Carrie Vaughn's Blog, page 39

book review

I just finished Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou.  Read it in two days. Couldn’t leave my gravity well sofa. It was great, and horrifying. Like, I knew there was a certain amount of cargo cult thinking in Silicon Valley but this. . .

The short version:  this is the story of Theranos, a company that insisted it had developed a technology that would run hundreds of blood tests on small, finger prick samples of blood. Spoiler:  it had not successfully developed such a technology. But at one point enough people believed it that it was valued at 9 billion dollars. That’s billion with a B.

It is now worth nothing. The company was dissolved last month, the assets sold to pay debts. The CEO and COO are up on multiple Federal fraud charges.

And after reading the book, it’s hard not to believe the company’s founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, is an outright psychopath.  As a character study, it’s riveting. Near as I can figure she never had an actual real job with a paycheck that someone else signed before dropping out of Stanford to start Theranos. (Because that’s what you do in Silicon Valley apparently — drop out of Stanford and then make millions of dollars with your company.) And yet people gave her hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a decade to run this business. That’s amazing to me.  (I’m told that this is normal in Silicon Valley, which is its own pocket universe that has very little connection with reality.)

(Note to self, I don’t think I’ve read enough non fiction this year. Fix that!)

So I might have mentioned that I’m a fan of Daniel Abraham’s writing. Full disclosure: he’s also one of my oldest friends in the writing/publishing world. His fantasy series, The Dagger and the Coin, has an amazing villain, Geder.  Geder is paranoid. Geder will do anything he needs to to win. Geder absolutely believes he’s in the right and everyone who opposes him is wrong and evil and out to get him on a personal level. Geder burns cities to the ground when he gets angry enough and spends a lot of time talking about how it was the right thing to do.

I kept thinking about Geder while reading this book. People like that are real. They exist. I’m not sure I really understood that before.

 

Colette

Colette is a biopic of the early 20th century French writer, starring Keira Knightley. It’s long and leisurely and visually lush in the way of a lot of biopics, especially ones of artistic people. And like a lot of biopics of writers it says some true things about writing while also making the writing life look impossibly romantic.  I mean, writing is just a really slow process, so you gotta take cinematic short cuts. But mostly what the movie is interested in is Colette’s unconventional life and career, and that’s where it shines, in its positive portrayal of genderqueer and genderfluid characters.

I also learned that Colette was born exactly a hundred years before I was.

For all that I enjoyed the film, I left angry because that thing where a brilliant woman creator had an egotistical and overbearing husband who constrained, damaged, or took advantage of her apparently happened enough that there’s a whole genre about it. Big Eyes about Margaret and Walter Keane, Sylvia about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.  Colette’s early novels were published under her husband’s name. He would lock her in a room until she produced more. When she suggested maybe putting her names on the books too, he did not react well. Eventually she left him, and wrote plenty under her own name.

During the movie I thought about the Impressionist artist Marie Bracquemond, whose husband was also a painter, resentful of her talent to the point where she stopped painting at all.

It just… it’s infuriating. Once is a sad story. Two, three, four. . . that’s a pattern. And it sucks.

 

rough week

Been a rough week. The bullies keep on because they keep getting away with it.

The thing about finishing a big writing project is this moment of despair when I’m trying to figure out what to work on next and have five choices and can’t focus on any of them.

On the plus side, I’ve been invited to be an auntie to a baby horse due to be born in April. So there’s that to look forward to.

 

furnace weather

A sure sign of autumn in Colorado:  the furnace came on this morning. The house smells like heat. Time to get out sweaters, maybe.

In other news, yesterday I rather suddenly and unexpectedly finished the second of the 3/4 finished manuscripts from The Year of Stalled Projects. This feels a lot better than I was expecting. It means I have a novel draft. It’s no longer abandoned. I no longer have to worry about how I’m going to go back and piece together what I was trying to do, which gets harder the more time passes. Finishing this was an unexpected victory when I kind of needed one.

