The Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Workshop for Young Writers provides a ten-day crash course in speculative fiction writing for students aged 14-19. The students write and revise a short story, receive critiques, and work with four professional authors–which have included big names like Tamora Pierce and Charles Coleman Finlay.

For the past few years, I’ve been peripherally involved by providing extra critiques of student submission stories. My first year, I critiqued Rachel Sobel’s submission story, “The Loyalty of Birds,” which she revised and sold to Clarkesworld Magazine as an impressive debut. She’s an exceptional case, but not the only Alpha student to go on and publish–the Alpha website includes a list of alumni achievements, including publications in Lady Churchill’s, Aberrant Dreams, Fantasy Magazine, and multiple Dell Award placements.

Professional workshops like the Clarions are well known for helping emerging writers, but Alpha goes back a stage further than that. Not every writer starts working as a teenager, but I know that when I was a kid, I was hungry for feedback and eager to meet other writers and be taken seriously–the chance to get together with other writers and receive feedback from real, live authors would have sounded like a dream.

Like any workshop that wants to get the best students, Alpha provides need-based scholarships. And like any workshop in this economy, Alpha is struggling to provide for all of its students. They’ve recently put up a website requesting donations to help them send teenagers to writer-camp.

They are offering a bit of bait, too–donations of five dollars and over will be rewarded with a copy of Ned and Jane, a collaborative girl-meets-zombie story written by the Alpha class of 2009.

Check out their website and consider donating, whether to get the zombie story or just show support for young writers.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife Now blog has two very exciting guest writers this week–Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.

Nisi and Cynthia are the authors of Writing the Other, a practical text aimed at helping authors write characters unlike them. The book is an excellent teaching tool, full of practical advice, and supplemented with exercises. VanderMeer writes:

I love Writing the Other because it espouses in a very specific and detailed way what I’ve always thought about writing characters, and even about writing minor characters: you need to fully inhabit them. Which is to say, if your characters aren’t going to just be carbon copies of you and your own experience of the world, you need to be able to see clearly through other people’s eyes.

Ward and Shawl teach workshops on the subject, though I haven’t yet had the privilege of taking one. The second best thing is reading what these smart women have to say.

Check out Nisi and Cynthia’s bios, and read their first post on The Unmarked State.

(Comments at Big Other or Booklife Now)

I still have no idea who this guy is, but the made Steven Colbert happy, and he’s Russian.

Via Chris Bodenner

Those of you who’ve been meandering around the interweb for a while will be familiar with the blogger Jon Swift, the mock-conservative who declared that he received his news through unbiased sources like Rush Limbaugh, and who said of the economic downturn, “At a time when Wall Street executives are being forced to give up their private planes, limousines, bathroom renovations and multimillion dollar bonuses, the idea that a homeless man has been allowed to hold on to his cellphone while others are making sacrifices is more than we can take.”

The writer behind Swift was Al Weisel. And sadly, Al Weisel has died:

Al was on his way to his father’s funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke.

I didn’t know Al personally, only through his writing. But his writing was superlative, the sort of satire his cognomen’s namesake would have heartily approved. My heart and thoughts are with the Weisel family, which is having to face far too much loss in too short a time.

N. K. Jemisin (who sometimes posts here via the Angry Black Woman as Nojojojo) discusses her excellent debut epic fantasy novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in the Big Idea feature at John Scalzi’s blog.

his week, in my copious free time, I’m reading Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It’s basically a dissection of the history that most US citizens learned in school, and some of its core fallacies — like the idea that the New World was an undeveloped, sparsely-populated wilderness before Europeans arrived. In reality, Mann explains, the pre-Columbian Americas had a population to match that of Europe — much of it concentrated in sprawling urban-centric empires like those of ancient Rome. And like ancient Rome, these New World civilizations thoroughly engineered the landscape, building aqueducts and roads and planting forests to optimize hunting, fishing, flooding, and commerce. (Did you know there’s a “Great Wall of Peru”? I didn’t.) It’s a fascinating book, though obviously not without controversy, and it seems well-researched and well-written. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far.

