Mari Ness's Blog, page 23

Various things that do not exactly make a post:

1. Apparently, I did forget to make an official announcement about this, so here goes the official announcement: I will be at Lone Star Con in San Antonio, August 29-September 2, 2013. Apart from definitely owing Cat Rambo and a few others some drinks, I have no official schedule, so if you are there, feel free to come by and wave; I'll be the small blonde woman rolling around in a wheelchair.

2. Some time ago, a few people said some very evil words on Twitter: "Superhero" and "limerick."

Most of you know me well enough by now to know that I can't resist that sort of evil. So, after multiple assurances that this was supposed to be for an anthology of bad superhero poetry, emphasis on bad, I wrote a very very bad limerick and shot it over.

To my joy, the limerick was pretty much immediately accepted for the anthology. To my horror, when I got a copy of anthology a few weeks later, I realized that several poets had entirely forgotten the word "bad" and instead gone for "excellent."

What this means is that my terrible, terrible little limerick is surrounded by some very good and when not very good, hilariously bad superhero poems in Flying Higher: An Anthology of Superhero Poetry, available in multiple formats for free over at Smashwords.

In fact my limerick is so terrible that I was halfway tempted not to link to this at all, but some of the other poems in here are hilarious and will completely make your day: check out Alex Bledsoe's O Captain, America's Captain; Amy McNally's little untitled haiku; A.C. Wise's little limerick which unlike my contribution is actually funny; Matthew Kuchka's The Wolverine; and...oh, just go read it already. There's even a villanelle.

My advice is, go get the book, and when you reach my poem, for the sake of your own brain, skip it, and go on to the better stuff. And if my limerick harms your eyeballs by accident, I can only say, I was told that these were supposed to be BAD poems, not good ones!

3. And the latest Tor.com post, about Mary Norton's Are All the Giants Dead just popped up, which means that we are only a couple posts off from a reread you've all been waiting for.

RIP Barbara Mertz, aka Elizabeth Peters

Publishers William Morrow are reporting the death of Barbara Mertz, better known to readers as Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels.

Mertz, who held a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, turned to writing Gothic romances in the late 1960s under the name of Barbara Michaels to earn some extra cash. She found aspects of the genre ludicrous, however, and after a few books, started adding jokes to her Barbara Michaels' books, before creating a second pseudonym, Elizabeth Peters, for books that poked fun at the genre. In one such book, the heroine triumphantly announces at the end of the book that she is not going to marry either of the heroes since that only happens in silly books. Instead she is going to blackmail her way into an academic job. It just gets better from there.

One of these parodies is Crocodile on the Sandbank, which features a Mummy -- sorta -- and a heroine who loves pyramids and hits the hero over the head with her umbrella. Miss Amelia Peabody, soon to be Mrs. Amelia Peabody Emerson (Peabody!) and her assorted gang of characters, including some historical personages, were to feature in a long, very popular series of books of varying quality. I liked the Vicky Bliss series, featuring an art historian and a not very courageous thief, much more, and some of her standalone books (Devil-May-Care, with several very eager if mostly unhelpful cats and dogs, and Summer of the Dragon) are also hilarious, books I turn to when needing a comforting reread.

Thanks for all the laughs, Dr. Mertz.

Writers and vacations

A number of other people have already objected more eloquently than I can to the "Ten Questions to Know if You're a Pro" questionnaire here ("pro" in this case meaning "pro writer.") John Scalzi, for one, has noted that by that definition, he's not a professional writer, and several other full time professional writers have jumped up to say the same. I'm with them: it's a terrible list. But apart from all of the major, major assumptions appearing all over that list, I was particularly struck with this comment:

"5. Do you plan vacations around writing opportunites (either research or networking potential)?"

I'm going to (mostly) skip past the obvious responses of "Can you afford vacations?" and "Is a research/networking thing actually a vacation or, you know, part of your job, whatever your job/field," and instead say this:

Writers, real, unreal, pro, hobbyist, don't go on vacation.

Ever.

In the literal sense. I have, at that all time premier vacation spot, Walt Disney World, written various Tor.com posts (six of the Oz posts were written there), flash fiction pieces, the story that recently appeared in 16 Single Sentence Stories (that was written while I was in line), and bits of other things. Admittedly this is partly because I know Disney very well, so it's not a particularly big deal for me to whip out a notebook (or these days, the Nook) and type things out (especially in line). But this has also happened in other "vacation" spots and times, on road trips, on planes, in places very far from home. When words come, I grab them. It's not just me. I have lost track of the number of writers who assured me that they were really truly really going on a nice relaxing vacation where they would not even think of writing only to return with a completed short story or poem or two.

