Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 10
August 8, 2016
MidAmeriCon2: Worldcon 2016
AWWWW YEAH I'M GOING BACK TO WORLDCON!
I have once again fooled the Worldcon programming folks into thinking I am a person of wit and notability, and as a result I have a freakin' amazing bunch of programming this year! And not just panelling, either. I have a kaffeeklatsch (which you'll need to sign up for in advance if you want to attend), a reading, and an autographing session. Wowzers!
Incidentally, autograph sessions can be lonely and demoralizing when you're a new author like myself and don't exactly have lines going out the door. (Or, uh lines at all...) So if you're free late Sunday morning, I'd be delighted to have you stop by to say hello and chat for a while. You don't even need to have or buy anything for me to sign! I am more than happy to sign nothing at all. Or if you really, really want me to sign something for you, I'll have a few postcards to give away, free of charge.
Please note that there are sometimes last-minute changes to programming, so double-check to be sure nothing's moved in space and time. But for now, this is my schedule:
Driverless CarsWednesday 16:00 - 17:00, 2206 (Kansas City Convention Center)
Self-driving cars are being tested on our roads, but it's not clear the public would buy one if available. Who do we trust with the design and production? The challenges -- potential hacks, electrical storms, malfunction or apocalypse -- and opportunities -- to empower people with disabilities, for example -- are discussed.
Andrea Phillips, Howard Davidson, Dr. Jordin Kare
Thursday 14:00 - 15:00, 2204 (Kansas City Convention Center)
From Azad to Armada, fictional games, gaming and gamers are an increasingly visible part of our SF landscape, offering us complex characters and interesting discussions of how gaming is becoming an integral part of our lives. Our panel discuss how these representations present gaming to a wider audience.
Becky Chambers, Andrea Phillips, James Cambias (M), Peter Tieryas, Tim Akers
Friday 12:00 - 13:00, 2208 (Kansas City Convention Center)
How will stuff (culture/tech/etc.) change in the next 40 years? Can we really predict with any sense of accuracy or will there be a singularity of some sort that makes all predictions worthless? Our panel predicts anyway, and wonders what their writing and creative practice will look like as a result.
Andrea Phillips, Edward M. Lerner, Kathleen Ann Goonan (M), Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Friday 13:00 - 14:00, 2211 (KKs) (Kansas City Convention Center)
James Cambias, Toni L. P. Kelner, Andrea Phillips
Friday 15:00 - 16:00, 2208 (Kansas City Convention Center)
Authoring is not a stale business. Today's writers are finding new ways to reach audiences, making interactive websites, podcasts, trailers and games to represent or enhance their worlds and characters. Panellists discuss ways that they build transmedia works and take their literature into the realm of games, video and visual arts.
Christopher Kastensmidt, Andrea Phillips, Katie Li
Friday 18:00 - 19:00, 2209 (Kansas City Convention Center)
Science Fiction explores the future. Futurism explores the future and tries to relate it to the real world. What causes someone to be a Futurist rather than a science fiction author? Where are the overlaps and the differences between the two practices?
S.B. Divya (M), Karl Schroeder, Andrea Phillips, David Brin
Saturday 13:00 - 14:00, 2208 (Kansas City Convention Center)
If your cellphone died would you be late for work? When your power goes out, would you dispair for entertainment? In a world where people are digitally dependent, what will happen when energy fails us? Downton Abbey dramatized the advent of home electricity, the telephone and the radio. How did those advances change social lives? Instead of bringing us together, have phones increase our isolation? We discuss how technology changes the way people communicate and relate in society.
Mike Shepherd Moscoe, Andrea Phillips, Edward M. Lerner (M), Karl Schroeder, David Brin
Saturday 14:00 - 15:00, 2502A (Kansas City Convention Center)
Our Magazine Group Reading Series continues with a special group reading that features authors from the family of Escape Artists magazines.
