Not Sure How Much This Helps

Despite frontloading a lot of the second-guessing of myself, and going in with a sense of not having a damn thing of use to offer; despite both of us being unreasonably tired and Damon missing half of Saturday due to health crap; despite a surprisingly small dealer's room (no t-shirts? How can there be no t-shirts?), Armadillocon was good for me this year.

I can never remember what I say on panels, though I always think afterwards of things I absolutely should have said, but after each one someone in the audience sought me out to remark favorably on what I said, and moreover on how I said it. I always have the vague sense that I've talked too much (and too loud, and too diffusely) and not said any of the right things, but the audience - or these specific portions of the audience anyway - perceives this as me being passionate about things.

That is certainly true as far as it goes. And apparently the other panelists don't find it too obnoxious, either, because when the ghost story panel was short of participants, at the tag-end of the day Saturday, someone I'd been on with earlier in the day invited me to get out of the audience and onto the panel. So I did. Because, ghost stories. And we were all weird by then anyhow, it wasn't just me.

I once again sat through a panel on promotion and was once again admonished that all sales involve "selling myself" and once again concluded that if that's true, I'm screwed, because I can't sell myself. This is not reluctance; this is not naivete; this is not cowardice; this is demonstrated fact. You might as well tell me to flap my arms and fly to the moon, or do a pull-up (honestly, how? I've never managed even one; I can't even bend my elbows), or fall asleep because it's bedtime. I've had 54 years to try this advice and it's not going to work because I can't do it, and my ability to network at all is small.

But I have sold books, and I have given workshops and been on panels that apparently were good for some of the participants, and I do get traffic on this blog, and somehow I've accumulated 337 simblr followers as of this morning, the vast majority of whom are not spammers, without any promotion at all. This is all small, but real. I'm okay with small success, and all my small successes have been the result of me telling stories and talking about the things I care about and basically engaging passionately with something, and conveying that engagement to people outside of it.

I do not know how to translate Being All About the Story into, say, a living wage.

But it's clear enough that Being All About the Story has to be where I start, or nothing else is going to happen at all.

Road Trip Time

Off to Armadillocon in the morning. We're leaving early so we can make a couple of stops on the way. My first panel is at 5:00 tomorrow.

If you're there too, find a panel I'm on and come say hi.

Maybe you can help me figure out this e-reader I bought.

Armadillocon 2015, Very Soon

The Armadillocon schedule is up.

I feel kind of detached from it all, as if I'm not really going. But I'll be there, and I expect I'll be present enough at the time. It's just that I'm so weird right now.

If you're there too feel free to say hi.

Armadillocon 2015

I just booked Damon's membership and our room for Armadillocon 2015.

I'm not sure why they want me. I'm not sure I'm a draw. I'm not sure I'm up to it. But I'm going and it'll sort itself out.

Because nothing good happens if you don't give them a chance; and the bad things that can happen aren't that bad.

Still Slogging Away

By my standards, having to decide between two equally compatible-looking agents at the same agency to target a query at is a pretty good problem to have.

Unfortunately the process of finding out more about them looks a lot like wasting time on social media. Fortunately, no one is looking at me.

Ah, November

All hail Kitchen Sanitation Month. When working with your hands leave your brain free to think broadly and deeply; but leaves you too tired to write anything down.

Which explains a lot about history and literature, actually; who gets to do them, and how, and why. Because for the vast and silent majority of humanity, from before the dawn of man, every day must contain the level of sheer physical labor that Kitchen Sanitation Month entails, in order to survive comfortably. (Or, in a war zone or a famine, at all.)

Got to go get lunch and then get back on it.

Visibility

It's Voter Registration Day (been registered for decades, so no worries; how about you?) and Bisexual Visibility Day, so here I am, bisexual and monogamous, popping up to be visible even though it's not your business. Or because it's not your business, but people act as though it is. If it were Omnivore Visibility Day I'd be popping up to say much the same thing, omnivore and vegetarian - the first by necessity, the second by choice. Biology is not destiny. I do not have to eat everything; do not have to act on every attraction; do not have to fit into anybody else's notion of what my category should be like; should not have to say this stuff, but "should" is a poor concept for dealing with reality, and the reality is that if we do not assert our own realities, other people will drown us in their illusions about who we should be, what we should do, and how we should live.

It occurs to me that my last several posts may be giving people an impression that I am more depressed than I am. I am not in any state to be worried about. I am not even, strictly speaking, feeling uncommunicative. Only I am tired of talking about things, and want to tell stories, and blogs are not for telling stories. I keep up with my tumblr just fine, because all that requires is posting pictures from my sims game and making story of what happened (with dialog in the captions and no attempt at plot), which that audience likes well enough to suit my purposes.

Everything I have ever learned always goes into stories, often before I can articulate it in any abstract fashion. Unfortunately the process of getting those stories where they can be read involves other kinds of communication, which are like pushing rocks uphill sometimes. So I learn to do them, with varying degrees of success, in much the same spirit that I vote on election day and make bald statements on Bi Visibility Day. They are small things and often feel futile, but not doing them is, in fact, futile, so - go for broke.

