My blog and welcome to it

Has anyone else noticed the rise of so-called "concrit" at ff.net? What the heck is that about?

Sending pissy notes to an editor about how you won't be submitting again because you worked very hard on that last submission doesn't fly well for several reasons:

1) Most of us work hard on our stories. At least 90% of mine are like sweating blood. Not to sound too harsh, but cry me a river, dude.
2) Rejection is hard but necessary. I submitted a number of stories to Fantasy Magazine before selling one to them.  I would guess that my subs to F&SF number in the couple of dozen by now.  And there are writers who are easily on their 13th, 14th, maybe more rejection to Fantasy since I became co-editor and I think that's awesome and will gladly keep reading their stories because they're getting better with every one they write.
3) You are violating Cat's first rule: Don't be a jackass.

Watching three synchronized fireworks displays over downtown from a balcony at my apartment building is just plain awesome. (Yes, I'm trying to make you jealous.)

Hearing via various outlets that students in the Clarion West writing workshop had their laptops stolen just plain sucks. Poor kids. Details over here. They're taking donations to help cover the cost.

Lets see . . . last year, I was here, watching the same thing. Two years ago, I was, um, I can't remember. Oh. On my aunt and uncle's house which is on the other side of downtown with a great view. Three years ago I was at Clarion; my default userpic is one Cory Doctorow took at the holiday BBQ. (Which wasn't actually on the 4th, but it was fun.)

And someone tell my muse that I need to work on two certain stories, not start another one. Arrrgggh.

In the course of any given week of conversing, reading, eavesdropping, news-avoiding, and otherwise engaging with the world, I--like everyone, I assume--notice a host of small things that I understand incompletely--or not at all. Small stuff, usually, like the precise meaning of a word or legal term, or a little gap in my knowledge of U.S. history. I'll learn some tiny new fact, and later on, often when I'm trying to pass the info along, I'll realize the new knowledge has come bundled with a bunch of intriguing follow-up questions.

Curiosities, I'm calling them. They wisp through the conscious mind, cobwebs on the wind, vanishing before I get more than a glimpse. They're easily dismissed and forgotten, because who likes admitting they don't know something, and besides, I've got the general idea, and who has time, anyway?

I got a beautiful Enlightenment Journal from my brother and sister-in-law some months ago: hardbound, beautiful art on the cover, thick, lovely, lined paper... and, for the purposes of my usual writing practice, not at all functional. I do a lot of writing longhand, but it's all in lightweight books whose pages tear out easily, the better to tape them to other pages, or transcribe and shred them. I receive a lot of journals as gifts, as it happens; I try to find them good homes, but this one is both too pretty to destroy and so gorgeous that I wanted to find a use for it, something for myself.

I did a bit of thinking about all this during my recent vacation, and now I've started writing in it. Heading up each page with I would like to know more about... whenever I notice the threads breezing past. And then leaving the rest of the page blank, for just a few notes. When I have a few minutes, I pick up the book, flip through the headings, pick whatever's tastiest and do a little websurfing. The first was my recent poke into the meaning of the word iconoclast. I've done a tiny amount of reading on Teddy Roosevelt, the Spanish-American War, and the Rough Riders. I've noticed I that despite watching billions of hours of crime dramas, I've never quite 'got' what a felony is, so I figured it out, and from there I picked up on what felony murder means, in U.S. legal terms, and how that all works here in Canada. I'm a born collector: I make short notes on the answers, no more than will fit on that single page under the heading. It's a toilet book in the making.

I'm not much for memes, but if anyone else out there already does something like this as a practice, or might like to take it up, I'd love to hear how it's going.

From several people on my friendslist:

Someone broke into the sorority house Clarion West is at and stole 4 laptops, clothing, and other personal possessions from 4 rooms on the 3rd floor. Clarion West is soliciting donations of either good used laptops or cash for laptops via the Clarion West administration. If  youncan help, let Leslie or Neile know at info@clarionwest.org

The current Write-a-thon story is based on an idea Ben Burgis and I were throwing around. Here's two excerpts from what I just sent him:

They said the Marielitas were escoria – scum. The abuelitas muttered it to each other, and the young girls coming home from school clustered together like butterflies, looking thrilled and worried whenever the wind whistled at them. The newspapers claimed Miami was under siege, that Castro had loosed the worst from the Cuban prisons and madhouses.

The respectable Cubans already in Miami by 1980 – the ones who weren’t driving the boats to bring over their cousins and brothers and grandparents who’d managed to flee to the port of Mariel – were quick to repudiate the incoming. Some of them put bumper stickers on their Pintos and Caddies: No me digas Marielito.

and

When I got back to the bike shop, I poured hot tap water in a cup, added a jasmine tea bag, sniffed the delicate aroma, and  added a half mug’s worth of sooty liquid from the coffeepot, ink and rusty bolts thick. It’d wake me up.

