Jenn Reese's Blog, page 4

Kung Fu Family Photo

One of my White Lotus Kung Fu classmates went back to college a few weeks ago and requested a photo before he left. Of course, he requested it after class, when we were all disgusting. Still, we were more than happy to oblige.

Here, then, is a rare shot of some of my kung fu family. (I’m the one who looks as if she might die from exhaustion.)

My instructors are Grandmaster Carrie Ogawa-Wong at the lower left and Master Phil Jennings in the middle at the top. Readers of Above World might recognize his name — I named Sarah Jennings, founder of the Kampii, after him (and writer Sarah Prineas). Master Jennings is an avid reader and gamer, and was the person who first introduced me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of my favorite shows of all time.

My Very Own T-Shirt Designs

One of the birthday presents I gave myself this year was to finally start designing t-shirts and putting them online… not necessarily to sell to other people, but so that I could start wearing more of my own stuff.

[Edited to add:]

If you’re interested in any of these designs, you’ll find purchasing options here:

–> 100% Star Stuff

–> I want to believe: Mermaids

–> I want to believe: Centaurs

Behold, my first design!

Obviously, this one was inspired by my amazing week at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop and the famous Carl Sagan quote, “We are made of star stuff.” I’m hoping to add many more space- and science-themed t-shirts as I go.

The other two designs are based on some of my Above World illustrations. I’ve combined them with the famous UFO poster featured in the X-Files for some fantasy takes on “I want to believe.” (In the case of Above World, though, they stand for “I want to believe that someday we can bioengineer ourselves into centaurs and mermaids.”)

I’m using Tiger Bright Studios (my ebook cover design company) as the company name for my designs and have chosen Redbubble as the vendor, although that may change. They use American Apparel t-shirts — nice quality, but I’m a medium in shirts and the XL “girly” t-shirt is almost too small.

I realize this is a silly thing, but even so, I’m having SO MUCH FUN.

Stuff I Love: Vegan Onitsuka Tiger Sneakers

I haven’t done a “Stuff I Love” post in a while, which is silly since I love so many things. Today I want to recommend my latest find: vegan-friendly sneakers from Onitsuka Tiger.

I have high standards when it comes to shoes, partly from having a bad back and partly because of my goal to “buy fewer things, buy higher quality (when possible).” Finding high-quality shoes with no leather or animal glues has been tough. Some of the more popular brands, like Jambu, don’t fit my feet at all. Others, like some Merrell styles, fit fine but don’t do it for me style-wise.

Enter the Ultimate 81 by Onitsuka Tiger.

It’s a more minimal sneaker than I’m used to, so I didn’t think I’d find it comfortable. I can’t wear Converse at all, for example. But I was wrong. After one day of breaking in, these have become my most comfortable pair of sneakers ever. (Note: I have very narrow feet with high arches, so your mileage may vary.) Here are the pluses of these shoes:

Vegan-friendly, huzzah!
Comfortable
Minimal
Light-weight, easy to shove in even a small carryon bag
Come in a large number of colors for both men and women
Apparently they make great parkour shoes
You can find good sales online

On the downside, Onitsuka Tiger (begun in 1949 and one of the oldest shoe lines in Japan, re-introduced in 2001 by Asics) isn’t great about telling people which of its sneakers are vegan-friendly. There are some sneakers in other lines that are vegan-friendly, but only in certain color combinations. The Ultimate-81s haven’t always been vegan-friendly in previous years, either, and it’s hard to tell sometimes if the shoe merely lacks leather, or if all parts of the production process are vegan-friendly.

Still, it’s a (very comfortable) step in the right direction.

Science Fiction World reprint

In May I mentioned that my “Tales of the Chinese Zodiac” stories were going to be reprinted in China’s Science Fiction World, and Lo! It has come to pass.

I’ve never seen one of my stories translated before, so this is a ridiculous thrill. (I’m just assuming that this is my story given the illustration and the spacing of the story. Feel free to disabuse me of that notion if I’m wrong.) In any case, here it is:

300,000 circulation. Still can’t get over that number. But hey, if you want to read the stories for free, pop on over to Strange Horizons.

