Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 8

[personal] In the Aftermath...

 Thank you, everyone who has asked how I'm doing.

In the days before the election, I tormented myself with worst-case nightmare scenarios. Memories of the shock in 2020, being unable to sleep that night. Even deeper memories of growing up under the cloud of McCarthyism. Now life has created a buffer for me, in small part from anticipating the worst but also just not having the emotional bandwidth. My newly replaced knee is doing really well, but I'm in discomfort most of the time and PT exercises, stretches, icing, and the like eat up a lot of my focus.

To make matters worse, our oldest cat, Shakir, is in serious decline, most likely cancer although we aren't going to put him through expensive, invasive testing. He's 17 and frail. We're doing palliative care, which has perked him up quite a bit, but it's likely temporary. Too soon after losing Gayatri.
And to make matters even more complicated, there's another parole hearing [for the man who raped and murdered my mother] next week. Remote, so I don't have to haul myself to Vacaville. My speech is just about ready. As usual, I plan to decompress by watching the entire Peter Jackson director's cut The Lord of the Rings over the following two days. It strikes me as an appropriate thing to do after the election, as well.
We aren't facing this alone. We have one another, our work, and our dreams. Me, I'll have Gandalf, Aragorn, Arwen, Merry & Pippin, Eowyn, and Sam at my side for a bit.
Fortitude,Deborah

In Troubled Times: Facing the Problem Squarely

Back in 2016, I posted a series of blogs entitled In Troubled Times. 
Today it seems fitting to remind myself that I survived then and will survive now. These thoughts are from Monday, December 5, 2016.
A few days ago, John Scalzi wrotein his blog, Whatever, “…theTrump administration and its enablers are going to make a mad gallop out of thegate to do a whole bunch of awful things, to overwhelm you with sheervolume right at the outset.”
Pretty shocking statement, huh? That was my first reaction.My second was that Scalzi is very likely correct. All the signs are there…allthe signs that in my panic-stricken moments, I want to ignore so hard they goaway.
My next reaction was to surrender my mind to a gazillionchattering monkeys, each with her own idea of What Must Be Done Right Now. Ican work myself into a downright tizzy in no time this way. Not only that, Ican paralyze myself with too many alternatives and no way to prioritize them,jumbling actions I might take with those that are impossible or unsafe (crazy-making)for me.
Any of this sound familiar?
It’s all based on a false choice. I don’t have to either prepare now for the logicallyimpending “awful things” or playostrich on the river in Egypt. But in order to see other, saner alternatives, Imust first evict the Monkeys of Panic so I can regard the situation calmly.
We’re in for some hard times, and knowing that is a relief.
At first, it seems counter-intuitive to say thatacknowledging we are in for some dark times comes as a relief. The relief isbecause instead of nebulous fears running rampant, bursting into exaggerationand melodrama at every turn, vulnerable to any sort of fact-free hype, I’vestepped away from the emotional storm. I’m facing the problem squarely, as mytai chi teacher used to say. We’re in for some tough times, and likely therewill be a whole slew of bad news in the early months of 2017.
When I’m no longer trying to deny or distort the way thingsare (for example, Trump’s cabinet choices and what is known about them, or whathe has said he will or won’t do) I not only become calmer, but better able tosee things I might do, alone or in solidarity with like-minded folks.
This is based on a simple truth that in order to acteffectively, I need to be sane. I can’t be sane if I’m bouncing off the wallsat every headline on social media. I could, of course, disengage entirely fromsocial media and refuse to read or listen to any sort of news. But I don’t wantto do that. I want to stay engaged, but in a mindful way. I want to know what I’mup against. Once I stop fighting the reality of what that is, I free myself touse my energy and time in productive ways. I don’t know exactly what form thesetough times will take, but I don’t need to prepare for every twist and turn. Ican trust my ability to respond appropriately and creatively.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts

National Novel Writing Month is upon us. It's an international month-long event in which
folks pound out the first draft of a novel, posting the progress, getting lots of cheers every step of the way, and exchanging writing advice. Lots of friends will be doing it, many of them regular participants.

