Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 115

[links] Wonderful Things in the Sky and Elsewhere

First, a beautiful image of the Trifid Nebula to brighten your day:

Mountains of opaque dust appear on the right, while other dark filaments of dust are visible threaded throughout the nebula. A single massive star visible near the center causes much of the Trifid's glow.

 Thank you, Hubble Space Telescope!



From Open Minded Health: Article Review: Sexual Orientation Identity Disparities in Awareness and Initiation of the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Among U.S. Women and Girls
Human Papilloma Virus

Lesbian, bisexual, and straight women had heard of the HPV vaccine. There was no difference there. However, 28% of straight women, 33% of bisexual women and 8.5% of lesbian women received the HPV vaccine. That’s 8.5% of lesbians vs 28-33% of non-lesbian women. Why?? Lesbians are at risk for HPV infection too!

In case you despaired of there being no new animal species left to be discovered, here is a beautiful new species of lemur:

About the size of a small squirrel, the animal weighs 250-310 g. It is reddish-brown in color with a white underside and has brownish-black rings around the eyes.

This galaxy (MBM 54) in the constellation Perseus isn't really awash in dust.  



The faint but pervasive clouds of interstellar dust ride above the galactic plane and dimly reflect the Milky Way's combined starlight. Known as high latitude cirrus or integrated flux nebulae they are associated with molecular clouds.

GUEST BLOG: Brenda Clough on Names in Fantasy and Science Fiction (part 2)

Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more!


You write fantasy or science fiction novels. And, unless you write very philosophical Olaf-Stapledon
type fiction about colliding universes and enormous spans of time, you have created science-fictional or fantasy characters — elves, Klingons, Martians, Wookkies. They need names — and this time you cannot resort to Robert, Mildred and Susie!

This is particularly hard for those of us who need to have the names in hand before starting to write. Because names imply enormous things. We do not notice this so much, because modern Western culture pervades all we see and do so thoroughly. But step out for a moment. You don’t need a rocket ship and FTL to travel to another world. All you need do is learn another language and culture. And suddenly names mean something different. Paul Atreides changes his name to Paul Muad’Dib in Dune. The change of name shows the spiritual change. Or open your newspaper. Some Midwestern kid moved to Syria yesterday and joined ISIS. What did he do, just before that? He changed his name from Jason to Ali.

So, somehow, before you’ve invented the world, figured out the plot, or anything, you need a character. And to handle him you need a handle — a name. In fact in inventing this name all the rest will follow: because the world is encapsulated in the name, and the name embodies character which will inevitably lead you to plot. Pantsers have it hard! But even if you are not a pantser — names are so important that you might well start here as well. J.R.R. Tolkien had Middle Earth and its languages mapped out in fanatical detail long before he sat down to write The Hobbit. But to start that work he needed Bilbo Baggins, who is not (as Gandalf notes) in any of the material about the Eldar at all. All those appendices at the back of LOTR, they were not the story. Bilbo was the story.

So let’s brood like Jehovah over the primordial chaos, and pluck a name out of nothing. It would be helpful at this early stage if you have some idea of what kind of book it is you’re going to write. Even the most general parameter will help you here. A romance novel, a space opera, a hard-boiled detective novel — this directly affects the characters’ names. If you don’t have the kind of book in mind, hopefully you have a grasp of the tone. People named Paul Atreides or Elrond HalfElven are not going to be slipping on banana peels, but a Bilbo Baggins might well be impaled upon the social embarrassment of twelve unexpected dwarves to tea.

Keeping all this in mind, start shopping for words — words that have the quality you are looking for. Atreides for example, is not original with Frank Herbert. It is the ancient name for the Greek royal house of Mycenae:Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes and the gang. Herbert recycled a name with the perfect resonances for what he needed. You can too. Cut-throat Bronze Age dynasties don’t do it? How about NASA engineers? South Asian deities? Zelazny did great with those in Lord of Light.

C.S. Lewis, a notable name-smith, did it by ear. ‘Maleldil’ was chosen because of the liquid flow of the L sounds over the vowels. Notice how many of the names in his Narnia books — Trumpkin, Puddleglum, Dufflepud — are modifications or chop-and-splice from English. His buddy Tolkien was of course the greatest namer of them all, and dipped from the pure fountain of language. All the Elven names in LOTR mean something in the various Elven dialects.