Alasdair Stuart (M), Marguerite Kenner (M), Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, Andrea Phillips, Bud Sparhawk, Scott Edelman
Sunday 11:00 - 12:00 (Autographing Space) (Kansas City Convention Center)
Kate Elliott, Melissa F. Olson, Robert Reed, Robert J, Sawyer, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Andrea Phillips
Sunday 14:30 - 15:00, 2202 (Readings) (Kansas City Convention Center)
Annnnnd that's it. Worldcon, get ready, this is going to be great! Just one more thing to work out: what the heck am I going to wear...?
July 2, 2016
Readercon 2016
This is big news, you guys. ENORMOUS. I'm going to be at Readercon this year, and—this is the big news part—I'll be doing my first-ever fiction reading. I can't decide what I should read from! An upcoming ReMade episode? The Luck Eaters? A short story to be named later? Ahhhhhhh so many options!
Anyway, here's my (possibly still preliminary) schedule. Please, please flag me down and say hello if you're at the con. It's going to be so great!
Thursday July 078:00 PM 5 Living in the Future. John Chu, Barbara Krasnoff (moderator), Andrea Phillips, Tom Purdom, Terence Taylor. Today, if we're going to see another person, we have cellphones to instantly communicate with that person, and maps on the cellphones to help us find our agreed-upon location. Twenty years ago we would have had to phone each other on landlines, pick a restaurant in advance or agree to meet at a landmark known to both of us. Five hundred years ago we wouldn't have had watches on our persons, so even keeping to the correct time of the appointment would have been difficult–how would we even know when the agreed-upon time of our meeting arrived? Our panelists will discuss some of the conveniences, large and small, that we take for granted, and the absence of which would cause difficulties of the sort that are often elided in fiction. The discussion will also discuss science fiction novels and stories that incorporate and project modern technology into their fictions, and which fail to take these things into account.
Friday July 081:30 PM A Reading: Andrea Phillips. Andrea Phillips. Andrea Phillips reads new work. (!!!)
3:00 PM C Fantastical Dystopia. Victoria Janssen, Ada Palmer, Andrea Phillips, Sabrina Vourvoulias, T.X. Watson. Dystopia is popular in YA fiction for a variety of reasons, but why do authors frequently base their future dystopian society on some flimsy ideas, rather than using history to draw parallels between past atrocities and current human rights violations? Is it easier to work from one extreme idea, such as "love is now considered a disease" rather than looking at the complexities of, for example, the corruption of the U.S.S.R or the imperialism of the US? If science fiction uses the future to look at the present, is it more or less effective when using real examples from the past to look at our present through a lens of the future?
5:00 PM BH WTF is Transmedia?. Andrea Phillips. Quick answer: transmedia storytelling is the art of using multiple platforms to tell a unified story. Sometimes it looks like the MCU, and sometimes it's stories that infiltrate the real world. Transmedia veteran Andrea Phillips will talk about her years as a pioneer in the transmedia mines, and how it made her a better writer–and a worse one!
Saturday July 091:00 PM 5 If Thor Can Hang Out with Iron Man, Why Can't Harry Dresden Use a Computer? . Gillian Daniels, Elaine Isaak, Andrea Phillips, Alex Shvartsman, E.J. Stevens. In a series of tweets in 2015, Jared Axelrod pondered "the inherent weirdness of a superhero universe... where magic and science hold hands, where monsters stride over cities." This is only weird from the perspective of fantasy stories that set up magic and technology as incompatible, an opposition that parallels Western cultural splits between religion and science and between nature and industry. Harry Dresden's inability to touch a computer without damaging it is a direct descendant of the Ents destroying the "pits and forges" of Isengard, and a far cry from Thor, Iron Man, and the Scarlet Witch keeping company. What are the story benefits of setting up magic/nature/religion and technology/industry/science as either conflicting or complementary? What cultural anxieties are addressed by each choice? How are these elements handled in stories from various cultures and eras?
3:00 PM C What Good Is a Utopia? . Michael J. Deluca, Chris Gerwel, Barry Longyear, Kathryn Morrow (leader), Andrea Phillips. If an author sets out to write a utopia, several questions arise. Character and interpersonal conflict can drive the story, but how do you keep the utopian setting from becoming backdrop in that case? Were the Talking Heads right in saying that "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens"? And how do you showcase how much better things would be "if only"?
June 29, 2016
Bookburners Debut
Ahhhhhhhhh you guys I am so, so, SO excited. It's LAUNCH DAY! Late last summer I holed up for the weekend with some of my very favorite writers to help plan Season 2 of Bookburners. And today, the first of my two episodes this season is LIVE and you can BUY IT and READ IT! OMG OMG OMG it's really happening.
...Wait, wait, hold on. Probably that needs a little translating before you can be as excited about it as I am. So BAM, let's FAQ this thing up!
Andrea. Andrea. What the heck is Bookburners?
Bookburners is a serial fiction narrative written by Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Brian Slattery, Mur Laffery, and ME! Plus the amazing Amal El-Mohtar also has a guest episode this season, so you're in for a real treat.
It's urban fantasy about a team of operatives working out of the Vatican to find and confiscate magic books before terrible, terrible things happen. Or let's be honest: usually slightly after terrible things have already begun to happen, because that's way less boring to read about.
How does this serial work?
One episode comes out every week on Wednesday in ebook and audiobook formats. This season started last week (you're already behind!) and goes for sixteen weeks.
Serial Box is bringing the HBO model to ebooks -- teams of writers working together to produce high-quality story each week, far faster and better than any one of those writers would be able to do all alone. I'm thrilled to be a part of it, and I'm hoping you'll be thrilled to read it, too! And I've got another Serial Box project in the works, too: ReMade. I can't say much about it yet, buuuuuut I'm pretty excited about that one too. More on that front in September!
OK but here's the important question: how do I buy it?
If you never want to miss an episode, you can buy a season pass for everything in ebook and audiobook format, and have an array of choices for where to read it. You can also buy single episodes (like mine!) on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, basically anywhere ebooks are sold. (For Nook, too, but it looks like it's not up there quite yet...)
Since this is the second season, you may also be interested in the Season 1 Omnibus -- or if you're in a rush, there's a convenient Season One Recap so you can get up to speed right away.
I AM SO EXCITED. ARE YOU EXCITED TO? AHHHHH! If you're feeling excited too, plus you have a couple spare bucks and an hour to read, pick up my episode and let me know what you think!
March 17, 2016
Introducing ConFinder
One of the tricky bits of turning pro in science fiction is figuring out how to deal with conventions. It's a good idea for an author to go to cons to meet readers, editors, agents, and perhaps most important of all, other authors. "Networking," right?
In fact, it can be a good idea to go to some even if you don't have any plans to turn pro whatsoever – conventions offer a fantastic opportunity to meet people who are into the same kinds of things as you, to connect with old friends, maybe even meet some personal heroes and discover new things to love.
Fortunately, there are a lot of SF/F conventions. A lot. There are so many that it can be hard to figure out an overall con schedule that fits into your calendar, budget, and overall needs and preferences.
Aside from a handful of whopping commercial events like PAX or San Diego Comic-Con, these events don't tend to get a lot of widespread advance buzz. Often I don't hear about a convention until I see people traveling to them on social media, at which point arranging to go myself is too late. And in the case of smaller regional cons, very often there is minimal or even no advertising. It's all word of mouth, and so information is limited to only the people who know someone who knows the con.
Which means fans, pros, and cons are all missing out on opportunities to connect. And some fans who might love to go to a con never find out about the event in their own back yard. You can't decide to go to a con you've never heard of!
So I got to wishing there was some sort of central resource to look at allllll the cons and decide which ones to think about attending. And then I thought about that super helpful philosophy where if you wish a resource existed, then probably you should just make it?
And so I made a thing. Welcome to ConFinder!
ConFinder is two things. One: a publicly viewable Google Spreadsheet with space for key information on conventions (dates, city, price, various policies). Two: a Google Form so anyone can enter information on the conventions they run or attend. Both of them are embedded below the post here.
I've seeded a very little bit of information, but I need your help. See, I don't actually have a lot of the information that belongs in this sheet. I'm hoping that if even a couple dozen kinds souls pop in information on one or two conventions, then before long this is going to be a spectacular resource for everyone.
