Topic: Posts

Trailing Edge, the story that I’m writing (and that I posted the first part of on Monday to kick of Critical Futures) is at least nominally a space opera.¹ It’s funny then, that after about a month of active writing on the project, I’ve begun writing the first part of the story that occurs in space. and I’ve written a respectable amount in this world so far.

Now it’ll be a while before this gets to CF, as I have a lot of stuff that I want to get to first, and I’m going to try and post a number of different stories. So I’m not going to spoil anything, but in honor of this, I’m just going to talk about space opera, and why I like it, and why I write it.

Basically, I like space opera because it takes an optimistic view of the future. Either we blow ourselves up on Earth, or we leave and see what’s out there. On a fundamental level those are the options. This is why, I think, science fiction writers and futurists (not necessarily overlapping categories) are so interested in maintaining and supporting an active space program, even when it seems to contradict their other political positions: the alternative is too frightening.

Given this, you can bicker about the details of what’s going to logically happen in the next 20 to 50 years, and you can write dystopias of various stripes. Everything else, is space opera of some flavor or another, and I guess that’s the core that I write too.

Now Trailing Edge is sort of weird space opera, I will grant you that, but I always find myself entertained by stories that are “about/set in a particular place” that take way to long to get to that place. Like in the Knowing Mars Story it took a long time for the narrator to actually get to Mars, in the story. Sort of, it’s complicated, and you’ll see in time, but it’s an interesting problem.

I guess the ultimate question that I’m asking is a follow up to this post, but does genre and sub-genre fiction need signposts early on to tell you that “this is going to be space opera,” or “this is going to be cyberpunk,” or can you do genre more subtly? I guess this is in part a technical question and in part a taste one.

So, don’t delay. What do you think?

As I am, apparently, entering into a new blogging niche, I’ve been trying to get the word out about Critical Futures and looking around at the field. Here’s a link dump with what I’ve found, if you’re interested.

• Space Haggis - Great name and it has an interactive element which I think is really clever, though it’s not my piece of cake, I can totally see why this project is so popular.
• BlogFiction Blog - Good meta site/community. Good resource.
• Sound of the Void - Fairly straightforward “blog-novel,” but it’s there.
• flogalicious given my readership, I think the term “flog” for fiction blog is likely to cause more confusion than it’s worth, but this is a great directory, though I’d love to be able to offer some advice for folks as they write their blurbs.
• fiction volante - Though it’s almost over, the concept is really cool, and my hat’s off to the author for a successful year.
• Horton’s Folly - This blog is more of a fictional blog, that is, not a blog of someone’s fiction project, but rather a blog by a fictional character. Interesting idea, and I do like the way that it toys with identity, and narration. I’m clearly pretty fond of this kind of play.
• A Change and Weather this is another single project blog, fantasy (there seems to be an abundance of fantasy in the blog fiction world,) and it looks pretty nifty.
• The Wikipedia article is also a great resource, though I think it’s not a particularly good exemplar of wikipedia.
• ETA: tor.com - I just got my beta invite from the new tor website. It’s very nice. I’m excited. In some respects this is just a traditional formed venue online, so we’ll see how it works out, but the truth is that there aren’t many of these types of publications either, so it’s welcome.

There’s also a multitude of original (and otherwise) fiction on livejournal, I’m not going to pretend to catalogue that in anyway. Do people have other favorites?

There’s a Catholic church not very far from our house, that has a very good rummage sale every year. Actually there are, I think at least three Catholic churches that are closer, but thats a geographical quirk, and is neither here nor there.

So, of course, we went.

We have the theory, that for the best rummage sale experience, go to rummage sales in neighborhoods where the mean household income is greater than your household income. As crap is relative, this has proven to be a good rule of thumb.

The corollary to this rule is that you shouldn’t go to sales in places that are too much better of than your neighborhood, as the likelihood of those people overpricing their crap relative to your means is too high.

