Found your post on the previous topic satisfying. Thank you for it. I often feel torn between my sense of the need for people to have well deserved outlets for expsoure and growth ( I think the two do go hand in hand because the former motivates the latter ) and my growing conviction that quality matters. It is a conflict I live at work, as well, in the tension between accessibility to education and the simple fact it would be useless to have if the bar just gets lower until every student can get over it.Balance is particularly hard to find during times of rapid change.

On the lighter side, I sat down to relieve myself of an amusing piece of business for Avim's Oath. Dela should start out trying to match make between Amel and Luthan, with a particular emphasis on underscoring for Luthan - once she learns of her interst in Erien - the lessons taught by Demish literature concerning Demish women who loved Vrellish men to their sorrow. It should set her up nicely for meeting Vras near the end. Dela is a robust enough character to cope with being the victim of such irony. She bounces rather than breaks.

posted by Lynda at 01:12   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Couldn't get past the survey in the PressForward site, and the TalentMatch, well it might be a good idea, but I'm cynical about people promising to expose aspiring artists to fame and fortune. TalentMatch's idea of vaudeville as a testing ground is an excellent one, but their focus is skewed. The word talent, for one, is misleading; it encapsulates one of the many romantic misconceptions around the arts. I have reached the conclusion that 'talent' is far less a determinant than artistic, social and business judgement; successful artists seem to be strong on at least two out of three. Even artists with lousy business sense can succeed through their relationships, because they attract patrons and advocates. The TalentMatch the emphasis seems to be on exposure and recognition, on putting up portfolios, rather than on development, experimentation, learning a craft and establishing relationships.

To my mind, the same kind of people are going to emerge as successful with the new media as with the old: the ones with a combination of talent, preparation, industry and opportunism. Three or four generations ago writers were founding small book presses and literary magazines to get their own and their friends' work into print: Virginia and Leonard Woolf published Joyce's Ulysses on their own press, along with Virginia's own work, to take an example of writers who have become institutions. Some of the SF greats started off in their own and other's fanzines.

It's a pity that self-published became tarred with the 'vanity' brush, and maybe the fact that self-publishing has become accessible to the majority will mean that it can go back to being part of the artistic, social and business apprenticeship of the writer, or, alternatively, an outlet for quality work that really does run athwart prevailing tastes. But I would put the majority of self-published works in the apprenticeship category without reservation; most of what I have seen lacks distinction in a way that has nothing to do with commercial appeal. But because everything has a normal distribution, there will be writing out there that is two sig figs above the average. It is a shame that independent sites have not grown up around finding and promoting the best of the ebook, epublished, web-published, self-published material, partly to get those people the notice they deserve and partly to show everyone (mainstream publisher and apprentice author alike) just how high the bar can be when a writer has control of their material and their craft, regardless of how the book is published.
posted by Anonymous at 23:43   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Intrigued by the TalentMatch site. http://www.talentmatch.com/. What do you think? Peter's PressForward business sounds exciting, too. Are they remedies for the woes of the publishing industry dieing under the weight of its inventory and hope for the creative spirits of the many, many talented people out there who cannot "break in" while capital controls access to audience? Or are they just "vanity press" in a new guise? I think, in a nutshell, I believe they are something in the middle and that the old divisions are breaking down. Fame and fortune will still be the holy grail, elusive as ever except for the very few. But maybe the pyramid I like to talk about is happening. You know, the stuff I like to say about how sci fi fandom is cool because people participate at so many levels, making many opportunities for success via outlets with a lower artist-to-audience ratio than nearer the top where it is higher. By which measure, of course, I can't think of a single book that would rank as high as the highest blockbuster movie so this does not have to be a quality call, although quality does inevitably have something to do with it as well as sheer mass appeal of genre and media issues.
posted by Lynda at 20:07   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Still just groping towards some sources of inspiration and jotting down guidelines but up in "Research and Commentary" on the ORU website.

