The Dangers of Missed Deadlines, or Pretty Ruby
This spring, I attended a writer’s workshop in Flagstaff, Arizona. There, I agreed to get the final draft of my current WIP novel, The Creative Fire, done by August 31. Now, all of us came up with carrots or sticks. I came up with a stick, since I am personally motivated by sticks. My stick was that I would need to paint my nail neon pink. It’s pinker than it looks in the picture, honest. Although my graphics expert called it Ruby. And for those of you who know the manuscript, that’s apt.
Art for Mayan December Cover, by Scott Grimando
I am excited about my next book, Mayan December. This is my first real post about it, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about the book as time goes on. It will be out sometime next summer, hopefully before Worldcon.
First, my publisher, Sean Wallace from Prime Books, showed me this art the day he proposed buying the book from me (right before last year’s World Fantasy). I love the art. It has the right feel for the book. No, it’s not pure fantasy, but it’s historical mixed with sf, set in the Yucatan Peninsula, partly in 2012 (without the end of the world histrionics of the movie) and partly in the far past, when the Mayans mixed science and magic together to make a warrior society. I fell in love with the place and the people, and this art evokes the mystery and strength of the oldest times I wrote about in Mayan December.
Scott’s work has exactly the right feel for this book, which is more about a sense of awe at the majesty of nature and human history than it is about the science and computers of the modern day. I’ll stop here before I end up with spoilers. But do go visit Scott’s Grimando’s site, grimstudios. The art piece itself is titled Alter of the Moon.
I’ll post more as the art turns into a cover and we get closer to publication.
Reading Recommendation: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
I got ready to head out onto a cruise last week, and picked up Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Shades of Milk and Honey” to see if I thought I’d like to bring it along as cruise reading. The next time I looked up I was almost 100 pages into the book.
It’s lovely.
I read it. Toni also devoured it on the cruise, equally fast.
It’s hard to review without spoilers, but the words I’d use are captivating, sweet, original, and fun.
Fish, or lack thereof
As many of you know, I just returned from a trip to Alaska. We stood in the back of a rocky boat, shivering gazing in awe at the Sawyer Glacier as it ca
lved. We learned that it is receding so fast they say it is “galloping” backwards. The cruise ship itself could not get near the glacier and we had to take a smaller boat that met up our big one and then took us near the glacier’s face.
We watched humpback whales breach as we motored back from Tracy Arm to Juneau.
In Ketchikan, there were so many fish coming in the inlet through town that it was impossible to take a picture that didn’t include fish jumping. I took ten or twelve of this spot and every picture had fish in it. Leaning over the bridge, the passageway under it seemed to hold as much fish as water.
Right before we left, I turned in an original essay for a book devoted to the gulf coast. In that essay, one paragraph mentions that some people are predicting we will kill all of the fish in the ocean, though acidification or through overfishing and collapsing stocks, or other means.
After this trip, when the ocean looked so vast and the fish so plentiful, I began to wonder if I had over-stated the case. Then I found the trailer for the award-winning movie “A Sea Change“ and it says the same thing. We may have no more fish.
That would be a true tragedy. I’m a girl that grew up leaning over the front of a boat watching dolphins coated in bio-luminescence off the shores of California and spent weekends anchored at Catalina Island. My family are still active sailors – my little brother Bruce owns the Ullman Sails loft in Newport Beach.
I cannot imagine a sea without fish, or dolphins, or whales. Can you?
I honestly think it would kill us to lose the seas.
Reading Recommendation: The City in the City by China Mieville
First, this was a hard read. I had to work for it. Maybe that’s partly because I have been pretty stressed by family stuff, but it took me two full weeks to read this, about 12 days to get through the first half and then not much time to finish.
But I loved it.
I’ve read so much science fiction and fantasy that I seldom come across an idea or a world that feels entirely new. New twists. New combinations of ideas. But not just “wow.” And that’s what China delivered to me in “The City and the City.”
Oh – it’s also a rather noir detective novel, and just as weird as anything China has ever done, but it’s also damned good. At the end of it, my passing thought was that he’s brave and skilled. Really brave and really skilled.
Stray Event Post: Bikes and squirrels
I was out riding my bike yesterday morning when I surprised a squirrel. It ran out straight in front of me, going as fast as it’s little legs could go, fluffy gray tail up and bobbing fast. Now, I wasn’t going all that slow. I’m not generally a fast rider, but I happened to be going slightly downhill on a heavy bike and I was doing fifteen or so, I think. I slowed a little to let the squirrel move, but it just kept right on going right in front of me.
Now, the path was wide enough for three bikes to ride side by side, and had a big lawn on the right and a planted strip on the left between the bike path and the street. So the squirrel could have turned right or left really easily. I think it was too scared to. It just ran and ran, for maybe a quarter mile. Right in front of me, inches from my wheel. I kept slowing, kept avoiding it. Eventually I think it’s little heart was going too fast and it finally stopped and darted left under a bush.
