© 2003-2006 David Moles
Chrononautic Log |
May 31, 200610 things I know about coming back from WisCon9:20 AM, Wednesday, May 31, 2006
(Love means never having to say you’re sorry to Meghan for stealing her idea. Right? I hope so.)
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May 30, 2006Wentworth syndrome*5:38 AM, Tuesday, May 30, 2006My con report: So there’s this kid, and he’s surrounded by candy, all his favorite kinds of candy. The kid is not eating the candy. Instead the kid is crying. The kid is crying because if he eats any one piece of candy, that means that at that moment, he’s not eating all the other pieces of candy. In case there’s anyone I didn’t tell this to already, that was my weekend. Also: I just dreamed that we all met up for a sort of PartyAtMyHouseCon in, I think it was supposed to be Kinshasa? And not a good neighborhood in Kinshasa. And even though it wasn’t the real Kinshasa, and even though I really want to see all you guys again, it didn’t seem like a very good idea. So, somewhere else, okay? Plane to Dallas in four hours. Plane to Zürich forty minutes after it lands in Dallas. Ugh. Condolences to everyone who had plane trouble yesterday; I’ll try to get my fair share in today. I’d settle for either a rocket car or a zeppelin, you know? Missing you already — — David aka Scary Editor Moles * Named for a Terry Pratchett character in, mm, think it was The Wee Free Men.
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May 27, 2006“...and I realized last year seemed like ten years ago to me.”9:28 PM, Saturday, May 27, 2006I keep forgetting that convention days are three times as long as ordinary days, because you work at them every moment of your waking life. And yet even though this afternoon is yesterday morning and yesterday is practically last week, Tuesday is still looming like it was tomorrow.
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May 25, 2006Holy genderf!@k, Batgirl!6:56 AM, Thursday, May 25, 2006Courtesy of Mr. Ruff, I finally discovered Ka-Ping Yee’s Regender website. It is cracktacular. It is da bomb. First, for humor value: Promise Keepers is a Christ-centered organization dedicated to introducing women to Jessica Christ as their Savior and Lady; and then helping them to grow as Christians. This is mainly accomplished through our Seven Promises and our women's conference ministry. Millions of women have participated since 1990 when PK first began. . . . Our Vision: “Women Transformed Worldwide” Our Mission: “Promise Keepers is dedicated to igniting and uniting women to be passionate followers of Jessica Christ through the effective communication of the 7 Promises.” Our Statement of Frank: • Summary Document • Full Document with Scripture References Promise Keepers is not a membership organization. Women and men of Goddess are welcome to participate in our ministries and join our mailing lists; but are only promise keepers to the degree that they individually live out their testimonies among those who know them. Second, for thought-provokage: “Every organism has its place in nature. That of man is at the foot of woman,” Tarl Cabot thinks while training her slave boy in “Beasts of Gor.” “Beasts” is Book 12 in the venerable and controversial “Gor” series of 25 science fiction novels written by Joyce Norma (the pseudonym of a philosophy professor at a respected university in New York). . . . In Gor’s violent, low-tech society, women are Women and men are slaves. This, the novels say — and say and say and say again — is the proper and rightful state of things because it is in consonance with the true evolved nature of the sexes. . . . There are free men on Gor — treasured fathers, brothers, sons and “Free Companions” to free women — but they generally sequester themselves with their children at home behind high walls. Their freedom, such as it is, is precarious. They are always subject to being kidnapped by a rival city-state’s raiders — or even outlaws of their own city — and forced into slavery. . . . In spite of the books’ reputation as female-centric erotic literature, there are, surprisingly, no really explicit sexual passages, and several of the books are written from a male point of view, tracing the characters’ acceptance of the “paradox of the collar,” that is, the “inner liberation” men find in a life of utter obedience to a masterful woman. . . . Whatever its narrative shortcomings, Norma’s politically incorrect world was once enormously popular. Hundreds of thousands of copies of her books were sold, and they were translated into several languages. Gradually, though, her work fell out of favor — some say it was spurned by gutless publishers and distributors in spite of audience demand — and it is largely out of print. It’s software, so, naturally, it’s not perfect. It runs into trouble with compound nouns (it’s not able to figure out Tarnswoman of Gor, for instance; not that you can really blame it), its handling of names is very clever but sometimes unintentionally amusing (the Promise Keepers site, for instance, offers “Our Statement of Frank”), and of course it can’t disentangle and rewrite complex societal cues. But reading its first draft of “Planet of the Amazon Men” was pretty surreal. I may have to clean that up and post it.
