bironic

Current Music: Bellowhead, "10,000 Miles Away"

I am delighted to announce that my story "Twice Every Day Returning" has been accepted for reprint by Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and forthcoming from Psychopomp in October. It was published originally in Uncanny Magazine #61, in winter to match its ice-memories as opposed to the heat wave it was written in; it is queer, maritime, diasporic, the latest pendant of an unplanned sea-cycle, and it's lovely to see it described as "Lyrical Magical Realism." The table of contents is exactly the kinds of liminal fiction I would plunge myself into even if I did not have the honor of being included among them. We're still finishing out the ghost-month of summer, but I have further reason now to look forward to the ghost-month of fall.

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Retribution poll, 78.6% of respondents said the best revenge is living well, followed by a tie between "is sweet" and "is served cold" with 21.4% each. In ticky-boxes, an ancient language of shadows and flight (52.4%) came second only to hugs (73.8%). Brain being empty, but not in a meditation way came third with 50%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, one short chapter a day. It's good! Yesterday's chapter was, basically, stop hesitating at the fork in the road, and take a step one way or another. So I should probably pick a WIP to work on. Heh.

Also listened to Network Effect (Murderbot) by Martha Wells, read by Kevin R. Free. (I've read it before in ebook, but I didn't remember much.) This time I was struck by how the first third or so is a locked-room mystery

spoilers.

set inside the corpse of the victim, ha! The middle is Murderbot-ART fighting/relationship drama, which is delightful. The final part starts out all action/adventure, and I kept zoning out of the logistics, but then we got other SecUnits, who are delightful, and ART cleaning for the in-laws.

Awesome! I've started System Collapse.

Ebook: just Guardian.

Kdramas/Cdramas
An episode and a half of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. We have two episodes to go. And I'm continuing my rewatch of Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You), a Chinese m/f romance set in a tennis club. I guess I'm renewing my VIKI subscription after all.

Other TV
About two thirds of The Residence (no spoilers, please!), which is enjoyably quirky in a Knives Out-esque way. Original flavour Lilo & Stitch, just as fun and anarchic as ever. We finished Turning Point: The Vietnam War, which was excellent but, despite having a wide range of voices throughout, ended very much in a US pov. And more Bluey, which is currently my happy place. "Bingo!"

Fringe with my sister (plus a couple of episodes of Bluey).

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 Did I mention that

guardian_wishlist is coming in a month or so?

Also, that

mific and I set up a comm for talking about writing:

fan_writers (original fiction writers also welcome). It's humming away so far. Bring us your writing-meta links and thoughts!

Audio entertainment
A little more Letters from an American (/o\), one episode of Writing Excuses (currently has a very chatty, not very technical vibe, which is not so much my thing).

Offline life
On Saturday I went to the Dowse Art Museum, which had a range of delightful exhibits, including: a) several rooms on the theme of gay cowboys (before I went in, one of the staff cautioned me in an undertone that some of the works were explicit; reader, they were), featuring frilly saddles, large metal dildos, a whole wall of pencil sketches of gay cowboy sex, like seriously, and a short film about a newly het-married man who either decided to live in his gay-cowboy dream or went through a portal to a meadow-by-a-river gay-cowboy paradise, taking the married couple's priest with him, I'm not sure which. It ended with a dance number. b) a collection of latex sphinx cats, with each tattooed by a different local tattoo artist. c) a more sober and traditional exhibition of art made out of stone. d) a collection of "Shoes with Personality". e) some very nice weaving from (iirc) the 1920s and 30s.

On Tuesday, a friend and I went to the National Portrait Gallery for the 2025 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award, which had a fantastic range of styles and media, and I was particularly struck by one that made me think about my WIP meta, how much conviction it must take and how grounded in the concept the artist must have to be to embark on something quiet and thoughtful and complex, and then keep at it.

Writing/making things
I wrote a last-minute drabble for the Face challenge on

fan_flashworks, but other than that, nothing but meta. And I spent yesterday's Writers' Hour on this post. I appear to be in a fic-writing hiatus, waiting for my creative brain to surface, but today I managed to find a sort-of ending for a WIP, just a few paragraphs, and send it to beta.

Life/health/mental state things
Arms still not great. Otherwise things are pretty good. The sunshine makes such a difference.

Food
I made this lemon chicken recipe twice in three days. So good! (So much sugar, lol.) Am about to make malfatti to stock the freezer with.

Good things
Art galleries and lunch with friends. TV with friends. Sunshine. Bluey. Guardian. New writing comm. Dreamwidth. Plenty of fun things to keep me busy. You all.

Poll #33408 Youtube

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

If you use Youtube, what do you mostly use it for?

View Answers

music
24 (48.0%)

game play
9 (18.0%)

vlogs
7 (14.0%)

instructional videos - practical
12 (24.0%)

instructional videos - creative
9 (18.0%)

dramas and tv
12 (24.0%)

movie and tv trailers
10 (20.0%)

other
22 (44.0%)

I don't use Youtube
5 (10.0%)

ticky-box full of squishable fur-creatures
23 (46.0%)

ticky-box full of the delicate scent of honeydew among beech trees
19 (38.0%)

ticky-box full of grabbing a large hammer and just smashing things
21 (42.0%)

ticky-box full of existential hummingbirds wondering what to do with their lives
22 (44.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
35 (70.0%)

sanguinity

Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

My check-in: Words over lunch!