Anyway, in accordance with these rules, we have always been fond of this sale, and this year didn’t disapoint. Here are the highlights.

• Worsted Weight Wool in good shape from the 50s and 60s. I’m going to make socks and hats.
• About ten old science fiction magazines. I going to start with a F&SF from October 1978 that has a Thomas M. Disch story in it, though most of what I picked up are from the last 10-12 years. Including some older Cory Doctorow stuff that I think will be interesting to read.
• A basket for holding spinning stuff while I’m spinning.
• A couple books and maybe some other stuff that I’m forgetting, but odds and ends.

I’m pretty pleased with this, on the whole. Reading the fiction will be a lot of fun. I’m doing better with the reading, but I think supporting the magazines more, and reading that material is something that I hope will be good for me as a writer. I’ll report on it here of course.

Onward and Upward!

I don’t tend to write a lot about the music that I listen to/participate in, I have sort of obscure tastes by contemporary standards, and have been known to go on somewhat eccentrically. In any case, I wanted to write briefly about two different kinds of “good music:” the great song, and the “desert island album.”

Great songs are songs that I love to listen to on endless repeat. I’ve spent, literally days listening to a single song, they’re songs that I know most of the lyrics to (though interestingly the songs I like to sing with other people aren’t always the same “great songs.”) Here’s a tentative list, in no particular order:

• Louis Killen’s singing of “The Leaving of Liverpool.”
• Finest Kind’s singing of “The Rose in June” (My dad, by contrast hates this song because it’s too religious and it “takes him too long to drown,” I think it’s a good song in any case.)
• Martin Simpson’s “Love Never Dies,” from the Righteousness and Humidity Album.
• Joni Mitchell’s “Case of You” (though “For Free” is a close second).
• Richard Thompson’s “Andalus/Radio Marrakesh” (The first tune on this list, and though I like a lot of tunes, this one is amazing.)
• Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” (with due respects to Jeff Buckely, actually it’s a tie, and Wainright, very rightly cribs from Bukley.) This song shares a brain cell with Josh Ritter’s “Harrisburg,” thanks to an old roommate, and I think I might like this song more, but in any case.
• Michelle Shocked’s “Come a Long Way,”
• The Kippling/Bellamy (by anyone) “A Pilgrim’s Way”

Desert Island Albums are something completely different, Judy and some other people started playing around with the question “what’s the album you’d take to a desert island, if you could only take 1?” I think we decided that it couldn’t be done in less than three, but never the less, there are some albums which are just divine as complete entities in themselves, and this doesn’t necessarily overlap with the great song category very much. Here’s a tentative list of my desert island albums (order not important):

• Nic Jones’ The Noah’s Arc Trap (this is Judy’s suggestion, and I agree completely.)
• Eliza Carthy’s Rough Music (It’s her latest)
• Jethro Tull’s Thick as A Brick
• Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
• Martin Simpson’s The Bramble Briar
• Brian McNeil’s Back of the North Wind
• Fairport Convention’s What we did on our Holidays

I think the former category is more subjective than the later, albeit only slightly. Do you have any good suggestions that I might have left off.

My past several posts about knitting and fiber arts have all been along the lines of “I haven’t been knitting much and I’d like to more,” but this post reports some success.

I’ve been working on things. I don’t yet really have a niche in my life for knitting, still--before, there were things that I always knit during, and now I either don’t do those things, or have gotten out of the habit of knitting during them--but I spun and knit a lot this past weekend: and I got other things done as well. Successes all around!

