The TBR Pile, 2015

As with any habitual reader, there are always more books on my "to be read" list than I can ever actually get to. Several of the ones I started over on Goodreads have not yet been finished (especially the writing books with exercises in them, which I hope to start remedying shortly), and I've added several more that I actually do have a shot at finishing.

So for 2015, here's my initial pass at a prioritized reading list, to be added to at will, with preliminary notes on why I'm reading what I'm reading, if anyone actually finds that of interest.

Nalo Hopkinson, "Midnight Robber"
Dan Wells, "Partials"

(I've signed up for the 2015 Out of Excuses Writing Workshop and Retreat. I"m already familiar with the work of Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson, and I'm perusing Howard Tayler's "Schlock Mercenary" online, so this is me catching up on what the other authors have been up to.)

Catherynne Valente, "The Habitation of the Blessed" (Audible)
E.E. "Doc" Smith "Triplanetary: Lensman #1" (Audible)

(I commute about a half hour to work each way, so I get a fair bit of listening time in - Audible and podcasts FTW...)

Jim Hines "Rise of the Spider Goddess"
Jim Hines "Unbound"
Anne Bishop "Written in Red"
Anne Bishop "Murder of Crows"
Cherie Priest "Maplecroft"
John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"
Elizabeth Bear "Karen Memory"
Gail Carriger "Prudence"

And more to come...

Writing Excuses 10.2 - Writing Exercise

This week's exercise builds on the first one.

Writing Prompt: Using last week's five story ideas (or five new ones):

• Take two of them and combine them into one story.
• Take one and change the genre underneath it.
• Take one and change the ages and genders of everybody you had in mind for it
• Take the last one and have a character make the opposite choice.

Combining the idea of a discovered artifact and the research idea, the new Shaman finds something in the belongings of an elder that leads both to the discovery of a new healing method, and to the solution to an old, old mystery about what exactly happened to the elder (a story that he wouldn’t talk about…)

Porn idea - change it to YA fiction instead of porn? Something a little less NSFW - this idea still comes across as low-hanging fruite, and I probably won’t do much more with it.

Drinking from Sprinklers - warning to children, perhaps? Kids invent a ridiculous tale of gaining superpowers from drinking sprinkler water, only to discover that the truth is even weirder…

Technomancer idea - the Technomancer finds out that the AI is actually amoral, bordering on psychopathic and evil. The “Black Hats” could either be using it for their own nefarious purposes, and she has to either destroy it, neutralize it, or enslave it for the greater good - or they could turn out to be the good guys, and she begins working for them (or at least with them, on a case by case basis).

Writing Excuses 10.1 - First Exercise

I'm following along with the Writing Excuses podcast's Season 10 Master Class series. Here's the exercise from the first episode.

This week’s writing exercise is:

Writing Prompt: Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:

• From an interview or conversation you’ve had
• From research you’ve done (reading science news, military history, etc)
• From observation (go for a walk!)
• From a piece of media (watch a movie)
• From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

1. An author decides to let off some steam in order to distract himself from an impending deadline and writes a terrible porn novella. On a whim, he releases it under a pseudonym, and it’s a surprise hit. The publisher (would this work if self-published?) demands more of him, resulting in pressure to punt his other deadlines in order to continue to produce terrible porn. Ending could go full O. Henry, with the author punting his porn deadline in order to finish the novel he was originally working on, or could go darker with some trope about art vs. Paying the bills.
2. In 1493, the author cites modern genetic research that indicates that the native lack of resistance to Western European diseases has a genetic component. What if a particularly gifted shaman discovered genetic manipulation via shamanic healing techniques, reversing Clarke’s Third Law (”Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”)? The discovery could lead to, say, genetically altered berserker warriors (my alternate history project posits early, sustained contact with the Vikings, who melt into the indigenous population as they tended to in other areas where they colonized).
3. Do not drink from the sprinklers. Who does that? Thirsty runners, homeless people, aliens misunderstanding how water distribution works on this planet? What happens as a result? Superpowers? What if it’s a communication to someone, or something, cleverly disguised as a health and safety warning regarding potable water? What would it be communicating, and to whom? And what might happen to someone who inadvertently cracked the code?
4. After watching a lot of History Detectives and Discovering Your Roots, it’s interesting to see what kinds of stories can be written about objects and their provenance, and about familial relationships. A young woman discovers an object (to be determined) among her otherwise unsentimental mother’s belongings while sorting through them after her mother’s funeral. The object’s story winds up revising a lot of the stories that she had been told about her family history, leading to a disruption of her remaining familial relationships and/or a new relationship with a distant branch of the family whose story was unknown to her.
5. A young technomancer, working on a musical side project, downloads a file that’s supposed to be a set of samples, loops, and/or full tracks for remixing. It’s not - someone has leaked a file containing something entirely different (perhaps an encoded intelligence?), and soon the Black Hats come looking for whoever downloaded the file. HIjinks ensue, including a chase scene through an Itchy-O concert, before the technomancer finally figures out how to release the “djinn” from its digital “bottle”.

The Year of Writing Dangerously

Has it really been over 2 years since I posted anything here? Sadly, it has. In that time, an awful lot has happened, but this year it seems as if things are coming together. The writing group has pretty much collapsed back in on itself, and all of us are focusing more on actually getting stuff written than on getting it critiqued - especially in my case, as my rough drafts are either getting rougher, or I'm getting better at figuring out what's wrong with them before submitting them to readers.

NaNoWriMo was a complete wash for me - after two middling days, I got sick and just never got my momentum back. I've continued to poke at one of the short stories I outlined, and it has possibilities, but I really need to do some research and rewriting before it's worth showing to anyone.

