Pics from WorldCon 2013

Just a few photos from WorldCon 2013, as promised. Above, the Alamo at night. Below, the Con-Tail (what my badge looked like--though Helsinki lost the bid for 2015 to Spokane, WA). Note that the most enthusiastic Con-goers had built triangular constructs (con-structs?) of over thirty badges in three rows. I am a noob.

Below, George R.R. Martin and Games of Thrones' Rory McCann do a ninja-signing added for limited numbers at the last minute. HBO was nice enough to import Rory from Scotland for the Con. He is just as tall and imposing in person as he is when playing The Hound on-screen--an impression somewhat mitigated when he attempted to drink the bottle of GoT "Take the Black Stout" I gave him to sign, and again when he showed up in the snazziest kilt ever to the Hugo awards ceremonies. Bottom line: this photo is of two Really Cool Guys. ;)

Below, a couple of shots of beer, pun-intended. Way too much of that at WorldCon, by the way--though I did manage to avoid the ghost-pepper-vodka cocktails. First, the row of Game-of-Thrones-licensed stouts and pale ales at the Brotherhood Without Banners Private party. Behind, you can see "Bros" frenziedly opening large bottles to pour and serve everyone. Ommegang brewing sent two cases of beer just for the party!

Below that, you can see my autographed bottle of Take the Black Stout. Rory signed across the tree, George on the lower right side. Certainly the coolest empty beer bottle we have owned!

At the BWB party, George's wife Parris supervises The Great Beering:

Finally, the awesome little pins devised by our friend (and GRRM-minion) Raya Golden for the Brotherhood Without Banners party--sold to benefit the BWB. A stylized representation of the House of Black and White insignia, also featured on this year's BWB t-shirt.

Thanks for reading, all, and I hope you enjoyed the photos! Sorry I didn't get more--will try to be better next time. :)

WorldCon 2013 - San Antonio

This past weekend my husband and I attended the 2013 WorldCon in San Antonio. We got back about two hours ago, but the whole thing has been affecting enough that I wanted to sit down and write about my experience.

First off, I've never before attended a WorldCon, and this is only my second Sci-Fi Con (the first being AggieCon earlier this year). I don't know why I haven't before. It's probably a combination of two things.

First, I work for a miniatures company. Being so involved with games cons (Gen Con, ReaperCon, Origins, etc.), most of the time Sci-fi cons or fan cons were off my radar. I just looked at them with a quizzical head-tilt and wondered "what do they do there?"

Second, ridiculous as it sounds, there was some fear of just not fitting in with the people who attended. If I allow myself to actually think about it for a full second, that is a goddamn silly thing to think for a woman who grew up watching Dr. Who and Star Trek and who started reading Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony at age 8 or 9.

I can blame my newfound Con involvement almost entirely on Parris McBride (and I suspect I am not the only one who can say that!). Parris LOVES fandom and conventions. She met her now-husband George R.R. Martin at the Cons, long before Game of Thrones. Parris was always asking me (and then Zak, my husband) if we were going to attend AggieCon or WorldCon. AggieCon is always in Texas, but WorldCon moves to a different city worldwide every year. This year the city was San Antonio.

At first I was skeptical. And that's an understatement. I have a busy life. I have to partition my spare time carefully. And, as I said, there were doubts number one and two sitting there in my head. But AggieCon would be short, and pretty inexpensive to attend. And George was the Guest of Honor. Sure, I'll go!

Long story short, Zak and I had such a great time that we ended up texting our dog-sitter and begging him to watch the dogs for an extra day so we could stay longer than we'd planned!

So, suddenly WorldCon was on the table. And to my surprise, it was my husband suggesting that we go!

I think almost anyone who's written science fiction or fantasy has at one point dreamed of the Hugo awards. There are others--the Nebula, the World Fantasy Awards--but the Hugo was the first. Many of my idols, the authors who I most adored as a kid (C.J. Cherryh, for one) were Hugo-award-winners. If we went to WorldCon we could vote for the Hugos! Wow! That sold me. Getting to vote was really cool.

Second, George and Parris were going, and their minion Raya who has become a good friend. George was nominated for a Hugo for The Battle of Blackwater episode from Games of Thrones on HBO. So between them (though we knew that George would be incredibly busy) and many of my Viable Paradise instructors who were attending, at least I knew some people.