Why am I talking about somebody else’s book when I should be talking about mine? Because this is the kind of thing that really gets me going: hidden truths. History is written by the victors, after all — which means that beneath many historical “facts” lie counter-facts and conflicting events, illogical assumptions and unrealized motivations, all of which would shake us to our foundations if we ever found out the truth. Maybe. Because there are always those who have reason to keep the truth alive, often at great personal risk, even if only via whispered tales and half-remembered songs. And yes, via a few lies too, told maliciously or through ignorance. One person’s truth is always someone else’s heresy. This is what I decided to write an epic fantasy about.

Read the whole thing.

First up: “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors” by Moxy Fruvous:

“We’ve been living in hovels / spending all our money on / brand new novels.”

And via Ann Leckie, “Sensitive Artist” by King Missile:

“I stay home, reading books that are beneath me, and working on my work, which no one understands.”

Comment at Big Other.

The first book I ever read by Howard Zinn was SNCC: The New Abolitionists. I’ve read a lot of his writing since then, and I think it’s his most powerful book.

Howard Zinn wrote an essay The Optimism of Uncertainty. He argued that history should give us hope, not because it guaranteed that the powerless would win (it really doesn’t), but because it showed extraordinary, unpredictable change is possible. The Civil Rights Movement, particularly SNCC, is an example of the unpredictability of hope. On the 1st of February 1960, Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain, sat down at the counter of their local Woolworth’s and refused to be served. Nobody could have predicted what would grow out of that action.

There have been so many attempts to hide the history of collective resistance, including the reduction of the the freedom movement SNCC was part of to someone sitting down on a bus and someone else giving a great speech. Howard Zinn wrote history like it mattered, because he wanted to cultivate the hope that history brings.

I recently blitzed through a number of short stories so that I could finalize the short story portion of my Nebula ballot. I wanted to post about the ones I decided to nominate, and also some of the other excellent ones I encountered in my reading. I hope people will check out these stories, possibly for award consideration, but mostly because they’re cool.

I have a post up at Ecstatic Days explaining my methodology for creating a reading list, and a few other points about what went into creating my list of nominees and recommendations.

Here are the nominees and recommendations themselves.

My short story nominations
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh, Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Remembrance is Something Like a House” by Will Ludwigsen, Interfictions 2
“The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo, Clarkesworld
“The Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert, Interzone
“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin, Clarkesworld

Highly Recommended Stories
“Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts” by Benjamin Francisco, Realms of Fantasy*
“Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman, Strange Horizons**
“Reading by Numbers” by Aidan Doyle, Fantasy Magazine
“Spar” by Kij Johnson, Clarkesworld
“Marsh Gods” by Ann Leckie, Strange Horizons**
“Superhero Girl” by Jessica Lee, Fantasy Magazine**

Recommended Stories
“Turning the Apples” by Tina Connolly, Strange Horizons
“The Score” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Interfictions 2
“A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Fantasy Magazine
“Endangered Camp” by Ann Leckie, Clockwork Phoenix 2
“…That Has Such People In It” by Jennifer Pelland, Apex Digest
“Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” by Cat Rambo, Strange Horizons
“Water Museum” by Nisi Shawl, Filter House
“The Moon Over Tokyo through Leaves in the Fall” by Jerome Stueart, Fantasy Magazine
“Light on the Water” by Genevieve Valentine, Fantasy Magazine
“Bespoke” by Genevieve Valentine, Strange Horizons
“The Olverung” by Steven Woodworth, Realms of Fantasy**

Tiptree Nominated Stories
I also nominated three of these stories for the Tiptree — “The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld), “Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert (Interzone), and “A Song to Greet the Sun” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Fantasy Magazine)

—
*This story would have been one of my five nominees except for the conflict of interest created by its appearance on PodCastle during my tenure as editor.
**These stories also appeared in PodCastle during my tenure as editor.

–

“The Mathematics of Faith” by Jonathan Wood, Beneath Ceaseless Skies — deleted from a previous version of this list because it is a novelette.

I am looking for a recommendation of a book or article that will give me background on what the situation was like for gay women in the decade or so before Stonewall. Non-fiction preferred to fiction, but I’m happy with material that’s available online and material that isn’t.

