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MarsCON Tonight!
Mar. 6th, 2015 08:46 amToday is the first day of MarsCON.
Looks like registration opens at noon, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to figure out when Opening Ceremonies is... I do have a panel at 4 PM, which I planned to arrive in time for. Hopefully, they won't need me too much before that since I have to pick Mason up after school, and he's not usually out until after 3 PM.
It's going to be a bit of a mad dash.
I've got a reading tonight and, of course, it finally hit me that what I should read from is the book that will be available there: SONG OF SECRETS, which I co-wrote with Rachel Calish. Depending on how much of that I want to read, I could also read part of my short story "God Box" which appeared in KING DAVID AND THE SPIDERS OF MARS as I'm thinking about bringing copies of that book along as well.
My schedule tonight is:
How Come Nobody’s Heard Of Me, Dammit!!
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) -- Friday 04:00 pm
Let’s figure out all the things we did wrong!
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, mod.; Rachel Gold, Michael Merriam
Fiction Reading: Lyda Morehouse
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) —Friday 08:00 pm
Come hear our Author Guest of Honor read her work.
With: Lyda Morehouse
FanFiction - Who, What, and Huh?
IV Hawk’s Ridge (Anime/YA) — Friday 09:00 pm
From the basics for the beginners to your favorite websites to share your own stories.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Rakhi Rajpal mod, Bailey Humphries-Graff, Susan Woehrle
In other news, Shawn is doing a lot better. She's still sleeping a lot, but I suspect that's what comes from removing an organ. But, she's otherwise back to doing most of the things she does. She's still restricted on lifting and OMG I can't wait until that's over, because I HATE DOING LAUNDRY SO MUCH.
I do a lot of other things around the house, including nearly all of the cooking and dish washing, but laundry has always been Shawn's thing and I can't wait for her to take it back. Also, I'm ready for her to go back to work, if only because the longer she stays home the more likely she is to notice how little ELSE I do around the house.
*wink*
I just got the notice that THREE-BODY PROBLEM is ready for me to pick up at the Roseville library. I'm headed there in about a half hour to also return ANCILLARY SWORD, which *cough*I didn't finish.*cough* This will now be two out of the six books up for the Nebula that I just couldn't finish for one reason or another. As I was saying to Shawn last night, there's nothing _wrong_ with ANCILLARY SWORD, per se. I gave it a fair chance: nearly 200 pages. I just never got really engaged in the story. I found the world.. too stiff and formal and unemotional (which is weird because I think it's loosely based on Japan or China--there is a lot of bowing and tea and begging of pardons), and so I never connected. For me, it suffered from a whole lot of 'so what?' I finally found a character I sort of enjoyed, the alien translator, and, well, not to spoil anything, but let's just say my attachment to that person was short-lived.
I feel very strange about my inability to connect to either this or ANCILLARY JUSTICE, since so many people recommended the first book to me and it was up for nearly all the awards last year. I feel like I failed this book. Like there's something wrong with me that I didn't 'get' it.
Certainly, there are nifty things going on in Leckie's universe. I love the idea of the ancillary's themselves, even with their gruesome past. I love (though found it somewhat off-putting and jarring at first) the whole use of the feminine pronoun for all the things. Leckie's writing is strong--for the most part.
Leckie is hobbled by the constraints of her main character, Berq, though. Because Berq used to be a ship (for real, she was a space ship), she's not exactly *in* her body. She's not sensual in any way. There's no physical description of other characters beyond basics like skin color and a bit about hair. Gender, of course, is never attached. Which is so much the opposite of the other books I've read by women this year--so much body: so much sex with the body, so much awareness of the body's gender, so much indulging of the body with food (glorious food!) and pissing and shitting and bleeding and f*cking.
And I miss it.
I feel "floaty" and unanchored without it.
Add to that the emotionlessness of Berq and her culture, and I'm lost. Berq often has to *tell* me what she's feeling, rather than showing it physically (also something to do with this emotionless culture Berq is from). "I'm angry all the time" I read, and I thought, "You are? Since when? and Why?" (which seems like a major misstep, if I'm supposed to have known, much less felt it, too.)
Because of all this, I end up just not feeling it. Any of it.
I really wanted to like this book too. And I just didn't.
At any rate, I intend to bring my laptop with me to MarsCON over this weekend, so hopefully, I can regale you all with daily con reports.
