I'm not familiar with this webzine but boy, does someone like the book. Thank you.


The Fantasy Times

A quote:

"Inferno is the utmost in genre goodness from the heart of the horror annals. Although there is no ‘theme’ to this anthology, there is an overarching sense of taking the best of every type of genre story, mix it with odd circumstance and then mashing it into a piece that cannot be put into a stereotype of horror fiction (zombies, cultists etc.) Instead, the anthology gives those of us who wish to send people to good examples of horror fiction a text book, of sorts, to learn from. There is something for every type of genre reader and can serve as a gateway to the dark fantasy/horror genre."

I only got 500 words on Sunday, because of climbing at Ragged Mountain and personal obligations. Still, it's 500 words I didn't have before.

The climbing didn't go so well. We were having an extraordinarily bad rigging day, and only managed to get one route set up properly over the course of pretty much the whole afternoon. (Don't ask. *g*) Anyway, I did about thirty feet of it (a 5.8) before I hit a patch I couldn't get over. Or, I might have been able to get over it if I were stronger and less terrified. Which is the same as saying I couldn't get over it.

It shames me to admit it, but I am discovering that, so far (and unlike everybody else I know, real and fictional) I don't really like climbing outdoors. This may change as I get more confidence, but I currently find it entirely too scary to be fun. It's physically much easier than climbing indoors, but the adrenal response kicks my ass, and I find it very, very frustrating. (I'm not big on adrenaline, honestly: a little bit is okay, but large quantities make me feel like crap for days afterwards.) And then afterwards I'm very ashamed of being so scared of the whole production. Also, I'm a bug magnet, which I don't mind so much while hiking, but there's a lot of sitting around in this endeavor.

So today I'm tired and don't want to work and I didn't even accomplish much of anything yesterday.

Also, because the Yellow Face Burns Us, I picked up a sunburn, and today I have a sun headache. Because we were hiking up and down the damned rocks to try to rig and re-rig the ropes, though, I did get about 3.5 miles closer to Lothlorien.

If the weather isn't completely terrible, I'm going to try some indoor climbing tonight. Which means I should dose up on naproxen now, and hopefully the headache and neckache will go away and leave me be. And I'll keep plugging away at the outdoor thing, though it's mostly a time-eating pain in the ass right now. And you know, a thoroughly humbling experience, but pretty much everything in my life (guitar, work, relationships, the self-education of the writer) is that.

Art.

Man. Is there anything in the world, this side of raising children, that's a more humbling experience than making your living as an artist? It's so amazing to watch people respond so very differently to the exact same piece of work. One will call it cold and distant, another emotionally manipulative, a third sentimental, and the fourth will write to tell you that you have captured their experience exactly, and rain blessings upon your head for putting that in words upon the page.

It's enough to make you shrug your shoulders and write to please yourself, I tell ya. And yet, when I think about it, I have a pretty nice life. I get to spend my workdays in front of a picture window and eat garlic for lunch without my cubemate complaining. (She complains about everything else, but not my garlic breath.) And it's a nice job, making things. It feels like contributing, a little.

And now, I have to make bread and cook this pork roast before it goes bad, and also go write some pages.

Tags: falling off perfectly good rocks
mood: grumpy
music: Jethro Tull - The Chateau D'Isaster Tapes

The first five people who reply to this post, and who re-post this challenge: YOU WIN!!!

For your prize, I will send you a gift.

It might be something I've made, or something cool from my hidden stash of obscure grooviness. It might be a rubber duck, or a toy, or a pretty picture, or a book I think you might enjoy. A useful object, a tchotchke, a piece of jewelry, or something else that is taking up room in my house.

Whatever it is, I promise I will get it to you in 30 days of your posted comment or less, and you must e-mail me your mailing address. Even if you think I already have it.

E-mail your address to me via Live Journal (gnomi [at] livejournal [dot] com)

Tags: meme
mood: creative

All the way back on March 10th, elfwreck posted this comment:
"I'm annoyed that it seems that the only way to teach my child to defend herself from verbal bullies at school is to arm her with counter-attacks -- because even non-violent children don't often have the patience and tolerance to step away from a conflict directed at them. (And because children, unlike adults, don't necessarily stop when the conversation becomes pointless, and don't limit themselves to subtleties. The GASVD books don't have any advice about what to do when the verbal attacks consist of four kids in a circle saying 'you're stupid and fat and ugly and lazy.')"

And that has been worrying me ever since. [This is not elfwreck's fault; I am by nature a worrier, and have had seventy-one years practice.] What I'd like to do here, as a first step toward a response to the comment, is post a brief excerpt from some guidelines on pp. 161-162 of The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids. Just in case that might be helpful.


Excerpt


1. Always remember that your language behavior is the model that the youngsters you interact with use to learn their language behavior.

