Martha Wells's Blog, page 176

Happy birthday to me!

It's my birthday today, and I am 47. I probably won't do anything but work as usual, though I may go out and buy a Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake at some point. I was craving sugar like crazy last night, but that may have had something to do with the fact that Top Chef: Desserts was on.

Thanks to nightwalker for the virtual gift on my LJ profile! I love those things.


links:

After Irene: A small-town Adirondack library needs your help
This library lost its children's collection during hurricane Irene - they need donations of money or of new hardcover children's books, picture books, or YA.

From Jenn Reese: World Bodypainting Festival Photos some really neat photos.


John Scalzi: Whatever: The Sort of Crap I Don't Get
Over at Twitter, author Adrienne Martini asks me if I get the sort of jackassed comments and e-mails that Shawna James Ahern, a female food blogger, talks about in a recent post, and wonders if it's a gender-related thing.

The short answer: No I don't get those, and yes, I think it's substantially gender-related.

I finally passed 80,000 words on the third Cloud Roads bo...

I finally passed 80,000 words on the third Cloud Roads book yesterday, and I'm pretty happy with it. (Or the third book in the Books of the Raksura) series. I hope the publisher will want to buy it. And I need to think of a title. At this point the best title would be The Other Shoe Drops but I don't really want to call it that.


This link has been going around on Twitter: Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor some really nice art here.


Saw Doctor Who last night and loved it. I'll need to watch it again to pick up on all the little bits of dialog I missed.

Dragon*Con is coming up but after two cons in a row I don't feel that envious of the people having fun without me. I think another big con at this point would flatten me.

Back From ArmadilloCon

Got back from ArmadilloCon late yesterday afternoon, and I'm still tired. It was a great con, but after the rain we had last week, the temperature shot up to over 108 here and in Austin for the past few days, and has left everything lightly fried, if not dead.

Very worried by all the hurricane news, too. There's a three other tropical storms pointed towards us at the moment, and one about to descend on Taiwan.


All four panels I was on went really well, especially the cover panel on Sunday morning with Lou Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Brad Foster, Rockey Kelley, Rick Klaw, and me. Lou Anders had us send covers to him that we wanted to talk about and assembled a power point presentation (so we could actually show the audience the covers) and also some slides showing how covers are developed from sketches, with the publisher choosing which versions they want to go with.

Also pointing out that authors rarely get input except sometimes towards the end of the process, and talking a bit about how books get face-outs in bookstores, and the placement on the "new books" tables at the front. (The publisher buys those spaces from the chain bookstores, then has to convince the chains which of their books to put there. The chains want the ones with the covers they think will sell best, which is not always the books the publisher wants most to push.)


And I have a link:

Writers and Pellets by Tobias Buckell

The neurotic behavior persists at all levels of writing. It isn't necessarily the writer's fault.

The reason for this is writing, as well as many of the arts, are fundamentally (but accidentally) designed to create horrible psychological atmospheres that are very conducive to creating neuroses if you aren't paying attention. Because the reward systems for artistic success aren't predictable. Which really fucks with the animal brain.

It really doesn't help if you're already neurotic. And it's also a reason why writers can be so vulnerable to depression.

ArmadilloCon and Hurricanes

Getting ready to leave for ArmadilloCon!


***


Everybody in the path of the hurricane please be careful. We're about a four hour drive from the Gulf coast, and a lot of the hurricanes that hit us flop at the last moment, but they're still scary. The ones that don't (hurricane Ike) are even more scary.

Here's a couple of my favorite hurricane preparations:

Solar water disinfection I've collected a bunch of soda bottles to do this if we have to. They're handy, because you can also use them to fill with water before the storm. (You do want to have a lot of drinkable water on hand in case the water is contaminated after the storm. And fill the bathtub, too, because you can drink it if you really have to, and also use it to water your animals or wash dishes and so on.)


This is an ebay link but it shows a bunch of different models: battery powered fans This was a recommended by a friend who spent about two weeks in Houston with no power after Ike. In our climate, once the hurricane is over, we go back to heat and killer humidity, and the fans can cool the room enough to let you sleep.


During the late summer, I always try to have a few days worth of canned food, plus extra dry food for the cats, on hand, so if one turns toward us unexpectedly I won't have to buy too much at the last minute.