posted by Lynda at 23:36   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Found this by accident, helping Jenny with her homework. (She's memorizing major muscles and basic bones for a test.) I thought it was cool. I mean, in case one needed to discuss with a fellow author who happens to be an MD exactly what bit of a character is damaged and needs pictures to keep up. :-)
http://eduserv.hscer.washington.edu/hubio553/atlas/content.html#109
posted by Lynda at 22:03   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Having an "ideas" kind of night. See notes: http://www.okalrel.org/stories/Reetion_ideas.htm. See anything you'd like to whip off? :-)
posted by Lynda at 02:03   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Uploaded an ALMOST complete revised draft of Second Contact, post Richard's input, to our respository for you. Notes on what's been changed and what hasn't are on the title page. Thanks for the input last night on the fencing stuff. Speaking of which, I have a lesson at 11 a.m. I am actually going to make today. Promised myself. :-)
posted by Lynda at 08:43   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Working on a scene (non ORU), in which a ruler-in-exile meets a man from off-planet she hopes will help restore her to her rightful place. I'm describing what they're wearing, with in my ears David Gerrold's plaint (made last year at Rustycon), about women writers who insist on stopping the scene to describe what people are wearing. This he found irrelevant and tedious. Though I piped up that it makes a difference who your viewpoint is: a tailor, for instance, would notice what people are wearing. But I have been rereading some of Baen books free library on my Palm: military SF, and some of those writers go into great detail about military ordinance, its history, its provenance, and its effect on tactics, because it's all relevant to the story, part of the worldbuilding (I like it, but then I like information in a story). I don't see why clothing should not be viewed in the same way, as a technology, and as worldbuilding. I wonder if women writers treat it differently than men. Or whether the divide is between people who have studied history and other cultures and learned to analyse the social languages of clothes. It may be you have to step outside your own culture to be able to understand the language of your own clothes - I know we have one - or several - they seem muted and muddled. And if you haven't had that perspective, you don't know just how much clothes say.
posted by Anonymous at 23:29   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Lynda, just uploaded revised version of Chapter 10 in which I made the changes we discussed last night. I did keep track changes on, but kept the display off, because it was going to be a mess. I wish I had the version of Word we have at work, that keeps the latest version in the main body of the document and all the changes in bubbles on the right hand margin. Anyway, Erien gets more authoritarian, though he's still driven by a desire to explain himself until he gets too tired or exasperated. I managed to keep track of Drasous, and get Dras aboard the shuttle, a continuity boo-boo I belatedly spotted. I'm sure there's a lot that could be crystallized, but it will have to wait until I bring some morning-brain to bear. It got shortened, a little, now coming in at 13 504 words. In this and future chapters, don't be afraid to edit out chunks of Erien that slow things down.
posted by Anonymous at 21:20   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
I've got through Chapter 11 - easy. Chapter 10 I'm having to shoehorn in another scene: a while back I realised that although Erien said he would go and tell the Reetions they would be leaving, he never did. So he's doing that now, and trying to make himself calculatedly obnoxious on the grounds that if he gets them mad enough, they'll come through it better than if they're simply scared. Trouble is, he's not very good at making people mad at him deliberately; he's much better at doing it inadvertently; I'll have to work on him. That chapter is still loooong, though - before I began shoehorning, I clocked it at 14 150 words.
posted by Anonymous at 07:31   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Hi Lynda ... just in case you're looking at the blog, or about to post an update. I think I just lifted Arena11 out of the depot two minutes after you put it in. I was going after Arena10. I've been 4 days on CST (trip to San Antonio), am wide awake and ready to party, and the swimming pools are closed for the holiday. Which I don't get. Since you're up, wish I could phone you without waking the household.
posted by Anonymous at 05:44   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Working on the following bit of Chapter 11 where Lurol enters the :

Her porch gave onto a simple patio with table and chairs that opened directly into their living room. Lurol hesitated with her hand on the see-through door. She could order it open with a word, or by hand. But she felt paralyzed.

Editing this, it struck me that Reetions on planet typically manipulate doors manually. On space stations there are no doors except to individual quarters or in places where noise might be a problem (gym). Why have doors anywhere that is more transparent than STI 2? It strikes me that opening and closing doors is a physically meaningful activity, like walking, which it makes no sense to eliminate from daily living. Reetions are well-balanced types who don't replace everything with mechanized solutions just because they can -- a la "the machine stops". They do, however, use arbiter support to redress disabilities, so I think it is reasonable that access would be situationally automat"able". If someone like Europa - in Second Contact - visited Lurol's home, the door would open for her, whereas the default for able-bodied people would be to let them open it themselves. Reetion philosophy is always one of personal choice with resulting consequences, so the option of deciding you felt like having the door opened for you would be there. Since it consumes a resource (arbiter attention) and is not the recommended thing to do (participaction!) there would be some small debit against your account, but a trivial one. Toddlers would discover they could order doors opened and closed and have to be taught - both by parents and arbiters - not to abuse the privilege. Much as we teach our toddlers not to open and close fridge doors for the heck of it. As Dependant Citizens, children would be exempt many of the consequences of their actions, with referral to their parents for attention, or to other community resources if parents could not cope.

posted by Lynda at 13:40   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Finally completed my pass through chapter 10, Far Arena. Sorry it took me so long! I've heard from Richard at Edge, also, about Second Contact. Looks like we have a plan for tackling changes there. I'll alternate between, I think. Don't think it is fair or even necessarily productive for me to grind to a halt on Far Arena. My original hope was to do the re-writes on Second Contact during the summer but the best laid plans of ... etc. :-) Maybe I'll be able to to it over Xmas. Seems like I did a lot of editing in Chapter 10 FA but I hope most of it was tightening and straightening lines of force. Still concerned re: clarity around Kali Station arbiter vs. visitor probe arbiter with regard to the threat of Fahzir downloading info, but probably too close to it to judge. Your turn. Cheers.
posted by Lynda at 23:14   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Totally convinced I'd layed out the wrong version of the Mekan'stan novella by Saturday morning and yanked all the copies in embarrassment but sold some copies of Throne Price, one to a member of my friend Elizabeth Woods' book club. They are doing to do Throne Price and invite me to their gathering when they are done. Also delighted to hear from women's studies prof Dr. Jo Anne Fiske that she had purchased two copied of Throne Price and still not read it because both copies left her home in the hands of friends. Also ran into David Casperson and Jennifer Hyndman. David read the "Reading by Readers". Discovered Ann Walsh's YA books, including one "time travel" sci fi one! Ann is a B.C. Writers Federation member who lives in Williams Lake.
posted by Lynda at 21:27   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments