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Be subversive

Dec 5th, 2011
by Sarah.
2 comments

The Crossed Genres folks, some of my favorite publishers, have a new anthology out today.

This is their first anthology of original stories; previous anthologies were from the Crossed Genres periodical (no longer with us; I’m certain that has nothing to do with them publishing my first story).

Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm is an anthology of stories about striking back at the status quo – whatever that might be. The Authority can be real or perceived; the act of subversion subtle or overt; and the consequences minute yet significant, or immense and world-shaking.

Sound like fun? You can pick up a copy of your very own (Kindle or print) at Amazon or BN (Nook).

Posted in: Books.

It’s the little things

Dec 1st, 2011
by Sarah.
2 comments

November. National Novel Writing Month. As already alluded to here, I sat down to write on November 1, shiny new novel idea lined up, and promptly realized that this would quickly turn into National Nervous Breakdown Month, and that would be considerably less fun. I can write 50,000 words in a month, if I have time (and this was not the month for that), but they’re not good and useful words. They’re just words in a loose semblance of prose, lots of rambling and not so much with the organized narrative.

So instead, I decided to write some fiction every day in November. No word count, no predetermined project, just fiction. And I did. Written?Kitten! was a great deal of help: it provides a little reward at the end of a certain number of words. I used the 100-word default, and some days that was all I wrote. I worked a bit on the new novel idea, and on a pair of short stories I’d like to finish by the end of the year. (I also wrote a fair bit of nonfiction and ran a weekend-long weaving symposium, but those don’t count.)

The whole thing reinforced my pre-existing belief that writing every day for the sake of writing every day isn’t all that useful for me. If I’m brain-dead after a long day at work, the words I write aren’t particularly useful, and I end up with snippets scattered across my hard drive. It’s better for me to write when I have the focus to do so usefully, rather than wasting my time trying to do something I’m not capable of doing just then. I’m not denying the importance of writing regularly for someone who wants to be a professional: momentum is important.

Instead of writing after work when work has eaten my brain (which isn’t always), I should do other things that will free up time later in larger more useful blocks. I have little time; I have to make the most of it by managing time and brainpower.

Some wonderful things I’ve accumulated:

Predicting the weather, 1851 style: with leeches!

Mesopotamian math homework. (Someday I’m going to write an article on Renaissance Italian story problems: the history of mathematics instruction is fascinating.)

More on pedagogy: miniature murder scenes, a 1930s forensic tool. Special bonus: a “crime-fighting millionaire heiress grandmother.” Can’t beat that!

Three writing articles that go together in my mind, saved here for later:

They’re linked by the Palahniuk article; the second two don’t have much to do with each other. Or, rather, they do, but not directly. I’m pretty good with sentences; the thing in my brain now is what larger chunks of prose do. All three of those address that question, if from very different angles. Sort of.

Wow. That was an expressive description. Maybe I should reconsider this writing thing. But really, the thing I’m flailing to explain? When I understand it, then I can explain it. That’s how I knew I was making progress on sentences. This is the same thing but scaled up. (Learning is a spiral: you hit the same spot over and over, just out a little farther each time.)

Posted in: Science, Writing.

Neat stuff

Nov 17th, 2011
by Sarah.
1 comment

I’ve been accumulating things. Time to pass them on.

The Moscow dogs and the Chicago coyotes: fascinating examples of canine adaptability to urban environments. The Moscow dogs have so far done a better job of fitting into urban patterns, possibly because they come from stock selected for dealing well with people over the past few millennia, or because they’ve had longer to practice. The coyotes mostly stay out of the way, but the dogs have learned to let the cute ones beg for food, and even to ride the Metro.

There’s a lot of ire about the “Futures in Nature” story I ranted about. This is my favorite commentary.

Laura has sent me several interesting things: an exploration of octopus psychology; Nathalie Miebach, an artist who turns scientific data into sculptures; and this video about making a coral reef. She shares my fascination with the art-science interface, though she’s a much better artist than I am.

Posted in: Art, Fun stuff, Science.

Lift a glass

Nov 8th, 2011
by Sarah.
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My friends said it better.

I’ve been part of the mysterious far-flung group known only as the UCF for a while, but hadn’t had the privilege of meeting Wendy in person, only through her presence online. A fair number of my friends live only in the computer, but they are no less important to me than the friends I see occasionally, or all the time.

Edit: More words from others. I’ll post additional links as they appear.

Posted in: Personal.

Leafy goodness

Nov 7th, 2011
by Sarah.
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Plants, ecology, pretty pictures, science fiction: all come together in today’s Science in My Fiction essay on leaf shape (more interesting than you might think).

