Shaken & Stirred

MIA

I know! I know! But not for long. Promise. More posts coming sooooon. Seriously.

Empaneled

Charles Tan, aka the hardest working man in science fiction, recently hosted an email roundtable on YA speculative fiction with Malinda Lo, Tehani Wessely, Cheryl Morgan, Tarie Sabido, and yours truly. It was great fun to do, although apparently I was trying to see how many times I could use the word conversation. (Answer: LOTS.) I blame holiday madness.

The resulting conversationpanel is now live at SF Signal. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Monday Hangovers

• The wondrous Meghan McCarron has an *excellent* new story up at Tor.com, "Swift, Brutal Retaliation." You won't read another ghost story like this one anytime soon.
• Dept. of I Love This Kind of Thing: Maggie Stiefvater compares and contrasts the draft of a chapter, taking it from first version to last.
• Laini Taylor offers some questions to ask when a scene is giving you fits.
• I can't remember where I first saw this, but it's kind of amazing: "The Power of the Witch," a British documentary from 1971.
• There could have been no more perfect name for this bird than Muppet.
• A good piece on acknowledgements at the Millions; I heart acks.
• Just in case you haven't yet swooned at the beauty of Tiffany Trent's cover for The Unnaturalists: Go do so.
• The delightful Nova Ren Suma is hosting a new blog series starting tomorrow, this one on turning points. (I'll be contributing an essay for this one; just started working on it, actually.)

Happiest of New Years

...to you. (Should that be Year's? or is Years okay? the day has passed, so I'm going SANS apostrophe, because I'm a rebel that way.) I am--like everyone else--playing catch-up and swimming as fast as I can coming out of the holiday. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say this year is already looking like it's going to be verrrry interrrrresting.

More soon. *swims*

This Was A Really Good Year

In terms of reading -- I really do recommend all the books in the sidebar over there, and, as you'll see, my effort to winnow to a Top 10 resulted in a Top 17, that could just as easily have been a Top 20. But I forced myself to stop. Behind the cut tag (in reverse alphabetical order by author).

#Topper Party

So TCM had a mini-Cary Grant marathon the other day, and one of the films included was Topper (which is also available on DVD, of course). Justine and I were bandying our love for it around with Ari, who had set up a timer but never seen it... And then Justine had the marvelous idea of live tweeting a simultaneous watch party from our respective corners of the world.

I'm stealing Scott's post about the relevant details, because lazy! but also busy! Here goes:

Next week I’m going to be live-tweeting an old movie with various friends around the world (namely, @justinelavaworm, @readingincolor, and @gwenda (ed. note from G--@scottwesterfeld is the other relevant twitter handle, of course). In other words, we’ll all be putting the DVD in at the same time, watching it in sync, and tweeting VERY witty things. Or just crapping on about Cary Grant’s amazing car, more likely. Why are we doing this? Because it seemed like fun, and @readingincolor hadn’t seen it yet.

The movie is called Topper, and is a screwball comedy about dying in a car accident and then messing with your banker as a ghost. (Seriously. People laughed at some weird stuff back then.)

If you’re on the twitter machine, please feel free to join in.

Time: 8:30PM US EST
Date: Tuesday Dec 27
(Sydney Time: 12:30PM Wed Dec 28)
Hashtag: #Topper

Join in if you like. It should be fun. After all, what is twitter for if not live tweeting old movies?

Excuses, Excuses: Holiday Edition

Yes, I know I've been MIA. I intended to do a post about books I recommend for gifts this year (just made our list today, figuring out which books to get for who) and about other things, but just haven't had a chance. I also have a million links for a hangovers post, which I'll try to post at some point in the nearish future. For the inevitable gift card frenzy to come, the 2011 reading list is down and to the right.

And here's a teensy reminder that if there's an old-school D&D or gaming fan on your list (or you fit this description), Christopher's Sandstorm makes a lovely gift--the perfect size for a stocking. And too big for a stocking but also a great gift is the Steampunk! anthology, edited by Kelly and Gavin, and filled with fabulous stories, including one by Mr. Rowe.

I could promise I'll try and do some catch up posts, but in all truth I'm probably going to do the sane thing and enjoy the coming time with our family, try and get some more novel written, and otherwise make my best attempt at R&R for the next week and a halfish.

So there. Happy holidays, my lovely ones.