Alas, or perhaps not alas, not me.

I always have specific reasons. This year, I'm very close to finishing a revision of an on-spec novel that I've been working on for some years now, in the time gaps between contracted projects. I'm on the brink of the climactic scene, which spans 4 or 5 chapters and brings together everything that has gone before with a bang and a few nifty twists. If I nail it, the book works. Needless to say, this book not only haunts my every waking hour but has inveigled itself into my dreams. Not the story, mind you -- the writing and revising of it.

I began this book back in 2013 on a lark, one of those what-if ideas that just takes off on its own. It had been a long time since I'd embarked upon an unoutlined, unplanned, seat-of-the-pants story, especially one of novel length. I had not realized how much my creative spirit needed what I call taking a flying leap off the cliff of reality. Working on my netbook, I continued the draft while taking care of my best friend as she died of cancer. The story, with all its open possibilities -- and it had quite a few surprises for me -- gave me an emotional refuge so that I could return, "batteries recharged," to be present with my friend and her family.

Am I going to set this aside and lose all the momentum I've regained during this revision?


Don't get me wrong. I think NaNoWriMo can be a wonderful thing. I've done writing challenges before, way back when, and learned a lot about JustKeepWritingNoMatterWhat. I also think I could use a reminder course from time to time, when I slog through a period of stopping every 5 minutes for another round of online Scrabble. The community support, the exhilaration posting each day's progress, is wonderful.

But every writer works in different ways, and I feel my hackles rise -- not a lot, just a tad -- at the "everyone's doing this, don't be left out" feeling. Maybe I'm creating that in my own mind, or it's an echo of being in the "out" crowd during my formative high school years. I need to remind myself to pay attention to what works for me, and that posting daily word counts does not fit most of the time. For me, daydreaming that leads to a deeper story, a connection between characters, a surprising turn of events, is time well spent. Sometimes, a single insight means a solid day's work, even if no words appear on the page. Other times, if I force that daily page or word count, I end up with something superficial and green, which is not necessarily bad as much of the real work for me happens in revision. But by working well, no matter how slowly, I can nurture that depth as I go along and be sensitive to the openings and connections that I might miss in my haste.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, more power to you, and may its many gifts be yours! But if not, join me in writing "deep and true and slow."
This essay first appeared in my blog in October 2023

Book Review: Not Fairyland

 And Put Away Childish Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s And Put Away Childish Things is a fresh new take on the subgenre in which the beloved children’s fantasy novels are real and open to visitors. In this case, middling successful actor Harry Brodie has grown up in the shadow of his grandmother’s wildly successful and much-loved “Underhill” book series. There’s something “off” about the world and its characters—from the saccharine child heroes to the spooky, dangerously contrarian clown to the faun who never learns from his mistakes. Harry shrugs it off as being “children’s literature.” Now, on the cusp of the Covid pandemic, Harry’s life as a failing kids’ TV presenter takes an unexpected turn and he ends up captive to a group of seriously disturbed folks calling themselves the “Underlings.” They’re convinced that Underhill is real, that Harry is the rightful heir, and that he is capable of taking them all to this magical kingdom.

They’re not wrong, though. But when Harry arrives in Underhill, he finds a world in disarray—decaying, abandoned, and failing. At its heart, in the castle that was once its crowning glory, a dangerous secret.

I raced through the book. I loved the layers of theme and emotional resonance. It is as much about Harry’s longing for meaning in his life as it is about an adventure in a childhood magical realm. Tchaikovsky gives voice to characters whose only purpose has been to entertain one specific reader. Created with immutable flaws, they strive for agency as their world deteriorates around them. I couldn’t help thinking that good fantasy, whether for children or adults, succeeds through emotional resonance at a deeper level. Placeholder characters serve the plot but have no inner psychological life; they cannot aspire to anything greater meaning than their superficial roles. Harry’s “hero’s journey” demands that he shift from an “I-It” relationship to Underhill to one of “I-Thou,” extending both compassion and responsibility to the magical realm and its folk. My favorite of these was the former-villain spider, Smackersnack, who has found her way into the real world as a computer programmer and abdicates the role of eternal monster. I rather like her.

