Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 129

Website Outage Tonight and LEGO Grayskull

www.jimchines.com will be down for a little while tonight while sff.net updates the WordPress installation for their users. I’ve also killed a few plugins that weren’t really necessary, and I’m hoping that will eliminate the occasional FastCGI Error message folks have reported. It’s certainly sped things up on the admin. interface.

Also, have a LEGO Castle Grayskull, just because. This was built by Fraslund, and you should definitely click through to see the rest. I think I even spotted the Sorceress up there…

Thursday Links: Autism and Other

April is Autism Awareness month–or perhaps Autism Acceptance Month is the better approach. As it happens, I’m working on a short story with an autistic protagonist. I also have an autistic son, as some of you know. Between the additional posts & discussion, research for the story, and my own ongoing personal efforts to expand my understanding, I’ve been doing a lot of autism-related reading lately.

Ada Hoffman talks about the problems with “cure stories.” This was both helpful and timely, given a short story I’m currently working on.
April is Here - Things You Can Do.
Functioning Labels. I’ve talked about my son as “high functioning.” Reading this piece gave me a lot to think about with regard to such labels and what they really mean.
The Autistic Tsunami. A Facebook page which collects and links to a number of articles about autism, many (most?) of them written by people with autism.
Someone Who Moves Like You. “…for the first time in Julia’s life, she looked at a character on television and saw a yes.  Abed Nadir walked onto Julia’s laptop screen, and nothing and everything changed.”

Other links:

Ben Wolverton’s Recovery Fund. Dave Wolverton was one of the instructors at my Writers of the Future workshop. His son was in a longboarding accident, and is now in a coma. The family is uninsured.
Cosplay =/= Consent.
Who failed Rehtaeh Parsons? The details of Parsons’ rape and suicide are potentially triggering. Much of her story is also far too common.

Goblin Hero, as Reviewed by Jackson

About a month ago, I posted my son’s review of Goblin Quest [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] here.

He and my wife finished reading Goblin Hero [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] last night, so I asked him to share his thoughts again. I was nervous, because he had said the first chapter was kind of slow. I also introduced a second point of view character in this book, and he didn’t really like Veka’s chapters, at least in the beginning. But by the end, he seemed to be really enjoying the story. Even the gross bits. (Glowing pee!!!)

Jackson would like everyone to know that there are SPOILERS in his review.

What is Goblin Hero about?

It’s about Jig, who has to kill the pixie queen, and Veka, who wants to be a hero, but she can’t really. None of the things that she did were in her book* except [SPOILER ALERT!] slaying a dragon, and that wasn’t really direct, but I guess a giant flying snake is kind of like a dragon.

*The Path of the Hero, Wizard’s Ed., by Josca. It’s a book Veka carries around that supposedly tells her how to become a hero. Naturally, shenanigans ensue.

Who is your favorite character?

I like Braf, but he’s not my favorite. He’s funny, and I like what he did to avoid getting killed by the other goblins. He just plays dumb. Jig is my favorite. He was in the last book. Of course, in the last book, most of the people were bad guys, and they were treating Jig like a slave. The only two good guys in Goblin Quest were Jig and Riana.



What about the other characters?

I liked them. Veka, well, I liked her, but what she was doing to try to help the pixies, I didn’t like that. I think you made more Veka chapters than there were Jig chapters. Jig chapters were my favorite.



What was the best part of the story?

The best part was when Jig found out [SPOILER ALERT!] that he couldn’t get affected by the pixie queen because he would be looking at her through two steel circles*, and steel is what the pixies call death metal. It’s the only thing powerful enough to kill a pixie!

*Jig’s spectacles.

Were there any parts you didn’t like?

There were some chapters I didn’t really like, but I don’t really remember them.

Which is better, Goblin Quest or Goblin Hero?

I can’t pick.

Who should read this book?

Everybody!

What do you think is going to happen in Goblin War?

