If you want to leave me good wishes, that would make me happy!

Current Mood: happy

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/25/the-computers-of-scalziland/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18684

Since the disappearance (and eventual reappearance) of the MacBook Air, and the emergency purchase of the most recent Acer netbook, there has been some curiosity in among Whateverians about the current state of electronics at the Scalzi Compound. While I choose not to go into complete detail on the grounds that I would hate to give thieves a shopping list, I will note that as far as laptops go we have six functional ones at the moment, one for each human and each of the cats (the dog prefers not to go online). In chronological order, they are:

1. A 15-inch Toshiba (the one in the back on this picture), which I bought in 2007 when I was on my “Last Colony” book tour to replace the 12-inch tablet computer I had at the time, which died when I was in Ann Arbor. This computer wheezes and clicks and we bought a replacement for it because we were sure it was going to die, but like a silicon version of that old guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it is Not Dead Yet. This is my wife’s primary computer.

2. A 17-inch Asus (not pictured) which I inherited as President of SFWA; the previous president bought it for business purposes and then shipped it to me when I ascended. It’s a desktop replacement, and as I had a desktop, I sent it into my daughter’s room (after removing anything confidential to SFWA, of course). Its keyboard is partially broken (the computer works fine when you plug in an outboard keyboard), so at the end of my tenure rather than passing it on I’ll probably purchase it from SFWA at current value; giving my replacement an only-partially operating piece of equipment is laden with too much metaphor, I would say.

3. A 12-inch CR-48, the prototype Chromebook I was sent by Google two Decembers ago (it’s to the left in the picture), which I wrote about half of Redshirts on. I’ve written about this one a bit; I liked the form factor of it but the trackpad was (and still is) awful, and at the time I was trying to use it, it had bugs integrating with Google Docs, which is what I needed it for. I still use it from time to time for Web browsing.

4. The MacBook Air (facing you in the picture). Lovely computer, for which I would note I paid more for than all the other computers on this list (a fact mitigated by inheriting one computer and being sent another by Google). From a practical point of view I’m not at all convinced that the premium I paid for the thing is justified; on the other hand when I use a non-Apple laptop I want to scream at its trackpad. I’ll be curious to see if Windows 8 mitigates the UI advantage Apple has to any serious effect. This is my primary computer at the moment.

5. A 15-inch (widescreen) Hewlett Packard (to the right of the picture). This is the replacement for the Toshiba, which hasn’t died yet, although probably will at some point in the reasonably near future, so we’re prepared, as it were. The HP is at the moment the “family computer” in that it sits at a built-in desk in the living room area, which makes it easily accessible when we’re all downstairs. You’ll often find Athena here, checking in on Facebook, or Krissy looking up something. I used it yesterday to make a video for a thing I’m doing after iMovie on my Mac made it clear to me that it didn’t want to be used.

6. An 11.6-inch Acer: Bought a week ago and the emergency replacement for the Mac, since I needed an actual computer while I was traveling. Right now it lives in my office and stays on the desk; the Mac tends to wander around the house with me.

I’m the first to admit that six laptops in one house is ridiculous, but I like to think the number is mitigated by the following facts: a) I was gifted one by Google, b) inherited another, c) bought a third to replace a computer that’s in the process of dying, d) bought a fourth to replace on I had every reason to suspect was lost forever. Nevertheless: SuperNerd, Thou Art I.

From a practical point of view I will say it’s easier now to have a bunch of laptops in the house than it used to be, because almost everything I write/do on a computer these days is stored online in some way. I do a lot of writing on Google Docs at the moment, store documents in Google Drive and/or Dropbox, and otherwise store material redundantly. When I lost the MacBook Air, I didn’t lose any work, because I could access it by signing in with another computer. It’s nice basically to pick up what you’re doing no matter where you are or what computer you’re using, and I definitely use that to my advantage these days. I don’t even have to save things to a USB drive anymore. Mind you, if Google goes down, I’m doomed, but then, if Google goes down, we may all be doomed.

(Before anyone makes the objection: I still DO save things locally, because, you know what? Google might go down one day. Also, there’s some stuff I don’t want to put online. Like my collection of badger porn! Wait, forget I wrote that last sentence. Anyway: Redundant data storage is your friend.)

So there you have it: A Scalzi computer census.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html

A hasty post...

There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)

(Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.)

DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the  books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase.

According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/)

(The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/the-slowly-disintegrating-tree/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18681

One of the two Bradford pear trees in our front yard has been slowly falling apart since a chunk of it was blown down by the remnants of Hurricane Ike that blew through here a few years back. Another chunk of it fell down today, and it must have been ready to fall. It was windy but not that windy. So fortunately no one was near it when it decided to tumble gravity-wise. So now the remaining tree has a distinct “V” shape. The good news, I suppose: Now we’ll have firewood for summer cookouts.

Update: Another chunk fell down in the night. This tree is doomed.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/redshirts-tour-chicago-area-stop-please-register/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18676

Folks, if you were planning to come see me on the Redshirts Tour Chicago Area stop (it’ll be at the Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling, IL), you should know that it’s a free event but that you’ll need to register, so they have some idea of how many people are going to show up.