Recommended.

Book Review: Murder on a Jovian Colony

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older (Tor)

I love the premise of this novella: a murder mystery set on a colony circling Jupiter, the last remnants of human civilization after the collapse of Earth’s ecology.  Against the backdrop of the storm-wracked gas giant, linked platforms grow crops, house communities, and provide nooks of academic research aimed at devising the perfect ecology once it is safe to re-seed Earth with life. Cool, huh?

When a man goes missing and it’s feared he has either jumped or been pushed off a platform, to fall endlessly in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the case falls to Investigator Mossa. This leads her to her old lover, Pleiti, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. The two of them are on the chase while exploring the resurrection of their old relationship. There are lots of plot twists and revelations along the way.

Despite the wildly exotic setting, I struggled to connect with the characters and their motivations.  Mossa is enigmatic and aloof, emotionally opaque; that’s supposed to be part of her character. The contrast with Pleiti, who is highly emotional, shows how their different strengths combine to solve the mystery. However, Mossa’s distant, intellectual approach is not limited to her own viewpoint and work. It’s hard to imagine her as having feelings about anything. This bleeds into the crux of Pleiti’s work, indeed the decision the entire Jovian colony must make: what is the best way to design a rejuvenated Earth ecology? Put together known species, available in platform zoos, and let adaptation create new species and relationships, taking the risk that the combinations will fail? This approach would save enormous amounts of time, hastening the return to Earth. Or meticulously craft a system that replicates what thrived on Earth (“the mimicking of known successes” in the title), even though you can never be certain you got it right? And that it would take far longer, risking the extinction of preserved samples?

It’s a fascinating question, and the division of opinions drives the murder plot. Or ought to, because it’s presented as a distant, academic discussion, as dry and dusty as the university chambers. Therein lies my issue with this book. There’s too much relative emotional weight on the will-they-won’t-they relationship and almost none on the question upon which rests the fate of a future return to Earth. Nevertheless, the setting is fresh and original, the prose is clear, and the plot moves right along.

 

Guest Post: A Story’s Genesis: The Wind’s Kiss, by Dave Smeds

Readers often ask where the idea for a story came from. Here, veteran fantasy author Dave Smeds offers a peek behind the scenes in the creation of his wonderful short fiction piece, "The Wind's Kiss." Its first publication was in Lace and Blade 4, which I edited. It's a marvelous story, exquisitely written, full of pitch-perfect heart. Now it's also available in Dave's collection Swords, Magic, and Heart (see the cover below). 

A Story’s Genesis: The Wind’s Kiss
by Dave Smeds

The headstone — as you can see in the photograph I’ve included here — stood alone, at least thirty paces from any other marker in the little one-acre graveyard. Still, it was there, intact and still upright, and I was grateful for that fact. The cemetery had been used for less than four decades, from its founding in 1881 to the final burial in 1920. Once the small chapel on the accompanying acre ceased to exist, no one consigned their loved ones to rest there. The place became so forgotten that its decorative lilac bushes grew into a huge patch, concealing nearly all of the stones. People would drive right and be unaware of the nature of the site, even though they could have thrown a tennis ball out a window and the ball could easily have landed on one of the graves. Nowadays local volunteers keep the shrubbery trimmed and mow the turf. If not for that, even I, who knew where to go, might have struggled to find it.

I had always meant to stop there, sooner or later. The problem was, I had kept saying to myself that I would do it when I happened to be passing through Nebraska. But given that I live in California and always have, I reached my sixtieth birthday having found no occasion in my adult life when I had cause to be “just passing through” Nebraska. My path-of-least-resistance approach was inadequate. I had to make the goal a bucket-list item.

