Trust the Guardian:

Soviet and American astronauts alleged to have secretly tested possibilities for sex in space.

Sure, don't tell us what *does* work? I think this article would be more convincing if it had included some juicy bits. Any tabloid writer knows THAT.

(My solution was grab bars, and lashing somebody to the wall, but maybe that's too kinky for NASA?)

Really, the appropriate music for this would be Jonathan Couton's "I'm Your Moon," wouldn't it?

I have to spam livejournal today, as I won't be around mostly all the rest of the week.

Anyway, this is kind of neat and I thought I should share it with you.

A fan emailed me a couple of days ago to ask if I had modeled Jenny's physical appearance on former actress/current MP for Churchill Tina Keeper, and I was forced to admit I'd never heard of her. (Yes, I suck.)

But I also have to admit, she'd make an excellent model:

http://media.liberal.ca/images/photos/180x240/16054.jpg

(In my head, Jenny looks more like Buffy Sainte Marie:

http://record.wustl.edu/archive/2000/02-10-00/photos/buffy.jpg

(My God, I envy her nose.)

but you know, whatever works for you.)

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Also, if you are local to Las Vegas, and might be interested in adopting three feral cats (apparently, the kittens are already socializing, but Momma may never be that into people), perchance you could pop by kit_kindred's livejournal and have a chat with him?

Oh, and in other news, Scardown has gone back for a third printing.

And lookie what I just found on Amazon.

So that's a pretty good couple of days all around.

Hayakawa Publishing in Japan has just purchased the translation rights for Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired.

You shall know me by the trail of Japanese people who are very confused by the franglish.

Two news flashes that are interesting in light of some of the medical tech in Hammered:

(I)

Researchers have shown how nerve cells can grow along bundles of a special fibre, which has properties similar to spider silk.

They hope the silk will encourage cell re-growth across severed nerves, possibly even in damaged spinal cords.


(II)

"The results hold out the promise to one day be able to activate limb muscles with these brain signals, effectively restoring brain to muscle control via a physical nervous system," said John Donoghue, director of the brain science programme at Brown University, Rhode Island, and chief scientific officer of Cyberkinetics, the company behind the brain implant.

Professor Donoghue's work is published today in Nature. He describes how, after a few minutes spent calibrating the implant, Mr Nagle could read emails and play the computer game Pong. He was able to draw circular shapes using a paint programme and could also change channel and turn up the volume on a television, even while talking to people around him. After several months, he could also operate simple robotic devices such as a prosthetic hand, which he used to grasp and move objects.


...

"...and you would not believe how hard it was to get the body down the stairs, especially since it was still all floppy, and Barry forgot to tie up the ends of the carpet... oh, hello officer."

---

stillsostrange has a ghoulishly good story up at Strange Horizons this week

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Some reviews out of the blogosphere:


alfvaen cordially loathed Hammered much, but was more enamored of Touched By Venom and really liked Scott Bakker's books.

Scott, by the way, is ONE MILE TALL. Just saying.



Anna at slithytoves liked the Jenny books okay, but thinks I have some annoying auctorial tics. Fair enough. It happens. *g* Repeated phrases, I suspect, are every writer's bugaboo. (See, told you there was worse stuff in those books than what I got Thogged for.)

I can't really argue with any of her other critiques, either. Although I will note that Elspeth, for the record, couldn't do Jeremy's job because she's a psychologist, not a linguist or symbologist of any stripe. In life as it is not in Star Trek, alas. And nothing romantic happened between Leslie and Jaime, not that they told me about anyway, though sometimes the characters don't tell me when they get up to stuff and I only catch on when I find them blushing and scuffing the floors later. [Maybe it was my own terrible crush on Leslie shining through? He's the one of that lot I'd want to take home in my pocket.]

Charlie's got a deadly crush on Jaime, though, and Jeremy has a long-term unrequited passion for Leslie, but Jaime and Leslie are both Pretending They Don't Know About That. Like you do.