Getting ready to leave for ArmadilloCon tomorrow. I'm tr...

Getting ready to leave for ArmadilloCon tomorrow. I'm trying to decide whether to read chapter 2 or chapter 3 of The Serpent Sea for my reading.

It actually rained yesterday, for the first time in nearly three months!!!! It was a short but fairly violent storm, with the trees bending like they did when hurricane Ike came through. It's been sprinkling again this morning, but probably won't last long. They said the drought will go on until January, so this is probably just a brief respite.


Kate Elliott: A Giveaway for Cold Fire, the sequel to Cold Magic You want these books. I can't wait for the next one to come out. They are "an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendents of troodons." and they rock.


NY Times: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? The answer to that is yes. Seriously, read this article.
This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.'s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.


Wirewalking: Bake and Book Sale to Save a House Please pass it on.


From Aliette de Bodard: Asian Historical Architecture a resource site with 1000s of photos and descriptions.

WorldCon Saturday, Books of the Raksura, and ArmadilloCon

Between a brief informal Twitter poll by me and a consultation at the publisher, the Cloud Roads books now have an official series title: Books of the Raksura I'm still plugging away on the third book.

I'll be at ArmadilloCon in Austin, TX, this weekend, and my schedule is here.

And if you haven't heard, San Antonio, Texas, won the bid for the WorldCon in 2013.

***

(Reports for Wednesday and Thursday and Friday)


WorldCon Saturday was when I really started to mentally and physically crater. Got up early again, finally found the one breakfast restaurant that wasn't exposed to casino smoke, then while my roommates went to the gym, I went swimming in the pools.

The Atlantis doesn't have as elaborate pools as the big one in the Caribbean, but it was still pretty nice. They had a round indoor pool in a glass enclosure with a two story boulder-strewn tropical waterfall. Very neat. Plus an outdoor pool and a hot tub. After that, I finally shopped more thoroughly in the dealers' room, signed books for another book dealer, and then did my reading. Panels were running late so I started out with only a couple of nice people, then looked up at one point to realize the room was much more full of nice people, so that was good.

After a quick break, this was the next panel:

Sat 1:00 - 2:00, The Comeback Genre: Sword & Sorcery (Panel), A16 (RSCC)
Sword and Sorcery has a rich history, going back to at least Howard and Smith. And it's making a comeback. Our panelists talk about its rich history and why it's back and better than ever.
Lou Anders, Dale Ivan Smith, S.M. Stirling, Martha Wells

This was in one of the smaller rooms and was crowded to pretty much standing room only. We talked a bit about the history and current books, and made a lot of recommendations. I recced Charles Saunders' Imaro and Dossouye books, Tanith Lee (Her early sword and sorcery like Vazkor, Son of Vazkor and Cyrion, plus the later Night's Master and Death's Master which feel like you're reading Robert E. Howard while dropping acid.), Howard A. Jones' The Desert of Souls, and Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Amazons anthologies. Someone in the audience also recced Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen books, set in feudal Japan.

After that I went to late lunch (it was after 2:00 by then) with my roommates and Courtney, and was so tired I was calling people by the wrong name. I only had one more panel to go and revived enough for:

Sat 5:00 - 6:00, Designing Believable Archeaology and Anthropology (Panel), A03 (RSCC)
Using anthropology and archaeology to build realistic SF and fantasy worlds.
Martha Wells (M), Jessica Axsom, S.M. Stirling

We had a really good talk for being so late in the day, in one of the big rooms with a large audience. Jessica is a working archeologist, so that added a lot to the discussion. (My degree was in anthropology and I've been on an archeology field camp, and Steve Stirling had done some extensive reading in it.) We talked about things that should inform your decisions while world-building, and I actually have my panel topics I prepared as moderator, so I'll copy them here:


1) cultures in the real world interact, borrow from each other, are influenced by each other's language, food, clothes, art, music, literature, etc. This isn't just a modern thing, but has been happening all through history. Do you think cultures in fantasy worlds can be too isolated, as people do extensive world-building but don't take these things into account?

2) cultures also evolve constantly, grow and change, cities, religions grow and change, and it's also hard to show that.

