Patrice Sarath's Blog, page 16

ArmadilloCon wrapup

I am feeling more of a let-down from this year’s ArmadilloCon, possibly because it was one of the best in recent years. I lingered longer than usual on Sunday, and as a result I napped hard when I got home (this despite fortifying myself with a latte for the road).

In no particular order, here’s what happened:

‘s presentation on translating The Three Body Problem. Thoughtful and philosophical, about language, culture, meaning, and intention in translation.

Michelle Muenzler’s reading, and also her moderation of the Hugos discussion. Well done, Michelle!

The classic feminist SF panel. We did great, and thanks to L. Timmel Duchamp chiming in from the audience, we managed to touch on everyone.

Growing the Next Generation of Readers — Mari Mancusi had good data, and KB Rylander came prepared with evidentiary support. I’m linking to KB’s award-winning short story because I can and you all should read it.

Fannish Food — laughter and fun and blatant cheating.

How to Perform Major Surgery on Your Novel — kill your darlings, kill your darlings, kill your darlings. Also, editors are on your side, so be professional and use the criticism.

Rebecca Schwarz‘s lovely lyrical story, in which she brought it all together at the end in a surprising way. A story that made me go, oh!

The science fiction mystery panel: I got so many recommendations, and my to-read pile has just doubled in size.

Friends and supporters who came to hear my reading. I am always happy to take my words out for a spin.

Next up: FenCon in September. Can’t wait.

 

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On “Go Set a Watchman”

Of all the mysteries surrounding Harper Lee’s second novel, the question of whether it’s a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird is the one I was the most curious about. We won’t ever know if Harper Lee is a mentally and physically frail old lady who was duped into publishing a second novel for the enrichment of her family and circle of caretakers. And actually, we can’t ever know for sure what Go Set a Watchman was really meant to be written as, but there are clues in the text to two paths.

The first path, and the most widely accepted, is that Watchman is a sequel to Mockingbird. Scout is all grown up, and she comes back to Maycomb to discover that everything she thought she knew about her father and his goodness and decency is wrong. He is a hypocrite, the worst kind of hypocrite, because he taught her differently and she believed him, and to find out as she does that he is thoroughly racist, a benevolent bigot, is almost unbearable to read. The last quarter of the book is Jean Louise in physical and spiritual pain over everything she has lost — her love for her father and her image of him as a good and just man.

“You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no man’s land but good — there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.” Scout Finch, in Go Set A Watchman

Scout’s anguished cry is echoed by the outrage of readers who remember Atticus Finch from the books, and more likely, the movie. Reading the last segment of the book was painful*, and I’m not even a huge Mockingbird fan. Atticus Finch is a beloved literary figure who has become a part of our culture of redemption. Atticus is a part of the story of the US. When race relations in the US dip to all-time lows, as they currently are, Atticus is a beacon of light in the darkness.

If Watchman is a sequel, then it’s a sequel that takes away a big part of our cultural complacency and replaces it with uncertainty. If Atticus Finch is a bigot, where does that leave us? And if Lee wrote him that way, what does she mean by it? Mockingbird is a pretty simple albeit well-written book, which is why it’s given to thirteen-year-olds to read. It’s probably the first “serious” book many of them have read, and it’s an introduction to US literature. And here’s where I go on a speculation binge — could it be that Lee wanted Watchman to re-set a course? Had she seen what she had created, this impossibly sainted Atticus Finch, and she wanted to bring him to earth? By puncturing a myth, we can take a hard look at the truth. And the truth is, we weren’t done with race in the 1950s, and we aren’t done with it now.

There’s another school of thought on Watchman, that the lost novel was the ur-text of Mockingbird. This story goes that Lee’s editor told her to just write the bits about Scout being a tomboy. And indeed, the Scout flashbacks are pretty funny, although they don’t have anywhere near the power of the rest of the book. Lee also talks about Atticus’s famous trial, but it’s not shown, it’s merely referred to as further illumination of his character, and it’s all the more searing because he no longer lives up to that image.