I instinctively work by eye and manipulation, as many crafty and handy people do. The name has to look right, and I have to forge it by moving stuff around. And I have a cheap and blatantly mundane trick, especially for names in volume — Scrabble tiles. Get yourself a Scrabble set, and use the little wooden rack for the tiles. Lay all the tiles out in the box lid, and start sorting. What letters of the alphabet look right for the names? You could sort them by groups — families, gender, status, titles. Certain syllables or combinations of letters look better — move these over to another wooden rack. How long should each name be? Long ones can be strung together out of nice-looking syllables. Perhaps all high-class people have names beginning with Vor, like Lois McMaster Bujold’s heroes. Keep track of all your favorites in a Word file or something, and you can fish one out every time a flunky needs a name.

And! Don’t forget to shove all of your creations through Google. If that fine alien-sounding name is NSFW slang in France for an skin-crawlingly gruesome type of genital piercing, you want to discover this -before- you write that entire novel.


Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest.Her novel How Like a God, forthcoming from Book View Cafe, was published by Tor Books in 1997, and a sequel, Doors of Death and Life, was published in May 2000. Her latest novels from Book View Cafe include  Revise the World  (2009) and Speak to Our Desires.

Guest Blog: Article Review: Differences in Health Risk Behaviors Across Understudied LGBT Subgroups

From Open Minded Health: 

I’ve been saying for years now that the phrase “LGBT community” is insufficient when it comes to health. It’s not one community — it is multiple communities. The social issues and health issues that a gay transgender man faces every day are different from the issues a bisexual cisgender woman faces every day. There are some similarities and grouping the communities together has been politically useful. But it should never be forgotten that L, G, B, and T all face different types of health concerns and have different civil rights battles to face.A study came out in August that has to be one of my favorites this year. Researchers in Georgia surveyed over three thousand lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer people. They asked about health behaviors of all kinds. And then they did statistical analysis, comparing the various genders (cis male, cis female, trans male, trans female, genderqueer) and sexual orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, straight). Let’s look at what they found!Diet and exercise: The researchers asked about fatty foods, eating while not hungry, quantity of vegetables and fruits eaten, and about hours and types of exercise. Transgender women had the least healthy diet of all genders. As a group, they were less likely to eat many fruits and vegetables, and more likely to drink sugared drinks and eat when they weren’t hungry. Both cisgender and transgender men were also less likely to eat many vegetables compared with other groups. Genderqueer people and gay cisgender men were most likely to exercise.

GUEST BLOG: Brenda Clough on Naming Characters (Part 1)

Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more! This is the first of a series. Welcome, Brenda!

You write a novel. Naturally it has characters. And those characters need names! Let us set aside for some other day the issue of creating fantasy names, and consider today only naming characters with cognomens that already exist.

Depending upon how you roll, this usually comes very early in the writing process. For me it comes before beginning the writing at all; if I don’t know the character’s name I cannot write. I can get away without looking at my hero for many thousands of words. I was more than halfway through the first draft of How Like A God before I thought to actually cast the authorial gaze upon my hero; I knew what all the other characters looked like because I was using his viewpoint, but he had never done the old look-in-a-mirror stunt. (When I did look I was astonished, and marked the place in the text.)

But there are a number of factors to consider. The most important of course is time and place. A work that takes place on Mars in AD 2502 is going to have a differently-named cast than a work that is set in 1741 in Wales. Given names especially come and go in fashion in an easily-charted way. You can search on it and kick up sites that will graph for you the popularity of, say, John as a name for boys over the centuries. Certain names are highly redolent of their time. Consider my own. Every Brenda you are ever likely to meet is between 50 and 70, because that was when that given name was in fashion. Nearly all Lindas are the same, whereas a Madison was surely born the year after Splash and is around 30 years old today. You therefore are foolish indeed to name your Elizabethan heroine Brenda or Madison, and if the novel is set in ancient Rome, all I can say is for god’s sake don’t! Rome, like many other non-Western cultures, had its own naming conventions which you should research carefully.