Here is the online registration form. Please use it and make the folks who are hosting me happy. I thank you in advance, and please let other folks you know who are planning to attend know about it as well. Thanks again.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/the-redshirts-fan-art-contest-finalists-vote-for-your-favorite/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18670

I’ve finally had a chance to look at the entries for the Redshirts Fan Art contest, and holy crap, there was some magnificent stuff in there. It was difficult to narrow it down to a final five entries for you folks here to vote on. But narrow it down I and my Jury of Awesomeness did, and here are you five finalists. At the end, you’ll be able to vote in a poll to pick your favorite. The poll will be open until noon Eastern Time, Tuesday, May 29. Please vote only once, but of course tell everyone you know to vote.

The winner will receive $250 plus an ARC of Redshirts, the 2nd place finalist will receive $100 plus an ARC, 3rd place will receive $50 plus an ARC, and 4th and 5th place will receive ARCs too. So everyone who is a finalist gets something (in the case of a tie for 1st, the 1st and 2nd place money will be split between the top two vote getters. In the case of a 2nd place tie, the 2nd and third place money will be split. In case of a tie for third place, what the hell, I’ll give them both $50).

And now, here are your finalists, in alphabetical order. Click on the picture to be taken to a larger version of the image!

FINALIST #1: DESIREE KERN

FINALIST #2: NATALIE METZGER

FINALIST #3: NATHANIEL PAYNE

FINALIST #4: ELIZABETH PORTER

FINALIST #5: TROY ZIMMERMAN

These are all fantastic.

Now:

Remember, vote only once! I don’t envy you the selection process you will have to make.

To the finalists: Congratulations and good luck! And to everyone who entered the contest: Thank you. You are all awesome.

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

Current Mood: pleased

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/the-big-idea-catherine-lundoff/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18667

For the big idea in her novel Silver Moon, author Catherine Lundoff looks at lycanthropy in the context of a “coming of age” story. What makes it unusual? Which age the protagonist of the story is coming into.

CATHERINE LUNDOFF:

Women have always been monsters.

From Lilith to Carmilla to the femme fatales of the silver screen, beautiful women are shown consuming men, and sometimes other women, as prey. Female monsters are thin and beautiful, ageless, if not actually young, the embodiment of seduction and desire: vampires, succubi, sirens, demons.

Against this backdrop of feminine monstrosities, depictions of female werewolves are rare. It makes some sense, given werewolf mythos. Werewolves are out of control, ferociously strong, unbelievably dangerous. They are, therefore, almost universally assumed to be male. Female werewolves simply aren’t sexy enough.

In a 2006 MTV interview about the Underworld films, actress Kate Beckinsale said that there were no female werewolves in the movies because “…that could be really horrifying. Hairy, thuggish women.”

That well-thumbed health reference, the InternetHealthLibrary.com, lists amongst the signs of menopause: “Psychological instability” and “Violent mood swings” and “…hair growth on the face, which is quite unlikely for a woman.” Or hairy and thuggish, if you prefer.

So I began with the impossible and the horrifying: a woman who is neither young nor thin nor beautiful who is wrestling with both psychological instability and hair growth. Lots of hair growth.  A woman who has become a monster in her own eyes, but is otherwise like your mom or your friend’s aunt or perhaps one of your elementary school teachers: familiar, comfortable and ordinary. For a werewolf of “a certain age.”

Like female werewolves, there are very few middle-aged female protagonists in science fiction and fantasy.  When middle-aged women appear at all, they are generally background players, secondary and tertiary characters in the flow of a larger tale. Always the monster food, never the monster.

But then, as my protagonist Becca Thornton says, speaking for herself, “Seems to me that when you go looking for monsters, that’s all you see. And sometimes you miss much scarier things.”

What’s scarier than monsters? It depends on your fears. Monsters are relative (and sometimes related, but that’s a different story).  You can find them hiding in a graveyard waiting for dark, lurking in an alleyway on a lonely night or sharing your bed. For some people, gay, lesbian and trans people are monsters, to be stopped at any cost, whether that’s killing or conversion. Those people are the models that I used for my werewolf hunters. They don’t care about orientation or gender, but they do care deeply about changes they can’t control. Deeply enough to try and cure the local werewolf pack of being what they are: a Pack of middle-aged women from very different backgrounds, united by some common experiences.

The werewolves of Wolf’s Point are called into being by the ancient magic of the place where they live.  It picks and chooses which women will serve as the valley’s protectors, deciding who will change and who will not, based on a logic all its own. Sometimes, it makes mistakes.

Becca thinks she might be one of the latter; it must have meant to pick someone else and somehow got her by mistake. But then, she thinks that about a lot of things. In this respect, Becca was a hard character for me to write. Like her, I’m a middle-aged woman just entering menopause. Unlike her, I’m not terribly introspective or insecure about what I’m doing. Of course, I’m also not dealing with the changes she’s wrestling with.

That, really, was what I was hoping to capture in this novel: the experience of change, both physical and psychological, that is absolutely earth shattering. I wanted to examine what an ordinary woman does with those kinds of events. Menopause is a time in a woman’s life where her body feels like it’s transforming into something else, something alien, and potentially monstrous. Not unlike changing into a werewolf, only less fun, at least from my perspective.

