This is not moral decay, but ethical growth.

<3

Slapfight watch:

Evil crochet: http://is.gd/1R5DW
Evil fantasy: http://is.gd/1R5Mc
Evil crime fiction: http://is.gd/1R5Qt   
Evil gaming companies: http://scott-lynch.livejournal.com/236345.html

...oh, wait. The gaming company actually is being evil.

Yep. We're ridiculous.

but dichroic wrote a good poem, and hermetic wrote an awesome essay. They're good and you should read them.

Slapfight watch! Time for everybody to stand in the internet and cat-yell again.

Apparently, this year of all years, the Hugo shortlist kind of sucks and it's all fandom's fault for being willing to acccept mediocrity; and SF authors shouldn't submit their work before it's "perfect," whinge so much about how awful their work is in public*, or admit to their doubts about their own ability. Meanwhile, the estimable jmeadows talks about two kinds of "good enough" (case (a), "Oh, it's good enough," and case (b), "Oh woe is me it will never be good enough!"), and I am about to add a third.

...tl:dr

( More tl:dr )

And now I should stop hanging out on the internets, and go to the damned gym.

---

*(Yeah, I whinge about how much I feel like I suck in public. Full disclosure: Michelle Sagara is a friend, and I am not upset by her post. I just, me, have no plans to stop whinging about how I fail my own standards on this blog, because, well, I fail my own standards all the time. And I'm not going to start lying to all you all now. Besides, this blog has never been particularly about self-promotion, and that's unlikely to change any time soon either. Self-promotion bores me.)

***(I am also one of those writers Jodi talks about (Jodi is also a friend, and so is Scalzi) who hates, loathes, detests, despises, and abhors her own work. Because it's never good enough.)

**(I've also noticed that any time I comment on something, it gets interpreted by some as taking sides. So please note for the record, I am not taking sides. I'm just kind of shaking my head and saying, "God, we are judgy monkeys." And I include myself in that, because this is me being a silly judgy monkey as we speak.)

And yet sometimes we don't get it done on time, for one reason or another.

Apparently there's a vast internet kerfuffle about writers turning in books late. Since I just turned one in a year overdue (Chill) for the first and I hope last time in my career, I am moved to say:

Y'all do know we don't get paid until we turn those in, right? It's not like we have a vested interest in being late. We're generally doing our best out here.

What, nobody who reads SFF has ever blown a deadline at work?

I do sympathize with the annoyance of anybody waiting for a book by a favorite author, but it is kind of a first world problem, and probably not worth writing scathing letters over.

via tanaise, benpayne offers "Some useful answers to questions about gender inequality: a handy guide for editors."

So it's happened again. Once a year or so some chick gets a bee in her bonnet about the whole "more men than women are published" thing.

I know! AGAIN!!!

Wasn't it enough that we pretended to listen last time??

Every year we men try our best to placate them. Following is a useful rejoinder that I recommend.

"Hey, relax. Don't worry. Look at the monkey."

Sometimes, though, that's not enough. So here are a couple of other useful arguments you might like to utilise. I've found they silence even the most ardent whinging...

I'd roll on the floor clutching myself, but it hasn't been swept.

Toby essentially says everything that I've been thinking about the current fuss over yet another bile-o-gram from the editor of Helix, this one sent in a "professional" capacity. When you have behaved in a contemptible fashion, it's beyond contemptible and into pathetic to claim that nobody should have called you on it. 

Also, just as a point of order? The question of the right to reprint the contents of letters, especially for purposes of comment or criticism, is an open one. The moral of the story? Don't say it if you don't want it heard.

Really, this kind of nonsense makes me embarrassed for my genre. Which is why I feel the need to comment on this issue, rather than shunning it, the way I tend to shun everything related to Mr. Sanders.

Because I feel it's important to make it plain that not everybody in the SFF community is willing to suffer hearing this kind of blatant racism in silence.

To Tammy Pierce and her commentors:

Amen.

