Alexander Jablokov's Blog, page 20

Travel prep

Apologies for the light posting. Tomorrow I'm leaving on a long hike in the Maze District of Canyonlands, and have a lot of work to finish up, so that people aren't cursing my name in my absence. I can't guarantee that they aren't, but I can at least do my best to lower the odds.

We can talk on my return.

Has Richard III's body been found?

How did I miss the fact that Richard the Third's body might have been found under a parking lot in Leicester? (from The History Blog) You probably already know all about this. An excavation at the spot in a church where Richard was supposedly buried has uncovered a male skeleton with perimortem trauma to the back of the head and an arrowhead lodged in the back--a skeleton showing distinct signs of a back abnormality (probably scoliosis) that would have left one shoulder much lower than the ot...

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" as SF

Mary and I recently saw a great science fiction movie: Beasts of the Southern Wild. It was about a bunch of settlers in an alien world called the Bathtub. They create functional devices out of the remains of old technology and squeeze out a living however they can: they have learned to live in harmony with the world they have settled in, while others still try to maintain the no-longer-meaningful structures of the world they came from. They have a vivid and entertaining popular culture. As su...

My story in The Other Half of the Sky

A few months ago, my friend and neighbor, Athena Andreadis asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was putting together. The theme was space opera, a female protagonist who doesn't feel guilty about juggling work vs. family, aimed at adult readers, no "big ideas" or used-up cyber-or-steampunk tropes.

Athena clearly didn't know that I never get asked to contribute to anthologies.

Then I demonstrated why. I was vaguely dissatisfied, pissy, uninspired, and whiny. I couldn't think of any...

Some problems with the procrastination literature

Like most people who want to become more effective, I goof off by reading books and blog posts about how to stop wasting so much time.

And you can spend a lot of time doing that, since there are entire blogs devoted to the topic, and a vast library of books.

I am currently in a situation where I have a lot of work in addition to my writing work, and am trying to keep up with all of it, so I'm thinking about how much waste there is in even a productive day. As I've said before, I am not much lik...

How many fun ideas are there?

Tonight I was eating with my daughter and telling her about an article I had read, about what an airline did to stop people from complaining about a long wait for luggage (if you like to read this kind of "why your brain is totally screwed up" article, you already know the answer didn't have anything to do with shortening the wait).

I do like reading this kind of thing, and Faith enjoyed hearing about it. But I read stuff every day, and I like to be entertained every day. Does someone, somewhe...

Everything you need to know about novellas

I just sold a novella I wrote, "Feral Moon". It's a military SF piece about the invasion of Phobos.

In some respects, novellas are the best form for science fiction, long enough to contain a complete plot or a crisp exploration of an idea, short enough to not waste your time on a bunch of useless crap. But there is one thing that is bad about novellas, and that's how much you get paid for them.

Or, as I put it to my friend Greg Feeley at Readercon, while we were discussing that topic: "Novellas...

Book report: In the Shadow of the Sword

As I mentioned in my post On buying books at full price, a few weeks ago, I acquired a copy of Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, and was having fun with it.

It continued to be great fun, all the way through. I recommend it highly. But not casual fun, I would say, so be ready.

An earlier book of his, Persian Fire, for example, was a coherent, dramatic story, about the attempted Persian conquest of Greece, and the failure of that...

Readercon, and the past

Readercon is by no means an oldsters convention, but certainly many of us have been going for decades, and we show it. While the phenomenon I am going to discuss isn't exclusive to Readercon, it seems more noticeable there, because I see many of these people only there, once a year. That sampling rate makes all of us seem to age faster than we do.

I was on a panel with a writer who had a fund of good stories about his writing career. I don't know him well, but even so, I had heard some of thes...

My Readercon - Friday, continued

The past slides behind me as I forge forward....

So, before I forget all about it, something more about the rest of Readercon. The astute observer will note that I spend too little time on the topics that got discussed, and more on the people I talked to. Readercon is a great place for ideas. But when I get home, they kind of get hazy. My brain is not as retentive as it used to be.

Friday night at Readercon is an event called the Meet the Pros(e) Party. Each of the writers puts a short quotatio...