Yesterday, Jersey Girl in Portland flew down to San Jose. We ran into Richard Lovett on the plane, and shared a cab to the convention hotel. Once there, the afternoon became a blur of old friends and new that I couldn't possibly do a sane job of listing. At the author signing, I was seated between John Scalzi and Joe Haldeman, with Connie Willis and Stephen Gould on the far end, safely out of range from me. Signing was busy and a lot of fun


DNA transfer between myself and John Scalzi

After the signing, Jersey Girl and I went to dinner with C.E. Petit, Catherine Shaffer, and the Locus crew, led by the indomitable Liza Trombi, along with Francesca Myman, Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw.


DNA transfer between myself and Francesca Myman of Locus while Catherine Shaffer looks on approvingly in the background

Post-dinner, we hit the reception at which the Nebula nominee certificates and pins are handed out, along with drinks and photography. It was fun to stand with Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu and Lawrence Schoen. We were only missing Nancy Kress. And I am in awe of both Aliette and Ken for their across the board strength on the award ballots this year.


(Most of) the Best Novella ballot lining up to be photographed for the later restraining order

Eventually I retired early for a crappy night's sleep.

Today my parents show up, as does my aunt and uncle, as does the_child. My profound thanks to Crystal Black for making her trip possible. Plus a ton more friends.

Tomorrow, I am off to Rio Hondo at the crack of doom.

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Photos © 2013 N. Schaadt. All rights reserved, reproduced with permission. As usual, more at the Flickr set.

Your Saturday moment of zen.



Test tank interior at Hanford Site, 2008. Photo © 2008, 2013, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

"Into the Gardens of Sweet Night" by Jay Lake — A review of my 2003 Hugo-nominated novella.

Stone Age Cinema — This is cool.

Brain Stimulation Can Boost Math Skills — The study was small-scale and is not something that should be replicated at home, because of the possibility of harm/ Ya think? (Via David Goldman.)

Farm Equipment That Runs on Oats

Huge Rock Crashes Into Moon, Sparks Giant Explosion

Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds — Of more than 4,000 academic papers published over 20 years, 97.1% agreed that climate change is anthropogenic. Reality's well-known liberal bias is not an inherent property of the physical universe. Rather, it's an emergent property of conservative privileging of ideological thinking over evidence-based thinking. Conservatives would serve themselves and the country as a whole a great deal better if they relied less on arguments from authority and more on arguments from reality.

Justifiable Cause — The Obama administration is making the case for conservatism better than Mitt Romney ever did. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The Great Benghazi Conspiracy and Republican Forgeries — As I said on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, GOP makes up fake White House Benghazi emails, cons news with fakes, now can accuse White House of covering up when real emails are released. Classy. The worst part, it works. Keeps their white men angry over outright lies.

QotD?: Have you handicapped the Nebula ballot?

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5/18/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA)
Hours slept: 4.25 hours (solid, but yikes!)
Body movement: n/a
Weight: n/a
Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0
Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

The contract for Gin & Tonic #3-#4 arrived in my inbox, and has been gone over. I will say that reading the marked-up pdf on my iPad mini was more enjoyable than trying to wrangle the legal-size paper Simon & Schuster still uses.  Anyway, it reminded me that #3 is due in SEPTEMBER, not October as I had in my mind, so the pace on that's been picked up a bit.

I'm still knee-deep in reading submissions for Entangled, trying to get back into the editorial mindset of "scan-for-brilliance."  I know the skill set's intact, it's just taking a while to reclaim.  Two projects that were almost-but-not-quite, and one that's probably-not-sorry.  This is the brutal part of the editorial job, and the one that many people sneer at, but my job here is to find the best stories I think will sell the best, not to make allowances or be gentle.  :-(

Meanwhile, I'm working on the on-spec manuscript, and juggling my two long-term freelance clients, and going through the final stages of production for PROMISES TO KEEP for the kickstarter release.

So yeah... if I've been quiet lately, all that would be why.