I'm still open to making a few changes to the information listed here if it seems important, but I don't want to replace the role of a con website – just include enough key data to enable someone to know which cons to look into more carefully.
Going forward, I will need to do some ongoing administration with the list. For one thing, new entries will need a modest amount of formatting . I also plan to remove cons that have already happened to another sheet. And humanity being fallible, I'm sure I'll have a steady business in correcting entries as the information changes, removing spam or irrelevant entries, and so on.
But I've made a start! And now kicking the ball another few yards is up to you. So how about it? Got a minute to tell me about your favorite cons?
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February 12, 2016
The Daring Mermaid Expedition
HEY GUESS WHAT I have a game out today!
It's called The Daring Mermaid Expedition, and it's published by the fabulous people at Choice of Games. Available for iOS, Android, on Steam, on Amazon, or you can just start playing in your browser!
Mermaid Expedition is a game set in the Lucy Smokeheart universe. This time, you play as an aspiring scholar of the esteemed Royal German Marinological Society. It's your job to discover proof that mermaids exist, and present your findings to the committee. Also: Pirates! Romance! Deception! It is, if I do say so my own self, very funny and charming. Also entirely scientifically inaccurate and riddled with anachronism!
There are ten endings. "Winning" is probably the most boring one. Sorry?
Anyway! Mermaid Expedition is a special game to me for a lot of reasons. For one, I coded it was well as writing it, which I'd never done before. It's making me question a lot of parts of my self-image, in good, stretchy ways. I don't identify as a programmer, and yet, here I've written a whole game! by myself!
This was also an arduous production process, mostly because my entire life has fallen apart several times over the last couple of years. It's been intense around here. So I want to call out Choice of Games in genera and Rebecca Slitt in particular for being extraordinarily kind about the fact that I blew every deadline they ever gave me, and in some cases by several months. It's not like me, I swear! But thank you, thank you, for your patience, and for working with me to get this lovely little thing into the world.
Anyway! The game is out! Available from multiple outlets! Hurry and give it a shot, it's only $1.99 until Feb. 19. And after that it'll only be $2.99! Cheap! Consider it buying me a cup of coffee. Happy adventuring!
January 15, 2016
How to Fake Clarion
So this happened this morning.
For many of us, Clarion isn't in the cards. Maybe you can't leave your job for six weeks without losing the job and your home. Maybe you're the parent of a small child, or take care of an elderly or disabled relative. Maybe you have a chronic health condition yourself, or an anxiety disorder that means you wouldn't be able to travel or participate. Maybe you're saving up for a house or paying off medical debt.
Maybe you'd rather go on a proper vacation if you happen to come into a few thousand dollars in disposable income.
None of these things mean you can't be a professional writer. But the good news is, there's more than one path to being a writer, pro or otherwise.
Clarion Isn't the Only Game in TownFirst off, Clarion is a six-week endeavor. There are other writer's workshops that require only one week out of your life, and are also highly regarded. Viable Paradise, for example -- and I wish I could make the time for that one. Taos Toolbox is also reportedly an excellent workshop and worth your time and money, if you have them to spare.
Even better, these retreat-style workshops aren't the only way to improve your craft. There might be a genre writer's workshop in your own town that meets once a week, or once a month. And there are critique circles online ranging from Critters to Absolute Write -- I'm sure commenters will chime in with more. If you want a workshop-style venue to have your work read, and to critically read the work of other writers in turn, there are plenty of options.
And the truth is, workshops are helpful... but they're not necessary. Far from it.
Faking a WorkshopWhat a workshop does for you is hone your critical eye. Simply by being exposed to excellent critical thinking, you develop the capacity to critique your own work. But you can develop a critical eye on your own, if other means don't suit you.
Read. Read widely. But don't just take in the story. As you go, consciously reflect on what you're thinking and feeling. Are you expecting the story to go in a particular direction? What exact sentence or passage led you to that belief? What made you feel excited, or sad, or tense? How are the scenes structured? How are description, dialogue, and action blended together? How long are the sentences? A story is a machine, and every part should be doing a specific job. You need to become a mechanic, able to look at each piece of the story to identify what work is being done.