Surnames, if your characters need them, are also a challenge. An old writer trick if you need foreign names is to look up categories of people — sports figures, say, or members of the state legislature, or plumbers. You need a Czech villain? Find the list of the members of the Czechoslovak Olympic soccer team from the 1950s. Plenty of nicely authentic surnames and given names will pop up, and a little slicing and dicing will get you a correctly-named supervillain. The great Georgette Heyer derived all her realistically-English titles for the earls and dukes of her fiction by plundering maps — all the names are obscure villages in the English countryside.

Beyond that, the vagaries of naming a character are mysterious — an art rather than a science. My heroine is staying with an elderly Frenchwoman. When the character was named Solange she was tall. Now she is renamed Cresside, and she is shorter. If I rename her again to Yvette she will be shorter yet. How do I know this? Why is it so? I have no idea. At some point the Muse takes charge of the process, and I have to let her do that. A rose by any other name does not smell quite as sweet.

All names, and in fact all terms and invented places, should be shoved through Google. If someone with your hero’s name was just executed in Beijing for sex crimes, you want to know this. You say nobody will likely notice? It is possible you will sell those Chinese-language rights, you know.

Oh, and one more very important tip: when you change her name from Cresside to Yvette, go through the ms with care. Do a Global Search and Replace, but then reread it. There are sad stories about writers who changed the hero from Richard to Wallace on page 200 but didn’t do a Search and Replace. The readers were confused!



Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest.Her novel How Like a God, forthcoming from Book View Cafe, was published by Tor Books in 1997, and a sequel, Doors of Death and Life, was published in May 2000. Her latest novels from Book View Cafe include  Revise the World  (2009) and Speak to Our Desires.

On Not Seeing the Lunar Eclipse

Like many others, astronomy buffs or ordinary folks, I looked forward eagerly to seeing Sunday's lunar eclipse. We can't see the eastern horizon from our property because it's surrounded by redwood trees (and then hills -- can't really call 'em mountains, although they feel like it). We can see directly overhead just fine, and there's relatively little light pollution compared to our nearest city, Santa Cruz. So after some research, we decided the best viewing location would be East Field at UCSC. Elevated, and with a spectacular view of Monterey Bay and eastward.

Alas, the atmosphere failed to cooperate. Even before we began the trek to USCS, clouds thickened across the east. The west, however, was not yet occluded. Lots of clear sky showed between the clouds. Armed with blanket and binoculars, we scaled the heights. On the field, we found groups of students and others, some with cameras set up on tripods.

The entire eastern horizon was, as they say, "socked in."We could just make out the lights on the Moss Landing power plant, which is further to the south. The gathering waited, hoping that the layers of eastern clouds would part -- or thin out -- just enough to catch a glimpse of the Moon. Was that reddish tinge the Moon or the riot of color to the west?

I was struck by how easy it was to get caught up in the gloom and disappointed hopes in one direction and miss the spectacular sunset in the other.

I didn't get to see the eclipse, although I can easily watch it on video online. I did, however, get to watch one of the most beautiful sunsets I've ever seen, sitting on a hilltop with my husband and my older daughter, who has just moved in with us so that she can go back to college. All in all, I'd pick the evening I got instead of the one I planned.

(My daughter took the photo.)

Cover Reveal: Realms of Darkover

Realms of Darkover, an anthology of short fiction including stories by Diana L. Paxson, Robin Wayne Bailey, Shariann Lewitt, Barb Caffrey and other wonderful authors, is set for a May 2016 release. In case you can't wait that long, here is a "sneak peak" at the cover by Dave Smeds.

In the future, I'll be posting a Table of Contents and interviews with the authors. Stay tuned!

Gossip and Controversy

I have refrained from any commentary on the Hugo Awards and all the events that led up to them. This does not mean I have not had opinions. Excuse me, Opinions. Only that I saw no point in adding gasoline to the burgeoning wildfires. Now various voices are urging everyone to play nice, to not harbor grudges. To get on with the business of writing (and reading) the best stories we can. Here's a post I composed a few years ago on the subject of gossip. I should add that I am not entirely innocent, and I have been on the receiving end of some vile accusations, as have folks I care about. It is helpful to me to consider my own behavior (both passing on gossip and being appalled by it) in a larger -- and hopefully, more compassionate -- context:

The internet is practically an engraved invitation to indulge in gossip and rumor. It's so easy to blurt
out whatever thoughts come to mind. Once posted, these thoughts take on the authority of print (particularly if they appear in some book-typeface-like font). Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to question something when it appears in Courier than when it's in Times New Roman? For the poster of the thoughts comes the thrill of instant publication. Only in the aftermath, when untold number have read our blurtings and others have linked to them, not to mention all the comments and comments-on-comments, do we draw back and realize that we may not have acted with either wisdom or kindness.