So excuse me. I should go write a query, but suspect I will go write story instead. (I also suspect that I am dragging my feet getting to the climax of the WIP because once that's done, the first draft will be over and I will have to commence making permanent decisions about how to arrange all this stuff, which will be hard; and then I'll have to try to sell it, which will be harder.)

Not a Complaint, Just an Observation

I have spent my entire professional life having to swim against my natural tendency to see and hear every viewpoint as equally important, equally valid; to be as interested (or more so) in the life of the person trying to cross the street as in the results of the epic chase scene. (Movie chase scenes bore me to tears and leave me wondering about all the people they drive right by, whose equally important business is thus disrupted.) Third-person omniscience, casts of thousands, and leisurely poking through all the stories to be found intersecting to form one big story have not been in fashion in my lifetime, except in the format of soap opera - a genre whose conventions, unfortunately, require that no one ever learn from experience and everyone make stupid choices ad nauseum.

I do not say that this is a good thing or a bad one. It is what it is, that's all.

It's Getting Better. Let's Pick Up the Pace Here.

It is never wise to rely too much on the assumption that what you happen to come across is a fair representation of reality. After all, we all see what we see because we look where we look. In order to understand the world, we have to examine it consciously and go into new places, look for new things, pay attention to details where we normally look at wholes, and at wholes where our attention is usually zoomed down to fine details.

But we all start with what's in front of us, and a juxtaposition of stuff floating across the screen in front of me when I was noodling around yesterday startled me into an invigorating, if intimidating, glimpse of reality.

First came a much-reblogged Tumbler post concerning the depiction of same-sex relationships in popular media, specifically movies; how "The girls are never supposed to end up together," how boy-girl relationships can be anything, go anywhere, be intercepted by story at any point. If a boy and girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, we know and they know that by the end of the movie they can be lovers and this can be accomplished by one kiss, no angsting, as part of a larger arc that may or may not focus on their emotional lives. But if a girl and a girl are best friends at the beginning of the movie, the odds are huge that by the end of the movie the one who isn't the protagonist will be standing on the sidelines being sweet and supportive of the all-important heterosexual relationship her BFF has gotten into during the movie; or even if they do wind up together, the movie will be about the struggle to face up to the fact of same-sex attraction. Most stories with queer protagonists are still coming-out stories first. And, given that we structure our lives around narrative, this is discouraging for the young queer, or the old one, trying to find the storyline that works for her life.

Immediately under this in my dash was a picture sequence of two male sims getting engaged.

I see a lot of such pictures on Tumblr, because I use it mostly to post pics from my game and follow what other people post about their games. The Sims2 program starts everybody off dead center on a scale of attraction to male or female, and the player (or a program modification installed by the player who wants less control of the process) determines the sexual preference and to a certain extent the gender orientation of the characters by decisions and actions during play. It's difficult, though not impossible, to model bisexual and transgender identities in the game; but any player can pretty much make any sim gay or straight at will. The sims themselves do not care.

And hardly any simmer I've ever run across didn't love having same-sex couples in their games. Sororities seethe with Lesbian Drama; male couples raise rampaging hordes of adopted and alien-hybrid children; generals and high-level politicians and small-town matriarchs welcome their sons' husbands and their daughters' wives with open arms; children grow up with two of one parent and none of the other, or with three grandfathers and only one grandmother, or (I have a kid like this in my game) two mothers with two fathers living next door, and never think it strange. Because it isn't. The vanilla code distinguishes between joined unions and marriage, but you can mod that out. You can even get same-sex pregnancy mods, if you want, or use a simple cheat to simulate artificial insemination.

What this tells me is that the movies, and to a certain extent even books (which are always ahead of the visual media in reflecting social change, if you read the right books) are missing a trick here.The General Public, or at least an economically viable chunk of it, is way past ready to get beyond the coming out narrative. We're ready for media to get with the program and treat normal stuff as normal, to proceed with the story (and get to the cute animations that we can't help snapping pictures of and showing each other online because although yeah, we've all seen the wedding video and the slow dance and the leap-into-arms hug in our own games, the pixels are individuated enough that they do not get old.)

Yet the institutions of media continue to behave as if this stuff is controversial, uncommercial, and barely in demand at all.

And then a little later, across the same dashboard, I get another reblog which gradually led me back to the UCLA Newsroom website, and a story about a study demonstrating that shows with racially diverse casts and creative teams do better in the marketplace than shows with primarily white casts and creative teams. Which nevertheless still outnumber the diverse shows.

Which is huge, as anyone in YA and children's literature can tell you. Non-white characters and authors are out there - but it can be so freaking hard to track them down, to get people of color onto bookcovers even when the protagonists aren't white, even to keep character tags that indicate ethnicity, and the reason we're told time and again is that white characters sell better and that non-white characters have to be handled with kid gloves so as not to offend anyone.

As if being left out completely isn't offensive.