Also. Actually, that's not what I said.

Nothing I love more than spin. The only thing more lost on some people than sarcasm is nuance.

Further to the short-fiction slapfight, Jeff and I have been emailing back and forth, and I just posted the following as a comment in his blog.

Actually, I should point out that I have *no* exception to what, based on your email, you *meant* to say–that we need to push hard and fail spectacularly to create anything worthwhile.

If you are not falling down, you are not running hard enough.

I *do* think the puppy mill rhetoric got away from you, and people (such as myself) are reading your post as an indictment of all the hacks you find yourself forced to work with, rather than a personal vow to wipe out more often.

I strongly believe in wiping out as often as it takes.

To double your success rate, quintuple your failure rate.

So there you have it. My advice for success as an artist.

Wipe out more often.

If you already know how to do something, why the heck are you doing it again?

Jeff V. responds to my post on his post here.

(My post.)

Alas, I seem to have been sharper than I intended, as I was trying for a tone of humorous argument, not condescension or viciousness. Viva la internets, I guess.

The mention of Cat/China/et al was indeed a tangent, one meant to illustrate that the standards of "great" fiction are incredibly arbitrary and personal, and not intended as a jab at Jeff, who is undeserving of such.

And he is absolutely entitled to not enjoy most of the short fiction he reads! (I don't enjoy most of the short fiction *I* read.)

What I took exception to was the implication I saw in his post that the reason he wasn't enjoying this fiction was because the authors weren't trying hard enough, which seemed to me the central theme and argument of what he wrote.

Jeff also sez:

And I still think there are pressures of commercialism and the idea of fiction-as-commodity that writers have to face and think about, and are often more noticeable within genre. It is good to continually remind ourselves of this–I know I have to.

Oh, heck yes.

If I would just put fewer icky queer people in my books, for example, who knows--I might get movie options or something.

Anyway, sorry I came across as having bit your head off, Jeff. Me being a jerk sometimes comes free with the subscription, I'm afraid.

Oh, look, I'm going to get into another fight with Jeff VanderMeer.

We're all shocked, I'm sure.

Here's the money shot of what Jeff says, for me:

What I seemed to find in those old magazines sometimes overreached, or crashed into and sank on the rocks of evangelical experimentalism…but, at its best, that fiction was altogether more adult than much of what I’ve read recently. It seemed sharper and more balanced between intellect and emotion. There was ample intelligence behind it, sometimes a cruel and frightening intelligence. It was often bracing, unexpected, and jagged. 

---

Dear Jeff,

Yep. The old "compare the best of the old stuff to the vast majority of the new stuff and then declare the current state of the field culturally bankrupt trick."

Jeff, I gotta tell you. The sheer illogic of your post boggles me.

First, it assumes that the majority of writers are not in fact sweating everything they produce. I dunno if this means that you're not sweating everything you produce, but I assure you, many writers are. Working their butts off, sweating blood, taking things apart and putting them together repeatedly, doing multiple drafts and a good deal of hard thinking, fussing over every sentence, putting their blood and sweat and painful hard-earned experience into every character detail--broken hearts, and broken bones.

I know. I watch some of them do it.

One's dignity as an artist requires that one keep pushing. Trying harder, digging in, going to the wall. Writing what it hurts you to write.

You know, most art, even earnest art, will be pretty bad. And a whole hell of a lot will be competent but average. And the reason for that is that not everything can be above average. You might look up the definition of the word average if you need a refresher course on why.

Second, you assume that hard work equals excellent stories.

Now, does hard work mean every story is going to be a great one?

Alas. That's where the heartbreak comes in.

No.

You can work your ass off, and kind of suck. You can work your ass off, and be just barely good enough. You can work your ass off, and be mediocre.

You can, in fact, work your ass off for fifty years, and be mediocre.

Yeah.

Scary, isn't it?

But you only get one R.A. Lafferty, one James Tiptree, one Chip Delany, one Kelly Link, and not all of us can be him, or her. Sorry.