New post at Big Other:

I am writing some Mad Hatter-March Hare slash, which I fully intend to parade past every respectable magazine I can find when I finish. Among the delights of this project, of which there are many, I have been having an excellent time looking up bizarre old-fashioned misconceptions, sifting through internet answers to why ravens resemble writing desks, and delving into the delightfully ridiculous depths of Victorian slang.

My dear nug, would you like to tip the velvet? Cram your arbor vitae down the red tunnel, perhaps, or go to bedfordshire with a wagtail where you can bury your whore’s pipe and your tiddle-diddles between cupid’s kettle drums before shoving Nebuchadnezzer through the roundmouth — unless you’re piss-proud. If you’re kinky, play the brother starling. Mandrakes might prefer to play the back gammon or visit the red tunnel. If you’re a dark cully, then you deserve the flap dragon — and keep your gaying instrument well away from me.

Now, I am willing to entertain the suggestion that this is faked or poorly researched — but I really don’t mind if it is. For I have been thoroughly entertained.

Comment over there.

Elsewhere, Nancy Lebovitz wrote:

I’ve been into Ayn Rand (details if you like about what I do and don’t agree with from her)[1], and how I still don’t see the emotional stench that’s obvious to a lot of people from her writing… [1]She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure– one that was part of the larger society. Signy Mallory (captain of a big spaceship) doesn’t have the same emotional effect, I’d say.

I replied:

…the only writer? can you qualify that in some way (timespan, political writings only, etc) because, er, if you’re somehow suggesting no other writer has ever done this, that’s a very strange claim.

Suggestions of other depictions welcome here.

A new post at Big Other, where I’ve recently joined as a blogger:

Over on his own blog, Jeff Vandermeer adds another dimension to the conversation by adding that women face particular challenges toward establishing a home life that will facilitate their writing careers. One difficulty is what feminists often call the second shift, wherein working wives and mothers put in a full day at the office and then come home to put in a second shift doing chores at home. Data suggests that women tend to spend a lot more time on this than men do, even in households where partners report they have an equal division of labor. Even if labor is divided equally, women are more likely to be held responsible for an unclean house, and so they’re often under more pressure.

…There are any number of ways that systemic sexism interferes with women’s careers, but one of the most direct is time. Time spent on housework is time not spent on writing. Time spent on hair and clothes and makeup is time not spent on writing. If women put in more of this time (and overall in America, they do), then that’s fewer woman-hours that are available for writing stories. When we start to address unequal representation in magazines, it’s important to ask questions on the editorial level, the content level, the submissions level, and so on — but it’s also important to interrogate the gendered ways in which sexism blocks opportunities for writing to occur in the first place.

The rest of the entry — and comments — over there.

Quoted for brilliance:

It wasn’t the end of the problems with Daly. For starters: Daly hated on trans people something fierce. This has been sort of lightly mentioned and hinted at elsewhere, but I have to tell you this in plain language: MARY. DALY. HATED. TRANS. PEOPLE. Particularly trans women. She intimated, at times, that they were part of a plot to eliminate “real” women, and to assign “men” all “authentic” female functions. She also said that they were like whites putting on blackface (yeah: Lorde might have been right, about the whole appropriating-other-people’s-oppression thing?) and implied that they should have bodily violence done to them, or at least should be physically intimidated, by “real” feminists, so that they could not enter the feminist movement or feminist space. Let’s not be coy, here: no matter whether she believed this for her entire life, no matter whether she privately got over it later, she published it, without apparently ever publishing a retraction, as far as I can tell. This is hate. This is privilege. This, right here, is the face of the oppressor.

And I’m not saying this to defile Mary Daly’s grave. I’m not saying it because I get a dirty little thrill out of tarnishing the legacy of a fallen feminist. I’m not saying it because I want to start a fight. I’m saying it because, for much of my young life, Mary Daly was my favorite feminist author, meaning that I believed this shit, too. There are still women who believe this, and these women often call themselves “radical feminists.” Because queer-bashing and misogyny are just so fucking threatening to the Patriarchy, apparently. I believed it, because Mary Daly published it, and I believed in her. And, let me tell you, I have worked like Hell Itself to get over that, and to get over the privilege that allowed me to place such emphasis on my own oppression that I could go around blithely oppressing other folks because clearly I had won the Whose Suffering Is Most Important game, and to be an actual functioning ally. Some encouragement from Mary Daly – some retraction, some statement of accountability – would have helped. It would have slapped me out of this unbelievably gross way of thinking with one blow, rather than making me go through life hurting people and being an asshole and having to receive many, many less powerful slaps until I got my shit straight.

