Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 108

Monday Wisdom From Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action.

BayCon 2016 Schedule

I'll be at Baycon 2016, Friday May 27- Monday May 30, 2016, at the San Mateo Marriott. Please stop by and say hello.
Evil to the Core: Villains in Sci fi and Fantasy (Saturday 11:30 - 13:00, Synergy 5)
Sure, the hero gets the gal (or guy) and all the glory, but it's the villain that does all the hard work. Where would Batman be without the Joker? Nowhere! A good villain can drive a story, but it's exhausting and thankless work. Come pay homage to your favorite villains and join in as authors discuss treasured villains in their own work and others to reveal what makes those villains engage or repulse us¦or what fails to. Find out if your antagonist is as villainous as he or she should be.

Autograph Session (Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Convene Lobby) (I will have copies of Collaborators, Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and other books to sell).

Wonder Woman After 50 (Sunday 14:30 - 16:00, Connect 4)
Ageism in fandom, or, Mom aren't you too old to dress up in silly costumes?

The Adult In Young Adult (Monday 11:30 - 13:00, Synergy 5)
YA: no swearing, sex, violence, or drugs. So your hero is a young boy who's just been thrown in among a bunch of space marines; can you really write a plausible story without swearing and violence? Our panelists discuss finding the appropriate without sacrificing the authentic.

Jane M. H. Bigelow on "Snow Dancing" in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Jane M. H. Bigelow had her first professional publication in Free Amazons of Darkover. Since then, she has published a fantasy novel, Talisman, as well as short stories and short nonfiction on such topics as gardening in Ancient Egypt. Jane is a retired reference librarian, a job which encouraged her to go on being curious about everything and exposed her to a rich variety of people. She lives in Denver, CO with her husband and two spoiled cats.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?Jane M. H. Bigelow:My first stories were mostly crayon pictures with a few words. I remember one with a young witch flying over the houses and having a wonderful time. As a story it lacked conflict, but the witch and I had a great time.

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in? JMHB: Darkover's wonderfully detailed world  intrigued me, especially the strong basis for the Darkovan's psi abilities. I only found the series after it had been going on for awhile; another thing I liked was that I didn't need to read the books in a set order to enjoy them.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover? Is there another story you would particularly like to write?JMHB: Another story? Oh, yes, several. As far as the future goes, I hope we'll see more of the ways that Terrans and Darkovans work out a coexistence. It seems to me that at least some of the Terran Empire might change, too. I enjoy stories set during the Hundred Kingdoms period also, though I can't seem to write them.


DJR: What inspired your story in Realms of Darkover? JMHB: I'd always wondered why nobody on Darkover used cross-country skis to get around in all that snow. Since Darkovans didn't in fact have them, how could I introduce them?  What would happen if I did?


DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead? (feel free to expound on your recent and forthcoming books!)JMHB: I recently had a short story, "The Golden Ruse", published in Luxor: Gods, Grit and Glory, ed. Billl Petty. I've sent my second novel, Children's Knives, off to a major publisher during their window when they'd accept unagented submissions; here's hoping! Former gem-thief Layla's determined to live alone, quietly, in the great trade city of Issrandar in The Wastes. She wants nothing more to do with magic, politics, or love. Both her friends and her enemies have other ideas. An earlier novel in the same world, Talisman, was published by Pronghorn Press and is now available on Smashwords.Currently, I'm working on another Darkover story, still too vague to discuss, and a mystery set in 17th century France. Its working title is The Body Under the Bed. 

Monday Wisdom From Alice Walker

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.


I have the best friends in the world!