But even when we are not physically putting words down on a notebook or electronic device, we are still, as writers, observing, watching, imbibing. I never know what might or might not appear in a later story. Going mangrove snorkeling, for instance, just seemed at the time to be fulfilling course requirements until it popped up in a fairy tale, years later. I have taken bits and pieces from other travels, other quiet moments, and put them in various stories and various poems; sometimes I don't even recognize these bits for years. Sometimes I know them immediately. Sometimes it's important to know.

And very often I have no idea that I'm doing "research." A trip to watch the space shuttle go up turned into a paragraph that thankfully I did not have to research, but at the time, I thought I was just watching the space shuttle.

Other times I need to see something new, something different, to find words again.

I'm not by any means saying that writers have to travel to write. Obviously, many writers and poets have written beautifully and deeply while rarely if ever leaving home (Emily Dickinson leaps to mind, but she's hardly the only example). But I do think that writing requires two things: one, time to focus on words, just words, time that may, or may not, require a "vacation" (however defined) to achieve, and two, above all, living. And if a writer needs that vacation to live -- well, I'll still think that writer is a writer.

Mrs. Jordan's Profession, Claire Tomalin

Royal mistresses are often given a bad rap. After all, by definition they are either engaged in adultery or enjoying (or enduring) decidedly outside of marriage sex with little hope for marriage. Beyond this, many such women are accused of acting solely out of greed: why else, after all, would anyone sleep with a prince or a king? To be fair, in some cases, said prince or king may not exactly be a model of good looks (Charles II, anyone?) even when the contemporaries of said prince or king (Charles II, again) assure us that whatever we might think of their looks, they were very very hot and sexy. (Hi, Charles II.) Still, given that many royal mistresses received jewelry or titles or money or estates from their lovers, this greed thing might not be completely unfounded.

But what happens when the royal mistress is the one financially supporting her lover?

Dora of many, many last names depending on the circumstances, but generally known by her stage name of Mrs. Jordan, was one of the most successful actresses of the English stage in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Primarily known for her work in comedy and her Shakespearean roles, she worked a punishing schedule, often performing two plays per night in front of large audiences (her primary London theatre could seat 2000 people) or doing exhausting road shows. Thanks to her popularity, she could, and did, command very high salaries; she also wrote music and helped write plays. She became known for championing plays written by women, and was talented enough that she could continue to play teenagers even when she was decidedly no longer in that category. What makes this particularly astonishing is that she did this while seemingly constantly pregnant: she bore at least 14 living children and reportedly also suffered multiple miscarriages. She typically worked right up to the point of giving birth, and took very short maternity leaves, often bringing whatever child she was nursing to work and sometimes even on stage. I mean, I hurt just thinking about this.

Her first pregnancy was apparently the result of what we would now call sexual harassment. This was before she had earned her later popularity, and Dora at the time had no money and only limited social connections; also, she was illegitimate herself. That pregnancy also forced her to take the name "Mrs. Jordan" (socially a "Miss" could not be so heavily pregnant, although the lack of a "Mr. Jordan" was an open secret.) Dora adored her little daughter. It's very possible that, however negative that first experience, the fact that she had been able to continue to work through and after the socially unsanctioned pregnancy encouraged her to have later relationships without the benefit of marriage. Or, more likely, she just fell in love.

One of these later lovers was the Duke of Clarence, third son of George III, later to become King William IV. In these pre-king days, the Duke of Clarence had very little to do: he spent some time in the Navy, and then was taken out of it for the fun of just hanging around and not doing much. Shockingly, when you have nothing to do, you end up spending a lot of money, and arguably one reason the Duke stayed with Dora was that she often paid his bills, and continued to pay her own. After all, she had more money than he did.

Despite his debts, they seem to have been very happy: they had a large house on the country (Dora commuted, often having to stay in town) and the Duke was very kind to Dora's children who weren't his (three of them) and Dora in turn was very kind to the Duke's son who wasn't hers (one of them.) When not together (because of her work obligations) they wrote each other constantly and affectionately. Until, that is, the Duke dumped her.

By this point Dora was turning fifty. The Duke was still in debt, and so Dora remained the main breadwinner for their family and their children. The boys started military careers at what we would consider horribly young ages (14, 11, and so on). The girls stayed with their father, but king's son or not, money was tight, and they continually begged Dora for money. A son-in-law cheated Dora out of money just as her health started to decline – she had, after all, been working a demanding job for decades, even beyond all the childbearing. Now deeply in debt, and unable to continue working the same schedule, she fled to Paris – close, she hoped, to one of her military sons – and died in poverty. Not exactly the royal mistress makes out big sort of story.

