Category: Reading

Reading at Seattle WorldCon

You can hear me read “Wishbone,” from my new collection Patti 209, at 3 p.m. Saturday (August 16) in Room 428 of the Summit building at the Seattle Convention Center (WorldCon membership required).

I could freak out about the fact that my reading is in competition with readings by two of the biggest names in science fiction (Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal) or I could breath a sigh of relief that I didn’t get relegated to a late-afternoon reading on the final day of the convention or an early-morning reading on the opening weekday. I’ll go for the sigh of relief. It’s better for starting a reading. BTW, I’ll be followed by Matt Youngmark, who writes delightfully zany and beautifully illustrated children’s books.

Copies of Patti 209 will be for sale in the Dealers Room at the LimFic and Fairwood Press tables.

If you’re in the publishing field, you know all too well how hard it is these days for authors to get any sort of traction for their new publications. I won’t add to the laments; I’ll just refer you to this excellent and dispassionate explanation by Cherie Priest, author of the brilliant new novel It Was Her House First.

How (and Why) to Review a Book

Want to delight an author whose work you enjoy? Post a three-sentence review of their book (or story) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads.

I had coffee this week with a fellow author and we noted that while we’re both selling books, we’re not getting the online reviews that are essential for building reputation and getting the next book (or story) published. We don’t mean book reviews from newspapers (most papers don’t even have reviewers any more). We mean reviews from the readers who’ve purchased the book!

Anyone with an Amazon account can leave a book review, even if they bought their copy of the book at a local bookstore or borrowed it from the library. Even if they just read one chapter, and liked that.

And the formula for a short review is pretty simple:

• Is this the sort of book you usually read?
• What did you like (or not like) about your experience with the book?
• Who do you think might want to read it?
• If you enjoyed it, what scene, character, or story was your favorite?

Karen Eisenbrey, author of A Quest for Hidden Things, Ego & Endurance, the Daughter of Magic trilogy, and the St. Rage duology, loves to review books by other authors.

“Writing a review is balm for a book hangover, when the book was so good, you didn’t want it to end,” she says. “Reviewing allows you to spend more time with a story and characters you enjoyed, putting into words what you liked and why. At the same time, a review is a cost-free way to promote a book and author you like, letting more readers know whether the book is right for them.”

Need inspiration? Check out these short reviews of three new books:

Amazon.com review of Evan J. Peterson’s Better Living Through Alchemy:

“Better Living Through Alchemy reads like William S. Burroughs meets American Gods in a Micky Spillane tale. The sense of smell is paramount in this book, kinda like in Patrick Susskind’s Perfume, but taken in an entirely different occult direction. The book is queer AF, incorporates cut-up poetry, and is a romp of a read. And though it stands alone, the ending sets us up for possible sequels.”

BarnesandNoble.com review of Alternative Liberties:

“This handful of writers had the visceral courage to write this book. In the midst of madness, this book presents a soul-stirring kick of reality into what we have become and where we are headed. Wonderful, begs deep introspection, the stories linger in your conscience, if you have one….”

Amazon.com review Irene Radford’s The Barefoot Sheriff:

“If you loved the smart-ass dialog in the film Tombstone, if your heart was stolen by Deadwood, you will be blown away by The Barefoot Sheriff. Phyllis Irene Radford puts a clever twist on all of the Wild West stereotypes, starting with her sheriff—a feisty, seductive, and magical woman—and continuing on to the evil banker, the fearsome widow, the madam with the heart of gold, and the mysterious clan living on the outskirts of town. Friends or foes? Radford will keep you guessing right to the last sentence.”

MISCosity—it will stick with you

Book Review

Early on in journalist Clark Humphrey’s refreshing new book, The MISCosity Manifesto: A Guide to Flowing Smoothly Through an Ultra-Complex World, he quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

The second half of that quotation is pretty clearly the underlying premise of Humphrey’s book. It’s a non-linear, richly illustrated and footnoted presentation of the author’s extensive knowledge of philosophy, history, politics, and pop culture. Each two-page spread (a “mini-essay”) takes on a topic. My favorites include “More Dada, Less Data,” “The Futile Wish for Order,” “Turn Off the Dark,” and “Dance Me to the End of Love”). And Humphrey doesn’t just take on a topic, he opens the topic and lets ideas pour into the reader’s mind. “Make Your Own Utopia” starts with Sir Thomas More, covers Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and ends with the ongoing journeys of the Star Trek shows.

You’ll come away with something fresh to think about, talk about, or act on (and, if you’re a writer, think of each spread as a juicy prompt to inspire your own work). You might be even able to understand opinions from “the other side” of a topic a bit better.

