Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 214
August 19, 2011
Greetings From Downtown Reno!
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Reno has two big attractions -- gambling and legalized prostitution. Oh yeah, and quickie divorces, though I gather that's fallen by the wayside since other states liberalized their marriage-negating procedures. So this is one city that was high on my list of places I never expected to wind up in.
So why did I come to the Worldcon here? Look up above. Check it out -- that's a picture of me with Robert Silverberg. We're on a first-name basis. I know him personally.
That's just cool.
*
Reno has two big attractions -- gambling and legalized prostitution. Oh yeah, and quickie divorces, though I gather that's fallen by the wayside since other states liberalized their marriage-negating procedures. So this is one city that was high on my list of places I never expected to wind up in.
So why did I come to the Worldcon here? Look up above. Check it out -- that's a picture of me with Robert Silverberg. We're on a first-name basis. I know him personally.
That's just cool.
*
Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 162
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And here I go into overdrive and begin plotting out the climactic scenes of Dancing With Bears . Good God, but that was work!
*
And here I go into overdrive and begin plotting out the climactic scenes of Dancing With Bears . Good God, but that was work!
*
August 18, 2011
Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 161
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Serious plotting going on here.
I've censored bits of this simply because someday you might read Dancing Wi th Bears and . . . Well, back when I was an undergrad at William and Mary, I used to read a newspaper which we all called The Richmond Times-Disgrace , At that time they had a movie reviewer who judged films entirely by whether the ending surprised her. She'd synopsize the plot and then conclude, "I would never have guessed that Norman Bates's mother was actually dead and he was dressing up as her and murdering people. You won't either! Highly recommended."
How many movies did this woman spoil for me? I won't do that to you.
*
* Surplus was not entirely displeased with how things had turned out. Oh, there were disadvantages, to be sure . . .
1) Grow drugs
2) Distribute
3) Set fires
4) Unleash [censored] (with [censored] infrastructure)
The [censored] steps on [censored]
Serious plotting going on here.
I've censored bits of this simply because someday you might read Dancing Wi th Bears and . . . Well, back when I was an undergrad at William and Mary, I used to read a newspaper which we all called The Richmond Times-Disgrace , At that time they had a movie reviewer who judged films entirely by whether the ending surprised her. She'd synopsize the plot and then conclude, "I would never have guessed that Norman Bates's mother was actually dead and he was dressing up as her and murdering people. You won't either! Highly recommended."
How many movies did this woman spoil for me? I won't do that to you.
*
August 17, 2011
George R. R. Martin Sighting Du Jour
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The Daily Show - Borders Goes Out of Business
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
Last Sunday, reading the New York Times , I ran across a reference to an old friend that I will confess gave me a momentary twinge of jealousy. No, I'm not referring to the back-page essay in the New York Times Book Review which was all about how wonderful George R. R. Martin was. ("Martin's second virtue is a nearly supernatural gift for storytelling," it, for example, reads. Click here to read for more informed and effusive praise.) I'm referring to the fact that Jonathan Lethem's name was used in the cryptacrostic puzzle. Even more amazingly, rather than referencing Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude , the clue was "Author of Gun, With Occasional Music -- his science fiction novel. The guy's really tearing up the charts!
Not that George is failing to become a part of the common parlance. As note the above clip from The Daily Show . (Warning: It starts with a commercial.)
And tomorrow I leave for Nevada . . .
So my blogging may be a bit sporadic. I'll do my best to post daily. But some of the places I'm going aren't likely to have broadband. We shall see.
*
The Daily Show - Borders Goes Out of Business
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
Last Sunday, reading the New York Times , I ran across a reference to an old friend that I will confess gave me a momentary twinge of jealousy. No, I'm not referring to the back-page essay in the New York Times Book Review which was all about how wonderful George R. R. Martin was. ("Martin's second virtue is a nearly supernatural gift for storytelling," it, for example, reads. Click here to read for more informed and effusive praise.) I'm referring to the fact that Jonathan Lethem's name was used in the cryptacrostic puzzle. Even more amazingly, rather than referencing Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude , the clue was "Author of Gun, With Occasional Music -- his science fiction novel. The guy's really tearing up the charts!