To make matters worse, we participate in conversations solely in print, without the vocal qualities and body language that give emotional context to the statements. I know a number of people who are generous and sensitive in person, but come off as abrasive and mean-spirited on the 'net. I think the very ease of posting calls for a heightened degree of consideration of our words because misunderstanding is so easy.

I've been speaking of well-meaning statements that inadvertently communicate something other than what the creator intended. I've been guilty of my share of these, even in conversations with people with whom I have no difficulty communicating in person. What has this to do with gossip?

Where this is leading is that such statements can be hurtful and damaging whether they are true or not. They are particularly embarrassing to the tellers when they are false and that falsehood is revealed. Human beings are peculiar creatures. When we have injured someone by passing on a rumor, false or not, instead of doing what we can to ameliorate the situation, we set about defending ourselves. "But it was true!" is one tactic, or "I didn't know!" or "Blame the person who told this to me!" Or we find some way to shift responsibility to the person who is the subject of the gossip. Even well-meaning people, people who see themselves as honest and kind, people who should have known better than to spread rumors, do this.

I believe that when we engage in gossip or rumor, we damage not only the person we have spoken ill of, but the bonds of trust in our community. We divide ourselves into those who are safe confidantes and those who are tattlers, between those who are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and those who will use any excuse to criticize and condemn us.

A huge piece of the problem, in my experience, is that we are inundated with role models of gossipers. We are told overtly and covertly that it is not only acceptable but enjoyable to speak ill of others and to relish their misfortune. If they have no discernible misfortune to begin with, well then we will create some! If media portray the pain of those who are gossiped about, it is often to glorify retaliation in kind. Almost never are we taught what to do when we speak badly. Saying "I'm sorry," or "Shake hands and make up," (as we're forced to do as small children) does not make amends.

Certainly, we must begin by looking fearlessly at what we have done or said (or left undone and unsaid), but we must also be willing to accept that there is no justification for our behavior. It doesn't matter if what we said was true or not if it harmed someone. It doesn't matter if we were hurting or grieving or too Hungry-Angry-Lonely-Tired.

What we have done does not make us unworthy, unlovable, inadequate, or anything except wrong. Good people can be wrong. Good people, when wrong, strive to make things right.

When we do this, we strengthen not only our relationships and our communities, but our own ability to choose better next time. As we have compassion for others, we owe ourselves compassion -- not excuses, not defenders, not "who's on my side," but gentle understanding, encouragement, patience, and courage.


Photo by Rebecca Kennison, Gossips in the Altstadt in Sindelfingen, Germany, licensed under Creative Commons.

Monday Link Delights

Some delicious things to begin your week:

First, a wonderful story by Rachel Swirsky, to read free online. If you don't know her work, this is a great introduction. Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia on Tor.com. The line between art and magic is a treacherous thing.

Next, another question and answer session on writing with Ursula K. LeGuin at Book View Cafe's blog. To a young writer asking about success, she responds:

I think the word success confuses people. They get recognition mixed up with achievement, and celebrity mixed up with excellence. I rarely use the word – it confuses me. I didn’t want to be a success, I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t set out to write successful books. I tried to write good ones. 

Receiving recognition is very important to a young artist, but you may have to settle for achievement with very little recognition for a long time. You ask about me. I wrote and submitted my work to editors for six or seven years without getting anything published except a few poems in poetry magazines – as near invisibility as you can get in print. It kept me going, though. Then I got two short stories accepted within a week, one by a literary quarterly, the other by a commercial genre magazine. From then on I had some sense of where to send the next story, and began to publish more regularly, and finally placed a novel. Each publication added to my self-confidence. Growing recognition added more. But the truth is, I always had confidence in myself as a writer – I had arrogance, even. Yet I had endless times of self-doubt. I think what carried me through was simply commitment to the job. I wanted to do it. 

