Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I call this batch "A Sound of Thunder" for reasons.... 



For those that might not be familiar: "A Sound of Thunder" is the Ray Bradbury story in which a time traveling tourist goes back to the age of dinosaurs and is warned to stay on the predetermined path. They end up stepping off the path, accidentally killing a butterfly, and famously think, 'Ah, well, at least it wasn't anything important,' only to discover the world is monumentally changed by this single, 'insignificant' act. The term "the butterfly effect" was coined, in part, due to this story.

I made these nerdy cookies in order to share them with my cousin Tracy who lives in Saint Louis. She's a former chemist and all around geek, so I suspect that they will make her smile.

Yesterday, besides making and decorating these, I finished our Yule decorations, including prepping our Yule Log.  Our Yule Log is birch and was 'liberated' (read: stolen) from the Eloise Butler Nature Center by Shawn and our mutual friend Julie, back in the 1990s. We drilled three holes in it for candles and every year I staple some pine boughs to it and decorate it with pine cones and ornaments. If I remember, I'll take a picture of it at some point. It sits on top of our piano, which serves as our mantle, where we hang our stockings.

Yesterday, I also hung out with naomikritzer who has finished up her yearly "Gifts for People You Hate" post over on her WordPress blog, which is always a delight to read. 

Thanks to a conversation with her (and then again later with my wife Shawn) about the Loscon 45 incident with Gregory Benford, Shawn and I started to read the link he posted to about victimhood (in lieu of an apology) that seems to imply that people are just too sensitive today and are over-exaggerating issues of oppression in what the authors consider today's "victimhood culture."  Okay.  I'd been feeling sympathetic with Benford having been escorted out of the con in the middle of his signing--which I still think was overkill--but maybe just apologize for some bad behavior too? Instead of linking to an article that basically implies YOU PEOPLE ARE TOO SENSITIVE?

I think there are a number of issues going on here.

One of them is going to be an on-going problem until the next generation decides they whether or not to fully invest in the culture of live, in-person science fiction conventions, and, that is, "you get what you pay for." Which is to say that panels like the one Benford was on are assigned on VOLUNTEER basis.  

It sounds, in fact, like LosCon _tried_ to have decent representation on this panel--a woman panelist was a no-show and there _were_ two people of color on the panel (which led to Benford's other alleged comment about Latinx names having "too many" vowels for him to properly remember them). So, this con had enough volunteers to attempt to mitigate the "old, white guy" problem. Unfortunately, the more incidents like this, the less women and PoCs feel WELCOME both in the audience, but ESPECIALLY at the table, as it were--to volunteer to be on the panel. So, this sort of thing is likely to remain an issue until we swing the demographics in our favor--and provided that that's what we want. That is, people may chose to abandon cons entirely. I'm not sure I would blame the next generation if they did just that.  

Let me just say, that I love going to science fiction conventions and have been doing so, as a fan and as a professional, since some time before the internet.... which was when cons were particularly useful, as it was one of the ways to find one's fan group, one's people.

The thing is, I recently did a podcast with my friend Minster Faust, who is the author of COYOTE KINGS OF THE SPACE-AGE BACHELOR PAD (among other things.) I met him at a science fiction convention, NorwesCON, when we were both up for the Philip K. Dick award. He's Canadian and a PoC and when we chatted, WorldCON 76 was blowing up, and so we talked about all of this. He was very leery of the benefits of attending cons-because travel is expensive (in his case, international), and the question is: do you get anything out of it other than a slap in the face? I spent some time trying to convince Malcolm that the sense of community was worth it, but I ended up stopping myself from pushing that idea too hard, because this girl has all sorts of privilege that Malcolm would not. And, it's not just an issue of systematic racism, which is absolutely a factor, but also because I have a ton of advantages, including being well-known to my local capital-F, Fandom (which is to say, the in-person, con-going community, as opposed to a specific interest group) AND living in a town where you can hardly turn around without hitting a local science fiction convention that only costs me, at MOST, the price of admission. 

A lot more people out there are in Malcolm's shoes than mine, which is to say that they are trying to make financial decisions (as writers or fans) about travel, hotel costs, food expenses, etc., and weighing the question of "is all that money worth it" against the whole series of issues, including very basic ones, like, will they even get impanelled, as it were, being somewhat "unknown"? Add to that concerns of having to deal with being misgendered in the programming material or being actively harassed on a panel for having too many vowels in your name or just looking around thinking "WTF, am I the only [queer, trans, PoC, disabled] person here?? How uncomfortable is this??"

So, to me, this is the number one issue that these incidents like Benford's blow-up and non-apology represents. The more crap like this happens, the less likely it is to convince people that cons are a worthwhile venture. If fewer people show up, the smaller the list of panel volunteers there will be, and... you guessed it, the more of these fails will happen because all that will be left are the dinosaurs...

The other general issue that things like this keep bringing to mind is that authors of a certain age, but really, all of us, need to understand the ways in which "the interwebs" have changed con culture.

It used to be, back in the late Jurassic, a person could say something that was maybe even just an innocent "failure mode of humor" (= a$$hole) and only offend the 70 or so people in the room.  Now, you say something like that and there is a statistically significant chance that it might go viral. Or, at the very least, if you are an "esteemed con guest" be noteworthy of a site like File770.

