Two things on the agenda. First, the third “season” of the BBC science fiction show Torchwood, which I have recently completed. Second, Samuel R. Delany’s novel “Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand,” which I am two-thirds of the way through.

Act One: Torchwood

I’m a huge fan of torchwood. It’s quirky, it’s fun, its easy to connect with the characters, and then there’s the Ianto/Jack relationship, which is handled amazingly throughout the entire story. The show isn’t without its flaws, of course, but it works really well.

So about this third season. It was good. While the fan in me says “I want more stories, and episodes” and “I want more characters to survive,” and “I want to see more of characters that I didn’t get to see very much of,” and “why do they leave so many fucking threads untied,” on the whole, I thought it was very well executed.

I think the mini-series--as this was, undeniably--is likely the future of television. The story telling potential is great, there are marketing reasons why it has merit, and I think from the perspective of the scripted television world, I think there’s a lot of potential for this sort of approach to television.

As for my quibbles with the story itself, I will attempt to not spoil anything, but I will say, that while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to see something different: it worked. Furthermore, I’d almost be tempted to say that “more torchwood” wouldn’t really work, and I don’t know that there’s anyway to write a season four that would capture “what I liked” about torchwood. It isn’t a pretty as the Battlestar Galatica ending this spring, but there’s almost a similar finality. Discuss?

If you’ve not watched torchwood, it is, I think, a worthwhile expenditure of time.

Act Two: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand

This is an amazing book. The prose is stunning, the world that Delany created is incredibly fascinating, and the story pulls it all together. Amazing. Simply Amazing.

I know what happens (or doesn’t happen) in the end, which but so much of this book revolves around absorbing the ecstatic experience of the characters, that it doesn’t really seem to matter. There’s also, a second book that remains unfinished (though a portion was published in the 90s,) and I don’t expect that to be finished, pretty much ever, though I could be surprised.

There’s so much to say about the book, even with 150 pages left to go, that saying anything seems incomplete. Despite the fact that the main character is human, the world, and “his” world, is so totally alien. There’s this new gendered-pronoun system that the main character (and narrator) uses, where everyone regardless of gender is “she,” unless the speaker is attracted to the referant, at which point they’re “he,” and typically people refer to themselves as “women.” It makes it hard to track things, but it really works.

The other cool thing, is that there are these two ideologies that are battling each other for domination. The conservative one, called “The Family,” take a very structuralist approach to social organization. In today’s world we might call them “conservative,” but I think that misses the point; in contrast there’s the “Sygn” who take a very radical/post-structuralist approach to social organization, which is useful both as an example, and as it provides a very non-Utopian idea of freedom.

This is amazing stuff, and in a totally different way, it’s a very worthwhile book and experience. Give it a shot if you’re looking for something good.

I’ve been writing a great deal in the past few days: blog posts, the seed content for a wiki, fiction at a somewhat impressive pace (for me). While (at press time) there are still lots of things on my plate and storms on the horizon it’s very true that doing creative things, getting work done makes it considerably easier to do more creative things, and to get more work done. The stuff on my plate and the storms on the horizon in another seem less threatening. It’s not logical, but I’m not going to argue with that.

Of note: I posted another story to Critical Futures from Chapter 6 of Knowing Mars, this is the last scene in this chapter, and I’ll post it in three chapters. After that, we’re going to get PDFs of Chapters 4-6, and I’ll be posting more about that in time. Thanks to everyone’s replies to my post about my emacs process, both on the thread and on identi.ca. I’m much impressed with all of your wisdom, and assistance. I didn’t know about wdired-mode which I shall explore, and while I did know about magit, I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet. Here I come.

One last thing, if there are any perl, ikiwiki, CGI::FormBuilder, Dreamhost wizards out there, I would be very flattered and indebted if you’d take a look at this bug report I filed on ikiwiki, I’m having some sort of minor problem with CGI form generation, which is such a minor bug that I’m highly annoyed at the concept. On the one hand, it’s a lot of effort to get ikiwiki working under these conditions, on the other hand it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay for a really robust server (with root access) for what will really be a minimal amount of content. Anyway, your help would be much appreciated.

ps. sorry for the late content.

pps. if you record a podcast over a skype (or other VoIP service) with Audacity and you’re running Ubuntu/Debian/Linux… I’d love to hear from you.