Daly and I were both Catholics, at one point, so I know both of us understand the power of Confession – not the version handed out by the church, where you say it and apologize for it and have all your guilt magically wiped away by the hand of God, but the version that actually works in the real live world, where you admit to being wrong and you take your consequences like a grown woman and you do your acts of contrition and your assigned penance, for the rest of your life, by living with those consequences and not repeating the actions that caused them in the first place. People might forgive you; they might not. The point is to value doing the right thing, for the sake of the right thing, more than you value your own personal comfort.

I’m exerpting this from the rest of the essay because I think this will be an important dialogue for feminists to have, and to continue to have, until the particular forms of transphobia which are fostered by the radical feminist movement die a long-awaited death. Mary Daly’s passing provides fodder for this conversation — a starting point — but it’s not really the core of what needs discussing.

Feminism is, still, used as a tool of oppression against trans people. Those who perpetuate this violence toward fellow human beings should feel ashamed. If they, like Mary Daly, have an investment in the imagery of the church — they should confess and repent. If they, like me, have no such investment, then they should apologize and stop hurting other people immediately.

Also, rest in peace Mary Daly and thank you for the good work you’ve done, but that’s just a footnote to this conversation.

Read Sady’s whole post here.

More spheres floated in this room, dozens of them. They were fantastically varied—of all shapes and sizes and colors—turning slowly and drifting through the air. They seemed to be nothing more than a child’s toys, until I looked closely at one and saw clouds swirling over its surface.

Sieh hovered near as I wandered among his toys, his expression somewhere between anxiety and pride. The yellow ball had taken up position near the center fo the room; all the other balls revolved around it.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?” he asked me, while I stared at a tiny red marble. A great cloud mass—a storm?—devoured the nearer hemisphere. I tore my eyes from it to look at Sieh. He bounced on his toes, impatient for my answer. “It’s a good collection.”

Trickster, trickster, stole the sun for a prank. And apparently because it was pretty. The Three had borne many children before their falling-out. Sieh was immeasurably old, another of the Arameri’s deadly weapons, and yet I could not bring myself to dash the shy hope I saw in his eyes.

“They’re all beautiful,” I agreed.

It was when I reached this passage, on page ten of N. K. Jemisin’s debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (forthcoming from Orbit Books in 2010), that I fell in love. Read the rest of this entry »

Edited because of privacy issues.

According to one of my students, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the different approaches to history in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has historically been infused with a “racial ideology of male masculinity” and that is why so many “Chinese Americans believe in racial inequality.” I wish I could quote the entire two sentences for you; they are truly precious. It’s not just the poor quality of this writing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ideology of male masculinity” appear all over the essays I have been getting from far too many of the students in the literature class I have been teaching–as if the students were choosing one word from column A, two from column B, etc. in order to come up with a sentence that sounds so intellectually profound that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean anything. It is depressing and debilitating when the papers handed in by my freshman composition students are, in many ways, better written than the ones handed in by the students in an advanced literature class.

There’s really not much in this Karoli post that I disagree with. Is Joe Lieberman odious? Yes. Should the Democrats strip him of everything, up to and including his jowls? Yes. Is there a good way to work around him? No. Has he effectively killed the public option and/or a Medicare buy-in, at least for this session? Yes. He has.

But does that mean health care reform, even without such an option, should simply be killed dead? No, it does not.

As Karoli points out, even after the public option is killed dead, the health care plan still ends banning people based on pre-existing conditions. It still provides significant subsidies. It still will mean the difference between millions of Americans being insured and uninsured, and that will save tens of thousands of lives a year. Is it perfect? Hell, no. Would it be better with a public option or Medicare buy-in? Hell, yes. But you pass the bill with the system of government you have, not the system of government you want, and for good or ill, the American system of government is designed specifically to kill big, sweeping changes, to whittle bills down into small, incremental, piecemeal steps.