I’m reading a lot of articles and books about political dystopias and resistance these days (as well as getting ready to publish my own book of resistance short stories). The MISCosity Manifesto is the book doing the most for my spirit.


Speaking the Southern Truths

This weekend B Cubed Press released Southern Truths, an anthology (ebook and print) of short stories, essays, and poems about the politics and culture of the American South as seen through the lens of speculative fiction. I co-edited it with Bob Brown.

The stories in Southern Truths range from contemporary humor (“It’s Election Day in Texas and I’m a Democrat Rarin’ to Vote” by Larry Hodges) and alternate history (“The Gateway” by Zachary Taylor Branch) to near-future dystopia and fantasy. “Mascot” by Adam-Troy Castro explores the transformation of Florida’s famous theme park culture in the wake of a dark cultural divide. In the book’s opening piece, “They Hear,” Kay Hanifen imagines the mother of a child killed in a school shooting appealing to the Devil for help when it appears that no other supreme beings will listen.

We obtained rights to reprint Jim Wright’s “Antipodes,” an essay describing insights into Southern politics gained from his morning bike rides through a small Florida panhandle community. Sara Wiley’s essay, “The Great Georgia Lesbian Potluck,” is a heartbreakingly beautiful story about a young woman’s return to the traditional camp meeting she still loves.

David Gerrold, author of the famous Star Trek script “The Trouble with Tribbles,” weighs in with “The Trouble with Dribbles,” featuring mad scientists and greedy politicians. Cliff Winnig’s “Degenerates Against Memphis” pits a cadre of idealistic high school students against a repressive city government. In Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s “Welfare Bitch Is Here for Da People,” a fast-talking New Jersey super-heroine confronts a corrupt healthcare system.

Of course, Southern politicians—past and present, real and fictitious—make their appearances. Marleen S. Barr’s “Teaching DeSantis a Lesson” takes on the governor of Florida while Branch’s “The Gateway” resurrects H. Ross Perot. The Mississippi senator in Ronald D. Ferguson’s “Filibustering the Asteroid” ignores a threat from outer space while the Texas politician in Liam Hogan’s “Best of Five” is cutting deals with aliens. 

That’s Southern Truths for you. What can I say but, “Bless their hearts.”

Southern Truths is the 18th book in the B Cubed Press anthology series that began in 2017 with Alternative Truths. Here’s the full list of Southern Truths stories:

  • They Hear by Kay Hanifen
  • The Great Georgia Lesbian Potluck by Sara Willey
  • It’s Election Day in Texas and I’m a Democrat Rarin’ to Vote by Larry Hodges
  • The Trouble With Dribbles by David Gerrold
  • Pantoum For Recy Taylor (1919-2017) by Elisabeth Murawski
  • Secondary Amendments by Alexander Hay
  • These Words Are Not for Sale by Leanne Van Valkenburgh
  • Mascot by Adam-Troy Castro
  • Filibustering the Asteroid by Ronald D. Ferguson
  • My First Gun by Alan Brickman
  • Best of Five by Liam Hogan
  • A Teacher’s Disillusionment by Leanne Van Valkenburgh
  • Healthcare Bitch is Here for Da People by Allan Dyen-Shapiro
  • Antipodes by Jim Wright
  • Degenerates Against Memphis by Cliff Winnig
  • The Gateway by Zachary Taylor Branch
  • Teaching DeSantis a Lesson by Marleen S. Barr
  • We Owe It to You by Maroula Blades
  • The Last Day on Earth by Heinrich von Wolfcastle
  • The Chatham County Blood Shower of 1884 by Anya Leigh Josephs
  • Watching Public TV in the South by Gary Bloom
  • In the Darkness, Defending the Wall by Allan Dyen-Shapiro
  • The Prodigal Sin by Tom Howard
  • The Southern Whyfors by JW Guthridge
  • Lot of Desert Between Us by Bill Parks
  • Greater Expectations by Manny Frishberg and Edd Vick
  • Neighborhood Watch by Mike Wilson
  • Rapture by E.E. King
  • The Sword and The Trowel by Lancelot Schaubert
  • Leave Hospitality at the Door by Brianna Malotke
  • Delia’s Legacy by Alma Emil


Escaping from the real world

I write to escape. Instead of looking around and asking “Why?” (which I find myself doing more and more often these days) I want to look into the mists and ask, “What if?”

Then my job is to clear away the mists and show people what “What if?” would look like.

Some fiction takes place in worlds where just about everything is different. Flatland, a story about a square living in two-dimensional space, is one of the most extreme examples. An example we’re more familiar with is Alice in Wonderland. I’m in awe of writers who can manage that sort of worldbuilding.