I saw a meme, I from lesboprof, that listed 25 authors that were influential to her. It was fun for me to read, because there was some overlap with what my list would be and because she’s (presumably) a feminist-studies type as well. I thought I’d give it a stab, though in typical tychoish fashion, this is going to be really eclectic. Also, because it’s a meme, please feel free to comment and join in.

1. Samuel R. Delany - Delany was probably the single most cited author during my college career, and was my root back into science fiction after college. Good stuff, because it combines feminist/queer/race theory interests with science fiction.

2. Kim Stanley Robinson - My “intro to college” class was built around Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy.” While I put the books out of mind for many years, I’ve recently come back to them, and am surprised how much my own “Mars stories” draw on Robinson’s influence to varying degrees. His work is Masterful and I quite enjoy it.

3. Gayle S. Rubin - Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex,” really defined my interest in queer studies and queer theory, and remains terribly important to my world view.

4. Melissa Scott - I read the “Silence Leigh” trillogy when I was in high school (twice!), and it rocked my world, seriously rocked my world. I’ve read two of her other books more recently, and was similarly influenced by them. Good stuff.

5. Anne Lamott - Contemporary/mainstream fiction isn’t often my thing, nor are (particularly) memoirs; however, I find Anne Lamont’s fiction (and non-fiction) quite powerful. Someone got me Bird by Bird as a gift, and I ate it up (again, during high school). I’ve since read more of her work, and I’m particularly fond of All New People.

6. Issac Asimov - I read the Foundation series twice in high school and it was amazing. There’s so much more Asimov out there, and while I’m not on a huge project to “read the SF canon,” every time I come across an Asimov story it often succeeds at being really awesome.

7. Robert Heinlein - In high school I took a class where I had to read Like 12 books in 4 months (sophomore year.) It was intense and I swear the only book I finished reading for that class was Stranger in a Strange Land. It’s good. I’m not a particular Heinlein fanboy, and a lot of his material creeps me out, but

8. Cherie Moraga - I have a copy of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years next to my desk and it’s a book that I find incredibly powerful. Many, I think remember and cite Moraga’s work with Gloria Anzaldúa (This Bridge Called My Back) which is indeed powerful stuff, but her creative work hit me a couple of times during college, and I think I’m better for it

9. Elizabeth Zimmerman - I knit the way I do because of Elizabeth, and I think about my knitting seriously because of Elizabeth.

10. Meg Swansen - See above only more so.

11. Paul Connerton - I read this little book called How Societies Remember, in this nifty seminar I took durring my last semester on historiography, which was one of the very few classes I took in college “just cause I wanted to,” and it was a great thing indeed. This book was a collecting point for a lot of the cultural identity, cultural memory ideas that guided my thinking durring the first two attempts at graduate school (long story), and much to my surprise continue to affect my thoughts

12. Orson Scott Card - I listened to an interview with OSC last week and he said that he recomended the “Speaker for the Dead” (post-Ender’s Game trillogy) for people over age 18. I was certianly much younger than that when I plowed through all of the (at the time) existing Ender Books. I think I was 14 or so when I read all of them. In any case, big effect.

13. James Tiptree, Jr. - I named my cat (Kip) after a character in Brightness falls from the Air. I don’t think I need to say much more than that.

14. Cory Doctorow - A huge force in contemporary science fiction, and despite the fact that I think our politics are at least mildly divergent (and as a result I find a lot of his more political fiction frustrating), he’s a great influence.

15. Barbara Kingsolver - I’ve not read the complete bibliography, for sure, but I read a couple of her books in high school, and do quite enjoy her writing on a stylistic level.

16. Nancy Kress - Amazing. Kress was on my radar before college, but I’ve really started to read her work since my return to SF. I quite enjoy her blog, and I learn something about writing short fiction every time I read one of her stories.