I do not know. I’d like to see Riana coming back in her [SPOILER ALERT!] dragonchild form.

Living the Dream

A few weeks back, my therapist pointed out that I was basically living my dream. Eight books in print, with a ninth on the way. A Hugo award sitting on my shelves. Guest of Honor gigs lined up for the coming year.

Forget Klondike Bars, do you know what 25-year-old me would have done to be where I am today? There’s always more to accomplish, and there are certainly things I’d change if I could (::cough:: day job ::cough::), but it’s easy to get caught up in where you’re going, to the point that you forget to appreciate where you’re at. I love being a writer, and I love that I’ve been able to do it pretty successfully, at least so far.

There’s an inspirational quote that gets passed around, usually misattributed to Confucius:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”

I’ve got a job I love, and I’m gonna come out and say this quote isn’t just wrong, it’s so fundamentally opposed to the state of “rightness” that if you put it together with a true quote, you’d create an explosion powerful enough to rip open spacetime and devour Kalamazoo.

I love being a writer, but if you try to tell me it’s not work, I’ll send goblins to eat your feet. It’s work I usually (but not always) love, sure. But we’ve got to move beyond the myth that dreams just happen. When I look around at my role models, the people who are living the kind of “dream life” I’d love to have someday, pretty much every one of them is working his or her ass off.

I don’t want to suggest that hard work will automatically make your dreams come true. That’s a different myth, and unfortunately, the universe doesn’t always play fair. There are no guarantees, and some of us have far more hurdles put in our way than others. In many ways, my dreams are a luxury, one I can afford because I don’t have to worry much about more basic needs.

None of which changes the fact that dreams, as a rule, are hard. And God forbid you ever complain about the work, because there are a hundred people just waiting to tell you how they’d happily trade places with you. Heck, if J. K. Rowling was venting about the stress and pressure of writing books after Harry Potter, I’d be tempted to say the same thing. “Just sign your career over to me, and I’ll take it from there, Jo! Happy to help!”

That “never work a day in your life” quote is nice and fluffy and feel-good, but I suspect the truth might be closer to this:

“Choose a job you love, and you’ll choose to work even harder every day of your life.”

I’m not complaining today. I reserve the right to vent some other day, but even if I do, that doesn’t mean I’d trade my life as a writer for anything else in the world. But I think the way we look at dreams is unhelpful and unhealthy. If we imagine our dreams to be this idyllic state in which everything goes perfectly and we never have to “work,” it’s gonna get pretty darn frustrating, since we’re never going to get there.

I’ve got a ridiculous (for me) number of projects lined up right now. I’ve managed to knock two of them off the list so far, but I still cry a little inside when I look at everything I want to write over the next 12 months. But you know what? This is what I’ve worked almost half of my life to achieve, and I love it.

Now if y’all will excuse me, I’ve got writing to do.

Bigots, Bullies, and Enablers

Synopsis of the April Fool’s Mess: One of Locus’ April Fool’s Day columns this year announced that all Wiscon attendees would now be forced to wear burqas. “…starting with this year’s Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!” There were also cracks about making sure burqas were available in sizes “to 5XL,” and working to “eliminate rampant lookism.”

Part of how this piece showed up on the site, as I understand it, is because of the separation between the Locus website and the magazine. The website editor apparently saw nothing wrong with the post, but as soon as the rest of the staff realized what had happened, they yanked the article site and apologized. They’re also taking steps to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t go up again.

Look, I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that there are people out there who think “Islam” and can’t get beyond burqas and “Allah Akbar!” Likewise, it’s no shock to see people actively reenforcing stereotypes of feminists as fat, ugly, shrill harpies with no sense of humor. None of this is remotely new or original.

I’ve been working on an autobiographical essay, and writing a section of that piece today helped me clarify what was pissing me off as much as the incident itself. We know there will always be nasty, small-minded bigots. But once Locus pulled the article, a mass of people–mostly white men, for reasons I’m sure are entirely coincidental–rushed in to defend the article, and to decry Locus for censoring free speech.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the dynamic didn’t click until I was writing about my own experiences being bullied as a teenager.