Ooo. Yeah. It smarts.

Lemme tell you. It smarts the hell out of me, too.


Third, you assume that the best work is going to be edgy and political and dark. And it's not, my friend. Or, at least, not edgy and political and dark the way you want it to be. Sometimes the best stories are edgy as hell, challenging and uncomfortable and right where it hurts and big and sweeping and savage. And sometimes they're tiny little perfect painful things, sweet and sharp and life-changing as a splinter of glass lodged in the soft pink swollen tissues of your throat, or as a a kiss from somebody you thought would never love you.

That assumption that the significant things in life are always dark and edgy? That's a comfort zone too, and a comforting--and I would honestly say adolescent--fixation.

John Gardner calls it "disPollyanna Syndrome," the cynical fallacy that the real world is unrelievedly bleak.

But it's not. Sorry. Sometimes, the real world--and art--are shockingly perfect. Sometimes the truth is a jewel.


Fourth, of course, SFF writers are universally engaged in writing highly commercial, derivative short fiction for the big bucks it offers. It's all comfort-food tripe, but it's what the market wants, and the short fiction scene isn't essentially a club scene consisting of writers writing for and to other writers and the most hard-core oh, five or ten thousand genre fans.

That was sarcasm, if you missed it.


Fifth, not everybody gets a great story. And even people who do, eventually, get one great story may not get two. And the vast majority of writers who get even one great story serve out a long and gruelling apprenticeship learning their craft first. Writing well is not a talent. It is not a gift. It is not an act of will. You don't get to get up in the morning, click your heels, and say, "Today I am going to write a classic story."

Believe me. If that worked? I would know by now, because I've tried it.


Sixth, once you've had your great story? You are stuck with it for the rest of your life. And you will have to get up every morning and wonder how you're going to top "Scanners Live In Vain," and realize that everything you write from now on is probably going to be a let-down.


Seventh, my great story is not necessarily your great story. Most of what the genre conversation as a whole praises highly falls flat for me for one reason or another.


Eighth, I have to point out that small stories can be important, too. Tiny little personal stories are no less worthy than big sweeping ones. And there are any number of writers who are engaged in the subversive activity of telling stories about the sorts of people SFF has traditonally found uninteresting. Unworthy. Beneath notice.

Midwives. Chimney sweeps. Beat cops. Orcs. Failing small businessmen. Mothers of sick children. Struggling hacks. Second-stringers.

Like the vast majority of writers.

Sorry, Jeff, to have to deliver the bad news. But it's okay; I understand not being good enough. (And hey, I mean, if you were a girl, you could have the added filip of having to be about twice as good as a male author to get the same amount of respect. I mean, do you honestly think Chris Moriarty is a worse writer than Richard Morgan? Or that Cat Valente is a worse writer than China Mieville? Because, um, with all due respect, and all respect due to Richard and China--I think Chris and Cat are every bit as good as the boys. And I know which writers I hear discussed more frequently.)

See, here's the problem. No matter how ferociously we hate our own inadequacies, no matter how much we will ourselves to genius, we each of us still struggle painfully with the fact that every morning we wake the hell up, and we still haven't turned into Theodore Sturgeon*.

God dammit.

To hell.

Your friend,

Bear

---

ETA:

In tangentially related matters, go read this:

http://nineweaving.livejournal.com/106450.html

and this:

http://cristalia.livejournal.com/192124.html

and this:

http://llygoden.livejournal.com/295112.html?view=547784

and this:

http://benpeek.livejournal.com/609355.html

---

Here. Have some pictures of Tornado Intercept Vehicles.

---

*Sturgeon probably had somebody he struggled painfully with not being too, I would guess, knowing writers.

1) >24 hours later, I am up to June of this year in the Great Email Download of 2007!

2) coffeeem, in the context of an email exchange about music that makes you never want to leave the city again, lest you run into one of the folks in those songs, says: "the evil triumverate... Zevon, Waits, and Cave, Attorneys in Hell." And I thought posterity needed to see that.