I haven’t read Mockingbird in a long time, but this path doesn’t read true to me. Watchman doesn’t even include the events that take place in Mockingbird, and two of the main characters — Jem and Dill — don’t show up in Watchman except by mention. I think it’s a sequel, and I think Lee wrote it deliberately and with some forethought to, as I said, re-right the course that Mockingbird took.

Or at least, that’s my speculation. We can’t know, can we?

From the moment I read about the discovery (or “discovery”) of Go Set A Watchman, I knew I had to read it. As I said, I’m not a monumental Mockingbird fan, but this book is work by a major cultural figure of the 20th century. Can you imagine a lost manuscript of Dickens, found in the twilight of his life? Or Jane Austen, or Mark Twain? Harper Lee is one of the signature voices of her age, and Mockingbird has never lost its relevance. I believe that in the coming decades, Watchman will be more than just a curious bookend, an asterisk or a footnote to history, but it will take its place next to Mockingbird as the right and fitting conclusion to the story.

It’s a sequel. It turns Mockingbird on its head, and even if Lee was conned into publishing it, as sad as that scenario is, it would have been worse if Watchman had never come to light.

Because now we can have a different conversation about Atticus Finch, and maybe it will be a more realistic one than the hagiography of Mockingbird. It’s not that we shouldn’t have heroes, and that they should always be torn down, but Watchman reveals that Lee also had something more to say about Atticus, and it’s fitting and right that she gets to say it, and the conversation gets to continue.

*Atticus’s defense is the tired defense of states’ rights and Southern culture and individualism, and also that Negroes are not ready for full equality. Remember, this book was written in the 1950s, before the Confederate battle flag was plastered all over the South, on public buildings and the like. And the way he defends himself is so paternalistic and sickening. It’s shocking to read.

 

 

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ArmadilloCon 2015

ArmadilloCon is next week — June 24-26. I have some great panels this year. The schedule hasn’t quite been finalized, but I will be quite busy all weekend. The panel I’m looking forward to a lot is the Growing the Next Generation of Readers on Friday at 5 pm, with a great bunch of panelists.

I will be reading from 3:30 to 4:00 pm on Saturday. I plan to read selections from both Reversal of Fortune and Fog Season. Hope to see you there.

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Comicpalooza and the future of fandom

Last weekend was Comicpalooza, and I had a blast. The convention was a mashup of a media convention and literary con, and it was a peanut-butter-and-chocolate amalgam of fan goodness.

The dealers room was a huge expanse of comics, books, geek toys, and props from movies, and more. Cosplayers everywhere, in the most amazing costumes. The amount of creativity and love and passion that goes into costumes was inspiring. The panels were well-attended, and the fact that the Aspiring Writers panel (called by Larry Dixon the Perspiring Writers panel) was full even though Chewbacca was doing a Q&A in another hall, was just crazy. I got to hear half of Peter Mayhew‘s talk before I had to sprint over to Aspiring Writers, and as I told the crowd, “What are you doing here?! Chewbacca is talking down the hall!”

But they stayed, and I think we enlightened them.

The panels were great. The dealers room was great. All of the things that bring geeks together — all right there, enjoyed by thousands of my tribe.

Media cons are the future of fandom. Not everyone agrees with this: just read Oscar Bernie‘s take on the same question. He comes to the opposite conclusion.

I just spent a weekend with my kids at CONduit 2015, a regional fan convention in Utah.  And driving home, I had a startling revelation – Comic-Cons are going to ruin EVERYTHING.

He goes on to say that his kids had an excellent experience at a small regional con, and I get that, I really do. Small cons are truly wonderful. My favorite is my hometown convention, ArmadilloCon. I love seeing my friends and taking part in a traditional SF geekfest, with all of the convention traditions. But you hardly ever see children at a con anymore, and the programming for them is thin gruel.