This is, incidentally, the biggest problem with the liberal opprobrium aimed at Obama. (Reid — well, he’s another story, and I’ll talk about him at another time.) Barack Obama is the President of the United States, not the Prime Minister. He commands large majorities in both houses, but those majorities are fractious, and have grown up under the American system in which each legislator is a free agent, whose votes are up for grabs on every bill.

Yes, the Republicans are moving away from that to perfect parliamentary lockstep — we know, we know. But the Republicans were not much more unified when they held Congress, and were forced to actually govern. Remember how the Bush Administration muscled through Social Security privatization right after the 2004 election? You don’t? Right, because it didn’t happen. Without Democratic support for privatization in some form — support that was non-existent save, maybe, for Joe Lieberman — the Republicans in Congress were so disorganized, so fractious, so disunited, that they couldn’t even get a bill through the House. Had it made it to the Senate, it would assuredly have died, as the Democrats — who held more than 40 seats — would have filibustered it to death.

The last major piece of domestic legislation the GOP got through Congress was Medicare Part D in 2003 — which only passed because the Republicans were willing to play major games in both houses to get the bill over the top, going so far as to hold the roll open in the House for two and a half hours in order to wheedle for the final votes for passage.

The GOP got no major bills through congress in the last five years of the Bush presidency. For all the vaunted unanimity among the Republicans, Bush Administration efforts on everything from Social Security to immigration reform failed, due to a lack of party support.

So while it’s both tempting and true to complain that the health care bill has been whittled down to less than half a loaf, and maybe down to a single slice, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that said single slice contains more health care reform than has passed since Medicare itself was enacted. And that even in its very watered-down form, it will save lives and save families from penury. This is not a minor accomplishment. As Nate Silver notes, the public option was always a long-shot in the Senate, but keeping the focus on that still managed to allow a pretty decent bill to get to the brink of passage.

Bill Clinton couldn’t get get a bill this far. Jimmy Carter couldn’t get it done. Lyndon Johnson, Jack Kennedy, and Harry S Truman couldn’t get it done. No great Democratic majority leader ever muscled health care reform through the Senate. And until Nancy Pelosi, no Democratic speaker ever had shepherded health care reform through the House.

Quite simply, this watered down, attenuated, imperfect, tenth-of-a-loaf bill still represents one of the greatest legislative triumphs by either party since the Great Society programs passed under Johnson. And while it will need to be improved in the future, it will establish the baseline from which all future discussions begin: Every American deserves health insurance, and no American should be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Once that is enshrined in law, changes will only make coverage more robust. Just as Medicare once failed to cover prescription drugs, just as Social Security once failed to cover large swathes of workers, so too will this bill need to be improved. But there will be nothing to improve if we fail to pass this now, and there will be no chance at improving it if, in our pique at imperfection, Democrats choose to allow the same forces that have been trying to kill this bill to gain ground in Congress. Imperfect isn’t fun. It’s frustrating and annoying and it means we have to endure Joe Lieberman. But it’s better than a perfect bill that doesn’t pass. Better by far.

Yasmin Nair, guest blogging at Dakshina, examines the connection between art and social justice with a skeptical eye, suggesting that the connections are not as straightforward as naive writers often want to believe. She also looks at how the idea of writing as a social justice project feeds into the undervaluing of writing-as-labor:

The notion that the production of art is separate from the nitty-gritty of art as labor. While I would never blame artists themselves for their woes in terms of getting paid, the truth is that many of us have a hard time seeing ourselves as laborers who ought to be fairly compensated. Most of us have been trained to think our work is sacrosanct, that our work is not labor, that it is above petty commerce, and that we must make art only for nobler causes. When you add on the patina of social justice, many of us are reluctant to or unable to negotiate with those who are supposed to pay us, in part because we do care about the issues and the people affected by them. And, in part, because, frankly, too many of us have assimilated a deeply privatized notion that our art is so profound that it can and should directly effect social change – monetary value be damned. The result, as Andrew Ross puts it in a seminal essay, “The Mental Labor Problem,” is that “…the new profile of the artist as a social-service worker is coming to supplant the autonomous avant-garde innovator as a fundable type, increasingly sponsored through local arts agencies.” In the case of the Artivist Coalition events, artists were deployed as semi-mystical healers, responsible for shining a light on matters that should be the purview of social workers and politicians.