3) I need to take archery lessons so I can get a consistent stance. Because when I find the right stance, I shoot rather well. It's just, you know, hitting it. Also, that panic attack seems to have cleared up, finally. Thank god.

4) Jeremy? Is not part of the problem. I would like to point out that Night Shade publishes scads of women, publishes them well, and treats them with respect. If there were a Lois Bujold story in that book, you bet she would have the front cover.

Sometimes, people actually do get listed in order of how much they sell, and thus, how many readers they will draw to the book.

(I am reminded of a recent conversation with some other writers wherein we were discussing the difficulty in deciding who to snuff dramatically when you only have one straight white male out of a group of ten characters, and you need him later, so either a gay character or a character of color, or both, has to get it.... Ahhh, the drawbacks of political correctness... We can't kill the token white guy! Oh noes!)

5) Pond Size Error: Abort/Retry/Splish?

There's this perennial argument about science fiction and its dwindling market share, and whether its market share is actually dwindling, and its graying audience, and whether its audience is actually greying and so on and so forth.

scalzi has a theory, and I agree with him (mostly) that part of what's going on is that SF is too much of an in-club; that you need to come in with way too much background, currently, to be able to just pick up your average Iain Banks novel and read it. Which is an interesting problem, and actually one I'm kind of trying to address, and I know John is as well.  But I think there's another thing going on.

I think we're not having enough fun. People complain of lack of sensawunda, as they say--big scope, big ideas, big spinning wheels in the sky. Some of that may be because the field is pretty heavily mined--the Dyson Sphere stories have been written--but it's not like it's impossible to do. In just the last couple of years, I can point to books by Charlie Stross (Accelerando), Peter Watts (Starfish), Robert Charles Wilson--pretty much everything he writes, let's be honest here--and so on, that are just full of shiny shiny ideas and plain neat weird. ("Neat weird" is not a bad definition of "sensawunda," now that I think about it.)

Now, big ideas are not really my baliwick as a writer. I mean, I can come up with 'em sometimes (There's a couple in each of my SF books that I'm more or less proud of.)? But I tend to bury them under plot and character, because that's what I love. So of course I'm going to come up with opposing theories.

And my current one is that we've gotten awfully fucking serious over here in SFland, and we're not all that damned much fun to read anymore. Now, I don't mean that we should abandon all pretense of social relevance, or real characterization, or Lit'ry Merit. because frankly, I like that stuff. And find the uncomplicated whiz-bangs pretty damned dull.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for packing in the cool, the fun, the adventury, and the zingy dialogue. One does not have to be staid and cryptic to discuss things of import. Irony and sarcasm and humor are useful tools for opposing the establishment. (Ask any feminist. Or, you know, any of the majority of feminists who do have a sense of humor.)

Sure, we're all over here sawing away, hammering together coffins. But I don't see why we can't nail some gingerbread and paint onto the damned things while we're at it. I mean, "fun" is pretty much de rigeur in a fantasy novel. And those sell a bit better. And I understand that there's this romance genre that's doing alright, and that might have some fun in it too. Or maybe some smut. But it can't be smut alone, because SF has accepted smut.

I guess what I mean to say is, yanno: if we can't dance, nobody's going to want to be a part of our revolution.

Now, the vast majority of people who get offended by stuff are reasonable, helpful people who really would like the world to be a better place for everyone, who are serious about training people to identify stereotypes, and who are a benefit to all of us. And then there's the 3 % who are professionally offended, and by whom you can really never do anything right, and who will use their pet cause as a bludgeon to demonstrate as much drama as possible anywhere.

It seems to me that one of the major problems we find in dealing with racist/sexist/looksist/queerist/classist/ismist assumptions in fiction (assuming for the moment that we are the sort of persons who would care to deal with these issues instead of sweeping them under our privilege) is that in some ways, there is no win. In other words, the accusation of (x)ism is enough. It's indefensible. Because what happens is not generally a statement of "I found x element of y work offensive because I saw it making these common genderist assumptions," but "X element of y work *is* offensive because of--"

And against that, there's nothing one can say. Other than "I'm sorry my work offended you," which is nice and all, but still winds up not making the person who made the accusation any happier, and, in the long term, involves a silencing of the artist. Because she's sure as hell not going to try to write a black vigilante drag queen vampire again after THAT shit. No way!

And the counterproblem is that the people who are set in their bigotry are not going to be put off by outcry. They're bigots. Sexist men do not care what women think. Homophobes do not care what dykes think.

The people who are going to wind up being silenced are the ones who mean well and are trying. Perhaps trying ineffectually, and needing guidance. Perhaps trying hard, and attracting the Professionally Offended. Perhaps just wanting to be told they are good people, which is unfortunately common. (And of course it's not about being Good People, or getting what oyceter calls your gold star for not being a bigot. It's about addressing a systemic problem.)

And I think I have a partial solution.

The clearest example of how this solution could work that I can think of off the top of my head is the so-called magical Negro, which is a phrase used to describe a situation where the (white) protagonist has a (black) mentor figure who is inevitably snuffed in the third reel. (You may substitute the Other of your choice in the magical Negro role, above: Apache shaman, wise old Jew, creepy witch woman, Inuit medicine man, cute nonthreatening gay best friend... you know the character, right?)

And I know exactly how that stereotype/archetype got established. It's because some poor schmuck of a scriptwriter or an author looked at their cast and went "God damn, that's a lot of honkeys. Let's fire one of these crackers and find a sympathetic role for a black character."

And the main sympathetic non-protagonist role is, of course, the mentor.

Who inevitable gets killed off or incapacitated in formula fiction, no matter what color he is, because he hast to be got out of the way so the protagonist can protag for the last half hour of the movie. (If you were a Wesley Snipes movie, you might colorswap your participants.)

In other words, the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film.

And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child. You only have one black guy in the movie? Oh, man, we know he's gonna die. Same thing with one queer guy (Heroic gays always die! It's a law! It's how you know they're heroic!). One woman is the love interest, and she will either stand by her man or betray him. And she might also die.

But you know, you start getting enough of those Others into things, and they become People. If the protagonist is also black, somehow that black-mentor-gets-killed thing seems less... well, icky. And more like maybe the author has been watching too many Hollywood films and needs to branch out a little to some new plotlines.

So you have a cop shop in your book. What if you don't look around and go, Hmm, black cop, WASP cop, Polish cop, Latino cop, maybe an Asian woman because everybody knows they're tough. What about two Asian women? What about two Asian women, a black woman, three Latinos (one Cubano and a couple of Mexicans?), a couple of Polacks, and two interchangeable Minnesota blonds that not even the duty sergeant can tell apart? Throw in two queers! Have them not be sleeping together! It happens! It really happens!

Real life, in other words, doesn't look like a "Three guys walk into a bar" joke.

So why does so much fiction?

My third column for Subterranean Press is up.

In the spirit of flagellating corpses, I give you:

A few brief words about zombies.

Book report #34, Sexual Homicide: Patterns & Motives, by Robert K. Ressler et al:

Results of extensive jailhouse interviews by the FBI with 36 murderers, including anonymous case studies and a discussion of patterns of behavior in same. Fascinating reading (for me, anyway), and another one of those books that's really useful to the working writer.

Not a lot of new information for me, here (this was originally published over twenty years ago), but this is presented in a no-nonsense and well-organized fashion, without a lot of faffing about.

---

And now, some reviews:

"Tideline," in the current Asimov's, gets some attention. You can read the first bit of the story here.

Happy Pixel-stained technopeasant wretch day.