I was a skinny, overly bright, socially inept, fashion challenged kid with glasses and a speech defect. My teenage years were utter hell. Looking back at any of those incidents of name-calling, having my books knocked out of my hands, being shoved in the hallway, tripped on the steps outside the school, having my belongings destroyed, and so on, very few of them in isolation were such a big deal. Real physical injury was relatively rare. But when those small jabs continue day after day, they add up. They whittle away at your strength and your hope, and it never, ever lets up, never stops, until you’re sitting alone in the bathroom with a syringe full of your father’s insulin, searching for a single good reason not to jab the plunger down and hopefully put an end to it all.

The backlash against the Locus article isn’t about someone taking cheap shots at Muslims and women. It’s about yet another person taking those shots, lining up to bully those who are already a popular target for abuse. And it’s about everyone else who stands around, encouraging and enabling that bullying.

25 years ago, I was told I should just ignore the bullies.

I was told I shouldn’t let it get to me. (”Why are you choosing to be offended? You’re just looking for reasons to be upset.”)

I was told they didn’t mean anything by it. (”It wasn’t intended to be racist or sexist!”)

They were just joking around. (”You people have no sense of humor!”)

That’s just how they are, and you need to learn to live with it. (”You need to be more tolerant of the people who are intolerant of you, and who are hurting you.”)

Stop making such a big deal about it. (”I don’t understand why you’re upset! …Ergo, you have no legitimate reason to be upset.”)

People complained about the Locus piece because it was hurtful. This wasn’t an example of the court jester speaking truth to power. While the author claims he was trying to write satire, what he actually wrote was another in a long line of jabs toward people who are already disproportionately targeted for a broad range of abuse in this culture.

It was bullying.

That’s what people are defending. They’re attacking Locus for not giving this person a platform with which to bully those he doesn’t like, based on an incident that happened several years ago. They’re telling the targets of ongoing bigotry that the best solution is to just ignore it.

That doesn’t work for the target of bullying. It only works for the bystanders who don’t want to deal with it. It’s a cowardly, ineffective, and downright shitty “solution.”

Yeah, I got through my teenaged years, and I survived despite the lack of support from those around me. But you know what would have helped a lot more? You know what might have saved the life of a classmate who, as far as we’ve been able to determine, killed himself as a result of bullying? If the bystanders had spoken up and told the bullies to knock that shit off.

Thank you, Locus, for taking that step.

April Fools’ Day Roundup

Humor isn’t easy, and April 1 often provides plenty of evidence to support that fact. But there are some people who do it well. This is a roundup of some of my favorite April Fools’ Day links. Please suggest your own in the comments, because really, couldn’t we all use the laughs?

ThinkGeek - I’m particularly amused by the Batman family car decal set.
Google is unveiling Google Nose, and Google Maps now has a Treasure Map option.
Dr. McNinja assembles the best Justice League ever!
Amazon Announces Purchase of English. The Millions has the scoop on this one.
Virgin is launching the world’s first glass-bottomed plane.
Could the 12th Doctor be a Dalek?
Tor.com presents the rocky road to John Scalzi’s The Shadow War of the Night Dragons: The Musical.
Surprise! Mary Robinette Kowal’s fantasy series is actually science fiction. Mary explains the science in impressive detail.
Quirk Books is launching “Normal Books.” My favorite of their forthcoming titles is Pride and Prejudice Without Zombies.
Brent Weeks is starting a line of children’s books, the first of which is One Kitten, Two Kitten, NINJA KITTEN!
In the tradition of The Force: Unleashed, author John Jackson Miller will be writing the novelization of the Star Wars game Boba Fett Pinball.

I’ll be updating this throughout the day with additional links that made me chuckle.

Grumbling About the Hugo Awards

The 2013 Hugo nominees have been announced! That means it’s time for the complaining to begin!