Which is, of course, interesting in terms of the pay rate flap, as another one of those excuses which comes up for the fact that writers are not compensated for their labor is that art is unlike real work and should be done for love not money. (I note that the problematic form of this argument is not “I write for love” but “I write for love, and that’s pure, but you are tainted because you write for money.” We once had someone write into podcastle that if we accepted their submission, they would refuse payment, because they didn’t believe that writers should get paid. This is certainly a decision they were entitled to make for themselves, but the indictment of all payment-seeking writers is problematic. Why should love and money be mutually exclusive reasons?) Nair goes on to say:

writing is profoundly devalued to the point where it is seen as work without labor – anyone can write, the argument goes. Just build a website, and pound away.

To be clear, I think it is always a good thing if people want to write more. The problem is that the apparent democratization of writing today comes along with a profound devaluing of its worth as labor that ought to be fairly compensated. Take, for example, the notion of the “citizen journalist.” Someone once had the bright idea that all it takes for a robust and civil society is to turn a group of citizens, armed with little more than basic web access and digital cameras and the ability to pound keys, to make society accountable for its ills. In return, they usually get little more than a free byline. So, what the term “citizen journalist” should really refer to is “unpaid schmuck who will work for free in hopes of a byline.” I also happen to be a professional journalist. I once covered an event and got some exclusive photos as well. When I returned home to file the story, I found that a local website had already “reported” on it. The citizen journalist in question had simply cut and pasted a press release from one of the organizing groups, without even acknowledging that the words were taken verbatim from the document. A reader who assumed that the reporter actually talked to people at the event was unlikely to see the inherent bias in the article. As as activist who has written a fair number of press releases, I know that they are always written ahead of time, regardless of what might actually transpire at an event, and about the careful crafting and messaging that goes into projecting events as spectacular successes. Without important information about the source of the material being divulged to the reader, the “citizen journalist” was able to pass off a cut-and-paste job as journalism. In the end, this is what brings down the quality as well as the expectations of what good journalism should be and it makes the work of journalists look like something that requires no effort and, hence, something that can be done for free or very little.

Let me be fair: I am also a blogger, and that work is entirely for free (a fact that escapes the notice of irate readers who summarily call for my “firing” by editors who are themselves making just enough to keep the sites up and running). I understand the value of producing work that might entice and create a reader base for my writing. But all of this goes on in a social and political environment where people assume that it is not only okay to underpay writers, but that writers should, if worth their salt, be willing to be exploited…

The situation is hardly helped by the fact that artists like me are expected to function without the basics like health care and that, as a freelance writer, I cannot seek unemployment. I have sprained the same knee twice in two years, leading to a drastic reduction in my earnings. Intrepid journalism is hard or impossible if you have to ask a fast-trotting subject at a political rally to please slow down so that you can keep up with them. I live with the knowledge that a slightly more serious accident could wipe me out. I do various gigs around town to make what I can and I try to carve out chunks of that most precious commodity, the drug of choice for writers: Time…

Most people unacquainted with the reality of a writing life cannot grasp the fact that while writing is not taxing in the same way as hard physical labor, it is draining, and not something you do on the fly… For writers, our work is not our reward; the amount paid for our work is the just reward.

I’ve cut a great deal of the connective tissue to try to highlight some of the article’s main points, particularly as they relate to artists who may or may not also think of themselves as activists. (I do consider myself to have an activistic purpose with some of my work, but obviously not all SFF writers do or should — it’s good for the field to have writers with varying motivations.) Her article also approaches the topic from the point of view of artists who are trying to make a living from their work, which again is a connection between her and me, though obviously not all artists are seeking to make a living off of writing and I do not mean to imply that all artists should be.

But ultimately, whether or not it’s also a hobby, writing is also work. It deserves respect as labor. Nair’s analysis of writing-as-exploited-labor is thought-provoking. It does concentrate on certain manifestations of writing, but that’s because she’s writing out of her own experiences, and the article is more interesting for that.

Go to Dakshina to read Nair’s whole article.

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s debut novel, Racing the Dark, was released in 2007 by Agate Bolden. The epic fantasy is the first in the Spirit Binders series.