And here is what other people thought of it:

http://serge-lj.livejournal.com/48109.html

http://www.tangentonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1022&Itemid=259


Reviews of Jim Baen's universe #5, including my short "War Stories:"

http://www.tangentonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1023&Itemid=266


Reviews of Carnival:

http://starfirenz.livejournal.com/274835.html


Reviews of Blood & Iron:

http://meijhen.livejournal.com/88173.html


Reviews of Blood & Iron *and* Carnival:

http://curgoth.livejournal.com/575044.html


Reviews of Fast Forward 1, including my story "The Something-Dreaming Game."

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/04/the_solaris_boo.shtml

Reviews of New Amsterdam:

http://www.rambles.net/bear_newamster07.html

Reviews of Scardown:

http://gcsbook.livejournal.com/3484.html

---

The N.B.:

Dear Internets:

Yes, I saw what Truesdale said. You can all stop sending me links now, because I don't care.

Love,
Bear

---

* "Not necessarily in that order."

i know you're out there with the rage in your eyes and your megaphones....


via james_nicoll, Dr. Howard V. Hendrix clarifies his position on e-publishing at Galleycat.


I should probably go eat something other than fruit salad today, shouldn't I?

Imagine a world in which we were all writing novels instead of pissing on each other on the internets.

You know, I shouldn't encourage that.

Publishing slots are limited enough as it is.

And some of these people are probably better writers than me.

papersky has declared Monday April 23rd to be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

She says, in part:

In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

Whatever you're posting should go on your own site. I'll make a post here on the day and people can post links in comments to whatever they're putting up on. If you are a member of SFWA, or SFWA qualified but not a member (like me) you get extra pixel-spattered points for doing this. If other people want to collect the links too, that would be really cool. Please disseminate this information widely.

Yeah, yeah, I've been staying out of the SFWA thing because I frankly don't care [/Tommy Lee Jones]. I'm not a member anymore, and I don't expect to be ever again.

But it's hard to let this pass:

I'm also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free.  A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.

--Howard V. Hendrix, SFWA's current Veep, as reprinted by Will Shetterly.

nihilistic_kid, with whom I often disagree, nevertheless knows a lot about labor unions and comments here on the fallacious definition of scab.

scalzi responds at length here.

As the granddaughter of a union plumber, raised in a staunchly pro-union household, and--apparently--a webscab, I have this to say: if SFWA were an effective labor union, in touch with the realities of publishing in the 21st century and interested in serving the professional needs of its members, I would rejoin in an instant.

It isn't.

And this purblind sentiment is an example of why, and how it got that way.

Unofficial writer's organizations (Critters, the OWW, Forward Motion, the Rumor Mill) do a far better job of serving my needs as an independent artist than SFWA does. If I were working in Hollywood, I'd join the Writer's Guild. I still pay dues to the Author's Guild, which is at least marginally more effectual than SFWA, and I'm far enough on the outside that I don't notice whatever mindless infighting there might be.

But it's not just selfish laziness that keeps me from joining any attempt to reform SFWA. In other reasons:

1) it's not my job--I have no investment in the organization, and the organization is set up to insure that I never develop one, and when I did, some time ago, attempt to answer honestly a question regarding why younger SFF writers weren't joining, I got alternately tarred-and-feathered and told that if I wanted the organization different, it was my job to change it, which kind of defeated the point of the original question.... which soured me on the whole thing somewhat. (Don't ask if you don't want to know.) 

2) I actually suspect there is no salvaging SFWA, but I'm pleased that there are people who want to try, and I'm not about to get in their way. I will cheer from the sidelines and bring lemonade and gatorade and soda pop, how's that?

3) I think it would be easier, frankly, to form a new trade organization (one that's interested in actually defending authors' rights, not arguing over codes of conduct,  having flamewars, holding award ceremonies, practicing bizarre policies of secrecy, and panicking about e-piracy) and start from scratch.

No, I'm not willing to organize one. I'm not an organizationally talented person, and I'm not a politician, and I'm certainly not a leader, and I'm not much of a joiner either.

I know my limits.

(Although that would be a great indicator of a trade union I might want to join right there: No awards. Ever. Except service awards.)

