lyster

Saw China Mieville yesterday at a Harvard Book Store book signing. Posted my thoughts on my blog: http://www.maxgladstone.com.

Go read!

I'm in LA with Steph this week, enjoying the rocking weather. And there's more than just the sunshine to celebrate: The Book of Exodi, containing my short story "On Starlit Seas," is now available on Amazon.com!

If the couple stories I've had any experience with are to be any indication, TBoE is going to be a great volume. All stories engage with the concept of mass exodus (from planet to planet or continent to continent or time to time) in some form or other, and they feature some excellent illustrations in addition, of course, to good prose. Check it out at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936075008

Just went for my first morning run in about seven months, and I feel awesome! Quicker, stronger, more productive. Of course, that's running for you. The first time back is great. The second one is when the pain sets in.

I'm listening to SecurityNow podcasts while I work on stuff for the Berkman Center, having finally decided that being a Chinese specialist is not enough; I need to educate myself about infosec as well. I've learned all sorts of wonderful new words already, and I'm only a few podcasts in. My favorite thus far is "honey monkey."

Oh, and in case any of you don't know this yet, I've finally acquiesced to the Herd and procured a Twitter account. Follow me at twitter.com/astralknowledge!

America is a funny place. To wit, the Fox television show Fringe.

In the first five minutes of the pilot, we watch a super fast-acting flesh eating toxin released in an airplane coming into Logan airport. We see about 150 people with flesh melting from their faces. The copilot's jaw actually falls off of national TV before we pop to credits.

Slam cut to: two mature hot adult FBI super-WASP agents, of opposite genders natch, lying in a motel room bed after some clearly satisfying off-camera action. They kiss closed-mouthed. The man's section of the bedsheets are around his waist; the woman keeps adjusting her sheets so they never get more than two inches below her chin.

We have, within five minutes, seen a man's face melt off in gruesome detail in camera closeup, and a quite attractive woman's body covered by a sheet.

Later, though, they don't mind the nice exploitative closeups of the same female FBI agent in her underwear when she has to strip down so a mad scientist working for the government can plug her into a psychic dream machine and shoot her full of acid. (The LSD kind - or the LDS kind, if you're of the Star Trek IV persuasion).

The order of acceptability here, in case you missed it, from most to least: dude's face melting off, followed by weird power-differential situation with sexy sexy camera angles, and then, least acceptable, non-fetishized nudity in a consensual sexual relationship.

Though maybe I'm just being cranky because of the swine flu.

My most recent Substrate blog post is up at virgilandbeatrice.com/substrate, and you should all go check it out. John Gardner's theories of writing, compared and contrasted with good ol' fashioned Karate stance work. Might be a bit of a blowhard, but that's what comes of throwing together a blog post too late at night.

Life is good. I'm getting a little less writing than I'd like done, but that's the way of the world. Three Parts Dead is at 75k and I've got a nice little short I'm trying to get set up and polished for an anthology, not to mention a really fun piece for Baeg Tobar that I'll keep y'all up to date on.

And of course you can pre-order a copy of the anthology with my story in it at Eposic Diversions' website!

Best wishes, and I'll catch you all around.

So a writing group I've created has just started a group blog on the estimable alanajoli's server:

http://virgilandbeatrice.com/substrate

Go, read, comment!

In other news, I just watched my first episode of Castle. It's awesome: you can tell it's not a Fox show because there's an ensemble cast, rather than one key character who does everything and makes everyone else look like an idiot. Nathan Fillion is hilarious, too.

Still, I wonder why television designers keep putting female detectives in heels, even when they're fixing to bust into a criminal's apartment. Wouldn't you want, you know, Asics for that kind of thing?

Walking back from an amazing dinner at the suspiciously-underpriced-for-its-quality Basta Pasta, the Lady and I decided to stop in at Pandemonium, local game-cum-sci-fi-book shop, for an after-dinner peruse.

The Orthodox churches were parading Good Friday outside, candlelight and low melodic songs, as I stepped in from the twilight. The first thing I did was, as per usual, visit the used 'Z' section, because Roger Zelazney is the man and for some reason almost everything he ever wrote is out of print, save the brilliant Lord of Light.