Also, it’s always interesting to see an outside perspective on characters one knows from the inside: Anna sees Ellie as a mommy figure, and I see her as a shameless manipulator. It's For Your Own Good. Really.



callunav liked Hammered, despite some issues with it. Apparently, the end of Scardown worked okay for her, though.

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Good to know they're out there keeping me humble.

From the perspective of Five Years Later, there's so much wrong with those books. But I do still love Jenny.

On the other hand, I wonder if that's why later books are so much harder to write than earlier ones: because you have the experience to know, as you are writing them, how desperately flawed they are, so you don't get the infatuation phase where it's all shiny and brilliant and this is the perfect book, finally. You just get the long slog of the relationship where you're in counseling and trying to work something out that doesn't involve alternate weekends and joint custody and an ugly lawsuit.

The bad news is, the acceptance that every book is broken can be a vicious cycle. You ever wonder why so many writers start to suck after the third or fourth novel?

Some of it is pressure to produce on a schedule. (One reason I've taken the day job is so that I don't starve to death while waiting for books to ripen. The SF novels, I am learning, take longer than nine months to cook. The series fantasy, since it has all the worldbuilding done, is faster-growing. That, and health insurance. And no, I don't feel like a failure asa writer because I'm not writing full-time (actually, I am writing full-time; about 45 hours a week. I'm just also doing another job full-time.) I feel like I am taking steps to ensure my continued success as a writer through the metric of Not Sucking.)

But some of it is the realization that you will never get the book perfect, so why the hell are you trying? and that is a problem. Because if we get slapdash, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Pursuant to this, Justine Larbalestier quotes Sean Williams quoting Charles Brown: "Writing is the only job that gets harder the longer you do it."

She also says:

I worried that my experience of writing each book would show on the pages, and so asked my writer friends if they’d noticed a correlation between their experience of writing a book and its reception out in the world. The unanimous response was a resounding “Nope, none.”

This is Truth. We can't judge our own work. We can only try to perform it as best we can. The stories I love most are inevitably the ones I can't sell on a bet, and the ones I feel meh about are often the ones that get reprinted in best-of anthologies.

My opinion is not the one that matters. Every book is a flawed book. Life goes on.

***

The line quoted in the title always seems to me a perfect example of telling detail. It establishes so much, so arrestingly, so efficiently.

Dude. Wow.

---

The glamour! deserves a post all to itself today: Today, I slept until 9:30, got out of bed, showered, checked email, saddled up, drove to the bakery in Manchester to buy bread, had a slice of "stuffed potato" bread for breakfast while I was there, went to the gym, did 4 miles on the ski machine, lifted weights for 45 minutes (RAH!), went to fedex and sent Ethel back to HP for debraining/rebraining, came home, cleaned the kitchen and the bedroom, cleaned all the food out of the fridge that's turned because I haven't had time to eat it, took the trash out, scrubbed the trash can, did four loads of laundry (because I haven't done laundry since before WisCon), realized I didn't have enough quarters to wash it and dry it, hung *up* the laundry, and salvaged the last two blackening bananas by putting the ingredients for a loaf of banana bread in my bread robot. (I love having a robot that makes me bread. It is so totally awesome.)

Now, I am going to drink a lot of scotch and try to write this genocide. This should be the death of the Bunnicula. It died well, my friends. It died very well indeed.

Also, I have killed my lemon balm. Alas. I need to go buy a new one.

---

God Damn, well I declare:

Yanno, it occurs to me that the one joke in the Jenny books that nobody seems to have caught is Jenny's name. The last name, anyway. Okay, there's the Casey at the Bat thing, which she actually jokes about in Hammered.

The other one, of course, is the railway engineer Casey Jones, credited with not only a record speed run, but one of the most notorious wrecks in American railway history.

It seemed appropriate, somehow.

You probably know him from the Grateful Dead song. He was a real person, famed in song and story. Literally.

The Grateful Dead, like Jimmy Buffett, are a fondness I owe to my ex-boyfriend, The Jeff (wonder where he is, these days.). The fondness for steam trains, I come by another way: my great-grandfather was a conductor. Who, I believe, died in a derailment, although I may be confused about that.