Not that George is failing to become a part of the common parlance. As note the above clip from The Daily Show . (Warning: It starts with a commercial.)
And tomorrow I leave for Nevada . . .
So my blogging may be a bit sporadic. I'll do my best to post daily. But some of the places I'm going aren't likely to have broadband. We shall see.
*
Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 160
.
Wow! And here I'd thought I did hardly any diagrams for Dancing With Bears . This one is only a blush away from being a circuit diagram.
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Wow! And here I'd thought I did hardly any diagrams for Dancing With Bears . This one is only a blush away from being a circuit diagram.
*
August 16, 2011
Announcing . . . Dragonstairs Press!
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Those who've been following this blog for a while know that upon retirement my wife Marianne Porter reinvented herself as a "nano-publisher." So far, she's nano-published six works by me: A Blurb Book photo tale for Halloween titled Autumn Leaves , a chapbook reprint of "A Midwinter's Tale," which we used as a Christmas card last year, and a set of four small Darger & Surplus chapbooks, most of which I gave away as promotional items over the last few months.
Now Marianne's imprint, Dragonstairs Press, takes another step toward commercial reality: It has a website. If you go there, you'll note that no prices are yet listed. That's because she's not ready to start mercantile operations yet. When she is, in the not-too-distant future, I'll let you know.
Meanwhile, Marianne is working on a big new project. It's very cool and very strange and something that no major press would touch on a bet. Keep watching the skies!
You can find the Dragonstairs Press website here.
And speaking of minor japes by major writers . . .
I received my contributor's copy of the new Gardner Dozois collection, When the Great Days Come the other day. (I co-wrote "Ancestral Voices.") In the introduction, Robert Silverberg writes:
And he goes on from there. But here's the thing: "The Empty Man," written when Gardner was either sixteen or seventeen, is a bit of a potboiler. In Being Gardner Dozois, my book-length interview with Gardner about the art and craft of every work of short fiction he had written to date, he summed it up thusly: "Sucks! is the way we describe it in technical language."
So I wrote Gardner, asking for an explanation. Here's his response:
So now you're in on the joke.
Above: The Dragonstairs Press logo. Derived from a photo of the Dragonstairs themselves.
*
Those who've been following this blog for a while know that upon retirement my wife Marianne Porter reinvented herself as a "nano-publisher." So far, she's nano-published six works by me: A Blurb Book photo tale for Halloween titled Autumn Leaves , a chapbook reprint of "A Midwinter's Tale," which we used as a Christmas card last year, and a set of four small Darger & Surplus chapbooks, most of which I gave away as promotional items over the last few months.
Now Marianne's imprint, Dragonstairs Press, takes another step toward commercial reality: It has a website. If you go there, you'll note that no prices are yet listed. That's because she's not ready to start mercantile operations yet. When she is, in the not-too-distant future, I'll let you know.
Meanwhile, Marianne is working on a big new project. It's very cool and very strange and something that no major press would touch on a bet. Keep watching the skies!
You can find the Dragonstairs Press website here.
And speaking of minor japes by major writers . . .
I received my contributor's copy of the new Gardner Dozois collection, When the Great Days Come the other day. (I co-wrote "Ancestral Voices.") In the introduction, Robert Silverberg writes:
Not that Dozois the writer has gone unrewarded. His first published story, "The Empty Man," was a nominee in 1966 for the award that science-fiction writers annually give their peers: the Nebula.
And he goes on from there. But here's the thing: "The Empty Man," written when Gardner was either sixteen or seventeen, is a bit of a potboiler. In Being Gardner Dozois, my book-length interview with Gardner about the art and craft of every work of short fiction he had written to date, he summed it up thusly: "Sucks! is the way we describe it in technical language."
So I wrote Gardner, asking for an explanation. Here's his response:
EVERYTHING got a Nebula nomination that year. As a protest over the way the Nebulas were run, Frederic Pohl nominated every single story to appear in GALAXY and WORLDS OF IF that year. So "The Empty Man," like many other stories that year, got exactly one (1) nomination.