Yeah, well, when all the books with black people on the cover are shelved under "African-American Studies" instead of "General Fiction" in big box retailers, it's not surprising if they don't sell it well. That's not the fault of the characters or the cover designer! But the place to deal with that isn't on the supply side; isn't to capitulate before being challenged; isn't to assume that this perceived marketing reality is inevitable and unfightable.

Or even true, as anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The moral of yesterday's dashboard is clear. The audience for diverse stories about diverse people exists. It is easy to be afraid of the economic consequences of writing for an invisible audience - but the secret, I see, is not to limit oneself to the visible audience, but to go forth and tear down the screens blocking them from your sight. They're out there. We can find them.

For one thing, we are them.

Now we just have to stand up nice and tall and speak nice and loud and make ourselves visible to the gatekeepers. This is taking too long, and media representation is an important part of social change. It's not enough to hang out whispering to each other on tumbler and Facebook. We have to vote with our dollars and our library cards. Complain as loudly and directly and vociferously of being stifled as the whiny minority complain in order to stifle us. Go into bookstores and ask for books with transgender protagonists; they'll find them for you. Go into libraries and check out books by Hispanic authors (whatever "hispanic" means anyway) on a regular basis. Talk up your favorite diverse shows to your co-workers in such a way as to coax them out of their comfort zones to watch and enjoy them too. Squee loudly about realistically depicted disabled characters, in public. Do amazon searches for "bisexual protagonists," "Native American / Indian authors," "black YA" whatever, and gripe to the management when you get inappropriate results.

Don't be didactic, but be proactive.

Write the book you want to write; and at the same time, create the demand you want to fill.

You are not the only one.

Creativity as a Civic Duty

So yesterday I was at jury duty. I did not get picked, although I was well up in the numbers (#10), which means I was specifically un-chosen. This did not surprise me, and does not hurt my feelings, because I probably shouldn't be on a jury. It's just way too easy for me to identify imaginatively with everybody in a case. And of course there's the whole issue of my two modes, Silent and Can't Shut Up.

But it boggled my mind, the number of people who said they couldn't think why, if you were innocent and accused, you wouldn't testify. That's just a failure of the imagination. I wouldn't do it - I talk too much and I annoy people and I bewilder them because my honest emotional reactions fall at the extremes of the bell curve and if I happened to be cross-examined when hungry - holey cheese, no! Just, no. And what if you have a stutter, or English is your second language, or you're self-conscious about your voice, or think poorly on your feet, or the opposing counsel reminds you of your abusive dad, or - I could come up with innocent reasons for silence all day long. (And I think everybody in that courtroom knows that now.)

Why is it so hard to bend their minds around the idea that the presumption of innocence includes the presumption that if the defendant doesn't testify there's an innocent reason for it?

Why do people assume that everything they're mildly curious about is their business?

I hear this sort of thing all the time, directed at me and at people around me. Why are you in a wheelchair? How did your spouse get HIV? If you're still friends with your ex why did you divorce? Why don't you have any children?

The answer to all these questions, and others like them, is: None of your business. Yet if you give this reply, the questioner is likely to treat you as the rude one.

When you're tempted to ask a question like that, stop and think a minute. Imagine a few scenarios that might result in the condition about which you are curious (or feel genuinely sympathetic and concerned) and ask yourself: "If that happens to be the reason, and it were me, how would I feel on being asked about it? And even if it's not - how often does she get asked about this? How annoying will this question be?" And then you won't ask.

Sure, the person might need to talk about it - but there's a thousand different ways to let someone know you're there to listen without asking personal questions that might have painful answers. And the people who demand information in this way aren't going to be good listeners. They're mildly curious, and a lot thoughtless, and that's all. Far from helping, they are part of the problem of coping - irritation on a wound.

Writing stories and drawing pictures and making music are refinements and developments of our basic creativity. We are all creative because we are part of a social species, and dealing productively with other members of our species requires that we be able to imaginatively identify with them.

Probably the lawyers wrote me off as being too easy with this facility. We all know people who become too enamored of the stories they tell themselves about the world to deal with the world itself when it differs from that story; and though I don't routinely do that, this is a reasonable reservation to have about me as a juror. I am professionally primed to read between the lines and fill in the gaps between the facts in the way that makes the best story, which is not necessarily the most just way to render a verdict. But other people in the same courtroom were undoubtedly written off for their professed inability to extrapolate at all - because that's not conducive to justice, either.

I hope they found the happy medium of that ability in the twelve people chosen.

Feedback

Pleasantest dream I’ve had in a long time.

Someone had approached me to write a Widespot-like book, and made a movie at the same time, to premiere the same day the book came out. It wasn’t exactly Widespot, because it was setting up a murder plot, but I used similar characters. I had to work to parameters but the packager and filmmaker both understood the point of Widespot and the openness so it had been a great experience making these things.

The day the movie came out my husband and I were in some sort of resort right after a big con of some kind, but the resort had a small movie theater and was showing it, so we went. The movie was well received, but the projector broke, so we went walking around and my husband was telling me his theories about how the story should work out. He thought Chester was the obvious person for the lovers to frame for the upcoming murder, and I had to explain that Chester wasn’t in the book. I wasn’t sure how the director had gotten permission to use him or why he wanted to.