In 2016, I was in Kansas City, MO to attend the World Science Fiction Convention. My wife joined me on the final day, and the next morning off we went on a long, snaking course to visit family graves in not only Nebraska, but South Dakota and Iowa as well — all three of them states outside the scope of previous explorations on my part, or hers. We arrived at the lonely little graveyard on the third day, reaching it about ten minutes after we had rolled through the forlorn village of Creighton, population 1125. After paying our respects, we would go north about three miles to Winnetoon, population 63. Vacant as those communities were, we would see encounter smaller ones the next day, including, as we crossed into South Dakota, the hamlet of Wewela, population FIVE.

It may sound like I’m being dismissive of these places. Quite the contrary. They all held meaning for me. Each time we stopped in some isolated, nearly-abandoned locale on that road trip, we were acknowledging a site where my kinfolk of dead-and-gone generations had resided, and in many cases, where they had gone through some of the key experiences of their lives. In the case of the relative commemorated by the headstone, it was where she had lived her entire life. If, that is, you can call five months an entire life. She is described on the stone as “Infant Warner, dau. of C.A. and M.E. Warner.” She was afflicted in some drastic way from birth. It was obvious to her parents she would not have a lengthy life, hence their choice not to give her a name.

“C.A. Warner was Charles A. Warner, the youngest brother of my great-grandfather John Warner. Charley and his wife Mary Elizabeth Maurer had come in 1884 and settled upon a homestead a mile northwest of the little cemetery. They brought along their three little girls, welcoming a fourth daughter in 1886 and then suffering the loss of “Infant Warner” two years after that. Arriving with them in 1884, and founding an adjacent homestead, was Charley’s sister, Minta Warner and her husband, John Ladd, and their kids. Plus, and most important to me, the two young couples brought along sixty-year-old widow Marancy Alexander Warner, my great great grandmother, the mother of Minta and Charley. Of all the graves I visited on that trip, the only one that belonged to a direct ancestor was that of Marancy. I had already over the years paid my respects at the graves of my mother’s other seven great-grandparents, and with my father’s great-grandparents’ graves out of convenient reach because they are located in Finland, you can see one reason why standing represented a checking-off from the bucket list. “Paying my respects” isn’t just a phrase for me. It is a privilege and a duty, and I needed to honor each and every one of the members of that generation. Now I finally had.

Life in Nebraska had been hard. The worst of it was the drought that plagued the area for five years in the first half of the 1890s. Across the state, most homesteaders who had come in the 1880s, moved on. That was the case with Minta and John Ladd. By the mid-1890s they turned their acreage over to Charley and Mary and retreated into Creighton, and later went on to Hot Springs, SD. Mary would ultimately keep trying to maintain the double-sized farm into the late 1910s before she gave up and moved back to Illinois. Charley was only there with her for the first part of that stretch. He developed stomach cancer and died in 1898. Marancy perished in 1901. By the time of those deaths, the family was too destitute to afford to have a stonecutter create a headstone, much less two. Charley and Marancy are buried on either side of Infant Warner, but you wouldn’t know it from visiting the cemetery. I knew it from family correspondence. That was another reason why I felt compelled to pay the visit. No locals would have cause to engage in a gesture toward my great great grandmother’s resting place. There is no visible sign a grave is there to be acknowledged.

As I stood there beside that surviving marker, I looked out across the landscape. Even if you’ve never been to Nebraska, you know it’s flat. There are places where a ridgeline pretends to poke skyward, and there are streambeds that cut into the terrain. None of that stops the wind. It typically comes from the northwest, given energy by the jetstream. It caressed me. I couldn’t help but feel as though the land was alive, and the wind its means of expression.

And there was the genesis of a story. I would go on to compose a tale of an imaginary realm in which the wind is conscious — a lifeform that dominates what I chose to call the Folded Prairie, and influences the lives of the humans who share the territory.