Claire Tomalin's Mrs Jordan's Profession: The Actress and the Prince is a delightfully gossipy biography of Mrs. Jordan that tells you all the important things, like, who was sleeping with whom, and how an attack of black beetles can attack even the best of households, and the circumstances leading up to court martials, and suicides, drug abuse, actresses, bigamous marriages (well, ok, just one) and other scandals. It could have benefited from slightly better copyediting – I caught a few typos and grammatical errors, and one of the footnotes claims that Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was Lady Harriet Bessborough's younger sister; it was quite the other way around. But still, quite a lot of fun, and if you've been reading my Georgette Heyer posts and want to know more of the background, recommended.

Morse Museum

Friday J.S. and I headed over to Winter Park to see the Morse Museum.

It was the second time I'd been there, and I have to say, I liked it even more the second time. The Morse Museum features the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, which mostly means stained glass, along with some pieces from other artists more or less associated with the late 19th and early 20th century, and two doors from medieval India which are just kinda there but also kinda cool. It's smallish – the entire museum can easily be seen in a couple of hours, maybe a little more or a little less depending on whether or not you decide to watch the introductory videos and how long you spend watching the light flood through the stained glass.

Alas, some of this glass, for preservation purposes, is displayed with a steady electric light that shows the glowing colors of the glass, and not the interplay of changing light with the glass. And, I'll be honest, I don't like a lot of Tiffany stuff – specifically, I'm not a big fan of most of the Tiffany lamps. I love dragonflies when they are flying around outside and sparkling under the sun, but I'm considerably less fond of dragonflies hovering over me when I'm trying to read. It bugs me.

Er, sorry.

Despite the smallness of the museum, we did have to interrupt the tour for emergency sandwiches and chocolate. I think you can all understand. Especially since the supposed motto of the museum is that beauty is an essential part of life, something we must all create and enjoy, and well, I may not have created the chocolate fudge cookie with white chocolate icing and I may not have allowed anyone to contemplate its beauty for very long, but I did enjoy it. That's the important part. Then we headed back for more light and glass, and the part of the museum designed to let light shift and dance through glass, an excellent way to follow up the magic of chocolate.

One other thing we both noticed: the museum is understandably set up for adults. I say understandably because we were the youngest people there by far, though I suspect the museum gets school groups at other times of the year. (Especially since it's across the street from a private school.) It has very few of the velvet ropes that generally separate visitors from art, although a few areas are set up to beep at you if you point at objects and while pointing happen to put your hand over an invisible line. Anyway. This means that the lighting and displays for the smaller pieces are set up on the assumption that they will be viewed only from above.

Which means if, like me, you're in a wheelchair, you get a very different view of many objects – in some cases seeing light bulbs otherwise not meant to be seen, in some cases not getting to see inside some of the glass and ceramic bowls, which in a few cases meant not seeing a different shimmer of colors. In other cases, this meant seeing small details – including different shimmering colors – not visible from above. J had me stand a few times, carefully enough, and I had her kneel sometimes, equally carefully. Sometimes the angle really does change things, especially when looking at magic and light.

Edit: I see cross-posting is failing again. Apologies if this pops up twice in any RSS feed.

Two tidbits

1. I chat about Sprig Muslin over at Tor.com. Spoiler=highwayman, yay, end of the book, not so ya.

2. Daily Science Fiction has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the zine for another couple of years. The Kickstarter rewards include anthologies, the chance to have your story critiqued by a Daily Science Fiction author, and excellent karma.

Obviously, I'm a bit biased here -- DSF published my story The Princess and Her Tale back in May, and will be publishing a little flash piece of mine, "Seaweed," next month. But it's not just me, really! They also publish several other amazing authors. If you can help out, it's an excellent zine.

Stronger Than the Wind, Stronger Than the Sea

Issue Three of Demeter's Spicebox just went live, with many gleaming treasures, including:

1. My short story, Stronger Than the Wind, Stronger Than the Sea. The story is a sequel of sorts to my earlier story for Demeter's Spicebox, Sister and Bones, but only of sorts. The island in the story is very real, the storm is real, the fire coral was, alas, all too real, and although fairy basslets are rare in those waters, I did see one, and can assure you that it, too, was real.

The rest, though -- well, I'll let you decide.

2. Two other retellings of the Aarne-Thompson folktale type 2031C, "The Mouse Who Was to Marry the Sun</a>: Flower of Flowers, Bird of Birds, and Bogi Takacs' Mouse Choirs of the Old Matra.