For starters I spun an entire skein of yarn, and it came out pretty well, or at least better than my last skein came out. I think on the last one I had forgotten that I had been plying using the “scotch tension” of my wheel. While I absolutely adore the double drive for spinning singles, but I apparently like to ply at really high tension. Having remembered this fact, spinning is going well. I have about 250 more grams of this current project to spin, though I did give my mother 100 grams of the project because I think it unlikely that a sweater to fit me would weight all of 2 pounds.¹

After I get done with this project, my mother and I are going to try a tandem spinning project. I have 2 pounds of Corriedale-cross (the cheap but sturdy wool undyed from the Yarn Barn), and we’re going to set our wheels to the closest ratio we can, and we’re going to both go for a sort of semi-worsted sport/dk 3 ply. It’ll be interesting, and I’ll keep you all posted as it develops. We won’t start until I get done with the current project (which I estimate will be in a couple of weeks.)

In terms of the knitting, I’ve made progress on the sweater. I finished the second skein’s worth of the body, and it’s about 8 inches long by now. And I started the first sleeve, which after a false start (too many stitches, I was just guessing,) it’s coming out fine.

As I had hoped, working on the plain sweater has revived my interest in two-color knitting. I knit a couple of rounds on it. The yarn is-- I think I’ve mentioned, heh--very fine, and the kittens have on several occasions managed to attack the yarn between the ball and the sweater and sever one or both strands. Thankfully this yarn splices really well. so it’s not an issue, but it is sort of annoying. I also got full look at it laid out on my desk and I’ve realized that I have more done than I thought. Still not “enough,” but a fair piece. It’s worth something.

Anyway, it’s good to be knitting again. Really good. Knitting is something that I really do enjoy (obviously) even though I’ve been off of it lately, and it’s something that I think I do really well, or at least, I don’t ever find myself questioning my ability to knit, in the way that I find myself constantly questioning my ability to write, or tell stories, or do research, or write code/use technology. That’s a nice feeling. I’ll have to write about that as I ponder this more.

It’s good to be back, at any rate.

Via: 43Folders and Mur

So this video popped up a couple of times in my news reader today, and I think it’s good enough to repost with some additional comments. It’s a video with Ira Glass talking about how creative people who are getting started doing something now need to give themselves permission to make crap and that the most important thing is to keep doing it, because the only way to learn is to make a lot of crap.

This has become a virtual mantra for me, and I think it’s good to have people remind us of this from time to time. This is why I’m starting a fiction blog. That’s why I write blog entries every day.

I think it’s true of knitting, as well. I have scores of horrible sweaters, and while most of my sweaters work now (and the ones that don’t are ill conceived from the beginning,) that’s a technical skill that I worked pretty hard for. So I’d say, not only does Ira Glass have it correct¹ for things like writing and audio/video production, but I think that he succeeded in expressing it in a way that’s applicable to everyone that makes something.

Today I edited the first sequence of the novella I wrote nearly a year ago. While I’ve been dreading this for a long time, I think it went off really well. I added a line that a test reader (whose unfamiliar with the work) really liked, I tweaked some things in a way that tie this scene (which I went back and added later) into the story more closely.

I made this one sequence better in fairly concrete ways, and I think every previous time that I’d tried to do this before I hadn’t been good enough to make it better. But a year later, I am enough better than I was that I was able to do this one thing better. I don’t think I’ve “made it” or anything, but it’s nice to have some sort of verification of improvement.

This scene that I talk about will be part of critical futures at some early point in that sites’ development. Maybe a week from today?

Stay tuned.

Here’s what I’m planning on writing (and revisiting to post) for the new site, Critical Futures which launches on Monday and that I wrote about here. I’m going to go from the stories that I’ve talked about least to the stories that you’re most familiar with, and I’ll include a little bit of background with each story/series.

