1) Icons Unmasked. I liked the Goku one.
2) Theater from the back of a car during a traffic jam. Video.
3) The top ten Lifehacker posts of all time.
4) “If you were with me, you’d suffer.” Australia falls in love with Chinese dating show.
5) What it’s like to drive the worst car ever built.
6) Every country where James Bond has spied.
7)
Most everyone who’s following the news knows about the difficulties facing Syrian refugees. Author Kevin Hearne has decided he’s going to do something to help.
Basically, he’s giving away books to people who donate to UNHCR. All you have to do is donate, send him proof, and you’re entered to maybe win something.
And, to support his efforts, I’ve sent him four copies of the limited edition omnibus of The Great Way. Did you miss out on the Kickstarter? Would you like to get one of fewer than 200 copies of that omnibus edition, the one with nothing on the cover but the fantasy map?
If so, pop over to that link above and follow the directions, so you can get a chance to win. It will help people who need it, and maybe you’ll get some books, too. Admittedly, my books aren’t pictured (yet) but he should be receiving them today, so maybe there will be a picture later. Check out the update page with my (and several other authors’) books.
Time is short, though, so don’t wait.
3) Ice-T will has some startling information for you in these (fake) SVU screencaps.
4) Most Heinous Stories of Role-Playing Games Gone Wrong.
5) Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Man. “Stereotype threat” and academic achievement, or how to erase any statistical difference between whites and blacks / men and women.
So, there’s this annoying conversation that comes up in social media every few weeks that goes basically like this:
Person 1: “Writers who write in coffee shops are just hoping that someone will ask them what they’re writing.”
Person 2: “Yeah!”
Which is weird, right? You see people on their laptops at a cafe, and what you think is I can see them. That means they want to be seen.
Or maybe, and more insidiously: I can see them there. That means what they’re doing is a performance aimed at me.
In all seriousness, people talking shit about writers at Starbucks is a petty thing. It bugs me a little if I’m having a hard day because I’m one of those writers, but folks assuming that I’m there because I’m hoping to be interrupted?… well, I wonder if they’re really thinking clearly.
Also:
I like Starbucks (& coffee shops in general) for the sense I can work, in company, while ignoring people. It often makes me more productive.
— Kate Elliott (@KateElliottSFF) September 5, 2015
If you like big epic fantasy with lots of great female characters, check out Kate’s work.
Personally, I’ve been writing in coffee shops (mainly Starbucks, but not always) for 13 years. Thirteen also happens to be my son’s age. COINCIDENCE? Guess again.
When he was born, my wife’s family descended upon us. We had nine people in a two bedroom apartment–including a newborne, a teenager, and my wife’s elderly parents–that was already crowded with stuff. Writing at home became impossible, so I slipped out to the local Starbucks before everyone woke up and I did my work.
What I quickly discovered is that a) no, no one ever asks what you’re doing–In the 13 years I’ve been writing in cafes I’ve been asked about it three times[1]–and b) I got a lot more done than usual.
Home is where my distractions are. I’m a very distractible person, and the lure of the TBR pile, internet, TV, fridge, chores, whatever is powerful. Even more powerful are the voices of my wife and son; when they speak, my attention turns to them. I can’t help it. At the cafe, as long as I have my internet disabled (nowadays I use a program called Focus for that) my distractions are few[2].
As for hoping people will ask what I’m writing, let’s run that through a common sense check: Fantasy is about 6% of the market. Do I want to be interrupted in the middle of a thought by people who are 94% likely to be totally uninterested in what I do? And of the remaining 6%, how many are interested in my exact sort of fantasy? And those numbers look even worse when you acknowledge that they’re based on the assumption that everyone reads novels, which they don’t.
The answer is obvious. Starbucks is not a convention, where you get to meet admiring readers. It’s a place where you can ignore people and do some work.
Which is why a lot of people in different fields see cafes as a refuge where they can accomplish work. I have managed to sneak peeks at other people’s computers at those long Starbucks tables; what I mostly see is people writing code, not fiction. What’s more, if you click on Kate Elliot’s tweet up there, you’ll see more people talking about their reasons for slipping off to Starbucks to get stuff done.
But like I said: petty. In the specifics, anyway. In a more general sense, the twin notions that I can’t imagine a reason other than X, so X must be the reason and That person can be seen in this place doing X, so being seen must be the reason they’re doing it here are a genuine issue.
I’d like to think that most intelligent people recognize the problems with those sentences. I’d like to hope that most people understand, just to take an example, that just because (to take a not-so-random example) someone is wearing something sexy doesn’t mean they’re wearing it to please you.
And for those who have learned that specific lesson, they need to apply the principle more broadly.
[1] Two were asked dismissively, as in that other person had their laptop open to do REAL work. The third was when an old guy rapped me on top of my head with a folded up newspaper because he wanted to chat but I was wearing headphones. We didn’t chat.