There’s an element of wish-fulfillment in that aspect of the book. The thrill of being something much bigger and stronger with fewer aches and pains, at least once a month, is pretty appealing to my middle-aged self. Apart from the whole uncontrollable killing-machine aspect of lycanthropy, who wouldn’t want that in some form? The werewolves of Wolf’s Point have some things that a lot of us might envy: a sense of purpose, of belonging, of newfound power at a time of life that can feel most disempowering.

Given that, I think Becca’s right; there are much scarier things out there than monsters. Perhaps monsters are more familiar than we realize. And maybe we’ve all got a bit of one inside us. It’s what we do with it that counts. Welcome to what I do with mine.

—-

Silver Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Fantasy Reddit is hosting an Ask Me Anything with me today. (Not familiar with AMAs? Basically, you ask questions throughout the day, and for a couple of hours this evening I will answer as many as I can.) Now’s your chance to ask all those questions you’ve had burning deep in your brain. Or to baffle me with koans. Come play, and tell your friends, and so on.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Ten years ago, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh.

It wasn’t Platform 9 3/4, but it might as well have been. My life changed the moment that train pulled out of the brick archways and into the rolling green countryside beyond London–it was just beginning to be autumn then, and the trees were full of crows. I remember thinking about bird magic, auguries, every story I’d ever heard about England and Scotland. I was a tiny thing, a maiden in all but the technical sense. I knew, as the old novels say, nothing of the world. My EuroRail photo looked absurdly, hilariously, preposterously like an illustration of Snow White. I had a bacon sandwich. My mother was with me, a psychopomp in knock-off Prada sunglasses, bearing me across the wall and into the life I didn’t yet know I was in for. It was the first time I wanted something with that desperate, pure fire–and made it happen, by myself, with will and work. After all, if you grow up loving fairy tales and King Arthur and saints who battle monsters, you want the British Isles the way some kids want boyfriends. Edited to add: is that a silly reason to want to go to a country? Yep. Is it a direct outgrowth of the complicated relationship of American culture to British culture? Yep. Was I 21 years old, pretty silly, fully of inchoate dreamy nonsense and trying to learn how to be a real person? Absolutely. In fact, a big part of that growing up was going to a place I'd dreamed about and figuring out what reality there was like.

I lived there for something over a year. I came back to America for stupid reasons–but that’s what you do in your twenties. Make stupid decisions while meaning so earnestly well.

My interviewer in Finland asked me: you’ve written about everywhere you’ve lived but Edinburgh. Where is Scotland in your books?

I laughed a little, pressed my lips together as I always do when I’m thinking, looked out the window of our car at the swans nesting in the golden Nordic estuaries. This is what I told her:

A poetry professor once told me that you can never name the thing you’re writing about. If the poem is about death, you can’t say the word death. Poems about memory shouldn’t go on about the thing itself. If you’re writing about grief, you can’t actually say grief, or sadness, or even tears. If you want to talk about love, love is the one word you can’t use.

Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.

Today, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh. It was Platform 7. It’s just beginning to be summer now, and the fields are full of chartreuse flowers. The old churches spring up out of them like strange, huge blossoms. The train rushes over a stream so full of swans the current is pure white.

I think about bird magic again. Auguries.

I am no longer small. I know something of the world. Maybe not much of a something, but something. I have made things with my hands and heart. I look a bit pugnacious in my passport photo, like I still have something to prove. I had a bacon sandwich. My husband is with me and this time I am bearing him across the wall, to show him this object that sits at the bottom of my mind, a grey stone city with a castle and a mountain, a place that was once wholly full of fairy fruit and temptation and the rich mess of becoming bigger, becoming grown. That fairy fruit made everywhere else look dimmer for awhile. My goblin city, that swallowed me whole. I think it took falling in love with Maine to fix me–before then I always had the idea that of course I’d go back, that somehow, somehow, this was where I’d live when I could choose.

I’ve been near tears most of the morning, riding north through sheep and cattle and chapels and flowers. When you love a place, it’s hard to leave, and harder still to come back. You hope it will be proud of you, of all you became when you left to seek your fortune.  You hope it will be as you remembered; you hope you are still as it knew you.
You hope it will forgive you long neglect, lines in your once-clear face, a hard blue edge of cynicism.

O goblin city, I hope you will forgive me for never writing a book about you.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!

Current Mood: mellow

The mail continues to bring treats, including a signed copy of Caitlín's The Drowning Girl. Very much looking forward to reading this one. Thank you, greygirlbeast! In your honor, I shall try to write something resembling a real entry. With, you know, thoughts and stuff. Not just random observations and eBay listings (though I do have some of those).