Day 23:

sanguinity

Day 22:

badlyknitted,

brithistorian,

callmesandyk,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddess47,

luzula,

nafs,

shadaras,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman

( more days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

celli

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sovay

Current Music: Great Big Sea, "Ferryland Sealer"

Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf (1941) is spectrally salt-soaked, ferociously anti-fascist, and gives great Alexander Knox. On the first two of these factors much of its reputation justly rests; the third, if you ask me, is criminally overlooked.

Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.

Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?

"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"

The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.

The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.

runpunkrun

A good old fashioned young adult novel about being stranded on an inhospitable planet and struggling to live off a steadily declining cache of resources. In one case, it's an alien world far in the future, and in the other, the dying Earth those colonists left, where the last inhabitants are about to extinguish themselves through nuclear war. Ah, children's lit.

This is actually a sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, but if you're a chaos demon you might be able to read this without having read the first. Partly because it stands on its own while gently reminding the reader what happened in the first book, but also because it fully retreads some of the same ground.

Because half of this book was telling me stuff I already, basically, knew, I was much more interested in the sections on the alien planet with its frontier survival vibes and foreign mysteries. I wanted to spend all my time there rather than on Earth, since I already knew that was a lost cause, and any new information we got in those sections could have easily been worked into the future segments and much of it, in fact, was. But it wasn't a chore to spend time with the original versions of Ambrose and Kodiak as they come to terms with the lies they've been told and try to undo some of the damage they caused, and together the two parts of this book tell a full story that comes to a satisfying conclusion, whether or not there's ever a third book in the series. But if there is, I'll be there.

Contains: queer dads; child harm and references to child death; wild animal harm/death; mental illness with intrusive thoughts; gun violence; nuclear apocalypse; climate disaster.

minoanmiss

Current Mood: annoyed

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minoanmiss

Current Mood: stressed

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minoanmiss

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yhlee

(Novelist.app appears to be genuinely free.)

celli

Current Music: Jin, "Rope It"

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kate_nepveu

Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Newly reprinted under the author's current name, The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed is a post-cyberpunk novel about brain modification, being queer in an oppressive society, the media, species extinction, and the possibility of changing human nature. In 2010, Jo Walton called it "one of the most important books of the last 20 years." We'll discuss what made this novel groundbreaking in 1996, what makes it still fresh and relevant today, our favorite lines that aren't the beginning and ending, and the throwaway worldbuilding detail that most caught our attention.
Kate Nepveu (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD

Last panel report! ... with so much extra.

The audience said they were okay with spoilers, so we included general spoilers for premise and worldbuilding from the beginning of the discussion. I will have a separate clicky arrow for ending spoilers. (Very gratifyingly, when we got to that point of the panel, someone in the audience got up and left, saying something like, "I decided I want to read it myself after all!")`

I gave a little summary of the premise for the couple of people who hadn't read the book, which I will try to recreate/improve upon now.

summary of the premise, with quotes

The book is set in Russia about 300 years in the future. Previously: America ("the Guardians") conquered most of the world [1], committing genocide through lowest-bidder concentration camps and ruling for 50 years. They were defeated probably 75 years ago, mostly by an army of ordinary people who were mind-controlled by a computer virus that erased itself from their minds once it detected victory. (Africa, which is now a walled-off technological paradise, took Egypt back from the Guardians without the virus.)

Maya is a camera, which means she broadcasts news as her senses experience it—except with a screener to filter out not just distracting bodily urges, but also forbidden topics, lest she attract the Weavers (immensely scary censors who live in the internet to prevent another mind-control virus). Screeners instantly know their cameras' minds in full. Cameras have no such reciprocal knowledge. As the book opens, Maya is broadcasting a series about why the reign of the Guardians is barely remembered, unlike the Holocaust and the Terror-Famine [2]. And she has a brand-new screener, Keishi.

footnotes

[1] North America, Eurasia, Egypt, and Japan, as far as we can tell. Hat tip to the Wizards versus Lesbians podcast for pointing out that the rest of Asia doesn't seem to exist; after I heard them say that, I looked and didn't see anything about South America either.

[2] No other information is ever given about this, just the way none is given about the Holocaust.

But actually, the book does not open there. It opens with Maya writing to her audience:

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know.

What a first line.

The prologue ends with another banger:

I will give you my thoughts since that time, but not on moistdisk. I will not let you explore the twining pathways of my thoughts as I explore them—not again. I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

(In addition to the narration, it's useful to know that the book moves through different modes, and some people find the last half to be a jarring change, for expectation-setting purposes.)

panel notes, plus some more thoughts

With that background, we got into the discussion proper.

Marianna: ways in which book is about camera and editing reminded of Dziga Vertov, 1920s Russian cinema, had a manifesto about how in the future we would become cameras. Maya is a camera, constantly making decisions that are directing and editing her broadcasts: pan here, add background information there.

Marianna cont'd: anticipating current social media, when livecasting everything: are we actually seeing what they are? not only that, but the asymmetry in the screener-camera relationship predicted parasociality. as does Maya's relationship with her audience: she needs them, she's uneasy about their demands, they think they know her and they don't—they don't even know what she looks like, she uses a false userpic because she's older and scarred with old-fashioned sockets drilled into her head—and there's literal emotional feedback between them. (also, the camera is preemptive censorship like using euphemisms on TikTok.)

audience member: thought about "veil of Maya" in Hinduism, which is a false reality. me: oh, so that's what Keishi was referencing!

me: going back to Vertov, that reminded me of the book's terrible monomaniacal old man, Voskresenye, who had idea that true teleprescence, that is, what cameras broadcast, can save humanity: overcome the "sins of locality" that arise from being trapped in our own skulls and unable to achieve empathy.