And what should I find there, waiting (it seemed) for me, but an entire new shelf of Zelazney books -- Unicorn Variations (a collection of shorts), Doorways in the Sand (an amazing light Sci Fi adventure), and first paperback editions of every book in the Chronicles of Amber save for the fourth book, Hand of Oberon, which, coincidentally, I'd picked up in original paperback last year in a small bookshop in Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Now, the Amber chronicles are not my favorite Zelazney, but they're rollicking, expansive, and at best brilliantly experimental (not as much as, say, Creatures of Light and Darkness, but still).

To top it off, apparently April is "clear out our paperback inventory" month @ Pandemonium. All used paperbacks, US$2. So I picked up a shelf of really amazing science fiction for the cost of a book and a half of new stuff.

A nice little windfall after a great week.

Good, clean fun. Not one of those I'm going to track down and watch again, but a good ol' romp with hungry beasties, wormholes, etc. Hardly any character development, and none of the moral weight from the Christmas Special. Also, of course you can use the Sonic Screwdriver to polarize sunglasses.

The Household was somewhat divided on the worth of Lady Christina de Somethingorother (Souza) as a human being. Steph points out, and I agree, that "I did it 'coz it was fun, not 'coz of the money!" hardly exonerates one from moral responsibility for stealing a priceless artifact. Seems likely to me that the Dr. agrees, and that "People keep dying when they travel with me" is code for "You're a manic-depressive attention monkey, and a sneak thief, and do you really think I'm going to let you loose on the multiverse?"

Now, sure, Ten is a manic-depressive attention monkey at times, but he's at least on the side of the good guys.

Some slight modifications to make the episode better: The Doctor didn't actually need the gold; he just convinced Christina he did so as to get it from her. Then he goes back in time and replaces Howl's Cup with a replica, because crossing your own timeline is strictly forbidden except for cheap tricks.

Also, his change of heart in the final scene: "Did you think I was going to let her get caught up in the justice system on Earth? They use adversarial deliberation down here!"

Before I moved to Tennessee, I didn't know what people did on Sundays.

We moved down when I was ten because my parents got a job teaching at an Episcopalian school. When I stepped out of the moving van, I saw the stars above me like god's own pinpricks in the sky, but this isn't that story. My parents attended the school's church for a while on Sundays, and I went with them, marveling in the music and the windows and the art and the prayers, and the fact that people took a little time out of their week to contemplate the Ultimate. I wanted to go up to take communion, but the priest said that only those who had been baptized were free to do so. I accepted his blessing anyway, feeling like a door had been closed on me at the age of eleven. But this isn't that story either.

This school celebrated Vigil every year. After the evening Maundy Thursday service, a small team of students and teachers would rise from the congregation, approach the lady chapel, knock for admittance, exchange a greeting with those praying within, and gain access to that space, decorated with garlands, to watch with Jesus for half an hour before they would be relieved in turn.

For those of you who don't do Vigil, the point is that Jesus can't sleep because he knows he's about to die, and he wants his disciples to stay awake with him. Yet they don't. I always felt that to be the biggest clue into the mystery of the season: the Messiah came, and we deserted him. We broke faith; we let him be handed over, and then we killed him, because that's what we do. We've been incredibly good, as a species, at handing over our Messiahs. But they come back anyway. He came back anyway.

So we keep watch now, because we didn't then. We keep watch to remind ourselves that we should be keeping watch more often.

My parents let me go with them to sit vigil for the first time when I was twelve. The flowers in the shadows made the tiny walls of the lady chapel open out into endless space. I was in awe.

But I was twelve. So after sitting one way for about five minutes, I was uncomfortable and needed to shift my legs. Then that position became uncomfortable, so I shifted again. Then the flower pollen got in my nose, and I sneezed. In a silent room, the slightest sound is an avalanche. I don't know what I must have sounded like.

When we left the lady chapel my father told me he had been disappointed that I had made so much noise, and suggested that if I couldn't sit still for half an hour, I might not want to come at all. This was a serious business, this ceremony, not to be trifled with. I had been disrespectful.