Life is ... sticky. I guess that's the best way to describe it. Not precisely bad, but difficult. Literally so, because the air conditioning in my house is broken and we're heading into another long, sweaty, tyrannical New Orleans summer. Most luxuries have fallen by the wayside, and necessities are starting to do so. Yet I live in interesting times, both personally, by being in a relationship that brings me joy and creative inspiration, and globally, by feeling -- as I seldom did growing up -- that we are living on the right side of history. The other day I sent Grey a text saying, basically, we may be old by the time it comes, but I think we'll live to see a day when today's last-gasp homophobes look as benighted as the news footage of rabid bigots screaming at black children integrating the public schools. (I didn't want to be a Negative Nancy, so I didn't add that I don't expect to live to see a day when transgender people are anywhere near as accepted.) Meanwhile, there are still "religious" nutjobs who want to put us all behind electric fences and courts that give evil little shitweasels thirty damn days in prison for hounding us to death, but society no longer seems to be in tacit agreement with those people as it did when I was younger.

One more paragraph for Caitlín. Christ, when you get out of the habit of writing, forcing yourself to do it starts to feel like weightlifting. I have little puny stringy 98-pound-weakling writing muscles. If I do any more reps, I'll make them sore. Clang.

So about those eBay auctions ... they are all crafty things, two more blank journals, a copy of Exquisite Corpse with a redesigned cover by me, and a "homoerotic botanic" treasure box. Please check 'em out.

Current Mood: tired

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/23/the-prodigal-computer-returns/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18661

Look! The MacBook Air! It’s back! I took a picture of it here with the Acer so you would know it wasn’t just me pretending to live in happier times. It arrived this afternoon, along with everything else in my computer bag, minus the ARC of Redshirts I gifted to the fellow at Reagan National who tracked me down. It’s nice when things have a happy ending.

Thus concludes my computer drama. I will never lose my MacBook Air again. Ever. I SWEAR.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/23/final-notes-for-lowest-difficulty-setting/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18658

It’s now been a week and a day since I posted the “Lowest Difficulty Setting” piece, and the dust around is finally beginning to settle, so a moment for some final notes on it before I let it go off into the sunset.

1. Overall, it was interesting. If I had to do it over again I would have posted it yesterday instead of a week ago yesterday, because a week ago yesterday I had five days of travel and business ahead of me which kept me away from the site and led to the comment threads not as pruned for twits as I would have liked. This should be an indication that I honestly did not expect the piece to blow up like it did. I was occasionally accused of writing the piece for attention, which is an interesting thing to accuse a writer on a public blog of; I mean, duh, yes, of course I wrote it for attention. However, I did not write it solely for attention, nor did I expect the amount of attention it got. So: interesting experience.

2. I’ve been asked for whom the piece was written, as at least some of the Straight White Males who were the focus of the piece did not take kindly to it, and thus it could be argued that it failed. Well, the audience for it wasn’t specifically white straight males, it was everyone, including and especially those folks looking for a way to explain the concepts of under discussion, especially to white straight males, without hauling out the dreaded word “privilege,” into the discussion. This did make the subsequent discussion here and other places just a little bit meta, but that’s okay.

3. Do I still think the analogy is useful? Sure. For one thing, the piece was useful for some folks already, both in giving them a new way to articulate the idea, or to think about it. I’ve got enough anecdotal evidence for that. For another thing, while the piece has received hundreds of thousands of page views, both here and other places online, that means there are still millions of folks who have never heard the analogy. Could still work for them.

4. There were a number of complaints about the article, many of which I addressed in the first follow-up post, although of course there were complaints about those responses as well. One of the biggest complaints was lack of facts in the piece, and while I argued and would still argue that the piece was about the analogy rather than the (to me rather painfully obvious) underlying assumptions, it’s still something that sticks in the craw of some. So, fine. For those folks, the estimable Jim Hines has thoughtfully given you some facts to chew on, although it should be noted that those are the beginning of the wall of evidence, not the only facts to support the piece’s underlying assumptions.

The second major sticking point is the chunk of folks who really very truly believe that I should have put class/wealth into the difficulty setting in addition to or instead of race/gender/sexuality. Again, I’ve already explained why I designed the analogy as I did, and while I think it’s fine that people disagree, I haven’t been sufficiently convinced by their arguments that I was wrong in the manner in which I designed it. I think some people are suggesting that I don’t think wealth and class matter in a significant way; they need to reread the entry. It’s not about whether it makes a difference. It does. It’s about where it’s properly placed in the analogy. Some have commented this is set-up that really is specific to the US, not other places in the Western world; I’m not wholly convinced of this, but then I live in the US, not other places in the Western world.

Also, let me be blunt about this: I think there’s a relatively small but non-trivial number of people arguing the wealth/class thing who believe that if they can only and simply make this all about wealth and class, then they can flat-out deny (or at least hugely mitigate) the idea that the US in particular still has issues with race, sexuality and gender, and that directly related to that, they have unearned advantages as straight white males. Well, that’s just stupid, and I’m not in the least inclined to indulge these folks in their particular fantasy.

Finally, and in general, please note the piece is really not intended to be a be-all piece; it couldn’t and won’t do everything. It’s a start to a discussion or a stepping stone to another part of a discussion.

5. Among the straight white males (and some of their friends) who read the pieces, my guess is that the majority found it non-controversial or perhaps food for thought, or that if they disagreed, and many did, they did so at a setting somewhat below “froth.” But there was a loud but I suspect relatively small number who disagreed at a setting of “froth” or above.