Marianna: Vertov was propagandist documentary maker, believed that if people just saw what was really happening, would get on board with the Russian Revolution. not only that but "Cine-Eye" technique would help improve/evolve humanity.

Marianna cont'd: thinks there are three themes that underpin SF in general: memory, identity, trauma. they all come together in this book so powerfully. but doesn't argue for universality in sense of uniformity, Voskresenye is also very angry about enforced homogeneity and exclusions.

(later on, we talked about the book's pondering of whether love results from, or is stifled by, intense mental intimacy.)

Marianna cont'd: all that and we haven't even mentioned the dead psychic whale yet!

so this may have been where I talked about Moby-Dick, which I re-read specifically so I could talk about how it relates to this book! it's name-checked by the text, given to Maya as a memory:

The novel seeped into my mind, like milk into a sponge. A man tattooed with frogs and labyrinths; a leg of polished whalebone; duodecimo, octavo, folio whales; a coffin bobbing among the waves; and in the blue distance a white mass rising, unknotting its suckered limbs, and sinking: unearthly, formless, chance-like mockery of life.

But it's a lot more in conversation with it than that quote may indicate.

They both have a central queer relationship. For those who haven't read Moby-Dick but have heard vaguely of Queequeg (the tattooed man), you may not know that Ishmael meets him because there is literally only one bed at the inn. The next day, Queequeg says that they are "married," and they go up to bed and talk, "in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair." This is text.
They both have terrible monomaniacal old men, as previously noted.
They are both narrated after the fact by narrators with specific agendas. Ishmael is desperately trying to understand what happened and to make us understand what happened. Maya is also trying to understand what happened, revisiting Keishi's actions and her own decisions; and she says she's trying to reduce our understanding, but I'm not so sure about that. Also, so much foreshadowing.
There is a whale, who is intelligent and filled with hate of humans, but only because humans keep bothering him or her.
They both are surprisingly funny. (I liked when Maya needs to insert a really gross public plug into her head—this is the very embodied kind of cyberpunk—but doesn't have anything to clean it: "I settled for wiping the plug on my shirt, to replace some of the unknown dirt with dirt I was on intimate terms with.")

My notes get a little sketchy here. I see that Marianna said that the novel is still frighteningly relevant, and there were times during this reread where she had to put it down. I'd previously noted on Bluesky that the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast thought that the homophobia in the book seemed exaggerated, even though the book was set in Russia, because we'd come so far in overcoming that ... which was not an unreasonable thing to say, all the way back in 2021. Ouch. And as for the McGulags, well.

I mentioned that asexuality doesn't seem to be a concept that the characters have (again, published in 1996), so at least one of them treats the ability to feel love and desire as the same thing; this is extremely relevant and in-character but the conflation was noticeable to me and would be a good thing to note in recommending the book to people. (Significant trans themes, though.)

Someone mentioned the Richard Matheson short story "The Box," about whether you really know the person you married (originally "Button, Button").

(Also, I just realized that this Tumblr short story might be a riff off that.)

I think at this point, all that's left of the panel discussion is talking about the ending.

SPOILERS FOR THE LAST 30% OF THE BOOK

Marianna noted that the conflict between Keishi and Maya is, in addition to a fundamentally different understanding of love, very much a 1990s argument about coming out and whether people have an obligation to do so

audience: political dynamic of the decision, Keishi claiming that they will represent hope

me: the way Maya presents things throughout the book seems to me to trying to justify her distrust of Keishi and her decision to leave her, which results in her death. I'm not sure she convinces herself, based on those haunting last two paragraphs:

And if I could, I would freeze that instant forever. But it’s no use. I can trap the young rose in the hologram, but the rose is long since dust. And what I most want to conceal from you, you’ve always known:

That I went up into the world and left her there, in the prison camp beneath the ocean, with the ruined mind of the new Iscariot and the body of the whale.

(Emphasis added.) I think Maya has shame, or regret, or doubt, or all of the above.

and I don't know that I would do the same in her shoes. all through the book, Maya is highlighting how Keishi is lying to her and manipulating her—this is even clearer, more painful, and more infuriating on a reread, but is explicit on a first read nonetheless. On the other hand, at the very end, Keishi says that she was forced into all the pre-whale manipulation by Voskresenye, who does not deny it. On the third hand, it was Keishi who took over Maya's mouth—which she did before and Maya specifically told her to never do again—and forced her to recover her memories before she was ready. Even if she didn't know that Voskresenye was going to broadcast them, that is a huge violation of trust, on top of agreeing to let Voskresenye broadcast the memories that Maya was in.

and now, writing this, I've talked myself back around into thinking I would have done the same: because I don't think that I could trust Keishi to leave my brain, ever. or to stay quietly tucked away like she promised, because she said over and over that she doesn't want that, that she wants their minds to lie next to each other, and she shows over and over that she takes what she wants. including by controlling my body. and that is a very literal horror story, to the point that I may have just given myself nightmares.

