No great announcements, just a few writerly things I saw today:
#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:
The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.
Exactly right, and that's what's wrong with everything fromWinterson's The Stone Gods to the atrocious "science fiction" of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.
#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it's always worked for me.
#3: I've been writing again, and it's been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of "Queerpunk," and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:
I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career. We'd have never met if it hadn't been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you're cut off from the net. We were forced to talk to each other. Hell, we were forced to notice each other. Which wouldn't have happened without the blackout.
Our seats were side by side. But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking. And me? Diffie Hellman nine but GPL'd, man... all the way.
I'm not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what's the plot? Hmm...