This is of course their right. No one has to agree with me. What I do find interesting is the rhetoric that was often involved, which, for lack of a better way to put it, seemed to me like an attempt to de-legitimize my standing as, you know, as a white dude who loves him some women. And I suppose I get this; it’s true enough that most of the folks who point out the unearned advantages of straight white maleness are not at least one of those things. When someone from inside the fence makes the observation, a lot of the tricks and tools one might use to discount the message and demean the messenger just won’t work, and one has to fall back on some ridiculous ”No True Scotsman” sort of argumentation.

The silliest example of this I’ve seen are the fellows who’ve noted darkly (no pun intended) that I live in a little town that’s more than 98% white; I think the idea there is that I choose to live among the white folks and/or don’t know what it’s like to live among the dark folks. Leaving aside anything else about this assertion that’s racist and stupid (and ignores the idea that there might possibly be women and/or gays and lesbians in Darke County, Ohio), this is an interesting argument to offer about someone who grew up in the LA area, went to school in Chicago, and then lived in Fresno and the DC area prior to moving to Darke County, Ohio, and whose family here in Ohio is packed to the brim with people of Hispanic and African-American descent. Perhaps a little research — perhaps on this very site! — might have been in order. It’s been otherwise suggested that I’m a quisling to other races, genders and sexualities (which lead to my recent tweet which said “THE MATRIARCHICAL HOMODARKOSPHERE WANTS ME TO TELL YOU I AM NOT THEIR PUPPET”), that I’m a beta male and that I’m ugly, or at least “profoundly unhandsome.” And so on.

Dudes: You can’t demote me. You just literally cannot. Despite your best efforts, when I go out into the world, in 98% white Darke County, Ohio or anywhere else, I’m still me, and me is pasty, and Y-chromosomed, and very very fond of the opposite sex.

Beyond this, mind you, the idea that simply noting the concept that white straight males operate on the lowest difficulty setting is the equivalent to an attack on, or a call for guilt on the part of, people who literally had no choice to be born white, or male, or straight, suggests of a level of panic that makes me wonder how these particular fellows manage to get out the door every single day of their lives. Fellows: I haven’t a single trace of guilt or angst on the subject. I don’t know why on Earth you think I think you should. But if you want to work on making life better for everyone, well, that would be a mitzvah, don’t you think?

6. And that’s pretty much where I am on all of this at the moment.

(PS: I’m about to go out the door to the dentist’s, and depending on how things go I will be shot up full of painkillers for several hours and in no condition to deal with the comment thread this entry would inevitably spawn. Also, will anything be said that wasn’t already said in three other separate comment threads on the subject, positive and negative both? I’m thinking: Not really, no. So I’ll just go ahead and keep the comment threads closed for now. If I get back home with my head undrilled, I may unlock it then. In the meantime, don’t worry, there’s all the rest of the Internet to air your comments on. I like Twitter, myself.)

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

The sun just came out, and the weather is finally warming in Providence.

Wait...the sun went behind the clouds again. Oh, well...

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99% of the people who have supported the two Kickstarter projects I've been involved with have been utterly fucking marvelous (and thank you all again, by the way). But there's this remaining 1% who seem to believe they're buying stuff off eBay. Anyway, the very last three rewards for the latest project will go into the mail ($150 tier), rewards for the project that allowed kylecassidy to create his series of still photos based on The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and that also allowed us to shoot the book trailer. My thanks to Spooky, who's had to manage the maddening task of putting most of this stuff together.

She'll also be schlepping the great heavy box of signature sheets for S. T. Joshi's Black Wings II anthology to the p.o., which reprints "John Four." And they will wend their way back to Yorkshire, England and PS Publishing.

---

Yesterday, I sat here for hours trying to find the story that accompanies the title "Forbidden Love, We Croak and Howl," which will appear in Sirenia Digest #78. I think it's sort of "Romeo and Juliet" with ghouls and deep ones. My editor at Dark Horse sent me inked pages for Alabaster: Wolves #4, and they're gorgeous. I have to get her notes on those today. My editor at Penguin sent three cover designs for Blood Oranges, two of which were actually very good. But I'm not sure any caught onto the gritty, bawdy humor of the novel. So, I'll be talking to her today, as well. And...oh, yeah. Trying to work out the whacky – yet erotic – ghoul/deep one LOVE STORY. I hope the sound I just heard wasn't HPL rolling in his grave over at Swan Point. Oh, nope. It was Hubero in the litter box. Never mind.

---

I've been getting some very enjoyable RP in City of Heroes and Villains. The Rift RP never materialized. I simply could not get more than a couple of people into the game. Mostly, people talked about wanting to RP at some future date. Anyway, I returned both our Rift guilds back to their inactive statuses, and followed stsisyphus back to the land of super heroes and super villains (and giant spiders). Spooky and I are both still playing quite a lot of Rift, and she's found a good guild on the Shatterbone PVE shard. But we're playing just to play, not for RP.

---

Today is World Turtle Day, and I refer you back to this entry I wrote in 2010.