3. And an image by Kirsty Greenwood, inspired by my short story Sister and Bones. I can't tell you how much that thrills me.

Defiance and House of Cards

A Tale of Two Seasons


Summer TV viewing so far has mostly focused on watching the first seasons of Netflix's House of Cards, which was pretty good, and Syfy's Defiance, which was just ok. I'll probably get around to writing separate posts on each, but what caught me most watching them more or less simultaneously was how in many ways the shows are inverted mirrors of each other. Both focus on power, politics, manipulation and corruption (especially in House of Cards; Defiance, set in a more resource-poor location, has less to corrupt people with) ; both feature ambitious politicians willing to manipulative their wives to achieve their ends, and wives who subtly and then not so subtly rebel against this use; both seemingly feature prostitution as just one of those things, and later in the show use prostitution as another tool to manipulate and destroy various characters. Both focus on the power of secrets.

But what I found really fascinating was examining the pace of both shows. Both – I do seem to be using the word "both" a lot, I see, but I'm about to stop, and soon – both shows featured exactly 13 episodes. House of Cards starts out brilliantly, strongly, compellingly in its first few episodes before falling into a kinda dull muddle where the show isn't really sure what to do to fill in space and time especially since the prostitute isn't taking her clothes off and the corrupt congressman is Trying To Do Good and Stay Off the Bottle, before revving up to a major, taut and kinda unsatisfying conclusion that shrieks, "SUBSCRIBE TO NETFLIX so we can tell you what the hell happened!" Shorter: brilliant, compelling beginning and end and....eh middle.

Defiance was the exact opposite: it started badly, got great in the middle, and then kinda flopped into an end which has been justly criticized for a) making no sense, b) seriously making no sense, c) having a surprising and unnecessary touch of sexism, and d) did I mention, really not making any sense? I finished House of Cards immediately wanting the next season so I can find out what happens to main character Francis and if someone is going to stab him with a dagger*; I finished Defiance asking the deep question of "Huh?"

I can only assume that the Defiance writers were caught between wanting to have a cliffhanger that would get everyone to tune in next season, and the knowledge that the Syfy channel is not known for renewing shows, and therefore they ALSO had to have a major, awesome ending. This unfortunately created what can most kindly be called an Attack of the Plot Holes, which is really not something you should have in your season finale.

Anyway. The shows have some other subtle resemblances: both have elections as a main plot line (something that doesn't always work in Defiance, but more on that later). Both feature non-traditional marriages; one couple in House of Cards has a marriage that can be best described as "open,"; one woman in Defiance has two husbands, and another couple have a halfway open marriage. Defiance, which needs the ratings for this kind of thing more than House of Cards does, also has some girl on girl action; in general, it's less wary of sex than House of Cards is – or is it? House of Cards mostly seems to show sex in unflattering lights, something physically but not emotionally necessary, and something that can make a character weak, but partners also forgive, or work to forgive, sexual lapses, and towards the end, two relationships have a bit of a surprise on this front.

More subtle. The two strongest actors on Defiance, far and away, both blowing the rest of the cast out of the water, are both women playing aliens: Stephanie Leonidas, rising well above what she's been handed as Super-Special Alien/Magical Native (in fact she's the only thing that keeps that plot line from being a complete yawn) and Jaime Murray as the seductive Stahma Tarr. This massively shifts the show's dynamic, probably not in the way the show intended, just because the two are far more interesting to watch than anyone else on the show. Defiance also exists in a more or less gender equal world – the prostitutes are multiple genders and serve multiple genders, some of the leaders are women, some men. Not all of the men can deal with this.

House of Cards stars Kevin Spacey. To say that he massively outshines the rest of the cast is an understatement; most are excellent, but this is Kevin Spacey. That, too, shifts the show's dynamic, in this case, as intended.

Despite this, both end up saying somewhat similar things about gender. Oh, they pay lip service to gender equality. Defiance here (until the last episode which was kinda a "say what?") does a considerably better and more thoughtful job with this; House of Cards thinks it's being equal – and yet, over and over again, House of Cards stresses the power of men. The president is a man. The vice president is a man. The House Speaker is a man. The House Majority Leader is a man. The House Whip is a man. The corrupt lobbyist is a man. Almost everyone making the initial decision to close a Pennsylvania shipyard is a man. The two people running for governor of Pennsylvania – men. We see several cases of sexual harassment, or near sexual harassment. Oh, here and there a woman has power – the White House Chief of Staff is a woman, but given the number of times she says "Sorry, Frank, it's out of my control," her power is shown as obviously limited. Another supposedly powerful woman confesses that she is unable to do something that should be in her control, and in the last two episodes, two women journalists hint that they are terrified that men will kill them.