The Adventure of the Walkabout Cat

One of the challenges of owning indoor-only cats is that they don’t always get with the program. They dart out of open doors, find ways to squirm through gates and partly-opened windows, and so forth. We humans have yet to find the means to explain to them why they must stay on one side of the door when there are so many intoxicating smells and things to chase on the other side.
In our neighborhood, there are all the usual reasons for keeping cats indoors, plus a few local ones. Predators (mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, plus critters who can take on a cat and come out on top, like raccoons), diseases, ticks, fleas, cars. Things that cats are predators for: songbirds and helpful garden reptiles, to mention a few.
In our household, the situation is complicated by having a retired seeing eye dog who has been trained to open doors. She can’t managed round knobs, but latches are no problem, nor are sliding screens.
Here are our two cats, Shakir and Gayatri. Despite having one eye, Gayatri is a fearsome hunter. If we acceded to her wishes, she would present us with a snake or lizard every single day. Since this would mean disaster for our garden ecology, we keep her in jail. She gets out occasionally, which is why we use flea/tick/heartworm prevention on her, and she always comes back a few hours later, irate that we have not let her in right now.
Shakir, on the other hand, would sniff at a screen door and then slink away to a cozy basket. We always believed that of the two cats, he was the stay-at-home. Until one day, we discovered that Tajji, our afore-mentioned door artiste, had managed to open the sliding screen door. We did not realize this until some hours after the fact.
“Where’s Gayatri? Oh, thank goodness, she’s here, napping.”
And we did not think to look for Shakir until the next morning, when he failed to demand his breakfast.
All of this was to no avail, however, and I watched my emotional state go from I WANT HIM BACK NOW to noticing all the absences in our lives and the beginnings of grief. Then, 2 days later, while walking past that same screen door, I heard a meow. I dashed outside, just in time to see him scurrying into the hedge maze. I tracked him to the back fence, where he freaked out at the sight of me trying to soothe and entice him.
Sightings over the next few days confirmed that he was still in the yard, which is enclosed by 6 foot high chain link, mostly to protect the garden from the deer (AKA rats on stilts) but also to ensure a safe enclosure for the dog. Apparently, the combination of the difficulty of scaling or digging under the fence, plus the food that we began leaving out every night, persuaded Shakir to stay close.
But how to really get him back? After research and consultation, and in view of how quickly he had gone feral, we resigned ourselves to having to trap him. Dave borrowed a raccoon-sized HaveAHeart trap from a neighbor and set up it near where we had left food. The trap worked. But it didn’t catch Shakir… it caught a raccoon.
A very, very unhappy raccoon. Which had bloodied its paws trying to escape and torn up a corner of the house in the process.
We’re not allowed by law to relocate wildlife; it’s kill it or release it. Dave took the trap to the other side of the property and opened it. The raccoon took off at maximum turbo-charged speed. We very much doubt it will be back anytime soon.
Back to leaving food out every night, then slowly introducing the pressure-spray-cleaned trap at a distance, then moving the two closer and closer. Because Shakir has gotten so skittish and runs whenever he sees a person through the windows, we have not tried to spot him. So we’re not entirely sure that whatever is chowing down on that can of Fancy Feast every night is indeed our cat. Could be the raccoon, although the dog would have let us know. Could be a skunk. Could be another neighbor’s cat. We’ll find out soon.
We are now at the stage where the food has been eaten when left just inside the door of the trap, which has been locked open. Tonight, we’ll leave food at the back of the trap. If that’s eaten, then the trap gets set.
We’ve done a little thinking about what to do if we do catch Shakir. We have to assume he’ll be feral and we’ll have to tame him all over again. We don’t really have a room to lock him in, other than my office. And he may be crawling with fleas because it’s been warm, a raccoon has been in the yard, and he didn’t have flea/tick/heartworm prevention. But one thing at a time, as they say.
And here is the last photo of Shakir, cuddled up to his jailbreak buddy, Tajji.
Stay tuned…

Michael Spence on “The Snowflake Fallacy” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Michael Spence describes himself as an expatriate Virginian living less than five hundred kilometers from the Canadian border, along the northern event horizon of the St. Paul-Minneapolis paradox. He is the narrator of several Darkover novel audio books, including of Marion's The Heirs of Hammerfell. Recent publications include "Dark Speech" (with Elisabeth Waters, in Sword and Sorceress 30), "The Music of the Spheres" (Music of Darkover), "Requiem for the Harlequin: Two Perspectives on Time, and a Celebration of Kairos, in Three Stories by Harlan Ellison" (Sci Phi Journal), and "Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Tale from the Archives of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences" (Imagine That! Studios), a Finalist for the 2014 Parsec Award.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?
Michael Spence: When? Not sure; I only know that I was doing story fragments and rudimentary stories by sixth grade. Some were submitted as school assignments. One collection of fragments appeared on a stack of monogrammed memo slips discarded by an aunt. A novel got outlined in eighth grade and then abandoned. Junior high saw an attempt at audio drama and some Man from U.N.C.L.E. fanfic. High school Star Trek parodies placed fellow high-school students on an all-female starship (all but one, that is: me. Wish fulfillment, you ask? Naah. Well, okay, the starship part was).
Why? Hm. Some will tell you they read an atrocious story and knew they could do better. I saw a couple of stories like that, even a novel published as part of a media tie-in series (no doubt filling a last-minute hole in the schedule, albeit with silly putty). But also there's the fact, at least in my experience, that writers simply are cool -- you would agree, wouldn't you? -- and I wanted to be one. As Diane Duane's enticing title says, So You Want to Be a Wizard ... well, being a writer comes pretty durn close.
I might have quit for good in college, though, after a creative writing course with a then-prominent "literary fiction" author who had no time for SF. That I resumed it later ... "and who deserves the credit, and who deserves the blame? Ay!" Elisabeth Waters, that's who. We'd been friends during high-school years, and after college I lost contact with her ... but one day in a bookstore near the University of Virginia I picked up The Keeper's Price and saw Lisa's story "The Alton Gift," and some years later her impressive "The Blade of Unmaking" appeared in Sword and Sorceress 14. A mutual friend put us back in touch, and once when she and Marion were going through some stressful times I wrote a lighthearted Darkover novelette for them, noteworthy only in that it's the first piece of that length that I actually finished. I look on that as the moment I finally became something resembling a writer.
Sometime afterward, we were discussing story thoughts, and I mentioned an idea I was struggling with. Shortly thereafter she emailed me to say she had a possible solution, and would I like to collaborate? The result was "Salt and Sorcery" in Sword and Sorceress 16, the second of the Treasures of Albion stories, and we've been working in that world since then.
At about the same time, I took a short break from dissertation work one afternoon to do a short piece called "One Drink Before You Go." I submitted it to S & S, but Marion bought it for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Worlds. That was my first fiction sale.