17. Arthur C. Clarke - I worried about picking too many canon names. It’d be like a theatre type saying “I’m really into Anouilh, Shakespeare and Johnson.” Frankly, however, I think it’s true that a lot of the--particularly science fiction--that really influenced me on this list were things that I read when I was in high school. I think it’s something more to do with “that stage,” but Clarke’s good stuff.

18. Armisted Maupin - The Tales of the City books are an amazing thing. I spent a week one summer, sitting in a chair, where I’d get a bottle of water, some crackers, and I’d just read book after book.

19. Irving Yalom - I have of course mentioned on this site that I majored in psychology in college. Throughout most of this period, I wasn’t particularly interested in clinical work, despite the fact that all of my classmates were. In any case, the last semester I took a class on a clinical/treatment topic, and while all of my classmates who so wanted to help other people gave reports on depression, and anxiety, and personality disorders; I gave a report on Death, Dying, and Grief, through which I discovered Yalom, and I think as a result gave one of the more uplifting reports in the class. Changed my world.

20. Judith Butler - Not much to say, except I spent a lot of time with Butler’s work in college, and like so much of the feminist and queer stuff that I read then, has really shaped my thinking. Butter, had a great impact for better or for worse on a lot of people, an I’m one of them.

21. David Eddings - I seem to have a thing for “books I read in high school,” particularly long series. I read one of Edding’s major sagas and it was delightful. I also enjoyed one of his non-fantasy books as well, somewhat later. I’m not a big fantasy lover, and but I do like saga’s and Eddings tells a damn good story.

22. Ken Macleod - If I’m only half as cool as Ken Macleod when I grow up, I’ll be one happy camper.

23. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Ok, I must confess, I read The Great Gatsby once in high school, and I’m convinced that this is the Great American Novel.

24. Theodor Holm Nelson - He wrote a book on hypertext that you probably haven’t heard about called Literary Machines, but it’s hugely inspiring in both it’s scope and vision.

25. Lionel Bacon - He collected dance notes and music for Morris dancing. While it’s not the kind of thing that you read, it is the kind of thing that my team has at every practice just in case we need some sort of arbiter.

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.

(**Editor’s Note:**Another short piece I wrote for school about my writing ability and the character of my writing strenghts and weeknesses. Here because we need content. Hopefully this will be over soon.)

I am a fiction writer who dabbles in nonfiction essays and articles; or maybe I am an article and essay writer who dabbles in fiction. In either case, it’s fairly clear that I am not a poet or a dramatist. It could be a lack of skill, experience, or talent. More likely, this pitfall in my ability is due to divine will rather than anything under my control. Some peopleóincluding meóare not capable of to write poetry or drama.

To say that I can’t write poetry isn’t to say that I’m physically or mentally incapable of writing in verse; however, I haven’t been able to amass any evidence that I am capable of writing poetry, and not for any lack of effort. Numerous times I’ve tried, and tried to write poetry, I’ve worked with a great deal of dedication without producing one poem that fills my definition of good poetry: a group of words that sends a message that is somehow larger than the words on the sheet of paper. I am somehow incapable of doing this.

Unlike poetry, my chances of ever writing drama are not quite as dire. With a great deal of time, effort, planning, and blood letting, it is conceivable that I could write and/or produce scripts that would at least equal the quality of my prose. Despite a familiarity with the form, I have yet to find success writing scripts with a satisfactory similarity to the picture in my mind’s eye. This isn’t to say that a work needs to end up exactly like the creator foresaw, but the work needs to maintain a certain continuity with the authors evolving vision.

Just because I haven’t been able to write a good script, and because I doubt I’ll ever be able to write a poem, I don’t hold any ill regard for either of these forms. In fact, good drama and poetry has a greater influence on my prose than the novels and short stories that I absorb. Quality poetry has the ability to express a message in the purest most beautiful form. Almost every good script, produced or not, can boil a plot into the most visual and descriptive form with minimum use of adjectives and adverbs. The lessons learned in story telling from drama, and the lessons about language learned through poetry transfers nicely into other forms, such as the fiction and non-fiction prose I write. I can only hope that some of this genius is rubbing off on me.