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May 22, 2006Ah, jet lag3:58 AM, Monday, May 22, 2006Nothing like waking up sure you’ve totally overslept and finding it’s still five minutes to six a.m.
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May 19, 2006Yep, pretty much8:27 AM, Friday, May 19, 2006Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You? You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out. (Via Patrick.)
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May 17, 2006Twenty Epics status update #29:58 AM, Wednesday, May 17, 2006Well, we’ve almost made it. The book is proofread, the cover is done, the introduction is written, and I’ve just uploaded all the files to the printer. Assuming nothing goes sideways when they actually try to print the things, we should have the first actual paper copies in our hands by — well, I was hoping the end of this week, but it turns out that Print “On Demand” means Print “In 3-5 Business Days,” so: by the start of WisCon, anyway. The bad news is that this doesn’t give us time to actually get the book into distribution by Memorial Day weekend, unless we want to trust that everything’s going to print just perfectly first time. Which might happen, but I don’t want to count on it. (If I had to bet on something going wrong, I’d bet on the maps coming out all pixilated. Which I could probably fix if I had to, but I’m hoping I won’t have to.) That being the case, while we plan to have a handful of advance reader copies at WisCon, and to start getting the book out to reviewers shortly thereafter, we’ve decided to push the official release date back to the first of July — sooner if we can manage it, but we want to make sure quality doesn't suffer. (And then I will never edit another anthology again.) (No, this time I mean it.) (No, really.) (No! Enough with the robots!) P.S. The web site is updated, though, and that’s the important thing! I plan to add expanded pages for the two books soon — don’t want to lose all those juicy author bios — but this should keep people busy for a while.
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Yes. Yes I would.7:50 AM, Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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Gaining on that tiara1:05 AM, Wednesday, May 17, 2006The highlight of my first WisCon was seeing John Kessel’s daughter crown Matt Ruff with the Tiptree tiara. I told Susan, I think it was, I’m gonna get me one of those. Or words to that effect. And I went off and in less than six months — lightning speed! — ripped out a little story called “Planet of the Amazon Women,” which I then sold to Strange Horizons. It didn’t win me a tiara, of course. But! Today Elizabeth Bear points me to that very Matt Ruff’s web site, whereon he has posted the Tiptree long list. Which is getting pretty close for a first try, I think. Thanks again to Jed and Susan at SH for some fantastic editing, and to the Fairwood writers’ group for some fantastic workshopping. P.S. Also, congratulate Meghan McCarron, if you haven’t already, for making the list with the hilarious and touching “Close to You.” To which, take note, there will be a kind-of-sort-of prequel in Twenty Epics.
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May 16, 2006How can you trust those untrained men out of doors? or, more Wiscon warmup1:19 AM, Tuesday, May 16, 2006I wrote a so-so paper on Indian women’s education when I was in grad school, but nobody told me that one of its pioneers also wrote science fiction, dammit. Viz: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream.” Originally published in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Madras, 1905. I became very curious to know where the men were. I met more than a hundred women while walking there, but not a single man. “Where are the men?” I asked her. “In their proper places, where they ought to be.” “Pray let me know what you mean by ‘their proper places’.” “O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.” “Just as we are kept in the zenana?” “Exactly so.” “How funny,” I burst into a laugh. Sister Sara laughed too. “But dear Sultana, how unfair it is to shut in the harmless women and let loose the men.” “Why? It is not safe for us to come out of the zenana, as we are naturally weak.” “Yes, it is not safe so long as there are men about the streets, nor is it so when a wild animal enters a marketplace.” “Of course not.” “Suppose, some lunatics escape from the asylum and begin to do all sorts of mischief to men, horses and other creatures; in that case what will your countrymen do?” “They will try to capture them and put them back into their asylum.” “Thank you! And you do not think it wise to keep sane people inside an asylum and let loose the insane?” “Of course not!” said I laughing lightly. “As a matter of fact, in your country this very thing is done! Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women, shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?” (Via The Valve.)
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May 14, 2006Wiscon travel arrangements11:55 PM, Sunday, May 14, 2006Anyone going to be driving up from Chicago on Wednesday (in time for the Meghan / Justine / Bear / KJF / Nalo Hopkinson panel at the Center for the Humanities) and driving back Monday? If not, I’ll rent a car. (In which case, anyone need a lift?)