The Wonder of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop

Last week, I attended the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming. Here’s the description:

Launch Pad is a workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

I’ve been avoiding this post because I know I won’t be able to do the experience justice. I’ll tell you about what we studied and the people I met, I’ll show you some pictures, I’ll attempt to explain the way the week sort of cracked open my head so that, for the first time in ages, I’m actually looking up again. But unless you were there on the mountain watching the sky darken and the stars emerge from the shadows, surrounded by a group of people all caught in moment of wonder, it won’t quite be enough.

What the heck. I’ll try anyway.

Launch Pad is tomorrow. Do not panic. DO NOT PANIC.

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 12, 2014

The Curriculum

According to the schedule, classes ran from 10am until 5pm with a break for lunch and a chance to stretch our legs every hour or so. In actuality, we ran over the times almost every day, trying to cram in one last equation or one last ah-ha moment that made everything come together. Some of the topics we covered:

Scales of the Universe (the first video we watched remained one of my favorites: You Are Not the Center of the Universe), Seasons, Lunar Phases, the Solar System, Kirchoff’s Laws, Spectra, Gravity, Newton, Kepler, Orbits, Einstein, Exoplanets, Hubble Image Processing, All About Stars, Supernovas, White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Galaxies, Quasars, Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy*.

As Day 2 of #LaunchPadAstro winds to a close, my browser has 8 open tabs leading to astronomical topics I want to learn more about. #happy

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 16, 2014

We also spent time talking about common misconceptions (almost all of which I had previously held), science fiction tropes, and how to get the science right in our stories. The ideas came fast and furious for most of us, I think, and the last page of my notebook is filled with inspiring words and phrases such as “Blackbody,” “The Big Rip,” and of course, “Tycho Brahe’s Moose.”

My favorite classroom activity by far was our introduction to “citizen science” and the PlanetHunters.org website. (Thank you, Andria!) Here, using data collected from the Kepler spacecraft, we can help scientists identify potential planets orbiting other stars. That’s right, exoplanets! This is ridiculously fun despite the fact that I have only found half a dozen strong candidates in over 200 samples. So far. (Damn you, Andria!)

@jennreese OMG I'm so sorry! :-D Not really. ;)

— Andria Schwortz (@aschwortz) July 17, 2014

There were also some activities that took us to labs on campus, as well as extracurriculars such as the “Starstruck” art exhibit, a hike in the nearby Vedauwoo rocks, and an evening up at the big WIRO telescope (but more on that last one later).

E.C. Myers and Malinda Lo attempt to find the Statue of Liberty in NGC 3576, the “Statue of Liberty Nebula.”

Me and the “Goldilocks” group (not too fast, not too slow) during our hike at Vedauwoo. L to R: Susan, Bill, Anne, James, Malinda, Lisa, Me, and Eugene.

[* The Dark Energy discussion was particularly interesting to me because in high school I was good friends with Adam Riess, one of the astrophysicists who received a Nobel Prize recently for this work. It was humbling to think back on what we were like in high school, and then to finally understand, just a little, the scope of what Adam helped discover.]

The People

The curriculum is the meat of the workshop, but not its heart. Sitting in a classroom all day could have been incredibly boring regardless of the subject matter, but Launch Pad boasts a trio of instructors whose enthusiasm for astronomy is practically a pathogen. Faced with their teaching chops and the wonder of the universe, we were defenseless.

Mike Brotherton: U. of Wyoming faculty, founder of Launch Pad, and hard sf writer.

Christian Ready: astronomer, public science outreach-er (his words!), and serious Deadhead.

Andria Schwortz: Astrophysics grad student, planet hunter, and badass karaoke singer.

Also in attendance were volunteers (and previous attendees) Todd Vandemark and Doug Farren. The other students were a fantastic mix of writers, editors, screenwriters, game designers, and generally fascinating people:

Amy Sterling Casil

Geetanjali Dighe

Susan Forest

Marc Halsey

Gabrielle Harbowy

Meg Howrey

Ann Leckie

William Ledbetter

Andrew Liptak

Malinda Lo

Sarah McCarry

E.C. Myers

Anne Toole

James L. Sutter

Lisa Yee

We bonded over our plastic-wrapped beds and shared tips for navigating the college cafeteria. (Marc showed me where to find the real granola; I’ll never be able to adequately pay him back.) But we also talked about writing and life and geeked out about astronomy. We amplified each other’s excitement, bouncing concepts and ideas off each other at meals and riddling our instructors with questions when they joined us in the dining hall. There was an energy to our acquaintances, fueled by proximity and intensity, and I like to think I emerged from the week with a whole heap of new friends. [Insert astronomy metaphor here.]