Trifling! Twelve-year-old Max was outraged. I can sit in meditation! I just needed to sneeze, that was all. I'll show you how respectful I can be. And once the outrage passed, I felt really ashamed: had I let the ceremony down? Let the community down? Had I broken the ritual?

A sensible person would have pledged to do it better next year. I, on the other hand, decided that if I couldn't go right back and sit another vigil in the lady chapel, I would sit one at home.

There is a seated position in the Japanese martial arts called seiza. You fold your calves under your thighs and sit back on your heels. This position is used for basic meditation, and shows up throughout Japanese culture, where it's regarded as a polite and healthy way to sit.

In Karate class, I had sat seiza before in meditation and in discussions with my sensei. Now, I decided I would sit seiza for vigil. Half an hour, no talking, no sneezing, no adjustment of position. And so I sat. When my legs started to tingle with a lack of circulation, I let them. When the tingling faded, to be replaced with a warm, liquid sensation, I let it. I was deep in vigil, my eyes on the far wall, half closed, my mind in my breath.

I was silent, and awake.

A half hour later, the timer I had set beeped. In the lady chapel, a quiet knock on the door stirred a team of vigil-keepers. I tried to rise.

And, of course, fell promptly on my face, as my entire lower body had gone numb some twenty minutes before. I'd had my arm or my hand go to sleep before, but never an entire section of my body. I thought I must have done something permanent to myself. I lay there, face in the carpet, legs still frozen in seiza position, vainly attempting to unbend my knees, flopping like a fish thrown on the deck of a boat, and thinking to myself, well, you've done it now, haven't you?

As that thought crossed my mind, the nerves in my legs and groin started to wake up, and I very quickly became on a first-name basis with pain. But I had kept vigil, at least. That was some consolation, once the agony finally started to fade and left me with at least some measure control over my lower extremities.

I'm not sure what that experience proves, if anything other than one should beware of undertaking to sit vigil just to prove one can do it. But there's something I love about that kid, lying face-down and immobile on the floor in the moment of his triumph. Sometimes I wonder if I've ever been anyone else.

I swung down to I-Con Long Island on Friday to do some meet-people-and-hand-out-business-cards stuff (after a particularly bad typing accident in 2008 I still can't write the word "networking" without it looking like "newtorking") with alanajoli and Max S.; five hours on the Fenghua bus, another two hours on the LIRR, and then, arriving outside the con, an hour and a half long wait to get even through the front doors. Once there, though, I met some awesome people, had good chats about game design, 4E, Cortex, and a bunch of related madness.

I'd been intending to get back Saturday morning, but plans ended up changing on the fly, which led to an awesome detour to Branford and New Haven, surprise Dr. Who watching, and a lot of Tony Jaa kicking people in the face. I used to be bad at these kind of last-minute schedule changes, but I think two years of China-style scheduling has done wonders for my ability to go with the flow.

So in short, a wonderful weekend, with good food, conversation, and company, capped off with a delicious sushi dinner yesterday.

Sometimes, my life is so awesome I can't help but feel a little guilty.

So, a Theory for Thursday (also because I mentioned this to alanajoli).

Unlike the domestic dog, which is quite different from wild dogs, wolves, coyotes &c., the modern cat is essentially a wild cat that's been brought into a domestic environment. There was some noise last year about how cats "domesticated themselves"; a quick Google search reveals this article.

The basic idea is: Some time ago, humans stopped roaming and settled down to farm. And it turns out that we attract pests, because we're pretty filthy animals that weren't "designed" by evolution to stay in one place for very long. Not only do we attract pests ourselves, agriculture and animal husbandry attract even *more* pests: the mouse sees that you've got a very nice stack of grain there, and brings all of his friends, and settles in.

Which, of course, brings the cats. Because where there's a food supply for pests, there's a second-order food supply for things that prey on pests. And thus cats realize these humans are awfully useful, and start hanging around us.