I still haven't seen either Iron Man #3 or the new Trek, mainly because I'm a social movie-going creature and nobody's schedule seems to be syncing up with mine.  *sighs*  But soon.

Coming up:  BEA and the related chaos thereof, and then a brief pause before I'm into the whirlwind of HEART OF BRIAR's release, and the related book-pimping. The sightings-and-signings page has been updated, and will continue to be updated on a probably-weekly basis... (so if you have a bookstore or book festival you think I should swing by, let me know!)



Originally published at Writer. Editor. Tired Person. You may comment here or there.

Read this Outline on Rena's Hub of Random on WordPress.

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Dreamsnake on Amazon

Dreamsnake on Powell's Books ***Cross-posted from Dreamwidth***

She basically had a meltdown when someone rolled a crit-fail on "how to handle draggy kid." So we came and got her. The meltdown was sufficient that we begged off the tooth reconstruction because she thought she wouldn't be able to handle it. (At least it reinforces that when we keep her home from school, we have reason to do so.)

Then she went and slept for a few hours. She may've revived a tiny bit with a frappe and food, but she's still pretty draggy.

I have managed to take care of two, count them, two older emails that I owed responses to! Woo.

Havva Quote
The need for a substantial bond to secure payment of costs and fees from Prenda is not an idle request. Prenda Law, Inc. and its associated lawyers are an organization that is rapidly falling apart. They have dismissed the vast majority of their pending court cases across the country—cases which are their sole source of revenue. Meanwhile, as the days go by, they are increasingly being hit with new motions and orders to show cause for sanctions in various courts[1] where they have tried, with mixed success, to escape from the consequences of their actions. Further, the lawyers and the entities involved here are likely the subject of potential criminal investigations, including an IRS investigation, flowing from the court’s formal referrals in the sanctions order below. In short, there may not be any solvent persons around to collect from for much longer.
--http://pietzlawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/4-Response-to-Emergency-Motion.pdf
(Lawyer snark!)

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http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/015099.html

I really don't want to get back into the business of being a big critic of Wikipedia, a site I use every day. But if, like me, you use it and care about it, you really should read the article Andrew Leonard has on Salon today: ""Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Wikipedia."

As Andrew asks: if this has been going on, with (up until today) no consequences to its perpetrator, what else don't we know about?

Ebay has now changed its policy so that it holds the money for you when you sell something. Isn't that nice. Bad enough that paypal always sides with the bitchy customers and ebay stopped letting you warn sellers against customers through negative feedback (which is why I don't leave feedback as a seller). So that's pretty much it for ebay. I may repost all of my sales like once a month, but at this point it ain't worth it to sell on ebay. Especially since reposting the sales every week is just costing me more than what I make off of it.

Amazon Vine has decided to go ahead with that stupid 100% within 30 days rule. They did limit it to the books that they have given this year so that all the old books for review are no longer in need of reviews. I suppose that makes some sense since a book review three weeks after publication is automatically more valuable than a book review 3-4 years after publication (hell some of these books have gone out of print by then). But it's still bullshit since it means that in order to get more books you either have to now make sure to read the 4 books (or 5 or 6) that you get a month or just write fake reviews based on the other reviews and the editor reviews. In one fell swoop, Amazon has turned all of its happy customers into Leonard Pierce - faking reviews in order to just get more free stuff.

Granted, professional book reviewers (like Leonard Pierce once was) should be able to read a book within a week and churn out a review of it. Ok, PW demands 4 months in advance to make sure that there is someone with enough time to read and review your book, but that's PW. Other reviewers get them - what? - a month or two in advance. And they get a bunch.

On the other hand, professional book reviewers get paid for it. Granted, I could get on that freelance. That's the way that ethical freelance writers work.

So that's that. For years, I was buying stuff and then selling it on Ebay. Or getting it for free from Amazon Vine and selling it on Ebay. Now I will still sell on Ebay and still get stuff for free but it won't be the same. I will feel bad about writing bad reviews. I will not add new stuff on ebay unless I am absolutely certain that it will sell. Instead I will donate my books to the local Goodwill. I figure I need to give tzeddaka more anyhow.