Comicpalooza was exploding with children. There were kids everywhere, dressed up, playing games, arms full of loot. At the booth of Bone artist Jeff Smith, I almost couldn’t get my book signed because the line was so long. I bought Smith’s collection RASL for my son, who is 20 now but grew up loving Bone, and I stood in line behind a family of small people, who were new fans of Bone.

Yes, at a media con you can stand in line if you want to get a celebrity to scrawl his or her name across a photo, and you can pay dearly for the privilege. Or you can dress up with your friends and wander the halls, taking part in a ritual of display, geeking out with your buds, and going to panels and wrestling matches, and concerts and films, and even literary panels, if you’re lucky enough to go to Comicpalooza.

Is it more expensive? Yes. That is true — it’s an expensive weekend. And to be sure, the con traditions of low-cost convention tickets and the welcome-to-all con suite, are traditions that will be sadly missed, if media cons take over the con-space, as Oscar Bernie fears. And I fear that too, because the history of cons goes back to the dawning of fandom, and it’s truly a great thing. However, the old ways are dying out, and if the next generation is not interested in the old traditions, then they have to make their own fun.

I’m a tad more optimistic though. Although the graying of fandom was starkly apparent at the last WorldCon I went to, the 2013 LoneStarCon, I think both media cons and traditional conventions can co-exist. I think traditional cons might find themselves taking on some of the glitz of media cons, and I like the idea of a literary track at the media extravaganzas. Cross-pollination is never a bad thing — evolution, after all, is not just the survival of the fittest, but adaptation.

Anyway. I had a fantastic time at Comicpalooza and can’t wait for next year. And I’m looking forward to ArmadilloCon too, as well as FenCon and ConDFW next year. In my world anyway, media cons and regional conventions happily co-exist.

So I’ll see you at the con — you know, the one with all the geeks letting their geek flag fly.

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Comicpalooza interview and schedule

I will be at Comicpalooza this weekend, May 22-25. This is the biggest convention I’ve ever been to and I’m looking forward to it. A media con is a vastly different creature from a literary convention, and I am preparing myself to be overwhelmed.

I was interviewed by AFK for the convention, which you can find here:

AFK Show Austin: Interview with Patrice Sarath

My schedule for Comicpalooza is as follows:

Saturday:

2:30-3:30 Tips for Aspiring Writers

New to writing? Not sure where to start? Come and learn from published authors; who will share tips; dos and don’ts; and personal stories about how they began their writing careers. Rachel Caine, Mercedes Lackey,Patrice Sarath, Martha Wells, Rachael Acks, Larry Dixon

Sunday:

1-2 Should You Self-Publish Your Book? (CBW)

We hear more about self-publishing success stories every day. What are the real advantages of self-publishing vs. the traditional approach? And what about the risks? A panel of pro writers discuss their insights and the pros and cons of self-publishing. Patrice Sarath, Jake Kerr, Heather Long, Carrie Patel, Pamela Fagan Hutchins, Russ Linton

4-5 Great Characters / Books That Have Inspired Me (SF)

From Hamlet to Captain Picard; from Huckleberry Finn to The Hunger Games; writers are often inspired by the characters and books of other writers. Come and listen to our panel of authors talk about the stories and characters that have been their greatest sources of inspiration. Who knows; maybe you will discover something new that will inspire you! Raymond E. Feist, Patrice Sarath, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Kimberly Frost

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Daredevil, Kimmy, The Americans

Daredevil, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and The Americans have nothing in common except:

I’m watching them
On Netflix or Amazon
They each have a different way to tell a story and I’m learning from each one, including what works and what doesn’t.

What doesn’t work, for me at least, is Daredevil. It started strong, we got the origin story, and then it went into progressively darker comic book violence, culminating in an episode of such a sickening murder that I gave up.

I can handle some violence and I don’t shy away from dark themes. But the violence in Daredevil is played for titillation only — once again, prime motivation seems to be, “see how transgressive we can be!” — and I say, “nope.” Additionally, the actor playing Daredevil has fallen into a terrible case of Batman voice, and I think that is a clear case of creative failure.