Okay! I think that's about all the panel discussion, or discussion directly related to it.

additional SPOILER thoughts

I was going to do a really thorough dive into my many, many ebook bookmarks, but I must sleep. So here's just three things I already had prepared.

First: you start looking up one chapter title, you end up with a zillion links. My suggestions for your consideration:

Ashes, Ashes: we all fall down.
The Platypus: Oliver Herford?
A Faster Cable: impossible to search; suggestions?
To Make Much of Time: Robert Herrick.
As a Wife Has a Cow: Gertrude Stein.
The Word: was God.
Khristos Voskrese: as the text says, "Christ is risen."
A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves: E.E. Cummings.
All the King's Horses: couldn't put Humpty together again.
My Man Sunday: impossible to search; suggestions?
A Property of Easiness: Hamlet, act 5, scene 1, lines 67-68.
Immediate Touch: as quoted at the start of the section, Paradise Lost.
Icarus: too close to the sun, etc.
Tea and Sympathy: the Classical movie?
Phaeton: as Wikipedia puts it: "See also: ... Icarus; Lucifer"
Very Like a Whale: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, line 382; possibly also Ogden Nash, though that would feel more appropriate for a later chapter to me?
Fallen Like Lightning: Luke 10:18?
You Must Remember This: Casablanca, of course.
Orpheus: now you see why explaining the reference in the prior panel would have been impossible.
Penelope: faithfully waiting, or not, for a spouse who came home twenty-odd years later. (edited because I got this totally backwards at first)
Sorrow's Springs: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Second: as I said on Bluesky, the contrast between Maya and Ishmael's last reported words is just brutal.

Ishmael:

"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."

Maya:

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Both the last things they said to the loves of their lives, but one is wholehearted affirmance that he means everything, and the other is equivocation and denial.

Third: a text to a friend after I finished rereading:

The Fortunate Fall shitpost:
one of the things it foresaw, in addition to going viral, McGulags, and the death of print,
is the meme about the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Two post-panel things:

Afterward, the person who recommended the book to the Wizards vs. Lesbians podcast came up and said hi, so that was very cool.

And I took a selfie of my white whale earrings, which I forgot to mention on the panel.

Poll #33405

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musesfool

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Angels on tv

Today was my first day back at work after my vacation and I did not sleep at all well last night, despite, you know, working from home and didn't have to get up early or anything. I was tossing and turning until sometime after 4 am, at which point I finally fell asleep.

Work was fine - busy, and kind of a lot, but not difficult despite the lack of sleep - but then I sat down on the couch after dinner to watch the Mets and fell asleep for about 40 minutes. *hands*

I'm really glad I took yesterday off too. I 100% recommend adding an extra day onto your vacation if you can - especially if it's a Monday, and doubly so if you actually went away. It makes it easier to get back into the grind, at least for me. I had 333 emails to sort through this morning, and there is way too much going on, as usual, but I timed it so that all of my regular meetings happened while I was out, so this week should be fairly quiet.

On the home front, I've had my new dishwasher for a week now and it is working really well, though I am still learning how to load it. The tines are much closer together and shorter than in my old one, which makes it difficult to get stuff in between them. But it's so quiet! And it doesn't leak! *knock wood* It does take 2.5 hours to run the full normal cycle, but I can live with that.

On the TV front, I finished Murderbot and enjoyed it - Mensah is still my favorite and I wish Bharadwaj had had more to do because I liked her as well.

I also finished the last 2 available episodes of My Life Is Murder because I read they are doing a new season, though who knows when it will be available here. I enjoyed the s4 2-part finale, and I do kind of low-key ship Alexa and Madison, though I also like that they have not had any real romantic interests for Alexa, and those 2 episodes really focused on her lingering grief for her husband.

In other news, Baby Miss L went to Sesame Place this past weekend and the videos of her vibrating with joy over meeting Elmo and Grover and Cookie Monster are amazing!

*

sanguinity

Intro/FAQ
Days 1-15

In case people haven't seen it,

china_shop and

mific have started a comm for posting or linking to writing meta:

fan_writers. Check it out!

My check-in: An intensive session with my partner in crime pulling together meta-info (tags, summaries, author notes, etc.). Plus some editing + brainstorming with my other partner in crime.

Day 22:

china_shop,

sanguinity

Day 21:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

glinda,

goddess47,

luzula,

nafs,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

isis

I finished the game, yay! As I've mentioned before, this is a spooky atmospheric puzzle game, very stylized in grayscale with splashes of red, and a sort of phase-shifted overlay effect that makes everything look a little unreal. You play as a mysterious woman who has come to a mysterious hotel full of locked doors somewhere in Europe (Italy? Austria? Germany?) in 1963, at the request of a mysterious man for reasons of ??? The gameplay is very simple: you move with either a controller stick or arrow keys, and you have a single action button to interact with whatever is highlighted in front of you, or if nothing is, to bring up your "introspection" screen that includes inventory, "photographic memory" (images of everything important you've interacted with, text from books/documents/signs you've seen, etc), and "mental notes" which is where your quests, so to speak, show up, e.g. "Unlock room 1957" or "Broken elevator?" The game manual - once you find it :-) - is minimal, and a lot of the game consists of figuring out how you need to figure out the game. The story also makes little sense and is mostly vibes until you accumulate more information, as putting the story together is in some sense the point of the game.