• Trailing Edge, is just a working title for a nexus of stories in a future world that’s been left behind. Humans have been moving out, continuously for hundreds of years and this has had a huge effect on the people and worlds left in the wake of these great journeys. This is the anti-epic story of those people and worlds.
• So this is an interesting story, I tried writing a story (which I might post, and that I’ve blogged about extensively) that I was calling Breakout about what happens on the “Leading Edge” of this “progress,” and it was during a rough space inside my own head, and the story didn’t really want to be in novel form, so I tried writing it has a hypertext, and that didn’t work either, so I just let go. And then, I realized that maybe the more interesting part of this world would be the “other side.” And while the original story had merits, and I might return to it in some form, it’s not calling to me in the same way.
• So I started writing this story, and I was thinking about the new site at the same time, so as a result the story really fits this new structure. The stories have a loose versioning system (so far I have “Episodes” 1, 2, 2.1, and 2.2, and 3 in progress or completed), and I write a page in one part or a page in another part, pretty regularly, and it’s good stuff. Like the Mars story, I particularly enjoy how the narrative is multi-modal, that there are different types of stories, different forms that I get to explore. And the concept is pretty fun.
• It’s a story written for the media: I talk about a handful of things on tychoish, productivity, technology, knitting/spinning, science fiction/writing, and in a way all of these are telling a reasonably consistent story of me and what I’m interested in. Critical Futures is sort of the same, except that rather than technology and knitting, there’ll be a couple of stories. And within those stories--as within my discussion of, say, technology--there’ll be a number of different threads to the story. And I’ll write it as I go, and the experience of writing fiction this way, is really appealing and compelling. Hopefully you’ll feel similarly.
• Knowing Mars, this is the novella I wrote last fall about a group of human telepaths who are forced to leave Earth in order to keep the secret of their ability safe… for a while.
• Interestingly, since I’m getting in the habit of explaining the origins of the stories, this story descended from a novel that I wrote while I was in high school. This isn’t part of that story, but rather an elaboration of the first six pages of the prologue (which really didn’t work). It’s clearly a sort of quirky coming out tale, and it’s a fun story. It’s a universe that I’ve got worked out, and I expect that there’ll be more related stories. (I have one plotted out, mostly that I just have to write, and another that isn’t coherent in my mind, yet.)
• By the way there are about 30,000 words in this story, and one of the biggest goals of this new site is to provide inspiration to plow through and get the final edits done.
• Station Keeping, the story that I (and others) wrote last year, as a sort of precursor to the current project. It’s a far future space opera, where “progress” has slowed to a crawl because of the relativistic effects of travel, and the eons old social and political institutions that hold humans together are beginning to crumble. These stories explore the lives of the crew and residents of a space station above a critical world in the budding new order.
• I think of it sort of told in the style of a TV show. Indeed I intended to post a series of episodes as a teleplay, because you know, I can. 12 episodes and about 10,000 words of this are old material, and then I’ve written 4 more that haven’t been posted anywhere and I have plans at the moment for 36-40 episodes (of uncertain total length).
• This is the remaining of a novel that I started writing but that sort of fell apart on me when I was a teenager. The characters and the setting were great, but the story is really a loose serial and not novel-like so it’s understandable that it didn’t work out. Its much more fun in this form.

And you know, odds and ends. I haven’t given a lot of to the pacing. I know I have enough content, and I do think that with a little inspiration I can write enough, so we’ll see how it goes. I also have an inkling of some other folks that might contribute some stuff from time to time, so we’ll see. Stay tuned.

I only learned early this morning that Tom Disch had killed himself July 4 in his New York City apartment….

Suicide is always, I think, something of a mystery. Even when someone is in poor health, in bereavement, feeling isolated, we still say Why? How could he end his life, be so sure that nothing would improve? Things always change over time. Tom was only 68.

I don’t know the answers to those questions for Tom Disch. I only know that the SF field has lost a major talent, one of our own.

From: Nancy Kress’ Blog

I didn’t really know his work, but he’s been on my list of things to read for some time. My internal database on him pegs him as the sort of “less pornographic Delany, with a greater tendency toward ‘dark material.’” That’s woefully insufficient. I’ll get on remedying this file.

I do remember that I’ve been nagging H. to read his stuff because I think she’d like it. I’m oddly struck by this, because although I didn’t know him, and haven’t been as familiar with his work as I’d like to be, I completely concur with Nancy Kress’ final sentiment.