A Trio of Tuesday Hangovers

...aka a pocketful of kidlit links:

• Editor extraordinaire Andrew Karre has very smart things to say about why #yamatters at Hunger Mountain. A snippet: "It’s easy to spot disruption in tech and media. These things happen very fast and concern a lot of people (and their money) on a day-to-day basis. It’s harder to see these disruptions in smaller and slower-moving categories and subcategories. But I believe they’re there, and, as you’ve probably guessed, I believe modern novels for young readers—particularly YA novels—are a disruption in children’s books and maybe in books in general." Right on. (via Big Think)
• Shannon Maughan has an excellent piece at PW about the history and importance of the Caldecott and Newbery awards, with extensive comments from Anita Silvey and Leonard Marcus. (I found the discussion about whether the best children's books really are "timeless" v. interesting.)
• At Publisher Perspectives, author Beth Kephart talks with Pamela Paul about her approach as the new editor of the NYT's coverage of children's books. Snippet: “It’s a busy world,” says Paul, a journalist and author who was named to the post in late January of this year. “There’s so much competing for our time. My hope with the children’s pages is to make them relevant and essential for all the readers of the Times — to provide expanded coverage of everything from board books and middle grade stories to young adult fiction and nonfiction. There are so many ways to tell a story. I’m trying to make room for them all.”

Monday Hangovers

Some links! And some of these have been sitting in my "links to post" file for awhile, so clearing them out. Also, I'm behind on email but hoping to catch up tonight or tomorrow. So there you have it.

• "For a Better Brain, Sleep Well": "While an awake brain is more stimulated, our thinking organ cannot handle unbridled activity. Neurons have a threshold past which the communication of information is inhibited. This is why, after a restless night, people say they are unable to concentrate on the day's tasks. By restoring the brain to a restful state, neurons are more prepared to activate the following day and learn from the surrounding environment. The brain's daily rejuvenation process is known as 'synaptic homeostasis." The key to everything, really.
• Great list: 5 Timeless Books of Insight on Fear and the Creative Process. 
• The science of kissing.
• "Alejandro Jodorowsky and His Tarot de Marseille": "In Paris, where he has lived for the last 20 years, he lectures on the tarot and does readings for strangers once a week. And he vividly remembers how, at 20, he first saw an old (and, he said, naked) woman in his native Chile give a tarot reading, and was instantly intrigued. He soon moved to Paris, where he joined the mime company of Marcel Marceau and began traveling with him. It was in Tokyo, Mr. Jodorowsky said, that he first bought a tarot deck. This became a habit. Every place they went, he would figure out where and how to buy a new deck; before long, he had a vast collection."
• Hannah Tepper conducts a fascinating interview about the science of free will with researcher Michael Gazzaniga at Salon: "There is something in our left hemisphere, a system, a module, a capacity that is constantly trying to see the meaning in the patterns of activity in the brain. It’s trying to interpret emotional changes and behaviors. It’s trying to put this into a story line. It’s the thing that builds our story. It’s also, I think, responsible for why we can talk about determinism and a lack of free will until we’re blue in the face, but none of us actually believes it. Because we feel we are unified and we have this sense of self. I think this is highly related to the interpreter."
• The difficulties of authors with hard-to-pronounce names.
• Everybody's favorite stealth library artist: link one and link two.
• Laura Miller interviews Jonathan Lethem, and many interesting things are said.
• Annalee makes a list of ten themes shared by historical and science fiction over at io9.
• Colleen visits The Big Idea to talk about The Map of My Dead Pilots, and the issues around writing about real people.
• The fabulous Kat Howard writes about fencing and its fictional versions (delightfully!) at Fantasy.
• Two wonderful and smart women talking: Malinda Lo interviews Cassandra Clare for Diversity in YA.
• I absolutely adored the series of posts Nova Ren Suma hosted on inspiration last month, and her own final post on the subject was no exception. Highly recommended.

Magically Inclined

I know I don't have to explain the enormous influence of Terri Windling to most people who visit this blog, but seeing everyone's posts about how important she's been to them--whether they know her personally or not--in relation to the Magick 4 Terri auction bonanza has been so incredible, I can't resist joining in.

It's hard to quantify, exactly, the ways in which a luminary like Terri impacts the artistic community she's engaged in. Some of her contributions have been as a fabulous editor, bringing to light the work of many, many writers at both the longer and shorter length, in a way that truly helped shape--and reshape--the field. Some have been as an author herself, including of the marvelous novel The Wood Wife, which I highly recommend. Still more, as an artist of gorgeous mythic art, and as one of the major forces behind the Endicott Studio and the Journal of Mythic Arts. Perhaps most of all as someone involved and invested in the speculative fiction and broader literary community through all of the above, and with the brilliant light of her personality and point of view.

I don't know Terri well, but she's always present in my life in a number of ways, small and large, that she doesn't even know:

- At the first Wiscon I went to, at Ellen and Delia's clothing swap, I came away with a dress that had formerly belonged to Terri. I feel like that dress is borrowed magic, and I still have it.

- The lion's share of the art in our living room is by Terri; a giant study for a larger piece we scored at a Tiptree Auction, personalized by her, and two smaller pieces framed together. In my office, there's a print celebrating the Endicott Studio and its support for at-risk children. These pieces bring me joy every time I look at them.