So given all that, surely Defiance, with its women mayors and leaders of the Earth Republic wins the gender wars hands down, right?

Not so fast.

Sure, in the first few episodes – all the way to episode eight, even -- Defiance is a model of gender equality if you don't think too hard about one of the relationships, and even in that one the woman seems to have significant power. Which makes the final episode all that much more odd as suddenly this is exposed as....not so true.

There's probably a larger statement on gender roles in today's society to be made here, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to make it. So I'll just end this by definitely recommending House of Cards, and sorta recommending Defiance -- well, if you've liked previous Syfy shows, and if you can make it through the first three cliché ridden episodes with my assurances that it does get better.

*It's a very Shakespearean sort of show, despite the American DC setting. I expect the final scene to consist of five or six bodies strewn across the Oval Office, with the Canadians arriving and declaiming "WELL THIS WAS NOT TO BE. GO BID THE SOLDIERS SHOOT" and various stunned Secret Service people saying "OK THEN." I'm only partly joking.

Various things do not really make a post

1. My brother, while we were driving back to the house on Sunday: There's a scary clown behind us.

Me: Yeah, I guess it will rain soon. Again.

Pause.

My brother: CLOWN. SCARY CLOWN.

Me: Well, it's not raining yet.

My brother: CLOWN.

A few confused moments.

My brother: SEE! SCARY CLOWN.

And indeed, to our left was an official Scary Clown, with a white face and green hair and green scarf, on a black and green motorcycle.

I can only assume this was an escapee from some part of Universal Studios who needed to speed home before removing his makeup, or someone who just wanted to ride around on a motorcycle sending the fear of CLOWNS and RAIN into innocent drivers everywhere. We may never know.

(In my defense in the conversation above I was a) kinda exhausted and b) not anticipating clowns of any emotional persuasion whatsoever.)

2. And this sums up exactly why I will not be going to Comic Con any time soon. I'm all about movies. I'm seriously all about superhero movies (chatter about Man of Steel will be forthcoming as soon as that's out on DVD, so I can watch it without getting sick). But even I have my limitations.

Also, interesting discussion of the ongoing sexism in genre.

K-Mart and online shoppng

Business Week has an interesting article explaining the internal business philosophy of K-Mart/Sears and how this has not been great for the company.

To be fair, though, I don't think that's a complete explanation for the demise of the local K-Mart, currently in the last sad dregs of its closing sale. This surprised no one; the main question was how the hell it had stayed open this long, given the proximity of rival Wal-mart and Target, the general dinginess and overall aura of depression that lingered over the store, the non-existent customer service, the road construction that made it difficult to get to for a couple years, and the sad truth that more than once I went in to get something (I use a trike, so going to Target or Wal-mart is not always an option for me, especially in the summer) only to find out that the cash registers wouldn't let me purchase it. (Seriously.) I popped by, thinking I might try to get a dutch oven or a microwave; neither are exactly necessities at this point, but I don't have a dutch oven (I have a pyrex casserole dish) and my microwave is disintegrating into its last days. So I figured I'd stop by.

A few sad scattered shoppers were wandering listlessly around, mostly in the clothing section. A few were looking at the jewelry section, questioning why a pair of 1/2 carat diamond earrings in 10 kt gold with low quality diamonds still cost $599. It was a valid question, and the K-Mart person shrugged. Over to the last of the housing goods, which still had about twenty dutch ovens left. It did not take me long to figure out why: someone else in that aisle had out a smart phone and was comparing the firesale prices to current online prices at Target and Wal-mart. At 40%, with half the store empty, K-Mart's dutch ovens were still more expensive than Wal-mart's and were only slightly under Target's.

Dutch ovens are probably not something the average shopper spent time doing price comparisons before pre-internet. Unless you're buying the Williams-Somona type, they're not that expensive. They also aren't a must-have item, though, and they aren't something you have to buy frequently, or at that very moment. So it only makes sense that with a cell phone, people would check prices before purchasing.

And that, in the end, was the other thing that doomed K-Mart: the prices were never that good. It didn't help that the Goodwill right next door was brighter and cleaner and had better quality clothing. For people like me and others in the immediate surrounding area, the convenience was probably worth it (well, it was worth it for me). But that wasn't enough to keep things going, and when you add in a dingy, unpleasant shopping experience, and the ability to check prices instantly on a small device in your hand, that was it for the store, especially with a problematic corporate structure that called for change, but had no way to deliver it.