This one, I printed it off and read everything over, and much like the other one I could see exactly where I lost confidence in my entire career and started wandering around and not knowing what I was doing. I had 72,000 words, and it was so depressing to not have a complete thing out of all that. So. I cut about 12,000 words out of this one, and rewrote almost the whole second half, then took the voice/tone I had developed in that rewrite and went back over the first half, streamlining and pumping it up. I changed the title. I added chapter headers.

I sent it to my agent.

Now we wait, and now I figure out what to work on next.

Meanwhile, I’m beta reading something that would make lots of you jealous if I told you what it was, and Murphy’s Law of Library Holds means that my library holds all came in this week too. Which means maybe I should curl up with tea and books and just enjoy the fall weather.

 

Operation Niece’s Halloween Costume 2018

This year, Emmy wants to be Crookshanks, Hermione Granger’s cat.

I broke three needles on this. But now I can check “fur suit” off the skills list.

I’m seriously considering trying to talk her into being an Ewok next year. Just a few tweaks…

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so that Captain Marvel trailer

So the trailer for Captain Marvel, the next film in the MCU, has dropped.

Of course I love it. Was there even a question? I can’t get through it without crying out of sheer, emotional resonance.

As you all likely know by now, one of my favorite pet topics is women aviators. Carol is a pilot before she’s a superhero. And the fact that the trailer highlights that just. . . I’m so happy. It’s like they did all this just for me.

And there’s even more:  this shows her falling, and falling, and falling… and getting back up. Like, what is the primary trait we want people to know about this character?  She gets back up and goes back to the fight.

Here I go crying again.

One more thing. So, Wonder Woman was all about Diana being a woman hero, from an island of women, a woman in No Man’s Land, and so on. Her gender is a huge part of that movie and her identity and that’s great, we needed that.

Carol is a hero who is a woman. It’s a subtle difference. One of the many things I love about this trailer — her gender isn’t brought up at all. It’s just another thing, like the color of her hair or what hat she’s wearing. A hero who is a woman.  We’ve needed that, too.

It’s great. Just…. somebody hand me box of kleenex, gah.

 

and another story…

Another story announcement — I wasn’t sure when this one would be out, but it looks like November. Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller, will include my story “Closer to the Sky.” It’s now available for preorder. Just follow the link.

This is a story about a girl and her horse. Given how much time I’ve spent with horses in my life, I don’t write about them very much. I’m not sure why. When my horse Rosie started getting sick I wrote several rather horrific stories about terrible things happening to horses (I was processing) — “The Librarian’s Daughter,” “A Hunter’s Ode to His Bait.”  “The Librarian’s Daughter” is ostensibly about a girl and her horse except it’s, you know, horrific.

But I actually consider “Closer to the Sky” my first real “girl and her horse” story.  It’s also a weird western.

So yeah, stories that I’ve sold over the last three years are now coming out all in the same handful of months. Weird!

 

 

FUR

I’m certain that my niece has been picking her Halloween costumes specifically to challenge me on sewing and craft skills I don’t have.

This year, it’s working with faux fur.

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And not just faux fur, but the shaggiest faux fur I could find. That’s a 3-inch pile, y’all.

It’s a challenge to work with, but not as much of one as I thought it would be. (Knock on wood.) So far it’s a matter of making sure all the fur is brushed away from the edges before I sew seams. I’m about halfway done. I installed the zipper last night, which was daunting. But I think that’s the hardest bit. Fur this shaggy hides a lot of mistakes.

Mostly, and happily, this stuff is making me laugh. I finish a piece and it looks so silly and ridiculous and wonderful, I can’t stop laughing. I hope she likes it.

Can’t wait to show you pics of the finished thing.

 

 

Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana

It’s live! The latest Harry and Marlowe story is now up on Lightspeed! And if you’d like, buy the whole issue with a ton of great fiction!

Here it is:  Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana.

And there’ll be another Harry and Marlowe story out next year as well.

Enjoy!

 

signing this Friday!

Hey locals! This Friday I’m signing books and chatting with folks at Talking Books Plus in Lakewood!  Starting at 5 pm. Stop by and say hi!

Another reminder:  Fairwood Press is publishing a signed, limited edition of my novella PARANORMAL BROMANCE — it’ll be the story’s first time in print!  Head over to the website to get the special pre-order price.

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