The puzzles are mostly a matter of figuring out codes to open locks (doors, safes, puzzle boxes, computer logins) based on information that is usually near the lock, but may require extra information from books, letters, or other documents in order to transform into the needed code. Some things rely on Greek letters or Roman numerals; some rely on perspective or rotation or other transformation. Usually if I couldn't figure something out, it meant I didn't have the necessary auxiliary information, though sometimes I had it but didn't realize it was the missing piece.

I found the overall game structure really interesting, in that it's sort of separated into informal stages where there are a number of places you can go and things you can do (and a few things you can't do yet and can't figure out at all, e.g. a statue with a hole in it where obviously something is meant to go but you don't know what, or a room you can see but not enter) and within that, you can do things in any order you like, it's completely nonlinear. And then either something you do triggers an event which opens up additional places you can go/things you can do, or you solve a puzzle that gives you a key (possibly literally) to open up a new area. However, sometimes (probably often!) you receive access to a new area before you've solved everything in a previous area, though in order to fully progress the game you'll need to go back and solve whatever you missed. My brother and I compared notes occasionally, and marveled at how we often did things in completely different orders! For example, there's one area called the "Quiz Club" where you have to answer questions about in-game things in order to progress, and to get to it, you need to solve a puzzle that you have access to from fairly early in the game. My brother got there long before I did, because I missed that puzzle entirely until much later, but he was only able to answer a few of the questions, since he hadn't encountered the answers yet; by the time I got there, I was able to get through the whole thing fairly easily.

I did a bit more than 95% completion (there are some optional things you can do, some of which I chose not to) and finished in about 25 hours, which is probably dead slow, but I'm a slow gamer. I have 9 pages of notes - the facts and diagrams are of course saved in "photographic memory", but I wrote some things down so I could refer to them while in the game without having to access it (and sometimes it's not available, so you have to either remember or take notes). Also a few photos I took with my phone, heh.

The game is pretty inexpensive on Steam and goes on sale periodically (at the moment it's $17.49). As I mentioned in one of my updates, there is a really excellent hint guide on the steamcommunity.com site, which gently nudges you in the direction you should be thinking in order to solve the puzzles, rather than providing answers. You can pet the dog! You can drink espresso (after solving a certain puzzle...)! If you like puzzle games of this sort, I recommend this game!

kate_nepveu

The Next Great Gatsby?
At Readercon 33, Max Gladstone mentioned that The Great Gatsby flopped upon publication—and therefore was cheap to send to American soldiers abroad in WWII, which resulted its revival. He asked the audience to imagine how great a world would be in which, for some reason, copies of Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered were suddenly everywhere. What other books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?
Ellen Kushner, Kate Nepveu, R.W.W. (Rob) Greene (moderator), Len Schiff

panel notes

Rob started the panel by talking about the reasons Gatsby was sent abroad, its canonization, and what that might mean for our panel. And, delightfully, he's put up a longer version of that in his newsletter, so that saves me so much typing right there.

Anyway, as Rob says over there, the first question was: "What book would create the most positive chaos if it suddenly appeared in every American household?"

Len: (who is a high school teacher, among other things): something Daniel Pinkwater, like Young Adults or The Education of Robert Nifkin

Ellen: mine! (Swordspoint, specifically.) because I've had a long time to collect reactions to it. remembers getting a negative reaction from Steven Brust, who said something like, "I didn't really like it, am I homophobic? No, everyone's just completely immoral and I couldn't handle it." Thinks some queer immorality would be good chaos. Also, even today still gets people remarking on how much of a difference the representation in it made to them

me: I don't know if it would be chaos exactly, but I had previously prepared the answer of Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison so I'm going to go with that, for the reasons in Amal el-Mohtar's essay: it's about a young girl who loses three homes and chooses the open road; it's beautiful, it's short, it's in conversation with other literature and a gateway into the author's other works.

Rob: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, which is horror novel about gay conversion camp with demons.

(my notes are a bit of mess in terms of chronological order, I'm afraid, so I hope I haven't reconstructed things in a way that distorts)

me: I'm not sure how much I agree with the premise. when I was looking at just the text of this description and thinking about the panel—well, first I thought how great Thus Was Adonis Murdered is.

(we did talk about that, but for the sake of time and my hands, I'll refer you to my old booklog posts and move on. (Except that Ellen knew Caudwell! She met her on one of Caudwell's U.S. signing tours and then visited her in London. I was so starstruck.))

me cont'd: and I immediately started making rules for myself, because I'm like that, and one of the rules I made was that I could not use "this book could fix the world" as a criteria. partly because that's a hole I'd just never climb out of, and partly because it's just too unpredictable. books get misunderstood, they get taught to kids who aren't ready for them, people take away such personal things. of course books affect people, but maybe because I'm not a writer, my goal for this was much more humble: "wouldn't it be great if I could say to people, 'remember when Selena got super high at an orgy and ignored everyone in favor of reading Pride and Prejudice?', and they did."

me concluding: that said, when I eventually picked titles to write down, I deliberately chose all women authors. (I do not give myself a cookie, however, because they were all white.)

Ellen: I think a way to approach your objections is to think about ubiquity. everyone's read Gatsby (me: I haven't!); even if they haven't, it's part of assumed knowledge, the cultural conversation. (just to be clear: she was entirely correct about this and I was being a little bit silly.)