This is where the geneticists' argument stops, and I kick in. Sort-of-feral cats used to live around the garbage pit behind my house in China. These were mangy creatures: long wicked claws, scraggly fur. One of them had one eye, another three legs. When the meaner of these cats came towards you, you went the other way. But they kept the garbage pits where they lurked free of mice. They didn't keep mice out of dorm rooms and faculty apartments, though, because nobody wanted one of those fearsome cats inside their house.

So what do you do to make a cat less scraggly, and make it like you more? You feed it. Put out a saucer of milk every night. Maybe some bread with the saucer. And what happens? Something silent comes in the night, something you can't quite control, something that treads softly on padded feet, and is subtle and quick to anger and sees the world quite differently from the way you see it. It kills your pests, and eats the bodies, and leaves your home cleaner than it was before, and safer, so long as you don't break your uneasy truce with it, or try to control it more than it will allow itself to be controlled.

Sounds a lot like the way people have related to fae and to household gods since time out of mind. Think also of images of the fae, ranging from elegant, graceful, slender creatures to redcap maniacs who rend and tear. And even the banshee's eerie cry....

So I've been having some trouble with the current work in progress -- mostly problems with scene balance. I have one character who is an expert in a particular area and the plot has stayed in that area for a while so it's been a stretch to keep other characters pro-active rather than relegated to a "Certainly So, Socrates" role. This happens for me a lot when I'm working on procedurals, whether they are legal procedurals or police procedurals or fantasy procedurals.

But problem solved! I did some old-fashioned background writing (by hand no less), and ended up not only with a better understanding of the motivations for some hitherto-problematic characters, but also with an awesome supporting character who will do a lot to complicate the dynamic and peel back some darker aspects of the setting.

Still a little uncertain about how to juggle things, but life is great. 2000 words today. Dinner soon, then more before bed, unless I get sidetracked, which is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A wedding this weekend! Yay for the coming newlyweds!

I continue watching out of detached interest and brand loyalty to Whedon, and I continue to fear that Whedon doesn't get (or won't be allowed by networks to portray, which looks the same from my end) the full ramifications of the tech he's created here. The Dollhouse just ain't the good guys. No matter how entertaining it may be that Not-Wash has an Evil Watercooler Rival in Evil Japan and an Evil Grad Student in Evil Neurochemistry who he sends to get his Evil Juice Boxes, I find it difficult if not impossible to side with them over Mr. Sleecy Slicy Kneefy Knify (Alpha), Ripper-esque sociopath hell-bent for leather on destroying what amounts to an organization built around human slavery.

Whedon must know this, and he must have some cards up his sleeve. I keep thinking of the line from Serenity that, if the Heroes don't do something, "[The Alliance]'ll just keep coming around to the thought that they can make people better, and to that I do not hold." The worry here is that he's not going to get the chance to play those cards.

I play games while I watch the episodes and the best game, at the moment, is "Spot the Active." I don't have an exceptional success rate thus far -- Victor being an active strikes me as weird (how long has he been under and how did Ballard find him? It's not exactly like you can just walk into a bar and pick a Russian and assume he wants to ask you "how much for da vimmin?") but whatever -- but I've started to see 'em everywhere. I wonder if DeWitt is supposed to be a former Active; I wonder if she's currently an Active. I wonder what she thinks about all these (predominantly) young beautiful women she's... well, let's not say buying and selling, but at least buying and renting.

My bet is that Agent Bob is actually one of Alpha's split personalities, post-plastic surgery. It seems the simplest (oddly) explanation of how the picture of Echo gets from Alpha's hand in ep. 1 to Ballard's desk in Ep. 2, in the FBI building without anyone seeing it or anything being caught on camera. And this also explains why a good actor is being given such a one-dimensional part.

Also Dichan Lachman is beautiful.

I came across this on a Chinese blog, and it really hit me. It's Haruki Murakami's speech on accepting the Jerusalem Prize for literature. I've been trying to articulate something like the conviction below in private conversation for a couple weeks now, and he nails it.

Always on the side of the egg

By Haruki Murakami

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

( Read more... )

Any of you who are into Arthuriana or fantasy, or just love a good story, owe it to yourself to check this one out, find a quiet spot, and read it as soon as possible.