- Her marvelous blog, filled with wit and inspiration and pointers to fascinating things, and, of course, pictures of Tilly. Terri makes an art of life as a creative process, and shares it with the rest of us.

- Perhaps most of all, the row of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volumes on our shelves. To say that Terri's editing hand on selecting the best fantasy pieces of the year was important to my getting to know the field would be an understatement. Her taste, along with Ellen Datlow's as the other editorial half of the series*, had a very real impact on not just what was considered "the best," but what was considered to be part of the fantastical conversation at all. There are many, many writers I might not have discovered until far later--if at all--without this resource to look to, and it played a huge part in helping widen our field's borders, and broaden the conversation. (This is not even to get into all the other anthologies Ellen and Terri have edited over the years and their wonders. They have also been trailblazers in including YA as part of the larger SFF field. And I'm still so honored that my one published short story appeared in Terri and Midori Snyder's Journal of Mythic Arts YA issue.)

All of this by way of saying, our community truly wouldn't be the same without her. I wouldn't be the same reader or the same writer. Apparently, she and her family have been going through a tough time, and need some financial support. So go check out the amazing auction her friends have organized and bid and/or offer something, or just donate. (I'm trying to figure out what I could offer--a bourbon and books selection, tailored to the winning bidder, maybe? I dunno.)

Terri's already given plenty to us all. It's a pleasure to have an opportunity to try and repay even a little of that.

*And Kelly and Gavin's later, when they took over for Terri.

Star Power

Last night, taking the dogs out for a late walk at my parents' in the country, I was looking at the sky. One of the biggest trade-offs we make living in light-polluted cities is losing the stars. Even though it was a foggy night, there were still plenty of things visible, including a star shining so bright it had to be a planet.

When I came in and said this to one of my nephews, he flipped out and asked if we could go back out and see it. So we did (aside: barefoot in late November; it was chilly, but not bad: what have we done to our own planet?).

I love astronomy and wish I'd held onto more of it, so sad to say I had to google to find out which one it was. (My mom was using an app on her ipad, but I cling to the old ways.) I was able to figure out via the help of Astronomy Central and EarthSky that the planet in question was Jupiter.

(photo from Astronomy Central)

According to this University of Oregon page: "Jupiter is the largest of the nine planets, more than 10 times the diameter of Earth and more than 300 times its mass. In fact, the mass of Jupiter is almost 2.5 times that of all the other planets combined. Being composed largely of the light elements hydrogen and helium, its mean density is only 1.314 times that of water. The mean density of Earth is 5.245 times that of water. The pull of gravity on Jupiter at the top of the clouds at the equator is 2.4 times as great as gravity's pull at the surface of Earth at the equator. The bulk of Jupiter rotates once in 9 hours, 55.5 minutes, although the period determined by watching cloud features differs by up to five minutes due to intrinsic cloud motions." There are lots of other fascinating things about Jupiter, including that if it grew much more in mass, it would actually shrink through gravitational compression. 

Science is awesome.

Afterward, Christopher and I talked about how day lengths govern the entire rhythm of our lives, and the "extra time" at the end of the day in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, and whether the loss of cultural interest in space travel has any correlation to more people living in light-polluted population centers.

*

I dreamed a movie that never existed with Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant opposite each other, on an enormous ship. Different kinds of stars.

The Giving of Thanks

As stated elsewhere, I'm attempting to stay off social media (aka The Services, to invoke a more sinister, Skynetish flavor) for the next little bit. There'll probably be a few more posts here in the meantime. It's not that I feel like I've been spending too much time on twitter, etc., of late or that such things are particularly disruptive or a bad influence or anything like that. What they are, though, is noise, and I'm at the point with this book where I need to cancel out as much noise as possible, the better to capture the signal. I think it's a good plan. There are those times when you just need to be in the book you're writing, as much as possible, and cutting down on distractions (like the controversy of the week or, more dangerous by ten times, the fascinating convo of the week--everything but Cute Animal Pictures, really) is very helpful with that, in my experience. Particularly when it's one of those books with a lot of "no one will ever get this, everyone will think I'm just insane, because this is insane" moments, which this one is.

So: Thanksgiving. I hope you had a happy one if you're celebrating, and if you're not I still hope you had a nice day.

Setting the problematic historical context aside, Thanksgiving is the major holiday that stresses me out the least, and the one I typically like best. (Apart from Halloween, of course.) The lack of gifting means lower stakes and less insanity, and at heart I am very down with the concept of pausing to appreciate the good things in our lives. Be it refugee Thanksgiving with friends, as we've done in past years, or lovely days with family, like this one, I feel like one extremely lucky lady.