And there were panels and seminars about all sorts of writing stuff. Lovely! I would have things to do.

Well...turns out I wasn't quite prepared for how MUCH I had to do!

Every morning I would haul myself out of bed (sometimes after having put myself into bed at a gawdawful early hour and after several-too-many Shiner Bocks), stagger downstairs, stuff breakfast/brunch into myself and then take off for three to five HOURS of panel discussions. Then we would meet people for dinner. Or we would go out by ourselves, just Zak and I, and have fun realizing which of our favorite authors were at the next table!

I met up with a couple of my Viable Paradise classmates, Sean and Jake (thanks for the awesome dinner invite, Jake! We had a blast!). I was able to touch base and at least say hello to almost all of my VP instructors who were there, and a couple of them (Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and SFWA President Steven Gould) were generous with their time. BIG thanks to Steven and Laura Mixon for a few moments of their time today before they left Steven's signing. Our talk was inspirational, and it left me fired up to continue to improve my writing. :)

The Hugo awards were terribly fun and it was even more fantastic to see friends and instructors win!! My instructor Elizabeth Bear won for her SF Squeecast podcast, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for his excellent editing, and John Scalzi won the coveted Hugo for Best Novel (YAY Scalzi! Zak and I both voted for you!). :) Plus, George won for Blackwater!! A phenomenal night, so much fun.

I walked away from this WorldCon with:

A very long chain of colorful ribbons attached to my badge (they call it "con-beard" but I am calling it "con-tail", as in pony-tail, because I am female, dammit)

Many new friends in the Brotherhood Without Banners fan club for George R.R. Martin. We wore many of their ribbons, a couple of their t-shirts, and the awesome pins designed by Raya Golden! We have also made some fantastic new friends. Thank you all so much for welcoming Zak and I into your circle!

A bottle of Ommegang brewing's Game-of-Thrones-licensed "Take the Black Stout" which I got to drink at the private Brotherhood party and then have both George and actor Rory McCann (who plays the Hound in the HBO series) autograph the next day;

SIXTEEN PAGES of notes from my panel discussions

Renewed acquaintance with many of my VP instructors

Did I mention "new friends"? Not only the BWB peeps but we met some wonderful people at the dinner Jake Kerr invited us to. :)

A big respect for what it takes to organize a big international event. Organizing ReaperCon is a cakewalk compared to this.

A flood of inspiration and ideas on things to improve in my own writing;

And finally, last but not least, a husband who says that *maybe* we can get ourselves to WorldCon 2014...in London!!!

Pics or it didn't happen? Of course! Check back tomorrow...

The Learning Curve

Pensive Mood Kyrie says, "I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here today..."

(Okay, not really. Really Mood Kyrie was saying, "You're not thinking of taking my bone, are you?")

Being in a thoughtful mood this evening, and having promised a new blog entry, and having been remiss in my bloggerly duties (I know, not a real word, but "bloggerly" is pretty awesome even so), I am here now to talk about the learning curve of writing.

This isn't about the four million words of crap you supposedly have to write. (Or was it one million? I've lost count. And anyway I always assumed that, like swing dancing, I would take four times as long to learn the same steps as everyone else.) Rather it is about how you work so hard, you're getting good feedback, you think you've gotten better, you're starting to feel encouraged...

And then you read something else and realize you're not even partway up the mountain--you're barely in the foothills.

In the last year I've been learning a lot. I realized that I would have no idea how to set about editing my novel, for one thing. So I wrote a bunch of short stories and tried to figure out how a short story actually works. Harder than it seems, by the way, as I am the sort of reader who hasn't really sought out short stories. I am much more fond of novels. And my writing resembles noveling. Which is fine until you realize that you're writing a short story, not a novel.

But I digress.

The point is that I think I have finally figured out how a short story actually works, and in attempting to edit my own hopelessly sprawling short fiction I managed to learn enough about self-editing to feel that I wouldn't make a total hash of the rewrite/editing of my novel. I honestly can say I would have had no idea about how to even begin to edit _East of the Sun_ if I hadn't spent the last year or so battling with short fiction.

I've read some writers who say that short stories really have nothing much in common with novels and that trying to write one to learn more about the other isn't the best use of your time. I would have to disagree. All stories, of whatever length, are about story, after all. For a wordy, rambling writer like me, learning to create a credible story in under eight thousand (the last one was only FIVE thousand! I almost swooned...) words is a very valuable lesson in how to trim the dross off of your fiction.