3) cultures can also evolve into behavior that is self-destructive, either from internal causes (behaviors that were needed for survival earlier but are now counter-productive) or external (European Rye blight), or working systems that get temporarily thrown out of balance and can't readjust (pueblo witch hunts) - it's easy to see from an outsider, historical perspective, but not so much from the inside. Examples of fantasy novels that pull this off?


There were a lot of good questions and comments from the audience, and since it was the last panel of the day in that room, we didn't get the five minute warning or the notice to stop, so people could come up to the table and discussion went on for a while afterward.

That was my last panel of the con, and we were leaving Sunday morning, though the con programming actually went on to late in the afternoon. We went to dinner in downtown Reno with one of my roommates' family, looked at the river and the park there, then came back and read Hugo results online and decided we were too dead for parties.

Next day they dropped me at the airport, I flew home with Amy and Paul, and then drove an hour and a half home from Houston, through once green and now drought-dead countryside, watching a tiny rainstorm dance around in the distance.

Now back to work.

WorldCon Friday

WorldCon Wednesday and Thursday

Let's see, Friday I still woke up at 6:00 am and wandered through the semi-deserted casino looking for food to carry back to the room. Even with all that time to get ready and no panels until 11:00, I still didn't get to the dealers' room until after 10:00, so didn't have much time to shop.

The panel was:

Fri 11:00 - 12:00, The Continuing Popularity of Jane Austen (Panel), A05 (RSCC)
Jane Austen remains very popular, including among SF fans. Her books continue to be read, and they've spawned numerous movies as well as a number of spin off novels. The panel discusses Austen's continuing popularity.
Darlene Marshall (M), Brenda W.Clough, Ellen Asher, Madeleine E. Robins, Martha Wells

We were in one of the big rooms again on the dais. Slightly smaller audience, maybe about 50 people. This was another good panel, since everyone (including the audience) knew a lot about the subject and there was a lot of good discussion and questions.

Then I had a brief break, where a friend and I bolted back to the Atlantis for a quick lunch, then I came back for my autographing, where I got to sit next to Sharon Shinn. We both had a fairly good number of people show up with books, but we were surrounded by writers who had huge lines. It was pretty funny. Every so often someone with our books would fight their way through the crowd and discover us.

After that was a koffeclatsch, which is basically a hour long period where people sign up and you all sit at a table and just chat, and I get given a chai tea. This was the first one I'd done in a long long time, and it was a lot of fun, and we had a good discussion. There were some really good questions we talked about, including how my OCD affects my writing and characterization.

After that I was done for the day with programming, so I found my roommates again and we went through the art show. There was a neat exhibit of concept art for movies and TV, which had some incredible matt paintings. There was also a water-bender's scroll for The Last Airbender. I kept thinking it was for the original cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender because it was so beautiful (and that show had some beautiful art), but it was actually for the crappy movie version. Hard to believe something that gorgeous was created for something that awful.

Then we caught a panel on Romance in SF/F, and then a bit later took the car and went out to dinner with Sharon Shinn and Kay Kenyon. We went to Claim Jumper, which is kind of like Outback, except with a Northwest US theme, with boulders and pines and bears and everything. Then they had to hurry back to the Atlantis for Louise Marley's launch party, and we drove over to the Peppermill for the Masquerade.

The Masquerade was probably unique in that it started on time and continued in an orderly fashion, with few delays. There was some great costumes, including a large elaborate Master's set of jewel costumes, which started out with the very typical presentation, then rick rolled itself in a hilarious way. During the judging, Paul Cornell hosted a game of "Just a Minute" that was absolutely fabulous. Here's the link to the recorded stream, and I really recommend it if you have time.

After that we came back and collapsed again.

Here are some photos from the Night Bazaar party, including the scorpion and cricket eating scenes.

And here's me in the exhibit hall:

WorldCon Wednesday and Thursday

Back from WorldCon! And now I'll try to do a coherent con report.

I drove to Houston Tuesday afternoon, then flew out from there Wednesday morning. When I got to the baggage claim at Reno I ran into Amy Sisson and Paul Abell, who had been on the same plane, but it was so crowded we hadn't seen each other. We got on the shuttle to the Atlantis with another lady who was going to the convention, got there and managed to check in early and then have lunch.