Side effect of #LaunchPadAstro: I can’t stop using astronomy terms and concepts as metaphors for non-astronomy things. #shockwave

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 20, 2014

The Setting

I’ve never been to Laramie, Wyoming, or done more than drive through a corner of the state. But in one week, Wyoming won me over. How can anyone resist that big, big sky?

After dinner at Sweet Melissa’s, we head up the pedestrian bridge for a better view.

Plus, there were tons of adorable critters pretty much everywhere. “Adorable?” Perhaps “nefarious” is a better word…

BUNNY COUNT: 24 (including a rare Bunny Pentagram that we disrupted before they could summon their bunny demon lord). #LaunchPadAstro

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 17, 2014

In Eugene’s picture, the mother bunny has hopped out of formation and signaled to the others to abort the summoning:

We may have saved the world by disrupting this bunny pentagram, which @jennreese spotted just in time. #ihaveatheory pic.twitter.com/sd8kF5BemP

— E.C. Myers (@ecmyers) July 17, 2014

Overall, though, there was a stark beauty to Laramie. There were mountains in the distance, but the city itself felt almost flattened by the immensity of the sky. That is, until we left the city and went to join it.

The Wonder

On Thursday night, after a long day of flat tires and hiking and classroom lectures and general exhaustion, we loaded into the SUVs and headed out to WIRO, the Wyoming Infared Observatory. After a death-defying climb up dirt roads to the top of Jelm Mountain (at an altitude of 9656 ft!), we arrived just as the sun was setting.

And that, of course, is when things got started. Inside the observatory, we got a tour of the massive telescope, climbing over and touching everything we were allowed to climb over and touch. They let us raise the telescope so it was pointing straight up, and to open the roof. Every last one of us has this shot:

Grad student Rachel explained everything and set us to work finding stars at which we could point the telescope.

Turns out you don’t actually look through an eyepiece at WIRO; you look at computer screens. But that’s okay, because while this was going on, the sky outside was darkening, and soon I left the warm observatory to stand out in the mosquito-laden air, crane my neck, and stare up.

At first there were just a few of us. We watched the stars start to appear and Christian pointed out the big ticket items: Mars. Saturn. Arcturus. He showed us how to find Polaris with the Big Dipper. We spotted satellites winging across the heavens and followed them until they disappeared. More people came outside. We oohed and aahed. We found constellations. It was already the best night of the workshop.

And then the sky darkened fully, and the Milky Way emerged, more like a ghost at first, but becoming a great big smear of star stuff. Christian pointed again and showed us how to find the galactic center. Yes, the center of our galaxy.

Dude. Seriously. Dude. #LaunchPadAstro

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 18, 2014

It was a giddy night. I think the old hats were feeding off the enthusiasm of those of us who never get to see stars, who hadn’t seen the Milky way since we were small, or maybe even at all. After so many days of mind-altering lectures, looking up and seeing the heavens made everything both more real and more unreal at the same time. If sense of wonder was a fuel, we could have sent a ship to Mars.

Leaving WIRO was bittersweet. We were exhausted and cold and had a long drive back home ahead of us. And yet I couldn’t calm down. In that moment, I was in love with universe and everything in it.

The Expanding Universe

I’m bummed that tomorrow is the last full day of #LaunchPadAstro. Can you call an astronomy workshop “magical”? Yes, you can.

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 19, 2014

At Launch Pad, I experienced a profound paradigm shift in the way I viewed the universe. I’m going to hold on to that sense of wonder no matter what, and I’m going to do my best to spread that joy to as many people as I can.

Everyone should go to Launch Pad. If you can’t go or don’t want to, you’re still welcome to support it financially — people like me will thank you for it.

I’ll be posting links to the official photos soon (Todd Vandemark is an incredible photographer) and here are some other accounts of last week (which I will continue to update):

Gabrielle Harbowy at LLF
Andrew Liptak
Sarah McCarry
Christian Ready

Public domain photo: “This dazzling infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. In visible-light pictures, this region cannot be seen at all because dust lying between Earth and the galactic center blocks our view.”