I’ve taken over as the SiMF coordinator. If you’ve ever wanted to write about the science in science fiction, either as a regular correspondent or for one awesome guest essay, I’d love to hear from you.

Posted in: Science.
Tagged:

Cities

Nov 4th, 2011
by Sarah.
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William Gibson:

Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it—a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.

Oh, YES.

There are constraints, and also opportunities, and realistic worlds have both, simply as a function of their shapes. Better science doesn’t change that, magic doesn’t change that, though both could change the outline of the constraints and the opportunities. A perpetual motion machine breaks all the rules: if there’s a get out of jail free card, the story is automatically no longer interesting.

Posted in: Uncategorized.

Something else entirely

Nov 4th, 2011
by Sarah.
5 comments

I was going to write something about National Novel Writing Month and how I’m tweaking the rules this year to get some of the mass enthusiasm without any of the nervous breakdown, but. I saw this instead, and am too angry about it to write about anything else.

Nature, one of the premier scientific journals, regularly publishes science fiction stories, which I think is fantastic. A number of authors I respect have featured in it, and I’d like to do so myself one day.

But this story? Not at all pleasing. “Womanspace,” by Ed Rybicki, was intended as a tongue-in-cheek mostly-true anecdote about two inept middle-aged men (as stated by the author, himself one of those men). That would be fine with me. I know plenty of inept men, and quite a few of them are covered for by incredibly competent women.

Where Rybicki goes wrong is extrapolating from his single data point to ALL men, and particularly ALL women. Men are hunters, you see, and women are gatherers, and as such women have miraculous shopping powers which extend to retrieving goods from parallel universes that men can’t access.

The story buys into stereotypical ideas in other ways: the two men are busily discussing plans for a technical book while the protagonist’s wife cooks dinner. She recalls a domestic purchase that she hadn’t had time to make, and sends the men off to do it. So the woman is in charge of cooking and shopping, except on special occasions where it’s necessary to send the men out for something even though they’re doing something important? The shop staff are of course female as well, as necessary to his point.

Just as aggravating, the story made the open assumption that everyone reading such a prestigious journal would be male, and would have a wife at home.

I’m willing to give Rybecki the benefit of the doubt here. He and his friend and his wife had a funny anecdote, and were all amused, and he wrote it up without thinking too hard about about. After all, middle-aged males in the sciences are often oblivious to issues of stereotype and discrimination regardless of the number of training sessions they’ve sat through. (He says in his comments that some of his best friends are women “my own (better-paid) professional wife thought it was funny,” which doesn’t really help his case but was enough to pass his own personal filters.

But WHAT were the editors thinking? I expect more thought from the editorial staff, and that’s where I place the major share of the blame here. It’s 2011, and we’re still dealing with outdated stereotypes about the roles and mental processes of men and women, even here among purportedly-enlightened scientists?

Oh wait. I knew that.

Posted in: politics, Science.
Tagged: ·

Zombies are coming!

Oct 31st, 2011
by Sarah.
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Last year, Tamie got me a zombie to celebrate the launch of Rigor Amortis. This year, she got him an undead girlfriend. (She obviously hasn’t read my story, or she would have gotten two girls instead.)

Zombie boy is courting her quite sweetly.

They even went on a date this afternoon.

And now they’re sitting in the candy bowl awaiting trick-or-treaters. (I hope they’re not oozing.)

Happy Halloween!

Posted in: Fun stuff.
Tagged: ·

Look to the sky

Oct 8th, 2011
by Sarah.
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I admit it, I wrote fiction last night instead of writing my Ada Lovelace Day post. Tsk. But I wanted to tell you about a woman of science anyway, even a day late.

In 2009, I wrote about a woman who’d influenced me even though she was long dead. Last year I wrote about a woman who helped to pave the way for others to enter traditionally male fields like medicine and science.

This year, I chose Maria Mitchell, the first female professional astronomer in the United States. Born on Nantucket in 1818, she attended Cyrus Peirce’s school for young ladies but was largely self-educated.

Discovering a telescopic comet in 1847 was the result of much hard work, study, and time spent behind a telescope, but it seems to have been what brought her to the notice of the scientific establishment. Prior to that, she was a teacher and librarian, both acceptable female professions.

Afterward, her life must have changed dramatically. She became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. She became the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College in 1865.

Mitchell was also active in the women’s suffrage movement, and in protesting slavery. She must have been ferociously brilliant, and worked very hard at her passions, but also stood up for what she thought was right.

If you’d like to know more, Google books has a collection of Mitchell’s writings published in 1896, seven years after her death.