The Atlantis and the Peppermill were not typical con hotels, since they had casinos. That took some getting used to for most people, since the casinos are dark, noisy, smoky (even with extensive air filtering), and deliberately confusing, and you needed to walk through it to get to some of the restaurants. But to get to the huge convention center you could walk across the second floor and take the extremely long but convenient sky bridge. There was no line at registration or the participant check-in and that went very quickly and efficiently (which was pretty much how the whole con went -- everything seemed really well organized). I listed the Night Bazaar/Night Shade Debut Authors party on the party board and managed to get the suite number wrong due to already being in confused/tired/overstimulated con mode. Then my roommates (who were driving up from San Jose) called and I went back to the hotel to get them checked in.

By the time they registered and we walked around the dealers' room a little, it was time for us to go to the spa.

When we decided to go to WorldCon a few months ago, we also decided to do the spa, since the Atlantis was supposed to have a really nice one. I've been to one once before, but never one this nice, and it was really worth it. I've had trouble with stiff neck muscles for the past year or so (it's hard for me to turn my head all the way to the left except when I'm warm from working out) so it was nice to start the con with neck and back muscles that actually worked. After that we had dinner at the Atlantis Steakhouse, which had great food and a gorgeous sort of glowy art deco decorating theme.

Thursday morning I needed to be over at the Peppermill at around 9:30 for the writers' workshop. (This was not that hard to get up for because the time there was two hours behind my normal time zone, so I was waking up at 4:00 am, forcing myself to sleep until 6:00, then getting up to wander through the nearly empty casino looking for tea and bagels.) It was actually about a 15 minute walk from the Atlantis and the convention center to the Peppermill, but there was a shuttle bus. But one of my roommates drove me over, since we wanted to stop at Walgren's on the way to get all the things we forgot to bring and get heavy-duty extra-strength moisturizer because the air there was dry, dry, dry. (Even with our four to six month drought, it's still more humid here than in Reno.) The Peppermill was kind of a crazy maze, even compared to the Atlantis, but I found the workshop rooms with only a few wrong turns.

(The Peppermill was decorated in the weird sort of lush pseudo Italian Renaissance faux-painting theme that seriously defies description. All the color and pattern made it even harder to navigate.)

I was doing the workshop session with Gregory Wilson and three participants, and we had a great time. All three manuscripts were good ones and I thought we had a really good session with a lot of great comments and discussion from everybody.

At the end of the two hour session I managed to find the shuttle (which was really easy to find, just like everybody told me) and got back to the Atlantis in time to meet my editor Janna Silverstein for lunch. (She's the editor for The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea). We ate at the sky terrace Sushi thing place in the Atlantis, which was actually pretty nice, since it was on an elevated bridge thing with a glass ceiling, so you could see outside (which you couldn't in most of the other Atlantis restaurants) and the sushi was very tasty. It was served a little weirdly, with no wasabi or shaved ginger or the little dishes for soy sauce, but it was still good. And we had a great time talking.

After that I found my roommates again and met up with the other Night Bazaar people (Courtney Schafer, Katy Stauber and her husband, and Bradley Beaulieu) to start getting ready for the party that night. (Actually they were going to get ready for the party, I had a panel at 4:00 to do.) With my roommate's handy car, they went off to finish buying food and alcohol and start moving the stuff into the party suite Courtney had rented on the 15th floor, and I took off to do my panel.

This was:

Thu 4:00 - 5:00, Writing Non-Human Characters (Panel), A05 (RSCC)
In writing a fantasy or SF story, how do you create non-human characters that are more than just humans with funny ears attached?
Carol Berg (M), Amy Thomson, Robert J. Sawyer, Martha Wells

At WorldCon panels, you are generally sitting up on a raised dais with microphones in a very large room with a fairly big audience, and this was the case here. I think we probably had anywhere from 50 to 75 people there. At the end we had some good questions from the audience. And I had brought some book samplers I had had printed (The first chapter and a bit from the The Cloud Roads) and I gave away a bunch of those.

One of the nicest things about the worldcon audiences is that people are very engaged and interested in the topics. You get people taking notes for their own research, asking for book recs or suggesting them, and wanting to still talk about the topic after the panel, so it's really a lot of fun.