Ellen, a bit later: conversations about ubiquity have shifted to movies. Lord of the Rings has far more power/reach culturally now than it did except at its first wave of popularity in U.S. (where did massively influence environmental movement), and people always quote (Ian McKellen as) Gandalf saying, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

Ellen and Len also defended Gatsby as a work against the negative effects that Rob laid at its feet (see his essay).

Rob: mentioned something about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn being the second-most-taught book in the U.S., but I didn't write down the context for that

I think this is when Rob asked what the first book was that changed our lives/opened our minds/showed us what books were capable of?

Ellen: "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison, for anarchy and chaos.

Len: The Dispossessed. the utopian impulse is not a thing to be dismissed. dystopia is culturally determined; what we have now in the canon is because people were disappointed by Stalin. it confirms shitty things we believe about people and self-propagates. instead foreground utopia. that said, discovered the book in a counterculture used bookstore, and canonizing things risks losing a lot of their charm

Len, later: did teach The Dispossessed to high schoolers and it went over like a lead balloon, they were just not interested in it.

(I did not jump in on this, though I thought of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor, which I read like twenty times in fourth grade or so.)

me: asks Len about a passing mention he made of The Hunger Games being taught in high schools. that seems like a good thing? inequality is bad, and the revolution needs more than a single teenager?

Len: haven't taught it, but thinks that as long as make authority abstract, can depoliticize it. I'm sure there's a reading of The Hunger Games in which the Capitol are all SJWs.

Rob: Ender's Game is one of the most popular books to be taught. used to be (?) taught as leadership in Marine Corps University.

me: Some Desperate Glory is in conversation with Ender's Game and is very specific about the fascist nature of the leadership

someone: ideally read them together

Ellen: just found out about Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, with regard to Gatsby

maybe in here is when Rob asked about dropping something else in place of Gatsby in high schools?

Len: refers back to Pinkwater

me: Piranesi, because Travel Light seems a little young for high school; Piranesi is also short, wonderfully written, has lots to chew on, is in conversation with other works (specifically The Magician's Nephew), and: "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

Ellen: wants to keep all the old difficult books being assigned in high school, because that's the only time get help reading them! know someone who was assigned Dan Brown in high school, come on

me: I had two books on my list that I thought were too dense and complicated, maybe I should put them back on! (Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh, and—of course, are you surprised by this point?—The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed) but also, some things seem like high school is just too early; shudder at idea Moby-Dick in high school, it's so long and I can't imagine the teachers would like explaining the chapter that's just a dick joke

Rob: Parable of the Sower

Rob to audience (copied from his essay): If you were designing a new book-distribution program for today’s challenges — climate change, polarization, technological disruption, nationalism — what would be your first five titles?

responses:

never know what's going to speak to you, needs to be lots of titles (like the original)
almost anything by Terry Pratchett (this was from Delia Sherman, and she and I discovered that we read Night Watch very differently in terms of what Pratchett, or more fairly the text, thinks of the revolutionaries in that book, which was delightful)
Le Guin
The Mahabharata! "it covers it all"
of course books can change the world, Costa Rico has no standing army because a key figure there read Aldous Huxley. (I would love if someone could suggest more reading on this! Wikipedia is pretty bare-bones, and this article I found might be from a somewhat conservative-leaning publication?)

Anyway, that was very fun and juicy.

The final book on my list, which I did not get around to mentioning, is The Interior Life by Katherine Blake/Dorothy Heydt, which Jo Walton reviews usefully and which is free to download.)

Poll #33403

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kate_nepveu

Take Your Novel to Work
In the genre of fanfic known as "take your fandom to work," favorite characters are placed in the author's work environment, often resulting in delightfully concrete and minute details about ecological field research or running a bodega or being a summer camp counselor. How do stories of everyday vocation enhance the experience of reading and writing fiction, and what works of speculative fiction take best advantage of the granular details of work life? What can bringing characters to work tell us about both the characters and the work itself?
Ken Schneyer (moderator), Marianna Martin PhD, Melissa Bobe, Sarah Pinsker

panel notes

Ken, who writes short fiction, amended the title of the panel to "Take Your Story to Work." And asked the panelists to talk about their work in their introductions.

Melissa: children's librarian

Sarah: writing professor, have been many other things including camp counselor, working with horses, nonprofit administrator, SAT tutor, singer/songwriter

Marianna: currently academic. formerly development executive for film and TV production, administrative assistant, film projectionist, IT, bartending training but not experience

Sarah: bartending experience but no training!

Ken: currently professor of humanities. previously IT project manager, ad hoc computer programmer, clerk typist, judicial clerk, lawyer in corporate law firm, dishwasher at deli, actor, director. several of those have found way into stories. asks: particularly good examples you've read, yours and/or not?

Marianne: caveat did not read novel Discovery of Witches, but TV really got minutia of academia right. Stross, Laundry Files, vibe of working in IT. le Carré, sounds very plausible!

