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Solaris Rising, Women Falling?

Solaris Rising, Women Falling?

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solaris_rising2I was consistently impressed with The Solaris Book Of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann, which published three annual volumes between 2007 and 2009. Solaris Books is relaunching the series as Solaris Rising (shipping in October) under new editor Ian Whates, and I’ve been looking forward to it.

A while back Kev McVeigh at Performative Utterance noted the following rather dismaying statistic:

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction by Boys volume one has Mary A Turzillo as token feminine contributor. One woman from eighteen listed authors. Volume Two is obviously the feminist volume with a remarkable three women out of fourteen involved…. It’s back to normal for Volume Three as fifteen stories allow room for just one woman…

It might be tempting to just blame editor George Mann for this. Perhaps it really is just his personal taste. After all Ian Whates is now on board, and he published an excellent all female anthology for Newcon Press, Myth-Undertakings. His Solaris Rising might reflect that? No, nineteen stories, 21 contributing authors, just three women.

What I’ve chiefly been dismayed about is the  reaction from some of the SF old guard, which quickly attacked Kev and his arguments in various newsgroups. This was an irrelevant stat (they said), and the percentage of women contributors had no bearing at all on quality. After all, if If Solaris was against women writers, why were they bothering to include any at all?

To put it bluntly, old guard, you’re missing the point. Wake up.

About five years ago I experienced exactly the same criticism as Ian and George. Someone (I honestly forget who) did the math on the first six issues of Black Gate and figured out that I’d published only 15 stories by women, out of a total of 51 – roughly 29%. Right about this time Rich Horton started reporting on the percentage of fiction by women in his yearly short fiction summations. At first I had exactly the same reaction as the old guard – this is a load of crap. I pick the very best stories sent to me; case closed. I deeply resented any implication otherwise, and considered the entire argument a waste of time.

I was, in short, a complete idiot.

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Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings wins the David Gemmell Legend Award

Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings wins the David Gemmell Legend Award

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the_way_of_kingsBrandon Sanderson’s novel The Way of Kings (Tor) is this year’s winner of the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2010.

The list of nominees, including Peter V. Brett, Markus Heitz, Pierre Pevel, and Brent Weeks, was announced in April. Sanderson was nominated twice — once for The Way of Kings, and once for Towers of Midnight, his posthumous Wheel of Time collaboration with Robert Jordan.

The David Gemmell Legend Award is a fan-voted award administered by the DGLA. The Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel was first granted in 2009, to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves, and last year’s winner was Graham McNeill’s Empire: The Legend of Sigmar.

The Ravensheart Award for best Fantasy Book Jacket/artist went to Power and Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts (HarperCollins Australia); illustrated by Olof Erla Einarssdottir.

The Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer/debut went to Warrior Priest by Darius Hinks (Black Library).

The complete details of the awards ceremony are available at the DGLA website.

Estate Your Business Part II: A Writer’s Guide to Organizing a Literary Estate

Estate Your Business Part II: A Writer’s Guide to Organizing a Literary Estate

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cemetery-smallFirst of all, let me say hello and introduce myself. I’m an author of about half a dozen published short stories, one of which has just come out from Black Gate. I also, once upon a time, went to law school and for six years I worked as an attorney, first at a large firm, and then as a solo practitioner in northern New Mexico. I did real estate, contracts, and estate planning.

Northern New Mexico is crawling with writers and their kin and given I was active in the writing community it naturally followed that I did quite a few literary estate plans. I have since gone inactive in the bar, moved to London, and had two children who don’t ask me a lot of legal questions to keep me on my toes (yet), so please don’t rely on this post for hard and fast legal advice. I can, however, provide some general guidance about literary estates, what they are and how you get one.

What happens if I don’t have a literary estate?

That has already been answered on this site in Bud Webster’s illuminating first Estate Your Business post. In it he documents his hard work on the SFWA Estates Project, and all I can add is, don’t bank on there being a Bud Webster on the planet when you pass on. With a few simple precautions you can keep your body of work available to publishers, and thus available to earn money after your death, without a saintly individual like Bud burning up the phone lines to find whomever inherited your copyrights.

Bud explained what happens when you don’t have a literary estate, and I hope he convinced you to get one.

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Behind the Plague of Shadows

Behind the Plague of Shadows

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Pathfinder Tales: Plague of Shadows, by Howard Andrew Jones. Coming February 2011Over at Flames Rising, Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones talks about the genesis of his Pathfinder novel Plague of Shadows:

I pitched [editor James Sutter] “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I wasn’t planning to lift the character or the plot, but I hoped to evoke a similar feel… I’d never written anything with orcs or dwarves, and while I’d scripted an evil sorcerer or two, they’d never been Pathfinder magic users. Writing deals in a lot of archetypes, and fantasy gaming fiction tends to wear those archetypes proudly on its sleeves — the elven archer, the surly half-orc, the mysterious wizard. I embraced those archetypes and tweaked them, as any gamer would when designing a character for play. I planned out scenes that would put the characters in conflict so I could get a better handle on who they were and what was important to them.