I was extra disappointed because Agent Carter was so good, and both shows are the Marvel universe, so I had high hopes. I suppose the difference is network TV vs. streaming.

So if I’m such a weenie, why am I watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? Can I only take violent themes if they are safely wrapped up in pastels and jokes? The 13-episode show takes a look at rape and kidnapping and hands it to us with a goofy theme song and rapid one-liners. UKS has caused controversy over its treatment of the main gay character, Tituss, and the main Native American character, Jacqueline.* It also brings us a look at a survivor of a heinous crime, and we get to laugh at her predicament and foibles.

You either love UKS or you hate it, and I loved it, even if some bits didn’t work. Terrible things have happened to Kimmy, and she has been deeply impacted. She has a decision to make everyday — do I stay curled up in bed and never leave the house again, or do I embrace life and people? She chooses to embrace life.

Daredevil tells us when bad things happen, we’re broken by them, and even worse, we become the people we are fighting. UKS says, bad things happen, and we do more than go on, we laugh again, and we live, and make our best efforts to bring people to justice. Daredevil was never meant to be a comedy, and I’ll miss seeing Rosario Dawson, but I’m not going back into that world view.

The Americans. I am just starting this show and I love it. It’s violent and dangerous (see, I’m not a total wuss), and completely fascinating. Since it takes place in the early 1980s, it’s a period piece (part of the charm). The characters are relatable, especially the Russians. Since everyone in the show is constantly in danger, and we in the audience know all the moves each character is making, it’s a fantastic story-telling technique. The writers don’t hide pertinent information from the audience– they hide it from the characters. So the tension is absolutely riveting. (Also, no Batman voice.)

I’ve said it before, the best writing is not just in books. TV, whether cable, streaming, or network, is really putting out some great stuff. While it does cut into writing time, nowadays a writer must stay up on good storytelling,wherever it’s to be found.

* I thought the Jacqueline storyline was clever and at times hilarious. And the actors who play her parents, especially Gil Birmingham, were also funny and over the top — watch the show for the “Iron Eagle” joke, which still makes me laugh.

 

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Election season

Okay, Hillary has announced. The election season has officially begun, and it’s going to be a long hard slog, so here’s a reminder about the newsworthiness of the variety of news organizations that are likely to be hitting your Facebook feed for the next several hundred months, or however long it’s going to feel. Seriously, it’s like the Earth’s orbit around the Sun takes a few loop-de-loops.

Here are the easy ones:

Fox News and Huffington Post are equal in value as far as newsworthiness, for the values that are zero and anything times zero. Doesn’t matter what side you are on. Both are excellent at the confirmation bias game. They require a very large grain of salt.

Likewise, in the same category are Salon and the Daily Mail. Now, there’s an interesting thing about the Daily Mail. I’ve noticed a lot of Americans think it’s an objective source for news about the US and the world, just because it is published in the UK. What you’re thinking of is The Guardian, or even The Times of London, and possibly The Economist. The Daily Mail is none of those things. It’s a crap newspaper that makes up stories and quotes, and gets away with it because it uses British spelling. Avoid.

Don’t trust Salon on anything other than its columns about culture, especially books (Laura Miller! I love you!) and possibly its articles about sex, but even that’s dubious.

Buzzfeed, Jezebel, Upworthy (gag!) have nothing but entertainment value. Share their political “news” in your feed, and you deserve to be mocked.

And any news organization that uses clickbait headlines such as “Shocking!” deserves to be shunned.

Slate. Slate has its good points. Slate’s political coverage leans left (as Colbert famously said, “reality has a well-known liberal bias”) but it also provides links to thoughtful coverage with a different viewpoint, and I think it can be counted as a decent source for the election season. However, it is doing the thing I hate, which is provocative headlines without context. Yeah, Slate does clickbait, but then it also has decent coverage.