DJR: Is there a particular kind of story you prefer? How does it shape your work?
MS: Fiction, to me, is a thought-experiment laboratory for life; which, among other things, means that cardboard or cliché characters are best avoided. I've always liked stories that pose problems that the characters have to solve -- those with well-drawn, authentic characters being the best -- and the more unexpected the solution, the better. The problems can be physical (as in Andy Weir's The Martian, which I'm enjoying the heck out of right now), social (hello, original Star Trek), or psychological, but they need to ring true.
If you just now thought, "Asimov, Clarke, Campbell, Heinlein" ... you're absolutely right. My teachers. With substantial leavening from Harlan Ellison and others.
Also, I like it when the route to the story's solution involves a field I'm unfamiliar with, such as matters equestrian (see Judith Tarr's "The Cold Blue Light," in your Stars of Darkover, which reminds us that communication between horse and human exists already, on a level unknown even to the MacArans), figure skating (Elisabeth Waters's "Ice Princess," in her Magic in Suburbia), or securities analysis (H.F. Saint's Memoirs of an Invisible Man).
There's also much fun to be had in stories that reveal unsuspected connections between parts of a created universe. (Peter David does this particularly well, even in his throwaway dialogue.) This plus my background in choral music gave rise to "The Music of the Spheres," in Music of Darkover; that story is for, among others, the people who find themselves thinking, "Right, I did read Darkover Landfall. Why in the world would they then call the place Cottman Four?"
You'll doubtless see all of this as you read "The Snowflake Fallacy." As Shelley Berman once put it, "God knows, I'm obvious."

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?
MS: I had known of Darkover for years before I finally read it. I remember as a college kid meeting Marion Zimmer Bradley at Philcon in the early 70s; she had a table in the back of a meeting room with a stack of books and a sign:
READ MY LATEST
DARKOVER NOVEL
(AND MAYBE THE LAST?)
The book, of course, was The World Wreckers.
Darkover, besides having one the most wonderful names for a planet, is an interesting mix of cultures -- rather refreshing to some of us who've noticed the homogeneous, not to say monotone, nature of various Star Trek worlds. Indeed, Marion seeded so many distinct elements in "The Planet Savers" that it's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that the story was intended as a one-shot.
Also, I've appreciated the fluidity with which SF and fantasy combine in Darkover. Wizards and starstones, or technicians and matrixes -- both paradigms have their place.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover? Is there another story you would particularly like to write?
MS: As you noted in your introduction to Realms, Darkover is indeed alive and well and in capable hands. You didn't include your own hands in that comment, so I will. Meanwhile, I don't have a future Darkover tale in mind yet -- actually, I have to catch up with the post-MZB work. I still have your Clingfire Trilogy to read....