And, even though I'm avoiding The Services temporarily, I wanted to pop in here to say how grateful I am that I'm able to be a part of such wonderful virtual (and real!) communities, full of people who talk and laugh and grouse and support each other, whether from up close or afar. That is no small or imaginary thing. You're all much appreciated.

Saturday Hangovers

• Sara Zarr contributes to Nova Ren Suma's series on inspiration, with a post about failure that's essential reading for all writers. Speaking of things that are not failures, I can't recommend Sara's new novel How to Save a Life highly enough; both first-person narrators are completely authentic and beautifully developed, and I just loved it. See also: an interview about the book at Matthew Quirk's site.
• An excellent post from Junot Díaz on character voice: "You want to write good characters with an unforgettable voice? In my experience it won't kill you if you first figure out the character's relationship with the telling, with the story, before you even think about what kind of words, what kind of languages, what kind of attitude these folks will be slinging."
• Jaw-dropping art from Alenka Sottler.
• Department of Huh: 'The Easter Island “Heads” Have Bodies."
• At the NYT, "Computer Experts Building 1830s Babbage Analytical Engine": "The Lovelace notes are remarkable both for her algorithm for calculating the sequence known as Bernoulli numbers and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection.” In passing, she commented that the Babbage computer would not originate anything, but rather could do only what it had been instructed. The implication was that machines would not be creative, and thus not intelligent."
• Maud posts some thoughts about astrology and extras from her talk with Susan Miller.
• An interesting look at Amazon as publisher thus far by Laura Hazard Owen at Paid Content. Amazon is making some smart hires--like Ed Park--who are making some smart, interesting acquisitions. Yay Jenny D; the new book sounds fabulous.
• Laura Miller has a very smart piece on epic fantasy focusing on Nora Jemisin and David Anthony Durham. See also: Thoughtful follow-up at Nora's blog, and a good discussion in the comments (including an interesting contribution from Laura about the coziness of good vs. evil, which seems spot on).
• Some love from the NYT for Laurel Snyder's Bigger Than a Breadbox, which I'll recommend here again. And, as Monica points out, the children's special section as a whole is filled with wonderful things.

Home Again, Home Again

Though I really don't believe in jigs. World Fantasy was great fun, despite the strangeness of being at a convention sans Christopher, and the extreme sprawl of the property, which had the odd distinction of feeling like a set from Dynasty or Falcon Crest, The Prisoner, Dirty Dancing, CSI or Bones*, Swamp Thing, and The Shining, depending what part of it you happened to be in.** Plus, there was a painting of a terrifying girl in a blue dress in every single room. (The one in mine and Tiffany's was between the wall and the TV hutch, where you forgot it was there...until you looked over and its eyes were following you.) Maybe there was a little Addams Family--with palm trees--going on with the property too, actually. At night blown bulbs left the illuminated sign over the convention center saying CONVEN CENTER.

Though I brought my camera, I then discovered it was out of batteries and never bothered to replace them. So these memories of the bizarro Town & Country will have to live on only in the mind.

I somehow managed to miss a few people entirely, which I can't remember ever happening at a convention, and to see others far too little, which happens at all of them. But there was plenty of fabulousness to make up for this--running into dear friends in the bar or the cafe, finally getting to meet some lovely people previously known only in virtual world, an impressive quantity of Korean BBQ, and many, many bits of hilarity, including a spectacular outdoor Couples Theater performance on the other side of the glass at The Cheesecake Factory. Good times.

I came home with a scratchy throat that I originally chalked up to laughing too much on Sunday night, but it seems to be ebbing away as the day wears on. It was probably destined I'd get sick as soon as I told Alice and Alaya--during a conversation about Contagion, natch--that I never get sick at conventions because I compulsively wash my hands and don't touch anything in a communal bowl. Note to self: Refrain from tempting the germs of fate.

Now it's back to work on many things.

*You know, where the murder has taken place.

**And which had lots of other, more serious issues. I also had the good fortune to miss the creeper.

Two Things

1. My long interview with the delightful Beth Revis has been posted at Lightspeed. She had many smart and excellent things to say, so do check it out. (Also up at Lightspeed this week is Cassie Clare's fabulous story from Steampunk!, "Some Fortunate Future Day." Do not miss. And, really, don't miss the whole anthology--it's crazy wonderful.)

2. Gabrielle Gantz interviewed the one and only Laura Miller about many things for the Rumpus, and Laura gave me a little shout out and says to do whatever I tell you. Mwahaha. But, seriously, if you're here from there (hi!), you might be interested in the bar of recommendations from this year's reading over (and down a bit) in the righthand column.

Aside: Off to World Fantasy tomorrow, arriving late afternoon, staying until Monday morning. I have some meetings, but most of my time is blissfully unscheduled. I hope to see you there.