I have no idea to the extent to which Benford's comments were, in fact, the failure mode of humor, but it doesn't matter.

As an author, he should know that authorial intent really doesn't mean diddly if the audience doesn't read things that way.  This is a lesson learned I learned in critique group when I was twenty-five years old: if six or so people, out of the seven who read your work don't GET the point and, in fact, take it the opposite way you intended the scene to read, you have FAILED to express the scene appropriately and the story needs revision. That's just how writing works. And, as it happens, real life. If you fail at a joke and accidentally fall into failure mode (aka a$$holery), you can apologize and try to be better the next time, aka, a kind of revision of the story of your life.

/rant

Anyway, the cookies are delicious. And, apparently, Mason's favorites.

I need to get to work on my revisions, but first I have to rant about my own stupidity. I was looking at fiction markets for a friend, and I noticed that there were a few that will take reprints and I started thinking, "What do I have that I could consider sending in?" My mind went back to my very first published science fiction story, "Twelve Traditions" which appeared in the May issue of SF AGE (now defunct.) I have about two zillion paper copies of the magazine because, as I mentioned, it was my first EVA professionally published short story (technically I'd sold "Irish Dreams" to Dreams of Decadance, but at the time that mag was considered semi-pro.)

Do I have an electronic copy of that story anywhere?

Oh, sure, one of those little square disk-thingies probably has a version of it, but do I have one on any media I can ACTUALLY READ!!!????

No.

The ironic part of this? I should know better. My partner can laugh right into my face when she reads this. Shawn, if you don't know, is an electronic records specalist (among her many duties at the Minnesota Historical Society) and I've listened to her practice her talks about migration and all the things you need to do in order to keep your files readable in the future.

I should also note that my made-of-awesome archivist partner DOES, in point of fact, have CDs which we can still read on our tower computer that have back-ups of all my writing files from as far back as September 2001. Given that the short story I'm looking for was published in 1999, I had hope that I would have kept an electronic copy of it... but no. So all the blame falls squarely on my shoulder. In fact, I can very easily see me saying to myself, "Well, this is in print now. Why would I ever need another copy of it?"

I have a partial of it on my website, but not the whole thing. I think one of my weekend projects after I finish my revisions and do some more work on the NEW short story I've been plotting, is to sit down with the magazine and re-key the damn thing.

*sigh*

I was going to post this over at Wyrdsmiths, but I noticed Kelly was in the queue and decided to let him go first.  

 

I just found out that a friend of mine got dropped by her publisher.  She was in the middle of a series and, “due to lackluster sales” they pulled the plug on her W.I.P. 

 

I’ve been there.  It hurts.  The worst part of it is that, in the current publishing climate, this sort of thing happens more often than we’d like to think about.  As I said in my post over at SF Novelists about pseudonyms, while many authors are ready to point out bestsellers that don’t “deserve” their success (just think back to the flack around Bridges of Madison County,) even though they should know better, they’re often more than willing to believe that books die due to quality alone.  The unspoken implication is that if you’d written a better book, it’d still be in print.

 

This is a lie.  It’s also a very hurtful one, because the nature of writing (and its life of rejections) is already full of self-doubt.  It’s often easy for a writer to believe they sucked themselves out of a book contract.  And stop writing.

 

Maybe you think I’m crying sour grapes.  After all, my books tanked.  When my second book was remaindered I was looking for other professional writers to talk to about it – commiserate, talk shop.  I cast around and someone who’d been through this sort of thing was recommended to me.  I sent her an email.  This writer, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, later told me she’d read my book, “just to make sure” before talking to me.  Make sure, she didn’t have to say, that I didn’t actually deserve my fate… and that the books were actually “good.” After determining that, she felt free to give me career advice.

 

It was hard to listen to any advice this author dispensed because I knew (even though it had happened to her!) that part of her bought into the publishers’ big lie: that good books do well and bad books die.

 

As much as we like to gripe about how the other guy is merely a hack, truly bad books don’t make it over the transom.  An entire team of people, including the bean counters, approve a book before an editor makes an offer to a writer (or, rather a writer’s agent, who also had faith in the book enough to try to sell it).  Also keep in mind that “lackluster sales” for a mass-market book often count in the tens of thousands.  Books that are critical successes – not only loved by reviewers, but also by award committees – still tank.  (Think about Megan Lindholm). 

 

Also, there are a lot of factors that completely fall outside of anyone’s control (even the publishers’), like readers’ trends.  It’s absolutely true that a cover sells a book, but it’s still a big question as to what it *is* about a cover that gets readers to pick it up.  There are lots of theories:  one of the reasons you often see people’s faces on the cover of books is that it’s generally believed that readers’ respond positively to an image of a person on the book.  Apparently, they like it even better when that person is looking directly at them.  Of course, books aren’t normally shelved with their covers’ facing outward, so the book has to do even more than catch your eye to people to pick it up.  What that is is anyone’s guess – publishers have admitted that a lot of this stuff is completely baffling to them as well (see NY Times article).

 

Books fail.  It’s just the hard cold truth of today’s publishing industry.  It’s nobody’s fault.  The only thing a writer can do is keep writing.