I hope it wasn’t too far to find it’s way back to its home. It really did go a long way for such a little being. I’ve recently had a lot of conversations about the power of animals as teachers, and remembering those conversation made me wonder how often we (I) look like that squirrel, running and running when we could just turn off a little and catch our breath.
Reading Recommendation: Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
This is a rare case of “Saw the movie, bought the book,” and even rarer case of “both worked.” For my usual readers, It’s NOT genre fiction, except to the extent the life of people in Ozark Mountains feels a planet away from Seattle. I’m currently working on a strong female character in my novel project, and Woodrell’s Ree Dolly is one of the strongest I’ve come across where her strength feels intrinsic and both possible and plausible, yet it’s enough to blow you away. Ree is real.
I also noticed that even though the world in the book is unfamiliar to many readers (including me, although I did live in rural Washington for a while and read echoes), the book was so unrelentingly immediate that it made me itch to go back into the manuscript I’m working on and rip out every single expository lump of description about what happened in the moments off-scene.
I wanted to read the book becasue the dialogue in the movie felt incredibly real. As it worked out, the dialogue is almost completely pulled from the book. In fact, the movie was peeled out of the book with more honor than I’ve ever seen. There are a few things that got left behind in the book when the movie came out of it, but for me they were treats, or a bit like the difference between the final cut and the director’s cut in those cases when both are excellent. So reading the book also gave me some appreciation for the crew that made the movie.
Anyway, Winter’s Bone is a great book for readers, and I recommend it even more highly for writers who are working on character or place. Which should be pretty much all of us.
Good Things in Threes
Most days, I still feel pretty invisible. I’m certainly not a famous science fiction writer, and no geek household name like Cory Doctorow or Charlie Stross that gets thrown around the interwebs regularly. But today is a very pleasant writer/futurist day from the point of being engaged in the bigger community conversation.
ABCnews included quotes from an interview with me for the story, “9 Sensational Sci-Fi Ideas That Came True: Predicting Crime, Flying Cars, Space Tourism first appeared in Science Fiction” by Ki Mae Heusner.
My regular monthly column, Today’s Tomorrow’s, came out today. This time I wrote about space elevators. See Riding the Wire: Space Elevators over at Futurismic, which you should all be reading (for way more than my column). I also got to talk about local filker and physicist (what better mix is there in the world?) Jordin Kare in the column.
I had a lovely lunch with an organizer for a reading I’ll be doing Friday, at the Redmond Association for the Spoken Word, or RASP.
Now, the rest of the day has been a craze of meetings at work and bill paying and dinner ingredient buying. In other words, perfectly ordinary and a bit stressful since there is NEVER enough time in any day to get everything done. But these things all made me smile.
Movie Recommendation: Winter’s Bone
Went out to see the movie Winter’s Bone in Queen Anne last night. I highly recommend it for writers. It has a strong female character, a society that is itself a character, knockout dialogue, real social dilemmas, and it never 
missed a beat.
We often think our stories need to be big – to be about saving the whole world from aliens or throwing the one ring into a lake of fire. This is as strong a story, humanity writ strong, all inside the stakes of a single poor family unlikely to ever be noticed by the world at large. And it works extraordinary well.
And did I say the dialogue is awesome? I want to write dialogue that real. I really do. I want to write words that fall out of characters mouths full of personality and toughness and setting, that aren’t wasted or superfluous and yet all sound natural.
There is also a book, by Daniel Woodrell. I read the opening (available on the films main website), and ordered the book. It’s voicy, which is also something I would say about the movie.
You can watch the trailer on IMDB. It’s not sf, not genre fiction at all, but it is about being human, which is something the best genre fiction is also about.
Squeel! New Ted Chiang
I was walking through Kirkland Honda when I looked down at the table in the waiting room and spotted a picture of a very contemplative and lovely Ted Chiang on the cover of City Arts magazine. Yes, Ted is lovely – writers aren’t supposed to overuse adjectives, but Ted is a lovely geek. Inside the magazine, there is an interview with Ted, who has a new novella coming out from Subterranean Press. So I immediately went off and ordered it. Physically. For a chunk of money, to be mailed in special edition. It’s my present for the day.
Now, I write science fiction for a reason – I love it to the core. I love thinking about technology and people and the future. I have loved reading science fiction since I was a wee one (as I was reminded today by a friendly ghost from my past on Facebook). Ted’s writing has never failed to give me that sense of wonder I crave when I start a new story.
We live in a time full of brilliant sf that is often overlooked by people outside of the genre, although the wonderful reception that Paolo Bacigalupi’s”Windup Girl” has received tells me there is hope for our best to do well in the general reading populace. I hope a lot of people order this and love it – I’m sure it will be worth it.
