why is there so much of it now? I tend to think it's a failure of nerve. Rather than write about the future, which is looking dark and coming at us quickly, we try to rewrite the past. The book I have coming out at Wiscon, Big Mama Stories, are mostly about time travel. There's a connection between time travel and alternative history. How contingent do you think history is? Will small changes cause big results? My stories, both time travel and alternative history, assume that answer is no. But that's only my opinion. I think it's easier to change the future than the past.

As far as villains go, I don't find them interesting. People who are pathological in fiction -- Jim Moriarty in Sherlock, Loki in Thor -- are fascinating and impressive. One is a master criminal. The other is a god. But in real life, we have street criminals and people with bad wiring in their brains and business people and government officials.

Patrick spent years working in locked psych units and met many people who had done terrible things. He said they weren't very interesting. What's interesting about people is their good qualities and how they struggle to overcome problems.

I don't think I believe in personal evil. Most bad behavior takes place within a social context, and it's hard to separate the behavior from the context. When you spend a lot of time looking at personal evil, you are likely to ignore social evil. You are focusing on the people who act out in obvious and usually fairly petty ways: street criminals, hackers, the homeless who camp in empty lots in violation of the law, gay people in a homophobic society. The police pull them in; we say they are bad; they may go to prison.

But you are not seeing the white collar criminals who are comfortable in the system. The harm they do is systematic and done in such an ordinary, everyday fashion that it doesn't seem like a crime. The CEO of Nestle has said that water is a commodity like everything else and should be bought and sold. People have no right to enough water to survive. If you denied water to someone dying of thirst, asked him for money when he had none, that would be a terrible evil act. But if you do the same thing to the planet, it's business.

As far as heroes go, I set out to write about people I like and who interest me. Why would I want to spend time with boring or depressing people? I do my best to avoid them in real life.

Twin Cities, April 19

A Dream

I was in a less than good mood yesterday, went to bed early and dreamt. Patrick and I had moved to south central Minneapolis. It was a neighborhood full of bungalows with a huge park. Neither the neighborhood nor the park exist in reality. We were walking in the park, which was flat and full of ponds and lakes. The water was covered with duckweed and water lilies, so I couldn't tell where the land ended and the water began. The day was sunny and lots of kids were fishing. We saw a couple of guys -- adult men -- with strings of good sized fish. One guy had northern pike. The other guy had fish I didn't recognize. This is interesting, because I know the local game fish and pan fish.

Then we saw a guy walking a miniature bison, which came up to his waist. I asked if the bison was going to grow more. The guy said, yes. It would grow to full size. But he wasn't worried. The bison was friendly and well behaved.

That was the dream. It was oddly reassuring. Maybe I will be in a good mood today.

I did finish proofing a 16,000 word story yesterday and am working on a new story about valet parking in space. It's my attempt to write something short and funny and working class. There's a dream in it, and I think I know how to write the dream now.

News

I am doing something that I think is sane. I have been in the habit of beginning the day by reading political and economic blogs. The news on them is usually depressing and angering. Now I am trying to start the day by checking facebook, my various email accounts and my blog. My facebook colleagues tend to be political and progressive, so I get a lot of news there, but it is intermixed with cat photos and links to xycd and other entertaining and fun posts. I have liked Curiosity's facebook page, also the facebook page of Idle No More, the First Nation movement in Canada. So I get inspirational photos of Mars and native people marching. Much more cheering than the usual news.

Fan Fic

I just sent another essay off to Strange Horizon. It's about fan fic, and I ended up wondering why I don't write fan fic. Friends do. I have in the past, the distant past at this point. I have written fiction about people who write fan fic (the hwarhath playwright in Ring of Swords) and people who cosplay (the hwarhath translator in "Holmes Sherlock"). But I have some kind of hostility to writing within a copyrighted universe.

I would hate to believe the reason is snobbery.

Buckminster Fuller

This is my half of a conversation on facebook, which began when I wrote the following:

I remember once, when I was a high school kid, coming home and finding Buckminster Fuller in our living room, holding court among adoring college students. The memory is vivid. I guess he was impressive.

One of my facebook colleagues asked, not unnaturally, what Buckminster Fuller was doing in my family's living room. I wrote:

My father was director of the Walker Art Center, back when it was not the huge and famous place it has since become. Fuller must have been there giving a lecture. I remember a geodesic dome was built behind the Walker, I think by the college students.

The facebook colleague then asked what it was like to be the daughter of the director of the Walker. I replied:

I met a lot of artists, most of them local to the Twin Cities, and most of them pretty interesting. I got to hang out in an art museum. It was not as glitzy as museums have since become -- a strange mixture of the founder's eccentric collection and contemporary art and design. T. B. Walker's Chinese jades are now at the Minneapolis Art Institute, and the jade mountain is in a glass case. When I was a kid I used to walk my fingers up the mountain's steps.

She asked if I had kept in touch with any of the artists.

No. They were my parents' friends, not mine. Most are gone now. For me, they are fragmentary memories. Some brief meeting or other that stayed in my mind. I guess what I got from them was the idea that art was serious and worth doing -- and being smart and arty and intellectual and eccentric was rather neat.

Short Fiction

From facebook:

It's miserable outside, rain that is predicted to turn to wintry mix. I have to proof a story. 16,000 words. It just printed out. Even typeset, it occupies 42 pages. This may not sound like a lot, but today, with wintry mix outside the window, I am not in love with my fiction. Why are my stories so long? I'm going to write tiny, gem-like short stories of a few thousand words in the future. Maybe I'll switch to short-shorts. Or haiku.

I'm not entirely serious, by the way. Don't rush to reassure me. I just don't like proofreading. I'm not good at it, and I keep seeing sentences that need fixing, but it's too late.

I like the early stages of writing, the first draft when I look at blank paper or a blank computer screen and think, "I am going to write something fabulous. A work of genius. And it will be funny."

Every once in a while, I write a story that's in the range of 1,500 to 6,000 words. I think they are always folk tales. Though when I started getting published, 40 years ago or whenever, all my stories were 3,000-4,500 words and science fiction. These are lovely lengths. I wish I could get back to them more often.

The shorter a story is, the better it has to be, because there isn't room of mistakes. A novel can have chunks that don't really work. A novelette or novella can have some weaknesses. But a short story... No.

Poem

For some reason I thought about this poem this morning, maybe because it's a cold spring day. I was thinking of traditional Chinese poetry, especially the poems in The Book of Songs, when I wrote this.

I.

“Caw! Caw!” sing the crows in the bare spring branches.
“Honk! Honk!” call the geese in the cold spring sky.

II.

At twenty-one my hair began to silver.
At the age of forty it was completely grey.
At sixty-five it’s white and thin.
I wear it short, my hair clips put away.

III.

At twenty-one I had ambition.
At the age of forty I wondered what I’d done.
At sixty-five the days move quickly.
I try to pay attention. They are too soon gone.

IV.

“Caw! Caw!” sing the crows in the bare spring branches.
“Honk! Honk!” call the geese in the cold spring sky.

I may have posted it on the blog before. If so, here it is again.