So. I have successfully slimmed my stories. I have gotten some very encouraging rejections from Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and even Tor.com. I am starting to feel like I might just write something very soon that someone might want to buy.

Then I went to the bookstore this past weekend and picked up Elizabeth George's _Write Away_. It's less a how-to and more an exploration of her own writing process. I find that stuff fascinating and have always loved George's mysteries--like my other fav P.D. James, she's a master of the literary mystery. Her characterizations and prose are deep and fluid enough to drown in.

This, however, along with being a wonderful read, exposed to my poor beginning-writer brain exactly where in the foothills of writing I was. It was like plotting my course with a topographical map and compass, and then getting cell phone reception and glancing at the GPS and finding out that you might, perhaps, have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

To be fair, not a wrong turn...just that you weren't as far along as you thought. There are always those wake-up calls where you realize that you have a lot to learn yet, and this is one of those.

On the one hand, I am ever so much better at the writing craft than I was two or three years ago. On the other hand, I am realizing that the learning curve for writing (like other forms of art that I have practiced) is two things.

First, it is actually a very gradual slope. A little epiphany here, a jump in logic there, a phrase that triggers a little light in the brain along a little farther there.

However, it is an INFINITE slope with many different trails. And no matter how far along you think you are in one moment, in the next you will turn around and read something that seems to expand the accordion of your brain (with accompanying wheezing and settling dust). I think that even seasoned authors must do that--they must read other authors and just have a moment of pause where they're like, "Well. THAT was well done." And maybe, for a second, they wish they'd written it.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself. I am also going back to re-read that damn book this weekend. And this time, like the student I am, I am taking notes.

Delving the Past

Since today's post is about the past, our Mood Kyrie is a photo of Kyrie at eight weeks. Heck of cute, no?

Today I was reminded why, in this age of technology and instantly-searchable documents, it is both exceedingly annoying and contemplatively useful to keep a journal that I actually WRITE in rather than type in.

I finished editing a short story last night (it's called Grim Thunder, for future reference), and it's about to start making the submission rounds. I needed a new project. One of my previous story ideas sat up in my head and said, "ME!"

Okay, sure, I can do that. Wait. Hmmm.

Almost all of my useful notes and scenes on that story are written in my journal.

Ummm. WHICH journal, ridiculous writerly self? You have filled FOUR of them in the last three years!

So today I went journal-delving, and managed to find a couple of key scenes that I needed to refresh me on where I was going with the story, though not the one I really wanted--yet! However, in the doing of it I found some interesting thoughts of mine from a couple years back and I thought that I would share them.

First was that even two years ago I knew that beginnings were my worst part of a story. I have a horrendous urge to start contemplative instead of with action, and if you don't know the character it seems to me that there's little to recommend a story that starts with their inner thoughts unless those thoughts are so traumatic or fascinating that you keep reading with a "WTF?" kind of attitude until the writer lets you figure it out. Or maybe you're C.J. Cherryh, in which case you can write a whole series full of convoluted yet somehow fascinating thoughts and yet I still keep reading (Foreigner, anyone?). But even then the first book started with action, so I guess that rule stands.

But, in the immortal words of Byron, I digress. I had in my journal a thought about why beginnings are so hard for me, and perhaps there's some truth in it. In my favorite genre, setting the scene is also necessarily setting the setting, and I grew up in the 80's when it seemed like all those lovely high fantasies started with meandering, thoughtful prologues that were really mental background paintings full of backstory. I guess in a movie it would be like that long panning shot at the beginning, or what Save the Cat calls the Opening Image.

But a long panning shot doesn't belong in a short story. It takes up too much room. So when I get my contemplative groove on I tend to founder in the surf instead of striking boldly off into the waves.

The good thing is, I've recognized this since, and I think I've managed to overcome this tendency. So writing such things in my journal does seem to work, eventually.

The second thing I read I found very interesting because it was directly related to Anne's First Rule, Don't Judge the Work. I jotted a thought that a writer reading their own reviews was poison. The reason was that in reading those critiques, it necessarily opened the door in the back of the writer's head and invited self-criticism. We spend so much time trying to lock up our Inner Editors, to just write and not to bog down in self-doubt. Even though the story being reviewed would have been published, I think that unless all the reviews were glowing (which would never happen to people in Real Life except to those people that we really do not like--channeling Anne LaMott, there...), it would still cause more harm than good.