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May 13, 2006False alarm1:40 AM, Saturday, May 13, 2006The nameless dread thing? Figured it out. My problem, not yours. Never mind.
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May 12, 2006The translator and other machines8:23 AM, Friday, May 12, 2006Via Ben: Take a story or blog entry you wrote, or a few paragraphs thereof. Pop it through as many Google Translate round trips as you feel like. Feel free to de-translate words that get marooned, if you know the language. Clean it up. You may change paragraphing, punctuation, and parts of speech (tense, case, person, and number) and add (but not subtract) the words “the”, “a”, “an”, “is”, “and”, “it”, “of”, “in”, “for”, “but”, and “or”. She is thin. The muscle, she is dark. As for her, and her, there it is, with Moussa. In the short khimar, the black hair that you spoke of, is the single stage of the thing. which is removed. (At the point where that bends, considerably; and she, from the light.) Write it. It meets, but for the boy, together. The curtain is complete. That is the car, but me, my thing is not closed. The screen whose two (because of the thing) is small, is almost with someone. Because it is to be many, or it is not; a thing that for a new one was made. The air is my student. “Her, with me” – but it is for the rear section of the saddlebag on which is it written. And my position? A hiding place, and my accent. It is measurement: of the lava, of the smell of the spice, of being rough; for that, it did not know a method. I taste of the foreign country and of my danger. For that, it was excited; think of that, that but a little spoke, to her. Using the product of European culture -- the shoes, and the history, which you write -- because of me; it is the structure of the sincerity which is specification. That is a large number. The fact that it is, and that it loves, that -- together from the history of an early stage: For the woman, it is inferior. But punishment, now? For loving the person? That is good; it starts in that. That acceptance is the substituting; it is the possibility that remains. (From the profile, perhaps; but that is not writing.) And there is Hippolyta. But, however, there is a woman, because of the place. Approximately? It was that, perhaps. But it was from the place. And someone has deceived. Night dream: track, truck and person. Always, that it does not, is meet; and to those, it is, and securely. This is young, but that it estimated one (but for the students) — do I make it foolish? From evening, following it to an emergency, that it looks at it all: shed either one, it comes. Returning, it is on her. For it is in the rear section, and it ignites with the lower part. But, first, sleep. I go out, that is the finger which I lead. And I move the ram liquor of the wife. But for the fact that it is I, it is all heads; and that, feel you have remembered. The girl is this thought that we want to have learned. Her craving is the prospect that it is suitable from another bed, and mine, for I am in the position of satisfaction. I go, out of time. It is the shout. Or you laugh. And that, I do not know.
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Goddamn nameless dread12:18 AM, Friday, May 12, 2006Why do I suddenly feel like something awful is about to happen and I’ve forgotten to prepare for it? (And why am I asking you when hardly any of you are awake?)
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May 11, 2006To our correspondents in Poland and Antelope Valley10:18 AM, Thursday, May 11, 2006Kindly take your philosophical feuds elsewhere, sirs. If you have something on-topic to say here, you have my email address. If not, no one’s stopping you from getting your own weblog.
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May 10, 2006If it ain’t fixed8:03 AM, Wednesday, May 10, 2006Elizabeth Bear has a nice post about what it means for a book to be broken. So, a book can be"broken" in a lot of ways, but what it boils down to is that the narrative machine does not function. Not that it has dings on it, not that it grinds a little, but it just doesn't work. Examples are when the writer has to resort to TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) character actions or Deus Ex Machina to resolve plotlines. When characters must behave in an out of character fashion to make the book come together in the end. When the pacing is off, or the thematic resonances are set up badly or in a confusing fashion, so the sonar-image of a satisfying theme does not emerge from the echoes. When there is no click, at the ending, when it falls into place. When you hold the book in your head, give it a spin on a fingertip, and you can see it wobble because the center of gravity is off somehow. (And I have no shit seen a wobble so big the book crashed and went bouncing across the room fixed by adding three paragraphs to the end. I am not kidding.) This is a tricky tricky thing, by the way, because so much of it is subjective, and readers project a good deal of themselves into the narrative machine of a novel. They do, in other words, some of the heavy lifting. A reader who clicks with the inner squiddy nature of a book can patch a hell of a lot that's wrong simply by bringing his experience in to oil the gears and spackle over the gaps, to mesh with the machine. But yeah, what I mean when I say broken is something deeper and more basic than a dent on the fender. Crucial to note is that among other things, for a book to be broken means the book might be fixable. Of course, that’s only helpful if you’re the author and the book isn’t published yet, but still.