Racing the Dark begins when thirteen-year-old Lana is initiated as a diver who seeks and finds Mandagah jewels, a profession that provides her island’s main commercial export and is also religiously significant. The jewels Lana finds during her initiation mark her as chosen by the spirits, but Lana hides this fact so she can attempt to have a normal life.

The island archipelago where Lana lives is in turmoil — her home island is suffering from environmental changes that seem to be caused by the great spirits (including water, fire, wind and death) which are struggling against their bindings. When the Mandagah fish become endangered, Lana’s family flees their home, looking for work on the inner islands. Lana becomes ill from hard labor and poor diet, forcing her mother to promise her as an apprentice to a witch in order to get money to pay for a cure.

The novel follows Lana through the major periods of her life, as she learns magic from the witch, takes on the spirit of death, meets the spirit of wind, and falls in love with the spirit of water. We leave her abruptly in the middle of the climax, paving the way for the sequel.

As I contemplated what to say about this novel, I came across a review by Niall Harrison of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s short story, “Far & Deep,” which appeared this year in Interzone.

“This is how you trail a novel,” writes Harrison. “‘Far & Deep’ shares a setting with, but is not extracted from (or is sufficiently well-adapted to stand apart from), Johnson’s Spirit Binders novels.”

He goes on to say:

“Far & Deep” is not as firmly controlled as I wanted it to be; the stabs of emotion that punctuate the predominantly cool narrative tilt, a little too often, a little too close to melodrama for my taste. I don’t think the revelation of the world and the mystery are quite geared correctly; we don’t always learn about the possibility of a thing and the significance of a thing in the smoothest progression…

All this is to carp, however. They are little criticisms. The busyness of the story — the many details of setting, the deft character portraits, a sense of events with forward momentum — the basic shape of it all — carries you over such details, on a first reading, and leaves you looking forward to Johnson’s next tale.

While I don’t feel that the momentum of Racing the Dark carries the reader over its flaws on first reading, the rest of Harrison’s review is spot on for my impressions of the novel. Racing the Dark is a flawed text, but a rich one, full of minor faults and major successes.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was happily writing along when all of a sudden Pandora turned up a musician I’d never heard before and I fell in love.

I almost never find musicians I love, but Gabriel Kahane is amazing. He’s sort of like Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown (who, I just learned by looking him up, apparently has a seriously gorgeous Jewish nose) presented as vaguely pop* music.

His instrumentation is stunning and I love the complex melodies. I almost didn’t pay attention to his lyrics until I happened upon his epic aria about the plight of a man who cannot find a roommate because of his compulsion to put ice cubes down people’s shirts.

I have a compulsion to put ice cubes down people’s shirts. As my roommate, you will likely bear the brunt of this problem. Don’t ask me why I do this. Why do I do this? Why do I do this? Years of therapy hasn’t helped. Hasn’t helped. Hasn’t heeeeeelped.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii always have ice cubes on hand. Don’t think you can simply get rid of all the ice trays in the apartment. All the ice trays! All the ice trays!

Trust me, I have tried this. I will only buy more! I will only buy more! I will ooooooooooooooonly buuuuuuuuy moooooooore!

Really — gorgeous music *and* humor? I swoon for this music.

You, too, can listen for free online.

–

*Note: my definition of “pop” means “written for enjoyment as individual songs.” As opposed to “part of a musical.” When I was in college, I complained over and over again to my friend Tim Jones-Yelvington that I couldn’t get into songs that weren’t part of a story. I thought my problem was unique until Tim’s boyfriend — a lyricist and playwright studying at NYU — revealed he had the same problem. I’ve gotten over it since, by dint of musicians like Poe (whose album Haunted is a musical response to her brother’s amazing experimental novel House of Leaves) and the Dresden Dolls (whose song “Coin-Operated Boy” is a perfect science fiction short story in three minutes).

–

ETA: Why did I not previously notice that this song is on an album called “Craigslistleider?” That’s seriously fucking brilliant. So, for instance, another song in the cycle is “I have one pair of slightly used assless chaps in size 42. Will trade for spiderman comics. Will trade for spiderman comics. Will trade for spiderman comics or equivalent.” Set to disjunctively serious music. Awesome.