On Monday, that is next Monday (there! a firm week from now--if slightly relative--commitment) I’m going to start a posting to a new blog. This isn’t breaking news to readers of this site as I’ve been talking about this with some of you for weeks, and mentioning it sporadically on the blog. Let me tell you about the site, and what I intend for it.

The site will be called Critical Futures, and it will be a fiction blog where I (and possibly others) will post a new piece of science fiction every day. Not necessarily, as 365 Tomorrows posts an new independent story every day, but rather a new section or part of an ongoing story. I mean sometimes I might fit a whole story into a single post, but that’s not a goal that I’m aiming for as a writer.

ETA: The site isn’t, of course, up yet, but you can read the about page if you want a sneak preview. Remember next Monday.

I’ve really grown to be fond of the regular blogging rhythm, and I think it would be nice to expand that habit into fiction writing. So the prospect of having a regular commitment to write and polish fiction for publication, will be a good thing. Kind of like the 365 projects, only different.

And I’ve been talking for a long time about a few things for a while: how blogging as a medium has potential for story telling, about how I want to write a story intended for online distribution. So I’m going to do it. Now. Because there’s no time like the present, and because I think that the most important thing for me to do right now is to just get content out there, and I think I’m at a point where I’d rather write toward a digital rather than a print audience. All the stars seemed to align, and in these cases I think it’s important to seize the moment and get stuff out there. So that’s what I’m doing.

So stay tuned. I’ll be posting little mini-entries here to announce the stories when they start to go up, and I have an entry for tomorrow that will cover/overview the story projects that I’ve been working on for the site. I’m really excited about this.

I penned, recently the following (compound?) clause in one of my projects: “my research program for the last 30 or more years.”

You’ll see what that’s in reference to in a while, ultimately it’s minor and my aim with this passage is to cement the “book within a book” feeling that I’m so fond of. But it also indicates that this character, who is older, but still very able bodied (the narration is the result of him taking a rather lengthy intra-solar system journey alone) I has had an active academic/intellectual career focused on one subject for at least 30 years. In point of fact, he’s probably even a bit older than that. Having characters that are older than they appear or would be in our contemporary world is something that I’m pretty fond of. And it’s science fiction, so having a character that’s pushing 200 is something that isn’t patently absurd.

This got me thinking to other things, namely, about the genre tropes that I am fond of using in my stories. So here’s a partial list:

• Space Opera. I like space opera because it’s fun and enjoyable, because I know that readers “get it,” but probably most importantly because it makes it possible to talk about political ideas and have interesting plots that aren’t over complicated or grafted onto popular/contemporary notions of politics and history.
• Within space opera it’s also possible to complicate plots in productive ways using various technological phenomena which might make stories difficult to tell in contemporary worlds? You need characters to be out of touch for a chapter? Relativity or a solar flare clears that up, sending your main character to the woods without a cellphone for the weekend, is kind of hackneyed.
• Globalization is changing the way that just about every group people on the planet interact with each other, and I think it’s very true that this process is only going to continue, and there are situations common to space opera where it becomes possible to talk about cultural difference and divergence rather than convergence.
• I like to use telepathy and telepaths as a way of talking about privacy, and subjugated classes of people (on the assumption that if there are human telepaths, there are probably also humon-non telepaths.)
• I think relativistic time-travel effects are incredibly fascinating, and the Station Keeping stories are--at least in part--an exploration of what happens when these sorts of effects are normalized in a society.
• I totally have a soft spot for cyberpunk style virtual reality interfaces and direct neural interfaces, even though I don’t expect that either of these are technologies that are likely to come to pass. VR makes it possible to toy with the mechanics of reality, and it makes it possible to have awesome battles/confrontations without needing to be contrived about it.

Now I think I should probably make a list of tropes that I don’t really get. Like super heros. Hmmm….

What are your favorite tropes? Have I forgotten a big one that you really like? Are the tropes that you just don’t get?

I look forward to hearing your responses.