1) June is LGBT pride month. And this weekend is pride weekend in Nashville. A group of us will walk and I’ve been told that others, possibly rollergirls, will roll. It could be a whole big thing. There will also be karaoke.
4) I’m on the cusp of addiction to Orphan Black and its existential hotness. Here are words with the show’s science consultant at Think Progress. And io9 talking about an essay concerning nature vs. nurture and “our genes do not define who we are” which said science-type person wrote called “Variability and Perturbations of the Spiral Universe Inside Us” which is most likely amazing and which I will not read because I don’t want to spoil future awesome.
5) I am inside of a day where everything seems possible and also I read a lot about pan amalgamation, which is what they used to do to separate gold, or silver, from ore. The process being to mix rocks with mercury in a pan and from this amalgamation you might get something shiny.
When I was a younger boy, I watched coverage of the San Diego Comic-Con on TV*. It looked like heaven. It looked like a place that make-believe could make as much belief as it wanted. People dressed up as Ghostbusters! As Skeletor! As various shades of pink! It was cool. It was exciting. It was geeks being geeks. I never thought I would get there, though.
And then I went to Clarion and I got to go there and lose my ability to even.
World Fantasy, which I attended in 2012, was lovely and amazing but not full of the same geek-fervor of SDCC. Most things aren’t.
A week or so ago, after a 24-hour-plus journey (including a linger in Chicago as Obama passed through), I arrived in Madison for my first WisCon. WisCon is not at all like SDCC except for that sometimes people are pink or blue or glittered**. Also, that they are geeks. Geeks for feminism, for discourse, for conscious consideration, for science, for robots, for korean dramas, and so forth, and so on. At the Con, I went to a few readings and a lot of brunches. I heard discussions of hidden narratives and monsters. Of the growing roles of women in Korean dramas, and the proliferation of time travel in the same. I saw a Dalek lingering in the hotel hallway’s linger lane.
There’s an energy to WisCon. It comes, in part, from how small it is. Just a thousand or so people who gather to ponder and celebrate a certain corner of the geekverse. In this it’s the inverse of Comic-Con, which is a gathering of an astronomical amount of people to celebrate all corners of the geekverse.
At WisCon, I discovered that the wonder of all wonderful conventions is meeting old and new people and old and new ideas that you get to discuss with those old new friends. Plotting novels and life goals in a hot tub is another good thing which is a plus for WisCon.
Below are pictures and more words.
Awesome awkward robot design by @egcosh
Madison, it turned out, is a fantabulous city what features lake-front cider, delicious gluten-free muffins, buckwheat crepes, and delicious coffee.
This is a picture of a lake-front Sam J. Miller (@sentencebender), who is, while not gluten-free, still fantabulous.
The panels and readings I attended were the following:
Three Awesome Women, in which did read three awesome women: Elise Matthesen, Delia Sherman, and Nene Ormes; as well as one awesome Wesley Chu.
Awkward Robots Read***, in which I, and many others of Clarion 2012, did read scary, funny, weird things. There was wine, cider, and beer, in the back.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, in which I for the first time ever attempted to live-tweet something as it happened live rather than wait until it was over and say things about what happened
Guest of Honor reading by N.K. Jemisin, in which mountains moved
Women in Sageuk/K-dramas, wherein Ha Ji Won was awesome and I learned what Sageuk meant and how popular time travel is of late in Korea****.
This Might Get Weird: Stories by Writers You Just Met Last Night, wherein Clarion alums, greatly from 2010, got weird and wonderful with their words.
Questionable Practices, wherein Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Eileen Gunn, and Nisi Shawl rocked. Karen Joy Fowler stood on a chair, for example, so that all could see. Nisi sang a song. Which she does every reading, apparently, which is awesome.
I’m not sure why I bulleted these things, reader, but having done it I feel pretty good about it.
Here are more pictures.