Joe Hill seems to have confused him with the conductor who wrecked the equally notorious Ol' 97; Casey put his locomotive through the back end of a parked freight train; it was Steve Broady who jumped the track into the river bottom. And none of this happened in California.

You can hear a sample of Pete Seeger doing the Joe Hill version at Smithsonian Global Sound. Completely unfair to Mr. Jones, of course, who may have been a bit of a speed freak, but who was a good union man all his life.

Anybody wanna write a ghost story about the Ol' 97? Look:

Engine #1102 (left) , a 4-6-0 Ten Wheeler, was on the point of the doomed train. She was a Class F-14 locomotive, bought new from Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1903. After the wreck, she was rebuilt and served on the line for over 30 more years.  The engine was scrapped on July 9, 1935, at the Princeton shop.

---

She can't sing and she can't dance
She can't walk too well
She can't cook and she can't sew
But she can sure raise hell.

--J.J. Cale

SF Signal liked Scardown a lot. Not too spoilery.

---

Book # 44: Wendy Moore, The Knife Man: Blood, Body-Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery;

This is the UK edition. The US edition has a different subtitle. And yes, I have more or less been reading it since I got back from the UK, though intermittently.

It's a biography of Georgian (the time period, not the state or the nation) anatomist John Hunter--both somewhat over-apologetic of his foibles, and intermittently fascinating. The author sometimes has a really sharp ear for a turn of phrase, but often the good sentences are buried under a lot of thrashing, and the narrative in general tends to be repetitive and boggy. It could have done with a good editing.

And some of the speculation-toward-explaining-mistakes is a little wearying. We all kind of fall in love with out historical subjects while we're writing about them, but I'm not sure it's necessary to invent excuses for a three hundred year old misdiagnosis.

On the other hand, the actual subject matter is fantastic. John Hunter himself is the kind of character you could hang all sorts of storytelling on, both fiction and nonfiction, and have it work the better for it. Irascible, adamantine, self-educated, meticulous, obsessed.... a fascinating creature. And the details of his research and treatment processes are both incredibly gross, and incredibly useful. (I now can tell you what the mucous lining the ureter tastes like, if you care.)

So, overall, a thumbs up. But a 535-page book (sans endnotes) that had enough material for a crisp four hundred pages, about.

One of the things that readers ask writers is "Who would play your characters in the movie?" It helps, I think, give a crisp vision to the reader if they know things like that.

For most purposes, in this case, I am absolutely no help. But I have had to learn, you see, because one of the things that editors sometimes ask you is to provide photo references for the cover artist. Now, several of mine still aren't helpful to the casting director (Morgan looks like Brian Froud's "Tapestry" (see icon for a detail of the painting), and Carel is Queen Tiye.) but I did manage to figure out that Matthew looked like Eric Stoltz with more jaw and Julian Rhind-Tutt's Keen Eddie hair, and I guess Claudia Black is about as close as anybody I could picture to Elaine.

Murchaud looks like a taller Ioan Gruffudd with blue eyes. Which, yes, explains a lot about Murchaud. And his social life. And stillsostrange nominated Tony Curran for Keith. So now I can point to him, too.

(Oh, and Lucifer, of course, is Tilda Swinton except when he looks like Travis Fimmel. But he's got that knack.)


For the Jenny books, after being asked seventy or eighty times, I realized that Jenny looks like Buffy Sainte-Marie, horribly scarred and with her hair butched. And if I had to name somebody to play Razorface, it would be Michael Clarke Duncan. And of the Carnival crew, I can at least say that Robert looks like Laurence Fishburne in the Othello days.

Other than that, I was more or less sunk.

Until I started writing Undertow. Which, fittingly for a novel that should end with a caper plot, if it all works out, keeps telling me who everybody looks like. Andre looks like Isaac Hayes, but he acts like John Cusack. Jean Kroc is Jean Reno. Timothy Closs is Sidney Poitier, and Jefferson Greene is either a youngish Derek Jacobi playing a heavy (without the toga) or the Kiefer Sutherland of Dark City.