DJR: What inspired your story in Realms of Darkover?
MS: Not sure how to answer this without spoilers ... so everyone out there please feel free to skip this section before reading the story. Ye've been warned ...
When we got the invitation to contribute, I told Lisa I wanted to explore the Overworld -- an idea used in various Darkover novels, to the extent of actually building a Tower there. Today we talk about the world of atoms and the world of digits (i.e., cyberspace), but the Overworld stands apart from both. It's a world in which mental activity is "real." We could call it the world of minds or, if you like, of souls. (I almost entitled the story "Noöscape" but, happily, relented -- imagine a demented voice from the shadows cackling, "No escape from the noöscape! Heeheehee..." And calling it "Psychoscape" would probably have conjured up the ghost of Robert Bloch, and then we'd be sorry.) It truly comes into its own when those souls meet and interact, so perhaps we could call it the world of interpersonal connections.
In fact, this is a concept that has fascinated me for some years, ever since I said, "Here I am!" to someone on the telephone and immediately wondered, "Wait. Where is 'here'?" For it was true: I wasn't physically "here" where that other person was, nor was he where I was, yet for the immediate purpose we were both "here," together in something I thereafter called "phonespace." You and I, like so many before us, are speaking to the reader in "bookspace" -- the limits of which spit in the eye of time. And then there's "cyberspace," which is likewise meaningless without connection; for want of that you'd be just one person fiddling with a keyboard. All of which means that the interaction of persons involves something that ignores our usual assumptions about place, time, and so forth. (Incidentally, that affects questions about the location and nature of heaven and hell -- in both of which I firmly believe.)
And for fun, I wanted to try telling a Darkover story that didn't look like a Darkover story, and in fact, very little of the action takes place on Darkover itself. The more interesting way to explore the Overworld, it seemed, would be from the viewpoint of someone who had no idea whatsoever what it was -- and what better candidate than a Terranan? The story evolved, and when it seemed clear how a young girl of Terran extraction might best cope with her situation, I realized that the story was also an homage to two creators from my younger days, John Broome and Gil Kane (plus, more recently, Geoff Johns).
But then came the question: how the heck would her predicament come about in the first place? That led to some reasoning that gave rise to the story's title and put its date considerably prior to the Compact era.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?
MS: Recently, Elisabeth and I wrote "Dark Speech" for Sword and Sorceress 30; it's set in the Treasures of Albion world and does allude both to magic and a sword (the latter being standard issue for the city cops) but more directly addresses academia, with our usual grin and cocked eyebrow. I've also turned "One Drink Before You Go" into an audio script, if any producers out there are looking for material...
At least two more Treasures stories are now in process. One addresses the Treasure guarded by Lord Logas, a senior faculty member in the College of Wizardry at the University of Albion. The other features Magistrix Judith from "They that Watch" (S & S 27), chancellor at the University and an equestrienne in her own right. While not a wizard herself, she nonetheless brings a unique background to the school.
There's also a novel taking form -- my response to the "many-worlds hypothesis" of quantum mechanics -- if I can get a handle on it. We shall see.

Monday Wisdom From Simone Signoret

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.


Really, would you want to be with someone you had to chain yourself to?

Leslie Fish on “Old Purity” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Leslie Fish says she learned to sing and to read at a very young age, playing guitar at sixteen, and writing the first of hundreds of songs shortly thereafter, including settings of Rudyard Kipling's poetry and the “all-time most notorious” Star Trek filksong ever written: “Banned From Argo”. She’s recorded a number of albums and composed songs, both alone and collaborative, on albums from every major filk label. She was elected to the Filk Hall Of Fame as one of the first inductees. In college, she majored in English and minoring in psychology, protest and politics, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and did psychology counseling for veterans. Her other jobs included railroad yard clerk, go-go dancer, and social worker. She currently lives in Arizona with her husband Rasty and a variable number of cats, which she breeds for intelligence.
Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?
Leslie Fish: As soon as I learned to write, I started writing stories, jokes, songs, poems, anything I could put on paper. I'd always loved storytelling, and writing was a way of preserving a story, plain and simple.

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover.LF: I was poking through a local bookstore and came across The Sword of Aldones in paperback -- and I was hooked.

DJR: What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?LF: I was fascinated with the idea of a society of psychics, complete with a technology of psionics.  And of course there were all the other fascinating intelligent beings on the planet.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover?LF: Expanding!  My latest story is about one of the native non-human(?) species plotting and politicking to survive and succeed in the aftermath of the Terran Empire.  I can imagine countless tales about the human and non-human Darkovans dealing with that future.

DJR: Is there another story you would particularly like to write?LF: Oh yes, and I'm outlining it right now.

DJR: What inspired your story in Realms of Darkover?LF: Would you believe, its roots are in the very first Darkover novel I ever read?  Even with the Terran authority gone, Darkover isn't an isolated world; it has neighbors, and used to have trade with them.  Any consideration of Darkover's future would have to deal with them.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead? LF: I have a novella -- "Revocare" -- out at Smashwords, and soon to be elsewhere too.  After that, I'm looking forward to the reissue -- and better marketing, I hope -- of my fantasy novel, Of Elven Blood.  And of course I'm working on another Darkover story.