Often this won't be obvious on the surface. You may feel that the children around you are as different from you as rabbits are from seals. But if you're someone constantly present in their language environment, even children who "wouldn't be caught DEAD!" using your slang or wearing your clothes or otherwise copying you will still acquire your language strategies -- your methods for handling conflict, for getting your way, for persuading others, and so on. The child will also acquire your nonverbal communication system, which carries almost all the emotional information and does most of the communication work. This gives you an awesome power, both to help and to harm. Use it wisely.


2. Don't lecture children to teach them something; model it instead.

The temptation is always just to tell. It's quick and easy to say to a child, "What Bill just said to you was an example of a verbal attack pattern. Here's what you should say back...." It's quick and easy to say, "The reason you're having trouble communicating with your math teacher is because you're touch dominant and she's sight dominant. Here's how you fix it...." It's harder and slower to make sure your own language behavior models the principles and techniques the kids need to know -- and to give them plenty of opportunities to see you demonstrating those principles and techniques. It's also much more likely to succeed.

In emergencies, when speed is the most important thing and there's no time to worry about the niceties, you may have to just say "This is how you do it. Say this:......" When a child asks you a direct question about the way you communicate, you should answer with explicit instructions and explanation. But always remember that that's not how language learning happens, not for youngsters.

You never told your children, "This is how you make an English yes/no question: Take the first auxiliary verb and move it to the immediate left of the surface subject position in the sentence." They learned how yes/no questions are made by observing the examples all around them and using their innate ability to figure out the rule from the raw data. They learned it so well that they'll never have to think about it again. The best way to teach kids communication is to provide the data and let them work out the rules on their own, so that they will internalize them the same way they internalized all the other rules of their grammar.

###

Hi there--

Just learned I shall be at WisCon in Madison WI--arriving on Friday afternoon and departing on Monday afternoon.

I would love to meet up with congenial souls, so please let me know if you're around and available for a coffee or a get-together!

Sorry to be off line _again_--I returned from the Caribbean honeymoon (a month away was a very good thing)and spent March moving stuff, helping family move, sorting out the apartment of a deceased friend . . . it was a lot going on plus of course taxes.

Then I started my new job April 1! It's a really fun job and has the advantage of being a startup inside of an established company, so steady paychecks and stability. But all of this change and work in my life has meant that (as usual) LJ gets pushed to the background.

Anyway, I'll check back and also check around on LJ too about WisCOn. Hope to see you!

Tags: madison, travel, wiscon
Current Location: NYC, PHL, MKE
mood: happy

lnhammer and bondgwendabond say useful things about the problems with assuming YA and adult SF/fantasy publishing is a zero sum game in the first place. Because with the exception of a few lines like Starscape and Mirrorstone, YA SF/fantasy isn't sold by imprints of adult lines, but mostly by completely separate imprints of completely separate publishers that think of themselves as YA imprints first, with SF/fantasy, mysteries, adventure stories, gossipy contemporary novels, problem novels, and all the rest sold side by side.

From a YA imprint's point of view, that YA fantasy trilogy is competing not with the adult fantasy trilogy on the other side of the bookstore, but the bestselling Gossip Girls book and the award-winning animal story on the same shelf, as well as with other YA fantasy trilogies. A YA reader is debating between Stephanie Meyer and Judy Blume, not Scott Westerfeld and George R.R. Martin.

One could argue that in spite of this in the big-picture view adult sales are still dwindling because folks are shopping in the YA section, but I'm not sure I'm convinced it's quite so cause and effect. I think--especially since there are differences in the types of stories being told even when you factor out the coming-of-age thing--that it may be more like adult SF/fantasy is for complicated reasons failing to connect with older readers as well as it used to, at the same time YA SF/fantasy is succeeding in connecting with younger ones (and some adults) in greater numbers than before--that these two things are happening for two mostly different reasons.

As lnhammer and bondgwendabond say, the two "genres" really do act mostly independently of each other, and there are only a few people who even could decide to focus on YA instead of adult SF/fantasy because it sells better.

Tags: writing business

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/oFec/~3/288655251/reviewing-mail-week-of-510.html

Yet another slow week; it may be time to wonder if the publicists have abandoned me for younger, hipper, flashier bloggers. But I will soldier on with what I have, and drag in some other stuff to fill out this column as well...

Both of the books that came in the mail this week were from the mighty Ballantine group (of the far-flung Random House empire) -- first was Daryl Gregory's first novel Pandemonium. Pandemonium is coming in trade paperback in September, and it sounds like an odd contemporary fantasy -- for the last fifty years or so, random people have been possessed by "pop-cultural avatars that some call demons." One possessee -- former possessee, or so he thought -- is the main character of the book. That seems odd enough, but the back cover copy also promises that the novel contains Philip K. Dick and a group called the Human League. So Pandemonium is clearly something out of the ordinary -- and I remember Gregory from his fine story "Second Person, Present Tense" of a couple years back, so he can be very good when he's on top of his game.