I started writing within a day or two of getting my outline approved, and pretty quickly I realized that I needed to stat out my main characters. I’ve been gaming regularly with a variety of systems since I was about 9, but in all that time, I’d never rolled up story characters prior to writing about them… I kept the rule book handy so that my spell descriptions would match, as closely as possible, the spiffy descriptions drafted by the Paizo maestros.

You can learn more about Plague of Shadows here, and the complete conversation with Howard is at Flames Rising.

Pottermore Revealed: Unique “Online Reading Experience” says Rowling

Pottermore Revealed: Unique “Online Reading Experience” says Rowling

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pottermorescreenHarry Potter author J.K. Rowling announced this morning (video here) that she will be releasing

“something unique: an online reading experience unlike any other. It’s called Pottermore. It’s the same story, with a few crucial additions. The most important one is you. Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader. The digital generation will be able to enjoy a safe, online reading experience built around the Harry Potter books.“

She claims that this new website will include not only the ability to buy digital audiobook and e-book versions of the Potter series, but also that she will be directly involved with the community, revealing tidbits about the universe which she’s known for years but which never made it directly into the novels.

youtubepotterscreenFor about a week, rumors have been swirling across the internet about the exact nature of Pottermore, since Rowling established a website by that name and a mysterious countdown clock appeared on YouTube (shown below).

Speculations ran wild throughout the week, fueled by tantalizing clues, some of them intentional, such as an online Google Maps-based game, and some unintentional, like the discovery that Warner Bros. had registered the website for trademark as a “global information computer network.”

Rowling and her spokesmen have been quiet on the details, except to stay that it is definitely not a new novel set in the Harry Potter universe, but still some have wondered if it was the long-anticipated Harry Potter encyclopedia, which Rowling has hinted may someday be released for charity.

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Writers of the Future: The 24-Hour Story Experiment

Writers of the Future: The 24-Hour Story Experiment

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Tim Powers decides to teach geometry instead

Numerous memorable exchanges occurred during the week I attended the Writers and Illustrators of the Future workshop as one of the winning authors. Many of the more outrageous I can’t quote here (the Workshop is a “safe” environment for people to express opinions they wouldn’t in public, such as conventions), but here’s one my favorites that I feel is quite safe out in the open:

Me: [To Eric Flint] I’m interested to know the sources you used to research the Thirty Years’ War. Because, I’m also a Thirty Years’ War buff —

Eric Flint: For God’s sake, why?

Yes, being a scholar of the Thirty Years’ War does cause people to look at you askance, even another person who has done extensive research into this most anarchic of Early Modern wars. Suffice it to say, I simply cannot help my attraction to the madness of that long, gory, indecisive war. Magnificent madness.

At his acceptance speech during the awards ceremony, writer Brennan Harvey (who is no relation to me except now as a good friend) stated that “K. D. Wentworth and Tim Powers filled my head up to here,” making a motion far above his forehead. “I don’t even know what I learned yet.” That’s the best way to put it. In that week, the experience of listening to advice from a who’s-who of the best in speculative fiction made it sometimes feel as if I were getting machine-gunned with data. I wrote as fast as my hand could go over my notepad, and eventually I’ll sort it all out and see what sticks the most. However, the sheer mass of it made me realize that I can’t do a single blog post to cover what happened during the week. So I will focus on one item at a time.

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Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

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The Adventures of Captain MarvelSerial storytelling is something of a mystery; even more so, perhaps, than most storytelling. When done right, it seems to hook an audience, to get them to invest heavily in the story being serialised. But for whatever reason, most serial forms have been pigeonholed as strictly popular arts; serial storytellers have generally been assumed to have a low amount of literary ambition. These presumptions about serials, and the way the form works, have always intrigued me — the more so since I’ve set out to write a serial prose fantasy of my own.

Let me try to define what I mean by ‘serial.’ The OED has “(of publication) appearing in successive parts published usually at regular intervals, periodical,” which is a start. More precisely, I’m talking about a narrative told across many installments, usually on a regular schedule, with each installment except the first and last expected by the audience to be incomplete, but usually containing some element of a genre or other story convention which will satisfy the audience.