Monday Wisdom From Mary Pickford

This thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.



When I read this, I think of how babies learn to walk -- by falling down a lot! Fortunately for the human race, we are too darn stubborn to let that stop us from trying again.

Original Vision vs. Compromising With the Market

A recent discussion with a fairly new, immensely talented writer highlighted for me a dilemma that most of us will face sooner or later. What do we do when what we really want to write, when the stories that catch on fire in our imagination, do not fit into a neat marketing niche? All of us fall somewhere along the spectrum from safely, predictably commercial to unclassifiable, idiosyncratic, and therefore of no interest to traditional publishers. One highly successful genre writer confided in me that her fantastic sales numbers were the luck of the draw. “I happen to write stories that are commercial and draw a large audience,” she said. “It's my natural authorial voice.”

I also know writers who are so original in their vision and so delightfully quirky in their execution that editors throw up their hands in frustration because although they adore this author’s work and see the author as the next great literary voice, they cannot envision a way to market it. In the best of times, such authors found a home in the midlist, and that still happens, although less frequently now than when editors had more power (and the freedom to discover and nurture new authors).

If you believe in your work, how can you be sure but this is not infatuation with your own words but that your work truly is of high quality? Every writer I know goes through spasms of self-doubt. Writing requires a bizarre combination of megalomania and crushing self-doubt. We need the confidence to follow our flights of fancy, and at the same time, we need to regard our creations with a critical eye. Trusted readers, including workshops like Clarion and Clarion West, critique groups, fearless peers, and freelance editors can give us invaluable feedback on whether our work really is as good as we think it might be. Of course, they can be wrong. It may be that what we are trying to do falls so far outside conventional parameters that only we can judge its value. It may also be that we see on the page not what is actually there but what we imagined and hoped.
Assuming that we are writing from our hearts and that the product of our creative labors is indeed extraordinary, what are we to do when faced with closed doors and regretful rejection letters? As discouraging as this situation seems, we do have choices. We writers are no longer solely dependent upon traditional publishers. We live in an era where writers can become publishers, and can produce excellent quality books, both in digital form and Print On Demand.

However, not all of us are cut out to format, publish, and market our work. All of these activities require time in which to acquire skills and time to actually perform them. That's time we have lost for writing. While becoming your own publisher is a valid choice, it is not right for everyone. Some of us would much rather write in the next book.

Writers, being inventive and clever, sometimes come together to ease the burden of having to learn a new skill set. Book View Cafe, a pioneering cooperative of writers, offers its members the best of both worlds. By exchanging expertise, from feedback by seasoned professional writers, to formatting and cover design at the highest standards, we together are able to do what most of us could not do as individuals.

A second way forward involves shifting genre, even sub-genre, in such a way as to become more marketable. For instance, a humorous YA a novel may be rejected by publishers, but a similarly funny story aimed at middle grade readers may be welcomed with open arms. Some writers have made the transition from science fiction or fantasy to mystery or romance with great success. They find just as much satisfaction and enjoyment in writing one genre as another, so it does not feel like "selling out" but discovering a new sandbox to play in. Sometimes they even like their new digs better.
The problem arises when what is in your heart to write does not fit what the market is looking for. Desperation ("Won't somebody please buy my book?") makes us vulnerable and magnifies our insecurities. We consider trying to write like Big Name Author, or stories that are knock-offs or pastiches of the bestselling work of Other Big Name Author. Some writers can do that without stifling the inner muse. For others, it means creative death. A wise writer understands and respects the difference.

A third option is to simply wait. Is it preferable to “get a book out there,” only to have it flop and then not have first rights available when its time has come? Or to wait, hoping that opening will indeed come? It all depends. This may not be viable to those of us who depend upon our our writing for income, but if we have alternative sources and we are not willing to compromise or to self-publish, the best thing to do may be to outlast the current fads. As an example, right now dystopic YA science fiction is very popular, but that may not be true in five years. Epic fantasy, all but unknown to general audiences before JRR Tolkien published The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, has come and gone in popularity. So if you truly believe in your work and can afford to delay publication, consider waiting for the right time and opening. Then you’ll be in the enviable position of having a stack of novels ready to appease your new audience.

There is no one right answer for everyone, and many of us will adopt different strategies at different times or for different projects. Talking things over with other writers, particularly those who have seen a round or three of best-selling tropes come and go, can be immensely helpful. In the end, though, the decision is up to you. You are the only one who knows your tolerance for risk, your storehouse of patience, and where you fit right now in the spectrum from Big NYC Publisher to desktop publishing. Whatever you decide, stay true to your creative vision and never stop believing in yourself!