The tale has more to it than the setting, of course. It’s a romance, and a story of fortitude, and a paean to the bond between a parent and a child. But the characters, the plot, the tone, the subject matter, all flowed naturally from me as soon as I had the place envisioned in my mind’s eye. In many ways I believe it was a story I was destined to write, and of all of the hundreds of stories I’ve written, it is my favorite. I call it “The Wind’s Kiss.” It is the opening piece in my new collection Swords, Magic, and Heart, available from Book View Café (and elsewhere) forty-eight hours after this blog goes up.

A personal note from Deborah

Lovely friends, I haven't been around much lately except for the occasional book review or shared post. I've been dealing with a ton of LifeStuff, including taking care of a basal cell carcinoma (excised, clear margins, yay!) and upcoming knee replacement surgery, which is scheduled for first thing Monday (Oct. 14) morning. I expect to come home the same day, assuming I can eat, walk, and pee. (Isn't there a book by that title?)

Good thoughts are always welcome. Meanwhile, take good care of yourselves and tell the folk who are important to you that you love them.

Blessings, Deborah

Guest Post: Writer Brain: Artificial Not So Intelligence, by Judith Tarr

Writer Brain: Artificial Not So Intelligence by Judith Tarr

The authorsphere has been rumbling for a while about the hot! new! shiny! tech! that has all the bros so excited they’re shoving it into everything and making it difficult to impossible to opt out. Generative AI is supposed to save the world. Take the work out of work. Replace the struggling human brain with a set of prompts. Instant art, hardly any waiting.

This isn’t the artificial sentience of Murderbot or the Justice of Toren or even Star Trek’s Computer. It’s basically a wood chipper, but for words and images. Dump them all in, hope something useful comes out.

The problem is, at this stage in its evolution, what’s mostly coming out is garbage. A book on mushrooms that labels a deadly variety safe and delicious. Sources for academic papers that don’t exist, or are garbled or distorted. “Art” that’s off in subtle and not so subtle ways—humans with extra fingers, rooms with weirdly angled walls and ceilings, skies that never existed on this planet. It’s getting so you can’t trust anything you see online.

It's not just that the thing is not ready for prime time. It’s that it’s being pushed hard, and it’s being backed with buckets and buckets of money. Billions. For basically faery gold.

And even worse than that, it needs massive amounts of energy to run. They’re actually talking about reopening nuclear plants in order to generate enough power for the huge surge of AI that the big tech companies are avidly investing in.

All of that is bad in the way of absolute decadence. A culture so far along in its devolution that it indulges in orgies of extravagance signifying effectively nothing.

So what’s the point?

Or rather, where’s it all coming from? What’s going into the chipper? How is it being trained to come out with its confident pronouncements of, all too often, deceptive nonsense?

That’s where the authorsphere, and the artistsphere along with it, is raising some good and holy hell. Because authors’ and artists’ work is being scraped as it’s called, swept up and dumped into the chipper. And it’s not being acknowledged or compensated. It’s being stolen, in a word. As one bro lamented, “How can we make money off AI if we have to pay for the source material?”

Companies meanwhile are firing their writers and artists and designers and replacing them with AI. Saving money by not having to pay humans to do the work. (We won’t mention that saving millions in salaries and contracts requires billions in energy bills to run the AI.) (Or that the AI is so messed up that companies are having to hire humans to clean up the garbage that’s being spewed out of the chippers.)

All of this comes from the same space as the guy at the party who comes up to a writer and says, “Hey, I have this great idea! How about you write it and we split it. I get 60% of the profits, you get 40.” Because writing is the easy part.

It also comes from the space that used to be occupied by term-paper factories. Students paid to have their papers written for them, either to order or from catalogues of pre-written essays. Now it’s a bot and a set of prompts.

Where it gets actively pernicious is when an entrepreneur with a questionable moral compass uses AI to generate books and stories, and floods the market with them. It’s a real problem not just for the self-publishing industry but for magazines and anthologies. They’re being inundated with submissions, hundreds and thousands of them, so many that actual real stories written the old-fashioned way, word by word, are lost in the tide.