It still sucked.
So now you're in on the joke.
Above: The Dragonstairs Press logo. Derived from a photo of the Dragonstairs themselves.
*
Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 159
* .
Here I'm plotting out Dancing With Bears . It's worth nothing that I dropped the "tank grown" (which I lifted from the Dune books) as being just too awful. The double-asterisks at the bottom are to make sure I don't forget to include that line.
My notes:
A: 1) Bring up Y. as a character.
2) Find a rationale for the mask & imposture.
3) Koschei's revelation comes last & leaves A. feeling impotent and demoralized. He overdoses,
hoping to multiply strength. He is stoned. He is God. He walks into the Terem Palace and sits
upon the throne.
"Are you . . . him?""Yes, my children.I am He Whom you seek."AP Crisis 1) cut off from cigarettes
Crisis 2) Darger is missing
"We are searching for a weapon . . . He may have found it."
"He claims he is searching for the tomb of the Lost Tsar. But he is not."
She convinces them he is looking for the Lost Tsar.
They cut off her cigarettes
The underlords [something] to grow rasputin
"Tank grown."
"What are the women for?"
"They are the tanks."
Separate "tank grown" from revelation
Change title: The Reign of Terror
* * "I'd kill for a smoke, "she said.
*
Here I'm plotting out Dancing With Bears . It's worth nothing that I dropped the "tank grown" (which I lifted from the Dune books) as being just too awful. The double-asterisks at the bottom are to make sure I don't forget to include that line.
My notes:
A: 1) Bring up Y. as a character.
2) Find a rationale for the mask & imposture.
3) Koschei's revelation comes last & leaves A. feeling impotent and demoralized. He overdoses,
hoping to multiply strength. He is stoned. He is God. He walks into the Terem Palace and sits
upon the throne.
"Are you . . . him?""Yes, my children.I am He Whom you seek."AP Crisis 1) cut off from cigarettes
Crisis 2) Darger is missing
"We are searching for a weapon . . . He may have found it."
"He claims he is searching for the tomb of the Lost Tsar. But he is not."
She convinces them he is looking for the Lost Tsar.
They cut off her cigarettes
The underlords [something] to grow rasputin
"Tank grown."
"What are the women for?"
"They are the tanks."
Separate "tank grown" from revelation
Change title: The Reign of Terror
* * "I'd kill for a smoke, "she said.
*
August 15, 2011
Whatever You Do . . . DON'T Drop It On Your Cat!
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I've had a story anthologized! Big whoop, you say. That happens all the time.
No, no, no, this is a very big whoop indeed. Sense of Wonder , edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, must surely be the very largest SF anthology ever compiled. When I tell you it's almost a thousand pages long, that doesn't take into account that it has the dimensions of an old-fashioned telephone directory. Or that each page has three columns of rather small print. This book has fiction by something like 148 different authors, from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly to Nalo Hopkinson. It has 62 specialized essays on topic ranging from Postcolonial Science Fiction to Jim Baen. It has the entire text of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars! And it contains my own "The Edge of the World."
Obviously this is not a book you'd want to drop on a household pet.
Sense of Wonder is intended, if I've got this right, to be used as a textbook for college science fiction classes. No matter what slant the teacher takes on SF, this book has it covered. Is this a totally mad notion? Maybe. But I remember when Jim Frenkl first came up with the concept of a gigantic best-of-the-year anthology and handed editorship of it to Gardner Dozois. A lot of us wondered then if there was really a market for such a thing. Yet now, more than a quarter century later, it's still going strong. So the same thing may well apply in this case too.
You can read a description of the volume (and the table of contents) here.
Above: Here it is, the distinguished thing, next to an actual life-sized pig. Just to give you some sense of scale.
*
I've had a story anthologized! Big whoop, you say. That happens all the time.
No, no, no, this is a very big whoop indeed. Sense of Wonder , edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, must surely be the very largest SF anthology ever compiled. When I tell you it's almost a thousand pages long, that doesn't take into account that it has the dimensions of an old-fashioned telephone directory. Or that each page has three columns of rather small print. This book has fiction by something like 148 different authors, from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly to Nalo Hopkinson. It has 62 specialized essays on topic ranging from Postcolonial Science Fiction to Jim Baen. It has the entire text of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars! And it contains my own "The Edge of the World."