First of all, what’s up with John Scalzi getting a Best Novel nomination for Redshirts [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]? That’s two years in a row he’s made the ballot for something humorous. Are we actually taking humor seriously now? Come on, people. Only Deep And Serious stories should be recognized for awards! The next thing you know, we’ll be treating urban fantasy or tie-in authors with respect. WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO???

And then there’s the gender balance. 2/5 women on the Best Novel Ballot? 3/5 in Novella, and 4/5 in Novelette? 2/3 in Best Short Story? IT’S CLEARLY A POLITICALLY CORRECT CONSPIRACY, BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS GIRLS CAN’T WRITE SF/F! What happened to the good old days when we only nominated old white dudes??? Have we lived and fought in vain?

Seanan McGuire made the ballot a record-setting FIVE TIMES!!! This is a Very Serious Problem, people! It’s OBVIOUSLY some kind of voting conspiracy wherein Seanan writes popular, fun, thought-provoking stuff, in addition to helping to create a widely-loved podcast, and in return, people vote for her. It’s a TRAVESTY of democracy!!! WE MUST REVISE THE RULES AT ONCE TO MAKE SURE THE HUGOS ARE A POPULARITY CONTEST WHERE ONLY THE PEOPLE I THINK DESERVE TO BE ON THE BALLOT ACTUALLY END UP ON THE BALLOT!

Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books is on the ballot for Best Long Form editor. How could this happen? Sheila doesn’t have an active blog or online presence, which means she must have gotten on the ballot purely by being an awesome editor. Thanks SO much for completely shattering my understanding of how this process works, Gilbert!

Wait, they let Throne of the Crescent Moon [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Saladin Ahmed onto the Best Novel ballot too? THE PC POLICE ARE RUINING THE HUGOS AND THE WHOLE DAMN GENRE BY NOMINATING AWESOME STORIES THAT AREN’T ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE!!!

Three more Doctor Who episodes made the Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form category. What’s up with that? ALL YOU PEOPLE WHO LOVE DOCTOR WHO SO MUCH AND THINK IT’S WONDERFUL SHOULD ACCEPT THAT YOU’RE WRONG AND STOP VOTING FOR THINGS YOU LOVE!

Look, the bottom line here is that the final ballot for the Hugos doesn’t precisely match my own nominations, and therefore all of y’all who nominated Wrong Stuff are Bad People, and you should feel bad!

#

Seriously, huge congratulations to all of the nominees! It’s true the final ballot doesn’t exactly match my picks, but I’m thrilled at many of the names and titles on the list, and I’m going to have a heck of a hard time trying to decide how to vote in many of these categories.

Big hugs to all of my friends who made the list! You’re amazing people, and I’m honored to to know you.

Diabetes Details 13: The Sick

I’ve spent the past day and a half with a stomach bug, which made me once again contemplate the possibility of installing Mira Grant-style sanitizing showers and blood screening tests in my house.

I’ve talked before about how I need to regularly test my blood sugar in order to keep my diabetes more-or-less controlled. Well, when I get sick, I have to test even more often. Here’s why:

[image error]

The vertical axis is my blood sugar readings, and the horizontal shows each blood sugar test throughout the course of two days or so.

It would be one thing if getting sick messed up my blood sugar in a consistent and predictable way. If I knew I’d always run high when I got sick, I could adjust the insulin pump to give me a little more insulin during that time.

But as you can see, I was all over the map for the past 24 hours, with a low of 23 and a high of 468.

Not cool, diabetes fairy. Not cool at all.

The low was the most dangerous. Normal blood sugar should be around 100 or so. I was still up and walking around at 23, but had it dropped any lower, I would have been in trouble.

Here’s a fun scenario. You have a low blood sugar, which is normally treated with juice or other high-carb food and drink. But your stomach is too messed-up to keep anything down. What do you do?