For my liberal friends, here’s a surprising source: The Wall Street Journal. Their reporting is solid and objective. Their editorial page is a crazy-ass display of conservative frothing, but the actual news is good. Ignore the silverbacks in editorial, and you can amaze your friends by linking to cogent reporting (and watch them all unfriend you, but it’s that time of year anyway).

For my conservative friends: Yes, The New York Times drives you to drink. We get it. But ignore the editorials and the columnists, and just go for the news. They’re still good at what they do.

Reuters. Once upon a time Reuters sent news scoops by carrier pigeon. This is so awesome that you can’t even make that up. Reuters news is written by reporters who were cryonically frozen in the 1950s. They write their stories on 25-pound solid iron Underwood typewriters on a solid sheets of newsprint, and yell things like “Copy boy! Copy boy!” and “Stop the presses!” They may even still send their editors dispatches by carrier pigeon. The point is, Reuters doesn’t have a bias. It just has news. It’s like news ingredients. It’s like news that other organizations buy in bulk (they kinda do) and then add their own spices to.

It’s really kind of boring. But you will probably make some 1950s-era reporter’s day to find out that you’ve shared his story on Facebook.

(If he even knows what that is.)

The Atlantic and The New Yorker. You know who you are. You know what you read. Yeah, they do the confirmation bias thing, but at least it’s real.

PBS News Hour. I think the last time I watched was at least six months ago. What can I say? Virtue is boring.

So what are your sources? Where do you go for enemy intel or sneak out to find tasty tidbits of truth, fact, and unbiased reporting? In a frothy atmosphere of lies and manipulation, where we are forcefed banalities and ginned-up outrage like geese undergoing gavage, where do you go for a palate-cleansing who, what, where, when, and why?

Here’s to the next billion years of an election cycle.

 

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To write is to live…

But to live is to have something to say.

Lately I’ve read a number of essays and posts on writing, finding the time to write, and the impact of living — having children, a job, obligations — on one’s writing. It is no secret that women have less time to write than men. We bear children and raise them, and even if we work hard not to gatekeep, it is usually our time spent in the drudgery of child-rearing, not our husband’s.

I read somewhere that Ursula Le Guin felt she lost a novel for each of her children, that the time she would have had to write was given over to motherhood. Implicit in this statement is a sense of frustration, no matter how matter-of-fact she may have said the words.

And yet. We don’t have to bear children to lose time. Anything can take it from us — illness, caregiving, and even good things like travel, moving house, a career, a sport, a hobby. We can lose time by wasting it, by deciding that writing isn’t what we want at the moment, until we want it back again. Writer’s block can force us to wait, impatiently, for inspiration to strike, for long-atrophied muscles to get back into the habit of daily word.

We can be blocked by fear and we can be blocked by joy.

We should not blame our children for not writing. The physiological and mental changes of being pregnant and giving  birth are real and undeniable, and there is a price to be paid for motherhood that fathers don’t tend to pay. Lack of sleep, the very fact of giving our bodies to nourish our young, the emotional changes that both challenge and exhilarate, all of these factor into a barrier to sitting down and writing. Post-partum depression is real and debilitating, and the crushing melange of fear, love, exhaustion, rage, and happiness that accompanies the first year of our children’s lives should all be acknowledged and accepted and bitterly fought, and negotiated, and bartered, and challenged every step of the way. We should understand why we are blocked, and we should never let it stop us, and we should also know that it’s very purpose is to stop us. Biology grabs us by the lapels and screams at us — stop! You have only one job now, and that is to nourish the next generation at the cost of your self because your self doesn’t matter. Only protection of your genetic legacy matters. And we feel this from deep within our core, because it’s programmed in our cells. As far as biology is concerned, your soul, your desires, your ambition, and your emotions are useless. The only thing that matters is being a mother.

Be warned: Biology is a selfish asshole. It doesn’t care about you, and you should not care about it.

The point is this: life gets in the way of writing all the time. You don’t have to have a baby to be kept from writing. It’s only that women are made to feel bad about it.