Obviously this is not a book you'd want to drop on a household pet.
Sense of Wonder is intended, if I've got this right, to be used as a textbook for college science fiction classes. No matter what slant the teacher takes on SF, this book has it covered. Is this a totally mad notion? Maybe. But I remember when Jim Frenkl first came up with the concept of a gigantic best-of-the-year anthology and handed editorship of it to Gardner Dozois. A lot of us wondered then if there was really a market for such a thing. Yet now, more than a quarter century later, it's still going strong. So the same thing may well apply in this case too.
You can read a description of the volume (and the table of contents) here.
Above: Here it is, the distinguished thing, next to an actual life-sized pig. Just to give you some sense of scale.
*
Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 158
.
Marianne is a fabulous cook and she provides recipes and menus for all my fiction. Someday I'll gather together all of them into a chapbook. The items in square brackets are cocktails which I created.
*
2009 -- I am taking an extended vacation from science fiction. Will I ever return to it? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I could spend the rest of my life writing science fantasy without anyone being the wiser.
n.b. -- ask M. for a recipe for human clone cutlets (& consommé!)
& open file:
-- haunch of unicorn
-- the russalka's picnic
-- [martuna]
-- [comedian]
Marianne is a fabulous cook and she provides recipes and menus for all my fiction. Someday I'll gather together all of them into a chapbook. The items in square brackets are cocktails which I created.
*
August 14, 2011
APPEARANCES -- Sunday Update
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August 19-21 Renovation (Worldcon) Reno, NV
Sept. 10 The Spiral Bookcase (signing) Manayunk Philadelphia
Sept. 21 KGB Bar (reading) NYC
November 10 Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza (reading)
NYC
And in 2012 . . .
Aug. 31- Sept. 2 Chicon 7 Chicago
Above: Friday I went around taking pictures of shadows. I only kept this one. It's of a tree in the courtyard of the Brandywine River Museum.
*
August 19-21 Renovation (Worldcon) Reno, NV
Saturday
Sat 11:00 - 12:00, Autographing: Michael Swanwick Sat 11:00 Hall 2 Autographs (RSCC)
Sat 12:00 - 13:00, The Craft of Writing Short Science Fiction and FantasyA SF or fantasy short story can be a sparkling jewel, making a long-lasting impact on the reader. The story may be serious or comic, a pleasure to read or a tale that won't let you stop reading until it is done with you. How does the writer craft effective short fiction? What techniques help the writer achieve success? We go beyond the "good idea" and discuss the craft of writing.
Adam-Troy Castro (M), Jay Lake, Connie Willis, Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed
Sat 14:00 - 15:00, SF: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Dialog) A11 (RSCC)
Two of SF's most award-winning writers discuss SF (and anything else they feel like touching on).James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick
Sat 17:00 - 18:00, Literary Beer: Michael Swanwick: Sat 17:00, Hall Bar (RSCC)
Michael Swanwick and Jack Skillingstead
Sunday
Sun 12:00 - 12:30, Reading: Michael Swanwick (Reading), A15 (RSCC)
Sun 13:00 - 14:00, Discussing Best Related Work (Panel), A05 (RSCC)
The Best Related Work category for the Hugo Awards can be anything about the field - from a humorous book about science to a biography or autobiography to a giant book about art. The panel discusses this year's nominees. Come and hear why you may want to pay more attention tothis fascinating category.
Farah Mendlesohn (M) Chris Garcia, Amy Thomson, Claire Brialey, Michael Swanwick, Stephen H. Segal
Sept. 10 The Spiral Bookcase (signing) Manayunk Philadelphia
Sept. 21 KGB Bar (reading) NYC
November 10 Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza (reading)
NYC
And in 2012 . . .
Aug. 31- Sept. 2 Chicon 7 Chicago
Above: Friday I went around taking pictures of shadows. I only kept this one. It's of a tree in the courtyard of the Brandywine River Museum.
*
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