Then I met up with the roommates again and we used our car advantage to drive to P.F. Chang's for dinner, and it was very tasty. We came back about the time we needed to get over to the Night Bazaar party (which I brought clothes to dress up for and then completely forgot to change because this is my brain on worldcon). All or most of the parties were on the 15th floor of the Atlantis, so it was going to get pretty crazy up there at around 8:00 when most of them started. The others had done a great job setting up and decorating the room with our night market theme, and the room looked great. We had each brought books to give away, plus bookmarks and cards and my samplers, and John Horner Jacobs had done a gorgeous poster for the door, plus Brad had had a banner made for his book The Winds of Khalakovo, and Night Shade had sent books and t-shirts to give away. It looked very professional (and had a hot tub filled with ice and drinks) and it was hard to convince people it was an author party and not an official publisher's party.

It got packed with people very quickly, and was a huge success. Katy had found some flavored crickets and lollipops with real scorpions inside, so at first we dared people to eat them to get a free book. It was surprising how many people were willing to do this for a new free signed book, so that was pretty cool. We also had exhibitions of phonebook tearing and 60-penny nail bending, which were very popular. The party ended up getting a great review in the WorldCon newsletter the next day.

(ETA: Photo!)

At about 10:00 or so I had catastrophic brain and body failure and needed to go to sleep. (I'd basically been up since 4:00 and my body thought it was midnight rather than 10:00.) So I took off relatively early and went down the stairs to avoid the crowded elevators, and collapsed back in the room.

Next, Friday and Saturday!

WorldCon Week plus First Chapter of The Serpent Sea

WorldCon in Reno is this week and for once in a long time, I'm going! My schedule is here. I'll be getting there around noon on Wednesday :knock on wood: to establish basecamp before my roommates get there.

I'll try to post on Facebook and Twitter (my Twitter is public and can be seen here), though I don't know about Google+. I'll have my iPad with me and Atlantis apparently has free Wifi (with or without the Ancient gene) but I do have some trouble using touchscreens because of my hand issues, so I don't know how coherent my posts will be. (This is why I don't have a smartphone; the iPad is almost big enough that I can use it comfortably.)


Thing of AUGH: twice this weekend it clouded over, got dark, windy, thundered and lightninged, and did. not. rain. So the drought continues unabated and trees are dying all over the place.


Fun thing: for people who aren't going to WorldCon, I've posted the first chapter of The Serpent Sea on my website here. It's spoilery if you haven't read The Cloud Roads yet.


links:


Review of The Cloud Roads: Remember When Fantasy Books Were AWESOME? Thoughts on The Cloud Roads

Neat article on WorldCon: Renovation

YouTube: Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death Rowan Atkinson as Doctor Who

Bad Reputation: The Representation of Women in Fantasy: What's the Problem? – a guest post by author Juliet E McKenna

The Serpent Sea cover, without titles, by Steve Argyle. ...

The Serpent Sea cover, without titles, by Steve Argyle. It's neat to have Jade on the cover this time.

links:

Kameron Hurley: By the Numbers: Earning Out the Advance on a First Novel
So I've mainly been sitting around gnawing on my nails for months waiting on royalty statements to see just how screwed I was writing a feminist science fiction novel with far too much religion and billions of expletives.


Terrible Minds: What It's Like Being a Writer

Every word of this is true, and it's why I generally try hard to avoid telling people what I do for a living.

"Oh. A writer. Uh-huh. Well, that's great." They blink and offer a kind of dismissive or incredulous smile, as if I just told them I was a cowboy or a space marine. Occasionally there exists a follow-up question. "So, you write, like, what? Books?" And that word — books — is enunciated as if it's a mythical creature, like they're asking me if I spend all day tracking Bigfoot by his scat patterns.

What I'm reading this weekend:

The Shirt on His Back by Barbara Hambly. This is the newest Benjamin January historical mystery. Ben is a black musician and surgeon in 1830s New Orleans. In this one, Ben, Hannibal, and Abishag Shaw are at a mountain man rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains, trying to find the man who killed Shaw's brother. Publishers Weekly said Along the way, January and company encounter eccentric trappers, reptilian fur traders, tragic prostitutes, raging missionaries, and sensitively three-dimensional Sioux, Omahas, Crows, and Blackfeet. Their expedition plays out against the British-U.S. rivalry for the enormously profitable beaver fur trade, while American covered wagons toil on toward Oregon. Excellent, excellent book.