(anyone interested in academia and/or Discovery of Witches must, must read this fic in which the author's note reads, "i'm not so much taking this fandom to work as i am meeting it next to the dumpster behind my workplace and engaging it in hand-to-hand combat for the honor of the field of human genetics"

pachytene phase (9096 words) by magneticwave
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Diana Bishop/Matthew Clairmont
Characters: Christopher "Chris" Roberts, Matthew Clairmont
Additional Tags: Epistolary

Summary: The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics is pleased to invite you to the annual Clarence Berrigan Lecture. This year’s speaker is Matthew Clairmont, DPhil, who is giving a talk entitled: “Interspecies compatibility, meiotic flexibility, and the end of the infertility myth: insights from the southern red muntjac.” Please join us after Dr. Clairmont’s talk for a reception in the McNeil Family atrium at 5pm. Refreshments will be provided!

you don't need to know the fandom and it is hilarious)

Sarah: office vibes: Jeff Vandermeer, Authority (second one in trilogy that began with Annihilation); Several People Are Typing, Calvin Kasulke, someone gets uploaded into work Slack

Sarah cont'd: music: Randee Dawn's new one, The Only Song Worth Singing; really picky about those, good details about gritty. Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

Melissa: read T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones, obsessed with research and entomology. own profession: Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Bruce Coville (alas no dragons at their library), probably led to becoming librarian

Ken: moments where certain details ticked off

Sarah: curse of being immersed something, is when encountering books where author learned by research. some do well: Dick Francis, glassblowers and meteorologists, seems like got it, at least from outside those professions. it's things that don't think to research that grate. music, people can only picture what rock star is like, not what slugging through every day. also categories where if write thing, prepare to get letters: guns, horses (I'm the one writing the letters), sailing, U.S. Civil War (and if you've done primary source research, often letters you get are wrong)

Melissa: authors try to get librarians right because know we'll buy the book

Melissa cont'd: remembered work meant to mention: The Public, movie, Emilio Estevez, made after watching interactions at LA public library. only thing not believable: entire staff but one person were all men (so much laughter)

Marianna: try to condense rant of many years. authors are like: I went to school, I know what faculty do, I don't need to look that up. get overly focused on research (academic conduct thereof). nothing about hiring, tenure, career track, which is what academics mostly care about: I don't care how in love you are, you are not leaving MIT to follow your lover and teach at an Arizona community college.

Ken: bias toward academia in mainstream novels, so think lot is accurate there. re: law: people view procedure through mainstream TV, movies, think understand. part is that day to day of law work is exceptionally boring. sitting for 12 hours a day in a library (me, to myself: Ken is showing his age: I sit for 12 hours a day in front of Lexis => ). almost threw book across room: passage in Orson Scott Card novel, character obtains divorce AND the arrangement of bifurcated child custody WITHOUT spouse's knowledge (caveat, not set in US and in future, suppose could imagine, but)

Ken cont'd: flip around other way: examples of juicy details re: something otherwise unfamiliar, what did that do for you as a reader?

Marianna: le Carré, spoiler alert I'm definitely not a spy, not just telling you that to throw you off scent. made me want to write spy novels, so good at lot of details but not overwhelming with. particularly love when get book like Perfect Spy: how does this person spend their time on an average day? what is the macro running in the back of their head? everyday stuff that you might not think about.

(le Carré came up so much at the con and every time I have to google his name to remind myself of the capitalization and also copy the accented e)

Ken: and we know that he had experience in British intelligence. can you remember particular detail?

Marianna: how much time he spent with radio when holed up in safehouse, had code keys, sitting around waiting to hear message

Melissa: because in hotel, thinking about Kate Stayman-London's Fang Fiction—

—at this point, I very rudely interrupted to ask for a repeat of the title, which caused her to completely lose her train of thought. I apologized then and also after. wait until people are done talking to ask for repeats of titles, self!

anyway the publisher's page on Fang Fiction indicates that the main character is a hotel manager, and also it sounds fun.

Sarah: talking about a lot of jobs that do exist, but made think of jobs that don't but believe that do: Peter Beagle, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, about dragon exterminator, like mice in the walls. hates his job because loves dragons, makes reader believe in this guy who knows he has to do, emotions resonant. mild spoiler for early part: protagonist tries to save some, sneaks away as pets.

Ken: The Martian, the book. main character has master's in botany and engineering conveniently. remember being struck by the thought process. no idea what experience author has, not point: I do know enough about electrical circuits to know that you need to know what gauge of wire, so completely sold that character knew what talking about, and did make me feel like I was there.

Melissa: A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon, very short, characters are all working as magical girls of X or Y, get sent on jobs, very much feels like 9-5 in hilarious way

Ken: more completely imaginary jobs?

Marianna: Stross' Laundry Files. wonderful balance between grounding familiar IT work but for government agency dealing with paranormal stuff

Sarah: all those little jobs in Terry Pratchett novels, e.g., candle snuffer. looks at Melissa: the Librarian though

Melissa: look, we take all representation

Ken: even the witches, does mundane detail so well, yeah, a real witch has to do that, more of a human interaction than anything else

(me, to myself: also, research witches.)

Ken: 15 years ago, talking with Elizabeth Hand, who said how in Glimmering, included nitty-gritty details of boat building which made real effort to research, surprised by great number of positive responses to that part specifically, not necessarily by boat builders, people who just really enjoyed. readers in general, American in particular, love to know how stuff is done, procedural details

(me, to myself: which is the joke in the Field and Stream review of Lady's Chatterley's Lover)

Ken cont'd: is detail good in and of itself, or does it have to advance plot/character/theme to be worthwhile?