2014 Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop

Last week, I attended the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in Laramie, Wyoming. Here’s the description:

Launch Pad is a workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

I’ve been avoiding this post because I know I won’t be able to do the experience justice. I’ll tell you about what we studied and the people I met, I’ll show you some pictures, I’ll attempt to explain the way the week sort of cracked open my head so that, for the first time in ages, I’m actually looking up again. But unless you were there on the mountain watching the sky darken and the stars emerge from the shadows, surrounded by a group of people all caught in moment of wonder, it won’t quite be enough.

What the heck. I’ll try anyway.

Launch Pad is tomorrow. Do not panic. DO NOT PANIC.

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 12, 2014

The Curriculum

According to the schedule, classes ran from 10am until 5pm with a break for lunch and a chance to stretch our legs every hour or so. In actuality, we ran over the times almost every day, trying to cram in one last equation or one last ah-ha moment that made everything come together. Some of the topics we covered:

Scales of the Universe (the first video we watched remained one of my favorites: You Are Not the Center of the Universe), Seasons, Lunar Phases, the Solar System, Kirchoff’s Laws, Spectra, Gravity, Newton, Kepler, Orbits, Einstein, Exoplanets, Hubble Image Processing, All About Stars, Supernovas, White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Galaxies, Quasars, Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy*.

As Day 2 of #LaunchPadAstro winds to a close, my browser has 8 open tabs leading to astronomical topics I want to learn more about. #happy

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 16, 2014

We also spent time talking about common misconceptions (almost all of which I had previously held), science fiction tropes, and how to get the science right in our stories. The ideas came fast and furious for most of us, I think, and the last page of my notebook is filled with inspiring words and phrases such as “Blackbody,” “The Big Rip,” and of course, “Tycho Brahe’s Moose.”

My favorite classroom activity by far was our introduction to “citizen science” and the PlanetHunters.org website. (Thank you, Andria!) Here, using data collected from the Kepler spacecraft, we can help scientists identify potential planets orbiting other stars. That’s right, exoplanets! This is ridiculously fun despite the fact that I have only found half a dozen strong candidates in over 200 samples. So far. (Damn you, Andria!)

@jennreese OMG I'm so sorry! :-D Not really. ;)

— Andria Schwortz (@aschwortz) July 17, 2014

There were also some activities that took us to labs on campus, as well as extracurriculars such as the “Starstruck” art exhibit, a hike in the nearby Vedauwoo rocks, and an evening up at the big WIRO telescope (but more on that last one later).

E.C. Myers and Malinda Lo attempt to find the Statue of Liberty in NGC 3576, the “Statue of Liberty Nebula.”

Me and the “Goldilocks” group (not too fast, not too slow) during our hike at Vedauwoo. L to R: Susan, Bill, Anne, James, Malinda, Lisa, Me, and Eugene.

[* The Dark Energy discussion was particularly interesting to me because in high school I was good friends with Adam Riess, one of the astrophysicists who received a Nobel Prize recently for this work. It was humbling to think back on what we were like in high school, and then to finally understand, just a little, the scope of what Adam helped discover.]

The People

The curriculum is the meat of the workshop, but not its heart. Sitting in a classroom all day could have been incredibly boring regardless of the subject matter, but Launch Pad boasts a trio of instructors whose enthusiasm for astronomy is practically a pathogen. Faced with their teaching chops and the wonder of the universe, we were defenseless.

Mike Brotherton: U. of Wyoming faculty, founder of Launch Pad, and hard sf writer.

Christian Ready: astronomer, public science outreach-er (his words!), and serious Deadhead.

Andria Schwortz: Astrophysics grad student, planet hunter, and badass karaoke singer.