Talent is no good without commitment. I’ve had students who wrote very well, but weren’t willing to commit to write, to go on writing, and to go on writing better. But that’s what it takes. 

“Feeling successful” – well, that’s something you have to work out for yourself, what it means to you, how important it is. You’re quite right that very good and highly celebrated writers may not feel “successful.” Maybe they have unhappy natures, and the Nobel Prize would just depress them. Or maybe they aren’t fully satisfied with what they’ve done so far, don’t feel they’ve yet written the best book they could write. But they have the commitment that keeps them trying to do it. 

Hang in there. And don’t push it. No hurry! Writing is a lifetime job.

What is a day without a beautiful galaxy to admire?

Like other flocculent galaxies, this spectacular galaxy lacks the clearly defined, arcing structure to its spiral arms that shows up in galaxies such as Messier 101, which are called grand design spirals. ... In flocculent spirals, fluffy patches of stars and dust show up here and there throughout their discs. ... Sometimes the tufts of stars are arranged in a generally spiraling form, as with this galaxy, but illuminated star-filled regions can also appear as short or discontinuous spiral arms.

Thunderlord news

Today I clicked the Send key and Thunderlord is off to my agent and thence to DAW!

The publication date is tentatively set at August 2016.

Cataract Journey: Post-Op #2

By the time of my second cataract surgery, I was readier-than-ready. I was so tired of not being able to see clearly out of both eyes, which made depth perception – necessary for driving, pouring water from a pitcher, etc. -- impossible. I was excited rather than anxious, an interesting way to approach eye surgery. My first surgery had been quick, painless, and even a little bit fun, especially the psychedelic lights during the femtolaser portion. The gap was only two weeks, so all the surgery prep was still fresh in my mind. By prep, I mean chatting with the anesthesiologist, starting antibiotic and steroid eye drops several days before, fasting the night before. I strongly dislike sedation and had asked to not be sedated the first time. In the past, it’s taken me a solid week to feel really clear-headed after receiving the drug they use. This time, I was able to tell the second anesthesiologist (a different one) how well it had gone and to reiterate my preference. Very often, patients don’t realize their opinions and prior experiences matter, especially when it comes to medication. Just because the “usual” protocol includes a specific drug doesn’t mean it is required. Often, there are alternatives with fewer of the obnoxious side effects.
The second surgery went just as smoothly as the first and I was soon home, sleeping it off. I was struck, as I have many times in the past, at how powerful sleep is in recovery, whether it’s from surgery, an injury, or an illness. Lying quietly is more effective than sitting up, but there is something about sleeping that is even more potent a restorative.
Even though my second eye was still dilated and there was post-operative swelling, I noticed an improvement right away. As before, I wore a clear plastic eye shield for the first day and then at night for 5 days. It took about a week for the dilation to resolve (at first I didn’t believe this when the ophthalmology folks told me, but I knew it was true the second time!)
The most challenging aspect of this second surgery was coordinating the schedules for eyedrops. The first eye still required some, but not all the ones the second eye did, and on a different schedule (for example, twice a day as opposed to four times a day). Some friends in a similar situation have generated spread sheets, although I found I could do okay. I just had to remember which post-op week which eye was at.
A one-week follow up with my local optometrist, who is coordinating care with the ophthalmology surgeon, showed my eyes to be healing, free of infection (yay, antibiotics and sterile technique!). He measured my first eye, the stronger one, at 20/25 and the second, weaker one at 20/60. This is close enough so I have good enough depth perception to drive if I don’t need to read street signs at a distance. We expect continued change over the next six months. Then, depending on how much improvement there is in the second eye, I can either get LASIK touch-up (which will impair my reading vision) or use spectacles for distance. If I’m uncomfortable visually in the meanwhile, I can get driving glasses, although in all likelihood the prescription will change. The best news is that I have great intermediate-distance vision. That’s what I use for computer work, playing the piano, and social interactions. I am a very happy camper, needless to say!
And it is truly amazing to wake up in the morning and be able to see clearly – no reaching for glasses or going through the routine of hand-washing and inserting contact lenses!