Sarah: love granular detail and think is a danger of too much, either "I've suffered for my research and so must you", or because genuinely love the subject—haven't written horse novel because of risk get too in weeds. new novella Haunt Sweet Home, protagonist is working at reality show as production assistant (PA), very bottom of ladder. got lots of feedback from ex-PAs, used to live from someone who was a set dresser got some flavor from her. the things sometimes skip between big plot moments, are what make the job and character pop, so that when get to plot, believe in fully rounded character and ability/inability to do thing

Ken: remember in your A Song for a New Day, early on, step by step to get into venue and set up, played really real to me, felt like there and put me on her side

Sarah: makes it really hard to read those in public readings, not most dynamic

Marianna: just crystallized, what really sells me on details being necessary, is when feels like answering question already had, or didn't know needed until got. joy of discovery for reader, not only having fun but just learned something. can get away with a lot

Melissa: always comes back to how well written. joke never want to represent someone going to toilet, but that's first story in Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, really works. as writer, always worry that losing audience when writing library

Ken: been moments where you as reader has been lost?

Melissa: hard to lose me, find a lot of things interesting

Sarah: if I do one good thing this con, it's getting people to go read Molly Gloss, in particular The Hearts of Horses, horse trainer novel; sequel of sorts, Falling from Horses, Hollywood stuntman. details ARE the story. not SFF, basically Westerns. nobody does it better than her.

Ken: granular details about occupations as tool of worldbuilding. thinking about economy of language, classic example "the door dilated"

(me, to myself, once again: can I tell you about The Fortunate Fall????)

Melissa: Evil, CBS series, investigating Catholic Church, which everyone gets wrong (never heard priests complain, think happy to have people talking about). does get details wrong of church, but climbing and motherhood details were really interesting and well done (in the same character)

Sarah: from writer's perspective, stuff make sure to show to beta reader, especially someone who knows field really well if not your area, or if your area, to someone who doesn't know

Marianna: one of best pieces of advice ever seen, if in situation where danger of infodump but exposition needs to happen: get two characters having intense emotions, maybe even conflict, about information. can get away with so much more and also tell readers about stakes

Ken: decades ago, reading SFF story about lawyer, remember character bemoaning that his pleading-generating software was so outdated and running so slowly; opened up entire world of, what does law practice look like when there's genuinely good AI that can generate pleadings. no big commentary on that in the story, just one little detail

Sarah: going back to annoys: music related: describing music in way that music critic would. stories that do music right, talk about emotions of playing, hearing. Lewis Shiner always gets right, also LaShawn M. Wanak

Ken: reminds of TV show M*A*S*H. there are lots of doctors shows, almost always have consultant on set to ask questions of. one for M*A*S*H said, usually actors ask how to hold this instrument, they always asked how would it feel. showed in series

Ken: asks Marianna about mundane occupations in fantastical setting

Marianna: always fascinated by genre as magnifier, makes things bigger. only way to do that is to ground in mundane in one way or another. PhD dissertation about Whedon in Buffy would have outrageous situations but mundane jobs like bartending at demon bar, or inverse, to really push contrast

Ken: reminded of very short story, 15 years ago, "Accounting for Dragons" by Eric James Stone, very tongue in cheek, also satire. when look at fantastical through lens of mundane, casts light both ways

Melissa: ongoing manga, Kowloon Generic Romance, about realtors: feels very grounded but in a fictional city where things shift and disappear

(me, to myself: is manga particularly good at this? or do I just happen to hear about examples there?)

audience: reality is stranger than fiction. experience is that weird shit happens more often in real life than is written out. sparks some of my best ideas. any of that that forms heart of why you write?

Sarah: hard thing is that because so much stranger, sometimes don't read as true; wife works for liquor board, her stories are so weird (snakes falling out of ceiling onto fire marshal who was trying to figure out what rustling noise was), haven't found way to make fiction

audience: Snow Crash opening: the Deliverator was speculation, but sheer terror and anxiety is all of our delivery services now

Marianna: genre wonderful tool for laundering these things

In the rush to get notes out, I haven't been saying, "this panel was great," but if I didn't say something, they were. however, it's worth saying, and it's true: this panel was great.

Poll #33401

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

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jadelennox

I have started rereading the Amelia Peabody mysteries. It makes me sad that they've definitely had at least a light visit from the suck fairy ^[note], because I've never realised before how much Amelia is in love with Evelyn in The Crocodile On The Sandbank.

She's obviously got it bad for Emerson as well, but my goodness her jealous desire to spend her life with her beautiful Evelyn is overwhelming.

Note: Amelia was never supposed to be a reliable narrator, and her Victorian Orientalism was always to be read as historical. It's just that in modern conventions we -- correctly -- no longer feel it's okay to portray the likable heroines of (wholly unrealistic) historical romances with historically accurate racism. _[back]

minoanmiss

Current Mood: anxious

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Or the ocean's brine will turn to wine

Me-and-media update

Write Every Day: Day 23

reading

Nothing very important

The Brightness Between Us, by Eliot Schrefer

One More Week To Sign-Up For VOXTEK Gift Baskets!

argh

Oooo exciting!

Four Assorted Sociopolitical Articles

presented without explanation

I got a job for my birthday!

Readercon: Book Club: The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

that's 21 straight successful stolen bases

Write Every Day: Day 22

Game: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Readercon: The Next Great Gatsby?

Readercon: Take Your Novel to Work

Actually Renee O'Connor and Lucy Lawless would have been great casting

Something I think about more than I should

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