Somehow word got out (I hadn’t been going around telling anybody) that the author of the book of the unfinished movie was there and I was approached by some people with a mutual acquaintance from the con, who had “some questions,” which were really their theories about what would happen. And then somebody overheard and joined us and started in with their own “questions,” then another person, until finally I’m in the theater listening to theory after theory and it’s wonderful! They had all these creative plot developments based on what had gone before and what they knew but didn’t know they knew about how story works, each one different and perfectly logical - I wish I could remember any of them, but you know how it is with dreams.

Until finally everyone had their say and clamored for me to get up and tell them the “real” story, and I got up to explain that there isn’t a “real” story, that they had each made the real story themselves because that was the whole point -

And woke up, which was good, because they'd have lynched me.

Artistic vision and public requirements don't necessarily synch perfectly. Games can be open-ended. Books and movies require closure.

This, I think, is why fandom thrives on series. You get the satisfactions of closure episode-by-episode, but the ongoing nature of the work invites the sort of active imaginative engagement that breeds fanfic, fanart, and ongoing water cooler discussion of issues. Unfortunately, the creative team can't afford to listen to this sort of thing too much - it's likely to make them self-conscious, tempt them into profitless discussion, distract them, or even potentially open them up to nuisance lawsuits if a fan proposes a storyline similar to one the creators come up with on their own.

It's a shame, because creators so seldom get the satisfaction of hearing their work discussed, or the extreme pleasure of seeing it in action, interacting with the audience. We're a social species. We like feedback. I don't think it's even ego-gratification - well, not all the way down - so much as it is creative satisfaction, and the wonder and surprise of seeing a work you know intimately in a completely different light.

On the other hand, if you're paying too much attention to feedback, you're not moving forward with the next work. So there's that.

Everything's a trade-off.

If you really crave audience reaction, volunteer to do storytime at the library. Just don't overload your schedule with your own work.

Why It's So Hard to Get Anywhere in this World

One of the great things about social media is that it's possible for the inexperienced, the curious, the amateur, the naive, and the isolated to listen in on, and even participate in, the conversations of the experienced, the accomplished, the professional, the sophisticated, and the well-connected and pick up early on whatever ideas are going around, more easily than ever before.

That's one of the awful things about it, too.

I hear, and once in awhile participate in, lots of conversations these days about the portrayal of marginalized groups in the media, what's wrong with mainstream habits, what's right with them, what more could be done. The Bechdel Test. Cover whitewashing. "Strong female characters." Bi-erasure. On and on and on. Somebody publishes something, it goes online, it gets comments, which draw more comments, which get quoted and Liked and reblogged and commented on and expanded and questioned and vehemently argued with and spin off new conversations of specific relevance to niche media and amusements - Is LARPing ableist? How sexist is the gaming industry? And on and on and on.

These are good conversations to have, and good ideas to ponder, because, face it, we are all ableist, sexist, racist, and so on, as an inheritance from our past, and the only way to stop being that way is to become aware of it. But -

There's always a but, isn't there?

One of the things I see, poking around in the back recesses of fandom, on the fringe of a bunch of things because that's where I naturally live, I see an unintended consequence of following these conversations.

Okay, two. One is that if you try to read all of it, you'll never write (draw/compose/program/whatever).

And another is the problem of the old man, the boy, and the donkey, who tried to please everyone, pleased no one, and lost the load of wood and the donkey. Or the problem of the caterpillar who can't walk because he can't figure out which foot to move first. I see it a lot - the person (usually female, sometimes male; usually young, sometimes middle-aged or old) who should be creating is instead paralyzed into inactivity by all the things she needs to do in order to produce the right sort of work. Will her story pass the Bechdel test? Is she being ableist? Is she writing the wrong kind of heroine? Does she have enough people of color? Is she the right color/gender identification/body shape to write this story? How can she be sure she's not just writing a silly Mary Sue story? Will she not only be able to do a good enough technical job, but produce an empowering, inclusionist work that will empower people rather than adding to the sum total of the world's screwed-up-ness?

Because heaven knows, it wasn't intimidating enough wondering if anyone would ever want to read the thing, or if you were imitating Tolkien too closely, of whether fanfiction is strictly speaking legal, or how copyright worked; which is the kind of thing I used to worry about back in the dark ages before social media.

So, if you're ever in that situation, or know somebody in a similar situation, remember this.

You won't get good if you don't do the work.

You don't have to show anyone your work until you're ready and it'll never be ready till you work on it.

If you don't do anything, it won't matter what you've done.

No one can do everything.

Discussions of this sort are intended to empower the disempowered and make the world better. If instead they paralyze you - stop listening to them. Withdraw. It's okay to do that. Things like the Bechdel test are tools to use when appropriate, but they won't always be appropriate. No work can include everything. You don't have to fix society single-handed.