Today, I realized that Nouel Huc is a Korean Jonathan Rhys-Davies in Raiders of the Lost Ark mode, and gave up. This book has apparently decided it's GOING HOLLYWOOD!

At least Cricket only looks like herself. She must have wandered in from a different book.

...and so to bed.

The one thing that seems to be cropping up most frequently on the "Ten things I have learned (about/from/in avoidance) of writing" thing (which I have stopped linking because, as the song goes "there's too many of us.") is the one about how there will always be somebody more successful than you (that, and blackholly's advice to take off your nametag when you get drunk) and I realized I need to make an addendum to it.

11. No matter how successful you are, it will still drive you. I met a very successful author a year or so ago who joked about being jealous of my then-current Locus review, and another one who made a crack about "Yeah, I keep telling myself, this book has to get one rung higher up the NYT best seller list than the last one did."

These guys were being arch and ironic, and they were trying to teach me something. (Both of them were, in fact, NYT best-sellers. Top ten. No, I won't tell you who.) You can't control that stuff. Nor can you control how readers will respond to the story. What you can control is the words on the page in a measured and consistent fashion.

Well, most of the time.

*piths another horta, going by*


ten things I am mostly ignorant about

1. number theory
2. types of Austrian sausage
3. eighties horror movies
4. clothing
5. color theory
6. the !kung language
7. network architecture (though I do listen to netcurmudgeon, I swear)
8. nonfiction publishing
9. how the heck Marketing goes about picking the cover art
10. classical sculpture. although truepenny recently told me a heartwarming story about the first female curator at the Met going around with a box of genitals, trying to match them to defaced statues

ten things I, like Clive Barker, don't really know much about--but do know enough to get myself into trouble with:

1. internal combustion engines
2. the second world war
3. the publishing industry
4. sex
5. current events
6. geology
7. cooking
8. fanfiction
9. Zen
10. archery

*g*

News from the weekend, which nobody has told me I'm not allowed to talk about, so I guess I can mention it. And I am very pleased to: Hammered has been nominated for the Compton Crook Award (the B(altimore)SFS's best first genre novel award) (and may I just say their notification email is unutterably charming? It reads in part: "This award was fist established in 1981 by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, Inc., in the belief that first novelists in the field and under-reviewed, neglected, and underpaid." Well, I'm not going to argue with that... well, okay, actually I'm really happy with the support my books have gotten, especially as a new kid.)

Pursuant to that, I can also tell you that Hammered has gone back for a fourth printing. Which by my count puts about 40,000 copies in print. Which I probably wasn't supposed to tell you, but hey, yours for transparency in publishing.

And which is, yes, they tell me, really rather good for a first mass-market paperback novel in genre. Yes, 40,000 copies. Is rather good. Four printings. (Somebody over there just fainted. Medic!)

...but what about Dan Brown?! And his billions and billions served? Why is Bear not Wealthy? Where are the Fans?

Well, this is why rezendi makes more money than I do, guys. (Or possibly because he's a better writer.) *g* There are only so many people who will buy that crap with the starships on the cover.

Oh, and Worldwired made the March Locus best seller list. Life is not so bad. And it's a living, after all.

...and now, my hair is filthy and so are my contacts, and the media mining calls.

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omgIleavefortheUKin36hours.

If you want to have a spoileriffical conversation about the Jenny books, this would be the thread. Put it here!

Or should I just cave to my own pretentiousness and start a community? (Gah, I can't believe I'm even contemplating that.)

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So, who else is looking at the new random RSS feed on Gmail and thinking, gee, just what I needed, even MORE 24-hour news saturation, YUM!?

Sort of a mixed review of Worldwired up at Reflection's Edge. Spoilers.