---

And here are four more photos from Sunday's trip to West Cove:

Current Mood: always, hallways

I’m looking for the ancient Greek for: We can do better.

In English, there is some ambiguity there (We meaning us?  We meaning humanity?  My group can do better than your group?).  I don’t know if those ambiguities would translate, but, if so, I want them.  If not, I’ll chose the best meaning for my evil purposes.

Any help would be appreciated.

Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there.

• Tue, 23:06: Just posted: At The Singapore Arts Fest http://t.co/mD36mhrE

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/22/redshirts-coming-to-the-uk/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18655

We’re two weeks out from the US release of Redshirts, and I have some contracts in front of me, which means it’s a good time for some good news for those of you in the UK: There will be an official UK version of the book come November via Orion/Gollancz. Here’s the UK Amazon pre-order page; here’s the Waterstone’s page. It appears it will be available both in hardcover and paperback, so that’s excellent.

I’m very excited to have Redshirts natively in the UK, and with such an excellent publisher. Gollancz publishes some of my favorite writers, including Richard K. Morgan, Joe Abercrombie, Justina Robson and Patrick Rothfuss; it’s nice to join their club. Hopefully the wait for the book won’t be too long for you over there. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/22/computer-and-other-stuff-update-its-been-found-arc-giveaway/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18650

So first, the good news: My computer bag — and everything in it, including the computer, books and such — has been found. Turns out I didn’t leave it in the cab, I left it on the floor of the baggage claim at Reagan National Airport. Why did I do that? Because apparently I am a complete moron, that’s why. However, airports are really good these days at collecting up unattended bags.

What makes this kind of awesome (aside from, you know, getting all my stuff back) is how the folks at Reagan National tracked me down: They used one of the Redshirts ARCs from the bag. The ARC doesn’t have my contact information on it, but it does have contact information for my former publicist at Tor — so they called her, and she contacted my current publicist, who sent me an e-mail about it. So there you have it: Being an author finally pays off. As a way of thanking the fellow at Reagan National who thought to contact my publicist, I told him to feel free to take one of the ARCs as a token of my appreciation.

My computer bag will soon be winging its way back to me, and to celebrate that fact, and to commemorate the role of the Redshirts ARC in its return, I am now going to give away two Redshirts ARCs. All you have to do is put a note in this comment thread between this very instant and noon Eastern time, Thursday, May 24, 2012 Wednesday, May 23, 2012. I will then have my daughter and wife randomly select a time between now and then, and the posts closest to those times will win (in case of a tie, the one closest before the time they specify will win). One entry per person, please.

So leave a comment! My computer is coming home! w00t!

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/22/journey-to-planet-joco-still-alive-reminder-new-joco-song-coming-in-one-week/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18647

Just a reminder that “Journey to Planet JoCo,”  my interview series with Jonathan Coulton, is still chugging along nicely at Tor.com. And today, in fact, we’re covering Coulton’s biggest hit to date: “Still Alive,” the theme song to the Valve video game Portal. There’s excellent conversation to be had, plus music and videos. It’s everything you could want in an interview! Or your money back.

If you’re just catching up with the entire interview series, an index page is here, with links to every single installment, refreshed daily at 9am.

Finally, a reminder that in one week exactly, Jonathan Coulton will debut his brand new, never-before-heard song at Tor.com. I’ve heard it. It’s fantastic. I can’t wait for you to hear it too.

Tonight, we had midnight launch events for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Various Red Storm folk went to various local Gamestops and hung out, signed autographs, talked to folks and generally celebrated the fact that GR:FS was, as they say, a thing. 
Me, I went to the store closest to my home, which is to say the Brier Creek one. I've spent a lot of money there over the years, gotten to know some of the folks who work there, and so it was a cool thing to share. I'd never done a midnight launch, you see. They were always kind of for other people. Various games I've worked on have had various degrees of launch pomp and circumstance - anything from massive star-studded launch parties in Hollywood to "wait, that came out? Really?"
So tonight was kind of special. This game has been a long time coming, and there's a lot of blood and sweat and tears and other, possibly less identifiable fluids that went into it (OK, there was a memorable trip to Harry's New York Bar in Paris, where the fluid in question was an absinthe cocktail served up by the greatest bartender in the history of humanity, but I digress), and to see it finally real - and to see folks that eager to play it, well that meant a lot.
And the best part was, as we signed posters and game cases and discs and bandannas, that so many of the folks who were there thanked us for making the game."We know you worked hard." "I appreciate how hard you guys must have worked." "Ghost Recon was the first game I ever played online - thanks for that." "I came here straight from work." Yeah, I know it sounds corny, but that really did mean something. The understanding that a lot of people - actual people, who busted their butts for a long time to make this thing happen and deserve recognition for the long hours and late nights they put in - made this, instead of a faceless company, well, I like to think that's a good thing.
Which leads me to say this: thank you, to the folks who showed up tonight, and to the folks who are excited to play the game. It doesn't happen without you, either. 

Super big congratulations to all the Nebula winners! The ballot was awesome this year and it was going to be a fantastic result no matter what.