The voice in your head saying excitedly: "You know what would be great? A deaf detective who is routinely underestimated because of the deafness and uses that to her advantage. If the heroine of this story set in the upper middle-class closed and gated community is black and the fact that she's black in a gated community is not the point of the story. Oh, wow, I just figured out that the reason this love story isn't going anywhere is that the supposed love interest is the wrong gender!" That's the voice of the Muse. Listen to it. Embrace it. Participate in any discussions that make that voice sing.

The voice saying: "You can't write that. That won't work. You're not good enough. You'll screw this up. You're not qualified. If you put in this good thing you're really doing this bad thing. Sit still. Don't move. You can't do it. You'll only make things worse." That's the Devil of Disempowerment. That's the voice these discussions are trying to still forever. You won't be able to silence it completely, but you can, in fact, build a cupboard in your head, shove it in there, lock the door, and tell it to STFU. And any discussions that let the Devil out of his cupboard - avoid them. However good they may be for society, and that's not your call, they're not good for you; and that can only be your call.

If you need permission - here you go. I give you permission to do whatever you need to do to accomplish the work that only you can do.

I'm as qualified for that as anybody.

It Takes Two (or More) to Polish

Yeah, I'm here, but it's hot.

Here's an example of how important revision, proofreading, copyediting, and fresh eyes are. I don't care what your medium or your target audience.

I was giving another Sims2 Neighborhood builder a hand with a project he'd undertaken which had been overtaken by Health Crap, and with three people working on it we thought we had it good to go. This is the third or fourth draft of this hood and we thought we finally had all the i's dotted and the t's crossed, though we did still have some differences of opinion on individual details. So we put it up for playtesting again.

Within 24 hours we had four or five tweaks that we'd missed, settled the difference of opinion based on feedback, and been alerted to a huge problem - one of the families was appearing, in certain views, with the text for one of the families that ships with the game! This makes no sense! And it was only happening to one person.

After two or three days of head scratching and grilling this player about her game configuration, another playtester had an idea, did an experiment, and gave us The Big Clue. As an artifact of how the neighborhood was originally set up, certain strings of text in the translation files for languages other than US English got duplicated from a premade neighborhood. The person with the problem had a game set to UK English, which was sufficient to trigger the glitch. Once we knew that, it was a piece of cake for the programmer among us to prevent, and the tutorial on creating neighborhoods has been duly updated with a warning about the practice that got us into trouble.

And this is why it bugs me that publishing companies have gradually downsized their copyediting and proofreading over the decades; why so many creative people find beta readers and test audiences an important part of their process; why self-publishing will always be a crapshoot; why I give Damon manuscripts to read for logic and continuity errors; and why whatever it is you do, you need to set your ego aside and listen to feedback from anyone who is kind enough to vet your work. Just because you can't see a problem doesn't mean it's not there. Maybe you're too close to it to see it; maybe you know what's supposed to be there so well you see it even though it's not; maybe it's not physically possible for you to see it because it only appears under conditions you have no reason or ability to replicate.

It's your name on the work, so you're responsible for the final result; but you can't do quality control all by yourself. You need someone to spot you.

Upcoming Public Conversation, or What Am I? Crazy?

I got my schedules for LoneStar Con - the World SF convention in San Antonio this Labor Day weekend - and boy am I intimidated. Here's how it looks:

What Happened to US-Based Spanish Language Publishing?
Friday 10:00 - 11:00
Less than a decade ago Spanish-language readers in the US were looked upon as next big untapped market, a rare bright spot of growth in the otherwise saturated book market. So what happened? Did US publishers fail to find the Spanish readers, or were they never there to begin with?
Liz Gorinsky, Peni Griffin, Norman Spinrad, Rudy Ch. Garcia (rudy.ch.garcia@gmail.com), Miguel Angel Fernandez
Dear heaven, what did I checkmark to make them think I might be qualified to sit on a panel like this? I’ll be in the audience but the amount of research I’d have to do to be a useful contributor is too much. Somebody should really represent the educational/MG/YA angle though. Why didn't they get Guadalupe Garcia McCall to do it? She’s teaches MG and is on the front lines of the demographic wave.

Yellow Roses: Texas SF/F Authors and Traditions
Friday 13:00 - 14:00
Women writing sf/f in the Lone Star state talk about their work including their influences and challenges.
Elizabeth Moon, Peni Griffin, Stina Leicht, Lillian Stewart Carl
I’ll be there with bells on. Figurative ones, anyway.

The Future of the Border
Friday 14:00 - 15:00
The future of the (US-Mexico) border as fortification, as passage, as imaginative interzone, as DMZ. The future of the Mexico-US relationship, including the Mexicanization of the US and the Americanization of Mexico.
Madeline Ashby, Walter Hunt, Peni Griffin, Dave Hardy, Chris N. Brown
I’ll have to do research for this to make sure I'm up to snuff. Oh dear, I'll have to go to the library, however will I bear it? :)

Alternate Mexicos and Alternate Texases
Friday 16:00 - 17:00
Dave Hardy, Alberto Chimal, Harry Turtledove, Peni Griffin
Bring it on.