Since I tend to work better with actual deadlines, though, I went ahead and signed up for the Writing Excuses 2015 Retreat, which will take place on a Caribbean Cruise Ship (tragic, I know - one must suffer for one's art...). I'd like to have edited rough drafts of as many of my stories as possible before sailing, so that I can use what I learn on actual work that I've done. We met one of the WE crew (Mary Robinette Kowal) on the first (and second) Steampunk Cruise during my hiatus, and she's a great presenter - I've been listening to the Writing Excuses podcast for the last couple of seasons after finding out that she was one of the "cast", and we bought a copy of their anthology, which they workshopped in a series of episodes of the podcast in order to demonstrate portions of their process in writing, which was very useful in learning to analyze my own weaknesses.

Now I just need to make it through Jim Hines' "Prosekiller Chronicle", which promises to be even more enlightening for a rank beginner such as myself.

Second thing coming together in 2015 is the new format of Writing Excuses - they're conducting this season as an extended Master Class in writing, so I've elected to dust off this blog, which I plan to use as my "notebook" for their writing prompts, exercises, and so forth - if nothing else, it should get me back in the habit of blogging, which in turn should help me rediscover a writing habit, which should help get some of my stories onto pages/disc storage, and so on down the domino chain.

Let us see what happens. We all know what road is paved with good intentions.

Writing Group - first meeting

As it happens, several of my friends and relations are also trying their hand at writing, some with more success than others (depending on how one defines "success") - and 5 of us got together over the weekend to discuss forming a once-a-month support group. Nothing terribly formal, as none of us particularly wanted to go the "bylaws and parliamentary procedure" route, but something that will allow all of us to get something out of the group, and that something being fairly flexible.

One of the big things for several of us was accountability - if we're setting an expectation that we'll have X done for the next meeting, we agreed that we need to actually have X done - and uploaded to our private Google Group at least a week prior, so that those who prefer to mark up hard copy can print and manage pages in their own preferred method (staples, paper clips, whatever...).

I'm looking forward to this - getting myself to the point of handing over my creative work for someone else to look at is going to be a big step.

Re-reading Lovecraft

I normally don't do a lot of re-reading. There are stories that stick with me, and there are some that I enjoy going back and re-reading - mostly, these are the books that stay on my shelf year after year, and don't get donated when I run out of room and have to clear out the stuff I feel is highly unlikely to ever wind up in my "to be re-read" pile...

Then there are the books and stories that I remember having read, but the details escape me - and I find myself re-reading those in part to see if there's a reason I don't remember them that well. Rereading the works of H.P. Lovecraft is turning into one of these experiences. I'm finding that some of the real horror in rereading Lovecraft comes from the author's worldview as expressed through his characters...

It's often a mistake to assume that an author's characters reflect the opinions, politics, or religious beliefs of the author, especially when the author's chosen genre is highly speculative and not necessarily grounded in ordinary reality, as with Lovecraft's nameless horrors inflicted on sleepy New England villages. Robert Heinlein, for example, is assumed by many readers (several of whom should know better) to have been a rabid jingoist and male chauvinist based on (mis)reading several of his characters, despite a preponderance of evidence contra (see Spider Robinson's essay "Rah, Rah, R.A.H." ). Since authors create not only the heroes of their works, but also their villains, it seems faintly ridiculous to assume that any given character is automatically a stand-in for the author - unless one can spot a pattern after careful analysis of several works by the same author.

In the case of Lovecraft, I'm spotting some trends that will bear further analysis. His work was produced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the language used is a product of that time. Lovecraft is known for his purple prose, with certain horrors hidden behind a veil of Victorian sensibility while others are written off as "indescribable" after a couple of descriptive paragraphs set up whatever context there may be for an unnamed horror from the Void... And yet, his descriptions of people often contain points of view that are markedly racist (animals, too - one unfortunate black cat is saddled with a moniker I cannot bring myself to type), while others display attitudes about race and social class that are jarring to modern sensibilities.

It has been many years since I first heard of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. I believe I was in junor high when TSR published the edition of "Deities and Demigods" (a reference book for the game Dungeons and Dragons) that included several fictional pantheons, including those of Michael Moorcock's Melnibone, Fritz Leiber's Newhon, and the Chulhu mythos. My local library had plenty of Fritz Leiber, and I glommed onto as much Moorcock as I could all through high school (along with Tolkein, Bradbury, Burroughs, and Asimov), but it was not until I got to college that I managed to lay hands on actual Lovecraft stories. I read several collections, which left me agreeing with many critics that Lovecraft's strength lay in his creation of a truly creepy mythos rather than in his writing per se. Now, some 25 years later, I'm discovering another problematic dimension to the stories I remember perhaps a little less fondly than I remember Leiber and Moorcock (both of whom still reside on my 'will be re-read eventually' shelves).

Checking In

Breaking radio silence at long last - I need to work on developing a blogging habit, I think.

Which links nicely with my most recent read, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business", by Charles Duhigg. It's a fairly comprehensive view of how habits work, both on an individual level and at a more corporate culture level. The author covers research into habits, both historical and recent, and details how they drive an awful lot of what we do as individuals, as consumers, and as employees. The core of the book is the three-step habit loop - the Cue, the Routine, the Reward - that forms the basis of every habit from brushing one's teeth to default conversational gambits to "muscle memory" when driving to work. After covering the neuropsychology of habits and the trails they leave in the brain, Duhigg covers the process of creating new habits, how habits drive business success and/or failure, how businesses take advantage of habits, and how habits can operate at a societal level. In the book's appendix, he also covers how to analyze, test, and change habits. This last bit is now available in handy flow-chart form at Duhigg's website.