[2] Not non-existent, but few. Very rarely someone with issues in their brain chemistry will distract me. Much more common are adorable tots. I don’t mind them at all. I like kids, and I’m happy to take a brief break to smile and wave at them, or to smile at their mortified parents when the kids act up.
Okay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.
Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.
He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)
Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?
Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:
The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]
I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.
But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?
Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.
Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.
Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.
Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.
That’s a good thing.
It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.
[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.
[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.
[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?
[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.
It’s strange for me to sit here and type out a short post about Jeff Rice and the effect he had on me. You see, I have never read one of his books.
However, his unpublished novel became one of the best horror TV movies of all time, THE NIGHT STALKER. If the sequel and the TV series never quite reached the heights of that first movie, it still set a precedent that horror TV shows follow today. We wouldn’t have The X-Files without Carl Kolchak, and although Richard Matheson wrote the script, Jeff Rice created the story.
From reports, he had a troubled life, and that successful movie and show never translated into other kinds of success. He died just over a month ago, and few covered it.
Still, he created a character I love.
If you’ve never seen any Kolchak–or you’ve only seen the TV series–get your hands on the original movie. It’s beautifully structured and incredibly effective, considering the constraints it was made under.
Rest in Peace, Jeff Rice. thanks.
A lot about this NYTimes article, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, seemed familiar to me. I worked at Amazon.com for a little while, in the late nineties when the Seattle fulfillment center was their only one.
I was temp-to-hire, which meant I was a temporary employee packing books into boxes or whatever, and if they liked my work they would offer me a permanent position. They did like my work. They did make that offer. I turned them down.
Here’s the thing: it was October, and the supervisors running our section were all gung-ho about the company. Real cheerleaders, and I just assumed it was an act. We were all standing in front of a terribly-inefficient packing machine, and they kept talking about giving our all. For a bullshit warehouse job.
Then one day in October, one of the supervisors stands on a box or something and gives us this lecture about the upcoming holidays. I guess it was supposed to be a coach’s halftime talk or something, but she was telling us that Christmas was going to be hugely busy, and it was “going to be like a war in here,” and that we should be ready to put our personal lives on hold.
My first thought was Fuck you.
My second thought was that she was joking.
When I realized my second thought was wrong, I knew I wasn’t going to stay.
At that point, I’d been with my then-girlfriend, now-wife for a few years, and one thing I’d learned was that she had no intention of being a career widow. If I was planning to ignore her over the Christmas holidays, she would never stay.
And besides, fuck that. Amazon.com wasn’t my company. I just worked there. I had people in my life, and my writing, and was I really supposed to put all that on hold so Jeff Bezos could create his dream company?
Eventually, one of the supervisors pulled me aside to offer me a job (because let’s face it, I’m a good worker) and I told him I wasn’t going to accept because I could never be part of Amazon’s culture. I could never be yay-gung-ho over a day job.
He instantly deflated, going from upbeat to morose, and we talked for a while about not really knowing where we belong and not knowing where we could make a future for ourselves.
I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s happy.
Anyway, Amazon is one of the reasons that Seattle has such a thriving economy, but I’d never want to work there myself. Check out this quote from the article:
A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon.
“Put your personal life on hold.”
“Put your personal life on hold.”
My personal life IS my life, and it’s the only one I get. I’m not wasting it to make some obnoxious super-libertarian richer than he already is.
1) How One Misunderstanding in the 1870s Created an Entire Sci-Fi Subgenre
2) Every state flag is wrong, and here is why.
3) Someone is setting hipster traps in New York.
4) An “accomplished writer” takes James Patterson’s “Masterclass.”
5) What if Werner Hertzog directed Ant-Man?
6) Architects crowdfund to build £1.85 billion Minas Tirith in England.
7) I read NPR’s 100 best sff novels and they were shockingly offensive. Nothing to argue with here.
I’m about to run out the door and do some writing, but first let me drop this link from Toby Buckell: Yes, Virginia, people of color do fucking read SF/F
First of all, why write a post asking “Where Are All The People of Color in Sci-Fi/Fantasy?” in this day and age? They’re out there, and easily found for anyone willing to make the extreme effort of searching with google.
But the post I’m linking addresses a particular comment, which is emblematic of a number of shitty zombie arguments that continue to be made. At this point in history, we ought to be addressing the institutional and subconscious aspects of racism. We ought to be long past this sort of white supremacy. But we’re not. These beliefs just won’t stay dead, no matter how many times they’re buried in evidence that refutes it.
And every time I think “I should get more involved with sf/f fandom” I read something like this and just go back to my writing.
1. How many of the “world’s strangest delicacies” would you eat? I consider myself an adventurous eater, but: five-ish, depending on the moment.
2. Video series compares the changes made to the Star Wars movies.
3. The Ten Best Tales of Online Drama from Ten Years of Fandom_Wank.
4) Academics unlock Agatha Christie’s “whodunnit” code.
6) The amazing high technology behind the NYC subway system.
7) A skateboard sidecar for toddlers: Video.