Mexican Folklore
Saturday 10:00 - 11:00
Carole Parker, Bridget Duffy, Peni Griffin, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Miguel Angel Fernandez
More research to make sure I've got stuff at my tongue's end, but I can do this. It's too bad the Anglo names outnumber the Spanish ones but I'll try not to run my mouth too much. I work best as a support figure in this context.

You've Got Texas in my Epic Fantasy: The Lone Star State as Setting/Influence in Speculative Fiction
Saturday 12:00 - 13:00
Texas is a weird place. They have a whole city devoted to staying Weird. What makes Texas so weird? And how does the weirdness of Texas spill over into its massive creative community? Our panelists will attempt to futilely struggle with an answer that may be bigger than San Antonio.
Peggy Hailey, Martha Wells, Don Webb, Howard Waldrop, Peni Griffin
Ha! Yes! Bring it on!

Xenoarchaeology in SF
Saturday 13:00 - 14:00
Xenoarchaeology, a field of hypothetical science concerned with the physical remains of extraterrestrial civilizations, can be traced back to the Giovanni Schiaperelli's 1877 observation of channels on Mars. Xenoarchaeological themes are common in science fiction. Examples of xenoarchaeological fiction include Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frederick Pohl's Gateway, and The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt. Come and discuss this popular subgenre. What might real xenoarchaeology look like?
Marianne Dyson, Charles E. Gannon, Peni Griffin, William Ledbetter
I hope I’m not too disappointing in this one but I know Marianne, I'll be hobnobbing with archeologists soon, and I’ll give it a go.

Cambrian explosion: a Developmental toolkit for complex body plans
Monday 11:00 - 12:00
Peni Griffin, Mel White, Jeffrey Shanks
I’m so sorry, this is waaaaaay too early for my limited paleontological expertise. I was hoping for megafauna. I hate to leave them with only two people, but I couldn’t contribute enough, even with research. I hope to be in the audience asking intelligent questions, though.

For What It's Worth Coming from Someone White as Rice

So yesterday in the morning I read Lee & Low's blog post about why diversity in children's books isn't any better than it was 20 years ago, and went out to do yardwork while I had cool morning to do it in and composed a post on the topic. Which is difficult, because in a lot of ways - as a middle-aged white woman writing in a field traditionally dominated by middle-aged white women - it's not my discussion to have. The conversation is not about me and what I can do is limited, though I hope I manage to do that limited amount. But I'm in the middle of it anyway, and the problem won't go away on its own, so it's not out of line to have an opinion.

And then I crashed like a helicopter driven by a chimp and don't remember any of the things I meant to say.

But I can tell you this.

Yesterday, I got a royalty statement and a check. A sizable check by the standards of the checks I've been getting lately. For Switching Well, which is 20 years old this year. An educational company bought some subsidiary rights, and now I may be able to put something into my Roth.

Switching Well has, of course, two protagonists. Both are middle-class white girls, swapping places across a hundred years of time.

As far as I'm aware, the only controversy there's ever been about this book is over the scene in which Ada, from 1891, is plopped down in modern San Antonio during Fiesta and, far too trusting, is nearly carried off by a child molester. I've never understood exactly why this scene is sufficient to get the book shut out of some libraries (without due process; I know this by hearsay talking to public school librarians) - it doesn't contain anything outside the standard "stranger danger" dramatizations that have been shown in schools for decades, and in fact I relied on modern schoolchildren's familiarity with the "stranger danger" meme to keep them ahead of Ada in this scene and enable them to understand what was going on. One teacher who had me for a school visit with her class of underachievers told me that this scene was when they sat up and started to take notice and get engaged with the characters. But whatever.

The point is, I did not feel I could avoid race when writing this story, and I did not want to. Racial issues were part of the suite of cultural changes and continuities with which both girls were logically confronted. Since 1891 was before Jim Crow laws (which surprised me; the impression my history classes had left me with was that Jim Crow rolled over seamlessly from slave codes after Reconstruction ended, but it's more complicated than that. It always is.), I was surprised at some of the ways this manifested. I didn't dwell on this stuff, but it's there, especially in the case of Violet, the black girl who becomes Ada's mentor and guide through the inadequacies of the child welfare system. One of the notable things about the nineteenth century system modern girl Amber encounters is that she's placed in an all-white orphanage; but I also stuck a misdiagnosed deaf child into that orphanage, because the tendency of deaf children to be misdiagnosed as "feeble-minded" was one of those things that leaped out of my research. None of this is or can be the focus of the story, but it's there, for what it's worth.

Practically everyone's favorite character is Violet, by the way. And the same teacher whose class was electrified by Ada's near-miss with the child molester has a deaf child and was enthusiastic about the sequence with the misdiagnosed deaf child.

The point being that, even if you and your protagonists are from the privileged categories of people, the diversity issues are there. It doesn't harm your story or your chances in the market place to acknowledge them. No, truly, it doesn't. I have 20 years worth of checks from Switching Well to prove it.