It's a crime wave. Theft of original works to generate the AI, and cheating and plagiarism coming out the other end in massive quantities. All the “author” has to do is pop in a prompt. The computer does the rest.

After all, isn’t that the easy part?

I’m all for labor-saving devices. I’ve lived without a washing machine, and I just about wept when I finally got one that worked. I appreciate my car that saves me having to walk miles to get groceries. On the digital side, I’ll say that with all its flaws and frustrations, Word still beats a typewriter and a bottle of White-Out, never mind a pen and a stack of foolscap. I’m good with fonts and formatting and global search and destroy, and there are real benefits to apps like Scrivener that can help organize larger projects. Research online is getting less useful thanks to bloody AI, but it’s a long way ahead of a card catalogue.

But the writing, the actual art and craft of it, is not something a machine can do—no matter what the AI propagandists will tell you. Ideas are the easy part; writer brains overflow with them. What we do with them, how we transform them, what happens to them when we apply our own peculiar and individual take on the world, is what makes every story its own distinct self.

There’s plenty of crap out there. Lots of derivative work. Bad writing, bad storytelling. But if real writers are doing it, they’re not cheating. Not stealing. They’re putting their own stamp on it. They’re making art, no matter how imperfect it is. If it’s derivative, at least it’s filtered through a human brain instead of a word chipper.

AI steals the words we humans make, to make money for companies that totally miss the whole point of what writing is. It’s a huge and painful irony that as it exists now, it’s orders of magnitude more energy- and money-intensive than simply paying human writers. The whole thing is inside out and upside down and backwards.

I don’t know what’s going to come of it all. Right here and now, it looks like being on the same trajectory as cryptocurrency, with the same hype and the same potential outcome. It’s killing writers’ careers, and it’s probably going to kill the gaming companies and film studios that have dumped their human creative departments and replaced them with AI.

It's a lesson the techbros will have to learn. I just hope they don’t burn down the planet in the process.

Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. Her weekly column at Reactormag.com, The SFF Bestiary, explores the many species of animals in the science fiction and fantasy genres https://reactormag.com/columns/sff-bestiary/ . She has a Patreon, where she shares fiction, nonfiction, and (of course) cute cat pictures.

https://www.patreon.com/dancinghorse . 

She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzan horses, a small clowder of cats, and two Very Good Dogs.

Reprinted by permission

Short Book Reviews: An Occult Mexican Horror Film Thriller

 Silver Nitrate, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (DelRey)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an amazing writer, bringing togethersympathetic (if wonderfully weird) characters, pitch-perfect tropes, and Mexicansettings. I adore some of her books more than others, but they’re all reallygood reads. I didn’t connect immediately with Silver Nitrate but when itgrabbed me, it didn’t let go until the breathless finish.

Here, Moreno-Garcia throws together an unlikely pair oflifelong friends (ungainly sound editor Montserrat and tarnished but swoon-worthysoap-opera star Tristán), the 1930s Mexican horror movie industry, Nazi whitesupremacist obsession with the occult, and magic ignited by movies made with highlyflammable silver nitrate film stock. And it all works. Brilliantly.

Just about the time Montserrat finds herself on the way outof a job in a 1990s Mexico City film studio, Tristán takes up with his elderlyneighbor, reclusive legendary horror cult director, Abel. Abel convinces thetwo friends to help him finish a movie that was imbued with magic by a Nazioccultist. Intrigued although skeptical of the claims of the cult’s supernaturalpowers, Montserrat and Tristán agree. This is when things begin, slowly butwith gathering speed, to go seriously pear-shaped.

Glimpses into the lower echelons of the film industry, peeksinto a subgenre I never knew existed (Mexican horror films), and two compellingcharacters carried me along as hints and nuances deepened and formed ever morehorrific connections. By the time Tristán started seeing the ghost of his deadgirlfriend, it was clear we “weren’t in Kansas anymore.” As with her otherworks, Moreno-Garcia’s prose is strong and vivid, and she handles relationshipsas well as thriller-paced action with consummate skill.

To Everyone on the New Year