Looks like registration opens at noon, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to figure out when Opening Ceremonies is... I do have a panel at 4 PM, which I planned to arrive in time for. Hopefully, they won't need me too much before that since I have to pick Mason up after school, and he's not usually out until after 3 PM.
It's going to be a bit of a mad dash.
I've got a reading tonight and, of course, it finally hit me that what I should read from is the book that will be available there: SONG OF SECRETS, which I co-wrote with Rachel Calish. Depending on how much of that I want to read, I could also read part of my short story "God Box" which appeared in KING DAVID AND THE SPIDERS OF MARS as I'm thinking about bringing copies of that book along as well.
My schedule tonight is:
How Come Nobody’s Heard Of Me, Dammit!!
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) -- Friday 04:00 pm
Let’s figure out all the things we did wrong!
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, mod.; Rachel Gold, Michael Merriam
Fiction Reading: Lyda Morehouse
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) —Friday 08:00 pm
Come hear our Author Guest of Honor read her work.
With: Lyda Morehouse
FanFiction - Who, What, and Huh?
IV Hawk’s Ridge (Anime/YA) — Friday 09:00 pm
From the basics for the beginners to your favorite websites to share your own stories.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Rakhi Rajpal mod, Bailey Humphries-Graff, Susan Woehrle
In other news, Shawn is doing a lot better. She's still sleeping a lot, but I suspect that's what comes from removing an organ. But, she's otherwise back to doing most of the things she does. She's still restricted on lifting and OMG I can't wait until that's over, because I HATE DOING LAUNDRY SO MUCH.
I do a lot of other things around the house, including nearly all of the cooking and dish washing, but laundry has always been Shawn's thing and I can't wait for her to take it back. Also, I'm ready for her to go back to work, if only because the longer she stays home the more likely she is to notice how little ELSE I do around the house.
*wink*
I just got the notice that THREE-BODY PROBLEM is ready for me to pick up at the Roseville library. I'm headed there in about a half hour to also return ANCILLARY SWORD, which *cough*I didn't finish.*cough* This will now be two out of the six books up for the Nebula that I just couldn't finish for one reason or another. As I was saying to Shawn last night, there's nothing _wrong_ with ANCILLARY SWORD, per se. I gave it a fair chance: nearly 200 pages. I just never got really engaged in the story. I found the world.. too stiff and formal and unemotional (which is weird because I think it's loosely based on Japan or China--there is a lot of bowing and tea and begging of pardons), and so I never connected. For me, it suffered from a whole lot of 'so what?' I finally found a character I sort of enjoyed, the alien translator, and, well, not to spoil anything, but let's just say my attachment to that person was short-lived.
I feel very strange about my inability to connect to either this or ANCILLARY JUSTICE, since so many people recommended the first book to me and it was up for nearly all the awards last year. I feel like I failed this book. Like there's something wrong with me that I didn't 'get' it.
Certainly, there are nifty things going on in Leckie's universe. I love the idea of the ancillary's themselves, even with their gruesome past. I love (though found it somewhat off-putting and jarring at first) the whole use of the feminine pronoun for all the things. Leckie's writing is strong--for the most part.
Leckie is hobbled by the constraints of her main character, Berq, though. Because Berq used to be a ship (for real, she was a space ship), she's not exactly *in* her body. She's not sensual in any way. There's no physical description of other characters beyond basics like skin color and a bit about hair. Gender, of course, is never attached. Which is so much the opposite of the other books I've read by women this year--so much body: so much sex with the body, so much awareness of the body's gender, so much indulging of the body with food (glorious food!) and pissing and shitting and bleeding and f*cking.
And I miss it.
I feel "floaty" and unanchored without it.
Add to that the emotionlessness of Berq and her culture, and I'm lost. Berq often has to *tell* me what she's feeling, rather than showing it physically (also something to do with this emotionless culture Berq is from). "I'm angry all the time" I read, and I thought, "You are? Since when? and Why?" (which seems like a major misstep, if I'm supposed to have known, much less felt it, too.)
Because of all this, I end up just not feeling it. Any of it.
I really wanted to like this book too. And I just didn't.
At any rate, I intend to bring my laptop with me to MarsCON over this weekend, so hopefully, I can regale you all with daily con reports.