I can tell you this much about racism, sexism, ableism, and all the other societal tendencies that group us into more and less privileged groups: It's always present. It's always complicated. Talking about it often doesn't seem to do any good, but ignoring it does harm and talking about it - doesn't.

Don't be afraid to take your story down those uncomfortable paths we mince along every day. We're on those paths anyway, and so are our audiences. We might as well acknowledge that.

It's something we all have in common.

Patience and Persistence

It's one of those weeks that disrupts discipline. We all have more important things to do than we have time to do them, so it happens. So you step back a couple of steps, but if you keep going, you get everything done. Sure, it takes awhile. Longer than you want it to. Even when you control all of it, and face it - you never control the whole process of anything.

I took K, who is 9, to the Alamo yesterday and then we had trail mix and sandwiches in the water garden across the plaza and walked down the Riverwalk. I pointed out an old work place to her, and the plaque about Bowen's Island, and this reminded me of B. She was my friend while I worked in that place, even though she was an executive and I was five years in an entry-level position. I'd temped under her and we talked about writing and she was partly responsible, I think, for my getting the entry-level position. It wasn't her fault I wasn't cut out for a day job. She did a lot of work gathering information on the history of the site, including collecting some artifacts uncovered during work that was done on the building during the time we were there. She wanted the company to put out a booklet, but they would only let her put together a display. It was frustrating for her. She also wrote fiction, and wrote well, but there was a disjunct between what she wanted to write and what a publisher would be willing to take. That sort of thing happens a lot.

Anyway, we walked on past my old workplace to the Tower Life Building, which K has often admired and of which she'd like to go to the top, which isn't happening. However, I took her on inside so she could see the lobby, which looks more like a little church than a lobby, and where the old brass mail chute is still in use, and the man at the front desk gave us a stapled handout with the history of the site on it.

I recognized it. B's name wasn't on it, but it had been based on her work.

She had other things going on in her life (including the illness that killed her) and made choices that resulted in her never writing for publication; and the decisions of other people prevented the full realization of the potential of the writing she did at the junction of her professional and her creative life. But the work was out there. It kept going.

We stand tall on the shoulders of giants; we also stand tall, and enable taller standing, if we form part of a pyramid of short people.

That's how the world works.

Patience and persistence are easier when you internalize that. At least, I find it so.

It's not Procrastination, it's Research

You know what drafting a guest post for Cynsations provides?

An excuse to go back and read ALL THE GUEST POSTS!

Yeah, not making visible progress this morning. But is visible progress the only kind? Hmmm....I'm good at this procrastination stuff, aren't I? Too bad I can't get paid for it.

Odious Comparisons, or Why I Am Midlist

So yesterday I got my first-quarter - actually first month, since it came out in March - royalty statement for Sullivan, That Summer. Five copies sold. Oh well.

But check out the downloads page for Widespot. It became available at almost the same time as Sullivan, and as of this writing it's been downloaded 548 times!

So my exercise in making something for a game that is no longer supported or sold by the company that owns its copyright is almost eleven times more successful than my book in a popular genre. Sigh.

I can whine about it, or I can learn from it. From what differences does this discrepancy arise?

It's not quality, I can tell you that. Both are solid, workmanlike storytelling.

Comparing across formats is always problematic because the technical requirements of storytelling in different formats - book, video, game, oral transmission, graphic - vary so much, and though techniques from one medium may be usefully translated into another (considering "camera angles" in a novel, say), they will not have equivalent values. Creators are often the worst judges of their own work, also. However, I'm in position to state that the same degree of care and creativity went into each; that both spring from the same fangirly place in my psyche; that both were created under considerable internal pressure, to the point that I could not leave them alone over an extended period of time. If work and care count for anything, in fact, Sullivan ought to be the better work, since I had almost ten years to polish it (I think it first forced me to write it around 1995) and I have a lot of experience and skill in prose storytelling. Possibly Widespot benefits from unstudied naturalness or something, but I doubt it.

Price should not be a factor. Widespot is free, of course, but Sullivan is only $4.99. And whereas Widespot is only useful to Sims2 players, Sullivan is available in trade paper and a variety of electronic formats; and Widespot is only available at a single website, while Sullivan can be acquired through the publisher or a variety of other retailers, including big players like B&N and Amazon.

Ah, but here's where the law of supply and demand comes in. Whereas the demand for LGBT YA literature is much higher than the demand for premade Sims2 neighborhoods, and the supply is not as great as it ought to be, the proportional supply-and-demand is skewed against me in the literary market, and for me in the gaming market. The number of populated premade Sims2 neighborhoods available is small, and the proportion of them that contains corruption (bad code that will eventually render the neighborhood unplayable) is large (and includes the original neighborhoods shipped with the game!); though I have no statistics on the matter, this supply is nowhere near big enough to satisfy the demand. The pay rate is low, the currency of tender is intangible, and the market is shrinking, so my only competition is from other people who were intrigued enough by the creative problem of making one to assay it and motivated enough to complete it. LGBT literature, on the other hand, is a growing market in which it is possible to make money as well as ego gratification, so competition is stiffer.