This Might Get Weird (from l/r: Tom Underberg (@tomatlarge), Leah Thomas (@thomtinuviel), Jessica Hilt (@bzztbaa), Holly McDowell (@hollymcdowell), Dustin Monk (@dustinjmonk), Eden Robins (@edenrobins))
People gathered to hear what THE STATUE says about exquisitely sticky cinnamon.
Sageuk/K-drama panelOoooooh.Post-floomp dancing with @egcosh
Happy conversations and cinnamon, readers. Listen to THE STATUE.
love.
*Specifically, Tech TV, ZDTV, and now, I suppose, G4, unless it has changed names again.
**The floomp dance is a thing wherein people at WisCon dress up in ridiculous handsomeness and dance. This being my first WisCon this was my first WisCon floomp. It was terrifically glittery and I wore a rainbow.
***Reading with Awkward Robots = gluten-free carrot cake with awesome sauce. You know. If you have to be gluten free and enjoy awesome sauces.
****In dramas. Not, so far as I know, in real life. Though possibly in a novel I’m writing.
It has been a very long time since I played any video games, but, recently, watching my partner indulge her puzzler in the puzzles of the beautifully designed Machinarium, I thought to myself, “Oooh. Cool.”
And then I remembered that I had downloaded Limbo a few months ago because my partner told me it was a cool game.
And it is AMAZING. A lovely combination of mystery, terror, and beauty. Sometimes you die in scary ways. Sometimes you swing among ropes and turn the whole world upside down.
The thing that’s cool about Limbo, beyond the atmosphere of silhouettes and fog, is the sound. It creeps around you, layed, hinting. A rolling boulder coming at you from off screen. Arrows or spears loosed and falling. Rain. God, the rain. It’s beautiful.
The thing about video games that I forgot is how much they honed, maintained, and sometimes dominated my focus. After playing Limbo for a few days, I found myself more alert, more capable of concentrating on things for longer periods of time–reading, writing, etc. I suppose any activity that promotes and rewards the practice of concentration helps to embiggen such muscles. I forgot. Now I remember. You just have to throw yourself into things now and then and possibly always.
In publication news, one of my more recent stories will be published in the second volume of the Dark Heart anthology put out by the London-based publisher, Little Bird Publishing House. The anthology collects work from “the best emerging authors of Young Adult paranormal and urban fantasy,” and it’s rather exciting to be in a proper book for the first time. While being published on the web is just as good as being published on paper; there is something wonderfully papery about paper that reminds me I am old enough to feel nostalgic about paper.
The story is one called Jjincha, which means “really” in Korean, as in really and truly. I wrote it for the first week of the Clarion workshop. It’s a fairy tale born from my time in Seoul and my love of monsters and bridges and shadows. Here is a sentence from the story what will give you an idea about the monsters and bridges and shadows.
For some time, Kyu-bi had been sitting among the shadows beneath the Olympic bridge, waiting, as patiently as she could, for the monsters to come…
Having watched Before Sunrise last night, I’m reminded of many things, including this trip taken while in Korea which I had happened to be remembering earlier in the day as I rode the bus home from school. What I was thinking as I rode the bus home from school was how, once upon a time on a mountainside in Korea, I met someone and we talked, and we explored, and we rode the bus, and we wondered if we would ever see each other again, and then we did see each other again, and again, and had many adventures, and then I left Korea and we haven’t seen each other for some months. What I was also thinking on the bus home from school was how so much of my time in Korea was built around a moment in which I met someone and we understood each other before we knew who each other were and it all seemed inevitable in retrospect, but it was pretty much totally evitable and fragile and incredibly happy and sad to remember.
What had led me to think these thoughts on the bus was seeing a girl sitting by the window with an empty seat beside her. I wondered, what would happen if I sat next to her and said hello? And then I remembered what happened the last time I did that.
Here are some things that caught my attention this past week.