(And yes, I did recently read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, by Pamela Dean.)

Posted in: Science.
Tagged:

All the Tea in China

Oct 7th, 2011
by Sarah.
4 comments

A tiny crescent moon, just past new, hovered in the west. Rick hadn’t seen so many stars in years. Ruined castles were a good place to escape light pollution, he supposed. And with no roof on this section, there was nothing to interfere with moongazing. Not that he had any interest in that himself. Of course, if he’d been the one to relocate an entire thirteenth-century ruined castle from Normandy to Newfoundland, he would have at least put the roof back on.

“How the fuck can you do that,” he asked? The object of his inquiry was sprawled on a folding lounge chair, a sidecar in one hand and a bowl of smarties at his side. Even as Rick watched, he popped a few more smarties into his mouth, and washed them down with his cocktail.

“Do what, my dear?” Arthur asked, not taking his gaze from the sky.

“Smarties and cocktails. Yuck.”

“Smarties improve brain function, thus the name. But only the blue ones.” Arthur looked down at his drink before returning his gaze to the sky. “And sidecars make me happy. Smart and content: I generate my best ideas that way.”

Rick hoped Arthur would choke on his smarties.

“And what the fuck are we doing way out here anyway?”

“I came for the peace and quiet,” Arthur replied. “And you came because I pay you. And you are interfering with the peace. And the quiet. Kindly cease.”

Rick scowled, but only because it was too dark for Arthur to see his expression.

Arthur leaned back, setting his drink down so he could point at the moon. “See that?” he asked, but Rick didn’t think his boss was really talking to him. “That’s the same crescent moon that shone over Sarajevo on the 28th of June, the night that this whole chain of events were set in motion.” He lifted his drink again, slugged it, then threw the glass into the darkness. It crashed against a crumbling wall that was faintly silhouetted against the stars and disturbing the geese who were roosting there. They were probably Canada geese, Rick supposed, or at least Canadian. “A war began that day, a global catastrophe that resulted in the love of my life never having been born.”

Rick knew better than to ask how Arthur could possibly know that some unborn woman would have been the love of his life. Or man, maybe. Rick had never seen Arthur in a relationship of any sort. Whatever.

All Rick knew is that he didn’t want to listen to this. He retreated quietly into one of the more intact rooms, where he could at least have a battery lantern. Some kind of hippie group had been living here, or reenactors, or some shit like that, and they’d left a bunch of crap. The lantern was resting on what he thought was probably a broken loom, or maybe a torture device, and there was a longbow hanging on the wall. That he recognized for sure. Fucking hippies. He fished a beer out of the cooler. The sandwiches were starting to look good, but he’d wait until Arthur came in to eat. He still didn’t know why there was five pounds of fresh ginger in the cooler. Maybe Arthur was expecting a serious stomach upset from all the Smarties. The ginger was better than the biohazard-marked package labeled monkey serum, though. Rick really didn’t want to know what that was.

“Rick,” called Arthur from the outer darkness. “I have an idea.”

Rick rolled his eyes, but set his bottle on the loom-thing next to the lamp and went back out.

Arthur was up from his chair, pacing back and forth. “The Hubble Space Telescope can see back in time, billions of years back. Right?”

Rick nodded. Arthur couldn’t see him do it, but kept going anyway. “So how far away do you have to get to see back in time a hundred years. I could see my lost love’s ancestors, if I could just get a telescope in the right place and pointed this way.”

Rick didn’t think that was how it worked, but what did he know?

“What about Cassini? No, that’s not far enough, quite. There must be something.” Arthur stopped abruptly. “I must go talk to my contacts at NASA. What are you waiting for, Rick? We must leave immediately. And be careful with the bioluminescent camouflage suit. It’s very fragile.”

Arthur stared up, his face limned faintly in silver. Rick went back in to pack. His boss might be a lunatic, but he paid very well.

—

This, as with all the Friday Flash stories, was based on prompts suggested on twitter. I ask for ideas, and then use all of them. I give myself an hour, no more. There’s no planning, little plotting, and absolutely no editing whatsoever. There might however be drinking.

The whole thing is rather fun.

Tonight’s prompts came from:

@thc1972 bioluminescent camouflage
@quasigeo Sarajevo 1914, a broken loom, five pounds of raw ginger.
@notmoro monkey serum
@quasigeo ruins of a 13th c Normandy castle, Cassini/Huygens probe, flock of canada geese
@carolelaine a space telescope
@ravenbait a tube of smarties, all blue
@marjorie73 unrequited love and a longbow
@qitou sidecar (the drink)

Posted in: Fiction, Fun stuff, Writing.
Tagged:

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