Read reviews. But not of your own work -- of the stuff you're already analyzing. When you've finished a book or a story, go looking for the reactions of other people to calibrate your own antennae. In preference, read longer, analytic reviews that talk about both what a work has done and how it fits into the overall landscape of genre publishing. Deep critical analysis like you'll find on NPR Books or Tor.com are perfect, but you'll even find insightful critique on Goodreads and Amazon.
Read bad work. This is, I strongly believe, an important part of a writer's development. Read stuff you know is going to be bad. And then -- this is the important part -- analyze the hell out of it. Why is it bad? Does it fail on a sentence level, on consistency, does it fail in terms of pacing or plausibility? Sometimes we learn from mistakes better than we learn from success. You can't watch Meryl Streep and learn how to be an amazing performer, but you can watch a fifth grade play and learn that maybe you shouldn't leave your hands hanging by your sides the whole show, and maybe you should speak up a little more.
Revise. This is where you apply what you've learned. The temptation to write and immediately submit is strong, but while you're trying to actively develop your craft, resist the urge. Come back to a story after a few days, weeks, months if you can spare them, and try to read as if you'd never seen the story before. Think about everything you're learning, and apply those lessons to your own work.
Repeat. Clarion (and other workshops) are an intensive course in this kind of thinking, but even when Clarion is over, you'll need to keep doing these things forever. At least, you do if you want to keep growing as a writer. And why on earth would you ever want to stop getting better?
Clarion's Secret SauceHere's the real reason Clarion is a big deal: the alumni association, as it were, is a powerful and widespread network in genre publishing. Human nature being what it is, we like people who have the same experiences and affiliations as we do. And we like to help the people we like. So if you go to Clarion, some doors of opportunity are a little more open to you than they were before.
We like to tell ourselves that publishing is a meritocracy, and that's only sort of true. People do emerge from the slush pile, naked and alone. You really don't have to know someone to be published.
But at the same time, it's a bit easier to break in if you've become a familiar face -- not just because people are more willing to go to bat for a friend, but because you'll begin to understand the kinds of work different editors and markets are interested in, you'll learn from the successes and mistakes of your peers, you'll become a part of the cultural conversation that SF/F fundamentally is.
So how do you fake the network? Duh, networking! Build your own. Go to cons, if you can. Make friends. Invite people to coffee or a drink. If that's not possible for you, work social media. Follow authors, editors, agents on Twitter.
And don't be all networky and utilitarian about it, because people can tell and generally super hate that. You need to approach everything as an exercise in meeting interesting people and making friends. Promote the work you admire. Ask questions. Introduce people to each other when you can; do favors when you can. Give to the community. Give. Give. You can worry about taking later, or maybe never.
Because Clarion is, at the end of the day, just one neighborhood in the SF/F community. But there are others, and you'll find professional writers in all of them.
January 12, 2016
Fast News Day
Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said that I had a bunch of unannounced work in the pipeline? Well, announcement season has begun! Yesterday two pieces of news dropped about what I'm doing in 2016, and both of them are basically fantastic in every way.
First: Bookburners!I'm a big fan of the idea of short-form serial ebooks; in fact that's exactly what Lucy Smokeheart was. But at Phoenix Comicon I met Julian Yap, who is co-founder of a company called Serial Box along with Molly Barton, formerly Penguin's global digital director. And their vision one-ups mine with an important improvement: working with teams.
I am beyond tickled to say I've joined on to help write the second season of Bookburners, their flagship serial, along with a bunch of writers I'd been dying to work with already: Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Margaret Dunlap, Brian Slattery, and now Amal El-Mohtar is also joining us!
And just wait until you see what the story is about. OMG.
Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.
I can't wait until May to share Season 2 with you. But there's no reason you have to wait -- Season 1 is complete now, so feel free to go pick it up on Amazon or in the Serial Box app. Or if you hold your horses just a little while more, an omnibus edition for Season 1 should be available real soon. (I think?)
Strange HorizonsBut if you want to do a little reading right now, have I got news for you! A piece on fitness games and New Year's resolutions went up on Strange Horizons yesterday -- and better yet, it's just the first in a column called Metagames that will be a critical look at the intersections between video games, culture, and genre fiction.