So those are your thoughts for the day. Now it's back to delving through the other three journals, trying to find that pesky scene...

p.s. yes I know I could just rewrite it from memory. IF I remembered it. Unfortunately, I only remember it exists. Aye, there's the rub.

The Best Rejection I Ever Got

Well I never thought I'd be pleased to get rejected, but sure enough, when I got my latest rejection for Areb Dar yesterday, it was a happy occasion. Am I losing my sanity? Well, yes. Think about it. This story has been subject to no less than ten partial re-writes and countless small editing binges. If I hadn't sacrificed a few brain cells to it along the way it wouldn't have made progress, right? Or maybe I'm comparing it to some sort of literary Cthulhu-spawn (which might not be too far off the mark anyway).

But, as Byron said, I digress.

In summary, many thanks to Brit Mandelo at Strange Horizons magazine for taking the time out of a busy schedule to personally respond in detail when my story was rejected. Thanks to you and your fellow editors' feedback I have a very good idea of where my weaknesses are and I'm encouraged to try again with a different story in the future. :)

Fear

A while back I was wanting to write a post on fear. And my friend Gwen who has an awesome blog in her own right asked me to do a guest post. And so my post on fear was written, and published--and I completely forgot to link to it here. Dang it.

So, better late than never:

Me, On Fear And Writing

I hope that, if it resonates with you, you go right now and sit down and do something creative that brings you closer to your life goals.

Enjoy! :)

A Long Education From A (Relatively) Short Story

Today's Mood Puppy is a Mood Saber from our first litter, pictured here all grown up at a year old. I feel like my writing is growing up, too, in important ways, and I owe it all to a very difficult short story.

It took me a long time to develop enough of an eye to see the flaws in my writing. The short story I workshopped at Viable Paradise in 2010 was the main tool of that learning, and it occurred to me last night that I was lucky that I did put all that time into it instead of something else. Here's why.

Areb Dar (the short story) went through at least five major edit/rewrite/revisions and countless small tunings. All while I was working on finishing the raw rough draft of my first novel and writing the roughs of other stories and mapping out the next novel, I also would take the old story out here and there and futz with it. When I got useful or specific feedback from my rejections, I re-examined the story in that light and tightened it. Those of you who have read my previous posts on this subject know that it was by turns frustrating, exhausting, and sometimes outright depressing to keep going back.

Yet I did--because I really believed in the story. I believed in what it was in my head when it was born, and in what it could be.

There are a lot of sources that say that once you start sending a story out you should just do so. You've surely read it, that advise against stopping to edit between submissions. I have to argue with that, because during those early submissions, I sensed that the story was still not quite there. At the same time, I did not yet have enough experience, enough of a feel for my craft, to pinpoint how to fix it. The time that elapsed between submissions and the feedback I got and the work that I was doing on my novel was invaluable toward fueling the back burner that the pot of this story simmered on (and it was always simmering, somewhere in the back of my head).

When I finished the most recent draft of Areb Dar, in October, I sent it to all the beta readers who had seen earlier versions for final feedback. Somewhere in that last set of revisions, something clicked in me and when I read it over I knew that I had leveled up. I was finally happy with the story--or as happy as I would ever be with it at that length. (6200 words, for those wondering. I still think it has enough potential complexity to fuel a novel in the future, but for now I'm not going there.)

So how exactly was I lucky? Well, think about it. Last night I was working on my second novel. I was also jotting down scenes and ideas for editing the first novel. Between paragraphs, it suddenly occurred to me: what kind of shape would I be in, going to edit East of the Sun, if I had not grown so much via working on Areb Dar? It was hell at times, working with the short story--and the novel is twenty times as long, and much more complex. I imagined, for a moment, how lost and depressed I might have become if I hadn't cut my teeth on those 6200 words.

So despite the fact that Areb Dar is not yet published, and may not be ever (such is the gamble of the freelance writer), I am currently thanking my lucky stars for the long education I got from my short fiction. Areb Dar, you have been a bastard of a story to work on, but I love you.

Now get published, dammit. I want you out of the house!