Every installment of The Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial made sure at some point to have the titular super-hero in costume, using his powers, and usually also included fight scenes, detective work, plot twists, and exotic locales — because that was the sort of story it was, and that was what audiences were looking for. Individual chapters (or issues) of a serial may play about with these conventions — like an issue of the Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man, in which scripter Stan Lee apologised for not having the hero fight a villain in that particular issue, something unusual in the mid-60s. But go too far, too often, and you just end up telling a different kind of story — like, say, Scott McCloud’s Zot!, which started as a retro-adventure-hero story, and ended up becoming an examination of adventure fantasy and how it contrasts with realism.

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Why Do You Like to Write? The Story of Janelle

Why Do You Like to Write? The Story of Janelle

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mead-notebooksWriters of the Future Volume XXVII is now available for pre-order from Amazon. That any book with my work in it is available on Amazon blows my mind.

Anyway . . . this week I started writing some more observations on my experience at the Writers of the Future Workshop, but somehow got sidetracked into the rest of what you’re going to read. So I’m delaying more WotF until next week.

“Why did you become a writer?” or “Why do you like to write?” These are variants of the same question — one that most writers, whether career authors, part-timers, or hobbyists, encounter many times. The simplest questions are the trickiest to answer, as the Tao Te Ching points out: “Straightforward words sometimes seem paradoxical.”

Here are my straightforward words to answer both these questions: I enjoy telling stories by using words in interesting ways.

Now, to confuse the issue and make it paradoxical, allow me to tell you about a girl named Janelle.

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Going Commando: The Endless War Between Pantsters and Outliners

Going Commando: The Endless War Between Pantsters and Outliners

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Outlining makes you more attractive to the opposite sex.
Outlining makes you more attractive to the opposite sex.

Human beings are sort of odd. That might be why we love examining our motives and actions so much. In fantasy, the traditional alternative races, such as elves and dwarves, have certain views about humans, and, if you were to ask any elf or dwarf you might meet how they felt, they would likely hew closely to the party line. The same goes with science fictional alien races. Their cultures have pretty much set viewpoints on how humies act, and they are generally not impressed.

One of the odd things about the humans, perhaps the most odd thing (according to these non-human viewpoints) is that we are generally given the full spectrum of viewpoints to choose from. Some of us distrust elves, and some of us have been raised with an unshakable hate for the bog-leapers of Epsilon Sigma. But then there are those humans who adore elves, and others who organize “Save the Bog-Leaper” campaigns. Humans, you see, can hold any viewpoint.

But that, obviously, is a far cry from accepting that diversity. We tend to caricature, pigeonhole, and stereotype other viewpoints, cracking that smooth continuum of opinion into a mere handful of glittering shards with massive generalizations filling in for what’s lost in the process. This makes the complexity of human thought approachable, and understandable, but it’s pretty irritating sometimes, especially when an opinion is contrary to a strongly held opinion of our own. Suddenly certain other humans are little better than bog-leapers themselves.

Outlining before writing is one small example.

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Writers of the Future: I Got an Illustration . . . and an Interpretive Dance!

Writers of the Future: I Got an Illustration . . . and an Interpretive Dance!

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with-framed-acolyte-illustration1chelsea-as-hallett-1I have returned after a two-week hiatus from Black Gate. It was a — busy time.

To get this out of the way first: Yes, I gave a shout out to Black Gate in general, with John O’Neill, Howard Andrew Jones, and Bill Ward in particular, when I accepted my award at the Writers of the Future Ceremony on 15 May 2011 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. (Here is the video of my section of the event, starting with the dance.)

When I started to write with the aim of publication — I don’t remember the exact moment when my love of writing began to seem like a possible profession, but it occurred about fifteen years ago — I liked to imagine a time when a professional artist would make an illustration of one of my books or stories. However, I never imagined that professional acrobats and dancers would create an interpretive dance of one of my stories as well.

I received many great gifts from my time at the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Workshop in Hollywood last week. Some are the tangibles like publication in a major anthology, a gala awards ceremony, my first official book signing, and payment. Some gifts are social, like a new network with the other winners as well as with the many celebrated writers and illustrators who make up the judging panel and the workshop teachers. All of us at the workshop will carry away a lifetime’s worth of advice, on everything from story construction to the best way to avoid getting a cold while on a book-promotion tour, from people such as Tim Powers, Robert J. Sawyer, Gregory Benford, K. D. Wentworth, Eric Flint, Dr. Yoji Kondo, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Kevin J. Anderson, Dave Wolverton, Rebecca Moesta, and Mike Resnick.

There’s plenty for me to say about the experience of the workshop and getting published in Writers of the Future Vol. XXVII, and I will say more in future posts. But for this post, I am going to delve into the purely emotional and personal high points: the picture, and the dance. The first I knew was coming — and it was better than I could have imagined. The second I did not expect — and no surprise could have been more sublime.

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