This is an idea that followed from my piece about desire demons in Dragon Age a while back, and when they asked if I'd like to write about games more often, I jumped at the chance. This is going to be so great, you guys. So great!
So 2016 is still looking pretty sunny from a professional perspective. No complaints on the front! Now if only I could get my domestic sphere under control, too...
January 5, 2016
Confusion 2016: Here I Come!
Confusion 2016 is coming! And it is a conference! In Detroit! (Actually in Novi, Michigan, so named because it was stop number six on the rail line. ...Wait for it...)
Best of all I am going to Confusion! And also I am on programming! And here is my schedule! I mean if you like that kind of thing.
Saturday 11am Crossing the Streams
Where are the lines in genre conventions and what happens when we cross them? What needs to happen to make something a crossover vs. a fusion? Do transmedia projects and genre fluidity benefit the genre? How does crossover in media experiences and production impact the kinds of stories we see on the screen?
Saturday 12pm There's an App For That?!
Is the ability to interact with online applications a determining factor of human productivity? What are the benefits and pitfalls of app-based interactions with the world around you?
Saturday 2pm Any Similarity to Real People is Completely Coincidental
It's easy to pretend that made up worlds shrug off the bias and stereotypes of our reality. Orcs and Elves, Drow and Ogres, and dozens of other constructs grounded in bigoted world views say different. What can we learn from these mistakes? How do we keep these stereotypes from bleeding through into our made up worlds.
Saturday 3pm Something Something Self-Driving Cars
Listen I don't have the official description but I am on this panel and it is the one thing I session I super wanted to be on because I lurrrrrrve to talk about self-driving cars so come on by and see me get excited about not ever having to drive again!
Saturday 5pm Autograph Session 2
OMG I could sign things! Like books! Or postcards! Heck, I'll even sign someone else's books if you like!
Saturday 7pm The Aftermath of Canon
Star Wars recently relegated all of its Expanded Universe fiction to non-canon, which was tantamount to betrayal for many fans. Aftermath, a novel in the new canon, was met with many reviews that could not come to grips with a Star Wars that included gay characters. How well did Disney handle their canon situation? And is there a place for fiction that services its readers' bias?
Sunday 10am Singularity for the Rest of Us
Is post-humanism really as straight, white, and Western as it often seems? How can science fiction talk about post-body identities without diminishing or dismissing embodied identity and experience? This panel will discuss the stories out there that complicate the uploaded experience.
As you can see, Saturday is jam-packed, so if you want to say hi, maybe track me down Thursday or Friday? I'm just saying your odds of a quality schmooze will be way higher. And on that note: see you there!
December 31, 2015
2015: So That Happened
Right. 2015! Dang. Just DANG, you guys.
While writing this post, I couldn't get over how much I've fit into twelve measly months. Things that happened in September already feel like they were a year ago, and last January might as well have happened in 2010. Or maybe 1999.
This has been an eventful year, to say the least. A year of spinning plates (and breaking some.) A year of oh-god-make-it-stop, please let me have two boring weeks in a row. Isn't that a thing? Don't people soemtimes have whole weeks where nothing very surprising happens? Months, even? I could swear I remember a time when life was like that.
Basically 2014 was a corker, and then 2015 decided that had looked like fun, so it kept up the pace.
Work's Been GreatLet's start with the easy stuff: I'm not sure I've ever had a better year, professionally. Not even in the award-winning years.
The big, big thing: I made my novel debut with Revision, which has been received better than I could possible have imagined. I got a few short stories and such published. And Lothian Airsoft, my ongoing client project, continues to sail along.
I also finished Lucy Smokeheart's Daring Adventures, at long last. And I polished off The Daring Mermaid Expedition, too -- a Lucy-world game/interactive novel that will be out in a matter of weeks. (OMG!)
I got a new agent! I sold A Creator's Guide to Taiwan! I went to World Fantasy Con and Phoenix Comicon! I taught a transmedia workshop in Austria, and briefly visited Vienna and Russia!