Also in attendance were volunteers (and previous attendees) Todd Vandemark and Doug Farren. The other students were a fantastic mix of writers, editors, screenwriters, game designers, and generally fascinating people:

Amy Sterling Casil

Geetanjali Dighe

Susan Forest

Marc Halsey

Gabrielle Harbowy

Meg Howrey

Ann Leckie

William Ledbetter

Andrew Liptak

Malinda Lo

Sarah McCarry

E.C. Myers

Anne Toole

James L. Sutter

Lisa Yee

We bonded over our plastic-wrapped beds and shared tips for navigating the college cafeteria. (Marc showed me where to find the real granola; I’ll never be able to adequately pay him back.) But we also talked about writing and life and geeked out about astronomy. We amplified each other’s excitement, bouncing concepts and ideas off each other at meals and riddling our instructors with questions when they joined us in the dining hall. There was an energy to our acquaintances, fueled by proximity and intensity, and I like to think I emerged from the week with a whole heap of new friends. [Insert astronomy metaphor here.]

Side effect of #LaunchPadAstro: I can’t stop using astronomy terms and concepts as metaphors for non-astronomy things. #shockwave

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 20, 2014

The Setting

I’ve never been to Laramie, Wyoming, or done more than drive through a corner of the state. But in one week, Wyoming won me over. How can anyone resist that big, big sky?

After dinner at Sweet Melissa’s, we head up the pedestrian bridge for a better view.

Plus, there were tons of adorable critters pretty much everywhere. “Adorable?” Perhaps “nefarious” is a better word…

BUNNY COUNT: 24 (including a rare Bunny Pentagram that we disrupted before they could summon their bunny demon lord). #LaunchPadAstro

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 17, 2014

In Eugene’s picture, the mother bunny has hopped out of formation and signaled to the others to abort the summoning:

We may have saved the world by disrupting this bunny pentagram, which @jennreese spotted just in time. #ihaveatheory pic.twitter.com/sd8kF5BemP

— E.C. Myers (@ecmyers) July 17, 2014

Overall, though, there was a stark beauty to Laramie. There were mountains in the distance, but the city itself felt almost flattened by the immensity of the sky. That is, until we left the city and went to join it.

The Wonder

On Thursday night, after a long day of flat tires and hiking and classroom lectures and general exhaustion, we loaded into the SUVs and headed out to WIRO, the Wyoming Infared Observatory. After a death-defying climb up dirt roads to the top of Jelm Mountain (at an altitude of 9656 ft!), we arrived just as the sun was setting.

And that, of course, is when things got started. Inside the observatory, we got a tour of the massive telescope, climbing over and touching everything we were allowed to climb over and touch. They let us raise the telescope so it was pointing straight up, and to open the roof. Every last one of us has this shot:

Grad student Rachel explained everything and set us to work finding stars at which we could point the telescope.

Turns out you don’t actually look through an eyepiece at WIRO; you look at computer screens. But that’s okay, because while this was going on, the sky outside was darkening, and soon I left the warm observatory to stand out in the mosquito-laden air, crane my neck, and stare up.

At first there were just a few of us. We watched the stars start to appear and Christian pointed out the big ticket items: Mars. Saturn. Arcturus. He showed us how to find Polaris with the Big Dipper. We spotted satellites winging across the heavens and followed them until they disappeared. More people came outside. We oohed and aahed. We found constellations. It was already the best night of the workshop.

And then the sky darkened fully, and the Milky Way emerged, more like a ghost at first, but becoming a great big smear of star stuff. Christian pointed again and showed us how to find the galactic center. Yes, the center of our galaxy.

Dude. Seriously. Dude. #LaunchPadAstro

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 18, 2014

It was a giddy night. I think the old hats were feeding off the enthusiasm of those of us who never get to see stars, who hadn’t seen the Milky way since we were small, or maybe even at all. After so many days of mind-altering lectures, looking up and seeing the heavens made everything both more real and more unreal at the same time. If sense of wonder was a fuel, we could have sent a ship to Mars.

Leaving WIRO was bittersweet. We were exhausted and cold and had a long drive back home ahead of us. And yet I couldn’t calm down. In that moment, I was in love with universe and everything in it.

The Expanding Universe

I’m bummed that tomorrow is the last full day of #LaunchPadAstro. Can you call an astronomy workshop “magical”? Yes, you can.

— Jenn Reese (@jennreese) July 19, 2014

At Launch Pad, I experienced a profound paradigm shift in the way I viewed the universe. I’m going to hold on to that sense of wonder no matter what, and I’m going to do my best to spread that joy to as many people as I can.

Everyone should go to Launch Pad. If you can’t go or don’t want to, you’re still welcome to support it financially — people like me will thank you for it.