The size of the pond is also relevant. MTS is the oldest and one of the largest (possibly the largest) fan forum the Sims franchise has online. Even people who don't like to hang out there, even people who rag on their upload policies and sneer at their downloads, check it out periodically. Within this tiny pond, I was able to hitch a ride aboard a good big fish.

Queer Teen Press is a small, niche venture; small enough that I didn't submit Sullivan there till I'd run out of mainstream publishers to try it on. It's one of a number of specialty publishers taking advantage of the digital revolution to launch, all vying for a good lane position on the information highway. Even within the tightest focus of this particular niche market, consumers are bombarded with more information than they can possibly absorb; any given company, let alone any given publication, in this market needs as much luck as skill in order to catch the attention of an interested buyer.

And within the small world of each pond, at MTS I'm a talkative poster who has become familiar to a fair proportion of the other participants, while at Queer Teen Press I don't really know anybody. MTS is part of my normal social milieu. Queer Teen Press is just another place where I submitted a story over the transom. I have a platform at MTS; I have none with the queer YA audience.

Nor do I know how to get one. I'm not a teen, and although I self-identify as bi I've never been part of the queer subculture. I live within a heterosexual marriage, for heaven's sake! And I'm just not social enough professionally; I never have been. I can make friends with other writers, but when it comes to being a personal presence to the audience - I suck at that. I'm sufficiently aware that most people who've ever met me have either been indifferent to or have actively disliked me (and that I could never isolate what I did to bring that on) that the idea of going out and trying, with an ulterior motive, to put myself out there were people can get to know me makes me physically ill. And even the most basic social networking with a purpose seems to be beyond me. Sullivan has a Facebook page, but with the best will in the world I haven't been able to find things to put on it and I'm not even certain it's published properly.

Maintaining a simblr (a Tumbler page consisting mostly of game-related pictures)? Ffft, that's easy! I can tell myself that nobody looks at it, really, except my friends who are genuinely interested and whose game pictures I'd also like to see more of, though I've been pleasantly surprised to find some "big name" simblers whom I don't know personally following me back. I promote Widespot accidentally, as a byproduct of stuff I do for my own amusement. I want to promote Sullivan, but can't relax and do it naturally.

Sometimes you know exactly what the problem is, and still can't solve it.

So that's where I am. Suggestions appreciated; but don't get your feelings hurt if you give me viable solutions and I'm too chicken to implement them.

Yet Another Sewing Analogy

So I'm making a pattern I've never sewn before, and on Friday it came time to make the back center seam of a bodice with a lining and no zipper. I read the directions, and they made no sense. None. I tried to follow the directions and they still made no sense. I manipulated the pieces as directed and it all seemed physically impossible. So I gave up.

I woke up a number of times during the weekend, worrying about this bodice.

Yesterday I went back to it. And it was easy. Obvious, even. This despite the fact that I was pretty light-headed, which makes seeing how two-dimensional patterns translate into three-dimensional garments exponentially more difficult for me.

Sometimes you have to let a problem rest and let your backbrain deal with it. I can't promise it'll take as short a time as a weekend. That block at Ch. 10 I referred to awhile ago has been there a good deal longer than that. But the backbrain does in fact keep working, out of sight, if your frontbrain will let go of a problem and allow it.

They don't seem to be able to work simultaneously, sorry.

News: Habitable Planets!

NASA's finally found a couple of planets enough like ours that life as we know it could be on them!

But wait, it gets better! They're both in the same solar system - they're neighbors! They're closer together than Earth is to Mars.

But wait, it gets even better than that! The system is older than ours (the star, an orange dwarf, is about 2.5 billion years older than Sol), so whatever new life and new civilizations are boldly going where ever they want to go on them has probably had more time to get there than we have.

It's easy to think too simplistically about extrasolar planets. I can't help noticing that even the scientists quoted about them are having trouble thinking of them as being as complex as Earth. One is slightly closer to the sun than the other, so is described as "Hawaii" or "Washington in May" and the other is "more Alaska." Which is nonsense, as they both obviously have equatorial and polar zones, seasons, and so on. But to determine them we'd have to know a lot more about their axial tilt and so on.

It's easy to think of these two neighboring planets in terms of earth politics, with perhaps one colonizing the other, or two planetary empires competing - but I bet it's way more complicated than that. You could have thousands of countries and cultures on each planet, allying and competing in the area of their common spaces, and the international political situation is several orders of magnitude more complicated than on earth because two equally complex species are competing within shared space.

The triple-gendered citizens of Sqark may not have a stake in whether heterosexual marriage is legal for the citizens of Pomph, but if Pomph controls the shipping routes through the Asteroid Girdle you can bet Sqark, with its dependence on raw materials from the Girdle, is interested in the stability of the Pomph government; as is Klarnk, Sqark's third-world neighbor, its industry stifled by Sqark's draconian import/export laws...And what effect does Hurricane Klaatu have on all these players?

Science is great.