Well, there are pills to help suppress nausea, which I completely forgot about because my blood sugar was 23 and my head was a bit fuzzy. So I ate high-carb, quick-acting snacks, disconnected my insulin pump for about six hours, and hoped I’d absorb some of the glucose before…um…sending a form rejection to my food.

I’m not thrilled about hitting 468, either. This happened after I finally got to sleep, but because I was sleeping, I couldn’t check my blood sugar as frequently. Oops. As much as I needed the rest, in hindsight, it might have been good to set an alarm for one or two in the morning, just to roll over and check my blood.

Short version: Diabetes + Another Illness = Visit from the Blood Sugar Gremlin.

(Also, I’m using this as my excuse for not answering email over the past few days. Sorry about that!)

Depression Guest Post at Maurice Broaddus’ Place

Two sick kids. Up late last night. Brain sleepy.

Guest post about depression at Maurice Broaddus’ site. Part of the preliminary conversation for Mo*Con 8.

Also, random LEGO Iron Throne, by Jacob Nion.

How Old Should My Child Be Before I Start Teaching Him/Her About Rape?

I’ve seen variations of this question come up in the wake of Steubenville. I’ve said several times lately that it’s important to educate boys and men about rape, because we do a piss-poor job of it. We do teach girls and women, but we present a very slanted, one-sided, and often harmful picture of what rape is and who’s responsible. We need to do better.

So how old should your child be for you to start teaching them about rape?

I don’t understand the question. How old should they be before you start teaching them language? Before you teach them about love and respect?

How long should I wait to start teaching my son that women are people?

I haven’t sat down with my eight-year-old son to discuss the horrifying details of what Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond did to their victim and why it was wrong, nor have we talked about the witnesses and everyone who tried to ignore or cover up the crime.

On the other hand, my son struggles with awareness of personal space. For years, we’ve been working to teach him that he can’t touch other people without their permission. That lesson can begin as soon as they’re old enough to comprehend it.

I’ve tried to teach both of my children that they have the right to control their own bodies. As my daughter approaches her teenage years, she doesn’t always want hugs from me, and that stings. But I’ve tried not to push the issue. I want both of my children to understand that not even their parents have the right to hug or kiss them without their consent.

How old does my son need to be to learn about bullying, and that when he sees someone being hurt, he can go and get help?

How old do kids need to be to learn that the word “No” means no, and that whining and wheedling and arguing with Mom and Dad isn’t a good way to get what you want?

There are twisted people out there who will molest children of all ages. How long should we wait before teaching our kids that they can say no, that it’s not okay for anyone to do this to them, and they should tell us if something happens? That if they see a grown-up or another kid doing something that seems wrong, they should tell.

How long should I wait to start modeling a loving, respectful relationship with my partner?

I think a lot of us underestimate how much our kids pick up. I certainly wasn’t expecting my son to ask about sex as early as he did, but I did my best to answer honestly. (I’ll admit to being both entertained and pleased when he made a face and said, “Gross!”) I suspect there are an awful lot of conversations that, if we wait until we’re comfortable and think our kids are ready, we’ll have missed the boat.

Rape is one of the most common violent crimes out there. It comes up in the news and in movies and TV and video games and books… There are countless opportunities to start that conversation with your children. To find out what they understand and what they’re confused about. To clarify misunderstandings and provide facts to dispel the various myths.

In my opinion, it’s never too early to start teaching your child about rape. It’s a conversation that will evolve over time as their understanding develops and their social life becomes more complex and confusing, but it’s a conversation that needs to begin early, and to continue. It’s a conversation we have to have with our sons, not just with our daughters. It’s a conversation both parents should be involved with, when possible.

It’s not a conversation most of us particularly want to have. But we’re parents. This is our job.

Related links (standard warning about not reading the comments applies here):

How to Teach Your Sons About Consent
Teaching Kids Touch: Consent vs. Grandma’s Feelings
Are You Teaching Your Son How NOT to Rape?
The Day I Taught How Not to Rape