I’ll be posting links to the official photos soon (Todd Vandemark is an incredible photographer) and here are some other accounts of last week (which I will continue to update):

Sarah McCarry

Andrew Liptak

Public domain photo: “This dazzling infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. In visible-light pictures, this region cannot be seen at all because dust lying between Earth and the galactic center blocks our view.”

Thoughts on X-Men: Days of Future Past (Spoilers)

Note: This post contains spoilers for X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Also note: I grew up reading the X-Men and for most of my life, they’ve been my favorite superhero team. I’m invested in this.

X-Men: First Class made me incredibly angry and sad, and I hoped that X-Men: Days of Future Past would not show such obvious disdain for woman and people of color. And it doesn’t! But mostly by not including women or people of color at all.

The movie has a frame story that takes place in the future. That team — and they do, indeed, act like a team, has some great characters: Storm, Kitty Pryde, Sunspot, Colossus, Blink, Warpath, Iceman, Wolverine, Charles Xavier, and Magneto. If the entire movie had been about them, I would have cheered.

However, it isn’t. The frame story is mostly doomed fight scenes wherein all of these characters die. Without saying anything. Repeatedly. The ones that do get actual dialogue (aside from basic one-liners) are Charles, Magneto, Kitty, Iceman, and Wolverine — except for Colossus (who’s Russian, so I guess he doesn’t rate), that’s all the white characters.

Together, they decide to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time. It should have been Kitty Pryde’s. But instead of getting to star in this movie, Kitty (Ellen Page) gets to sit there and enable Wolverine’s quest, with a power she doesn’t even possess in the comics.

–> See “Why is Wolverine Doing All the Stuff I Already Did?” in Slate

In the seventies, where the bulk of the movie actually takes place, we have this team of X-Men: Wolverine, Beast (who is inexplicably in “human” form for most of this, exhibiting a power I do not remember from the comics and in direct contradiction to the themes of X-Men: First Class), Charles Xavier, and Magneto. All white. Except they recruit new member Quicksilver for a jail breakout. Quicksilver is also white.

This team is hunting Mystique who is occasionally blue, but is mostly a white guy, since she’s a shapeshifter. (She’s a black woman if she needs to get dragged somewhere and a Vietnamese man if she needs to be a villain. Huzzah?) For all the sexist bullshit revolving around Mystique in this movie (and there was plenty of it already in the first movie), see C.C. Finlay’s excellent post, “New X-Men Movie, Same Old Sexism.”

So, despite the X-Men being a diverse team of mutants, despite the very theme of the comics being about marginalized people, every active character in this movie is white. Every single one. The only heroes of color exist in the frame story, where they die repeatedly and say almost nothing.

Women fair almost as badly. The lone active woman in the movie is Mystique, and she’s barely on screen being portrayed by the actress Jennifer Lawrence. (She’s often shapeshifted and being portrayed by other actors.) Despite the fact that the movie is literally about her decision to kill a man or not, the entire story is built around Charles Xavier anyway and framed as his decision to let her decide.

It’s appalling.

Once again, this entire screenplay is written as a love fest for Charles and Erik, with all other characters’ roles reduced to “how do they make Charles feel?” or “how will their actions or words affect Charles?” The X-Men is a team, and they deserve so much better than this lazy, myopic writing.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the story of a white dude who goes back in time to enlist the help of three other white dudes to stop a competent, driven woman who is going to ruin them all because she dared to try and save her people and the world. Meanwhile, all other women and people of color either don’t exist or exist to die.

This is not my X-Men.

“Zodiac” in Science Fiction World

Back in April I received an email from Science Fiction World in China asking if they could reprint my “Tales of the Chinese Zodiac” stories — 12 flash pieces under 500 words each that originally ran in Strange Horizons and were then collected in a Tropism Press chapbook. I happily said yes.

Science Fiction World has a circulation of 300,000 print copies. (That’s a 3 followed by 5 zeroes, for real.) They estimate that because of the way the magazine is passed around, they have a readership of one million people. One million.

So it’s fairly safe to say that more people will read those short stories than will read everything else I write for the rest of my life combined. (Unless that hypothetical movie deal ever comes through.) I’m still trying to wrap my head around the numbers. Perhaps when I get my contributor copies in the mail, it will start to feel real.