Representative sample:

...both new and old series readers may want to skip the first 45 pages, which are more confusing than helpful. Bear succumbs briefly to Star Trek talking head syndrome with a crew of not-yet-differentiated scientist characters; to complicate matters, they are sometimes called by first names, sometimes last names, sometimes nicknames, sometimes specializations, and sometimes nationalities. Even with a cheat sheet, it can be hard to keep track of how many people are in a room. Fortunately the story picks up once characters split into easier-to-manage subgroups, especially since it means they start doing things instead of just talking about them.

Most of Worldwired is about attempts to find common ground - whether within a broken family, between countries on the brink of war, or with aliens so truly alien that humans may not be able to communicate. Bear excels at breaking world-altering political acts and military coups into personal ambitions, compromises, and politicians who are neither gods nor monsters; United Nations hearings are neatly balanced with bargains in men's rooms, hotel suites, and private telephone calls. The alien first-contact scenes are less nuanced and harder to identify with, but are a welcome contribution to a limited library of non-human intelligence concepts.

---

below lies my nattering, not so much a disagreement with the review (the only thing I take exception to is the word "cyberpunk") as a discussion of how odd it is to see readers reacting to what one wrote.

The best part of reviews is the range of reactions. Specifically, getting to see how differently different people react to what you've written, and how it interacts with their internal landscapes. It's incredibly cool!

So as I'm reading the above, I'm thinking: uh huh, uh huh.... aww! I like Leslie Tjakamarra. And his quirky sense of humor. And his first contact problems. And boy, has he got problems.

And also, yeah, yeah, the one name per character rule. Which I think is a silly fetish anyway, and which only works if you have characters who always think of other characters by the same name. Considering that my head turns to "Sarah," "Bear," "Ebear," "Sarah Bear," "Elizabeth," and "Wishnevsky," and scott_lynch has got me halfway trained to answer to "Liz!" that becomes a little problematic when you're sticking to deep POVs with an ensemble cast.

And then my brain goes haring off on a tangent, and I find myself thinking: I can't wait for the reader response to the barbed-wire thickets of Wills and Toms and Roberts and Johns and Edmunds in The Stratford Man. Thank God for Kit and Ben and Dick, or I'd be completely sunk.

I've discovered that now that I have some assurance that what I write will be published, I find myself very conscious throughout each book what readers are likely to react to, what things are going to annoy the everloving bejebus out of writers who are at the stage of craft where they're unable to skim a sentence or they're very dependent on whatever auctorial fetish is trendy this week. (Hey! That's against the Rules!) and that I'm also very, very aware of the tradeoffs I'm making with every choice I make as a writer. So I know, when I choose to show a scene from X's perspective, that I'm losing things by not showing it from Y's.

This is all stuff I used to do by instinct, and now it's different. The instinct is still there--but I can explain why I have that instinctive reaction. Why I'm avoiding Z (because it's a genre trope) or embracing X (though it's also a genre trope) or undermining Q (a third genre trope.)

It's like the sex and mud and beard lice in A Companion to Wolves. No sex, no beard lice, no book. Because part of what that book is about is an argument with the tendency, in certain tendrils of the fantasy genre, to kind of sweep anything vaguely unpleasant under the rug. The Inciting Incident, of course, was the infamous semi-elided dragon-mediated rapes and less-infamous extremely-elided institutional homosexuality in the early Pern novels. But then the book takes on a life of its own, and the worldbuilding does too, and if you pull out that one thread (i.e., isn't a bit icky that dragonriders are making off with teenaged boys, some of whom are going to wind up bonding to green dragons, and we all know what those green dragons are like, and wouldn't it be interesting to tackle those social issues head-on rather than eliding them) then the whole structure of the book collapses. And you essentially have a fuzzy wish fulfillment fantasy about a boy and his wolf fighting trolls and obtaining an understanding of the world, and the world really doesn't need another one of those.