By contrast, the fiction I write usually takes place in recognizable worlds where one small element is different. For an alternate history, it might be a past in which two people who never met encounter each other. I’ve written time travel stories in which people from the past encounter each other and build a different future. This approach is certainly inspired by my fascination with Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.

Quite a few speculative fiction works examine humans in settings where a major physical or cultural rule is different: A world where gender roles are switched or societies have multiple or fluid genders, such as the one described in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Dystopian fiction, such as Stephen King’s The Stand, often looks at the ways in which humans might respond to a disaster (nuclear war, alien attack, or a pandemic).

One of the most fascinating variations on the “one change” theme involves the ways in which a completely isolated group of people build or maintain a culture. Would we do it better this time? This includes Riverworld (again), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and Mike Resnick’s astonishing short story “For I Have Touched the Sky,” (available online), part of his Kirinyaga novel. (If you are familiar with Resnick through his humorous space opera stories, Kirinyaga is quite different, and deadly serious. I recommend approaching it without reading any spoilers.)

I have more to say on the topic of writing to escape, but I’ll stop here for the moment. Go read “For I Have Touched the Sky.”

Anthologies: Variations on a Theme

The Metaphorosis Books anthology Reading 5 x 5 was designed to provide insight into the process by which authors write to a detailed theme.

Themed anthologies and themed magazine issues are big these days. They enable editors to focus on timely topics and they attract new readers interested in those issues. Themed publications are inspiring for writers, too. In the past year, I’ve written stories for six anthologies:

Of particular interest is Reading 5 x 5, edited by B. Morris Allen. The book was designed to provide insight into the process by which authors write to a detailed theme. Allen brought together 25 authors, grouped them by five speculative fiction subgenres, and for each subgenre provided a fairly detailed story brief. (His concept is described at the Reading 5 x 5 website.) Thus all five authors in each group started out with similar characters, settings, and plots. The resulting stories — most wildly divergent — are fascinating.

While I’d written to general themes for the other anthologies, I struggled with writing a story outlined by someone else. I may have been the “bad girl” of my group (I was in the soft science fiction group, writing in a style that non-genre readers might know as “space opera.”). I felt hemmed in by the detailed brief and spun my wheels for several weeks — until I came up with the idea of writing a story in which someone hemmed in by authority rebels and plots an assassination. To see how my little revenge fantasy turned out, buy Reading 5 X 5 and read “Patience.”

I strongly recommend the writers’ edition of our book, with 100 additional pages including the original story briefs we worked from, authors’ notes for each story, and two additional stories.

The editor and writers involved in the Reading 5 x 5 experiment agreed at the outset that proceeds from the book will benefit the Jo Clayton Memorial Medical Fund. Administered by Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Inc., the fund assists professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska who need help with medical expenses.

 

 

Pay in advance for speculative fiction

Build a foundation for the next wave of speculative fiction by supporting the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Find out what 200 writers are doing this summer to raise money for the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

woman reading a book with colors emerging

Summer is early in Seattle, and I’m getting a head start on my annual summer project.

No, not gardening! The Clarion West Write-a-thon. What’s that, you ask?

Clarion West, along with its sister program, Clarion in San Diego, is renowned as the world’s pre-eminent workshop for emerging writers of speculative fiction. (“Spec fic” covers everything from the magic realism that Junot Diaz writes for The New Yorker to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones to classic science fiction novels like Starship Troopers and fantasy like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Quite a range.)

This year Clarion West accepted 18 students from across the world, most of them recent college graduates. They were chosen based on the quality of their writing. If they follow in the footsteps of previous Clarion West graduates, more than a third of the Class of 2015 will go on to publish professionally. Many of them will be nominated for — and win — major awards in the field of speculative fiction.

For the students, the six-week Clarion West residential workshop is a full-immersion, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Many of the students have left their jobs to attend, borrowed money from family and friends to pay for travel, and several of them are receiving support from Clarion West’s scholarship program.

How You Can Get Involved

If you are a speculative fiction reader, I encourage you to underwrite the next wave of speculative fiction by supporting Clarion West, its scholarships, and its operations (run by a part-time staff and a cadre of volunteers).

The Clarion West Write-a-thon seeks donations at all levels, from $5 to $1000. (Many donors divide their donations, giving $5 or $10 through each of a dozen or more writers’ pages.)

Meet the Writers

The Write-a-thon harnesses the power of some 200 writers, people at all stages of their careers, who form a “shadow workshop.” While the six-week workshop for the Class of 2015 is underway, the Write-a-thon participants work to meet their own goals. Each of these writers has created a Write-a-thon page where you can read an excerpt of their work and see the goals they’ve set for writing and for raising money for Clarion West.