In the meantime, you can read the “Tales of the Chinese Zodiac” online at Strange Horizons for free.

Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop

This summer, in a galaxy far, far away (aka Laramie, WY), I’ll be attending the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop!

Launch Pad is a workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

Five and a half days of lectures will cover the fundamentals of introductory astronomy at the college level… Topics we will cover: the seasons, phases of the moon, historical astronomy, misconceptions, the electromagnetic spectrum, gravity and orbits, planets, stars, galaxies, and cosmology. Additional afternoon talks will focus on special interest topics like black holes, NASA missions, and extrasolar planets. Afternoon hands-on activities will include how raw Hubble Space Telescope data is transformed into poster-quality images, and several laboratory demonstrations/exercises.

I’ll get to spend a whole week with about 15 other students described as “old pros with dozens of novels/short stories to their name, comic book writers, board game writers, video game writers, TV writers, editors, etc.” I can’t wait to meet everyone and get my science on. Pretty sure this will be my celebratory t-shirt:

Trilogy unlocked: Horizon is here!

Today is the official release day of Horizon, the third and final book in the Above World trilogy. I’d like to follow tradition and share with you the book’s dedication and acknowledgements. (I’d also like to tell you why this book is special to me and why it means so much to me to have a trilogy, but that will have to wait until I’m done traveling this month.)

The Dedication

Here it is in regular text:

For everyone who’s come on this adventure with me so far.

—

And for my first D&D friends —

Carolyn, Eddie, John, Michael, and Rick E. —

who were there when I fell in love with adventuring in the first place.

(There should be a “Ken” in there, too. Ken played with us the first year and then his family moved, but he was there when it all started. “Rick E.” wasn’t in our group — he had his own — but based on the hours we spent discussing elves, I couldn’t leave him off.)

Oh, the stories I could tell about our epic adventures! All the M&Ms consumed in basements, all the wandering monsters, all the dice bought and rolled and cursed, all the nights we broke our curfews… Such good memories, and such important ones.

And as for the first part of that dedication, that includes all of you reading this right now, too.

The Acknowledgements

The Above World Team really came through for me on this book. Thanks to Stephanie Burgis for her amazing pep talks and advice, to Chris East for his love of spies and Upgraders, and to Deborah Coates, Sarah Prineas, and Greg van Eekhout for their continued support and friendship. Christine Ashworth, Sally Felt, Yvonne Jocks, and Anne Nesbet were always ready with virtual cupcakes and confetti. Thanks to the Blue Heaven crew, led by the inestimable C.C. Finlay, and to the incredibly supportive middle grade and young adult authors in Los Angeles who spend all their evenings at one another’s book events.

My editor, Sarah Ketchersid, helped me make this the book of my dreams with her perfect blend of kindness, savvy, and creative inspiration. Our partnership has been one of the best parts of this whole process. I treasure the entire Candlewick team, including: Melanie Cordova, Erika Denn, Tracy Miracle, Hilary Van Dusen, Andrea Tompa, Rachel Smith, Katie Ring, Hannah Mahoney, and the hard-working sales and marketing team.

Thanks to Joe Monti, my agent, for countless things, but especially for wanting Hoku to get an upgrade; to Patricia Ready for running everything with style an humor; and to Barry Goldblatt for bringing the agency together in the first place.

Thanks to Kate Rudd for her riveting narration on the audiobooks and to Alexander Jansson for his gorgeous cover art.

Big thanks, too, to the great local bookstores who’ve welcomed and supported me: Children’s Book World, Curious Cup, Flintridge Books, Mrs. Dalloway’s, Mrs. Nelson’s Toys and Books, Mysterious Galaxy, and Once Upon A Time Bookstore, among others.

And last of all, I want to thank a few of the readers who’ve taken the time to share their enthusiasm (and sometimes even their fan art) with me: Federico, Sophie, Jillian, Ethan, The Maud, Samantha, Shelby, Rihanna, the Munoz family, Claudia, friends both near and far, and whole hordes of book bloggers. Your passion has meant so much to me.

And the last line, which makes me all choked up to say out loud because it’s so, so true:

I treasure this journey with all my heart and am grateful that I didn’t have to make it alone.