The other actual submission this week was Jennifer Stevenson's The Brass Bed, which has a very paperback-romance cover. I won't say that I was about to ignore it, but it didn't look like any of the things I usually read -- until I realized the author's name was oddly familiar. Stevenson's first novel was Trash Sex Magic, which Small Beer published back in 2004 and which is still sitting on my gosh-I'd-like-to-read-these-someday pile. So suddenly Brass Bed became an object lesson in the different ways of packaging (or maybe even of writing) fantasy novels set in the modern world and featuring a lot of sex -- Trash was aimed at the "classy" end of the market, in trade paperback from a small press and with a subdued cover design. Brass Bed, on the other hand, screams mass-market, from its bright colors to the reading line quote: "More fun than pillow fighting naked!" And sometimes we assume "not published in a classy way" equals "trashy book," but that is only an assumption. Brass Bed is the first in what will be a paranormal romance series about Jewel Heiss, a consumer investigator in a Chicago filled with odd, inexplicable magic. I might just have to read this one -- I don't think I've read anything explicitly published as paranormal romance before, and I'd like to see how the romance genre accommodates a series in which the heroine (apparently) deals with some kind of sex magic in each book. Brass Bed was published on April 29th.

I also made a trip to the library this week, so I'll stretch this post (and give you a preview of some other things I hope to review soon) by listing some of the books I picked up there.

Mary Roach's Bonk has been a bestseller recently, but I really picked it up because one of my colleagues just read it and really enjoyed it -- and her highest praise is that Bonk is a book all about sex, but she didn't find any of it creepy. (I suspect I have a much higher tolerance for creepiness than she does, so I might find it a bit tame.) Roach is the author of Stiff (about dead bodies) and Spook (about ideas of the afterlife), both of which have sounded interesting but neither of which I've read. It takes sex, I guess, to drag people like me in the front door. Bonk is all about the scientific investigation of sex, rather than being a sociological look at different sexual "weirdos" (like so many book in this same general publishing area), so I hope to learn something.

Vampire Loves is a graphic novel by Joann Sfar; I've read his Little Vampire and some of his work on the Dungeon series. This is also published by First Second, who have been bringing out a lot of good work lately. I grabbed it partly for those two reasons, and partly because I think I need to be better-read in French cartoonists in general.

I know I read about Shinjuku Shark (by Arimasa Osawa) somewhere recently, but I can't remember where. This is the first novel in a Japanese hard-boiled police procedural series about a tough detective in a seamy Tokyo district -- the series has been wildly popular over there, and this book won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award, which looks like the Japanese equivalent of the Edgar. Shark is from 1990, but it only made it into English sometime late last year. And it's published by Vertical -- I've been impressed by their publishing choices in manga, so I figured I should see what they're doing in fiction.

And last is Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, which I first got three weeks ago and just renewed, since I still want to find time to read it. It's a modern werewolf novel set in L.A. and told in verse, with great quotes from Michael Moorcock, Gregory Maguire, David Mamet, and Nick Hornby. How could I not read a book like that?

I have a revision letter! I have a lot of writing for this one section (of which I only did one draft, so I am not surprised)! I haven't written any of it yet!

Friday night, I read over the letter to make sure the eunuchs were safe [they were], and then saw Iron Man and drooled over Robert Downey, even when his character was obnoxious, because I have a Thing for him which apparently nothing can dampen.

Saturday, I read over the letter again and deliberately did things like wrap some books to mail and put away laundry. Then I made many notes. Then I went to lawbabeak's bday party all afternoon and into the evening. Sunday, I made more notes, then had lunch with feklar and some shopping, then went home and made more notes.

I guess I have to start writing soon.

Editing/revising is much easier than zero drafting. It's so much easier to make something better than to have it spring, fully-formed, from your head.

Tags: writing process

http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=743

James Frey’s latest book Bright Shiny Morning gets a rave in the New York Times.

Wait until they find out that this novel is actually a memoir.

More seriously, if Frey has come out of this whole experience as a better writer and a less grasping opportunist, well, then, good for him. Nice to see people have a learning curve.

That said, I could probably say something here about the irony of a writer who has screwed up so badly as Frey still getting lots of ink while other writers of similar or better quality who plug along not lying about their text toil in obscurity. But in fact it’s not irony, it’s just superior marketing.

Does anyone happen to know where the epicenter for today's quake in China actually was? From this news story, I can't tell. Sixty miles northwest of Chengdu is right about where we were in 2005 and I'm worried for the people in Tangjiahe, Pingwu, and Wanglang.

(And selfishly a little freaked that if this had happened two years ago, my hub would have been right in the middle of it. Aiya! But obviously right now, I'm more worried for the friends we made there and the people trying to eke out an existence on those hillsides...)