Untitled, for now

: doc_lemming; July 8th, 13:17

I'm trying to find a reference I once read about how the term "urban fantasy" is becoming a marketing term that doesn't mean any more what we once meant by urban fantasy. Topper and other Thorne Smith books would not be included.

I haven't found that, but I have found some links that might be of interest. So:

Carrie Vaughn's analysis of urban fantasy:

And some others:

It's interesting how the last fellow sees urban fantasy as coming more from the mystery end of things than the romance end. Hamilton seems to straddle the two, first picking one, later the other.

Edited later: Here's the posts I was thinking of--Lilith Saintcrow's discussion of modern urban fantasy. Unfortunately, I was wrong in that she doesn't get into the marketing discussion.

And a commentary on the first post of hers: http://ofblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-tripe-hos-skanks-feys-rants-and.html

Tags: publishing categories

Spam ravings

: doc_lemming; July 7th, 11:27

I've been getting a lot of spam lately that's putatively from me.

I think there's a failure in the spammers' algorithm. But it just irritates me that someone might think I wouldn't remember sending myself something about, say, lottery winnings.

Oy.

Moves: REC or Quarantine?

: doc_lemming; July 7th, 9:47

So Thursday night I'll have the opportunity to watch the kind of scary movie that no one else likes.

I'm tempted to watch either REC or Quarantine (the North American remake).

Suggestions?

(Or should I just catch up on my cult movies and watch The Faculty? Or Once Upon A Time In The West?)

Losing air pressure

: doc_lemming; July 4th, 3:25

So suppose you have a hole in your spacecraft--maybe a fist-sized hole that reaches from the vacuum of space to your living environment. The common wisdom (among SF fans) is that you slap something flat over the hole and air pressure keeps the air in. (That was Pat Harris' solution in Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust" and Heinlein used somebody's butt cheek in a story.)

I suspect not. I have an anecdotal comment from someone who repaired vacuum pumps as part of his job. Air molecules are tiny and slippery, and apparently things had to be just so to get the vacuum pump to make a vacuum. That is, the air molecules kept rushing to the vacuum.

Books and butts are not made smooth enough to keep an atmosphere of pressure in. I think you'll need a patch made to be a patch.

But I would love to see it tested. Somebody want to call the Mythbusters?

Tags: space

Black Gate

: doc_lemming; July 2nd, 12:58

I notice Black Gate has closed to fiction submissions again. Good thing mine is already there as part of the backlog.

well, now i feel guilty

: doc_lemming; July 2nd, 0:29

Have a story at Heroic Fiction Quarterly. They request no queries before 60 days, so I sent a small query note at 61 days. (They have no autoresponder, so I didn't even know that they had my MS.) Got a response back quite quickly that my story is in the next 15 to be looked at. They just hadn't gotten to it yet.

My interpretation is that they're swamped with submissions. At least, more than the time they allotted for reading submissions.

So I feel badly that I added to the workload. Maybe if they had an autoresponder ("we got your sub") and upped the do-not-query time to 90 days? The autoresponder is crucial, though: it soothes the minds of paranoids like me (or should that be "like I"?).

Tags: writing

Flash fiction

: doc_lemming; June 30th, 12:05

I've been thinking about flash fiction lately.

( Read more... )

Tags: metafiction

Writers of the Future: an ongoing saga

: doc_lemming; June 20th, 10:28

So the current procedure is that you receive an email acknowledging receipt of your story (if you included an email address), and to ensure that you got it, you should send one back.

It's been 36 days since I mailed it, so that's nice, and I won't hear anything more until after the end of the quarter (the end of September), and then only if I win something. So that's done. (Though the story was written pre-brain tumor, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I often think that my creativity came out with the tumor. Fortunately you don't need a lot of creativity to be a published writer.)

( and in other writing news... )

Tags: wotf, writing

Idea du jour

: doc_lemming; June 18th, 10:30

Based on

bonniers post about the second Iron Elves book, namely this: "These elves don't fear metal, they sacrifice parts of themselves for the power of muskets."

So suppose the reason we have the technology we do is that wayyyy back in prehistory, humans sacrificed some aspect of themselves to be unlike the other Fae and handle iron without harm. We are, in fact, warlike dwarves. :)

The question is, what did we give up?

(Hmmm. I just realized I should call this Idee du jour, but I can't figure out how to do the accent properly in my web browser. So it will continue to be Idea du jour.)

Tags: ideas

Why have a prologue in your novel?

: doc_lemming; June 17th, 13:54

This post subject to changes as people say smart things. ( Actual article after the cut )

Tags: writing

Dogs in fantasy?

: doc_lemming; June 13th, 8:47

On about ten seconds of reflection, I can't think of many dogs in fantasy. I mean, dogs that are important characters, sidekicks to the heroes or whatever. The Harlan Ellison one, "A Boy and his Dog," classifies to me as SF. Most Clifford Simak dogs are SF (I won't claim to having read enough Clifford Simak to know everything). All I can think of, at this moment, is Barnaby is the Sandman comics, and I'm not sure he even qualifies as important.

There are wolves as the villains, sure, but dogs? What am I missing?

Tags: dogs

Aliens in SF

: doc_lemming; June 12th, 11:56

Somewhere, probably in Wolff's Notes (which doesn't exist on the web any more) is a note from a writing course where the author teaching the course opined that aliens exist to comment on the human condition. (It was a big name author; I'll look it up later.) That statement has always been opaque to me. Between all the biology and chemistry and world-building, that part never seemed to gel.