Restated super big congratulations to Katie and Ferrett, WHO ARE AWESOME, for their nominations! Yeah, Walter Jon Williams made some jokes about it being an honor to be nominated, but really truly the nominations alone were the most amazing and wonderful thing!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go lose my mind over getting ready for Wiscon. See you there!

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/22/the-big-idea-kim-stanley-robinson/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18645

Kim Stanley Robinson has created such amazing futures in his Mars books and others that it’s sometimes difficult to believe he doesn’t have a direct line to what comes next — a crystal broadband line, rather than a crystal ball. But as Robinson explains in this Big Idea, today’s present changes the future even for him, and for his latest and in many ways most ambitious novel, 2312.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON:

My new novel 2312 began with an idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a saturnine person. Matching these two character types would make for quite an odd couple, I thought, and since all couples are odd, it seemed like the story might have wide appeal. That the two people should actually come from Mercury and Saturn is my kind of joke, in other words lame, but I like both those planets, and recent robotic space missions have given us a lot of new information about both of them.

However, having people call Mercury and Saturn their home requires some kind of solar system-spanning civilization. Thus the three-century time scale. This also put the story somewhere beyond the end of my Mars trilogy, and allowed me to return, not to that particular future history, but to that general story space: Humanity In the Solar System In the Next Few Centuries! I love that story space, one of the most exciting in all science fiction, so it was a pleasure to get back to it.

But so much about the future has changed since I last visited it. So much that I never believed possible is looking like it might happen anyway.But always in ways that to me seemed very unlike what all the other stories have been saying. I had a different vision of most of these startling new possibilities, and I found on reflection that I needed or wanted to retell the whole Matter of the Solar System.

That was fine, but also problematic. The big stories are hard to tell; you need special tricks, often lifted directly from Sir Walter Scott. I was forced to use the Kitchen Sink Theory of Novel Construction—again, of course—indeed, more than ever—but it was necessary, because the future is going to be a wild place, a recombinant multiplicity of clashing elements, a real mess. To do justice to realism these days, the kitchen sink is really nowhere near the end of what needs to get tossed into the mix.

So: terraforming (on purpose or not); living in space; genetic modifications in all living things; brain implants; artificial intelligences; gender manipulations; space travel; longevity treatments; big sea level rise on a hot sad old Earth; new forms of economics and governance. Sex, politics, art, revolution; and always, no matter what, human subjectivity. Our streams of consciousness. Because we read fiction to experience telepathy; we want to get inside other minds, and hear how other people think.

So my original two characters still carry this story, they struggle in their strange new world, making their way as best they can. In their travels they see the solar system from the Vulcanoids to Pluto; they body-surf the rings of Saturn, deal with some desperate moments on Mercury’s brightside, and cope with the icy dangers of frozen Venus. The plots they are caught up in are an important part of the history of their time, and just as messy and dangerous as history always is. And the romance’s end has a (spoiler alert!) surprise setting.

Writing 2312 was great fun. I got a lot of gentle but electrifying help from my editor, Tim Holman. His combination of stimulus and aid made a huge difference to the book, in both conception and execution, and I am grateful to him. Thanks Tim! And it’s been a pleasure watching his whole team at Orbit produce and promote the book, I’m happy to be part of such a high-powered team. I’m also grateful to all the people who helped me with various aspects of the book, from Chris McKay and his colleagues at NASA/Ames, to Pamela Mellon and all my other friends at UC San Diego, and all the rest who helped me (see acknowledgments at the back of the book).

I was also inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramovic, the landscape art of Andy Goldsworthy, and the novel technique of John Dos Passos. Goldsworthy and Abramovic have become simply genres in my future world, their names common nouns for what lots of artists do. I think that will happen. And it took the model of Dos Passos’ great USA trilogy to suggest to me the best form that could be used to portray a complicated culture in a novel. John Brunner used Dos Passos’ format for his Stand On Zanzibar quartet, and now I can see why; it’s not only useful, it’s lively. I hope readers will feel that way about 2312, and if so I will be happy, and grateful, because it’s the readers of a book who bring it to life.

—-

2312: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

Read an excerpt. Visit the book’s site.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/preamble-to-photograph.html

This is a very long preamble to a photograph.


When Amanda and I were first going out together we would spend a lot of time on the phone, talking about big real things. We don't talk on the phone anywhere nearly as much any more, and when we do talk on the phone we're more likely to be trying to figure out the logistics of where we are in the world and how we can warp space and time in order to be in the same place relatively soon than about our hearts or our lives. That's just the way things are, and when we're together, late at night, in bed, we still talk about all the big real things. 

But we used to talk on the phone. One night I said something to Amanda about my life, and beds, and the sizes of beds, and she got very quiet. I thought she was crying on the phone, which seemed odd, as I'd not said anything (to my mind) about hearts.

A week or so later, she announced on Twitter that she was writing a song. She posted photos of herself after each verse. It seemed like the whole of Twitter was cheering her on.

I got to Boston a few days later, and she played me her song, on the huge grand piano in her cramped apartment. She'd taken a tiny fragment of my life and made it into something else, a story about a couple, from joy to death, exhibited, as in a legal case or at an inquest, as a sequence of beds. I cried when she played it. 