“You.”

I looked up. Standing in the doorway was tall, dark, and pink shirt. A lot of women would have melted under the force of those black eyes, crows-wing eyebrows, lashes like a smolder of incense. But something about the flatness of his stare, the swamp-water shine of his hair, gave me the creeps.

“Me,” I said, half question, half challenge.

He glanced around at the clutter of parts, the pegboarded tools, the skull and crossbone neon behind the front counter. I was still getting the hang of being a business owner, after having been a waitress, a bike mechanic, a student of paraconsistent logic.

And, as always, now and forever, monster hunter.

To which I say: Hooray!

I'm way behind on write-ups of the books I've read over the past month or so, so I'm just going to list them here. If anyone wants to know more about any of them, just ask.

17. The Second World War: Alone, by Winston S Churchhill
18. The Ghost Brigrades, by John Scalzi
19. Mort, by Terry Pratchett
20. Rollback, by Robert Sawyer

Rollback is the only Hugo novel nominee I managed to complete; I'm also about 100 pages through both Scalzi's Last Colony and Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union, and while I might finish _one_ of those by this weekend, it's not going to be both. That's a shame, because I really wanted to have read all five nominees before making a choice, and the voting deadline's in a couple of days.

The reason I'm so behind with pleasure reading is of course TNEO. Since I'm essentially critiquing half-novels this year, I'm going to count them in the list as I complete them. Therefore:

21. The Willow Maiden by Ellen Denham
22. The Lion and Girl Mystery by Larry Taylor.

Needless to say, the only people who can ask for reviews of those last two are Ellen and Larry, and even they can't for another couple of weeks. :-)

http://walterjonwilliams.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-fame.html

http://walterjonwilliams.blogspot.com/2008/07/back-on-colorado-plateau.html

I decided to begin my Mars novel--tentatively entitled Focus--on July 1 for Novel_in_90. So far I've had two sub-par days and one all right day.

The house is still in turmoil, and that's my excuse for the sub-par days. I moved furniture around again today, as well as doing some long-neglected gardening. And we have a new source of excitement.

It seems that Ben's girlfriend has introduced bedbugs from her dorm room. Ben found one at 3 am, and Louise has also been bitten. So we're putting tape traps everywhere, washing everything washable and putting it through extra long hot cycles in the dryer, which is supposed to kill eggs, and putting non-washable items outside in the hot sun. Hopefully this will work. Louise says her workplace is also infested, and that they're very hard to get rid of.

As you've no doubt guessed, I took a couple hundred pictures during my ten days off, and a number of them can be found in this gallery, but the one I want to post now is actually from our trip to Queen Elizabeth Park.

Kelly and I watch a lot of nature documentaries, and among the recent viewing has been David Attenborough's THE BLUE PLANET. One of the things that occurs frequently in this series is bait ball footage. A bunch of herring, mackeral, sardines or some other snack-sized fish is schooling along, numbering in the thousands, when a predator shows up. See, National Geographic has footage, complete with cheesy narration. They're then either herded into a big tasty ball of OMG, what were we thinking, now there is no escape! or they cluster together by choice, in hopes of looking like a big scary predator. Herded or dumb, the dolphins or tuna or sharks go "Hey, keen!" and munch until the food is gone.

Sometimes they'll drive the bait ball up toward the surface, narrowing its escape options, and birds will dive down for a share too.

For whatever reason we really got into this, to the point that whenever we thought a spherical shoal of delicious fishy doom was about to coalesce, we'd yell at the TV, gleefully: "Bait baaaallll!"

So. Anyway. Baby orb spiders do this too, but if you poke them they'll scatter to the four winds. Which I personally think is much wiser.
( Proof )

Derryl Murphy led me to the wonderful video Where the Hell is Matt? I laughed, I cried.

In unrelated news, here's a pretty picture of the house we stayed in last weekend:

Mr daw and I are at loose ends this long weekend. Is there a movie anyone would recommend we see?

I've been contemplating how hard it is to write a novel. I critique for a lot of people, and not one of them is a slouch. They're all talented, hard-working writers. And every single one of them struggles with writing a novel. As I see it, there are so many ways to go wrong: plot, characterization, voice, language, world-building, description, pacing, etc. You name it; it can go wrong. And yet every one of those things has to be at least competently done for the novel to be good.

IMHO, if you complete a novel at all, you're exceptional, and my hat's off to you. If it's coherent and entertaining, you're astoundingly good. If it's one of those novels people get really excited about, you've accomplished the equivalent of qualifying for the Olympic team.

We writers must be optimists to think we can pull this off. Either that or fools.

A bit of morning eye-candy, gathered on one of my recent walks this month...