So, Howard, no worries about rotting the organization from within, at least from my direction.  I'll do my rotting from without, like a proper scab.

I'm leaving comments on this entry open, but I won't be responding to them. I have to clean my house and do laundry and watch Doctor Who today. So, you know, knock yourselves out.

In the meantime, there are some links to some of my free online fiction in my CV, here.

(eta: suricattus points out rightly in comments that it's not a union, and never was one. Fair enough, and my mistake in adopting HVH's metaphor without clarifying. It's also not an effective trade organization, although I hear tell it was one, once.)

---

Review roundup!

Free SF has... well, not exactly reviews, more summaries, of the stuff I have online, here.

jasminehammer was confused by the naming conventions in Carnival.

(A quick field guide for the likewise confused: it's one of the ways you can tell the POVs apart: Michelangelo refers to himself by surname except when something gets through his shell, in the grand tradition of spy novel protagonists. (It's kind of clunky when you don't have a nice tidy name like Bond to work with, isn't it?) Vincent calls him Angelo. Lesa starts off calling them both by last name, and eventually switches, and both of them eventually stop calling her Miss Pretoria and start calling her Lesa. Like you would if you got to know somebody pretty well.)

rivka more or less liked The Chains That You Refuse and really liked Blood & Iron. YAY!

mjlayman liked Carnival.

Audrey thinks that Carnival is not nearly as cheesy as the summary would tend to make it sound.

tacithydra on Hammered, long with spoilers.

aaaaaaand the real prize: Don D'Ammassa with the official first-up review of Whiskey & Water!

---

Internet slapfights!

cristalia on the reaction to the reaction to the chicklessness of the Hugo ballots.

buymeaclue on same.

---

All right. Time to get a bottle of wine, a Jeremy Brett DVD, and get my taxes done.

They're all talking about urban fantasy, othering, marginalization, liminal spaces, and all kinds of interesting things.

And I'm working on the page proofs for Whiskey & Water, which is an urban fantasy dealing with, among other things, othering, marginalization, liminal spaces, and...

...but that would be telling.

Holly's point, linked above, that the liminal spaces are where the magic lies is very well made. And specifically, interestingly, fantasy has often been about transformation, and about journeys outside the mundane. Personally, I'm not fond of the romanticization of anything--the romanticization of "normalcy" inevitably leads either to hypocrisy or exclusion/oppression. Because normalcy isn't, of course. And the romanticization of trauma leads to...

Well.

We all know that guy.

Exhausting, isn't he?

But the thing is, by tradition, magic is the liminal. It is the numinous, the transcendent. It is the thing that is not a part of our everyday existence. if it was, we wouldn't call it magic. And urban fantasy is often the narrative of the disconnect, the intrusion of the numinous or liminal into everyday existence.

It's comforting, of course, to imagine that this transformative experience will be positive. Traditionally, this has not always been so. These days, we've transferred that original narrative, the one in which the intrusion is a negatively transformative experience, to the horror genre. The monster comes upon us, and so we are destroyed.

But the other experience, the exalting one--frequently, in our modern narratives, that falls upon someone marginalized.

I think is some ways this is a reaction to societal disempowering of such persons--art is about inversion, after all. The mighty brought low, the humble raised high. And in some ways because it's easy to plot an upward arc for somebody who starts in the gutter.

And to be frank, there is a romance there. Freedom from responsibility. I mean god, this get up go to work pay the bills thing is a grind. And of course it's nice to subvert the dominant paradigm. The valium fifties is still out there. Lurking. And the counterculture is a necessary thing.

But, on the other hand... the counterculture, for all its romance, is not the whole world either.

On the other kind, there's a homely kind of magic, too. The magic of stew pots and heart fires. I think the best street-people magic book I have ever read is Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, which is more subtle and honest than most... and is aware of this distinction, and inclusive of it.

And of course, no one book can do all things.

No verdict.

Just some thinking.