The Acts was one of the last projects Steinbeck worked on before he died. At its beginning it was intended as simply a modernizing of the language of Mallory, but as he continued to work on it, it grew beyond that, and deeper than that. It's also a very different retelling of Arthur than T.H. White's Once and Future King, which I love: White spends a lot of time with King Arthur and the court, and doesn't detail the quests and adventures all that frequently, where Steinbeck shows the other side. It's quite possible to read these two books as different halves of the same coin.

In the first chapter, Steinbeck is more or less recounting the Mallory, but as he moves forward, into the Death of Merlin and The Knight with Two Swords, he finds his own voice in the tales. The Triple Quest (Gawain, Marhault, and Ewain) contains more frank treatment of character, more development, and more awesome moments than I've found in some entire fantasy series, and one of the most amazing kung-fu masters of knighthood ever. The last of the tales Steinbeck completed was "The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot;" I haven't read it yet, but if it lives up to the rest, as it's promising to, it will be fantastic.

It's a true shame the man never finished this work, but what he's left will last.

Get the Penguin (I think) edition that's out now - it's got a brace of letters in the back by Steinbeck talking about the creative process and his own interests in it and anxieties about it.

When I left China, there were a lot of things I expected never to do again. One of them was to sally forth and engage with the Chinese business banquet drinking culture, in which the banquet and its attendant booze is used as a powerful form of leverage to bring parties of type-A standoffish officials together. The key isn't that alcohol (beer or baijiu usually) flows at these banquets, but that it flows due to mutual cooperation and competition between the participants themselves. The rules aren't so clear as they might be in, say, Japan, but drinking from your own glass without challenging someone else to drink from theirs just isn't done. On the plus side, there's a spirit of friendly competition about the entire affair; on the minus side, if you want to be a Chinese official, or to have dealings with Chinese officials, you need to be ready to get cheerfully drunk at a moment's notice, possibly for many meals a day.

I got a bit tired of these banquets by the end of my stay in China, but they're one of the many strange parts of the experience that I've become nostalgic for. On Friday, as part of a translation engagement for an educational exchange group, I attended a banquet with about ten Chinese high school principals, and there we were, toasting and being toasted and getting toasted as the sun went down and Cambridge chilled outside. The principal from my school in Anhui was even there, getting pleasantly drunk along with the rest of them.

So I drank, and made all the jokes you learn how to make at these affairs, and toasted the right people in the right order, and thought of absent friends.

After a surprisingly short period of time wrestling with WordPress, I have successfully updated my site at www.maxgladstone.com !

Now those awesome business cards I had printed up on Monday will work properly. Rock!

... Also I was wondering why I wasn't getting a caffeine rush from the soda I snagged at Berkman Luncheon this afternoon. Then I looked down at it and saw it was a Sprite Zero. Trip to the coffee shop in order for me, I guess.

Some people know politics. Some people know languages. Some people know that the square of the hypoteneuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the remaining sides.

Brothers, Sisters, I only know one thing with any degree of certainty: when Quinn the Eskimo gets here, them pigeons'll go to him!

Squick is the feeling that begins as an ephemeral sense in your gut that something ain't right, and coalesces slowly into the certain knowledge that you need to vomit, go to confession, and then burn the world to the ground so that God can start over and maybe get it right this time. It's the realization in the Dune series first that you haven't seen any Tleliaxu women walking about, and then that there aren't any Tleliaxu women walking about, and then why there aren't any Tleliaxu women walking about. Shou Tucker, in Full Metal Alchemist, is a good example of Squick -- I'm not enough of a bastard to devise proper punishments for that man, and I can be a pretty big bastard.

Squick is a hard force to control, because of how world-tainting it can be. And it's one of the reasons I'm a little nervous about Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse.

Now, in most ways, the show is set up to be Whedon's version of La Femme Nikita, which captivated by showing us what the sex-and-superspies universe looked like from the bad guys' perspective. Sure, the villains on Nikita were, by and large, the worse guys, so you were still rooing for Nikita and her pals, but it was also obvious that Nikita & co. were, in no sense of the imagination, okay.