From Bea Ballard’s obituary of her father, J.G. Ballard:

He had raised three of us single-handedly following my mother’s premature death when we were five, seven and nine. It was the 60s, when single fathers didn’t do that sort of thing. Most of his friends were sceptical. But he did raise us, as father, mother and much more besides. Fortunately for him, and for us, his work as a writer meant he could work from home and juggle writing with the care of us. So in between school runs, ironing school ties and cooking sausages and mashed potato, he wrote his novels and short stories – one minute conjuring up wild dystopias, the next watching Blue Peter.

There are a lot of things to unpack here. One is that for everyone, writing time is at a premium. Women have less of it than men do. Sometimes that is because our time is devalued by others and sometimes it’s because we devalue it ourselves, and we hand over the time we should be keeping to ourselves.

Another thing to unpack: writing time should be at a premium. We should be living. Doing. For some women, that means raising a family, whether we stay home or have a career outside the home. But that’s not the only path. Think of all the things you want to do, that fulfill you.

Long drives by yourselves. Painting. Woodworking. Learning languages. Dancing. Singing. Playing softball. Arguing politics. Having dinner parties. Volunteering. Dog training. Bike riding. Hiking…

It’s not writing. It’s living. And we should all be doing more of it, not less.

So when we think about the ways that our lives have constrained us and kept us from writing, we should think, yes. Yes, my life has kept me from writing.

But at least now I have something to say.

 

 

 

 

 

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My three Jewish Dads: Sarath, Nimoy, Oppenheimer

Edward Sarath, my dad.

There were two men who reminded me of my father: Leonard Nimoy and J. Robert Oppenheimer. As a teenager I conflated the three of them so much that I think I may have intertwined details of their lives and thoughts with that of my real dad.

 

Leonard Nimoy

I of course came to know Nimoy through Spock, but it was never Spock that I was thinking of. It was always Nimoy.

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer

And after I did a project on the Manhattan Project for History in high school, I definitely conflated Oppy with my dad. So essentially I have these three Jewish men in my life who were all one great big mixed-up father figure. I look back now and just shake my head — who knows that goes in the human heart that it recognizes something essential about three completely different individuals? Is it culture — or another quality that is brought out by that culture?

Here’s to Edward Noah Sarath, Leonard Nimoy, and Oppy. Jewish men, changing the world.

 

 

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ConDFW Recap

One of the best little conventions in Texas, ConDFW 2015 was a success as usual. I got to the con late on Friday and so I missed what looked like really great programming, but made up for lost time on Saturday.

This year I was tapped to do the guest of honor interview and had the good fortune to chat with Rachel Manija Brown, who co-authors YA (Stranger, Hostage) with Sherwood Smith and writes a werewolf-marines series (Laura’s Wolf, Echo’s Wolf) as Lia Silver. Brown is a PTSD counselor at a Los Angeles clinic, and she also makes a decent living as a writer. As someone who firmly believes that while the goals of most authors (including myself) is to support oneself through writing, it’s equally important to have a career that includes the opportunity to do cool stuff. Let’s face it, writing is boring. Brown talked about her day job with even more passion than about her writing.

The No Excuses! writing panel with Aaron de Orive, Kate Sanger, and Sue Sinor was very well attended. We discussed writers block and how to unblock, and there were many helpful suggestions from the audience too, such as journaling. As a long-time writer I have suffered from writers block and I’m sure I will again. We’re all in this together, and if you have something that works, then share it. I enjoyed the conversation.

My reading from the current WiP was well received. It’s so important to hear your words out loud, seriously. What you hear in your head is a far cry from what your readers are hearing in their heads, and frankly, the only way to even get close to how your work is received is to read it out loud. I’m definitely excited about the new project.

I confess that I stayed up way too late with friends on Saturday night, but as Tex Thompson said, a con is the only place where you can meet your writer-friend obligations, right? Just doing my job, ma’am, and I did it way past my bedtime.

See many of you at ArmadilloCon next!

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