And yet, I know perfectly well that if that book goes to press, there's going to be a faction of readers who are like "oo, icky, the sex totally ruins this nice YA novel!" ( digressions ) and there are going to be readers who are like "there's all this sex, and it's not erotic at all, what's with that?" and then, Goddess willing, there will be a faction of readers who are like "Whoa! Genderfuck! And an honest appraisal of the difficulties in living your life while dealing with a physical response to the biological rhythms of another species! And negotiation and compromise and people making sacrifices to defend their families! And the psychic cost of war! And dude, pitched battles in Lovecraftian troll-tunnels, and beheadings, and beard lice, and GIANT PSYCHIC DIRE WOLVES! How cool is that?!"

And it's that last guy I'm aiming for. Dead between his eyes. Because there are books for the other two already, and they don't need my book.

Also interesting that this review calls the Jenny books a "true trilogy," while the Locus review calls them one novel busted up into chunks, and the Agony Column meditation-on-form says they straddle the gap between the two forms.

I'm really going to confuse the heck out of people with the not-a-trilogy of the Eddas books (All the Windwracked Stars, The Sea thy Mistress, By the Mountain Bound). Which are intended to be a three-book series that you can read in any order, and get an emergent story every way you read them. (Three novels about three characters, spread out over something like 2500 years, each novel focusing on a different member of the triad, though they all three get POV in each book. Yeah, it's a mess. If it was easy, it wouldn't be fun.)

And Worldwired, still not cyberpunk. You can tell by the complete absence, in this book, of any of the characteristic genre markers of cyberpunk. Well, okay, except for the odd mechanical limb. But those are practically de rigeur, these days. I think you can probably just scrape Hammered under the edge of the cyberpunk rubrick, because in large part it consists of deconstructing a bunch of cyberpunk tropes. (Locus's comment on the Jenny books re subgenre: "Hammered has a strong cyberpunkish center with annexes extending into other motif areas: ancient alien artifacts, nanotech, experimental stardrives, ecological breakdown, AIs, and the possibility of a posthuman condition. The series completions(s), Scardown and Worldwired, exapand deep into all those spaces and make story labels nearly impossible.)

Maybe we should call it syberpunk.... or use Chris Moriarty's term, Chick Punk. Because really, her book, not so much the cyberpunk either. Or the Punk.

Hey, kristine_smith, you listening? What do you think we should call this stuff? You're writing it too; get in here.

P.S. I call everything I write eco-Gothic, which is descriptive rather than a prescriptive subgenre kind of deal. And generally translates as, preoccupied with mankind's place in the natural world, and also dark and a bit baroque.

(Also, a hundred pages of gunfight, frantic interspecies negotiation, revolution, ecological breakdown, assassination, codeslinging , and fish kills aren't a climax? Dammit. I knew I left something out of that book...)

(No, I'm not actually arguing with the review. I'm kind of...meditating on the review. I'm too amused to work up a good argument.)

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Reflection's Edge also offers a lovely article from Hanne Blank, on researching for fiction: "Verisimilitude and the Competent Con."

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kateelliott on American Fairy Tales.

pecunium on General Pace, USMC.

jlassen has a novel solution for preventing rape: don't rape people.

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via slithytove: Avenging Unicorn Playset!

...damn, there goes the merchandising campaign for Blood and Iron.

Dark Echo says some nice things about the Jenny books, and also truepenny's Mélusine:

Elizabeth Bear's Hammered, Scardown [review website spellchecker issue corrected--eb], and Worldwired (Bantam Spectra) were released in January and July respectively with the third due in November, but consider all three as a single 1000-page mass market paperback debut novel.

They also liked Touched by Venom (recently seen sweeping the blogosphere), Elantris, and several other debuts.

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And ETA: The Chains that You Refuse is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Pretty good week, what?

ETA AGAIN. You know, when I posted this, there were some little addenda on it about supporting one's local bookstore or ordering through Powell's or another non-chain bookseller, in preference to Amazon. *sigh*

And there was also a cute little comment to the effect of being pleased I was winning the name-recognition wars with the flower arrangement book and the Santa mysteries, though I'm positive they're perfectly nice Santa mysteries and/or flower arrangements, and if you like that sort of thing there they are.

*sigh*

Livejournal is censoring me when I try to be amusing. But who could blame it?