(I have an argument about how Nikita and its steak-and-potatoes successor, 24, are actually brilliant Dante-esque peeks into Augustine's Hell, but that's for later.)

Dollhouse is similarly populated by the bad guys, with the possible exception of Echo's clearly-meant-as-sympathetic handler. Not-Wash, the mindwipe/cyberware technician, goes on two full-blown evil overlord monologues in a one hour show, one of them while eye-groping an employee over whom he has total mental control. The English likely-former-Active businesswoman lady gives the usual protestations that what they do "helps people." (Yea right.) Etc.

Now, the concept of rewriting peoples' minds to make them perfect fits for any number of jobs could spawn really impressive twists - like Mr. Nice Guy FBI Agent being an Active, which is a prediction I'm going on the record with right now - but also has a lot of squick potential. In fact, the squick potential is so over the top that I'm almost afraid they won't be able to exploit it on network TV, because the things my mind comes up with are more horrible than most of what I think is allowed on networks.

For example: Mr. Mexican Businessman knows about the Dollhouse. Trusts them implicitly in fact -- trusts them with his daughter's life. When the girl is kidnapped he goes to them straightaway, rather than to any other mercenary outfit or private negotiator.

And, he's conspicuously single. His daughter's mother isn't mentioned once. Not even by Echo, when she's in full-on professional analysis mode. It's as if the mother never existed.

Which throws Mr. Businessman's reaction to Echo's appearance, and his willingness to press her on her repressed memories despite being warned not to, in a very different light.

Now, Echo was probably not the girl's mom (not enough time, if we're believing that this is her first five-year tour -- though we have absolutely no reason to believe that). But it seems overwhelmingly likely, given circumstances, that the girl's mom was an Active. And that's just dropped there in the negative space of the story. That's how you do squick. Now the question is, how is Whedon going to handle it? Because while gloriously evil people can make great protagonists, squicky people can't. He'll have to be very careful to either convince us that the Dollhouse has lines they wouldn't cross, or make them the enemies fast. I'm not sure how many other options there are.

Substrate, my new writing/critique group, went down this weekend, and was a ton of fun! Lots of really talented writers in the same room, with very different styles. I used to be skeptical of critique groups, but have come to love them over the last few years, for two main reasons.

First, it's an opportunity to talk about problem-solving with writers who regularly face the same problems I confront myself, and work through them. I'm not talking about personal problems here, but technical problems: problems of story architecture, of character construction, and of diction. Writing's a craft as much as it is an art, and it's great to have a circle of fellow craftsmen-and-women to consult with when I get myself into a sticky spot. (This absolutely happened with the piece I sent in for critiquing -- I was troubled by a bit in the ending that I didn't quite know how to handle, and in group discussion we came out with a few ideas I really want to take into account when I go back through the draft for more polishing.)

Second, critique groups provide a dedicated audience that'll be honest with me when they think something's not working. This is partly to keep me honest with myself, though really the lion's share of the fun is that it sets the bar higher -- because I, at least, start really wanting to hit my stories out of the park. Knowing that someone is going to be reading my stories with an eye to what *doesn't* work puts me in that Rocky zone, where I don't need any inspirational music on the stereo because it's already playing in my mind, and my only rhythm is the rhythm of fingers on the keyboard.

Badum-baaaaa, badum baaaaaa!

Ummm. :) Anyway! So, Substrate was great, and it was excellent to see New Haven again. Tons of awesome people - including lisa_bee, hellpossum, and ladybird97, who threw together an amazing pancake breakfast! And, of course, the best faux Gothic architecture I've ever seen outside of Sewanee, TN. Played in alanajoli's Ancient Greece game as a pirate demigod son of Poseidon on the run from Dionysus because of the whole kidnapping/Dolphins thing. 4E's got its fun points, and one of them is being able to actually play a fast-talking, enterperneurial strength-based fighter.

Other news - you can see a summary of the story that will be coming out in the Eposic anthology at http://www.eposic.org/exodi ! And Substrate's got a group blog in the works. More news here as it comes.