She asked me to give it a title, because I had inspired it, and I didn't want to give it a clever title, and so I called it "The Bed Song", and the name stuck.

It's one of the songs on her new album.

She's asked a number of artists to make art to go along with the book, asked if I would do something for "The Bed Song". I thought about what I wanted to make, realised it was a sequence of five photographs, mirroring the five verses/exhibits in the song. And that, while I love taking photographs (my lomo cameras are some of my favourite possessions) I did not know how I would take these photographs...

Fortunately, a few days later there was a gathering in Barrington Illinois to honour Gene Wolfe, and my friend Kyle Cassidy was there with his beautiful actress wife Trillian. I asked Kyle if he'd like to collaborate on making art: I'd write a script, describing the images, as I would have done if I was writing a comics script. He'd take the photos. Kyle said yes. Then I told him the deadline we were on...

And that we'd need people of all ages, willing to be photographed, in couples (all but one), naked in a bed.

Kyle set off, undaunted.

Kyle is an amazing photographer. We found volunteers through friends and through Twitter. It was relatively easy to find people to pose in their twenties and thirties and forties... finding older models was harder. I was hugely pleased when my friends Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff agreed to pose for the last  photograph we needed. 

Many of the people who had their photos taken told Kyle that it was a life-changing experience for them, and I can believe it.

The photographs were beautiful. The sequence of photographs worked as a story. We were happy, about everything except...  Kyle had taken too many good photographs.

Each photograph was a piece of art. Amanda's doing an art book already, of the art that's been made for the album, but we desperately wanted to see Kyle's photos reproduced at the size and at the same quality as they'll be hung in the art galleries they'll be hanging in this summer, during Amanda's art tour. And we wanted the photos that weren't just part of the set of five, that would hang in the gallery and be part of the art book, to be seen.

And Amanda was putting together a Kickstarter (it's at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour). It was going to need incentives at various levels. And if the incentive level was priced high enough then we could actually afford to make the kind of book we dreamed of -- something with the level of art and craft you'd find in the impressive oversized Taschen photo books. Although there would be significantly fewer photos than the $15,000 Helmut Newton SUMO book (but then, it also wouldn't need to come with its own display stand).

So that's what we're doing. We're making a maximum of 666 of them (to commemorate the % by which the Evening With Neil and Amanda Kickstarter exceeded its level). If the demand is less, we may make significantly less. We want copies for our models, and a few for ourselves. You'll get one if you support the Kickstarter at the $1000 level or above (so each of the 35 people hosting a house party, for example, will get a copy), and you also get all the goodies from lower levels as well.

Right now we're just finalising the specs -- Kyle wants a lock on the box (or slipcase) it comes in, for example, but we need to decide what kind of lock...

There will be photographs,  reproduced at the same size (HUGE -- the book is planned to be the same size as the recent oversized Little Nemo Sunday pages) and quality (amazing) as the actual prints. There will be an essay by me about the song, what inspired it and what it means to me. There will be the script for Kyle and the emails. There will be a reproduction of Amanda's handwritten lyrics. And we will sign it, and limit it, and I very much hope that each of the people who winds up with a copy is made very happy by it.

Of all of the things in the Kickstarter campaign, it's the most likely to ship last, because the production process of objects like this is always beset with nightmares. We want it fancy and beautiful and unique, but each fancy thing we add means there's something else that can go wrong or delay things, and that printers and bookbinders and boxmakers will simply not be able to do what we're asking, meaning we'll have to find someone who can, or wait, or send something back to be redone.

Right now, Kyle is taking the handful of last photographs for the book. And as we were talking about it, I realised, with a creeping horror, that the final photo had, inevitably, to be me and Amanda. Amanda has been in many photographs naked, has no nudity taboo that I've ever noticed. I'm English. I have a nudity taboo. 

Kyle took several shots of us in Philadelphia last week, in our hotel room. Some of them we had the covers over us, in others (the scary ones -- well, scary for me) we didn't.  I held Amanda and did my best to go to sleep and not to think about the camera on a stick far above us.

I've not seen any of the photos Kyle took of us without bedclothes, yet.  I'm nervous as hell about seeing them, but also certain that we'll find the one to be the final image, and glad it will only be in a very limited edition book. But the photo that Kyle just sent over showing Amanda and me together, under the covers, with me mostly asleep, is beautiful.

And this is it.

It's the only one of the photos that's in colour, too. I think we may use it as the image on the limitation page, the one we all sign.

And, with Kyle's permission, I'm putting it up here.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/21/writer-beware-wins-blogging-award/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18641

The Writer Beware blog has been devoted for years to exposing scams aimed at writers, and now that work has paid off: The blog and its proprietor Victoria Strauss have won the Independent Book Blogger Award in the category of  ”Publishing Industry.” This is pretty awesome.

Here’s the official page with all the winners (and nominees), and here’s the press release, posted on the Writer Beware site itself.

Congratulations to Victoria Strauss! May you continue to vex and annoy scammers and scumbags who prey on writers. No doubt some of them are grinding their teeth at you winning this award. I say: Let them grind.