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Mouse/Cylon hybrid discovered in North Carolina12:01 AM, Wednesday, May 10, 2006Okay, that’s not what they say, but the inference is clear to anyone who’s watched Battlestar Galactica season two. Three years ago, Wake Forest researchers discovered a mouse that could not get cancer no matter how hard they tried to give it the disease. Now, they said white blood cells from that mouse's descendants were injected into ordinary mice with cancer and their disease was completely wiped out. (Via Jeremy. I have to confess to a certain chagrin at seeing what I thought was the show’s single hokiest bit of technobabble replicated in the lab. . . .)
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May 9, 2006Fun with machine translation4:24 AM, Tuesday, May 9, 2006Inspired by Ben’s discovery of a Chinese bootleg of his story “Embracing-the-New,” and his machine translation of it back into English, I ran a few paragraphs of “Planet of the Amazon Women” through a few Google translators, looking for found poetry. Of that, the best I found is probably the English-Korean-English: In the unreality which is born with the thing together each one and with the thing the together different person define my thing with the real thing history of my oneself to under justice it was incorrect together with Hippolyta, Hippolyta. That was attempting the fact that the presumed engine talks to me, it is. That it passes from some feeling and is not fraud. We lead and untranslatable the picture of remembering and imagining we see a past. . . . But the most amusing, considering the story, has to be finding the word “anomaly,” after translation into Arabic and then back into English, transmuted to “homosexuality.”
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May 8, 2006WTF? follow-up6:24 AM, Monday, May 8, 2006Anybody going to WisCon should read Belle’s latest CT post as a warm-up.
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May 6, 2006WTF?7:08 AM, Saturday, May 6, 2006No, I mean really WTF. Belle’s WTFs don’t begin to cover it.
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May 5, 2006¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva Juárez!8:01 AM, Friday, May 5, 2006Porque soy un californiano, he celebrado el cinco de mayo todo mi vida; pero como la mayoría de americanos creía que estaba la día de independencia mexicana. Es solamente ahora que he aprendido que en verdad el cinco de mayo celebra un evento mucho más interesante: la primera victoria, en 1862, de la guerra contra las tropas imperiales de Napoleón III, una guerra que comenzó para una razón muy moderna: el negando de los deudas internacionales que Mexico debía a los poderes europeos. Supongo que normalmente los E.E.U.U. tambien invadieran, como su costumbre, pero tenían sus proprias problemas cerca de este tiempo... De hecho, después del Disgusto Reciente, los E.E.U.U. apoyaban las fuerzas republicanas de Benito Juárez contra el régimen francés. Supongo tambien que es parcialmente porque la día no celebra una victoria contra los Americanos que ahora es tan bien aceptado por allá. :) Después del cinco un ejército francés mucho mas grande hizo un contraataque (o un contra-contraataque), y instaló el Archiduque Maximiliano como el emperador de Mexico. Era cinco años mas antes que Juárez y sus republicanos depusieron y fusilaron el emperador, pero ahora es este primera victoria que celebramos.
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May 2, 2006Second-best story idea I’ve heard all year3:22 AM, Tuesday, May 2, 2006“The world of ideas doesn’t really need another grad student hauling the brains of dead Marxists around in his suicase.” (The best story I’ve heard this year, of course, is this one:
“. . . And this one is called New Saturn.” From Karen’s son Jeremiah.)
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May 1, 2006News flash: Ebooks still neither E nor books7:10 AM, Monday, May 1, 2006If I was running Fictionwise, and I wanted to make it difficult (but not strictly impossible, ’cause that would be cheating) for readers to browse their SF section, I’m not sure I could improve on what they’ve got. (Also, a warning to anyone contemplating being as stupid as me: if I wanted to make an ebook format more painful to use than Adobe Secure Reader 7, that format would have to somehow pull out the reader’s fingernails with hot tongs. Would someone explain to me what the point of downloading a file is if you have to connect to the internet every time I want to read it? No? Talk about DRM that punishes the legitimate purchaser . . .)
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