Having read James Patrick Kelly's Think Like A Dinosaur, I wonder if one way to do them might be as follows:

Given a problem with a number of solutions, most of which are abhorrent...
...the alien thinks one of the ahorrent solutions is perfectly reasonable.
Conflict ensues, either between the humans and the aliens or between the humans with the aliens acting as cheerleader for one of the solution--that the human in fact think like the dinosaur

It doesn't matter for the purposes of this model whether the human accepts the alien point of view (and changes to do the unpopular thing), or doesn't accept the alien point of view (and therefore defines what he or she chooses to do as human).

Just thinking.

(I wouldn't call it an epiphany; maybe a hemidemisemiepiphany.)

Tags: metafiction

What does "sympathetic character" mean?

: doc_lemming; June 12th, 9:33

What with one thing and another, I eventually ended up on this page http://www.amypadgett.com/2006/09/creating-sympathetic-characters.html, which offers one solution. Having seen one too many Dean Koontz characters, I think I agree with the intent, though I have to think about the specifics of the answer. (Agreement might only mean that it reinforces my preconceptions.)

Apparently there's a sequel, which I haven't read yet. http://www.amypadgett.com/2006/10/more-on-creating-sympathetic.html.

I have to run to a meeting, so I'll just ask, Anyone know anything about Amy Padgett?

Tags: metafiction

So how does WotF work nowadays?

: doc_lemming; June 10th, 12:24

An open question. I only know one Writers of the Future entrant, and he went on to win the quarter and that year, so he's perhaps not the best data point. (Also, it was a while ago.)

According to the web site, winners are notified; what about losers? (Yeah, I have such high hopes. )

Also, there are four quarters to the year--how long after the end of a quarter do they announce the results?

Tags: wotf, writing

Huh.

: doc_lemming; June 5th, 8:38

Current Mood:: aggravated

I have been making backups, even if irregularly, for over ten years now, but until now, I have not needed to get anything from any but the most recent backup.

Last night I discovered that I don't have a good way of storing and sorting my backups.

Well. The GM notes for the As Above, So Below adventure might be lost forever. (Not that it's a huge loss, but I wanted to cannibalize some of the research material about Newton that I had written there.)

So: It's not enough to make backups, you need to store them in a sensible location.

Tags: computers, writing

Idea du jour

: doc_lemming; June 3rd, 21:17

Vampires can't cross running water, but I know of no legend that says they can't cross still water. (Still water used very effectively by Alan Moore during his run on Swamp Thing.)

So the resting place for the vampire is a cistern built into a hundred-year-old house. Underwater.

(Oh: some legends say that the vampire must rest in his native soil, but he could well have put it into the cistern...muddy at the bottom, but acceptable.)

Actually, even a dry cistern would work: we had a heck of a problem getting into our cistern in the old house.

Tags: ideas

Found it!

: doc_lemming; June 3rd, 15:50

Well, one of the things I was looking for.

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…This 'outgrowing' ...on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through this widening of view the insoluble problem lost its urgency..."

If I'm reading this right, this is from 'Commentary on "The Secret Of The Golden Flower," in Collected Works, volume 13, Alchemical Studies, paragraph 18, page 15, published in London by Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Of course, being a friend of James Nicoll, whose English language quotation has been attributed to everyone from dead painters to Winston Churchill, does make me suspicious until I've found the original....

Please do my homework for me

: doc_lemming; June 2nd, 17:59

Jung apparently once said that each age of a man has important questions, but we never answer them. (I can't even find the quotation.)

What are the ages of a man, and what are the questions?

Tags: writing

Hmmm....seizure free

: doc_lemming; June 2nd, 11:20

Current Mood:: tired

Well, the news from the doctor (a specialist in London) is that my daughter is again seizure-free. If she maintains that until October, they'll start reducing her medication and see if it continues. (Basically, in the test, she goes without meds and they try to induce a seizure with flashing lights and such. They have her hooked up to an EEG, so they can see even quiet absence seizures.)

If she stays seizure-free, then she had juvenile epilepsy. If reducing the medication brings the seizures back, then it's an adult form.

In other news, the Cub Scouts' summer camping trip (well, spring) was cold. And wet. One tent was broken by the wind, lots were blown over. Our camp broke the force of the wind for the other camps, so they didn't take nearly as much damage. There's a barbecue tonight (which I will miss) but other than that, Cubs is over for the year.

Tags: medical

Yup, doing the rewrite

: doc_lemming; May 29th, 10:27

Current Mood:: anxious

Thought about it, and did the rewrite on "Thicker Than Law." I lose a little bit of voice, but I gain on the uncertainty of the win. What's interesting is that I've already cut 300 words from the story (from ~5000 to ~4700) just by removing stuff that was personality stuff a first-person narrator would use to being able to just say what was happening using a tight third. I hadn't noticed that in shorter (~500 words) pieces.

I'm up to page 13 on the rewrite. I was looking hard for a market for it after I'm done, and I think Weird Tales comes next. GUD is a possibility but only publishes twice a year; a horror anthology is also a possibility, but only publishes once a year.

Also, I added some bathroom words to the fantasy thesaurus, courtesy of one of today's Straight Dope articles. "House of Honor" goes wayyyy back.

Tags: fantasy-thesaurus, writing

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Untitled, for now

Being musings, observations, and other commonplaces

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