William Boyle–friend, writer, fellow noir lover, devourer of music and film–has written a book called Gravesend. I’m so damn excited to see how his love landed on these pages.
Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, discussed at Feminist Fiction. It encapsulates a lot of what I loved about the show (Tennant, the humor), some of what I have felt about the show recently (the favoring of dramatic whamwow over emotional continuity and narrative logic), and some thoughtful thoughts on the recent treatment of the women that surround the Doctor. I found myself, while watching the 50th anniversary special, to be so charmed by the proceedings, and so moved by the finale, that my misgivings over recent Who did not misgive me this time around. The dynamics of 10 and 11 and The War Doctor sparkled and sparked with so much emotional bite that I felt, at last, here was Moffat back to engaging us so deeply in the emotions and emotional arcs of characters that any possible narrative flim-flammery barely registers because we the emotional arc sustains us.
I’m so excited for the Christmas special and what might come next.
Today, November 20th, is Teacher’s Day in Vietnam. This means that I know have a great deal of roses, along with some body wash, pens, and a very nice tie. It also means that the students put on a show in a big hall for us teachers. Dances were performed to a mix of dubstep, Justin Bieber, and k-pop–not all at once, of course. There was a play about bullying, and a song or two sung as well.
As a bonus, in the teacher’s lounge, one of the teachers had her guitar, or a guitar, and with it she played some Bon Iver, Journey, and Fraggle Rock. We sang along as best we could. The room clapped for mine, and another teacher’s, rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing.”
Sitting outside at the moment with some coffee and plans of writing and reading. It will probably rain at some point, which is when I will go inside. For now, it is pleasantly wonderful.
From time to time one gets, if one writes, rejections. Sometimes in the form of forms. Sometimes in the form of a comment or two from an editor. Occasionally, one might receive a whole letter. Chuck Wendig has a post concerning 25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection, which includes such delightful phrases as “tentacles of woe” and “the secret gnostic gospels of Doctor Huxtable.” You should read it. It’s delightful.
Of late, I’ve received several letters of rejection. These letters included several encouraging words. It’s an odd thing being both buoyed and deflated in a rejection, but it’s far better than being simply deflated. It occurred to me, upon the 5th or 6th of these letters, that it might be fun to pull certain quotes from my recent rejections, freeing them of their otherwise rejectionatory context and arranging them in such a way as to be not so much happy sad as happy happy. Here is what such a list would look like.
“…really cool…and very memorable…”
“emotional and well-written…”
“enchanting…”
“Lush, mythic…”
“…a strange, beautiful story. The prose uses words in ways I’ve never seen them used before…”
Happy weekend, readers. If you’ve any happy sad pull quotes to share, feel free.
p.s. To the editors who sent me such quotable quotes, thank you. It is wonderful to receive such considered responses. Also, if you recognize your words and would like me to remove them, drop me a note and *poof* go the words.
It’s a sunny Saturday in Saigon, and I didn’t really mean to alliterate so early in this post, but there you go. Around me, the mise-en-scene includes: a vase of flowers, a boy in an orange shirt, a tiny hat, yellow sunglasses, hipster lightbulbs, a circulatory system of streets pulsing with motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, and cyclos.
This morning, I wrote a bit about a girl who keeps mermaids in jars. At school, I’ve started running a creative writing club. It’s fun. The members are all 6th and 7th graders who are in love with imagination and words and dragons. Well. They probably don’t all love dragons. That would be expecting too much, I think.
3. “The Witches of Athens” by Lara Donnelly, friend of the blog and dancer with fire.
4. IU, K-pop idol and frequent releaser of videos whimsical, precise, occasionally TARDIS-y, and terrifically nostalgic, released a new album a week or so ago. This is a song called “Red Shoes”, live or in a glorious, weird, Chaplin-esque, MV. There’s also this and this, which is a lot of the same songs and people dancing with umbrellas, bowler hats, and black-and-white striped shirts.
the magnelephant review 