Many of the writers are offering incentives to sponsors who donate through their pages. You can browse the writers, or search for your writer friends, here: http://www.clarionwest.org/groups/write-a-thon-2015/members/

You’ll find folks including Aliette de Bodard, Helena Bell, Steve Miller, Henry Lien, Kelly Sandoval, Usman Malik, Eileen Gunn, J.M. Sidorova, Randy Henderson, E. Lily Yu, Pat Cadigan, Mark Teppo, Nisi Shawl, Paul Park, Neile Graham, Julie McGalliard, Caroline M. Yoachim, Helen Marshall, Curtis Chen, Rachel Swirsky, Kris Millering, and this year’s Worldcon Guest of Honor, Vonda N. McInytre. You’ll find Viable Paradise workshop graduates, include Beth Morris Tanner, Spencer German Ellsworth — and me.

TIP: Be sure to read Eileen Gunn’s writing sample, a flash-fiction piece about a time-traveling necktie collector.

Become a Sponsor — and My Muse

What am I’m doing for this year’s Write-a-thon? After spending the past six months submitting stories to magazines and anthologies (I’ve sold three stories, which will be published this fall), I’m going to spend the Write-a-thon focusing solely on new writing. I’ll be writing six stories for the Write-a-thon — and my plan includes opportunities for the people who sponsor me to act as “muses” for those works.

Please visit my Clarion West Write-a-thon page to find out more. And, of course, to donate!

The return of Amazing Stories

Steve Davidson and a team of 50 bloggers have relaunched Amazing Stories magazine as a community site for science fiction fans.

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 1.56.48 PMApril 1926 — Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Electrical Experimenter science magazine, launched the first magazine devoted to science fiction — or what Gernsback liked to call “scientifiction.” Amazing Stories was published for almost 80 years, passing through the hands of a wide range of publishers (including, in the late 1990s, Wizards of the Coast). It debuted writers including Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin, but the magazine suffered from uneven leadership, uneven quality, and controversial editorial policies. It ceased publication in 2005.

January 21, 2013 — Steve Davidson of Experimenter Publishing (note the company name) has re-launched Amazing Stories as a web community, with the goal of establishing a market that will enable him to revive the professional fiction magazine. Davidson, curator of the Classic Science Fiction Channel website and author of several books on paintball, spent three years obtaining the rights to the Amazing Stories name. He published two online issues of the magazine last year, as a proof of concept.

“Every genre fan now has a chance to help support the creation of a new market for the stories, artwork, and articles they all love so much,” Davidson said in a news release this morning.

At the core of the new site’s content are posts by a team of bloggers covering a wide range of science fiction-related topics. The site will offer product reviews, convention news and listings, and will take advertising.

I have more than just a science fiction reader’s interest in the revival of Amazing Stories. I’m going to be one of the bloggers for the site, writing primarily (but not exclusively) about my explorations of science fiction-related communities including gaming, girl geekdom, the Maker community, Steampunk, Browncoats, Discworld, and SF/mystery crossovers. Please come join us at Amazing Stories.

iPad, Mac questions? They’ve got the answers

Take Control has just announced their summer sale — 50% off on most ebook titles — so now is the time to buy and download.

If you’ve got a new iPad — or just about any Apple device — the Take Control ebooks are a quick way to master the basics and gets tips you’ll actually use.

One of the new Take Control ebooks about the iPad.

Take Control has just announced their summer sale — 50% off on most titles — so now is the time to buy and download. (You’ll even find an ebook covering iPad Basics that’s absolutely free.)

Full disclosure: Take Control is one of my favorite clients. I’ve edited two of the books in their current catalog: Take Control of iWeb by Steve Sande and Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner by Joe Kissell.

iWeb is Apple’s web software, a application that allows complete beginners to use Apple-designed templates to turn their words, photos, audio, movies, etc., in professional looking websites. Thanksgiving Dinner is, well, I suspect you have an idea. This free sample of the ebook includes Joe’s method for making great mashed potatoes and his tips for putting together a Thanksgiving dinner at the last minute.

You can’t tell a person without the book cover

How, indeed, can you tell if the ebook someone is reading on their Kindle or iPhone is Chaucer…or chick lit?

James Wolcott’s amusing article “What’s a Culture Snob to Do?” in Vanity Fair bemoans the impending loss of the book cover as a way to assess fellow travelers. How, indeed, can you tell if the ebook someone is reading on a Kindle or iPhone is Chaucer…or chick lit?

Wolcott goes on to predict the demise of the bookcase, and even the end of the coffee table book. But, speaking as someone with more than 30 bookcases overwhelming the house, I’d happily lose those and have more wall space available for art.

(Thanks you to The Culinary Curator for pointing out the Vanity Fair piece.)