And perhaps best of all, I wrote a whole new book -- The Luck Eaters, née Felicity, which will be going on the market in a few weeks. And I also wrote a couple of novellas, which you'll be hearing more about before too much longer.
I knew it was going to be a red-letter year, but I didn't realize just how bright a red.
Personal Stuff Is More Complicated
But as lovely as the year has been professionally, my personal life has been characterized by... disruption, to put it kindly.
I came into January recovering from pneumonia, a process which was slow and not fully complete until this summer when I got some amaaaaaayyyyyzing new asthma drugs. (So amazing, in fact, that I now have an amount of energy I last saw in my late twenties.)
Then we figured out I have a kidney stone which is just going to sit there aching me for... probably ever. So I have that going for me.
We've pretty well concluded that my younger kid does not, in fact, have glaucoma, but my older kid has suffered bouts of mysterious and undiagnosed abdominal pain since April, which has been stressful for all of us. I'm spending easily a dozen hours a week dealing with phone calls and appointments for my sick child lately, because American healthcare freaking sucks.
We bat mitzvahed our daughter the same month Revision came out, which was wonderful and touching and we are simultaneously bursting with pride and so, so glad it's done.
We got a new washer and dryer! Which was great except for the part where our new washing machine then broke for two full months before we could get it replaced, much less repaired. Along the way it leaked and damaged my laundry room walls and floors, and repairs are a work in progress. *looks at calendar* No seriously, the contractor says he might come by tomorrow. Or the next day.
But I didn't have skin cancer, not even one time! So that's nice?
Onward to 2016The thing I've learned from 2015 is that too much going on in your life is hard, even if it's all great stuff. So my hope is for 2016 to be much more boring.
I need to finish up edits on The Luck Eaters in the next few weeks. And then The Daring Mermaid Expedition will be out -- and Circus of Mirrors, too. We'll be talking about those novellas! Maybe even Lothian Airsoft! I'm going to go on a cruise, which I've never done before! And maybe snorkeling, which I've also never done before! I might even sell The Luck Eaters to a publisher, and I hope to write at least one more book in 2016 -- and two is better.
So 2016 looks pretty packed out of the gate, and my chances of a boring year aren't that great. But maybe I can get a boring month? Let's call if for March, OK? March, you're on notice. You'd better not let anything happen at all. Because jeez do I really, really need a break.
November 19, 2015
Van Halen, M&Ms, and Accessibility Policies
Van Halen famously had a rider on their touring contract that stipulated there must be a bowl of M&Ms backstage -- with all the brown ones picked out. But despite appearances, this wasn't ego run amuck. That contract rider also had complex technical specifications for electrical systems, clearance, even how much weight the girders must be able to support.
Once Van Halen arrived to set up a show, any brown M&M was a quick red flag that the venue hadn't read the contract carefully, and so probably wasn't complying with those detailed technical requirements, either. And while a brown M&M might not be poison, those technical requirements were literal showstoppers. Electrical fires are not rock 'n roll.
This brings me to accessibility policies, and more specifically to Mary Robinette Kowal's pledge not to go to a convention that lacks such a policy. Seriously, stay with me.
Some years ago, John Scalzi made a similar pledge regarding harassment policies. At the time, I worried that participating would be damaging to my career -- when you're a tiny fish in a wide blue ocean, you have to take all the publicity you can get your grubby mitts on.
I've been to a lot more conventions since then, and here's what I've learned: the sort of convention that can't be bothered with a harassment policy is likely going to have serious organizational problems, weird politics, dull programming, or some combination thereof. It's true I'm very early in my career as an author, and I can't afford to miss out on promotional opportunities.
But the flip side of that is that as an early-career author, I pay my own way to conventions. I have only so much time and money to give, and there are so many, many conventions. So I need to budget carefully to make sure I get the most bang for my promotional buck. I really can't afford to go to a lousy convention.
Which means harassment and accessibility policies are increasingly important to me -- not just because they're morally right, not just because of my leftist SJW politics. Even if you're not worried about harassment yourself, even if you're not worried about accessibility yourself, if those policies are missing, that should be your brown M&M. The sign that what you're dealing with is very likely to be a shitty convention.