Sassafras, a mostly female Viking a capella group, are doing a Kickstarter to raise money to produce their new album Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok and to produce the play version at Balticon, and to film that so those of us who can't be there can see it later. I think they're awesome, and some of them are dear friends. Their music is one of the things that's been enabling me to be this productive this little while -- there are samples on the web page, I especially commend to your attention the song "My Brother, My Enemy" which is a duet for Odin and Loki.

Support nifty people working with interesting mythology! Give them some money! They're offering all kinds of great things at different levels.

And, I've offered to write two poems for them as stretch goals, one about Odin if they reach $10,000 and one about Loki at $14,000.

The Odin one would be posted here, and the Loki one initially sent to subscribers and then posted here in the fullness of time.

I have already written the Odin one. It's about Odin hanging on Yggdrasil, and it's quite long. If they don't raise enough for me to post it, in the true spirit of Ragnarok I will destroy it utterly and delete the file.

relayed from malkingrey
For anyone out there who might be considering applying to the Viable Paradise Writers Workshop, the application period for this year closes on midnight of June 15th. Class size is twenty-four — with eight instructors on-site for the entire week, this makes for a fairly impressive teacher-student ratio (the nautically-minded among us like to think of it as hitting them with a full broadside.)

Viable Paradise is a one-week† residential workshop held annually in the autumn on the island of Martha’s Vineyard; the focus is on fantasy and science fiction, and the students can submit either short stories or an equivalent portion of a novel for workshopping.

†Why one week, rather than six weeks or a month, like some other workshops? Because not everybody out there in the world can free up that much time in one block. Students can, and people who have already committed themselves to some kind of major lifestyle change, but other people have things like families and day jobs. But almost anyone can hack out a single week — take that overdue vacation from the office, or stock the freezer with a week’s worth of pre-made casseroles and indebt yourself to your mother and your mother-in-law and the teenager next door for the necessary babysitting, and come spend a week with people who actually understand why you’re still obsessing about this writing thing.

In other areas, I've been doing Netflix either as hand relief or when it's been too hot to have the computer on safely (upstairs here retains the heat, abysmally well).

Some recent goodies: Indian film Lagaan, which means land tax, but if you think that word is boring, or the fact that the storyline is about sports (in this case cricket), well, it is and it isn't. Ordinarily I think it is impossible to find anyone less interested in sports than I am. But the three hours of this film snapped by because the characters were so compelling, the music so wonderful, the visuals so transcendently vivid. Wow. I think my only complaint is that one really gallant character got shoved into insta-love resulting in a Ruined Life, totally not deserved (nor did I believe said character would be so wimpy), but that is pretty minor.

Another really good one was Tony Palmer's documentary on the Salzburg Music Festival. Another three hours that passed by in a whiz. Rich with interviews with music stars, artists, descendants of same, it details the history of the festival, which was first proposed right before WW I broke out, then carried forward as a way of recovering from the war. When the Nazis overran Austria, they took that over, too, but after they were gone, their long shadow lasted in ways you wouldn't expect. Then there was the modern era (some felt overnight arrival with Karajan's death), and its sometimes problematical ways of making classical music hip, or bringing modern music to modern people.

I'd been wary because I'd once been burned by Palmer's self-consciously 'absurdist' documentary on Peter Sellers, which reminded me of the worst, most self-indulgent excesses of the early seventies. I recollect so much of that attitude kind of formed around the Beatles and the "If I poop on a plate, it's art" vibe. But he'd clearly got past that stage in his documentary making.

Another lovely one was called "Under the Tuscan Sun," a female-made film. The central woman is dumped by her husband who manages to take her house away, too. After the requisite period of shock (some of it is painfully funny) she is given a ticket to Italy by her best friend, who is now pregnant and can't go. So she goes, and ends up buying a wreck of a house, and tries to fix it up. As she does, she collects a family of oddballs, in this glorious countryside--a feelgood film. Wonderful acting.